THE MAVERICKS OF BROADWAY
"Ye Dutch's Chiefe Towne"
Right in the very beginning of this book I talked of the "Manhattan Mind,"* thanked everybody, said something about life down in Texas, and told how the stork, in a fashion quite proper and constitutional, brought me into this world. In this chapter I think I shall finish off the Manhattan mind.
The story of New York City is essentially a disjointed one; it always was, and always will be. Samuel Maverick, whom you already know, in the year 1664 wrote the first letter that ever was marked "New York"; and if you do not believe it, read your New Yorker's Almanac, which will cost you fifty cents, but you can take my word for it, and save the money.
The first part of this chapter will be a sort of Lecture to New Yorkers.
First, my children, let me tell you the origin of the name of your little island. The name "Manhattan" is a corruption. Sam Maverick referred to it as "Manhatas, which is ye Dutch's Chiefe Towne". [Go to the Library on Fifth Avenue, and ask for Maverick's Description of New England, and Osgood's American Colonies.] Then, I find the word Man-a-hat-ta-nink, which means a place of general intoxication. [Aboriginal Place Names of New York, New York State Museum, 1907, the New Yorker's own authority.] Therefore I presume the word developed into one word, Manhattan, because of the curious habits of the natives.
Now, during the Presidential campaign of 1936, I bowl into this Manhattan and go to the Biltmore, since it is the headquarters of my party. Sensations begin before I got off the train. A lady drops dead in a stateroom near me. I think I hear horrible noises. Relatives come to meet her, and find her dead body instead. Doctors are called and everybody is sick over it. They pull up a window, and cram the dead body out. Just that.
Into this great modern pueblo I go. Into the room. The door closes. It is dreadful and lonesome. It is like the Death House. Shall I call up some friend? No. I will go out on Broadway. But before I go, I shall tell of Sam Maverick, who lived on Broadway nearly three hundred years ago, and how there came to be a New York.
Sam Maverick was up in Massachusetts, anxious to get away, and some of his neighbors, as you remember, felt the same way about it. So he wrote Lord Clarendon in the year 1661, following it up with a visit to England in 1662. His letter concerning what is now New York City and surroundings is as follows:
"The land also is exceedinge good, There are also two gallant riuers running farr vp into the land And it lyeth most Commodious for comerce from and wth all pts of the West Indies, and may in tyme on that Account, proue very aduantagious to ye Crowne of England if Regained, and as priudiciall if not." ["The Clarendon Papers," N.Y. Historical Society, Vol. I.]
Having given the warning that New Amsterdam should be under the British Crown, advantageous if so, and prejudicial if not, he gives several pages of lengthy advice as to military strategy, and the taking of the town, and says:
"For the Dutch I know by credible information they haue not of theire owne Nation, forteene hundred wch can beare armes, and there are neare fower hundered able English men wch liue amongst them, These all both Dutch and English, are extreamely burdned wth heauie taxations as the tenth pte of all the land produceth, And vnheard of Excise, not only on all goods, brought to them or caryed from thence, but also on what they eate and drinke. Sr I am very Confident, if his Matie doe but send and demaund a surrender lettinge them enjoy theire lands and goods, and mittigatinge the burdens they now lie vnder, there will be littell or no dispute about it. Yet for the more honorable caryage on of the worke and the more surely to effect it, It will be Convenient if his Maiestie please, to haue one good frigott and two smaler ones, a hundered or two of well experienced soldiers, one thousand spare armes wth some powder shot &c. And for what men else may be needful in case they should at first refuse surrender, the English Plantations wthin twentie or thirtie leagues can suddenly furnish."
Then he adds more detailed advice, and reminds Clarendon that the people should have two things: civil and religious liberty, and low taxes. This, he said, would make it work for all time.
It was finally decided to take over the Dutch Colony, and four royal commissioners were appointed. They were Richard Nichols, George Cartwright, Sir Robert Carr, all colonels, and Sam Maverick, civilian. In September of 1664, after several months of intrigue and preparing the way, they entered and took possession. As Maverick has said, there was no opposition. The oath of allegiance was taken by all the Dutch within a month, and all was hunky-dory.
The King's Commissioners were always signing papers with people, and with each other. Here are the four commissioners who took New York, gave her a name, and put the British Flag flying over the Island.
By now every New Yorker knows why he has a place to sleep. And if Sam Maverick conspired to take "ye Dutch's Chiefe Towne" away from the Dutch, is it not proper that I should return these three hundred years later to help elect a Dutchman president, and to lecture the wild mavericks of Broadway about their inhibitions and bad habits? So let us jump these centuries, and move to the death-cell in the Biltmore.
I get dressed and move out. Broadway. . . . Still lonesome as hell; I feel slightly suicidal, but not enough to commit the deed. From Broadway and Forty-second, up and down, is the greatest display on earth. The Spearmint sign is a marvel of beauty, radiant in red, green and gold; thousands back up against the Astor Hotel and other buildings to gaze at it. The greatest place for the benefit or detriment of the easy spenders ever yet known. Here, intelligent or dumb, you see and hear what you like—there is even a Texas Chili Parlor, with Mexican and Spanish foods, at Forty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue.
Now I walk out and see great crowds. People are walking around, in ones and twos, even sixes and eights. There are noises, honks of taxicabs, (and here and there taxicab drivers use language that would make a cowboy seem like a Baptist lecturer in comparison); there are accents and faces strange to a Southerner. . .
For the old timers, such as Fiske and Gould, the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, even Morgan, and in the last two decades, Mellon, knew America. They were themselves avaricious, cunning, and understood the pioneer spirit of it all. They knew how to exploit every other American, for they had sense enough to know that every other American, was as selfish as they.
Suddenly, these High Bankers and Big Fixers found themselves out in Repudiation Street, with their comrade Hoover. Was it because the Men on High had been dishonest, selfish, or corrupt? No. It was because their own shell-game economics broke down, and they could no longer keep the habitués of the gambling house, into which they had converted America, in odd jobs and drinks. Was it a great moral awakening that threw out Mr. Hoover and his crew of codfish pirates? No, of course not.
And so, crowds here in New York City march aimlessly around, as everywhere else. And in the city of New York have risen no new leaders to take the place of the old leaders. People talking a strange tongue of Marxian dialectics, whatever that is. Will the people who have any feeling for the masses be able to gain their confidence? If they get it, will they have sense enough to run the country? That is the question. For so far, among those who claim to think and use their heads, no spark of leadership or understanding has come.
Consider, I say to myself as I traipse along in the rambling, good-natured crowds, that in this city there are six or seven millions of human beings, packed up and down great houses. In Texas or Kansas, we are spread out flat and it takes any given group days and days to get together. Any banker, nut, devil or saint, can blow his horn in New York and get his crowd together in thirty minutes.
For the life of me, I cannot see the real difference between the New Yorker and the Southerner, or other American. What is it? . . . I have it! The New Yorker imagines he is different. The outlander is also different—for the same reason.
On the whole, most of the intellectual life of New York—talk, lectures, plays, writings, is so broken down into various ideas and philosophies, and always presented separately in such great detail, that there is no such thing as a "way of life," or a co-ordinated presentation of thinking, which will be of value to the nation. Even the Communists cannot agree on what a True Communist is, and the different brands hate each other more than the reactionary hates all of them.
I think our pioneer psychology—and New York is a pioneer town and doesn't know it—prevents us from producing plays, books, stories that explain simple things. It seems our sudden acquisition of scientific knowledge and our studied sophistication reveal us instead as transparent boobs, unable to see and understand the simple forces of human liberty, and our dependence on the soil.
In plays and books or propaganda, people are not going to be moralized at by a big dunce who knows less, and feels much less, than the people he is exploiting. No one wants to see problem plays with a moral any more, nor do they want to be a b c'd around on some curious social philosophy; more, they no longer want to see vulgar and obscene affairs of any kind—not because it offends their moral sense, but because they are bored.
But this is too much of a load to carry down Broadway, all this heavy thinking. So I go into an Italian Restaurant just off the street, and drink a glass of wine, to think, or not to think, or just to drink another glass of wine.
The soil.
The island was bought from the Indians for sixteen dollars' worth of beads. Forests, great rivers, fertile fields all around, on a vast continent.
New York. No, not New York, but a tiny group there, controls all this country.
We of the country are peonized by New York.
But the millions in New York are peons, too, and most of them do not know. The city lulls them. . . .
There are not many people in the restaurant. Some people from Kansas enter and talk loudly and brazenly about nothing. A boy swaggers in, orders food, and I feel he is surely drunk; however, he orders milk. Italians are there, but they too look misplaced.
No one knows anybody else; possibly everyone else was as lonesome as I.
Back on Broadway I see a sign: Sergeant Frank Poulos—Natural Health Remedy. I enter, and listen to the sergeant. People listen just as they did to medicine shows in the most ignorant backwoods cities of Illinois or Texas, or the most backwoods farm areas of the United States fifty years ago. By bullying his witless audience, he sells his concoction.
I find another place where the highest form of amusement is marble tables, slot-machines—all affairs which gyp the boob who has a nickel or more to throw away. In the window they are selling turtles painted in all colors, just as they do in Alabama and Texas when the circus comes to town.
A big man, dressed rather effeminately, minces in, lapping up an ice cream cone, and gets skinned out of his dough by playing "a game of chance." Music is loud and tin-panny. The "prizes" or winnings from the various games are cheap and tawdry, just like those sold by pitchmen all over the country.
On the street, sandwich boards cry aloud their wares. One says: "Fiftieth and Broadway. Drink. Bar. Dancing with beautiful girls." Don't talk to me about Barbary Coast, I say to myself reproachfully. I walk in. It is a cruel affair. The ladies are mispainted, and not what you could call spring chickens.
There is a Chinatown agency, still making in 1936 the same appeal for the sale of tickets as they did nearly twenty-five years ago, when I passed through on my way to the Virginia Military Institute, and saw Broadway for the first time.
However, on this trip we missed a "club" where I had seen, for the first time in my life, a white woman smoke a cigaret. All of us, in the year of our Lord 1912, had listened intently to the lecture on "Bohemian Life"—and there the lady sat, blonde and pretty as she could be, smoking that cigaret. There was a honky-tonk piano, and two boys came out and sang: "I want to be way down in Dixie, where the hens are doggone glad to lay, ham and eggs in the new-mown hay." They looked out of field glasses made of two beer bottles tied together. Night clubs have not changed much except that the decorations are more bizarre, and the expense is greater. At any rate, this kind of life is what it was then, lonesome—and tiresome, unless you get very drunk.
On our trip to Chinatown we went to the same "Chinese Joss House." The same dingy steps; the same rooms; the same grotesque, cheap Chinese decorations. The same speech: "This is a religious house, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe they don't worship the same God as we do, nevertheless, they respect their gods. And, ladies and gentlemen, since this is a house of worship, the gentlemen will please remove their hats. (Said unctuously, piously.) Like any church, they are maintained by contributions. . . ." I was sore about it, but I wanted to get the whole show, so I put my twenty-five cents in, too, in order to be admitted. Sameness dragged on; but I smelled a rat, and went to the rear where I saw the guide go with a Chinaman. I eavesdropped on their conversation. "Like hell," said the Chinaman, "don't pull that stuff on me. You have thirty-nine people, and that makes. . . ." The split was made.
I returned to the scene of battle around Times Square, went into the bookshop and other places, and continued what I had done previously: to engage people brazenly in conversation, and find out what they thought, and also from what part of the United States they hailed. Far the greater portion were from New York—Manhattan itself, Brooklyn, Bronx, Yonkers—some from New Jersey, but nearly all gaining their livelihood in the City.
This picture of New York life is, of course, not the only one, and probably not a fair one. There are intellectual and sincere people in New York—no more, no less, than in the bushes. There are, of course, more authors, writers and artists, because that is their market, and market is the only reason. There are more oil men in Texas than in New York City because Texas has the oil.
Some New Yorker is likely to say that I don't know the "real New Yorkers." To which I answer, I should like a New Yorker to tell me what a real New Yorker is. Is he the young man with the Harvard accent, whose father has an Italian accent? Or the old lady who belongs to the DAR, and most of whose ancestors were Tories and hid out during the Revolution? Or again, the young lady in Greenwich Village, who really ought to be back home attending a Wednesday night Bible class?
I have not met all the six million, but I have trudged eight floors up to an apartment (I had no idea such places existed, and without elevators); I have visited people who live off of bonds, talk liberal and are not; and have been around the country places beyond the Bronx line, also in Connecticut and New Jersey. The truth is, New Yorkers fall into the same classifications as elsewhere—reactionaries, liberals, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Possibly the New Yorker is a little more self-satisfied than the average American, and over-emphasizes the importance of New York, but essentially he is the same.
New York, however, has its place. It has admittedly always dominated American life. But we must make it clear that this has been through finance, and economic power. The domination is breaking—but the liberals and progressives have not the ability or training to take the national leadership once held by the reactionaries, who have been renounced. Hence the New Yorker must learn to talk, think and act American.
*At the National Capitol one day a large delegation came down from New York, representing the League Against War and Fascism. I finally left the House floor and went out to see them, because it happened that although the delegation was from New York City, there was but one Congressman from their whole state who might have come out and spoken to them, and he was away.
I hove on the scene with my Nordic blonde curls, [footnote: Since the above was written, I am told my hair is dark brown, and a Greek tells me my ancestors were Hellenes—well, I had always thought I was a Nordic blonde.] and Southern prejudices. I saw dark hair, some Semitic features—and something I had never seen before—a mixed delegation—Whites and Negroes.
I was asked to make a speech, right out on the Capitol steps. I started, but was not allowed to talk for over a minute or two.
Someone heckled me and demanded, in a sarcastic voice, to know something about "Southern Justice," hissing out the "S" like a stage villain.
I was sore. So I shot: "Where were Sacco and Vanzetti tried? In Alabama? In what prison do we find Tom Mooney? The Texas Penitentiary?" I gave tongue to a long list of civil liberty violations all over America, for I am a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and happened to have just read the list of violations.
As I looked over my crown of Manhattanites, I realized that when they spoke of "Southern Justice" they were quite certain that the most terrible place on earth was the South. Like most New Yorkers, they did not see the forest for the trees. They were unaware of the multitude of abuses in their own insignificant island. I knew also that when they spoke of "Southern Justice" they meant the Scottsboro Case. Now, this case is neither better nor worse than other persecutions, mistrials, or violations of civil liberties in other parts of the country. The fact that the boys are black is no excuse, but certainly the legal conduct of the case has been fairer than that of Sacco and Vanzetti. One is racial, the other was industrial prejudice; no doubt the background of both is economic.
I now lectured my New Yorkers. I told them that in the South people were neither more nor less narrow-minded than they were in the East or the West or the North. I told them that I was sick of this business of New York City pretending to have all the intelligence and wisdom of the country; it was bad for us down South, and bad for those up North. The pacifists and anti-Fascists seemed very subdued and they listened quietly.
This gave me courage. So I proceeded to a point. I told them that the Bill of Rights was for all the people of the United States; that civil, religious and other liberties were supposed to be for everybody in the United States but that they were not being maintained anywhere in the Union. As I enlarged on my subject, I realized that I was developing an important truth, and unfolding a story which was as dear to my heart as it was true.
And there I came, by conversation back and forth, in contact with the Manhattan mind. Book-words were used, but they had no substance or sense. I was later to realize this more fully in attending meetings in New York, where words, sentences, whole paragraphs were thrown at audiences which meant nothing to the listeners, nor to the speaker himself . . . "proletarian ideology" . . . "economic determinism" . . . "crisis symptomology" . . . "the class struggle" . . . "fronts" (of all kinds) . . . these, I tell you, American people do not understand, and do not like. This kind of talk is a stumbling block in the path of anything progressive or sensible.
I told them, and I think I told them the truth, that one of the narrowest places on earth is New York. At least, I said, the South is no worse, and no better. You talk of share-croppers in Arkansas. What about your starving industrial piece-workers of New York? You worry about the Negroes of the South. What about the Negroes of Harlem, and the poor whites of the whole island?
There is likely more sectional prejudice in Manhattan than there is in the South.
The whole country is about the same; the exploiting groups teach us to hate and distrust each other, so that this exploitation may continue. South: dog-eat-dog, share-cropper kick "nigger," so the top dog can skim the lickins around the edge of the dollar-pot. North: Union against Union; farmers' organization against farmers' organization; fight the foreigner—all for the benefit of the dear old industrialist.
What are we to do? Obviously, our democratic liberties must be preserved, not just in New York or Arkansas, but in the Imperial Valley, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado. . . .
I was thinking the other day: "When we had prohibition, we had the Volstead Act, with a horde of officers to enforce an un-right. Why not have an act to enforce and protect the fundamental liberties, civil and religious? Why not protect constitutional rights of travel, speech, press, assemblage, freedom from unreasonable search?"
Let us take the various proposed anti-lynching laws. They are always approached in the slip-shod manner of degraded politics—catering to the Negro vote; chief advocates are the sentimentalists, and the few who are left in the East who are still marching on Harper's Ferry, book-singing their inhibitions away, evading their local duties and fighting a foe they will never have to meet. And since the approach is made that way, their defeat is encompassed the same way; by the opposite emotions: magnolia blossoms, the virtue of womanhood, economic prejudice, Jackson was a great general, and a lot of bunk about state's rights. . . .
It is then apparent that an act must be made to cover the whole subject of constitutional civil liberties. It should guarantee that no man, White or Negro, shall be lynched, or beaten to death by rangers, local police, sheriffs, or "special officers." And we must have not merely a regional or state interpretation of the Constitution, but a national one. A right is a right, whether that citizen is blue, green, lavender, or even yellow.
In the history of constitutions, rights have been stated affirmatively. The 18th Amendment was the first constitutional change which took away a right and made a negative statement. In any event, it was part of the Constitution, and a law was passed in pursuance of it, to enforce this single part of the Constitution. Hundreds of other rights are not covered by statutes, but the courts are supposed to protect them under the Constitution.
Hence it would appear that a statute should be enacted, setting up the machinery to enforce ordinary civil rights; such as travel, life, liberty, free speech, religion, assembly and press. Naturally, since all these rights proceed from the Federal Constitution, the set-up should be Federal and would be for the benefit of the Negro likely to be lynched in the South or the lettuce worker likely to be lynched in California—or to protect anybody who wants to preach, pray, talk, write, or move anywhere in the United States of America.
The grave necessity for all this is so deep that we can hardly realize it. I shall not use the old cliche that we are at the crossroads—but it is certain that with our ideas on government still wearing the frocks of 1880, while our scientific achievements are ten thousand years ahead, there is every danger that civilization may crack completely.
Which means that we must hold back violence long enough to talk things out; possibly we can then make some fair solutions. If we do not, we fight each other to the death.
I want to make it plain that freedom of the intellect is essential to any civilization. In this I am not talking about the freedom to starve, or the freedom to be unemployed—all that is in the realm of economics. I am talking about the realm of the mind and the soul.
The story of New York City is essentially a disjointed one; it always was, and always will be. Samuel Maverick, whom you already know, in the year 1664 wrote the first letter that ever was marked "New York"; and if you do not believe it, read your New Yorker's Almanac, which will cost you fifty cents, but you can take my word for it, and save the money.
The first part of this chapter will be a sort of Lecture to New Yorkers.
First, my children, let me tell you the origin of the name of your little island. The name "Manhattan" is a corruption. Sam Maverick referred to it as "Manhatas, which is ye Dutch's Chiefe Towne". [Go to the Library on Fifth Avenue, and ask for Maverick's Description of New England, and Osgood's American Colonies.] Then, I find the word Man-a-hat-ta-nink, which means a place of general intoxication. [Aboriginal Place Names of New York, New York State Museum, 1907, the New Yorker's own authority.] Therefore I presume the word developed into one word, Manhattan, because of the curious habits of the natives.
Now, during the Presidential campaign of 1936, I bowl into this Manhattan and go to the Biltmore, since it is the headquarters of my party. Sensations begin before I got off the train. A lady drops dead in a stateroom near me. I think I hear horrible noises. Relatives come to meet her, and find her dead body instead. Doctors are called and everybody is sick over it. They pull up a window, and cram the dead body out. Just that.
Into this great modern pueblo I go. Into the room. The door closes. It is dreadful and lonesome. It is like the Death House. Shall I call up some friend? No. I will go out on Broadway. But before I go, I shall tell of Sam Maverick, who lived on Broadway nearly three hundred years ago, and how there came to be a New York.
Sam Maverick was up in Massachusetts, anxious to get away, and some of his neighbors, as you remember, felt the same way about it. So he wrote Lord Clarendon in the year 1661, following it up with a visit to England in 1662. His letter concerning what is now New York City and surroundings is as follows:
"The land also is exceedinge good, There are also two gallant riuers running farr vp into the land And it lyeth most Commodious for comerce from and wth all pts of the West Indies, and may in tyme on that Account, proue very aduantagious to ye Crowne of England if Regained, and as priudiciall if not." ["The Clarendon Papers," N.Y. Historical Society, Vol. I.]
Having given the warning that New Amsterdam should be under the British Crown, advantageous if so, and prejudicial if not, he gives several pages of lengthy advice as to military strategy, and the taking of the town, and says:
"For the Dutch I know by credible information they haue not of theire owne Nation, forteene hundred wch can beare armes, and there are neare fower hundered able English men wch liue amongst them, These all both Dutch and English, are extreamely burdned wth heauie taxations as the tenth pte of all the land produceth, And vnheard of Excise, not only on all goods, brought to them or caryed from thence, but also on what they eate and drinke. Sr I am very Confident, if his Matie doe but send and demaund a surrender lettinge them enjoy theire lands and goods, and mittigatinge the burdens they now lie vnder, there will be littell or no dispute about it. Yet for the more honorable caryage on of the worke and the more surely to effect it, It will be Convenient if his Maiestie please, to haue one good frigott and two smaler ones, a hundered or two of well experienced soldiers, one thousand spare armes wth some powder shot &c. And for what men else may be needful in case they should at first refuse surrender, the English Plantations wthin twentie or thirtie leagues can suddenly furnish."
Then he adds more detailed advice, and reminds Clarendon that the people should have two things: civil and religious liberty, and low taxes. This, he said, would make it work for all time.
It was finally decided to take over the Dutch Colony, and four royal commissioners were appointed. They were Richard Nichols, George Cartwright, Sir Robert Carr, all colonels, and Sam Maverick, civilian. In September of 1664, after several months of intrigue and preparing the way, they entered and took possession. As Maverick has said, there was no opposition. The oath of allegiance was taken by all the Dutch within a month, and all was hunky-dory.
The King's Commissioners were always signing papers with people, and with each other. Here are the four commissioners who took New York, gave her a name, and put the British Flag flying over the Island.
By now every New Yorker knows why he has a place to sleep. And if Sam Maverick conspired to take "ye Dutch's Chiefe Towne" away from the Dutch, is it not proper that I should return these three hundred years later to help elect a Dutchman president, and to lecture the wild mavericks of Broadway about their inhibitions and bad habits? So let us jump these centuries, and move to the death-cell in the Biltmore.
I get dressed and move out. Broadway. . . . Still lonesome as hell; I feel slightly suicidal, but not enough to commit the deed. From Broadway and Forty-second, up and down, is the greatest display on earth. The Spearmint sign is a marvel of beauty, radiant in red, green and gold; thousands back up against the Astor Hotel and other buildings to gaze at it. The greatest place for the benefit or detriment of the easy spenders ever yet known. Here, intelligent or dumb, you see and hear what you like—there is even a Texas Chili Parlor, with Mexican and Spanish foods, at Forty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue.
Now I walk out and see great crowds. People are walking around, in ones and twos, even sixes and eights. There are noises, honks of taxicabs, (and here and there taxicab drivers use language that would make a cowboy seem like a Baptist lecturer in comparison); there are accents and faces strange to a Southerner. . .
Should we have a revolution—that is, real violence and disorder—these people would be as helpless as the most ignorant and illiterate human beings of centuries ago. These people, like those of other great cities, would simply starve to death, never knowing why. . . .Yes, here is the place which controls America. Here is the city powerful. Noise is on the street. But it is not this noise, this roar, this jumble of helpless millions, that controls. It is a very small group of men in the financial district; they have always done so. They still do so. But now they have at least been questioned. Though they still have the economic power, the political power, at least, has been transferred to the nation's capital.
For the old timers, such as Fiske and Gould, the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, even Morgan, and in the last two decades, Mellon, knew America. They were themselves avaricious, cunning, and understood the pioneer spirit of it all. They knew how to exploit every other American, for they had sense enough to know that every other American, was as selfish as they.
Suddenly, these High Bankers and Big Fixers found themselves out in Repudiation Street, with their comrade Hoover. Was it because the Men on High had been dishonest, selfish, or corrupt? No. It was because their own shell-game economics broke down, and they could no longer keep the habitués of the gambling house, into which they had converted America, in odd jobs and drinks. Was it a great moral awakening that threw out Mr. Hoover and his crew of codfish pirates? No, of course not.
And so, crowds here in New York City march aimlessly around, as everywhere else. And in the city of New York have risen no new leaders to take the place of the old leaders. People talking a strange tongue of Marxian dialectics, whatever that is. Will the people who have any feeling for the masses be able to gain their confidence? If they get it, will they have sense enough to run the country? That is the question. For so far, among those who claim to think and use their heads, no spark of leadership or understanding has come.
Consider, I say to myself as I traipse along in the rambling, good-natured crowds, that in this city there are six or seven millions of human beings, packed up and down great houses. In Texas or Kansas, we are spread out flat and it takes any given group days and days to get together. Any banker, nut, devil or saint, can blow his horn in New York and get his crowd together in thirty minutes.
For the life of me, I cannot see the real difference between the New Yorker and the Southerner, or other American. What is it? . . . I have it! The New Yorker imagines he is different. The outlander is also different—for the same reason.
Important in our psychology is breaking down these fancied differences. The hungry Southerner (and this includes the hungry Southern Negro) has precisely the same economic interest as the New Yorker, the New England farmer, or the merchant in Seattle or St. Louis.A New Yorker tells me about Southern hospitality. That is the bunk, unadulterated bunk, in so far as the South pretends to have any more fundamental courtesy than any other section of the country. This idea grew out of the manners of slavery days when there were rich gentlemen, who had slaves, and entertained at their homes a great deal, because they had the leisure and money, and because there were no hotels. But that day is long dead and gone, and the people of New York are as courteous, or discourteous, as any in the world.
Worse, and my heart breaks to tell it, the Police Force of New York has more first-class, well-fed horses and riders than all the police and sheriffs of the State of Texas.All the time I have been going to New York I have been eating up "plays," drama and culture, until Eugene O'Neill wrote a five-and-a-half hour play. Then it seemed time to revolt against all this intellect. I got the idea then, and the idea is fixed now, that to spend hours and hours on the particular life of a single person, especially of one who is an isolated psychopath and not representative of the people as a whole, is wasted time. That applies to books as well. [Reading proof this sounds very naive. But being human, I deny this applies to me, or my book. I will let my statement stand.]
On the whole, most of the intellectual life of New York—talk, lectures, plays, writings, is so broken down into various ideas and philosophies, and always presented separately in such great detail, that there is no such thing as a "way of life," or a co-ordinated presentation of thinking, which will be of value to the nation. Even the Communists cannot agree on what a True Communist is, and the different brands hate each other more than the reactionary hates all of them.
I think our pioneer psychology—and New York is a pioneer town and doesn't know it—prevents us from producing plays, books, stories that explain simple things. It seems our sudden acquisition of scientific knowledge and our studied sophistication reveal us instead as transparent boobs, unable to see and understand the simple forces of human liberty, and our dependence on the soil.
In plays and books or propaganda, people are not going to be moralized at by a big dunce who knows less, and feels much less, than the people he is exploiting. No one wants to see problem plays with a moral any more, nor do they want to be a b c'd around on some curious social philosophy; more, they no longer want to see vulgar and obscene affairs of any kind—not because it offends their moral sense, but because they are bored.
But this is too much of a load to carry down Broadway, all this heavy thinking. So I go into an Italian Restaurant just off the street, and drink a glass of wine, to think, or not to think, or just to drink another glass of wine.
The soil.
The island was bought from the Indians for sixteen dollars' worth of beads. Forests, great rivers, fertile fields all around, on a vast continent.
New York. No, not New York, but a tiny group there, controls all this country.
We of the country are peonized by New York.
But the millions in New York are peons, too, and most of them do not know. The city lulls them. . . .
There are not many people in the restaurant. Some people from Kansas enter and talk loudly and brazenly about nothing. A boy swaggers in, orders food, and I feel he is surely drunk; however, he orders milk. Italians are there, but they too look misplaced.
No one knows anybody else; possibly everyone else was as lonesome as I.
Back on Broadway I see a sign: Sergeant Frank Poulos—Natural Health Remedy. I enter, and listen to the sergeant. People listen just as they did to medicine shows in the most ignorant backwoods cities of Illinois or Texas, or the most backwoods farm areas of the United States fifty years ago. By bullying his witless audience, he sells his concoction.
I find another place where the highest form of amusement is marble tables, slot-machines—all affairs which gyp the boob who has a nickel or more to throw away. In the window they are selling turtles painted in all colors, just as they do in Alabama and Texas when the circus comes to town.
A big man, dressed rather effeminately, minces in, lapping up an ice cream cone, and gets skinned out of his dough by playing "a game of chance." Music is loud and tin-panny. The "prizes" or winnings from the various games are cheap and tawdry, just like those sold by pitchmen all over the country.
On the street, sandwich boards cry aloud their wares. One says: "Fiftieth and Broadway. Drink. Bar. Dancing with beautiful girls." Don't talk to me about Barbary Coast, I say to myself reproachfully. I walk in. It is a cruel affair. The ladies are mispainted, and not what you could call spring chickens.
There is a Chinatown agency, still making in 1936 the same appeal for the sale of tickets as they did nearly twenty-five years ago, when I passed through on my way to the Virginia Military Institute, and saw Broadway for the first time.
The people of the city of New York are lost people, lonesome people, being whirled around in forces too big to understand, like the little balls in the wheel of roulette. They know neither more or less than the citizens of Yazoo Junction—or Floresville, Texas.But the trip to Chinatown intrigues me, and I buy a ticket. The sameness of their spiel is strange. What! Still knocking off boobs a quarter of a century later? Away we go. The lectures are word for word the same. No change, even of route. The same jokes about the Irishman and the Jew.
However, on this trip we missed a "club" where I had seen, for the first time in my life, a white woman smoke a cigaret. All of us, in the year of our Lord 1912, had listened intently to the lecture on "Bohemian Life"—and there the lady sat, blonde and pretty as she could be, smoking that cigaret. There was a honky-tonk piano, and two boys came out and sang: "I want to be way down in Dixie, where the hens are doggone glad to lay, ham and eggs in the new-mown hay." They looked out of field glasses made of two beer bottles tied together. Night clubs have not changed much except that the decorations are more bizarre, and the expense is greater. At any rate, this kind of life is what it was then, lonesome—and tiresome, unless you get very drunk.
On our trip to Chinatown we went to the same "Chinese Joss House." The same dingy steps; the same rooms; the same grotesque, cheap Chinese decorations. The same speech: "This is a religious house, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe they don't worship the same God as we do, nevertheless, they respect their gods. And, ladies and gentlemen, since this is a house of worship, the gentlemen will please remove their hats. (Said unctuously, piously.) Like any church, they are maintained by contributions. . . ." I was sore about it, but I wanted to get the whole show, so I put my twenty-five cents in, too, in order to be admitted. Sameness dragged on; but I smelled a rat, and went to the rear where I saw the guide go with a Chinaman. I eavesdropped on their conversation. "Like hell," said the Chinaman, "don't pull that stuff on me. You have thirty-nine people, and that makes. . . ." The split was made.
I returned to the scene of battle around Times Square, went into the bookshop and other places, and continued what I had done previously: to engage people brazenly in conversation, and find out what they thought, and also from what part of the United States they hailed. Far the greater portion were from New York—Manhattan itself, Brooklyn, Bronx, Yonkers—some from New Jersey, but nearly all gaining their livelihood in the City.
This picture of New York life is, of course, not the only one, and probably not a fair one. There are intellectual and sincere people in New York—no more, no less, than in the bushes. There are, of course, more authors, writers and artists, because that is their market, and market is the only reason. There are more oil men in Texas than in New York City because Texas has the oil.
Some New Yorker is likely to say that I don't know the "real New Yorkers." To which I answer, I should like a New Yorker to tell me what a real New Yorker is. Is he the young man with the Harvard accent, whose father has an Italian accent? Or the old lady who belongs to the DAR, and most of whose ancestors were Tories and hid out during the Revolution? Or again, the young lady in Greenwich Village, who really ought to be back home attending a Wednesday night Bible class?
I have not met all the six million, but I have trudged eight floors up to an apartment (I had no idea such places existed, and without elevators); I have visited people who live off of bonds, talk liberal and are not; and have been around the country places beyond the Bronx line, also in Connecticut and New Jersey. The truth is, New Yorkers fall into the same classifications as elsewhere—reactionaries, liberals, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Possibly the New Yorker is a little more self-satisfied than the average American, and over-emphasizes the importance of New York, but essentially he is the same.
New York, however, has its place. It has admittedly always dominated American life. But we must make it clear that this has been through finance, and economic power. The domination is breaking—but the liberals and progressives have not the ability or training to take the national leadership once held by the reactionaries, who have been renounced. Hence the New Yorker must learn to talk, think and act American.
*At the National Capitol one day a large delegation came down from New York, representing the League Against War and Fascism. I finally left the House floor and went out to see them, because it happened that although the delegation was from New York City, there was but one Congressman from their whole state who might have come out and spoken to them, and he was away.
I hove on the scene with my Nordic blonde curls, [footnote: Since the above was written, I am told my hair is dark brown, and a Greek tells me my ancestors were Hellenes—well, I had always thought I was a Nordic blonde.] and Southern prejudices. I saw dark hair, some Semitic features—and something I had never seen before—a mixed delegation—Whites and Negroes.
I was asked to make a speech, right out on the Capitol steps. I started, but was not allowed to talk for over a minute or two.
Someone heckled me and demanded, in a sarcastic voice, to know something about "Southern Justice," hissing out the "S" like a stage villain.
I was sore. So I shot: "Where were Sacco and Vanzetti tried? In Alabama? In what prison do we find Tom Mooney? The Texas Penitentiary?" I gave tongue to a long list of civil liberty violations all over America, for I am a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and happened to have just read the list of violations.
As I looked over my crown of Manhattanites, I realized that when they spoke of "Southern Justice" they were quite certain that the most terrible place on earth was the South. Like most New Yorkers, they did not see the forest for the trees. They were unaware of the multitude of abuses in their own insignificant island. I knew also that when they spoke of "Southern Justice" they meant the Scottsboro Case. Now, this case is neither better nor worse than other persecutions, mistrials, or violations of civil liberties in other parts of the country. The fact that the boys are black is no excuse, but certainly the legal conduct of the case has been fairer than that of Sacco and Vanzetti. One is racial, the other was industrial prejudice; no doubt the background of both is economic.
I now lectured my New Yorkers. I told them that in the South people were neither more nor less narrow-minded than they were in the East or the West or the North. I told them that I was sick of this business of New York City pretending to have all the intelligence and wisdom of the country; it was bad for us down South, and bad for those up North. The pacifists and anti-Fascists seemed very subdued and they listened quietly.
This gave me courage. So I proceeded to a point. I told them that the Bill of Rights was for all the people of the United States; that civil, religious and other liberties were supposed to be for everybody in the United States but that they were not being maintained anywhere in the Union. As I enlarged on my subject, I realized that I was developing an important truth, and unfolding a story which was as dear to my heart as it was true.
And there I came, by conversation back and forth, in contact with the Manhattan mind. Book-words were used, but they had no substance or sense. I was later to realize this more fully in attending meetings in New York, where words, sentences, whole paragraphs were thrown at audiences which meant nothing to the listeners, nor to the speaker himself . . . "proletarian ideology" . . . "economic determinism" . . . "crisis symptomology" . . . "the class struggle" . . . "fronts" (of all kinds) . . . these, I tell you, American people do not understand, and do not like. This kind of talk is a stumbling block in the path of anything progressive or sensible.
I told them, and I think I told them the truth, that one of the narrowest places on earth is New York. At least, I said, the South is no worse, and no better. You talk of share-croppers in Arkansas. What about your starving industrial piece-workers of New York? You worry about the Negroes of the South. What about the Negroes of Harlem, and the poor whites of the whole island?
There is likely more sectional prejudice in Manhattan than there is in the South.
The whole country is about the same; the exploiting groups teach us to hate and distrust each other, so that this exploitation may continue. South: dog-eat-dog, share-cropper kick "nigger," so the top dog can skim the lickins around the edge of the dollar-pot. North: Union against Union; farmers' organization against farmers' organization; fight the foreigner—all for the benefit of the dear old industrialist.
What are we to do? Obviously, our democratic liberties must be preserved, not just in New York or Arkansas, but in the Imperial Valley, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado. . . .
I was thinking the other day: "When we had prohibition, we had the Volstead Act, with a horde of officers to enforce an un-right. Why not have an act to enforce and protect the fundamental liberties, civil and religious? Why not protect constitutional rights of travel, speech, press, assemblage, freedom from unreasonable search?"
Let us take the various proposed anti-lynching laws. They are always approached in the slip-shod manner of degraded politics—catering to the Negro vote; chief advocates are the sentimentalists, and the few who are left in the East who are still marching on Harper's Ferry, book-singing their inhibitions away, evading their local duties and fighting a foe they will never have to meet. And since the approach is made that way, their defeat is encompassed the same way; by the opposite emotions: magnolia blossoms, the virtue of womanhood, economic prejudice, Jackson was a great general, and a lot of bunk about state's rights. . . .
It is then apparent that an act must be made to cover the whole subject of constitutional civil liberties. It should guarantee that no man, White or Negro, shall be lynched, or beaten to death by rangers, local police, sheriffs, or "special officers." And we must have not merely a regional or state interpretation of the Constitution, but a national one. A right is a right, whether that citizen is blue, green, lavender, or even yellow.
In the history of constitutions, rights have been stated affirmatively. The 18th Amendment was the first constitutional change which took away a right and made a negative statement. In any event, it was part of the Constitution, and a law was passed in pursuance of it, to enforce this single part of the Constitution. Hundreds of other rights are not covered by statutes, but the courts are supposed to protect them under the Constitution.
Hence it would appear that a statute should be enacted, setting up the machinery to enforce ordinary civil rights; such as travel, life, liberty, free speech, religion, assembly and press. Naturally, since all these rights proceed from the Federal Constitution, the set-up should be Federal and would be for the benefit of the Negro likely to be lynched in the South or the lettuce worker likely to be lynched in California—or to protect anybody who wants to preach, pray, talk, write, or move anywhere in the United States of America.
The grave necessity for all this is so deep that we can hardly realize it. I shall not use the old cliche that we are at the crossroads—but it is certain that with our ideas on government still wearing the frocks of 1880, while our scientific achievements are ten thousand years ahead, there is every danger that civilization may crack completely.
Which means that we must hold back violence long enough to talk things out; possibly we can then make some fair solutions. If we do not, we fight each other to the death.
I want to make it plain that freedom of the intellect is essential to any civilization. In this I am not talking about the freedom to starve, or the freedom to be unemployed—all that is in the realm of economics. I am talking about the realm of the mind and the soul.