More women vote than men. Woman is the housekeeper and municipal politics is a kind of nest building and a house keeping of a sort.
The women follow their old occupations. And they have many new ones. They are locksmiths, safe experts, confectioners, cigar factory workers and owners, makers of advertising novelties for the whole world, eye, ear, nose and throat physicians, bill posters, wallpaper cleaners, opticians, dog, cat, and bird doctors, barbers, undertakers, auctioneers, dentists, and a thousand other things. But this does not mean that women monopolize such occupations. It is only a minority that leaves the home. But it is a majority that floods the elections. They are about equally divided between the established factions among the men and perhaps getting the mass of their opinions from the men but certainly furnishing their own steam.
I note many curious phases of caste, if there may be said to be such in a fluent community where everyone may change his status before nightfall by doughty deed or awful failure. There is an exalted status to occupations that were once deemed commonplace. There is yet the same distinction that used to go to lawyer or doctor or head of a university department, but it is extended to such seemingly miscellaneous occupations as conductors of Turkish baths, special gymnasiums and mud baths, billiard halls, bowling alleys. Stores for sporting and athletic goods convey great distinction. And the demi-god of these, Cave Man Thomas, is indeed held in high regard and his minions have almost the same lustre, and so he is one of the eleven city commissioners.
But the end of these surprises is not complete. There is a particular dignity given to junk dealers, cobblers, garbage handlers, and manufacturers, and devisers of patent medicines. They stand as did the lords, dukes, knights, and bishops of old, if there is a charm to their private characters equal to that of their public service.
I find that a special training, and therefore a special distinction, is involved in being shoddy manufacturers, pawnbrokers, silo manufacturers. And many other once simple ways of making a living have become so complex and fastidious that they are the signs of nobility. But respectability, in man or woman, is, as a matter of fact, not always a thing of occupation in the final analysis. It may be a matter of race or of personal record. And sometimes it seems to be a matter of party politics.
The really significant party lines are local. The Democratic and Republican parties have their turn every four years at national elections but at all other seasons new ideas come into the local commissioners, platforms that cannot be classed as Democratic or Republican ideas and the people do not array themselves under those banners but rather the banners of Doctor Mayo Sims on the one hand and Black Hawk Boone on the other.
New Harmony, Indiana, is particularly distinguished for sending in civic and social recruits to Boone’s faction, though the nucleus of the faction came up with him from Cairo. While New Harmony was founded by those who protested against mystical religion, many of the present waves of enthusiasm from that exceedingly vital place were born in the New Harmony Methodist and Episcopal churches. They take to Boone by affinity, and hate Mayo Sims by instinct.
With no particular support from Boone, they have cultivated the mania for planting the highly specialized ever-blooming Golden Rain Trees from New Harmony as symbols of democratic feeling and as a way of saying that all men are created equal. And they call them The Gate Trees, since, passing under them, we enter the gate to the free land of democracy in symbol if not in fact. The horticulturists from New Harmony are making newer and more magnificent varieties of the tree and sending them across the world.
But in the Mystic Year, Springfield is rather to be discussed, for instance—as a convention center, which has at last evolved into the home of a perpetual World’s Fair. It is as of old, a travelling man’s home city, a retired farmer’s place of sleep, a state official’s paradise. Agricultural experts, coal mining experts, would-be statesmen of the middle west, have the same general relation to the city about them that they had in the ancient days of the horse-cars, and the Sangamon County Fair. The town has many of its ancient types. But they are overshadowed by the sculptors, the motion picture scenario writers, the motion picture directors and actors, and the prophets and sibyls of all the arts that go to make up a University Fair. The entrance examination for permanent residence in Springfield, except for the native-born, is the same as that for the Universities of America. The native-born, no matter how stupid or cranky, cannot be banished. There are so many extreme followers of the various local religious and philosophical sects that Springfield is as much a Hobby Horse Fair as University Fair, if we are to believe the wits and the laughing poets.
One index of the hobby riding character of the place is the way the humorous columnist, Romanoff, in the Boone Ax characterizes conspicuous people, even at the risk of suit. Today’s Boone Ax contains a new epithet: “The Muttering Thibetan,” a name for the young architect and protege of St. Friend, the Bread Giver. This youth makes his acquaintances impatient by talking to the empty air as he walks the streets.