Home life in America

Preface

IN presenting these phases of America I have tried to let conscience rule pride in my conception of patriotism, but as a New England conscience has been defined as "nine-tenths bad liver," the view of national life I have given may be condemned as " spleenish."

There is as great difficulty in writing with any degree of objectivity, let alone as an impressionist, about one's own country as there is in conceiving your daily-met circle of faces through an impressionalistic blur. It is difficult to give stimulating colour, and to limn superficially when well-known details draw the hand to critical judgment. But I hope if what I have written seems less vivid in colour, less startling in form than is gratifying to those who look to America for sensational conditions, it will be granted that it is a sacrifice of the picturesque to verisimilitude.

An artist knows instinctively how many details may be obliterated, and his treatment made more direct and convincing thereby. If circumscribed ability has made this picture of American home life more the work of a photographer than an artist, it is only to be hoped that in the interest of truth I have not left too many lines in the face of Uncle Sam.

Some of the comment is familiar, some of the anecdote may leave a reminiscent twang, but with all the books being written on America just now, to be strikingly vi HOME LIFE IN AMERICA

original would be to write in a lighter and more strident strain than the American Eagle's scream in our nation's early self-consciousness.

The scream of the eagle is still heard now and then, but as a nation we no longer hang upon the accents of that rather self-centred bird.

No doubt the " muck-rakers " have done something to tone down our triumphant " yawp."

American home life has no superlative virtues and no original sins. It is only in the little things that it differs from that of other nations, but — it is, after all, the little things of life that mean so much.

It is hoped, as herein set forth, they may be found not uninteresting.

K. G. B.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE V

I. IN GENERAL . . " *

Chapter I In General

A FEW years ago, on a first trip through their West, a party of American tourists from Eastern States were commenting upon the relief of leaving behind the foreign population deluging their homes. They had reached the Mammoth Springs Hotel, the first in that chain of surprising hostelries through the Yellowstone National Park, and had found that the waiters were college students from State universities working for funds for the next winter term ; the desk clerk was a healthseeking easterner ; the manager's parents had come West in one of the gold rushes — everybody about the hotel was •'pure American."

After dinner the easterners sat on the hotel porch and looked more admiringly at Fort Yellowstone, that symbol of the American army within a stone's throw of the hotel, than at the steaming multi-coloured terrace of the geysers they had come to this nature's wonderland to see. Some of the officers from the garrison came up to call. They were West Point graduates — also representatively American. The tourists experienced a rush of patriotism to the heart. " Life may be rough, but blood is pure out here on the frontier," affirmed the epigram-maker of the party. Next morning their belief in this promised land of pure Americanism seethed again as they arose to reveille, and saw the

B I

Stars and Stripes over the parade ground and found the driver with whom we were to tour the Park to be an old mail-coach pilot, ** American through to his hip-pocket load of six-shooter and tobacco plug," as the epigrammatist said. But one of the party had developed a sore throat, and a trip to the garrison dispensary had to be made before starting. The first sentry of whom directions were asked replied, " Yer'U be afther follerin' this yer booard walk to the building foreninst the barricks, ind 'tis beyondt that ver'll find it." " Irish, in our uniform, too ! " gasped the Boston man, shades of the Celtic political bossism in his own city arising unpleasantly. The next soldier encountered spoke English as it is broken over the Norwegian tongue ; the uniformed gentleman who opened the dispensary door was fresher than the first encountered from the Emerald Isle ; the man who handed out the remedies was a German, acting under the direction of a Scotch doctor. The cook, who came in with a scalded hand, was a Frenchman. A coloured boy was watering the colonel's lawn, and further along officers' row two Japanese servants were snatching a word and gesture as they scuttled along on errands.

**And we thought that we had discovered *pure America,' " sighed the disheartened enthusiasts. " Reminds me of the House of Representatives," remarked the Congressman in the party, and he spoke without reckless exaggeration, for the foreign-born, or the man of foreign-born parents, does appear in considerable variety in our national Legislature.

In fact, from the East Side district of New York, which is our doorstep, where foundlings of every nationality are laid for Uncle Sam's adoption — to the highest niches in the Government, the foreigner is always with us, and the amalgamation of this citizenship of all races within our gates into the American type is like alchemy.

The native American may protest against the foreign invasion as in the incident given, but the fact that the foreigner's " foreigner-ness " never survives two generations, that distinct American ideals hold supreme in Home life as well as in the Government, should be regarded by him as the real phenomenon.

We have our stock-in-trade pleasantries over this forced maturity of citizenship. There is the story of the Irish and German immigrants who quarrelled in the steerage before landing, Max whipping Pat ; but the next week, Pat, as a member of the New York police force, arrested Max, a full-fledged saloon-keeper, for having his place open on Sunday. Likewise the story of a Middle West political meeting of local import when a certain " Michael O'Toole " was nominated for office.

" Who's he ? " demanded a hardy opponent.

" 'Tis me brother on his way here on the ship from the ould country," calmly avers Michael O'Toole's Americanized relative, and the convention is satisfied. //

But, aside from the humorous 'point of view,^tliis constant assimilation of foreign element into a oneness of national life and custom makes a convincing description of everyday life in American homes hard to give. The truth is that from the very beginning we were a composite people, or, rather, a complex people, in the total of which the various elements did not at any time very successfully compose. In New England States there was a nearer approach to uniformity than elsewhere ; but in the Middle States, and to a less degree in the Southern States, each State differed markedly from the others, and the classes in each from one another. These differences rather grew than lessened until the middle of the nineteenth century. They were, curiously enough, largely put in the way of adjustment by the fusing influence of the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, and the reorganization of the South on the basis of labour no longer servile. They were still further and more powerfully affected by the marvellously rapid and extensive development of the means of intercourse and by that most subtle and invincible of unifying forces, freedom of trade within our vast territory. It was only when Mr. Bryce came to visit us after the Civil War that it was possible clearly to distinguish the traits of a truly national life, and the existence of a crude but powerful national consciousness. And then came immigration, and, curiously enough, under that heterogeneous pressure, the welding has progressed more rapidly than ever before. It seems almost incredible, in view of the figures of our foreign population ; and not only statistics but what one sees in our cities, would seem to refute the possibility of distinctively American characteristics and home life. In London and Paris, while there are foreign bits, the general impression is of uniformity. The names on the signs have a national unity with rare exceptions. In New York irregularity alone is regular. London is the capital of the great British Empire — one never forgets that — and in its narrow streets with their low buildings one sees many a barbarian and occasional specimens from all her colonies ; but for actual cosmopolitance of population Paris is perhaps more noteworthy than London. And New York outruns either.

In fact, all the large cities in the United States are aggregates of little cities — real cities, not " quarters," and not on the basis of division of means and caste, but of i-ace — little cross sections of the Old World transplanted intact, and steadfast in customs, home life, and traditions as the first English colonists dropped in the new world wilderness.

The human wilderness of lower New York is to-day a bundle of distinct foreign cities. The number of native Italians and their children now in New York make a total equal to Rome's present population, or more Italians than Florence and Venice put together. This " Little Italy " with its original centre at " Mulberry Bend," bids fair to be a " greater Italy." As each of the little cities in New York has its predilection in the matter of stores, Little Italy runs to grocery establishments and clothes emporiums, where previous servitude seems the one essential to inclusion in the stock. For squares here one sees only Italian signs and the sleek oily braids of hatlcss women in startling-toned petticoats and laced bodices, until the ordinary street scene looks more like an open-air rehearsal of an opera chorus, than even the streets of Old Italy itself do, for in the tenement environment peasantry massed in this way brings an unreal atmosphere. But perhaps the weirdest foreign city in New York is that which has won for the region about the Lower Bowery the nickname of the New Jerusalem. It is said to contain three times as many Hebrews as the Ghetto of London, five times that of Paris, and six times that of Berlin. If there are 1,068,282 Jews in Greater New York, as has been recently estimated, this would be fifteen times more than Syria and Palestine contain, and twenty-five times more than the entire population of Jerusalem itself.

And it would seem as if a million of the new world Jews were in the Bowery settlement. In no European country does the Jewish quarter seem so much a world apart. The flower of trade in this city of Jews is dry goods and clothes, with lace establishments for a second choice, and throngs pass busily among the push-carts, elbowing each other in the streets, and their rivals upon the inner pavement edge — the stores. Who walks there passes between a corridor of eyes, and you feel that your weakness and possessions are judged at a glance, for the wisdom of their race is in their eyes, and you feel, above all, a foreigner on this particular spot of American soil. Away from the eternal driving of bargains, seen in their restful moments, in the family life, these people make one feel more the foreigner than ever in their new Canaan. In the afternoons the tribes assemble in the breathing-space of park in their congested metropolis. Men with their families come and sit upon the benches in domestic content. One may notice that this people, whatever concession to the new world demand they may make in the articles of trade, is yet most careful of the things which are of itself. While together it speaks only Yiddish — never Russian or English. There is, of course, the difference between the old generation and the new. The younger Jews wear patent leather shoes of the shiniest kind, and their clothes are in the mode, if not in advance, according to the Bowery prophets. But the older people have a patriarchal air. The men dress in black, and beards among them are common. A type which perhaps may be seen only here, but here frequently, is the old Jew dressed in tall silk hat and square frock coat, old too and lustreless and of antique design, but worn with simple and perfect dignity. In the heavy-lidded eyes of this type of patriarch, moving sadly among his commercial people in the midst of the new commercial world, one may read the history of the race. But one sees Jews of every type in this American Jerusalem. The eager chafFerer of extreme gesticulation (the kind of whom it is said, without hands they would be dumb), the ascetic, the student, the dark, the fair and of every degree — they are here, a city by themselves, and this in America.

There are several New York daily newspapers which are published in Hebrew. But for that matter, almost all of our foreign-born citizens have their own papers and their own theatres. German, French and Italian papers are found in most of the cities, while periodicals of less frequent appearances are in Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Finnish, Roumanian, Japanese, and Chinese.

In the midst of the foundry clang of New York there is a little city of silence. It is Chinatown, and, on entering it from the boiler factory of a business square criss-crossed with elevated trains, you feel you have crossed the Pacific in one step. In this Chinatown the citizens move noiselessly on felt-soled shoes, and they have a foreign way of walking in the streets which go in such crocks that one of them describes a semicircle and, with true Oriental politeness, eventually leads you back to the street you just left. Chinese women leading their fascinating, incredible, dollchildren, patter about, glossy and clean as a whistle, amid one of the most unsanitary combinations of filth in the United States ; while the men in this Celestial city prowl about with stealthy tread until, however harmless they may be, they suggest melodrama of opium dens and highbinders. And when you find one of them silently regarding you from strange crannies of ramshackle structures, you feel yourself the victim of a sinister plan. The fact is, however, that he is merely speculating on your probable value as a prospective customer ; for Chinatown, as all the other foreign cities in America, has been exploited by society folk slumming, until the inhabitants look at you in surprise if you come down after six in anything but evening clothes.

But Chinatown is truly a separate world. The town's private affairs are governed by a committee of twelve prominent Chinese merchants and an annually elected mayor. The business of the municipality is drawn partly from curious sight-seers, but largely from native patrons, and many a Chinese woman has lived and borne her children and supplied her diminutive house-keeping and personal wants without ever having set foot beyond the narrow streets of this little silent city in the heart of New York.

New York's Chinatown is a mere outpost compared to that of San Francisco and the Chinese quarters in the cities of the North- West. An American writer illumines a phase of America's relation to this utterly unassimilable race. " California, and San Francisco especially, are in a large measure indebted to the Oriental race," he reminds us, " who in the early days of the State were the hewers of wood, and drawers of water, and cooks, and the laundry men of the adults, and nurses of the infants.

"The newer generation of Californians grew up with baby-loving, devoted Chinese servants about them. The sons and daughters of the Golden West did not, indeed, draw their first sustenance from yellow breasts, as the Southerner has drawn it from black ones. That mystic bond was lacking. But a Chinese man-servant had watched the cradle above most of them, rejoiced with the parents that there was a baby in the house, laughed to see it laugh, hurried like a mother at hearing it cry. A backyard picture in any of the old Californian mansions include always the Chinese cook, grinning from the doorway on the playing babies.

"The Chinese cook was a volunteer nurse. For him the nursery was the soul of the house. He was the consoler and fairy-tale teller of childhood. He passed on to the children his own nursery tales of flowered princesses and golden dragons ; he taught them to patter in singsong Cantonese ; he saved his frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts, and as the better Southerner, despising the race, loves the individual negro through this association of childhood, so the Californian came to love the Chinaman that he knew. In his ultimate belief, indeed, he outstripped the Southerner, for he came first to a tolerance of the race and then to an admiration."

So much for the subtle influence of these aliens in our midst ; to the casual observer the city of these almondeyed brethren has always been a realm of artistic composition, subtle colouring, and shadowy suggestion — everything un-American. Since the earthquake, Chinatown in San Francisco has shown phoenix-like qualities in rising again out of its ashes. The new buildings are all Oriental, not of Western architecture, and while it will probably soon be the care and vexation of boards of health, as old Chinatown was, it will always be beautiful, falling everywhere into its foreign pictures.

You see a balcony, a woman in soft gauzy robes, a window whose blackness suggests mystery and the artist's hand, and these streets, spotted with the multi-coloured banners of gold and green that hang out as sign-boards, form a bewildering contrast to the shops and wholesale houses, and unimaginative rows of American houses.

It is a common joke that the Irish own New York and Boston, and run them to suit themselves, and with the Irish population of New York nearly three times as large as that of either Dublin or Belfast and Boston holding second place in the United States as a city of Irishmen, and all of them ambitious, their prominence in politics is as legitimate as it is undeniable. Some one has said that it is astonishing how often one finds that a prominent Englishman, in military, literary or political life, is really an Irishman ; and over here one is not astonished at all, because one takes it for granted that any prominent American is of Irish descent until it is disproved.

The German supremacy in the Middle Western States marks home life there so thoroughly that a German tourist is said to have remarked that he felt more at home in Milwaukee than in Berlin. One never thinks of the State of Minnesota without a mental image of " Yan Yonson " and " Ole Olscn " and his tribe there, while Norwegians, and Finns, too, have exclusive colonies in the agricultural belt still further west. Even Puritan New England draws its industrial vitality from Scandinavian workers, or from French-Canadian (Cannuck) settlements that have leaked over from the northern border.

America is really a congress of nations in permanent session. Other countries are Meccas of interest to tourists, but foreigners who come to America come to live. They may have cherished false hopes of the extent of personal liberty, and of the ease with which money is to be acquired.

lo HOME LIFE IN AMERICA

but at least they stay. From all of which arises the difficulty in finding a standard mould of home life or of type as yet in America. Certain broad attributes of character have been evolved throughout the country, but the details of the household still vary with the different nationality it represents in direct descent or in marriage crossing.

The visiting foreigner does not see these great cross sections of foreign lands in our midst. He is in search of the typical American, and he takes his observations from " Long Acre Square,"— ^hat space included in the irregular widening of one of New York's biggest traffic avenues and its slow crossing of another seething avenue and a small radius of intervening streets — which, if not yet the centre of the world, as the New Yorker believes, by the general consent of the world, certainly, is to America, including Canada and Mexico and most of South America, what the Place de la Concorde is to Europe — the centre of a continent.

Within that compact little patch there are twenty-one first-class theatres, about the same number of clubs — America's most famous restaurants — not less than a dozen hotels, any one of which twenty years ago would be observed for its great size and elegance. There are literally hundreds of apartment houses ; there are studios, and there are some houses where people sometimes go hungry. But one mentions such things for the value of contrast, for the characteristic of "The Acre" is gaiety, light, laughter, good dressing, feeding, drinking, and good fellowship ; and if people will crawl into its corners and starve there, they fail to diminish the general tone of the " Acre," which is exceedingly gay.

And perhaps the visiting foreigner does well to take his observations here, for here he catches his glimpse of the composite American who bubbles to the top of this huge melting-pot of all nationalities.

For outside, and even from the interior of those nuclei

IN GENERAL ii

of other races, there is going on continually a fusion of bloods, a modification of race characteristics, of physical form as well as habits of living and ways of thinking, until gradually there is a metamorphosis into a distinct American type among persons of European descent.

A recent immigration commission, appointed to investigate how far American breaks down alien characteristics, has made a comparison of measurements and a study of temperament among foreign-born and their descendants, with the result that most stable racial characteristics were found to change in America. "Racial and physical characteristics," the report concludes, "do not survive under the new social and climatic environment of America. If American environment can bring about an assimilation of the head forms in the first generation, may it not be that other characteristics may be as easily modified, and that there may be a rapid assimilation of widely varying nationalities and races to something that may be well called an American type ? "

Still, that type has not yet evolved. Facially it is slow to make. There is as yet no facial type among our middle and lower classes.

So much is said abroad of the American " face " that the foreigner expects to find us in this country all of a mould, from the Bostonian who traces descent to a " Mayflower" passenger, to the Italian immigrant who still dreams of Italian skies and poverty, as he sells semi-putrid vegetables at usurious rates in a damp cellar in the new world " Little Italy." It is true there is a type of American face among our comfortably-off classes, or rather a type of expression, that could belong to no other land, and yet a curious physiognomy among prosperous American people. From the very beginning, from the landing of the Puritans, this has been a country of strife. Women as well as men had, in the early days, to fight for their homes. No amount of wealth and ease among later generations seems to have been able completely to destroy the atmosphere of virility and strength in which our women once moved. Women became so accustomed to heroic deeds thrust upon them in our colonial and revolutionary days that heredity still insists upon fitting their serious, almost stern, faces upon their luxury-wrapped descendants. It takes more fat to engulf the rugged character outline of the American woman's face than the features of the women of any other race. Many American women who have known only comfort and whose mental exertion is limited to frocks and stage love stories, have the thinker's furrow between the brows, and strength and activity in their rather sharp features. There is a humorous side to this appearance of a sibyline expression and strong cast of features on the exponent of the luxurious habits which come of national wealth. Untouched of longing for independence and activity, mental or physical, the average well-off American woman — that type seen abroad — looks keen and shrewd and as inspired for work and expectant as her Puritan ancestors were.

Even in the type of American beauty there is the influence of the pioneer mother. Her firm chin is a trifle square, and has not the roundness nor the dimple of the placid classic type. The expression is earnest, almost tragic, as compared with the calm, benign eyes, bowed lips and aesthetic chin of the accepted European type of beauty. And yet this type of American woman is generally as free from passion and deep emotion as she is removed from the commercial abihty her brow and chin proclaim.

But the fact remains that among the lower classes there is no settled type of colouring nor contour as yet ; indeed, we might be considered farther from a type in that strata than we were fifty years ago, for immigration and inter- marriage has run us into many new moulds.

That the amalgamation goes on in such complete subjection to Anglo-Saxon influence ; that we have evolved distinct national points of view, distinct social custom ; that our manners and even our morals or immorals — for of course no European ever overlooks our divorce evil — have become standardized to a certain extent ; that Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, Easter, in church and home, become more and more alike the country over ; that there is " for better or worse " developing a distinctively American home life ; is as if the builders of the Tower of liabel had succeeded in founding a colony without actual dialects, and with the cut of the clothes and even the shape of the hands tending to uniformity — a type. For after we have digested such statistics as those of the distinguished scientist who claims that the people of German origin in the United States numbering 30,000,000 form an absolute majority so far as nationality is concerned, and that in spite of the unimportance to which the German tongue is condemned to-day, America is internally German, and not English ; after we have shuddered properly over the deductions of our own magazine writers, who cry aloud that the Anglo-Saxon race in America is doomed to follow the buffalo and the red man into extinction, and that as a result of the pouring of European hordes into the Western world, and the revival here, through crossing and mixing of blood, of submerged ancestral traits, a mongrel race of humanity may get a footing in our soil, and the American woman of to-day changed to a creature with the feminine characteristics of the age of chipped flints ; after we have beheld ourselves in the newspapers, a degenerating race of pigmy physique and lost ethics, the result of too much rich blood, bolting our meals, fried things, wasting our saliva on the pavements instead of saving it for our digestion, liberty run to license, and other delicately worded charges ; after every form of discouraging prophecy from within and without for the future of America ; it is of some comfort really to look into the homes that make up America and mark the overwhelming uniformity on breakfast-table and around the evening lamp at night, and realize that the national diet is not mince pit nor buckwheat cakes (on which point, however, Matthew Arnold, when visiting America, is said to have reassured his wife by remarking, " Try them, my d'yah, they're not half so nahsty as they look "), and that the family is not composed of lank, nervous, dyspeptic, hysterical, frivolous and immoral individuals. On the contrary, I venture to say that in no country does the cosey home-life of the bourgeoisie — the scramble intimate of children and family pets, and elders — so thoroughly permeate its middle and upper classes as in the United States, and that so far from being in a state of dyspeptic, neurasthenic, catarrhal degeneracy, America, like Napoleon's army, '* marches on its stomach."

Even the American child, comment upon whose spindled-shanked, pastry-faced, nervous condition we have admitted at times almost apologetically, proves by the measurements of some scores of thousands of American school children and their classification according to nationality, parentage, and descent, to have spindled to the extent of becoming from an inch to two and one-half inches taller than the school children of the same or corresponding class in most European countries. He proves to be, too, from three to twelve pounds heavier at all ages than the little John, Pat and Jean in our schools ; Teutonic little Max alone out-weighs him. Moreover, despite the fact, childhood in America is supposed to entail a diet largely of candy and chewinggum and a sitting up until all hours and no family discipline to speak of, the foreign blood does not seem to have vitiated under the less Spartan regime of infancy, for the second generation of American school children, that is, those of American-born parents, are above the average in both height, weight, and chest measurement of those born before the parents emigrated to America, or representing the first generation of American-born ; and those from families three generations in America have a still higher average.