The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Monday was the Fourth of July. Harry and Al were early off again with buggies and best girls, and Mr. Barton invited me to join the family in celebrating the day in town. We hitched a team to a four-seated market wagon, and Mr. Barton’s son and his wife, who live on an adjoining farm, drove with us to Blue Earth City, where we were to attend the festivities and go for dinner to the home of a married daughter of Mr. Barton, whose husband is a merchant there.

All along the country roads converging toward the county seat we saw lines of farmers’ wagons driving to the common centre. There was great variety of equipage; some were very rude and plain, but others were exceedingly well appointed, and not a few of the low phaeton-buggy type rose to a degree of elegance.

Many of the nearer dwellers were walking in, and as we approached our destination the foot-paths were crowded, chiefly with young men and boys, and the town itself, when we entered it, we found thronged with holiday-seekers, the women in light dresses and bright ribbons, the men in sober black, and all of them in their movements giving the sense of heavily conscientious merry-making in spite of the glorious sunshine and the air that throbbed with the joy of a ripe summer’s day.

When the horses were put up we fell in with the stream of people moving toward the main street, and there in the thick of the serious throng we stood on the curb watching a procession of local organizations file past, headed by a brass band from Winnebago, all gorgeous in new uniform and led by citizens on horseback as important and uncomfortable as the marshals in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

There was a common movement then of the crowd, through streets which cracked to the continuous discharge of explosives, toward a wood on the outskirts, where a rough booth had been erected and row on row of benches placed before it in the shade. We found seats near to the front, and presently there fell a hush upon the assembly which quieted the flutter of fans and the mingled interchange of neighborly conversation. A procession of little girls in white, with bright blue sashes, each wearing the name of a State or Territory in silver letters across the band of her sailor hat, which had long blue streamers behind, came filing in among the crowd, all intensely trim and self-conscious with their fingers protruding stiffly from white cotton mits. Following them were a minister and a schoolmaster and a small group of other prominent citizens, from among whom towered the tall, massive figure and the clean-cut, rugged, beardless face of an old ex-senator who was the orator of the day.

The little girls grouped themselves on benches which rose like steps from the ground to the level of the floor of the booth, and the citizens took seats assigned them on the platform. One of their number, the chairman of the occasion, introduced the minister, who led the company in prayer. Then the schoolmaster was presented as the reader of the Declaration of Independence. A few explanatory sentences in unconventional English served to bring vividly to the minds of the people the familiar circumstances of the signing of the Declaration, and then in sonorous, ringing voice he read, amid breathless stillness, the deep natural stillness of the woodland, the well-remembered phrases of that great document. There was no applause when he ceased, no outward demonstration of any kind, but through the great still company one could feel the strong movement of the sense of national life.

The ex-senator then rose to speak. He was himself a frontiersman, having known the Northwest from its early settlement and having represented it in Congress a generation ago, and he spoke to people whose history he knew and whose temper he thoroughly understood. It was inspiriting to catch the dominant note of what he said and to watch its effect upon his hearers. There was talk of national growth, but without boasting, and there was very serious reckoning of national problems, but without carping, and there was high appeal to national responsibility, but without canting, and when at the end, out of the wealth of his own personal association with the man, he spoke of Lincoln and enforced all that he had said with homely, cogent teachings drawn from the life and the words of the great apostle of the common people, the assembly was moved and stirred as no other appeal could have affected it.

After this the crowd scattered for dinner, most of the people re-entering the town, and the spirit of fun, no longer to be restrained by a conscientious sense of the seriousness of enjoyment, broke loose in a bit of genuine American horseplay, when a company of boys and young men, in most fantastic disguise, passed in grotesque procession through the streets, and for a few minutes the solemn crowds really lost self-consciousness in true abandon to the spontaneous sport.

The Barton family had soon gathered at the married daughter’s home, and there with the greatest good cheer we had a picnic dinner of delightful cold meats, and the thinnest of bread and butter, and olives, and dainty home-made cakes, and the reddest of ripe cherries—all served to us as we sat just within the dining-room door or ranged in a semicircle about it in the shade on the lawn.

When it was over everyone was eager to start for the public green outside the town, where the afternoon’s sports were to be held. It was not far, and we walked out, but almost a continuous stream of carriages was passing us in a common movement, and when we reached the bridge just outside the town the stream had narrowed to an unbroken line of vehicles moving slowly in single file. At the centre of the bridge which spans a narrow stream below the public green stood an interesting figure as we drew up. He was a tall, lean man of sixty, perhaps, but without a suggestion of old age in his lithe, sinewy frame; a Yankee by every gift of nature, with the sharply inquisitive face of a ferret and shrewd blue eyes with a gleam of humor in them and a little tuft of whiskers on his chin. Every vehicle, as it passed, underwent an interested scrutiny from him, and his whiskers worked comically up and down as he cordially greeted the occupants whom he knew. I was walking with Mr. Barton, and seeing us in the crowd on foot, he eagerly hailed Mr. Barton as a sympathetic old acquaintance.