The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents, The Driver, by Garrett Garrett. Read by Jeff Rigenbach.
Chapter 1. Phantasma.
1. It is Easter Sunday in the village of Masslin, Stark County, Ohio, fifty miles south by east from Cleveland, fourth year of the soft money plague, 1894.
The sky is low and brooding with an untimely thought of snow. Church bells are ringing. They sound remote and disapproving. Almost nobody is mindful of their call. The soul may miss its feast. The eye of wonder shall not be cheated.
The comic God has published a decree.
Here once more the sad biped, solemn, ludicrous and romantic, shall mount the gilded ass.
It is a spectacle that will not wait.
For weeks, in all the newspapers of the country, the fact has been advertised in a spirit of
waggery.
At this hour, and from this place, the army of the common wheel of Christ will set forth
The Village is a gog with people congregating to witness the fantasied event.
In the main street, natives and strangers mingle their feet gregariously.
There are spasmodic sounds of laughter, retort, argument and ribaldry, and continually the
shrill cries of youth in a frenzy of expectation.
Buggies, two-wheelers, open carts and spring wagons line both sides of the street.
The horses are blanketed.
A damp, chill wind is blowing.
Vendors from Chicago, lewd-looking men, working a hundred feet apart, are yelling,
Get a Christ Army button here for a nickel!
There is a composite smell of ham sandwiches, peanuts, oranges and cigars.
A shout rises at the far end of the street. The crowd that has been so thick there, filling
the whole space, bursts open. A band begins playing Onward Christian Soldiers, and the
spectacle is present.
First comes a negro bearing the American flag. Next, on a white horse, is a thick, close-bearded,
self-regarding man with powerful darting eyes and an air of fantastic vanity. He wears a
He wears a buckskin coat with fringed sleeves. The breast is covered with gaudy metals.
On his head is a large white sombrero. Around his neck swings a string of amber beads.
He is cheered and rallied as he passes, and bows continually.
Behind him walks a trumpeter, saluted as Windy Oliver.
After the trumpeter walks the astrologer, bearing the wand of his mysterious office.
In a band of seven pieces, very willing and enterprising.
And now, by the timbre and volume of the cheering, you recognize the commander.
He rides.
Sitting so still and distant beside a negro driver in a buggy drawn by two mares, he is
disappointing to the eye.
There is nothing obviously heroic about him.
He wears spectacles.
Above a thin, down-growing mustache, the face is that of a man of ideas and action.
The lower features, especially the mouth, denote a shy, secretive, sentimental, credulous
man of mystical preoccupations.
None of these qualities is more than commonplace.
The type is well known to inland communities.
The man who believes in perpetual motion, in the perfectibility of human nature, in
and miraculous interventions of deity and makes a small living shrewdly.
He might be the inventor of a washing machine.
He is in fact the owner of a sandstone quarry and a breeder of horses.
But mark you, the ego may achieve grandeur in any habitat.
It is not in the least particular.
This inconsiderable man, ludicrously setting forth on Easter Sunday in command of a modern
and Crusade has one startling obsession.
He believes that with the bandit-looking person on the white horse, he shares the reincarnation
of Christ.
In a buggy following, with what thoughts we shall never know, rides the wife of this half
of Christ reincarnated.
Next comes another negro bearing the banner of the common wheel of Christ.
In the center of it is a painted Christ head.
The lettering, divided above and below the head, reads,
Peace on earth, goodwill to men, but death to interest-bearing bonds.
Then comes the army of the common-wheelers.
They are counted derisively.
The commander said there would be a hundred thousand, or at least ten thousand, or, at
the start, not fewer than one thousand.
Well, the number is one hundred scant.
They are a weird lot.
A grim, one-eyed miner from Ottumwa, a jockey from Lexington, a fanatical preacher of the
raw gospel from Detroit, a heavy steel mill worker from Youngstown, a sinewy young farmer
from near Sandusky, a Swede laborer from everywhere, one doctor, one lawyer, clerks, actors, paper
A man in a blue overcoat and white trousers, riding a horse with a red saddle, moves up
and down the line, eyeing it importantly.
At the end of this strange procession are two wagons.
One is called the commissariat wagon.
It is loaded with a circus tent, some bales of hay for the horses, and a few bags of provisions,
hardly enough for one day.
The other is a covered wagon painted blue.
The sides are decorated with geometrical figures of incomprehensible meaning.
This vehicle of mystery belongs to the precious being on the white horse ahead.
He created it.
Inside are sliding panoramas, which he has painted.
As these wagons pass, people on foot and in buggies and wagons to the number of more than
a thousand fall into line and follow.
Their curiosity is not yet sated.
They cannot abandon the spectacle.
Among these followers are forty-three correspondents representing newspapers from New York to
San Francisco, four Western Union telegraph operators and two linemen.
The route to Jerusalem is uncertain.
Something may happen on the open road miles from a telegraph office, hence the linemen,
anywhere to climb a pole and tap the wires and special operators to dispatch the news
emergently.
The reporters are to hoop the story up and be in on the crucifixion.
Could anything less seeming of reality be invented by the imagination?
It has the pattern of a dream, yet it is history.
This is how two fatuous spirits, charlatans maybe, visionaries certainly, Carl Brown on
the white horse and Jacob S. Coxey in the buggy, led the Army of the Common Wheel of
Christ, Coxey's Army for short, out of Massillon, past the blacksmith's shop, past the sandstone
quarry, past the little house where the woman was who waved her apron with one hand and
I, who am telling it, was one of the 43 correspondents.
The road was ankle-deep with that unguent kind of mud which lies on top of frost. Snow
began to fall. Curiosity waned in the rear. The followers began to slough off, shouting
words of encouragement as they turned back. Brown on his white horse, Coxie in his buggy,
and the man in the red saddle were immersed in vanity. But the marchers were extremely
At one o'clock there was a stop for coffee and dry bread, served on the table, and the
Out of the Commissariat Wagon
It was understood that the Army would live on the country as it went along, trusting
to charity and providence.
But the shrewdness of the commander had foreseen that the art of begging would have to be learned,
and that in any case it could not begin successfully on the first few miles out.
The common-wheelers watched us curiously as we tapped the telegraph wires by the roadside
to send off flash bulletins of progress. Both Brown and Coxie exhorted their followers to
courage, challenged the weaklings to drop out, and the march was resumed with only two
desertions. These were made good by excessions further on.
At four o'clock a halt was called near a village, the inhabitants of which made friendly gestures
and brought forth bacons and hams which were gratefully added to the boiled potatoes and
and Bread Served Out of the Wagon.
The tent was raised.
Brown, astride his bespattered white horse, made a speech.
He was the more aggressive half of the reincarnation.
Indeed, it came presently to be the opinion of the correspondents that he was the activating
principle of the whole infatuation and held the other in a spell.
He was full of sound and rhetoric and moved himself to ecstasy with sonorous sayings.
His talk was a wild compound of scripture, theosophy and populism.
The kingdom of heaven on earth was at hand, he said.
The conditions foretold in revelations were fulfilled.
The seven heads of the beast were the seven conspiracies against the money of the people.
The ten horns of the beast were the ten monopolies nourished in Wall Street.
The sugar trust, the oil trust, and so on.
We are fast undermining the structure of monopoly in the hearts of the people, he declaimed,
reaching his proration.
Like Cyrus of old, we are fast tunneling under the Boettler's Euphrates and will soon be
able to march under the walls of the Second Babylon and its mysteries, too.
The infernal, blood-sucking bank system will be overthrown, for the handwriting is on the
wall.
The listeners, though they growled at the mention of Wall Street and cheered the fall
of Babylon, received his interpretation of their role and errand with an uneasy, bothered
air.
Voices asked for coxie.
He spoke to them in a gentle manner, praised them for their courage and fortitude, emphasized
the hardships yet to be endured, proposed a hymn to be sung, and then dismissed them
3.
In the village railroad station was a telegraph office, where our special operators cut in
their instruments and received our copy.
Among us, we filed more than 40,000 words of narrative, incident, pathos and ridicule.
News is stranger than fiction, not in what it tells, but in how it happens.
In a room 20 feet square, lighted by one kerosene lamp, we wrote our copy on our knees, against
the wall, on each other's backs, standing up and lying down, matching notes and exchanging
information as we went along.
What's the name of this town? Louisville. Kentucky? Kentucky? No. Hear him. Ohio. Didn't
know there was a Louisville, Ohio. Write it anyway. It isn't the first time you've written
what you don't know. Then silence, save for the clicking of the telegraph instruments
and the crackling of copy paper. Who was that man in the red saddle? No answer. Again, who
Who was the guy in the red saddle?
No answer.
Another voice, in the same difficulty, roaring, Who in hell was the man in the red saddle?
Now everybody for a minute stops writing.
Nobody knows.
Voice, call him Smith, the man of mystery, the great unknown.
We did.
The man in the red saddle was Smith, the great unknown, to the end of his silly part.
There was a small hotel in the place with only two bedrooms available, and these had
been selfishly seized by three magazine writers who had no telegraph stuff to file.
They had retired.
The rest of us took possession of a fairly large lounging room and settled ourselves
for the night on cots, pallets and chairs.
The lean-minded man from Cleveland, reclining on the hotel desk with his feet on the cigar
We've set off a lot of guff about this thing, he said, and not a word of what it means.
Not a man here has tried to tell what it means.
Leave that to the editorial writers and go to sleep, said St. Louis from under his hat.
He had made his bed in the swivel chair.
It means something, it means something, said Cleveland.
Well, what? asked a petulant voice.
It's a joke, said St. Louis, not moving.
It's a joke, said St. Louis, not moving. People have to laugh, he added. Go to sleep or be still.
Another voice. What does it mean, you Cleveland? I saw you reading Plutarch. What does it mean?
These people are asking questions to which there is no answer, said the Cleveland man, lifting on his elbow.
Why is anybody hungry in a land of surplus food? Why are able-bodied men out of work
A man whom we had hardly noticed before, anemic, shrill, and hairy, sat up on his mattress and thrust a naked bent arm out of his blanket.
I'll tell you what it means, he shouted. Wall Street has sucked the country dry. People may perish, but Wall Street will have its profit and interest.
Labor may starve, but the banking power will keep money sound.
Money in itself is nothing, merely a convenience, a token by means of which useful things are exchanged.
Is that so? Not at all.
Money no longer exists for the use of people. We exist for the sake of money.
There is plenty everywhere, but people cannot buy because they are unemployed and have no money.
Coxie says, create the money, make it abundant. Then people may work and be prosperous. Well,
why not? Wall Street says, if you make money abundant, you will ruin the country. Hell,
the country is already ruined. We laugh. Yet what we have seen today is the beginning of revolution.
As people have freed themselves from other tyrannies, so they will free themselves from
from this money tyranny.
He stopped, out of breath and choking, and a singular hubbub arose.
Everyone awake had been listening attentively, and now, just as they lay, not an arm or a
leg stirring, all those huddled inert forms became vocal, shouting, Populist, righto,
put him out, douse him!
Points of weariness, irritation and raillery were inseparably mingled.
Yet the overtone was not unfriendly.
We could be light and cruel with the army of the common-wheel of Christ because its
whole figure was ludicrous.
But there was no love among us for Wall Street or the money power.
Those names stood for ideas of things which were commonly feared and hated and blamed
for all the economic distress of the time.
Above, the plutocratic magazine writers were pounding on the floor. The hairy agitator,
breathing heavily, melted back into his mattress, heavy in his conscience, no doubt, for having
written a very sarcastic piece about that Easter Day event. We saw it afterward in his
Chicago paper. The fat reporter from Cincinnati began to snore.
For a long time, I lay awake, thinking. What were we doing here? Reporting the news. News
of what? One hundred inconsequent men dreaming in the mud. Was that news? No, not intrinsically.
As a manifestation of the frustrate human spirit, it might serve as material for the
reflective fictionist, or text for some Olympian humorist. But why was it news, to be written
In their acts of faith, folly, wisdom and curiosity, men are moved by ideas. Perhaps therefore the discrepancy between the unimportance of this incongruous Easter Day spectacle itself and the interest we bestowed upon it was explained by what it signified, that is, by the motivating idea. This thought I examined carefully.
Two years before this, Jacob S. Coxie, horse breeder, quarry owner, crank, whom no one had heard of until then, proposed to cure the economic disease then afflicting the country by the simple expedient of hiring all the unemployed on public works.
Congress should raise half a billion dollars from non-interest-bearing bonds and spend the money on national roads.
codes. This plan received some publicity as a freak idea. Nobody had been really serious
about it. What then happens? One Carl Brown, theosophist, demagogue and noise breaker,
seeks out this money crank at Masslin, and together they incubate the thought of calling
upon the people to take the plan in the form of a petition and walk with it to Congress.
The thing is Russian, a petition in boots, a prayer to the government carried great distances
by peasants on foot.
The newspapers print it as a piece of light news.
Then everybody begins to talk about it, and the response is amazing.
People laugh openly and are secretly serious.
A day is set for the march to begin, a form of organization is announced, and Coxie Army
Many contingents begin to appear spontaneously all over the country.
This also is news, to be treated in the same light spirit, and no doubt it is much exaggerated
for sportive reasons.
As the day approaches, little groups of men calling themselves units of the Christ Army
of the Common Wheel set out from Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Michigan,
from anywhere east of the Missouri River, footing it to Massillon to merge their numbers.
Then it rains.
For three weeks there is nothing but rain, and the flesh fails.
That is why there is but a scant 100 to make the start.
Coxie believes the bemired and tardy units will survive and catch up.
He still hopes to have tens of thousands with him when he reaches Washington.
Man is unmistakably emotional. That is a fact to be accounted for. When did it become possible
to emotionalize the human animal with a financial idea? Specifically, a plan to convert non-interest-bearing
bonds into an unlimited amount of legal tender money? Never. The money theory is merely the
ostensible aspect, the outwardness of the matter. Something else is signified. What
What is it?
I come back to what the Cleveland man said.
Why are people hungry in a land of surplus food?
Why is labor idle?
Labor applied to materials is the source of all wealth.
There is no lack of materials.
The desire for wealth is without limit.
Why are men unemployed instead of acting on their unfinished environment to improve it?
And now, though I had thought my way around a circle, I began to glimpse some understanding
of what was taking place in a manner nominally so preposterous.
People had tormented themselves with these questions until they were weary, callous,
and bitterly ironic.
The country was in the toils of an invisible monster that devoured its heart and wasted
its substance.
The name of this monster was Hard Times.
The problem of unemployment was chronic, desperate and apparently hopeless.
The cause of it was unknown.
People were sick of thinking and talking about something for which there was no help.
They had either to despair or laugh.
Then came Coxie, fanatic, mount-a-bank or rare comedian, so solemn in his egregious
pretensions that no one knew which, and they laughed.
It might become serious.
Last psychology was in a highly inflammable condition. There was always that thought in reserve to tinge the laughter with foreboding. But if there came a conflagration, then perhaps the questions would be unexpectedly answered. Nobody cared much what else happened.
Cincinnati turned over with a frightful snort and was suddenly quiet. I prayed that he might be dead and went to sleep.
The next morning the New York Herald man took me aside.
I've been recalled from this assignment to go to Europe, he said.
I'm waiting for a man to relieve me.
He will pick us up some time today.
I said I was sorry, and I was, for we were made to each other's liking.
I don't care for the man who is relieving me, he continued.
Besides, he isn't competent to do what I'm about to ask you to undertake in my place.
Anything I can, I said.
You are from the West, he continued, and therefore you're not likely to know how jumpy the Wall
Street people are about what's going on.
They are afraid of this coxie movement, of what it may lead to.
They want to know a lot about it, more than they can get from the newspaper stories.
I've been sending a confidential letter on it daily to Valentine, you know, John Jay,
President of the Great Midwestern Railroad.
He wants the tale unvarnished, and what you think of it, and what others think of it.
He particularly wants to know, in the fullest way, how the Coxieites are received along
the way, for therein is disclosed the state of public feeling.
Well, I wish you to take this commission off my hands.
It pays fifty a week for the life of the circus.
I'll see him in New York, tell him who you are and why I left it for you to do.
Then when the thing is over, you can run up to New York from Washington and get your money.
I hesitated.
It's Wall Street money, I said.
It's railroad money, he replied.
That may be all the same thing, but there's no difficulty, really.
It's quite all right for anyone to do this.
What's wanted is the truth.
Put in your own opinions of Wall Street if you like.
Indeed, do that.
Wall Street people are not as you think they are.
Valentine is a particularly good sort, and honest in his point of view. I vouch for the whole thing.
So I took it, and thereafter posted to John J. Valentine, 130 Broadway, Room 607, Personal, a daily confidential report on the march of the common-wheelers.
I would not say that the fact of having a retainer in railroad money changed my point of view.
It did somewhat affect my sense of values, and my curiosity was extended.
For the purpose of the Valentine reports, I made an intensive personal study of the common-wheelers.
I asked them why they were doing it.
Some took it as a sporting adventure, with no thought of the consequences, and enjoyed the mob spirit.
Some were tramps, who, for the first time in their lives, found begging respectable.
But a great majority of them were earnest, wistful men, fairly aching with convictions, without being able to say what it was they had a conviction of, or what was wrong with the world.
Their notions were incoherent. Nobody seemed very sanguine about the Coxie Plan, nobody understood it, in fact.
Yet something would have to be done. People couldn't live without work.
Unemployment was the basic grievance. I took a group of twenty, all skilled workmen, sixteen of them married, and found that for each of them the average number of wage-earning days in a year had been twelve.
They blamed the money power in Wall Street. When they were asked how the money power could profit by their unemployment, what motive it could have in creating hard times, they took refuge in meaningless phrases.
Most of them believed in peaceable measures. Only three or four harbored destructive thoughts.
The manner of the Army's reception by farmers, villagers and townspeople was variable and hard at first to understand.
Generally there was plenty of plain food. Sometimes it was provided in a generous, sympathetic spirit.
Then again, it would be forthcoming as a bid for immunity, the givers at heart being fearful and hostile.
The army was much maligned by rumor as a body of tramps obtaining sustenance by blackmail.
It wasn't true. There was no theft, very little disorder, no taking without leave, even when the stomach gnawed.
One learned to anticipate the character of reception by the look of the plays.
of the Place. In poor, dilapidated communities there was always a hearty welcome with what
food the people could spare, cheerfully bestowed. The better and more prosperous the community,
the worse for the common-wheelers.
I spoke of this to some of the more thoughtful men. They had noted the fact and made nothing
of it. Then I spoke of it to one of the tramps who knew the technique of begging. He said,
In those industrial communities where class distinctions had arisen, that is to say, where poverty and affluence were separately self-conscious, the police invariably were disagreeable, and the poor were enthusiastic over the common-wheelers.
At Allegheny, where the steel mill workers had long suffered from unemployment, the army
received a large white silk banner, lettered, Laws for Americans, More Money, Less Misery.
Here there were several collisions between, on one side, the common-wheelers and their
welcomeers, and, on the other, the police.
At some towns, the army was not permitted to stop at all.
and others, it was officially received with music, speeches and rejoicings.
As these incidents became repetitious, they ceased to be news.
Yet they were more important, merely by reason of recurring, than the bizarre happenings
within the army, which, as newspaper correspondents, we were obliged competitively to emphasize.
As for example, the quarrel between Brown and the bandmaster, the mutiny led by Smith
the Great Unknown, the development of the reincarnation myth, and the increasing distaste
for it among the disciples.
The size of the army fluctuated with the state of the weather.
Crossing the Blue Mountains by the icy Cumberland Road in a snowstorm was an act of fortitude
almost heroic.
Confidence in the leaders declined.
Brown came to be treated with mild contempt.
The line Christ and Coxie, which had been painted on the Commissariat Wagon, was almost
too much.
There was grumbling in the ranks.
Everybody was discouraged when the expectation of great numbers had finally to be abandoned.
Never did the roll exceed 500 men, not even after the memorable junction in Maryland with
Christopher Columbus Jones, 48 men and a bulldog, from Philadelphia.
But there was a cohesive principle somewhere. Nearly all of those who started from Masslin
stuck to the very end. What held them together? Possibly a vague, heard sense of moving against
something and a dogged reaction to ridicule. This feeling of againstness is sometimes stronger
to unite men, especially unhappy men, than a feeling of forness. The thing that they
The climax was pitiably futile.
Two self-mongering reincarnations of Christ, both fresh and clean, having knighted in decent
Hotel, led 400 Draggletail men into Washington and up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds.
Enormous, humiliated crowds looking on. Brown dismounted and leaped over the low stone wall.
Coxie tried to make a speech. Both were good-naturedly arrested for trespassing on the public grass and violating a police ordinance.
The leaderless men wandered back to a campsite that had been mercifully loaned.
For a time they dully subsisted upon charity, ceased altogether to be news, and gradually vanished away.
4.
Though the army of the common-wheel of Christ was dead, and Coxie himself was now a pusillanimous figure,
Coccyism survived in a formidable manner.
The term was current in newspaper language, and the country seemed to be full of those
forms of social insubordination which it was meant to signify.
In the West, rudely organized bands, some of them armed and strong enough to overwhelm
the police of the cities through which they passed, were running amok.
They bore no petition in boots.
They were impatient and headlong.
One of their pastimes was train stealing.
They would seize a railroad train, overpower the crew and oblige themselves to outlaw transportation,
and the railroad people, fearful of accidents, would clear the way to let them through.
It was very exciting for men who had nothing else to do, and rather terrifying to the forces
of law and order.
Public opinion was distracted and outraged.
Some said, put down coxiaism, put it down with a strong hand.
To treat it tenderly is to encourage lawlessness.
Others said, you may be able to put down coxiaism by force, but you will sometime have to answer
the questions it has raised, better now than later.
There was a great swell of radical thought in the country.
The populist party, representing a blind sense of revolt, had elected four men to the Senate
and Eleven to the House of Representatives. Many newspapers and magazines were aligned
with the agitators, all asking the same questions. Why hunger in a land of plenty? Why unemployment?
Why was the economic machine making this frightful noise?
The federal and state governments were afraid to act effectively against coxiaism because
was too many people sympathized with it, secretly or openly.
It was partly a state of nerves.
Writers in the popular periodicals and in some of the solemn reviews laid it on red.
In Coxie's march they saw an historic parallel.
In almost the same way, five hundred volunteers, knowing how to die, had marched from Marseille
to Paris with questions that could not be answered and gave the French Revolution a
A Hymn that Shook the World
Human distress was first-page news.
The New York world gave away a million loaves of bread and whooped up its circulation.
The New York Herald solicited donations of clothing, which it distributed in large quantities
to the ragged.
On the train from Washington to New York, I found men continually wrangling in fierce
heat about money, tariffs and coxiaism.
I was surprised to hear Wall Street attacked by well-dressed, apparently prosperous men
in the very phrases with which the Coxieites had filled my ears.
Nobody by any chance ever stood in defense of Wall Street.
But there were those who denounced the Coxieites and populists intemperately.
Everybody denounced something.
Nobody was for anything.
National morale was in a very low state.
In the smoking compartment, two men, behaving as old acquaintances, quarreled interminably
and with so much dialectical skill that an audience gathered to listen in respectful silence.
One was a neat clerical-looking person whose anxieties were unrelieved by any glimpse of
humor or fancy.
The other was carelessly dressed, spilt cigar ashes over his clothes unawares, and had a
He had a way of putting out his tongue and laughing at himself dryly if the argument went momentarily against him or when he had adroitly delivered himself from a tight place.
He was the elder of the two. He was saying,
Because men are out of work, they do not lose their rights as citizens to petition Congress in any peaceable manner.
Your low tariff is the cause of unemployment. There is the evidence, those cold smokestacks.
He pointed to them. We were passing through Wilmington.
The importation of cheap foreign goods has shut our factories up.
You retort by calling the unemployed tramps.
It was the high Republican tariff that made the people soft and helpless, said the other.
For years you taught them that good times resulted not from industry and self-reliance, but from laws.
That prosperity was created by law.
Now you reap the fruit. You put money into the pockets of the manufacturers by high tariffs. The people know this. Now they say, fill our pockets, too. It's quite consistent. But it's socialism. That's what all this coxiaism is, a filthy eruption of socialism, and the Republican Party is responsible.
You forget to tell what has become of the jobs, the other said. All they want is work to do. Where is the work?
These coxeyites, the other retorted, are a lot of strolling beggars. They refuse work. They enjoy marching through the country in mobs, living without work, doing in groups what as individuals they would not dare to do for fear of police and dogs.
and the Republican Party encourages them in this criminality because it needs a high-tariff argument.
At this point, an impulse injected me into the discussion.
You are wrong about the Coxieites, I said. At least as to those from Masslin.
I marched with them all the way. A few were tramps. There were no criminals. A great majority of them cloyed.
Both of them stared at me, and I went on for a long time, not knowing how to stop and wishing I hadn't begun.
The younger man heard me through with a bored air and turned away, but the other asked me some questions and thanked me for my information.
The episode closed suddenly. We were running into the Jersey City Railroad terminal on the west bank of the Hudson River,
and all fellow traveller contacts began to break up without ceremony in the commotion
of arrival.
I saw no more of the disputants and forgot them entirely in the thrill of approaching
New York for the first time.
It was early evening.
Slowly I made headway up the platform against the tide of New Jersey commuters returning
from work.
With a scuffling roar of feet and no vocal sound whatever, they came racing through the
The terminal in one buffalo mass, then divided into hasty streams, flowed along the platforms
and boarded the westbound trains, strangely at ease with extraordinary burdens, such as
reels of hoes, boxes of tomato plants, rakes, scythes, hand cultivators, bags of bulbs,
carpentering tools and bits of lumber.
Beating my way up the current, wondering how so many people came, by what means they could
be delivered in such numbers continuously, I came presently into view of the cataract.
Great double-decked ferry boats packed to the rails with self-loading and unloading
cargoes were arriving two or three at a time and berthing in slips which lay side by side
in a long row like horse stalls.
We the eastbound passengers from the Washington train gathered at one of the empty slips.
Through the gates I saw a patch of water. Suddenly a stealthy mass upheaved, hesitated,
then made up its mind and came ahead on with terrific momentum. At the breathless moment
the engines were reversed, there was a gnashing of waters and the boat came fast with a soft
bump. The gates burst open and the people decanted themselves with a headlong rush.
We stood tight against the wall to let them pass. As the tail of the spill filed by we
were sent aboard, the gates banged too behind us, and the boat was off toward the other
shore for another load. This was before the unromantic convenience of Hudson River tunnels.
I stood on the bow to have my first look at New York. One's inner sense does not perceive
A wide mile of opal water, pulsatile, thrilling to itself in a languorous ancient way, and
so indifferent.
Indifference was its immemorial character.
I watched the things that walked upon it, four-eyed, double-ended ferry boats with no
No fore or aft, like those monsters of the myth that never turned around. Tugs like mighty
percherons dragging sledges in a string. A loitering hyena marked dynamite, much to be
avoided. Behemoths of the deep, helpless in this thoroughfare led by hosers from the nose.
Sore-footed scows with one-pole rigs and dressy high-heeled pleasure craft. The river was
Was as unregardful of all these tooting, hooting, hissing improvisations as of the natural fish,
the creaking gulls, or those swift and ceaseless patterns woven of the light which seem to
play upon its surface and are not really there.
Beyond was that to which all this hubbub appertained, the city, sudden epic, man's forethought of
escape, his refuge, his self-overwhelming integration.
Anything may happen in a city.
Career is there, success is there, failure, anguish, horror, women, hell and heaven.
One has the sense of moral fibers loosening.
Lust of conquest stirs, the spirit of adventure flames.
A city is a tilting field, unknown, self-named, anyone may enter, cast his challenge where
he will and take the consequences.
The penalties are worse than fatal, the rewards are what you will.
New York, I said.
It stood against the eastern sky, a pure illusion, a rhythmic mass without weight or substance
in the haze of a Mayday evening.
The shadows of twilight were rising like a mist. Everything of average height already
was submerged. Some of the very tall buildings still had the light above, and their upper
windows were a gleam with reflections of the sunset.
Seething city, so full of life, transacting potently and yet so still. A thin grey shell,
a fragile show, a profile raised in time and space, a challenge to the elements. They take
New York, I said again, out loud.
A man who must have been standing close beside me for some time spoke suddenly, without salutation
or word of prelude.
You were with Coxie's army?
Yes, I said, turning to look at him. I recognized him as a man who sat in one corner of the smoking compartment, listening in an attentive, though supercilious manner, and never spoke.
Wasn't there plenty to eat? he asked in a truculent tone. People were very generous along the way.
Wasn't there plenty to eat? he asked, repeating the question aggressively.
There was generally enough, and sometimes plenty, I replied.
said, then I added, rather sharply, I have no case to prove for the coxiites, if that's
what you think. I know you haven't, he said. I have no case to make against them, either.
They are out of work. That's bad. But people who will ask need not be hungry. You can cut
that out. The unemployed eat. You've seen it. Do the ravens feed them?
What are you driving at? I asked. They all eat, he repeated. Ain't that extraordinary?
doesn't seem so to me, I said, they have to eat. Oh, do they? he said. You can eat
merely because you have to, can you? Suppose there wasn't anything to eat.
He was turning away with his feathers up, as if he had carried the argument, but I detained
him. All right, I said, there is not enough work, but plenty to eat. We'll suppose it.
What does that prove?
Seeing me intently, with some new interest, he hesitated, not as to what he would say,
but as to whether he should bother to say it.
It proves, he said, that the country is rich.
Nobody knows it.
Nobody will believe it.
The country is so rich that people may actually live without work.
That's an interesting point of view, I said.
Who are you?
Nobody, he replied with an oblique sneer, a member of the stock exchange.
Oh, I said, before I could catch it. And not to leave the conversation in that lurch, I asked,
Do you know who those two men were who wrangled in the smoking compartment?
Editors, he replied cynically. The younger one was Godkin of the Post.
I've forgotten the other one's name. Silly magpies. Politics hell.
At that instant the ferry boat bumped into her slip. The petulant man screwed his head
half round, jerked a come-along nod to a girl who had been standing just behind us and stalked
off in a mild brain fit.
I had not noticed the girl before. She passed me to overtake her father, I supposed it was
her father, and in passing she gave me a look which made me both hot and cold at once. It
left me astonished, humiliated and angry. It was a full, open, estimating look, too
impervious to be returned as it deserved, and much too impersonal to be rude. It was
worse than rude. I was an object and not a person. It occurred to me that either or both
of us might have been stark nude and it would not have made the slightest difference.
For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken, that she was not a girl but a man-hardened
and Women. I followed them for some distance, and she was unmistakably a girl, probably
under twenty, audaciously lithe and flexible. She walked without touching her father, if
he were that. He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and
moved with a bantam egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his trouser's pocket,
which gave him a slight lift to the right, for his arms were short. The skirts of his
His overcoat fluttered in the wind, and his left arm swung in an arc.
Presently I lost them, and that was all of it. But this experience, apparently so trivial,
cost me all other sensations of first contact with New York. I wandered about for several
hours complaining that all cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere
My last thought was, why did she look at me at all? Her eyes were dark carnelian.