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Son of the Middle Border

<hr />[Pg 421] <h2>CHAPTER XXXII</h2> <h2>The Spirit of Revolt</h2> During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and the old time politicians were uneasy. As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest were troubling Kansas so six-cent cotton was inflaming Georgia—and both were frankly sympathetic with Montana and Colorado whose miners were suffering from a drop in the price of silver. To express the meaning of this revolt a flying squadron of radical orators had been commissioned and were in the field. Mary Ellen Lease with Cassandra voice, and Jerry Simpson with shrewd humor were voicing the demands of the plainsman, while "Coin" Harvey as champion of the Free Silver theory had stirred the Mountaineer almost to a frenzy. It was an era of fervent meetings and fulminating resolutions. The Grange had been social, or at most commercially co-operative in its activities, but The Farmers' Alliance came as a revolt. The People's Party which was the natural outcome of this unrest involved my father. He wrote me that he had [Pg 422]joined "the Populists," and was one of their County officers. I was not surprised at this action on his part, for I had known how high in honor he held General Weaver who was the chief advocate of a third party. Naturally Flower sympathized with this movement, and kept the pages of his magazine filled with impassioned defenses of it. One day, early in '91, as I was calling upon him in his office, he suddenly said, "Garland, why can't you write a serial story for us? One that shall deal with this revolt of the farmers? It's perfectly legitimate material for a novel, as picturesque in its way as The Rise of the Vendée—Can't you make use of it?" To this I replied, with some excitement—"Why yes, I think I can. I have in my desk at this moment, several chapters of an unfinished story which uses the early phases of the Grange movement as a background. If it pleases you I can easily bring it down to date. It might be necessary for me to go into the field, and make some fresh studies, but I believe I can treat the two movements in the same story. Anyhow I should like to try." "Bring the manuscript in at once," replied Flower. "It may be just what we are looking for. If it is we will print it as a serial this summer, and bring it out in book form next winter." In high excitement I hurried home to dig up and re-read the fragment which I called at this time Bradley Talcott. It contained about thirty thousand words and its hero was a hired man on an Iowa farm. Of course I saw possibilities in this manuscript—I was in the mood to do that—and sent it in. Flower read it and reported almost by return mail. "We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies necessary to [Pg 423]complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay you for the serial besides." The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were nobly generous. They set me free. They gave me wings!—For the first time in my life I was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car, and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did so with elation—with a sense of conquest? Eager to explore—eager to know every state of the Union and especially eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails." On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known leaders in the field. Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm life were in no wise softened by these experiences. How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and twenty-six cent cotton—these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and silos! As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates and places—and no wonder, for I was doing [Pg 424]something every moment (I travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that summer does stand clearly out—that of a meeting with my father at Omaha in July. It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the Arena I had come to know many of the most prominent men in the movement, and my father was deeply impressed with their recognition of me. For the first time in his life, he deferred to me. He not only let me take charge of him, he let me pay the bills. He said nothing to me of his pride in my position, but my good friends Robert and Elia Peattie told me that to them he expressed the keenest satisfaction. "I never thought Hamlin would make a success of writing," he said, "although he was always given to books. I couldn't believe that he would ever earn a living that way, but it seems that he is doing it." My commission from Flower and the fact that the Arena was willing to pay my way about the country, were to him indubitable signs of prosperity. They could not be misinterpreted by his neighbors. Elia Peattie sat beside him at a meeting when I spoke, and she heard him say to an old soldier on the right, "I never knew just what that boy of mine was fitted for, but I guess he has struck his gait at last." It may seem illogical to the reader, but this deference on the part of the old soldier did not amuse me. On the contrary it hurt me. A little pang went through me every time he yielded his leadership. I hated to see him display the slightest evidence of age, of weakness. I would rather have had him storm than sigh. Part of his [Pg 425]irresolution, his timidity, was due, as I could see, to the unwonted noise, and to the crowds of excited men, but more of it came from the vague alarm of self-distrust which are signs of advancing years. For two days we went about together, attending all the sessions and meeting many of the delegates, but we found time to discuss the problems which confronted us both. "I am farming nearly a thousand acres this year," he said, "and I'm getting the work systematized so that I can raise wheat at sixty cents a bushel—if I can only get fifteen bushels to the acre. But there's no money in the country. We seem to be at the bottom of our resources. I never expected to see this country in such a state. I can't get money enough to pay my taxes. Look at my clothes! I haven't had a new suit in three years. Your mother is in the same fix. I wanted to bring her down, but she had no clothes to wear—and then, besides, it's hard for her to travel. The heat takes hold of her terribly." This statement of the Border's poverty and drought was the more moving to me for the reason that the old pioneer had always been so patriotic, so confident, so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West—in America—and it produced in me a sense of dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall into this slough of discouragement? My sympathy with the Alliance took on a personal tinge. My pride in my own "success" sank away. How pitiful it all seemed in the midst of the almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West! In the face of my mother's need my resources were pitifully inadequate. "I can't go up to see mother this time," I explained to my father, "but I am coming out again this fall to speak [Pg 426]in the campaign and I shall surely run up and visit her then." "I'll arrange for you to speak in Aberdeen," he said. "I'm on the County Committee." All the way back to Boston, and during the weeks of my work on my novel, I pondered the significance of the spiritual change which had swept over the whole nation—but above all others the problem of my father's desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes engaged my sympathy. "Unless he gets a crop this year," I reported to my brother—"he is going to need help. It fills me with horror to think of those old people spending another winter out there on the plain." My brother who was again engaged by Herne to play one of the leading parts in Shore Acres was beginning to see light ahead. His pay was not large but he was saving a little of it and was willing to use his savings to help me out in my plan of rescue. It was to be a rescue although we were careful never to put it in that form in our letters to the old pioneer. <hr style='width: 45%;' /> Up to this month I had retained my position in the Boston School of Oratory, but I now notified Brown that I should teach no more in his school or any other school. His big shoulders began to shake and a chuckle preceded his irritating joke—"Going back to shingling?" he demanded. "No," I replied, "I'm not going to shingle any more—except for exercise after I get my homestead in the west—but I think—I'm not sure—I think I can make a living with my pen." He became serious at this and said, "I'm sorry to have you go—but you are entirely right. You have found your work and I give you my blessing on it. But you must always count yourself one of my teachers and come [Pg 427]and speak for us whenever you can." This I promised to do and so we parted. Early in September I went west and having put myself in the hands of the State Central Committee of Iowa, entered the field, campaigning in the interests of the People's Party. For six weeks I travelled, speaking nearly every day—getting back to the farms of the west and harvesting a rich fund of experiences. It was delightful autumn weather, and in central Iowa the crops were fairly abundant. On every hand fields of corn covered the gentle hills like wide rugs of lavender velvet, and the odor of melons and ripening leaves filled the air. Nature's songs of cheer and abundance (uttered by innumerable insects) set forth the monstrous injustice of man's law by way of contrast. Why should children cry for food in our cities whilst fruits rotted on the vines and wheat had no value to the harvester? With other eager young reformers, I rode across the odorous prairie swells, journeying from one meeting place to another, feeling as my companions did that something grandly beneficial was about to be enacted into law. In this spirit I spoke at Populist picnics, standing beneath great oaks, surrounded by men and women, work-worn like my own father and mother, shadowed by the same cloud of dismay. I smothered in small halls situated over saloons and livery stables, travelling by freight-train at night in order to ride in triumph as "Orator of the Day" at some county fair, until at last I lost all sense of being the writer and recluse. As I went north my indignation burned brighter, for the discontent of the people had been sharpened by the drought which had again cut short the crop. At Millbank, Cyrus, one of my old Dry Run neighbors, met me. He was now a grave, stooping middle-aged man also in [Pg 428]the midst of disillusionment. "Going west" had been a mistake for him as for my father—"But here we are," he said, "and I see nothing for it but to stick to the job." Mother and father came to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation. They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected. They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value and to the full, the honor which their neighbors paid me—their son! Their presence so affected me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address. We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly regaining the use of her limbs. Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live together,—not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be long now." She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all right again—at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are successful." This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to rescue [Pg 429]her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land. My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to be the all-conquering capital of The Nation. My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston to build up Manhattan had begun. My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in Shore Acres, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding houses." With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd like to spend a winter in the old town anyway." My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet wide and about [Pg 430]forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal was eaten at home. Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons, but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly acknowledged their indebtedness to him. Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays. Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the good old Convent Avenue days!" [Pg 431]New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now, but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in waves of unearned rent. And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me, I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My dominion is the West." Though at ease, I had no feeling of being at home in this tumult. I was only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor sometimes made us all seem rather like thorough-going cranks—which we were. In the midst of our growing security and expanding acquaintanceship, my brother and I often returned to the problem of our aging parents. My brother was all for bringing them east but to this I replied, "No, that is out of the question. The old pioneer would never be happy in a city." "We could buy a farm over in Jersey." "What would he do there? He would be among strangers and in strange conditions.—No, the only solution is to get him to go back either to Iowa or to [Pg 432]Wisconsin. He will find even that very hard to do for it will seem like failure but he must do it. For mother's sake I'd rather see him go back to the LaCrosse valley. It would be a pleasure to visit them there." "That is the thing to do," my brother agreed. "I'll never get out to Dakota again." The more I thought about this the lovelier it seemed. The hills, the farmhouses, the roads, the meadows all had delightful associations in my mind, as I knew they must have in my mother's mind and the idea of a regained homestead in the place of my birth began to engage my thought whenever I had leisure to ponder my problem and especially whenever I received a letter from my mother. There was a certain poetic justice in the return of my father and mother to the land from which they had been lured a quarter of a century before, and I was willing to make any sacrifice to bring it about. I take no credit for this, it was a purely selfish plan, for so long as they were alone out there on the plain my own life must continue to be troubled and uneasy. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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