Being handed this dose of inspiring information, I was in no mood for what followed; although I decided that this series of ills that were now befalling him was due to the fact that he was older than myself and maybe not very efficient, whereas in my case, being young, efficient, etc., etc—the usual mental bonus youth hands itself—I should do better. But when it came to my assignments this day and the next and the next, and in addition I was “handed” the late watch, my cock sureness began to evaporate. Each day I was given unimportant rumors or verification tales, which came to nothing. So keen was the competition between the papers, especially between the World and the Sun, or the World and the Herald, that almost everything suggested by one was looked into and criticized by the others. The items assigned to me this second day were: to visit the city morgue and there look up the body of a young and beautiful girl who was supposed to have drowned herself or been drowned and see if this was true, as another paper had said (and of course she was not beautiful at all); to visit a certain hotel to find out what I could about a hotel beat who had been arrested (this item, although written, was never used); to visit a Unitarian conference called to debate some supposed changes in faith or method of church development, the date for which however had been changed without notice to the papers, for which I was allowed time and carfare. My time, setting aside the long and wearisome hours in which I sat in the office awaiting my turn for an assignment, netted me the handsome sum of two dollars and fifty cents. And all the time in this very paper, I could read the noblest and most elevating discourses about duty, character, the need of a higher sense of citizenship, and what not. I used to frown at the shabby pecksniffery of it, the cheap buncombe that would allow a great publisher to bleed and drive his employees at one end of his house and deliver exordiums as to virtue, duty, industry, thrift, honesty at the other.
However, despite these little setbacks and insights, I was not to be discouraged. The fact that I had succeeded elsewhere made me feel that somehow I should succeed here. Nevertheless, in spite of this sense of efficiency, I was strangely overawed and made more than ordinarily incompetent by the hugeness and force and heartlessness of the great city, its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, the air of ruthlessness and indifference and disillusion that everywhere prevailed. Only recently there had been a disgusting exposure of the putrescence and heartlessness and brutality which underlay the social structure of the city. There had been the Lexow Investigation with its sickening revelations of graft and corruption, and the protection and encouragement of vice and crime in every walk of political and police life. The most horrible types of brothels had been proved to be not only winked at but preyed upon by the police and the politicians by a fixed and graded monthly tax in which the patrolman, the “roundsman,” the captain and the inspector, to say nothing of the district leader, shared. There was undeniable proof that the police and the politicians, even the officials, of the city were closely connected with all sorts of gambling and wire-tapping and bunco-steering, and even the subornation of murder. To the door of every house of prostitution and transient rooming-house the station police captain’s man, the roundsman, came as regularly as the rent or the gas man, and took more away. “Squealers” had been murdered in cold blood for their squealing. A famous chief of police, Byrnes by name, reputed at that time, far and wide, for his supposed skill in unraveling mysteries, being faced by a saturnalia of crime which he could not solve, had finally in self-defense caused to be arrested, tried, convicted and electrocuted, all upon suborned testimony, an old, helpless, half-witted bum known as Old Shakespeare, whose only crime was that he was worthless and defenseless. But the chief had thereby saved his “reputation.” Not far from the region in which my sister lived, although it was respectable enough in its way, tramped countless girls by night and by day looking for men, the great business of New York, and all preyed upon by the police. On several occasions, coming home from work after midnight, I found men lying hatless, coatless, trousers pockets pulled out, possibly their skulls fractured, so inadequate or indifferent or conniving was the so-called police protection.
Nowhere before had I seen such a lavish show of wealth, or, such bitter poverty. In my reporting rounds I soon came upon the East Side; the Bowery, with its endless line of degraded and impossible lodging-houses, a perfect whorl of bums and failures; the Brooklyn waterfront, parts of it terrible in its degradation; and then by way of contrast again the great hotels, the mansions along Fifth Avenue, the smart shops and clubs and churches. When I went into Wall Street, the Tenderloin, the Fifth Avenue district, the East and West sides, I seemed everywhere to sense either a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged resignation to deprivation and misery. Never had I seen so many down-and-out men—in the parks, along the Bowery and in the lodging-houses which lined that pathetic street. They slept over gratings anywhere from which came a little warm air, or in doorways or cellar-ways. At a half dozen points in different parts of the city I came upon those strange charities which supply a free meal to a man or lodging for the night, providing that he came at a given hour and waited long enough.
And never anywhere had I seen so much show and luxury. Nearly all of the houses along upper Fifth Avenue and its side streets boasted their liveried footmen. Wall Street was a sea of financial trickery and legerdemain, a realm so crowded with sharklike geniuses of finance that one’s poor little arithmetic intelligence was entirely discounted and made ridiculous. How was a sniveling scribbler to make his way in such a world? Nothing but chance and luck, as I saw it, could further the average man or lift him out of his rut, and since when had it been proved that I was a favorite of fortune? A crushing sense of incompetence and general in-efficiency seemed to settle upon me, and I could not shake it off. Whenever I went out on an assignment—and I was always being sent upon those trivial, shoe-wearing affairs—I carried with me this sense of my unimportance.
CHAPTER LXXIV
It is entirely possible that, due to some physical or mental defect of my own, I was in no way fitted to contemplate so huge and ruthless a spectacle as New York then presented, or that I had too keen a conception of it at any rate. After a few days of work here I came in touch with several newspaper men from the West—a youth by the name of Graves, another by the name of Elliott, both formerly of Chicago, and a third individual who had once been in St. Louis, Wynne Thomas, brother of the famous playwright, Augustus. All were working on this paper, two of them in the same capacity as myself, the third a staff man. At night we used to sit about doing the late watch and spin all sorts of newspaper tales. These men had wandered from one place to another, and had seen—heavens, what had they not seen! They were completely disillusioned. Here, as in newspaper offices everywhere, one could hear the most disconcerting tales of human depravity and cruelty. I think that in the hours I spent with these men I learned as much about New York and its difficulties and opportunities, its different social strata, its outstanding figures social and political, as I might have learned in months of reporting and reading. They seemed to know every one likely to figure in the public eye. By degrees they introduced me to others, and all confirmed the conclusions which I was reaching. New York was difficult and revolting. The police and politicians were a menace; vice was rampant; wealth was shamelessly showy, cold and brutal. In New York the outsider or beginner had scarcely any chance at all, save as a servant. The city was overrun with hungry, loafing men of all descriptions, newspaper writers included.
After a few weeks of experimenting, however, I had no need of confirmation from any source. An assignment or two having developed well under my handling, and I having reported my success to the city editor, I was allowed to begin to write it, then given another assignment and told to turn my story over to the large gentleman with the gold-headed cane. This infuriated and discouraged me, but I said nothing. I thought it might be due to the city editor’s conviction, so far not disturbed by any opportunity I had had, that I could not write.
But one night, a small item about a fight in a tenement house having been given me to investigate, I went to the place in question and found that it was a cheap beer-drinking brawl on the upper East Side which had its origin in the objection of one neighbor to the noise made by another. I constructed a ridiculous story of my own to the effect that the first irritated neighbor was a musician who had been attempting at midnight to construct a waltz, into which the snores, gurgles, moans and gasps of his slumberous next-door neighbor would not fit. Becoming irritated and unable by calls and knocking to arouse his friend and so bring him to silence, he finally resorted to piano banging and glass-breaking of such a terrible character as to arouse the entire neighborhood and cause the sending in of a riot call by a policeman, who thought that a tenement war had broken out. Result: broken heads and an interesting parade to the nearest police station. Somewhere in the text I used the phrase “sawing somnolent wood.”
Finding no one in charge of the city editor’s desk when I returned, I handed my account to the night city editor. The next morning, lo and behold, there it was on the first page consuming at least a fourth of a column! To my further surprise and gratification, once the city editor appeared I noticed a change of attitude in him. While waiting for an assignment, I caught his eye on me, and finally he came over, paper in hand, and pointing to the item said: “You wrote this, didn’t you?” I began to think that I might have made a mistake in creating this bit of news and that it had been investigated and found to be a fiction. “Yes,” I replied. Instead of berating me he smiled and said: “Well, it’s rather well done. I may be able to make a place for you after a while. I’ll see if I can’t find an interesting story for you somewhere.”