The road from Michigan undulated over a weedy wilderness and gnat-swarming marshes. I had a bad time as to the heat and the mosquitoes, and, despite use of strong disinfectants, I got badly stung, and was consequently feverish for some days. I was also very idle, very much inclined to sit on palings and consider how hot it was. On the Sunday, just to see whether the plaints of the farmers were justified, I made a census of all the vehicles that passed me. On the Monday I got to Hammond, and on Tuesday came in by car to Chicago. That day was the hottest of the year. Fifty-three people died from the heat in the city that day. I could have understood a few tramps dying even on the road.
XVI THE CHOIR DANCE OF THE RACES
The road into Chicago was one of increasing noise and smoke and desolation, of heat and gloom, and the rumour of a sordid defeat of life. I remember Calumet City by the factory stacks, the chimneys whose blackness seemed fainting out of sight in the haze of the heat. Dark smokes and white steams curled above many workshops; along the roadside black rivulets flowed from the factories. There were heaps of ashes and tin cans lying in odorous ponds. The leaves of the trees and the grasses of the fields were wilted and yellowed by the airs and fumes of Chicago. At Hammond a drunken, one-armed man followed me for about a mile, attracting a crowd of street Arabs by his foul language. East Chicago looked to me like parts of suburban London, and I was reminded in turns of Peckham, Hackney Marshes, Commercial Road, Whitechapel. There was, however, much that was unlike anything in London—the ominous squads of factory chimneys; clouds of heavy-rolling, ochreous fumes and smoke; palings with such advertisements as "Read no scab newspapers" or "You'll Holler"; wooden houses; dilapidated, ramshackle frame-buildings of grey wood; broken-down verandahs; black stairways; grey washing hanging on strings from stairway to stairway; half-naked children; piles of old cans and rusty iron.
The vehicles increased on the highway, the lumber of much traffic commenced, the red and yellow tramcars multiplied, railway lines crossed the road, and by the rush of trains one felt that all the traffic of Eastern and Central America was converging to one point. The open country disappeared. The air of the roadway became full of dust. The heat increased ten degrees, and to move a limb was to perspire. Foreigners jostled one another on the sidewalks, negroes and negresses sat in doorways. The odour of carcases came to the nostrils from Packing-town, and at last the great central roar of traffic—Chicago.
I can give no account of the great city here—it would be only to recount and add together the uglinesses and the promises of other cities. It was at once worse and better than I had expected. The hopelessness of the picture given by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle I felt to be exaggerated. I was told at Hull House that the novelist had got all his stories at the stockyards, but that the massed calamities that are so appalling in the story never occurred to one family in real life. The effect of accumulated horrible detail in The Jungle deprives you at the time of any love towards America; it made me, a Briton, feel hatred towards America, and when first I read the book I felt that no Russian who read it carefully would entertain willingly the idea of going to America. If he had entertained the idea, having read The Jungle he would abandon it. It is an astonishing tract on the fate of a Russian peasant family leaving the land of so-called tyranny for a land of so-called freedom; and its obvious moral is that Russia is a better country for the individual than America—that America takes the fine peasant stock of Europe and shatters it to bits.
It is true that Chicago makes a convenience of men, and that there man exists that commerce may thrive rather than that commerce exists that man may thrive. It is a place where the physical and psychical savings of Europeans are wasted like water, and where no one understands what the waste means. Spending is always joyful, and Chicago is a gay city. It is full of a light-hearted people, pushing, bantering, laughing, blindfolded over their spiritual eyes. In such places as Chicago the immigrant finds a market for things he could never sell at home—his body, his nerve, his vital energy; a ready market, and he sells them and has money in his pocket and beer in plenty. Listen to the loud-voiced, God-invoking crowd in the saloons! They have the proceeds that come of selling the savings of Europe. They have come out of the quiet villages and forests where, from generation to generation and age to age, the peasantry live quiet lives, and grow richer and richer in spirit and nerve. But these in the Chicago streets and saloons have found their mysterious destiny, to lavish in a life, and for seemingly worthless ends, what hundreds of quiet-living ancestors have saved. The tree of a hundred years falls in a day and becomes timber, supporting a part of the fabric of civilisation for a while.
