The Golden Book of Springfield

by Vachel Lindsay

And with the exception of a few too exquisite creatures like Joseph Bartholdi, III, the clan is not inbred. The greater part of the brains of the tribe is still in their legs and arms, not off in a separate compartment in their skulls.

By dint of earnest cross-questioning, I get it from Joseph Bartholdi Michael, that he has been a figure in Illinois in dreams of 2000–2018. He has been the author in precocious youth of a book, entitled: “Paper Made Nations,” a treatise on the laws of flying machine commerce, and it became the basis of the economic side of Black Hawk Boone’s pet theory and way of life.

According to the model, Joseph Bartholdi, in his reincarnation, has shod the horses of many a governor of Illinois and President of the United States, and President of the World Government. This husky, distinguished democracy combines with the prestige of his precocious book to make him the most distinguished representative of the teeming 2018 Middle West, in the World Government. He champions there the ceremonies and honors due the International Flag with the loyalty to what they like and a sense of the depths of pageantry, that has distinguished the Michael following from the beginning. Portia, the Singing Aviator, has in the generation of the Mystic Year, written the local song about “The Patchwork Flag of Michael and the World.” And she calls it in the same song: “Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors” or “The Flag of Joseph’s Coat” in allusion to his fashion of almost draping it around him, with the Star Spangled Banner, when he is speaking on high occasions, on international issues.

Instead of an exquisite, he is lean, wiry, with a hooked and hatchet face, burned, cooked, in the forge. He finds he has the habit of pointing his long, skinny fingers at the enemy he denounces. He finds that, like his progenitor, “The Iron Gentleman,” he has a record of putting things through with sheer fury when there is no other weapon handy.

He tells the Prognosticator’s Club, that, through the century, the flag with the six hammers and the six anvils has been smeared by renegades. But the proud truth-speaking custom has tortured the whole clan till some one has risen to confess the sins of the name, and start new.

And the Michaels have been hated off and on for a whole century because of these things, and because they were always hating some one, even without cause. They were apt to be jealous of other vigorous citizens, considering themselves the sole saviors of the principle of defiant democracy. But all the century the leading Michaels have seemed to be saying: “A town well hammered into shape is better than fortune or fame.” Few Michaels were guilty of living a private and secluded existence.

Few maidens were crowned with lovelier hair or carried themselves with finer mien than the granddaughters and great granddaughters of the “Iron Gentleman.” The stock has gone on in beauty and strength through the vision of a century. Yet in 2018 it seems that the scepter is just a little departing from the younger generation. It is not that they are ousted from public office. The fearless voice of a Michael always counts most as a private citizen, and, whenever Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, returns from The World Government, he takes his place in the Horse Shoe Brotherhood as a private in the ranks beside his son Joseph Bartholdi, the Third, and it is their full intention, according to hereditary political habit, to ride against Singapore, when the time is ripe, as privates in the ranks.

But a new clan has come up from Cairo, Illinois, led by Black Hawk Boone. Many of their young girls look more like young Indian maids from a government reservation school, than people of Caucasian stock. But, for all that, they have their own original ways of delicate manner and address, most disconcerting to the fixed limits of Springfield’s conventionality. They are rather short and heavy-set. Their merry young men and middle-aged men have, most of them, long, curly black lovelocks to the shoulders, not carefully combed, and nearly all defiantly wag big black beards in every argument, when all other men in the modern world are shaved clean.

They cheerfully hate the blacksmith clan which they are ousting by a greater talent for fury, preaching, and cursing, and by having just a little more brain at the back of the neck.

The town wits say these clans hate each other because, on the whole, they are so much alike, and always vote the same way at a crisis. The locks of both the Boone men and women stream back over their shoulders, and their left hands are dyed crimson as a proud perpetual reminder to themselves and all the world that among their ancestors were aborigines.