Part 18

Mr. McClure thought there was an important story in General Miles’ observations, and I was commissioned to get it. But General Miles, willing and glad as he was to tell of his European experiences—he had never been abroad before—wanted to tell only of the sights he had seen, sights which had nothing to do with armies, their equipment, and their maneuvers. All that was shop for him. “They’ll think I didn’t see anything but soldiers and guns,” he growled, “think I’m not interested in history and art. People don’t know how wonderful Pompeii is, and I would like to tell them. A lot of them never heard of Alexander’s sarcophagus—finest thing I ever saw. There are countries that would pay a million dollars to get it, and there’s the Parthenon and Moscow and the Tower of London and the Louvre. There are the things I want to write about.” And he was preparing to do it, as I saw by the stack of Baedekers, the volumes of the Britannica, the pamphlets and travel books on his desk. It took all my tact and patience to persuade the General that, whatever his interest, ours was centered only on military Europe.

In the course of this distasteful task I came to have a real liking for General Miles. He was as kindly and courteous a gentleman as I have ever known, and certainly the vainest. One of the real disappointments of his European visit was that the American uniform was so severe. There were hundreds of lesser ranks than himself on parade with three times the gold braid he was allowed. When it came to the Queen’s Jubilee he revolted and had special epaulets designed. I was at Headquarters the day they arrived from London, and nothing would do but I must see them. He ordered the box opened, disappeared into an inner office and came back arrayed in all the glory the American Army allowed him.

I was working on the Miles articles on February 16, 1898, when the _Maine_ blew up in Havana harbor. As no message came canceling my appointment with General Miles that morning I presented myself as usual though with some misgiving, for it seemed as if the very air of Washington stood still. At Headquarters there was a hush on everything, but the routine went on as usual. As we worked an orderly would come in with the latest report: “Two hundred fifty-three unaccounted for, two officers missing, ship in six fathoms of water only her mast visible, sir.” Then a second report: “All but four officers gone, sir, and there are two hundred women up in the Navy Department.” (The Army and Navy were in the same building in 1898.)

The General made no comment, but every now and then blew his nose violently, while his smart Chief of Staff, a gallant simple-minded officer with a bullet hole in his cheek, kept saying to himself: “Ain’t it a pity! By Jove, ain’t it a pity!”

Through the two months between the blowing up of the _Maine_ and the declaration of war I vacillated between hope that the President would succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the Hill would be too much for him, as they were in the end. I honestly believed then as I do now that he was doing his best, and this in spite of the fact that my heart was hot with resentment for what I considered his cowardly desertion of my Poland friends in 1893.

McKinley was patient, collected, surprisingly determined. Everybody indeed in the departments where the brunt must fall if war came seemed steady to me, as I watched things in my frequent visits to General Miles’ Headquarters. Everybody was at his post, everybody except Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He tore up and down the wide marble halls of the War and Navy Building—“like a boy on roller skates,” a disgusted observer growled. More than once he burst into General Miles’ office with an excited question, an excited counsel. Already he was busy preparing his Rough Riders for the war to be if he had his way. Already he saw himself an important unit in an invading army.

I remember this because it shocked me more than anything else I was noting. What chance had government in peace or war if men did not stay on their jobs? Was not fidelity to the trust committed to you a first obligation? And if Theodore Roosevelt felt—as he evidently did—that he was needed in the Army, did not good manners if nothing else require resignation? I was very severe on him in 1897, the more so because he had bitterly disappointed me in 1884 when he had refused to go along with the mugwumps in the revolt against Prohibitive Protection, refused and gone along with my particular political abomination, Henry Cabot Lodge. I had not been able to reconcile myself to him even when as a Police Commissioner of New York City he made his hearty and effective fight on the town’s corruption.

The steadiness of General Miles and his staff in the weeks between the blowing up of the _Maine_ and the breaking out of war with Spain raised my respect for Army training as much as Roosevelt’s excited goings-on antagonized me. At the same time my contempt for the outpouring of Congress in a crisis was modified by almost daily association with one of its oldest members, the Senator from Massachusetts, George Frisbie Hoar.

When I had decided in 1894 that sufficient materials were at hand in Washington for the sketch _McClure’s_ wanted, to go with Gardiner Hubbard’s Napoleon portraits, I went to live at a boarding house on I Street between Ninth and Tenth recommended by Mrs. Hubbard, chiefly because Senator and Mrs. Hoar lived there. The neighborhood had been not so long before one of the desirable residential sections of the town, but business and fashion were pushing well-to-do residents into Connecticut and Massachusetts avenues, into Dupont Circle and beyond. The fine old brownstone houses left behind were being used by trade and occasionally by owners, whose incomes had been cut or destroyed, as rooming or boarding houses. The head of the house into which I was received was a Mrs. Patterson, the widow of a once distinguished Washington physician. She and her daughter Elizabeth made of their home one of the most comfortable and delightful living places into which I had ever dropped. Such food! And best of all the Senator.

At this time Senator Hoar was close to seventy years of age. He had been in Congress for twenty-six consecutive years, seventeen of them in the Senate, and everybody knew that as long as he lived Massachusetts Republicans would insist on returning him. He embodied all the virtues of the classic New Englander and few of the vices. His loyalty was granite-ribbed; he revered the Constitution and all the institutions born and reared under it. He was proud of the United States, but his heart belonged to Massachusetts. In his mouth the name took on a beauty and an emotion which never ceased to stir me—Westerner that I was.

Combined with his patriotic loyalties was a passionate devotion to classic literature—Greek, Roman, English. He knew yards of Homer and Virgil, as well as of the greatest of the early English writers, and not infrequently at our Sunday morning breakfasts he would repeat long passages in his sonorous voice. This was the one hour in the week when the Senator laid aside all formality and became our entertainer. He never spoiled things by opinions on current events, but poured forth daily whatever came into his mind. We were a good audience, willing to sit until noon if he would talk. He claimed that it was Mrs. Patterson’s codfish balls and coffee that put to flight all his cares and loosened his tongue. That Patterson Sunday morning breakfast was enough to put gaiety into any heart. Senator Hoar had already celebrated it in a widely circulated letter to a Pennsylvania editor who attacked him for never having done a stroke of useful work in his life and, what greatly amused the Senator, living in Washington on “champagne and terrapin!”:

My dear man [he wrote the irate critic], your terrapin is all in my eye, very little in my mouth. The chief carnal luxury of my life is in breakfasting every Sunday morning with an orthodox friend, a lady who has a rare gift for making fish balls and coffee. You unfortunate and benighted Pennsylvanians can never know the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls and eaten on a Sunday morning by a person whose theology is sound, and who believes in all the five points of Calvinism. I am myself but an unworthy heretic, but I am of Puritan stock, of the seventh generation, and there is vouchsafed to me, also, some share of that ecstasy and a dim glimpse of that beatific vision. Be assured, my benighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that hour when the week begins, all the terrapin of Philadelphia or Baltimore and all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore might pull at my trouser legs and thrust themselves on my notice in vain.

As we all knew, Senator Hoar had no money for “champagne and terrapin.” He had sacrificed his law practice to public service, “getting a little poorer year by year.” As a matter of fact he had no interest in making money. I never saw him more irritated than after taking a difficult case for which he was to get a fee of twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand dollars.

“Earning money is hateful to me,” he said. “Never in all my life before have I undertaken a thing I did not want to do simply for money. Some things I like to do, believe that I can do better than I could do anything else. I never was such a donkey before. There are so many things I long to do; one of them is to learn Italian well enough to read Dante and Boccaccio and Ariosto in the original; and I want to commit Homer to memory. I would like to have my head _packed with Greek_.”

The Senator’s Sunday morning talks were rich with anecdotes of New England types. He had his antipathies—Margaret Fuller Ossoli was one of them. He used to tell the story of an old Concord doctor who was called up in the night by a quavering voice outside his window asking, “Doctor, how much camphire can a body drink without its killing ’em?” “Who drunk it?” he asked. “Margaret Fuller.” “A peck,” snapped the doctor, shutting his window with a bang.

Dr. Mary Walker, who in her rather shabby man’s attire was a familiar figure in those days, was a particular abomination. She made him “creepy,” he said. Simply to mention her, I found, would dry up his talk. But the mention of Jonathan Edwards’ name, although he particularly detested him, always loosened his tongue. “He was an inhuman cuss,” he said one morning. “There is a true story of his riding through Northampton with a slave boy whom he had just bought tied to a cord and trotting behind the horse. ‘Is thee doing as thee would be done by?’ a woman of his faith called him, and Edwards said, ‘I’ll answer you some other time.’”

Senator Hoar rather enjoyed calling a man whose acts he disliked by hard names. Indeed he very much enjoyed salty words generally, and one morning ably defended them: “‘Dammit’ is a useful word. It eases one’s feelings.” He also put up a strong argument for “whoppers.” “They are,” he contended, “a valuable weapon with the impertinent and the imbecile.” There was much boyish mischief in him. He greatly admired our wholesome big-hearted Elizabeth, daughter of the house, her common sense and her gaiety, and loved to pinch her plump arm. He did it in the presence of us all and in spite of Mrs. Hoar’s reproaches. “Do you know, Elizabeth,” he said one evening as he followed us up the stairs from the dining room, “that it has taken nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization to produce a man who does not pinch a girl’s pretty ankle when she is going upstairs ahead of him?”

In July, 1898, after Congress had adjourned Senator Hoar made up a party for a trip through the Berkshire Hills and I had the good fortune to be asked to join it. I had heard him talk much of his walking trips there in Harvard days with his favorite classmate, Francis Child: “as great a man at seventeen when he entered college,” he said, “as when he died—a real genius.” From the moment our little caravan left his home at Worcester the trip was like champagne to him. Trees, graveyards, epitaphs, views, the homes of the honored in this day and past days kept him busy. There was the Sheffield elm which we must stop to measure, the grave of Mumbet with the inscription his favorite Catharine Sedgwick had written for it; there was the best view of the Sleeping Napoleon on Cedar Mountain—this for me. Then we must spend the night at a certain inn on Mount Washington to give Elizabeth plenty of time to look up family graves and records. Her father had been born on Mount Washington, which was one of many reasons why the Senator admired her. He went with her to look up the graves and, returning late, said, “If we had not feared you would wait supper we would have stayed and been buried there.”

I have certainly never known anyone for whom life at seventy was more joyous and full. He hated weakness, as well as everything that impaired his dignity, his self-reliance. He was a true untouchable and would fall into a rage if friend or stranger offered to assist him. “Unhand me,” he thundered at a street car conductor who one day seized his arm to help him up the steps, and his wrath lasted until he had told us about the indignity at the dinner table. On this Berkshire trip a little accident happened to him which caused an explosion of the same nature. We were at an inn in the mountains, and after dinner had gone on to the lawn. The Senator was sitting on a rustic bench which gave way, turned him on his back, feet in the air. We all ran to assist him but were stopped in our tracks by a stentorian voice which roared, “I decline to be assisted.”

But this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday morning’s breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle, and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American conviction that minding one’s own business was even more important abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country. Certainly there were far fewer Sunday morning breakfast table talks. His greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of 1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate he placed these sentences:

No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic.

I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it? But how? That was clearly now my problem. I could not run away to a foreign land where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a citizen. I must give up Paris. Between Lincoln and the Spanish-American War I realized I was taking on a citizenship I had practically resigned.

The war had done something to _McClure’s_ as well as to me. In all its earlier years its ambition had been to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers, to give fiction, poetry, science of wide popular appeal—an ambition which it must be admitted opened the pages occasionally to the cheap, though it rarely excluded the fine. An eager welcome was given new writers. Indeed it was always a great day in the office when we thought a “real one” had reached us. While it fostered new writers it held on to the best of the old. It had touched public matters only as they became popular matters. Thus, when the Spanish-American War came it was quickly recognized that it yielded more interesting material than any other subject. There was a great war number and there was a continuous flow of war articles. _McClure’s_ suddenly was a part of active, public life. Having tasted blood, it could no longer be content with being merely attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part. It had a staff sympathetic with this new conception of the work. Mr. McClure had had in mind from the start the building of a permanent staff of good craftsmen, reporters on whom he could depend for a steady stream of contributions, as well as of editorial ideas. He wanted them versatile, flexible, as interested in the magazine as in themselves, capable of sinking themselves in a collective effort.

After I came in, the first to become such a permanent acquisition was Ray Stannard Baker. An article on the capture of John Wilkes Booth by Baker’s uncle, Colonel L. C. Baker, written from personal reminiscences and documents, was submitted by Baker, then on the staff of the Chicago _Record_. It was “the General’s” ideal of a _McClure’s_ article. Baker was urged to write more, and each piece emphasized the first impression. The year after his first appearance in the magazine, May, 1897, he joined the staff and became a regular contributing editor.

Baker was an admirable craftsman, as well as a capital team worker. He had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than anything else about him.

When I learned a few years later that Baker was the author of the wise, homely, whimsical “Adventures in Contentment,” “The Friendly Road” and other delightful essays under the nom de plume of David Grayson I said at once, “How stupid of me not to have known it! Haven’t I always known that Baker is a David Grayson?” Few practical philosophers, indeed, have so lived their creed as Ray Stannard Baker, and none have had a more general recognition from the multitude of people in the country who, like him, believe in the fine art of simple living. It is a comforting and beautiful thing to have had as a friend and co-worker over many years so rare a person as Ray Stannard Baker.

By good fortune _McClure’s_ in this period happened on a reader of real genius—Viola Roseboro—the only “born reader” I have ever known. I found her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts after material. It was as a talker that I first learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were unfettered, her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing, stirring, and she loved to talk, though only when she felt sympathy and understanding. She loved to share books, of which she read many, particularly in the biographical field; she wanted none but the best—no imitation, no mere fact-finding. Her eagerness to let no good thing slip, her consciousness of the all too little time a human being has in this world to explore its riches made her rigid in her choice. An unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give it a chance, and secondarily, she said, to enrich the magazine, made every day’s work with the unsifted manuscripts an adventure. If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to _McClure’s_ she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it till faith grew in those less sure of the untried. It was when _McClure’s_ was making a great hunt for a good serial that I saw her one morning bringing into the editorial sanctum Booth Tarkington’s “The Gentleman from Indiana,” tears celebrating the discovery as she cried, “Here is a serial sent by God Almighty for _McClure’s Magazine_!”

This woman of unusual intelligence, loyalty and of truly Spartan courage was a precious addition to the crowd. Ill health, threatened blindness, have never lowered her enthusiasm, her ceaseless effort to find the best, to give the best. She is still doing it.

The most brilliant addition to the _McClure’s_ staff in my time was Lincoln Steffens. He had made himself felt in the journalistic and political life of New York City by a fresh form of reportorial attack. Young, handsome, self-confident, with a good academic background and two years of foreign life and observation, Steffens began his professional career unencumbered by journalistic shibboleths and with an immense curiosity as to what was going on about him. He was soon puzzled and fascinated by the relations of police and politicians, politicians and the law, law and city officials, city officials and business, business and church, education, society, the press. Apparently groups from each of these categories worked together, supporting one another, an organization close, compact, loyal from fear or self-interest or both. It was because of this organization, Steffens concluded, that graft and vice and crime were established industries of the city. Attacks from outraged virtue had slowed up the system at intervals ever since the Civil War, but never permanently deranged it. A few rascals might be exterminated, but they were soon replaced. The system had bred new rascals, grown stronger and more cunning with time. He set out to trace its pattern. Incredibly outspoken, taking rascality for granted, apparently never shocked or angry or violent, never doubtful of himself, only coolly determined to demonstrate to men and women of good will and honest purpose what they were up against and warn them that the only way they could hope to grapple with a close corporation devoted to what there was in it was by an equally solid corporation devoted to decent and honest government, business, law, education, religion. First as a reporter and later as the city editor of the _Globe_, Steffens stirred the town.