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CHAPTER V - CHICAGO
"I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,
And all thy glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material."
I HAVE struck a city--a real city--and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a
pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a
phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It
holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and
stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I
urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by
savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is
dirt. Also it says that it is the "boss" town of America.
I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country.
They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded
and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble
crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about
everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno
with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted
at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for
him told me that this was "the finest hotel in the finest city on
God Almighty's earth." By the way, when an American wishes to
indicate the next country or state, he says, "God A'mighty's
earth." This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.
Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and
without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the
East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those
held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable
vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and
crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a
great horror.
Except in London--and I have forgotten what London was like--I
had never seen so many white people together, and never such a
collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and
no beauty--only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone
flagging under foot.
A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so
much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all
this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired,
that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one
atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.
He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures
hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they
were trying to make some money that they might not die through
lack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as
black as ink, and filled with un-told abominations, and bid me
watch the stream of traffic across the bridges.
He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note
that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A
Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism.
The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them
there had no thought of beauty, and, therefore, he was a savage.
"Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and
studded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and
looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each
vender stood at his door howling:--"For the sake of my money,
employ or buy of me, and me only!"
Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You
know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their
arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women
dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I
had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what
he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The
other makes me ill.
And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress,
and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every
intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in
language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together
of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of
money is progress.
I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through
scores of miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few
hundred thousand of these terrible people who talked paisa bat
through their noses.
The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who
was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion
required or the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned
out so many hundred thousand dollars' worth of such and such an
article; there so many million other things; this house was worth
so many million dollars; that one so many million, more or less.
It was like listening to a child babbling of its hoard of shells.
It was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was
expected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I
should admire; and the utmost that I could say was:--"Are these
things so? Then I am very sorry for you."
That made him angry, and he said that insular envy made me
unresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand.
About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the
Garden of Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that
her head was not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a
cocoanut-palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him
breathe heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest her lord
should miss his footing, and so bring the tragedy of this world
to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam then,
I should have been sorry for him. To-day I find eleven hundred
thousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father in the
art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him in that
they think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies.
Consequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different
ways.
In the East bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a
little scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In
less favored countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed.
And that was on a Saturday night.
Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all--a revelation
of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially
described as a church. It was a circus really, but that the
worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the
building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much
luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic
design.
To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a
wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he
treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper
reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the
newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that
he, and not He, was the centre of attraction. With a voice of
silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built
up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but
with all the gilding real gold, and all the plate-glass diamond),
and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very
shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point
caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the
Judgment, and ran:--"No! I tell you God doesn't do business that
way."
He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold
and jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest.
He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the
counter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to
enter into daily life. Consequently, I presume he introduced it
as daily life--his own and the life of his friends.
Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at
such hands. But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy
themselves, and I understood that I had met with a popular
preacher.
Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called
Talmage and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to
a very mild specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold and
silver idols, his hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and
hat-on-the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the sacred
vessels, would count himself, spiritually, quite competent to
send a mission to convert the Indians.
All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact
of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and
iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was
progress, and the net-work of wires overhead was progress. They
repeated their statements again and again.
One of them took me to their City Hall and Board of Trade works,
and pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big,
and the streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I
saw the faces of the men who did business in that building, I
felt that there had been a mistake in their billeting.
By the way, 'tis a consolation to feel that I am not writing to
an English audience. Then I should have to fall into feigned
ecstasies over the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days
of the great fire, to allude casually to the raising of the
entire city so many feet above the level of the lake which it
faces, and generally to grovel before the golden calf. But you,
who are desperately poor, and therefore by these standards of no
ac-count, know things, will understand when I write that they
have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and
that the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than
Mahajans and not so companionable as a Punjabi Jat after harvest.
But I don't think it was the blind hurry of the people, their
argot, and their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate
interests that displeased me so much as a study of the daily
papers of Chicago.
Imprimis, there was some sort of a dispute between New York and
Chicago as to which town should give an exhibition of products to
be hereafter holden, and through the medium of their more
dignified journals the two cities were yahooing and hi-yi-ing at
each other like opposition newsboys. They called it humor, but
it sounded like something quite different.
That was only the first trouble. The second lay in the tone of
the productions. Leading articles which include gems such as
"Back of such and such a place," or, "We noticed, Tuesday, such
an event," or, "don't" for "does not," are things to be accepted
with thankfulness. All that made me want to cry was that in
these papers were faithfully reproduced all the war-cries and
"back-talk" of the Palmer House bar, the slang of the
barber-shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman
car porter, the dignity of the dime museum, and the accuracy of
the excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that
the paper educates the public. Then I am compelled to believe
that the public educate the paper; yet suicides on the press are
rare.
Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest
upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and
began to talk what he called politics.
I had chanced to pay about six shillings for a travelling-cap
worth eighteen-pence, and he made of the fact a text for a
sermon. He said that this was a rich country, and that the
people liked to pay two hundred per cent, on the value of a
thing. They could afford it. He said that the government imposed
a protective duty of from ten to seventy per cent on foreign-made
articles, and that the American manufacturer consequently could
sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an imported hat would,
with duty, cost two guineas. The American manufacturer would make
a hat for seventeen shillings, and sell it for one pound fifteen.
In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the
effeteness of England. Competition between factory and factory
kept the prices down to decent limits, but I was never to forget
that this people were a rich people, not like the pauper
Continentals, and that they enjoyed paying duties.
To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with
counters. Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice
as much as it would in England, and when native made is of
inferior quality.
Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited
a gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He
owned the factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing
a handsome income from a syndicate of firms for keeping it
closed, in order that it might not produce things. This man said
that if protection were abandoned, a tide of pauper labor would
flood the country, and as I looked at his factory I thought how
entirely better it was to have no labor of any kind whatever
rather than face so horrible a future.
Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar country enjoys
paying money for value not received? I am an alien, and for the
life of me I cannot see why six shillings should be paid for
eighteen-penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown
cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a decently populated
level a few million people who are not aliens will be smitten
with the same sort of blindness.
But my friend's assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque
ferocity of Chicago.
See now and judge! In the village of Isser Jang, on the road to
Montgomery, there be four Changar women who winnow corn--some
seventy bushels a year. Beyond their hut lives Purun Dass, the
money-lender, who on good security lends as much as five thousand
rupees in a year. Jowala Singh, the smith, mends the village
plows--some thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred and
sixty-five days; and Hukm Chund, who is letter-writer and head of
the little club under the travellers' tree, generally keeps the
village posted in such gossip as the barber and the mid-wife have
not yet made public property.
Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million bushels, a
hundred banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in the year,
and scores of factories turn out plow-gear and machinery by
steam. Scores of daily papers do work which Hukm Chund and the
barber and the midwife perform, with due regard for public
opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. So far as manufactories
go, the difference between Chicago on the lake, and Isser Jang on
the Montgomery road, is one of degree only, and not of kind. As
far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang,
for all its seasonal cholers, has the advantage over Chicago.
Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four
ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village; but he is
not urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun
and swear that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab; nor
does Purun Dass fly forth in an ekka more than once or twice a
year, and he knows, on a pinch, how to use the railway and the
telegraph as well as any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is
absurd.
The East is not the West, and these men must continue to deal
with the machinery of life, and to call it progress. Their very
preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for
money and the thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam's curse, by
saying that such things dower a man with a larger range of
thoughts and higher aspirations. They do not say, "Free
yourselves from your own slavery," but rather, "If you can
possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things
of this world."
And they do not know what the things of this world are!
I went off to see cattle killed, by way of clearing my head,
which, as you will perceive, was getting muddled. They say every
Englishman goes to the Chicago stock-yards. You shall find them
about six miles from the city; and once having seen them, you
will never forget the sight.
As far as the eye can reach stretches a town-ship of cattle-pens,
cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can
be speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which
leads to an elevated covered way straddling high above the pens.
These viaducts are two-storied. On the upper story tramp the
doomed cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, with a
scuffling of sharp hoofs and multitudinous yells, run the pigs,
the same end being appointed for each. Thus you will see the
gangs of cattle waiting their turn--as they wait sometimes for
days; and they need not be distressed by the sight of their
fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that
a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by
means of a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and
behold! that crowd have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and
return no more.
It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the
exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive.
It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct
which was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see,
I marked a sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not
unalarmed by stray cattle who had managed to escape from their
proper quarters. A pleasant smell of brine warned me of what was
coming. I entered the factory and found it full of pork in
barrels, and on another story more pork un-barrelled, and in a
huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof great lumps of
ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was the
mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state
ere they began their progress through such passages as kings may
sometimes travel.
Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of
greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four
eviscerated carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect,
pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside, the
floor was slippery under me. Also there was a flavor of
farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in my
ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood
in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the
railway of death that had nearly shunted me through the window.
Each man carried a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off
at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was blood-red.
Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that
was where I worked my awe-struck way, unwilling to touch beam or
wall. The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by
reason of the steam and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of
things and, perched upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly
all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had just been shot out
of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled together in a large pen.
Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a
smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on their hinder
legs, so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway of
death.
Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and
made promises of amendment, till the tackle-man punted them in
their backs and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage,
very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited
them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through
their throats, and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and
then a fall as of heavy tropical rain, and the red man, who was
backed against the passage-wall, you will understand, stood clear
of the wildly kicking hoofs and passed his hand over his eyes,
not from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood
was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the next
arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, still kicking,
into a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but
wallowed in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently
came forth at the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the
blades of a blunt paddle-wheel, things which said "Hough, hough,
hough!" and skelped all the hair off him, except what little a
couple of men with knives could remove.
Then he was again hitched by the heels to that said railway, and
passed down the line of the twelve men, each man with a
knife--losing with each man a certain amount of his
individuality, which was taken away in a wheel-barrow, and when
he reached the last man he was very beautiful to behold, but
excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of individuality
was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been in
case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his
most cherished notions.
The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying.
They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were
so excessively dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, not
passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of such a one had
ceased to foam on the floor, such another and four friends with
him had shrieked and died. But a pig is only the unclean
animal--the forbidden of the prophet.
Content of CHAPTER V - CHICAGO [Rudyard Kipling's novel: American Notes]
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