Ohio is too flat. It hasn’t the rural innocence and unsophistication which Indiana seems still to retain, nor yet the characteristics of a thoroughgoing manufacturing world. There are too many factories and too many trolley lines, and a somewhat unsettled and uncertain feeling in the air, as if the state were undecided whether it would be all city and manufacturing or not. I hate that mid-state, uncertain feeling, which comes with a changing condition anywhere. It is something like that restless simmering into which water bursts before it boils. One wishes that it would either boil or stop simmering. This, as nearly as I can suggest it, is the way the northern portion of Ohio that we saw impressed me.
And, unlike my feeling of fifteen or twenty years ago, I think I am just a little weary of manufacturing and manufacturing towns, however well I recognize and applaud their necessity. Some show a sense of harmony and joy in labor and enthusiasm for getting on and being happy; but others, such as Buffalo and Cleveland, seem to have fallen into that secondary or tertiary state in which all the enthusiasm of the original workers and seekers has passed, money and power and privileges having fallen into the hands of the few. There is nothing for the many save a kind of spiritless drudgery which no one appreciates and which gives a city a hard, unlovely and workaday air. I felt this to be so, keenly, in the cases of Buffalo and Cleveland, as of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.
Years ago these American cities were increasing at the rate of from ten to fifty thousand a year. Then there was more of hope and enthusiasm about them than there is now, more of happy anticipation. It is true that they are still growing and that there is enthusiasm, but neither the growth nor the enthusiasm is of the same quality. As a nation, although we are only twentyfive to thirty years older in point of time, we are centuries older in viewpoint. We have experienced so much in these past few years. We have endured so much. That brood of giants that rose and wrought and fell between 1870 and 1910—children of the dragon’s teeth, all of them—wrought shackles in the night and bound us hand and foot. They have seized nearly all our national privileges, they have bedeviled the law and the courts and the national and state seats of legislation, they have laid a heavy hand upon our highways and all our means of communication, poisoned our food and suborned our colleges and newspapers; yet in spite of them, so young and strong are we, we have been going on, limping a little, but still advancing. Giants who spring from dragon’s teeth are our expensive luxury. In the high councils of nature there must be some need for them, else they never would have appeared. But I am convinced that these western cities have no longer that younger, singing mood they once had. We are soberer as a nation. Not every man can hope to be president, as we once fancied,—nor a millionaire. We are nearer the European standard of quiet, disillusioned effort, without so many great dreams to stir us.
Departing from Buffalo, not stopping to revisit the Falls or those immense turbine generators or indeed any other thing thereabout, we encountered some men who knew Speed and who were starting a new automobile factory. They wanted him to come and work for them, so well known was he as a test man and expert driver. Then we came to a grimy section of factories on a canal or pond, so black and rancidly stale that it interested us. Factory sections have this in common with other purely individual and utilitarian things,—they can be interesting beyond any intention of those who plan them. This canal or pond was so slimy or oily, or both, that it constantly emitted bubbles of gas which gave the neighborhood an acrid odor. The chimneys and roofs of these warehouses rose in such an unusual way and composed so well that Franklin decided he should like to sketch them. So here we sat, he on the walking beam of a great shovel derrick lowered to near the ground, behind two tug boats anchored on the shore, while I made myself comfortable on a pile of white gravel, some of which I threw into the water. I spent my time speculating as to what sort of people occupied the small drab houses which faced this picturesque prospect. I imagined a poet as great as Walt Whitman being able to live and take an interest in this grimy beauty, with thieves and pick-pockets and prostitutes of a low order for neighbors.
EGYPT AT BUFFALO
A Grain Elevator
A few blocks farther on there came into view an enormous grain elevator, standing up like a huge Egyptian temple in a flat plain. This elevator was composed of a bundle of concrete tubes or stand pipes, capable of being separately filled or emptied, thus facilitating the loading and unloading of cars and allowing the separate storage of different lots of grain. Before it, as before the great bridge at Nicholsen, we paused, awestruck by its size and design, something colossal and ancient suggested by its lines.
Then we sped out among small yellow or drab workingmen’s cottages, their yards treeless for the most part, their walls smoky.
Lone women were hanging over gates and workingmen plodding heavily about with pipes in their mouths, and squeaky shoes and clothes too loose covering their bodies. Every now and then a church appeared—one of those noble institutions which represent to these poor clowns heaven, pearly gates and jasper streets. Great iron bridges came into view, or some small river or inlet crowded with great ships. Then came the lake shore, lit by a sinking and glorious afternoon sun, and a long stretch of that wonderful brick road, with enormous steel plants on either hand, thousands of automobiles, and lines of foreign looking workingmen going in and out of cottages straggling in conventional order across distant fields. Out over the water was an occasional white sail or a gull, or many gulls. Oh, gulls, gulls, I thought, take me into your free, wild world when I die!
Just outside Buffalo, on a spit of land between this wonderful brick road and the lake, we came to the Tackawanna Steel Company, its scores of tall, black stacks belching clouds of smoke and its immense steel pillar supported sheds showing the fires of the forges below. The great war had evidently brought prosperity to this concern, as to others. Thousands of men were evidently working here, Sunday though it was, for the several gates were crowded by foreign types of women carrying baskets and buckets, and the road and the one trolley line which ran along here for a distance were crowded with grimy workers, mostly of fine physical build. I naturally thought of all the shells and machine guns and cannon they might be making, and somehow it brought the great war a little nearer. Personally, I felt at the time that the war was likely to eventuate in favor of the Germans because they were better prepared.