The Government and the Jobless

Westbrook Pegler

Connecticut Post/March 6, 1961

The statements of the Department of Labor on unemployment always are subject to suspicion because administrations promote policies by propaganda. The Kennedy administration has not been in office long enough to have run up any substantial blame for a big factor of unemployment. Therefore, the worse the unemployment is made to seem, the worse the reproach to the Eisenhower administration. Jack turned the rascal out just in time. After a year, President Kennedy and his Labor Department either will have to put out claims that employment has picked up nicely or, as Roosevelt did, start up a rousing “war effort” to take idle people off the streets.

It is hard to define unemployment. I recently heard of a man drawing $35 a week as unemployed although he was working as a chore-boy for $10 a day, paid in cash. Given three days a week as chore-boy, he was drawing $65 a week for three days’ work. To a young man in an inexpensive neighborhood, that was a convenient deal. On one of those days as chore-boy, he said he could not get to work until 11 o’clock because he had to go downtown and get his check from “the unemployment.” He worked overtime to give eight hours. He is very honest and conscientious. Another young fellow, and this one with a wife and new baby, implored a few days’ work as a laborer with a builder. He really needed work. But the very first day he went to the builder at noon and asked for his time, explaining that he had to have his car fixed. There would seem to be a million variations of these examples which would reduce the alarming figure of five million considerably. Some of the great but uncertain army of unemployed will work for ten employers in a year or hundreds of employers in a lifetime. There are many intervals between jobs. These individuals are off the payroll for that amount of time, but are they really unemployed in the sense that calls before the public imagination pinched faces and worried eyes?

A friend of mine has made an avocation of firing cooks. He complains fiercely that humanity and the economy are ill-served by the provision which bars an applicant from “unemployment” if she quit her last job voluntarily.

He holds that this folly makes it necessary for cooks desiring unearned money from “unemployment” to get fired. How does a cook get fired? This man says the surest way is to burn a roast or smash a precious article of crockery. Obviously it would be better for the national economy in the preservation of such values to deny “unemployment” to those who purposely have got fired and grant this dole only to those who quit. But the fallacies in that were threshed out in the debates long ago. Millions and millions would quit. The only certain safeguard would be to abolish unemployment money altogether, but that would be reactionary, undemocratic, and probably Hitlerian.

Even when there is no big, dramatic strike going, there are always strikes affecting many strikers directly and affecting indirectly many others who are not strikers but have run out of raw materials to make into products or run out of finished products to transport and sell. Billing clerks, all sorts of incidental workers in the stream of commerce, are not strikers.

But they are laid off just the same. Thus they qualify for “unemployment” and are added into the Department of Labor’s alarming total.

I always doubted that Eisenhower knew anything about labor when he took office. Senator Taft’s indignation on hearing that Ike had picked the president of the plumbers’ union, a New Deal Democrat, to be Secretary of Labor, spoke volumes about Eisenhower’s unfitness. He thus confirmed the impression he had given me at his grand headquarters of the United Nations armies outside Paris a few days before he allowed that he was in the market for the nomination. That day he seemed to be reciting from a memorized survey thrust at him by some secretary who told him Pegler would ask questions about unions and labor. Then, so help me God, he got out a golf driver with a head like a flat-iron and whipped it around the room. The head weighed about a pound and Ike explained that on days when he couldn’t get out and play or ride a horse, he got in his licks in the office.

It may seem heartless to weigh such a fact, but it is a fact that in all masses of unemployed people there are many who work as little as they have to. Skill used to be one of the most important elements, but machines have changed the skill to “man-hours” in many cases. Such people are not necessarily unhappy to be unemployed provided they get “unemployment.”

The wife who holds a job while her husband is unemployed actually is his rival in the job market and the rival of the idle breadwinner of the homebody wife down the block. That fact makes many women so mad that they scream and hiss in their furious letters. They think I am trying to argue that all married women should wear aprons and murmur “yes, dear” when the master of the household plants himself down for the corned beef at eventide. I do think it would be a good idea, but I wouldn’t waste my genius arguing an axiom.

In the Days of the Runyonesque

Westbrook Pegler

The Idaho Statesman/February 6, 1961

Gene Fowler’s farewell is here, a story of Park Row in the ’twenties, called “Skyline.” On my pillow late at night I slowly realized with sorrow that I had known a saintly man whose goodness glows with a supernatural light as of a halo. His recountal of little matters among reporters long ago is a rosary of trivialities made spiritual and precious by an apostle who never knowingly hurt anyone.

Why didn’t he wear sandals and a cowl?

I criticized Gene for condoning guilty wrongs by notorious public men of his time and circle which had an important aggregate harmful effect on the morals of the rabble. He implied that the charm, the shocking abandon, luxurious wantons compensated the harm they did far, far beyond the company of those who knew them.

I agree with Damon Runyon on the vocation of the reporter and the reporter’s duty to walk alone shunning popularity. Which reminds me, there is a studio and factory a block from where I often work on 45th Street, where shields, plaques, and medals are designed, graven, and washed in gold for presentation in considered recognition of the glory of heroic columnists who savagely condemn racism, bigotry, and McCarthyism. This is now a commerce. The banquet departments of big hotels run it.

Once, in a thoughtless moment, the honoree of such a tribute invited me to sit among the elect at his recognition in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf on a Sunday night. I had known him in the first war so I accepted. But when I showed up, he panicked. The chart disclosed no seat for me in the ranks of the great, and he seemed to hope I would get the idea and get lost.

I did get the idea, but I did not get lost. I dogged him and his manager until, at last, they wedged in an extra chair in the fifth or sixth row from the front in rising bleachers about 20 rows deep. I was at the very end until some other Dutchman, as they call inconvenient creatures, came in late and became the end man.

It is not vanity, I assure you, but irony which reminds, after all this time, that although the occasion was loaded with leaders of the Roosevelt cult, when our names were called, only Jim Farley’s decibels measured up to mine. I will never forget the rage and consternation in the dark visage of Fanny Hurst as she swiveled around in unbelief. Cheers for Pegler! Here was McCarthyism running riot.

Damon Runyon ran with the underworld but he wrote and made his fortune interpreting the brutality of criminals of the bootleg era. He never blew the whistle but rather endeared his rodent associates to the public by his skill, but as well by an innate sympathy which he brought to Broadway from water tanks and jails in Pueblo and Denver.

If Damon had had any of the district attorney in his nature he would have written the truth.

But he was not a crusade or campaign reporter. He was a description-reporter, and his fiction also was reporting of that kind.

Probably all men know fear and so, I suppose, did he. But he had soldiered as a skinny kid volunteer with the 13th Minnesota in the Philippines, and he had never stepped back in any casual quarrels around Madison Square Garden. So he was true to his principles and not afraid in his failure to write the truth about the Broadway underworld.

Ed Sullivan, however, now an institution, a great man of brotherhood, wrote on Nov. 22, 1953, a confession that would make me writhe. Ed Sullivan said in his column in the New York Daily News: “That not one of the newspaper men covering the Broadway beat in those days was shot is an index of the lousy jobs each of us turned in as reporters. Winchell, Hellinger, Runyon, Sobol, Skolsky, and Sullivan each relied on mob protection during the machine gun era. We were ‘right guys,’ a happy compliment when you’re young and actually a savage indictment viewed through the other end of the telescope a quarter of a century later.”

I hasten to dismiss the others from this roster. We have only Sullivan’s word that they relied on “mob protection,” and his word is not enough. But he can speak for himself and does.

Runyon in his own name wrote a fine, honest testament on the proud but lonely honor of reporters who write the truth and walk alone. I will present it in my next dispatch with my compliments to Sullivan and to others who, last year raised a suspect chorus of welcome to Josephine Baker, the antique sepia squirm who came back from Paris to the fine country which she had repudiated with scorn—to make some easy money. In the vulgar idiom of their world and hers, she laid an egg.

That Old Pepper

Westbrook Pegler

Connecticut Post/June 5, 1961

The precious right to vote is not as exciting as political superstition would have it. In California just now, it is nestled down like an aged yard-hen in a box. It is soft, insipid, and warm. It will wink the yellow lids if you mutter “chick-chick.” Cross-filing and gerrymandering have sickened the franchise with a pernicious roup. I was born with the right to vote when I came 21, and I have read of battles where young sprouts in ragged breeches were shot down by the soldiers of George III so that I could walk into a little canvas shower-stall at the Casas Adobes quarter of Tucson a few weeks ago to vote for Mac Matheson, the Republican candidate for Congress, against Mo Udall, the Democrat. But it was a listless exercise of a paltry heritage. I was heartily surprised late that night by a broadcast which told us that our man had hustled the Democrat right down to the finish, breathing hot on his neck. I will be aroused when I can’t vote.

Republicans do not expect to win except with Democrats like Eisenhower. So here in California today, George Christopher, the Republican mayor of San Francisco, is giving Republicans the old pep talk about enticing Democrats to vote for Republicans next time out. He means Wendell Willkie Republicans. He reminds me of Charlie Pyle, the football promoter, who seduced Red Grange from the Illinois campus when we were very young and took him barnstorming with a gang of other apostates from the cloisters of statutory education. Charlie was stomping up and down the dressing room between halves this cold winter day, banging his walking cane on the concrete floor and yelling, “Now next half I want a lot of that old pepper.” This was at the Yankee Stadium.

George Trafton, our center, was drinking hootch out of a paper cup.

“Did you hear that?” he said. “Charlie wants a lot of that old pepper.” A blond brute named McMillan stirred in his blankets and muttered, “Go away.” We had tossed and bounced over the mountains from Pittsburgh the whole night before.

I have to doubt that the Republicans of Los Angeles were any more deeply stirred by Mayor Christopher’s exhortation. The mayor told them they must find a “positive, honest approach.” The old pep.

There is a tremendous, hardly perceptible silent commotion all over California about the outrage of reapportionment in both the congressional and state legislative bodies. The Republicans reapportioned these precious institutions ten years ago, and the Democrats yelled murder. This was going far too far—by far.

This year the Democrats did it back, and Herb Klein, the quiet, mannerly press secretary who so well conducted Richard Nixon’s visit to Moscow in 1959, remarked, “They cut up the Republicans pretty badly. You have to have a party to have an opposition.”

Mr. Klein was right, although the Republicans still have the makings of a party. They will come back. The indomitable party spirit of American politics will keep the Republicans in business. Mr. Klein said, however, that it is a good thing to have a big, wide spread in a national party in this country. A New York Javits is a horror to a Goldwater Republican. Even Nixon finds a Javits hard to endure. But Rockefeller, for example, is worse. And it certainly was much worse when Harold Stassen was around, always latching onto the fabric of Ike’s pants like a cholla burr in the desert until something shook him finally loose and he spun off into nowhere.

“Otherwise,” Mr. Klein said, “you disintegrate into the French system with every voter his own party and total confusion. Some Democrats ought to be Republicans, and some Republicans across the country are better Democrats.”

In 1964 Nixon will tear into Kennedy with more vigor and much better skill than he showed last fall. Nixon can’t help profit by his own mistakes and by Kennedy’s juvenile and shallow conduct since. At the thought of Herbert Klein showing up in a G-string at a Nixon presidential press conference as the astounding Pierre Salinger did at one of Kennedy’s, Herb wagged his head. Where did those Kennedy people pick up their sideshow talent? Was there ever such a spectacle as the President’s secretary bouncing around in a clout?

Goodie Knight, the Republican ex-governor of California, is making an astounding recovery by means of a teevy political harangue, or better say lecture, twice a night, five minutes a show, five nights a week, as a straight commercial feature.

It is a miracle. He talks straight, practical politics and to the amazement of all others except his enchanting wife, he is coming back faster than even Nixon. His future seemed absolutely blank after Senator William Knowland balled up the whole Republican campaign in California with his clumsy version of right to work and a course so selfish that, as of now, he could not be nominated for a City Council. Knowland made so many enemies in his own right that he warped the organization out of plumb. He hated Nixon, and he may take a little pleasure in Nixon’s defeat. But it was an awful price for the whole party to pay for one man’s ugly spite.

Enormities Blemish Movies

Westbrook Pegler

El Paso Herald

March 8, 1961

The best moving pictures ever made were Walt Disney’s fairy tales in color such as “Barnyard Symphony,” “The Country Mouse,” and “Snow White” in which countless drawings were strung together so smoothly that these graduations seemed to be photographs of actual creatures from out of this world. The music was consistent as in “Barnyard Symphony” where horses whickered and fowl expressed themselves in cackles and clucks of superb absurdity, all of it loyal to an operatic theme.

There came a week, just before Christmas a quarter of a century ago, when someone barely dusted out the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd street, the scene of the great Ziegfeld Follies, and installed half a dozen spools of this great American art, a form which no other people on earth has ever approached and no other genius but Disney had the gift and patience to create.

I was then slave to a young friend now six feet two and nudging 30 who wanted to see Santa Claus not only at Macy’s but at Gimbel’s and Wanamaker’s and on all the corners thereabout. I did my duty loyally until 4 o’clock, when lights were coming on and reminded him that he had promised, on his part, to sit through my kind of show.

He trudged along in slush, often lost in a wilderness of hurrying trouser legs and skirts, and up the stairs to second balcony, for the festival had captivated many others who may have had a faint intimation that this might be their last hour of such beauty on this more and more evil earth.

I remember with longing scene in which the country mouse fell into a champagne glass at a great table after the party and drank his way out, emerging so belligerent that he blethered a challenge to his own dancing image reflected in a tremulous mold of jelly.

The masters drew and painted that scene in the drunken vision of a hilarious little giant who squared off to fight through adventures which I will not attempt to relate further lest memory betray me. I want to believe the country mouse licked the resident cat, but the actual ensuings probably were much more poetic.

Disney was not yet fully appreciated as he came to be, not with “Snow White,” his first great full-length production, but later, with an unworthy incoherence from the floor of his cutting room called “Fantasia.” Disney then got into the hands of the condescending patrons who had seen the Moscow Ballet, and went arty.

I sat through the whole program at the New Amsterdam with a twinge for Marilyn Miller, who had sung “Silver Lining” on that stage, and was longing indescribably to see it all again when my young friend reminded me that they were expecting us home up the country.

One year I hurt my spine playing softball for a fund for crippled children and barely escaped fusion operation. Hearing this, Disney sent to my home at Pound Ridge, N. Y., his entire production for the coming year, six or seven of his best films of “feature” length, as I believe they call shows that run about an hour.

The living room was 14 feet high and my bedroom had a window giving onto this in which Disney’s crew established their machinery to throw the pictures on a big screen rigged across the massive chimney.

We invited, perhaps, 30 people and commandeered folding chairs from an undertaker in New Canaan.

There were sandwiches and so forth in proportion, but nearer 60 than 30 showed up, including Gene Tunney, who, when all was said and done, clamored for some detail that he had liked most and started the carnival over gain.

And now, heaven pity us, we have “Exodus” and glandular enormities of impersonal females named, for example, Monroe, and the rat pack’s evil interpretations of the soul of the American GI on foreign service.

I pity myself as I face the New Frontier, which I wot not, and venture, memories of “The Pled Piper” where the little crippled boy on his crutches barely hobbled over the threshold of the enchanted mountain as the massive doors swung shut and trapped him in realm of endless joy.

Cash Register Silent as Ban Hits Pyle’s Side Show

Westbrook Pegler

Cleveland Plain Dealer/April 3, 1929

Expected Receipts Vanish as Saxophones Are Stilled and Dancers Languish

The small town authorities along the route of the second transcontinental bunion Marathon seem to be picking on Mr. C. C. Pyle. His band of limping bunioneers parked in North Philadelphia this evening, at the end of the third stage of the goofy journey from New York to San Diego, and, for the first time Mr. Pyle was permitted to finger the keys of his cash register at the entrance marquee of his show tent.

Accustomed as he is to being tossed lightly about by rural constables and deputy sheriffs, Mr. Pyle was in a temper against the commissioners of the city of Trenton, who refused to sanction the performance of his 21 dancing debutantes from wholesome home surroundings and the solo rendition of Miserere by La Belle Irene, a Chicago artiste, claiming to be the lady champion slap tongue baritone saxophone player.

If this official ruling of the Trenton city commissioners could be regarded as the first firm stand of an American governing body against the playing of the saxophone, slap-tongue or otherwise, one might applaud them for their courage.

But local saxophonists performed as usual, if not more so, in the night life centers of the New Jersey state capital, and, moreover, there was bitter logic in La Belle Irene’s words about their permitting the New Jersey Legislature to hold open debate in town while forbidding C. C. Pyle’s refined divertissement. The New Jersey Legislature is not refined.

Sheriff Snatches Sedans.

Two of Mr. Pyle’s small second-hand sedans remained in the custody of the sheriff when the ladies of the entertainment piled into the omnibuses and the runners, shivering miserably in their underwear in the cold wind of the morning, answered roll call for the run to North Philadelphia. The sedans had been detained under a writ of attachment for $800 and Mr. Pyle was advised to relinquish them entirely, on the ground that if the complainant got them it would only serve him right.

There was some disquiet among the ladies of the entertainment as to the whereabouts of Mr. Pyle. He had been missing and unaccounted for nearly twenty hours. The adventurous children of Madam Duvall’s dashing, dazzling, dancing debutantes, girls apparently between the ages of seventeen and twenty, were sewing sequins onto their costumes as the bus rolled along, and asking Madame Duvall if she thought everything would be all right about Mr. Pyle—and, you know—the payroll.

Worry About the Payroll

Madam Duvall, an English lady with the remarkable fortitude and the strange capacity for domesticity under difficulties which characterize the tent show trouper, assured them that everything undoubtedly would be all right about—you know—the payroll. The dancing debutantes are under her charge and even in the loose organization of a rolling show company, she kept them close by her and was constantly chattering at them to keep their coats tight about them in the cold.

None of the debutantes has been under canvas before and they were setting out on a 3,500-mile, 90-day migration through bitter cold, fog, rain and the hot blast sandstorms from the American deserts as though for a picnic. There were to eat hot dogs from the grease-joint concession and stuffing themselves with candy and peanuts from the road stands wherever the bus pulled up to wait for the runners. There will be children down with common cold if not with pneumonia before C. C. Pyle’s cross-country follies reach San Diego, but they are young and the road ahead is the future to them.

Philadelphia was cordial to Mr. Pyle and company, and, at the end of his third day on tour he had excellent prospects of bearing down hard and heartily on the rustling keys of his cash register.

Britons Face Government by Decree

Dorothy Thompson

Houston Chronicle/August 31, 1947

Great Britain no longer has merely a Labor government. She has a Labor dictatorship, and the course on which she is embarked is heading toward the totalitarian state.

The reason given is the usual one: economic crisis.

Just as under the Weimar public Chancellor Bruning started the process of governing by decree, certainly with no intention of initiating a procedure which would lead to the totalitarian state, so the “moderate” Laborites—pressed by their left—have started the same process which certainly will not stop of itself.

Few people in America realize the extent to which Anglo-Saxon liberty under law already has been undermined.

Early in August the Labor majority passed its agricultural bill. This bill continues controls dubious even in wartime. Under it the British farmer can, if the opinion of certain monitors of the state so rules, be dispossessed of home and land though it may have been in his family’s possession for 100 years.

The English farmer is under power of his county’s agricultural executive committee, which is a creature of the minister of agriculture with no independent authority or existence. The committees consist of farmers, millers, seed merchants (unpaid), and of paid executive officers who have the effective power. These officers consist of students from agricultural colleges who knew the theoretical aspects of farming but have little practical experience, and of farmers and other country people who prefer a bureaucratic job to farming. Every rural community knows the type—the man who becomes an insurance salesman, for instance, because he can’t make a go of his farm.

These are the inspectors who give evidence before the committees of the “inefficiency” of farmers. If their evidence is supported, such farmers may be dispossessed without compensation, disturbance, or loss of income.

The procedure is the more unjustified because the British farm before the war was the most efficient in Europe. In 1937, for instance, the British produced £45 more net agricultural value per head than the next most efficient—the Danish.

Everywhere in the world the independent farmer has been the bulwark of liberty. That is why all totalitarian movements must intimidate, bribe, and eventually break the peasant. The whole world knows what is happening to him “behind the iron curtain,” which is of highly transparent iron. But Britain is on the way to the same thing. And incidentally, the proportion of Britons, theoretically “engaged in agriculture,” who actually are engaged in drawing salaries to supervise the real producers, is enormous.

No country yet has produced more food by breaking the independent farmer.

But theoreticians never learn from experience.

The Early Days

Mark Twain

Buffalo Express/December 11, 1869

Letter Number 4.

[These letters are written jointly by Professor D. R. Ford and Mark Twain. The former does the actual traveling, and such facts as escape his notice are supplied by the latter, who remains at home].

But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner raked a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dues and other entertainments, he hadn’t a cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. They cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts—blue woolen ones—and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those people hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant animosity toward what they called a “biled shirt.”

In his sketch entitled “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Mr. Bret Harte has deftly pictured the roughness and lawlessness of a California mining camp of the early days, and also its large-hearted charity and compassion—traits found in all true pioneers. Roaring Camp becomes blessed by the presence of a wandering, sickly woman and her little child—rare and coveted treasures among rude men who still yearned in secret for the mothers and sisters and children they loved and cherished in other days. This wanderer—the only woman in Roaring Camp, died, and the honest miners took charge of the orphan little one in a body. They washed it and dressed it and fed it—getting its garments on wrong end first as often as any other way, and pinning the garments to the child occasionally, wondering why the baby wasn’t comfortable and the food these inexperienced nurses lovingly concocted for it was often rather beyond its capabilities, since it was neither an alligator nor an ostrich.

But they meant well, and the baby thrived in spite of the perilous kindnesses of the miners. But it was manifest that all could not nurse the baby at once, so they passed a law that the best behaved man should have it for one day, the man with the cleanest shirt the next day, and the man whose cabin was in the neatest order the next, and so on. And the result was, that a handsome cradle was bought and carted from cabin to cabin, according to who won the privilege. The handsome cradle made such a contrast to the unhandsome furniture, that gradually the unhandsome furniture disappeared and gave way to a neater sort—and then ambitious male nurses got to washing up and putting on clean garments every day, and some of them twice a day—and rough, boisterous characters became gentle and soft-spoken, since only the well-behaved could nurse the baby. And, in fine, the lawless Roaring Camp became insensibly transformed into a neat, well-dressed, orderly, and law-abiding community—the wonder and admiration of all the mining world. All this, through the dumb teaching, the humanizing influence, the uninspired ministering of a little child.

The Sex On Exhibition.

In those days, men would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell how, in a certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was come! They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the camping ground—sign of emigrants from over the great plains. Everybody went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was discovered fluttering in the wind! The male emigrant was visible.

The miners said,

“Fetch her out!”

He said, “It is my wife, gentlemen; she is sick, we have been robbed of money, provisions, everything, by the Indians; we want to rest.”

“Fetch her out! We’ve got to see her!”

That was the only reply.

He “fetched her out,” and they swung their hats and sent up three rousing cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her, and touched her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men who listened to a memory rather than a present reality and then they collected twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, swung their hats again, gave three more cheers, and went home satisfied.

Exhorbitant Rates.

A year or two ago, I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer and talked with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was only two or three years old at the time. Her father said that after landing from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant leading the party with the little girl in her arms. And presently a huge miner, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons—just down from a long mining campaign in the mountains, evidently barred the way, stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with gratification and astonishment. Then he said, reverently,

“Well, if it ain’t a child!” And then he snatched a little leather sack out of his pocket and said to the servant:

“There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I’ll give it to you to let me kiss the child!”

That anecdote is true.

But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner table, listening to that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of seeing that same child, I would have been refused. Seventeen added years had far more than doubled the price.

Touching Spectacle.

And while upon this subject I will remark at once in Star City, in the Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office single-file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in a cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation—a genuine, live woman!

And at the end of three-quarters of an hour my turn came, and I put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and tossing flap-jacks in a frying pan with the other. And she was 165 yrs old, and hadn’t a tooth in her head. However, she was a woman and therefore we were glad to see her and to make her welcome.

The Famous “Cement” Mine.

It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the wonderful Whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie. Every now and then it would be reported that this mysterious Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda at dead of night, and then we would have a wild excitement because he must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow him. In less than three hours after daylight, all the horses, mules, and donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired, or stolen, and half the community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of Whiteman. But W. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the miners ran out, and they would have to go back home. I have known it reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that W. had just passed through, and in two hours, the streets, so quiet before, would be swarming with men and animals. Every individual would be trying to be very secret, but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor that W. had passed through. And long before daylight—this in the dead of Winter—the stampede would be complete and the camp deserted, and the whole population gone chasing after W. I ought to know, because I was one of those fools myself.

But it was enough to make a fool of nearly anybody. The tradition was that in the early immigration, twenty years ago, three young Germans, brothers, who had survived an Indian massacre on the plains, wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all trails and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find California before they starved or died of fatigue. And in a gorge in the mountains, they sat down to rest one day when one of them noticed a curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of shining yellow metal. They saw that it was gold, and that here was a fortune to be acquired in a single day. The vein was about as wide as a curb stone, and fully two-thirds of it was pure gold. Every pound of the wonderful cement was worth well-nigh $200. Each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it, and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started westward again. But troubles thickened about them. In their wanderings one brother fell and broke his leg, and the others were obliged to go on and leave him to die in the wilderness. Another, worn out and starving, gave up by and by, and lay down to die, but after two or three weeks of incredible hardships, the third reached the settlements of California, exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings. He had thrown away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to set everybody wild with excitement. However, he had had enough of the cement country, and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither. He was entirely content to work on a farm for wages. But he gave W. his map, and described the cement region as well as he could, and thus transferred the curse to that gentleman—for when I had my accidental glimpse of Mr. W. in ‘62, he had been gone for the lost mine, in hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years. Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he hadn’t.

I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist, which was said to have been given to W. by the young German, and it was of rather a seductive nature. Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice of fruit cake. The privilege of working such a mine about one week would be sufficient for a man of reasonable desires.

California: More Climate

Mark Twain

Buffalo Express/November 13, 1869

Letter No. 3.

[These letters are written jointly by Professor R. FORD and MARK TWAIN. The former does the actual traveling, and such facts as escape his notice are supplied by the latter, who remains at home.]

There are other kinds of climate in California—several kinds—and some of them very agreeable. The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broad-cloth—if you’ve got it—in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other. You don’t use overcoats and you don’t use fans. It is just as pleasant a climate as could be contrived, and is the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal in the Summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you want to—three or four miles away—it doesn’t blow there. It has only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff was.

During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four months come along, the most righteous thing you can do will be to go and steal an umbrella. Because you’ll need it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in unvarying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain or not—you look at the almanac. If it is winter, it will rain—there is little use in bothering about that—and if it is summer, it won’t rain, and you cannot help it. You never need a lightning rod, because it never thunders and it never lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything alive—you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with the red splendors of hell for one little instant. You would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. And along in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and beg for rain—hail—snow—thunder and lightning—anything to break the monotony—you’ll take an earthquake, if you can’t do any better. And the chances are that you’ll get it, too.

Sandy Fertility

San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. They yield a generous vegetation. All your rare flowers, which people in “the States” rear with such patient care in parlor flower pots and green houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses—I don’t know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow. And I have heard that we have here that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it—or flower of the Holy Spirit—though I never have seen it anywhere but in Central America—down on the Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure and white as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived has failed.

Climate Resumed

I have spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and the eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of Sacramento. One never sees Summer clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco—but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about 143 months out of twelve years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, you can easily believe—people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their dearest energies fanning themselves. It gets pretty hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at 120 in the shade there all the time—except when it relents and—goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they are bound to suffer without it. There is a tradition (attributed to John Phenix) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course he went straight to the hottest corner of perdition, and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no doubt about the truth of this statement—there can be no doubt about it—for I have seen the place where that soldier used to board with a French lady by the name of O’Flanagan, and she lives there yet. Sacramento is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and take the cars, and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. There is transition for you. Where will you find another like it in the Western hemisphere? And I have swept around snow-walled curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, 6000 feet above the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the everlasting summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its green fields, its foliage, its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance—a rich, dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairy land, made all the more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidding gateway of ice and snow and savage crags and precipices.

Desolation

It was in this Sac Valley that a deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California—and in some such places, where only meadows and forests are visible—not a living creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness—you will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a wildly, fiercely flourishing little city of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling halls crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with glittering gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German principality—streets crowded and rife with business—town lots worth $400 a front foot—labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing—a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning—everything that goes to make life happy and desirable—all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young city—and now nothing is left but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the name of the place is forgotten. In no other land do towns so absolutely die and disappear, as in the old mining regions of California.

The Crusading Host

It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a curious population. It was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again. For, mark you, it was an assemblage of 200,000 young men—not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants—the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged and decrepit—or shot or stabbed in street affrays or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly all—victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf—the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. California has much to answer for in this destruction of the flower of the world’s young chivalry.

It was a splendid population—for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home—you never find that sort of people among pioneers—you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring, and a princely recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day—and when she projects a new astonisher, the grave world smiles and admires as usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.”

Silver Land Nabobs

Mark Twain

Buffalo Express/January 8, 1870

Letter Number 6.

[These letters are written jointly by Professor D. R. Ford and Mark Twain. The former does the actual traveling, and such facts as escape his notice are supplied by the latter, who remains at home.]

Early Days In Nevada.

Silver Land Nabobs.

One of the curious features of Pacific Coast life is the startling uncertainty that marks a man’s career in the mines. He may spring from poverty to wealth so suddenly as to turn his hair white and then after a while he may become poor again so suddenly as to make all that white hair fall off and leave his head as clean as a billiard ball. The great Nevada silver excitement of ’58–’59 was prolific in this sort of vicissitude. Two brothers, teamsters, did some hauling for a man in Virginia City and had to take a small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $300 cash. They gave an outsider a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming. But not long. Ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each owner $8,000 to $10,000 a month—say $100,000 a year. They had that handsome income for just about two years, and they dressed in the loudest kind of costumes and wore mighty diamonds, and played poker for amusement, these men who had seldom had $20 at one time in all their lives before. One of them is tending bar for wages now, and the other is serving his country as Commander-in-Chief of a street car in San Francisco at $75 a month. He is very glad to get that employment, too.

One of the earliest nabobs that Nevada was delivered of wore $6,000 worth diamonds in his bosom, and swore he was unhappy because he couldn’t spend his money as fast as he made it. But let us learn from him that persistent effort is bound to achieve success at last. Within a year’s time, his happiness was secure; for he hadn’t a cent to spend.

Another Nevada nabob boasted an income that often reached $16,000 a month; and he used to love to tell how he had worked in the very mine that yielded it, for $5 a day when he first came to the country. Three years afterward, he attained to the far more exceeding grandeur of working in it again, at four dollars a day.

The silver and sage-brush State has knowledge of another of these pets of fortune—lifted from actual poverty to affluence almost in a single night—who was able to offer $100,000 for a position of high official distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it—and a little over a year ago a friend saw him shoveling snow on the Pacific Railroad for a living, away up on the summit of the Sierras, some 7,000 feet above the level of comfort and the sea. The friend remarked that it must be pretty hard work, though, as the snow was twenty-five feet deep, it promised to be a steady job, at least. “Yes,” he said, “he didn’t mind it now, though a month or so ago when it was sixty-two feet deep and still a snowing, he wasn’t so much attached to it.” Such is life.

Then there was John Smith. That wasn’t his name, but we will call him that. He was a good, honest, kind-hearted fellow, born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant. He drove a team, and the team belonged to another man. By and by he married an excellent woman who owned a small ranch—a ranch that paid them a comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little it did yield was worth from $250 to $500 in gold per ton in the market. Presently, Smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped silver mine in Gold Hill. He opened the mine and built a little unpretending ten-stamp mill. Eighteen months afterward, he quit raising hay, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable figure. Some people said it was $30,000 a month, and others said it was $60,000. Smith was very rich anyhow. He built a house out in the desert—right in the most forbidding and otherwise howling desert—and it was currently reported that that house cost him a quarter of a million. Possibly that was exaggerated somewhat, though it certainly was a fine home and a costly one. The bedsteads cost $400 or $500 apiece.

And then the Smiths went to Europe and traveled. And when they came back, Smith was never tired of telling about the fine horses he had seen in England, and the gorgeous sheep he had seen in Spain, and the fine cattle he had noticed in the vicinity of Rome. He was full of the wonder of the old world and advised everybody to travel. He said a man never imagined what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.

One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours. Next day, toward noon, the figures were all in the purser’s hands in sealed envelopes. Smith was serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer. But another party won the prize! Smith said,

“Here, that won’t do! He guessed two miles wider of the mark than I did.”

The purser said, “Mr. Smith, you missed it further than any man on board. We traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday.”

“Well sir,” said Smith, “that’s just where I’ve got you, for I guessed two hundred and nine. If you’ll look at my insert again, you’ll find a 2 and two naughts, which stands for 200, don’t it? and after ’em you’ll find a 9 (2009), which stands for two hundred and nine. I reckon I’ll take that money, if you please.”

Well, Smith is dead. And when he died, he wasn’t worth a cent. The lesson of all this is, that one must learn how to do everything he does—one must have experience in being rich before he can remain rich. The history of California will prove this to your entire satisfaction. Sudden wealth is an awful misfortune to the average run of men. It is wasting breath to instruct the reader after this fashion, though, for no man was ever convinced of it yet till he had tried it himself—and I am around now hunting for a man who is afraid to try it. I haven’t had any luck, so far.

All the early pioneers of California acquired more or less wealth, but the enormous majority of them have not got any now. Those that have, got it slowly and by patient toil.

Anatomy of One Reel Comedy

Ring Lardner

Winifred Times/September 7, 1928

To the Editor:

In a recent letter I give my readers the story of a friend of mine name Joe Cooper that was not getting along so good in his regular job and finally began to take correspondence courses by mail in other lines like short-story writing and expert acct and cartoonist and etc., and after a wile he got so as he was knocking out close to 50 thousand per annum for his spare time.

Wile theys still another field yet that Joe hasn’t went in it and that is writeing photo plays and great big money is promised for good ones because god knows they are a rare bird and if they is some of my readers that finds trouble making both ends meet the other and could use a couple 100 thousand a year extra earned in their spare time, why here is the field to go into.

You can pick up most any magazine and find a dozen ads of correspondence schools that learns you how to write photo plays or movies as I have nicknamed them, but how are you going to know that the people that run them schools has ever wrote a photo play themselves and for all you know you may be paying your tuitions to a bird that ain’t done anything all their life but pluck pimples off a putting green.

So in order to protect my readers from these kind of vipers I have made it up in my mind to start a school of my own along these lines and my qualifications is that I have wrote 2 photo plays and they both flopped like the sure thing and my system of teaching will do to learn my pupils to write photo plays opposite to like I wrote.

The big money in the screen game today lays in reel comedys.

The things that is necessary in writeing 1 reel comedys is (1) a catchy title (2) a funny idea (3) plenty of laughs (4) witty sub titles. As a sample of what will go and go big, the Ring School of Photo Play Writing gives the following speciment of a 1 reel comedy.

As a title for this picture we have chose “The Finny Tribe” which in itself will knock them for a goal.

Characters:

GEORGE WOTTLE, a fishmonger (comedy lead)

GERTRUDE WOTTLE, his wife, (comedy lead)

MINNIE QUAGMIRE, her rival (soubrette)

AL SWAMP, a private detective (heavy comedy)

BABY WOTTLE, the Wottle baby (Juvenile)

A Minister of the Gospel, Wottle’s clients, etc.

Continuity:

Scene 1—George is in his store sorting fish. A client comes in and looks over the stock. Sub-title: “The customer asks for a flounder.” George picks up a fish and hits the client in the eye with it, knocking him down. Sub-title: “I guess that will flound you.” Another client comes in the store. Sub-title: “The customer asks for finnan haddie, but George tells him he only keeps weak fish.” The client falls down and tears his trousers.

Scene 2—Gertie is at home sitting on the lounge and pulling superfluous hairs out of Baby Wottle’s head. The telephone rings. Gertie goes to answer it. Sub-title: “The wrong number.” Baby Wottle falls off the lounge and lands on his bean. Sub-title: “Oh, what a headache.”

Scene 3—George and Minnie are spooning in the hammock on the Wottle porch. Gertie comes out of the house and catches them. Sub-title: “Caught in the act.” The hammock breaks and the lovers set down suddenly on the floor. Sub-title: “It couldn’t of been a very good hammock.”

Scene 4—George goes to Swamp’s detective agency and hires Al Swamp to take up the case. Al puts on his shoes and starts out with Gertie. Sub-title: “The plot sickens.” As they are leaving Al’s office a swinging door hits them in the eye and knocks them down. Sub-title: “In again, out again, Finnegan.”

Scene 5—George and Minnie are spooning in the fish store. Minnie steps on a eel and falls down. Sub-title: “Minnie says her eel slipped. George tells her she ought to wear rubber ones.” Al and Gertie come in the store and surprise the lovers. George runs to a fish box and sets on a perch. George tries to get down but falls and tears his trousers. Al tries to pick him up but slips on the slippery floor and tears his trousers. Sub-title: “Al thinks theys more to be patched up than the marital affairs of the Wottles.”

Scene 6—They all go to the Wottle home. Minnie loses her interest in George and falls in love with Al. They decide to get married. Sub-title: “Al asks the fair Minnie to become his bride. She says O.K.” Al summons a minister and him and Minnie are married with the Wottles as witnesses. Sub-title: “The knot is tied.”

Scene 7—The party adjourns to the dining room where a fish breakfast is served. Sub-title: “London Bridges is falling down.” In the midst of the hilarity, Baby Wottle chokes on a fish bone and croaks. Sub-title: “Eat jelly fish. No bones.”

There you have got your catchy title, your funny idea, your laughable situations and your humorous sub titles. Further and more the construction is perfect you might say.