A Little Look at the People
I
BEING endowed with a light-hearted propensity to do whatever is suggested by a friend, I have at various times in my life found myself with undertakings on hand for which I had no preparation; and when I came to examine my reasons for consenting, I could find none that were valid.
It was this propensity which led me a few months ago to accept an invitation, several times extended to me, to go on what they call a ‘Chautauqua circuit.’ Having ‘signed up,’ I began to consider what it meant, with my usual experience of finding that I did not know what I was going into, and that I had very little reason to think that I could do acceptably the work for which I was to be paid.
The more I thought of it, the more doubtful it seemed. Why should I, who had spent most of my life putting words down on big sheets of yellow paper, suppose that I could stand on my feet for an hour or more for forty-nine consecutive days in forty-nine successive places and talk so that people would listen to me? Why should I, who had always slept quietly month in and month out in the same bed, suppose that I could, in comfort, sleep for forty-nine successive days in forty-nine different beds?
It was the forty-nine beds that caused me the most unrest, and perhaps it is quite logical that, now that the circuit has been made and I come to tell its story, these beds should loom astonishingly large in my mind. It is a fact (which I verified) that three months after I finished the circuit I could draw a diagram of every one of the fortynine successive rooms in which I slept, giving the exact location of doors, windows, and bed.
I leave it to the person who knows the secrets of the human memory to tell me why this should be. It was quite by chance that I discovered that I had collected any such package of information, and I found it amusing to get it down in black and white. The first time that I attempted to verify my recollections, I found that there was one town without a room, and, of course, without a bed. I could not visualize myself there at all, and yet my schedule told me that I had spoken there. When I came to look over my notes I found that as a matter of fact I had not slept in the place, but for a particular reason had gone back to the town where I had been the night before.
On such a junket as I undertook one who flatters himself that he is rather superior to mere surroundings is sure to come to a realization sooner or later of what an enormous part they play in his physical well-being, and, in consequence, his freedom of mind. I have always jeered rather at people who rush hurriedly through Europe and come back to tell you with great particularity of the hotels in which they have been; but I shall never do it again. In spite of yourself, you soon fall into the habit of asking first of all about the town to which you are headed, ‘Has it a good hotel?’ When you step down on the station platform, the first thought is, not for those who come to greet you, but for the hotel bus — and what it promises. You are uneasy to find out whether there are baths, and, if so, whether you can get one; you are uneasy until you get to the table and find out what the ideas of cooking and service are. At night, when it is time to turn in, you are uneasy about various things — the noises, the draughts, and other possible and unmentionable worries. Never again shall I take indifferently and lightly the matter of the room in which I am to sleep.
On the whole, this experience which made so deep an impression upon me gave me a very hearty respect for innkeeping in the part of the world in which I traveled — Western Pennsylvania, Ohio at large, and Southern Michigan. I do not by any means pretend to say that all the forty-nine towns through which we passed had good or even tolerable hotels. In even the best of them there was a disregard of certain simple conveniences which was very irritating to one whose minutes were numbered, and who could get on in comfort only by the strictest of attention to the order of her belongings. Nowhere except in a few of the modern hotels were there enough hooks! I have occupied beautiful big rooms, with good beds, electric lights, up-to-date baths, without a closet or even a rack of hooks. If you complained, you were pointed to a coat-pole. The idea seemed to be that it was all that a normal woman ought to ask for. If I were inclined to go on a campaign of hotel reforming I should begin with hooks — and proceed to bath-mats. There is a chain of splendidly equipped hotels in the region where we traveled which refuse to furnish an extra bath-mat. They tell you that there is a rug on the bath-room floor. What more could a bather ask?
The great majority of our forty-nine hotel quarters were distinctly tolerable; some of them were most interesting, and a few of them thoroughly delightful. There were parts of Pennsylvania and of Central Ohio in which the inns had a flavor not unlike that of old European provincial towns, and the innkeepers were personalities who not only were interested in you, but who entertained you with bits of information and comment of rare and delightful flavor. To at least a dozen of these forty-nine hostelries I could gladly return. If among the number there was the worst hotel that I have ever been in, it stands out rather as a horrible example of the influence that liquor interests may be able to exert in a town of ten thousand people.
This town is in many respects a lovely old place, with people of real cultivation ; but it is dominated by a brewery and its owners. The hotel property belongs to them. The things which liquor naturally encourages, to which it must cater in order to keep up and extend its sales, are written large all over this hotel and over much of the town. Prostitution, recklessness, vulgarity walked up and down the halls. To a handful of people of normal, healthy, decent tastes, such as I flatter myself our little group was made up of, the night and day we spent in this house were a revelation, such as I never have had before, of what the liquor interests naturally must fatten on.
As a matter of fact, one of the things this trip did for me was to make me understand the value of prohibition as I never understood it before. We came to know almost as soon as we reached a new place whether the town was ’dry’ or not. A town that had been ‘dry’ over a period of a dozen years had a trimness about the streets and buildings, a look of freshness and energy about young people and old, which stood out in almost incredible contrast to what we found in the ‘wet’ town of the same size. We went to one town in Ohio, which had been dry for thirtyone years, so the hotel-keeper told me. He claimed to be a much-traveled person, and said that in all the many towns which he had known intimately, he had never found one in which there was such a fine lot of young people as here. In health, in vigor, in initiative, he believed that the young men and women, particularly of the working classes, were tremendously ahead of the same group in the towns where liquor was freely displayed.
II
In starting the Chautauqua work I was not conscious that, there was a large percentage of condescension in my attitude toward the undertaking. I was going out after long solicitation. I was conscious that I had none of the qualifications of the speaker and no experience. Unconsciously I had come to feel that if they wanted me — a greenhorn—it could not be much of a task.
My first audience revealed my own mind to me with painful definiteness, and humbled me beyond expression. It was all so unlike anything that I had had in my mind. I was to speak in the evening, and arrived at my destination late and after a rather hard day. It was a steel town — one which I had known long years before. The picturesqueness of the thing struck me with amazement. Planted on an open space in the straggling, dimly lighted town, where the heavy panting of the blast-furnaces could be clearly heard, was as gay a little camping outfit as one could wish to see. Khaki tents bound in red, with a great khaki fence about, pennants floating up and down the streets, and within, order, cleanliness, and the smartest kind of little platform and side dressing-rooms.
From the room to which I was taken in a private house on the square, the little hotel having no place for me, I could see the tent ablaze with electric lights, for, if you please, we carried our own electric equipment. From all directions men, women, and children were flocking — white shirt-waists in profusion, few coats and still fewer hats. And there were so many of them! I began to feel a queer sensation of alarm. What had I got into? My orders had been to appear at eight o’clock; that I was to ‘go on’ at eight-fifteen; and at eight o’clock I made my way past the trim little ticket-stand and round an audience of nearly two thousand people, who at that moment were listening to what I realized was some very good singing by fresh and well-trained young voices.
It was the audience that brought me to my knees. I don’t know what I had expected — certainly nothing so serious as that which I found. Here in the high-banked tiers, particularly at the sides and in the rear, were scores upon scores of serious faces of hard-working men. I had come to talk about certain hopeful and optimistic things that I had seen working out in the industrial life of the country; but face to face with these men, — within sound of the heavy panting of great furnaces, within sight of the unpainted, undrained rows of company houses which I had noticed as I came in on the train, — the memory of many a long and bitter labor struggle that I had known of in that valley came to life, and all my pretty tales seemed now terribly flimsy. They were so serious, they listened so intently to get something, and the tragedy was that I had not more to give them. This was my first audience. With one exception, I never had another that made so deep an impression upon me; but it probably was a healthy thing that I was so humbled at the start.
As a matter of fact, any such poignant impression as this of my first night was hardly compatible with the conditions under which I found myself living. I had the machine, the life, to get used to, and the novelty of it was highly entertaining. I found myself quite absorbed in seeing how our organization was managed. It all went so well, like a well-oiled machine, that I at once realized that it must be run by some very good brains.
The circuit to which I had committed myself was under the Coit-Alber Chautauqua Company, and was what is known in the business as a seven-day circuit. By this is meant that it remains for seven consecutive days in the particular town in which it is placed. We had forty-nine towns on our list. Each one of these forty-nine received seven-days’ entertainment — two sessions a day. The programmes were made up of music, recitation, lectures, and impersonators, and, to my amazement, ended on the last day with real grand opera, given by a well-known company, the San Carlo. Of course the programme for each of the seven days was the same in each of the forty-nine places. My day was the sixth.
When I realized that I was to be for the whole six weeks in the company of the same people, I had naturally no little curiosity to know who my traveling companions would be. Scoffing Eastern friends, whose only idea of the Chautauqua is that it is made up of Mr. Bryan and a company of vaudeville artists, told me that I should always be traveling with bell-ringers and Tyrolese jodelers. One facetious friend, who claimed to have had some experience, said that if it were not bell-ringers, it would be trained dogs. This did not appal me in the least, as I am devoted to both; but although, as a matter of fact, I had neither, I could hardly have fallen in with pleasanter company.
A quintette of young people whose business it was to sing for three quarters of an hour before my afternoon lecture and for a like period before the evening entertainment, proved to be the gayest, kindest, healthiest of companions. They were hard workers, seriously interested in pleasing their audiences. They knew not only how to work, but how to live on the kind of a junket that I had undertaken. In other words, here was a group of five young people who were doing what to me was very unusual, in a thoroughly professional way. The seventh member of our party, the evening entertainer, Mr. Sydney Landon, had had long experience on the circuit. He was doing his work exactly as a good writer or a good lawyer would do his. In fact, I saw at once that what I had joined was a new profession. It was not, as I had hastily imagined, a haphazard semi-business, semi-philanthropic, happy - go - lucky new kind of barn-storming. It was serious work.
The physical side of the thing was managed in a most shipshape way. The equipment which had looked so picturesque to me as I caught my first glimpse of it at night proved to be hardly less interesting by daylight. Everything about it was new. Everything was well kept up. It was managed with strictest care as to cleanliness, hours, manners. The force having the organization in charge was made up of a superintendent, a man of more or less education, with experience in handling audiences and familiar with executive work; a young woman, nearly always a college girl who had had some practice in social work, whose business it was to organize the young people into junior bands; and three or four young college men, known as the ‘crew.’ They pitched the tent, cared for the grounds, kept things in order, took the tickets, and so forth. There were on our circuit nine members of the crew. They passed seven days in each particular place, and then were allowed two days for breaking camp and planting themselves in the next town.
As one became acquainted with the superintendent and crew it became one of the pleasant social features of our life to meet them again every ninth day. These personal relations made tolerable what may be called the tyranny of the schedule. It is your task-master and driver, this schedule. I should advise the managers of any Chautauqua circuit never to show it to a ‘ talent ’ (that is what you are technically called when you join a circuit), if that ‘ talent’ is new to the business. I certainly never should have put my name to the contract if I had seen that schedule beforehand. To see that for forty-nine consecutive days you are never to get up at the same time; that one morning it may be four, and the next eight, or nine, at your discretion; that another morning it is five, and the next six, and the next seven, and the next possibly three; that you are traveling daily, sometimes two hours, oftener four, and occasionally eight or ten! In one case we were twenty-four hours on the road. Right away you become defiant of the tyranny, and you propose to beat it if you can. As a rule, trying to beat a Chautauqua schedule results only in disaster. The utmost skill has been used in working it out, and no amateur can do better, unless, indeed, money is no consideration, and you can hire motor-cars as you will. Even then the motor often seems to be in league with the schedule, and you find yourself arriving later than you would have done if you had stuck to orders.
III
My usual audience on the circuit was what is technically known as the ‘shirt-waist audience,’ that is, it was overwhelmingly feminine. The women of the towns practically filled the tents in the afternoon. They came in clean shirt-waists, no hats, sometimes with their knitting in their hands, though more frequently carrying a baby, or leading a child. It was an audience which never took its business of listening over-seriously. It had no settled strong convictions about confusion and noise. If a baby cried, there was considerably more sympathy for the mother than there was for the speaker. It was quite obvious that the mothers encouraged the boys and girls to stay. For one reason, they could have their eyes on them; then there seemed to be a vague notion that they might get some good.
The music in the prologue always held the children, and I was surprised to notice that they seemed to have a certain curiosity about the lecturer, which would keep them in their seats for five or ten minutes. Occasionally there would be a youngster who would sit throughout the lecture with his eyes riveted on you— serious, attentive, apparently thoughtful. It was always puzzling to me to know whether he really was hearing what I said, or whether he might not be taking this opportunity for wonderful day-dreams. He was probably off with Captain Kidd or Buffalo Bill, sailing the seas, searching for treasure, hunting big game. I hope it was that.
More often than not, the little groups of children who remained would fall to whispering and giggling, and sometimes to frisking, which would end in an occasional rough-and-tumble fight. When things reached this point, they were generally shooed out, but here again without any apparent consideration for the speaker. It interested me to see how gradually I came to be on the side of the audience in this informal procedure. They were there, partly at least, for entertainment. This was not a school. This was a place to go with the children; and if you could not keep them quiet by force of what you had to offer, it was up to you to endure what you got.
This caused you to do queer things with your material. I think the place where it hit me hardest was in my figures. I informed the audience once that we were a nation of one hundred thousand people, and a gentleman on the front seat promptly took me to task. I did not tell him that the reason I had made the slip was that directly in front of me was a little mother trying to keep quiet an obstreperous child of two and a half or three years by raising and lowering as rapidly as she could a big blue cotton umbrella. Somehow that umbrella upset my statistics. My misstatement could be explained more easily, however, than another one I discovered that I had made two or three times when the babies cried or the boys fell to batting one another over the head. I was talking of the earnings of a certain prosperous company which has an admirable system of profit-sharing. These earnings came to something like $4,000,000 a year; and whenever there was confusion at that point in my lecture I always put them at $40,000,000. It was some time before I discovered what I was doing.
You had to get used to the babies — to get, so to speak, their point, of view; and you had to get used to the dogs. They wandered across almost every lecture, looking for the one boy, I suppose; and occasionally they seemed to have a real interest in you. I shall always keep as an amusing recollection a little black dog that came down the centre aisle one afternoon, wagging his tail and looking me straight in the face as if my remarks were being addressed to him and he wanted to show his friendly appreciation of what I was saying. He came directly down in front of me, stopped, eyed me for a time, and then trailed off.
At the start I began to be curious about the women, and why they came so regularly; and gradually I got from one and another the chief reasons why they are so faithful in these towns to the Chautauqua movement. One day on the train out from a town where I had spoken, a woman came and sat beside me. She told me that she had heard me the day before, and asked me many questions about the people with whom I was traveling, and those who had preceded me. It was the third year, she said, for the Chautauqua in that particular community. ‘It is a great thing for us, particularly for us younger women with growing children. There are none of us in this town very rich. Most of us have to do all our work. We have little amusement, and almost never get away from home. The Chautauqua brings us an entire change. We plan for weeks before it. There is hardly a woman I know in town who has not her work so arranged, her pantry so full of food, that she can get to the meetings at half-past two in the afternoon, and easily stay until five. She gets her work done up for Chautauqua week.’
I found that this was a habit in a great many of the places where we went. The household régime was readjusted so as to make a place for the afternoon and evening sessions. Almost everywhere the men complained because they could not get away from their business as the women could. It was to me an interesting demonstration of something I have always claimed — namely, that the women’s home business had much more flexibility and opportunity for change in it than the man’s, providing, of course, that it is intelligently managed.
While the relief from the monotony of village existence was probably with most of the women the strongest reason for the Chautauqua support, they almost all seemed sincere in their claim that it acted as a good tonic to the community. ’It brings us new things to think about, to talk about’; and it was true. Bird of passage though I was, I regularly heard the echoes of my predecessors. In fact, I came to know a good deal about what certain of the speakers were saying, simply by listening to the Chautauqua followers.
In many places the Chautauqua was taken by the women, not merely as an entertainment and a tonic, but as an antidote to certain influences in the community which they felt were harmful. On the whole, they felt that it was lessening the power of the saloon. Not that there was any direct criticism; but the whole tone was antagonistic. In several of the towns the women work hard to make the show a success, and were promising their coöperation for the coming year that they might have an antidote to the traveling carnival, an institution of which I personally know nothing, but which in place after place I was told had done serious harm. They claimed that it had encouraged boys in evil ways and unsettled their girls; and in some cases there were tragic tales of young girls enticed away from town, or of boys bitten by the desire to go with the show.
Gradually it comes over one who studies the daily audience that this whole Chautauqua week and each one of its ‘talents’ are simply food for these people’s opinions. One gets an impression of being ‘sized up,’ quite commonly and quite naturally. They are people who have something to do, responsibilities that they regard as grave, work that they know is necessary. I was a little suspicious sometimes that they might be saying to themselves, ‘How in the world can it happen that a woman should be rambling about in this sort of way? Has she nothing to do, that she does not stay at home?’
They have something to do; they believe in it, not only for themselves, but for everybody; they are making communities, forming and building up families. They think about what you say, but you may or may not influence the opinions which they hold. You are simply one of several sources to which they look for the stuff on which they will form their judgments. Sometimes you know that you have won them, or that they believe with you — occasionally that they believe quite enthusiastically with you; and sometimes you know that they are silently protesting with might and main against what you say. I have seen men get up and leave my audience whose very backs declared as they went out, ‘She don’t know what she is talking about.’ It sinks into you deeper and deeper that these are the people who make the country, not the excited chattering kind who peddle opinions.
Proofs that they think about things, that they are well informed about what is going on in the country, multiply. One of the most convincing proofs that I received came from things I overheard at night. We ended our circuit with a siege of terrific heat — the kind of heat that made sleep impossible. The best room you could get was generally on the second-floor front. You pulled your bed to the window, and lay with your head practically out; but if you could not sleep you would certainly be entertained, for on the sidewalks there would gather, around 9.30 or 10, a little group of citizens who had come down to town after supper ‘to see a man.’ The common expression in the hotels for these groups would be that ‘they were out there chewing the rag.’ Their main theme, as I listened to them, was the war. Those who suppose that this country is not thinking about the war and thinking hard are wrong. These shop-keepers, laborers, traveling men, lawyers, and occasional preachers and hotel-keepers would sit out talking war, preparedness, neutrality, Wilson, Hughes, for half the night; and some of the shrewdest observations I have heard since this awful trouble began I heard from groups sitting on the curb or on the sidewalk under my window along about 11 or 12 o’clock of certain hot nights last July.
They were making up their minds; and to a larger extent, I believe, than has ever been true before in this country — in the localities where I traveled at least — those minds were open. I had interesting confirmation of this from a candidate for the nomination to Congress with whom I talked one night in an Ohio hotel. We had gone out to sit on the sidewalk, and as far as we could see all up and down the village street there were little groups on the curbs, on doorsteps, talking, talking, talking.
‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘Four years ago I could have told how practically every one of the men in this town would vote in November. I can’t do it to-day. Nobody can. They are freed from partisanship, as I could never have believed. They are out there now thrashing over Wilson and Hughes, and not twenty-five per cent of them know which it will be when election day comes.’
One thing which I consider of tremendous value I carried away from my unusual experience, and that was a deepened respect and confidence in the average people of the country. I had a new view of them — their sufficiency to the situation, their stability, their reliability. They stick by the thing in hand; and this is the vital quality of a great people. They work. Life is a stiff thing for most of them, but few of them shirk it. It comes to them as a slowmoving drama. The looker-on is inclined to think it is a commonplace drama, but when he knows a little more of it he sees how it is marked by sombre and real tragedies; not melodrama, not hysterical revolts, but events which have all the quality of nature’s tragedies, and everywhere a ripple of comedy plays through the drama. Sometimes, to be sure, it bursts out in something like horse-play, but as a rule it is a continuous current of humorous appreciation of the life around.
More and more I came to feel that you could count on these people for any effort or sacrifice that they believed necessary. One of the most revealing things about a country is the way it takes the threat of war. Just after we started came the call for troops for Mexico. It seemed as if war were inevitable. There was no undue excitement where we traveled, but boys in khaki seemed to spring out of the ground. The call came on a Saturday, if I remember, and the next morning our cars were sprinkled with soldiers.
I shall never forget one scene, which was being duplicated in many places in that region. We were in an old mountain town in Pennsylvania. Our hotel was on the public square, a small plot encircled by a row of dignified, oldfashioned buildings. In the centre stood a band-stand and beside it a foolish little stone soldier mounted on an over-high pedestal — a Civil War monument. We were told that on the square at half-past nine in the evening a town meeting would be called to say good-bye to the boys who were ‘off to Mexico on the ten-thirty.’ ‘How many of them?’ I asked. ‘One hundred and thirty-five,’ was the answer; and this was a town of not over twenty-eight hunared people.
That night we made ourselves comfortable in the windows of the hotel overlooking the square. As the hour approached the whole town gathered. It came quietly, as if for some natural weekly meeting; but they packed every foot of space. A little before ten o’clock we heard the drum and fife; and down the street came a procession that set my heart thumping. Close beside the City Fathers and speakers came a dozen old soldiers, some of them in faded blue, two or three on crutches, and behind them the boys, one hundred and thirtyfive of them — sober, consciously erect, their eyes straight ahead, their step so full of youth.
The procession formed before the little soldier, who somehow suddenly became anything but foolish; he took on dignity and power as had the boys in rank — boys whom, if I had seen them the day before, I might have called unthinking, shiftless, unreliable. The mayor, the ministers, a former Congressman, all talked. We simply watched the serious, steady young faces. There was a prayer, the crowd in solemn tones sang ‘My Country’t is of Thee.’ There was a curt order; the procession reformed; the old soldiers led the way, and the town followed the boys to the ‘ten-thirty.’
Nothing could have equaled the impression made by the quietness and the naturalness of the proceedings. And yet it took but little imagination to understand how the going of this hundred and thirty-five dislocated a town of twenty-eight hundred. I heard of one shop closed — the proprietor left behind a wife and two children. ' We look after them,’ the people told us. There was one young doctor who gave up a profession just finely established. To everybody it was a matter of course that he should do it. Besides the continuous vaudeville, the agitations and hysteria to which the East has treated us in the last two and a half years, this dignity, this immediate action, this willingness to see it through, gave one a solemn sense of the power and trustworthiness of this people. It was a realization that one would be willing to pay almost any price to come to. Certainly it more than paid me for my forty-nine days in forty-nine different beds.
He who undertakes a Chautauqua circuit may be able to contribute little to the education of his audiences, but let him be assured that if he is openminded, they will do much toward his own education.