April 12:—Now I note certain established and accredited loafers, who are assumed to be part of the landscape. I find that the gang of Kopensky, Sims, and so forth have not failed to annex every one of such, who can tell a smutty story to some jolly group of pornographically inclined gentlemen. Mayo Sims believes in the medicine of laughter to cure the sickness of a political machine, and with Kopensky’s help has made it appear on the surface that the issue is between the laughing City Hall and the militant and irksome University. So I get a public-school map of the city from the Board of Education offices and hire a taxi and make a quick still hunt around all the old and new sites. Judging by the equipment alone, I conclude at once that the public schools of Springfield have gone on like a line of irresistible battle-tanks. There is a complete material ladder from the first grade, on through the awards and honors of The University World’s Fair that sets itself in rigid competition with the masters of the world. But there are, no doubt, many qualifications to this outline to be offered by friends and enemies of the system. It is plain in one taxi ride that the system has commanded rivers of ungrudged money and I can well believe that outside the political field the system has had an unbroken and unchallenged prestige.
In the coffee houses and the gigantic loafing lobbies of the motion-picture theatres and over the endless ice cream tables of the drug stores and confectioneries and in the lounging rooms of the dance-halls everywhere the argument roars and rattles and clatters and squeals and shrieks and splutters and swears. Every kind of a skirmish between Catholic and Protestant, aristocrat and democrat, labor and capital, is obliterated or merged into this main war. Springfield is Black Hawk Boone, President of the Board of Education and the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield and editor of the relentless Boone Ax:—versus this gang composed of Mayor Kopensky, Sims, his boss, and the laughing, dancing crew led by Drug Store Smith and Coffee Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas.
Practically all the religious leaders and all the people with names of real distinction and untainted standing are with Black Hawk Boone. His School Board includes among others Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, Roxana Grey, Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, son of the Senator who represents us in the World Government, St. Friend, the Bread Giver, Rachel Madison, the Christian Science Reader, Mary Timmons and John Emis, representatives of the African Race, Gwendolyn Charles, the Motion Picture Director and scenario writer, Patricia Anthony, Josephine Windom of the Three Color Printing Department. They are a dithyrambic, chanting improvising howling-dervish set, with a local millennial dialect of their own and lacking mainly in that sense of humor and everydayness and that cold political self-control with which the City Hall is fully supplied.
CHAPTER VII
FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THE POLITICAL MACHINERY, INCLUDING THE CITY HALL DRAG NET OF DRUG STORES, COFFEE HOUSES AND DANCE HALLS.
April 11, 2018:—Mayor Kopensky is particularly deep in Singapore learning. He conceals his well-beloved studies in public, as senators of old used to conceal their wealth. He must, of course, get his majorities from the University students, who are the majority of the population, so many are studying even after marriage, and so many men continue their studies after entering business.
In political hours the attitude even of the older students of the University of Springfield is seemingly ungrateful. It is that of the traditionally impudent college freshman toward the imaginary greasy grind and toward the professor who eggs him on to scholarship. They think the names of these City Commissioners: “Cave Man Thomas,” “Sparrow Short,” “Coffee Kusuko,” “Montague Rock,” “Drug Store Smith,” “Jefferson Radley,” “Mayo Sims,” mean dash and romance.
This is the “City Hall” block of seven people in the city commission of eleven. The Mayor is the eighth. He seldom has occasion to use his prerogative of the casting vote, for it is not often five to five on a side. There are only three people in the commission who represent the School Board, one of them is Black Hawk Boone.
Boone roars away with the others, who are on his right and left, like Aaron and Hur holding up the hands of Moses. And it is only at the end of some long and well dramatized skirmish that Boone wins by forcing the issues in his paper the Boone Ax and scaring a more cowardly four in Kopensky’s faction to vote with him temporarily on what seems a purely educational issue. It is not always the same four he bulldozes and many and obvious are his plots.
Drug Store Smith and Coffee Kusuko supply about one-fifth of cold science to the Mayor’s City Hall stew. They represent the “slick” side of Kopensky. They have natty ideas of dress and natty ideas of administration. The remainder of Kopensky’s routine political workers are slack in every way except in the matter of secret party-discipline.
The columnist Romanoff in a charitable mood says, in the Boone Ax for April 11, 2018:—“When we view the soggy-souled but amiable group of city fathers around Kopensky, we rejoice. There is no sign of a complete clean-up of the ages. The patriot is still at home in the government. And, as Andrew Jackson knew, there is an intrinsic governing power in any mass of humanity linked by friendship and under American skies. Along with the City Hall dishonesty there goes a certain mercy and fraternity, far from the sternness of the editor of this paper, who may take my remarks for what they are worth, and he may fire me if he chooses. Let my boss, the editor, admit, since he must, that the City Hall gang keep our more angular truth-telling moods from torturing the town beyond reason. As it is, I declare myself the only real jester among all our children of light.”