A Hoosier holiday

by Theodore Dreiser

So this place, now we reached it, had interest to this extent, that I wanted to see what it was like although I really knew—courthouse, courthouse square, surrounding stores, and then a few streets with simple homes and churches. Exactly. It was like all the others, only somewhat poorer—not so good as Napoleon, Ohio, or even Hicksville.

But there was something that was much better than anything we had encountered yet—an Old Settler’s Day, no less—which had filled the streets with people and wagons and the public square with tents, for resting rooms, had spread table cloths out on the public lawn for eating, while a merry-go-round whirled in the middle of one street, and various tents and stands on several sides of the square were crowded with eatables and drinkables of sorts. I believe they have dubbed these small aisles of tents a “Broadway,” in the middle West. Of course, there were popcorn, candy, hot “weenies,” as sausages are known hereabouts, and lemonade. I never saw a more typically rural crowd, nor one that seemed to get more satisfaction out of its modest pleasures.

But the very old farmers and their wives, the old settlers and settleresses and their children and their grandchildren, and their great grandchildren! Life takes on at once comic and yet poetic and pathetic phases the moment you view a crowd of this kind in the detached way that we were doing it. Here were men and women so old and worn and bent and crumpled by the ageing processes of life that they looked like the yellow leaves of the autumn. Compared with the fresh young people who were to be seen spinning about on the merry-go-round, or walking the streets in twos and threes, they were infinitely worn. Such coats and trousers, actually cut and sewn at home! And such hats and whiskers and canes and shoes! I called Franklin’s attention to two stocky, pinky rustics wearing Charlie Chaplin hats and carrying Charlie Chaplin canes, and then to group after group of men and women so astonishing that they seemed figures out of some gnome or troll world, figures so distorted as to seem only fit fancies for a dream. We sat down by one so weird that he seemed the creation of a genius bent on depicting age. I tried to strike up a conversation, but he would not. He did not seem to hear. I began to whisper to Franklin concerning the difference between a figure like this and those aspirations which we held in our youth concerning “getting on.” Life seems to mock itself with these walking commentaries on ambition. Of what good are the fruits of earthly triumph anyhow?

Nearly all of the older ones, to add to their picturesqueness, wore bits of gold lettered cloth which stated clearly that they were old settlers. They stalked or hobbled or stood about talking in a mechanical manner. They rasped and cackled—"grandthers," “gaffers,” “Polichinelles,” “Pantaloons.” I had to smile, and yet if the least breath of the blood mood of sixteen were to return, one would cry.

And then came the younger generations! I wish those who are so sure that democracy is a great success and never to be upset by the cunning and self-interestedness of wily and unscrupulous men, would make a face to face study of these people. I am in favor of the dream of democracy, on whatever basis it can be worked out. It is an ideal. But how, I should like to ask, is a proletariat such as this, and poorer specimens yet, as we all know, to hold its own against the keen, resourceful oligarchs at the top? Certainly ever since I have been in the world, I have seen nothing but Americans who were so sure that the people were fit to rule, and did rule, and that nothing but the widest interests of all the people were ever really sought by our statesmen and leaders in various fields. The people are all right and to be trusted. They are capable of understanding their public and private affairs in such a manner as to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number—but are they? I was taught this in the adjacent schools of Warsaw, quite as I was taught that the Christian ideal was right and true, and that it really prevailed in life, and that those who did not agree with it were thieves and scoundrels. Actually, I went into life from this very region believing largely in all this, only to find by degrees that this theory had no relationship to the facts. Life was persistently demonstrating to me that self-interest and only self-interest ruled—that strength dominated weakness, that large ideas superseded and ruled small ones, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. It was interesting and even astonishing to find that we were not only being dominated mentally by a theory that had no relationship to life whatsoever, but that large, forceful brains were even then plotting the downfall of the republic. Big minds were ruling little ones, big thoughts superseding little ones. The will to power was in all individuals above the grade of amœba, and even there. All of us were mouthing one set of ideas and acting according to a set of instincts entirely opposed to our so called ideas. I, for one, was always charging individuals with failing to live up to the Christian idea and its derived moral code, whereas no detail of the latter affected my own conduct in the least.

Looking at this crowd of people here in the streets of Columbia City, I was more affected by their futility and pathos—life’s futility and pathos for the mass—than by anything else so far. What could these people do, even by banding together, to control the giants at the top? Here they were, entertained like babies by the most pathetic toys—a badge, a little conversation, a little face-to-face contemplation of other futilitarians as badly placed as themselves. The merry-go-round was spinning and grinding out a wheezy tune. I saw young girls sitting sidewise of wooden horses, lions and the like, their dresses (because of the short skirt craze) drawn to the knee, or nearly so. Imagine the storm which would have ensued in my day had any girl dared to display more than an ankle! (Custom! Custom!) About it were small boys and big boys and big girls, for the most part too poor to indulge in its circular madness very often, who were contenting themselves with contemplating the ecstasy of others.

“Franklin,” I said, “you were raised out in this region about the time I was. How would such a spectacle as that have been received in our day?” (I was referring to the exhibition of legs, and I was very pleased with it as such, not quarreling with it at all.)

“Oh, shocking,” he replied, smiling reminiscently, “it just wouldn’t have occurred.”

“And how do you explain its possibility now? These people are just as religious, aren’t they?”

“Nearly so—but fashion, fashion, the mass love of imitation. If the mass want to do it and can find an excuse or permission in the eyes of others, or even if they don’t want to do it, but their superiors do, they will suffer it. I haven’t the slightest doubt but that there is many a girl sitting on a wooden horse in there who would rather not have her skirt pulled up to her knees, but since others do it she does it. She wants to be ‘in the swim.’ And she’d rather be unhappy or a little ashamed than not be in the swim. Nothing hurts like being out of style, you know, especially out in the country these days—not even the twinges of a Puritan conscience.”