A Hoosier holiday

by Theodore Dreiser

So the clerk wrapped six bottles into a large, heavy parcel, took the extra bills which she produced and rang them up in his cash register. And meanwhile she gathered her cure under her shawl, and hobbled forth, smiling serenely. It depressed me at the time, but it was none of my business.

Now as I looked at this large building, I wondered how many other hobbling mammies had contributed to its bricks and plate glass—and why.

There was another large building, occupied by a concern called the Ansco Company, which seemed to arouse the liveliest interest in Franklin. He had at some previous time been greatly interested in cameras and happened to know that a very large camera company, situated somewhere in America, had once stolen from this selfsame Ansco Company some secret process relating to the manufacture of a flexible film and had proceeded therewith to make so many millions that the user of the stolen process eventually became one of the richest men in America, one of our captains of great industries.

But the owners of the Ansco Company were dissatisfied. Like the citizens in the ancient tale who are robbed and cry “Stop thief!” they sued and sued and sued in the courts. First they sued in a circuit court, then in a state court of appeals, then in a federal court and then before the United States Supreme Court. There were countless lawyers and bags and bags of evidence: reversals, new trials, stays, and errors in judgment, until finally, by some curious turn of events, the United States Supreme Court decided that the process invented by the Ansco Company really did belong to said Ansco Company and that all other users of the process were interlopers and would have to repay to said Ansco Company all they had ever stolen and more—a royalty on every single camera they had ever sold. So the Ansco Company, like the virtuous but persecuted youth or girl in the fairy tale, was able to collect the millions of which it had been defrauded and live happily ever afterwards.

Leaving Binghamton, we went out along the beautiful Susquehanna, which here in the heart of the city had been parked for a little way, and saw all the fine houses of all the very wealthy people of Binghamton. Then we drove along a street crowded with more and more beautiful homes, all fresh and airy with flowers and lawns and awnings, and at last we came to Johnson City, or Leicestershire as it once was. Here were the remains of a most tremendous American celebration—flags and buntings and signs and a merry-go-round. In front of a new and very handsome Catholic Church which was just building hung a large banner reading “The noblest Roman of them all—R. G. Johnson”—a flare of enthusiasm which I take it must have had some very solid substance behind it. Down in a hollow, was a very, very, very large red factory with its countless windows and great towering stacks and a holiday atmosphere about it, and all around it were houses and houses and houses, all new and all very much alike. You could see that Mr. Johnson and his factory and his protégés had grown exceedingly fast. And in the streets still were wagons with bunting on them and people in them, and we could see that there had just been a procession, with soldiers and boy scouts and girls—but alas, we had missed it.

FLORENCE AND THE ARNO, AT OWEGO

“Well,” I said to Franklin, “now you see how it is. Here is the reward of virtue. A man builds a great business and treats his employés fairly and everybody loves him. Isn’t that so?”

Franklin merely looked at me. He has a way of just contemplating you, at times—noncommittally.

It was soon after leaving Binghamton that we encountered the first of a series of socalled “detours,” occurring at intervals all through the states of New York, Ohio and Indiana, and which we later came to conclude were the invention of the devil himself. Apparently traffic on the roads of the states has increased so much of late that it has necessitated the repairing of former “made” roads and the conversion of old routes of clay into macadam or vitrified brick. Here in western New York (for we left Pennsylvania at Halstead for awhile) they were all macadam, and in many places the state roads socalled (roads paid for by the money of the state and not of the county) were invariably supposed to be the best. All strolling villagers and rurals would tell you so. As a matter of fact, as we soon found for ourselves, they were nearly always the worst, for they hummed with a dusty, whitey traffic, which soon succeeded in wearing holes in them of a size anywhere from that of a dollar to that of a washtub or vat. Traveling at a rate of much more than ten miles an hour over these hollows and depressions was almost unendurable. Sometimes local motorists and farmers in a spirit of despair had cut out a new road in the common clay, while a few feet higher up lay the supposedly model “state road,” entirely unused. At any rate, wherever was the best and shortest road, there were repairs most likely to be taking place, and this meant a wide circle of anywhere from two or three to nine miles. A wretched series of turns and twists calculated to try your spirit and temper to the breaking point.