The Peripatetic Reviewer

As WE settle back into our private lives, the guard goes up. Reticence has returned. I see it as I travel. I miss the camaraderie, the sharing, the boy picked up as he thumbed his way back from leave, the friendliness which so often led to unburdening. I miss the candor and the heart with which Americans turned to each other while the pressure was on.

This feeling of unanimity grew on us by degrees. I felt it in my trip across the continent in February, particularly in San Francisco, which was then receiving the first wounded. The war came home to San Francisco early, and in that heavenly room which hangs like a lantern above the Golden (date, the Top of the Mark, to the north one could see the submarine net and to the south the first transports making up for Auslralia, — I watched men andh women in uniform, strangers sizing each other up, not critically as in civilian life, but with a sense of belonging. The guards were dow n.

Who can forget the patience and the humor of the crowds? It was in our railway stations, from the Pennsylvania Terminal to the whistle stops, that you saw character in the open, and the heart on the sleeve, I think of the files of selectees, hatless, leaving one life with no more luggage than a toothbrush how they would stand there covering up embarrassment with the old horse laugh: and in the shadow and out of touch, the mother with the red eyes, the old man, so inarticulate, and the kid brothers.

I remember one midnight in the Dayton station. Ohio was a bottleneck of shipping at the time and the train was more than two hours late. Information kept repeating, “Twelve thirty-five, yes, twelve thirty-five”—which meant that we’d be silting up until three fifteen in the morning before we reached Indianapolis. Many of us were waiting— parents who had been seeing their flyers at Wright Field; Army wives with the little kangaroos; salesmen, soldiers, and Waes. When at hist the train did show up, there were extra coaches for our benefit; crowding the aisles and sitting on the arms, we could just, fit in.

And then, since sleep was out of the question, a vaudeville show began. The car attendant was a little, very dark Negro with a while smile. He’d edge into the car with something to sell, the salesman nearest the door would nab him, and an auction would begin pillows, sandwiches, Lily cups of coffee, were auctioned off with some pretty good cracks. As we rattled along there was singing, and when the conductor fought his way in, he really ran the gantlet. The heat, the sprawled, relaxed figures, the lovers, head on shoulder, the merciless light crude? Sure, crude as Chaucer. But unmistakably American and unanimous.

For the couples those stations must have been unforgettable. South Station, Grand Central, the Union at Washington who could ever paint, not the uniforms, but the hurry, the tension, and the muteness? You don’t speak when you’re snatching at time. There aren’twords. But the fingers lock and the eyes hold back time in that long utterable look, the look Chilians tried not to bump into.

I remember bring on a Local which stopped for a century at Salem. Right beneath my window a GI and his wife were looking farewell. They fixed that train, even after the conductor’s “All aboard!" had urged him into the seat beside me— it didn’t go. The two-vear-old was held up to the window and the GI kept looking, and it felt like tearing apart when at last we jerked into motion. When we were safely out of sight his tears came.

I remember an early breakfast in the station at Pittsburgh and a fine-looking woman of about my age who was crying silently as she read a red and blue edged letter. She was not looking at any one of us, nor we at her, but the grief was plain and unreticent.

About a year or so later I remember flying north from Alabama. June, the midnight flight, and a moon big as a barn. My seat male was it sailor home bound from San Diego after fourteen months in the Pacific. “Where you getting off, sailor?” “Charlotte, sir. I live forty miles over the mountain from Charlotte.” “Will they be expecting you?” “ I sent ‘em a wire but I don’t reckon they’ll get it.”

It was 3.00 A.M. when we put our wheels down at Charlotte and he was dead to the world. The stewardess and I shook him. “Sailor, you’re home,” I said. “No,” he mumbled, “wanna get off at Charlotte.” Well, wre got him to his feet at last he’d lost his hat — and I followed him down the dimly lit plane to see him ashore. Half drunk with sleep, he tacked across the apron, making for a flight of stairs, and just as he walked into the floodlight a girl in a red dress came down like a diver. “Johnny!” she cried, and the note of her voice I can still hear; then she was in his arms, her feet clean off the ground. I looked up the stairs and there in the shadows were the family, the elders waiting their turn.

We are speaking of the open heart. I don’t say this is the way to live, this anguish, this uprooting, this cry of return. I say that while we had to we lived with the open heart and with a sympathy for others that makes us a great people. See that we do not close it too soon in our hurry to renew our privacy.

He was born in Kansas, the only surviving child of independent, middle-aged parents. Let the stress fall on that word “independent.” Will’s father was known the state over as “Doc” White, a self-made, bumptious character, undersized and overweight, whose five-foot-five, 220-pound figure made him conspicuous as he walked the streets of El Dorado in his white suit and Panama. He walked with a minority, for he was a Northern Democrat in a passionately Republican neighborhood; he believed in a negotiated peace and would take no part in the Civil War other than doctoring its survivors. In middle life he had picked up enough medical training for a degree, and he would practice medicine until his money ran out, then go back to keeping store, preferably a drugstore. He dyed his hair, but the dye fooled no one, said his son,»— was a nimble dancer and a practical joker who usually ended by being the butt of his own jokes. From him Will inherited buoyancy, gregarious ness, and “something of an abdominal tendency,” and if sons grow by contradiction of the Old Man, from him Will inherited his lifelong, undeviating loyalty to the Republican Party.

Will grew up in a Kansas of farms, prairie, and woods uncut. He knew the Indians. As a toddler he had been ridden back to town on the saddle of a friendly Sioux. He knew the massacre stories, too, from mothers of his schoolmates who had been scalped. He grew up a redhead, his face one large freckle, who took love seriously at six (“For me it was the greatest thing in the world, and it still is”), a youngster who loved not only Leila Heaton and then his schoolteachers, and then his Sallie, but even more the little feuds, the hearty humor, and the family loyalties which held the small town together. His love of Kansas was his mainspring, and if he dwells on the bucolic to an extent some Easterners will find garrulous, it is because out of such soil came the strength, the shrewdness, and the heart which made him the spokesman for the small town everywhere.

If no one knew it, this book would demonstrate that Will White was a born journalist. The most endearing chapters in it are those which tell of the fun and challenge he had in his middle twenties as the beginning editor of the Emporia Gazette, circulation rising 500. He wrote well, with a zest and with an edge frequently contemptuous of things as they were, but not cynical. And he wrote with that editorial balance which enabled him to see both sides of an issue, despite his partisanship. The story of how he worked twelve hours a day as the editor of the thriving Gazette, of correcting with Sallie proofs of his first book, The Real Issue; the story of his first famous editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and of how Mark Hanna offered him a political side of pork in the Zanesville Hotel; the story of his first visit to Washington, of his meeting with T.R. and William Dean Howells, and of the beginning of his friendship with John Phillips, Sam McClure, and Ida Tarbell these are pages whose freshness and magnetism will give a lift to any new writer.

A born journalist, so he was by inheritance and inclination a Progressive. He had been warned by an old friend of his father’s that the could never be a good editor and run for office. The warning went deep and he did his best to obey it. But he was sorely tempted, and the direction of his temptation you see in phrases like this: “We just were not meant for each other — William McKinley and I. He was destined for a statue in a park and was practicing the pose for it”; Congressman Charley Curtis was “a kind of animated figure of political seduction”; Warren G. Harding had “the false harlot’s voice of the old-lime political orator.” I think that all his life Will White wanted to rebel from the political machine, and he had his chance in the exhilaration of the Bull House revolt of 1912. But T.R. broke Will’s liberal hopes when he turned down the Progressive nomination in 1916, and thereafter Will came sorrowfully to heel. Like a good Republican, he reviled Wilson (and when his wife Sallie at Oyster Bay told T.R. that she was voting for Woodrow, what a scene!), lie could put up with the more genial side of Harding; he could write, though without his characteristic salt, the campaign life of Coolidge, and unlike such fellow Progressives as Harold Ickes, James Garfield, and Donald Richberg, he could resist the liberalism of the second Roosevelt. “You’re a good fellow, Will,”F.D.R. once said to him. “Anyhow you’re with us three and a half years out of every four. But what that internal struggle meant to Will White he never lived to tell us.

Eager, impulsive, warmhearted, thrifty, often morally indignant and vet capable of a compromise and even of self-deception when it came to politics, Will White writes himself down as open, as manysided, and I think as representative an American as has lived between Lincoln and Hoover.