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.

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.

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.

Giant Fielders Played Uphill Game

Ring Lardner

October 15, 1923/The Toronto Star

At the hour of going to press tonight Manager McGraw seems to have it all over Manager Huggins. The last named will half to stay awake wondering who to pitch tomorrow.

For the benefit of those that ain’t never been to the Yankee Stadium, I will state that the ground just inside bleachers has a decided slope down towards the infield. Well, in the first four innings today the Giant outfielders certainly played an uphill game. They seem to be always dashing up to the bleacher rail to shake hands with friends.

Though the day was too sunny and bright to be just right for Joe Bush’s speed, he would of scored a clean shutout if he had been able to fool Emil Meusel. Emil cracked out a triple and two singles and scored the only National League run. His brother Bob was also slapping the pill on the nose, and though Joe Dugan helped himself to four hits, including a home run, why all and all it was a Meusely game to watch.

Anxious to Get Home

Judging from the performance of the Giant pitching staff to date, why if Nehf manages to win his game tomorrow, it won’t be proper to ask who is going to pitch Tuesday, but who ain’t? A large number of newspaper men who have nothing against Mr. Nehf personally is kind of pulling for him to have some Sam Jones luck tomorrow. We are anxious to get home and meet the wife and kiddies.

When it come time to play the Star Spangled Banner the bleachers was packed with the biggest crowd that ever stayed away from church to go to a ball game. Speaking about the Star Spangled Banner, I have noticed that every time the band gets through playing it practically everybody claps their hands. It begins to look like this song would be one of the outstanding hits of the season.

Two features of the crowd was very laughable. One was that the most of them brought their overcoats and the other was that probably 95 per cent of the people that came did not have to come.

Before the game several players gathered around the handsome umpires and did a lot of talking. As they had not been no decision made it is hard to tell what the athletes were kicking about unless it was because they was such a lot of money in the house and they were not going to get none of it.

From Mr. Bentley’s showing they did not seem to be much reason for Mr. McGraw having started him except that everybody else had pitched the day before. Or maybe the little Napoleon wanted to show the fans that there’s something besides the world series that takes a long time to wind up

The reappearance of Jack Scott come as a big surprise. It was thought that he would of lose interest after Saturday and not come out to any more of the games. The tall Southerner furnished even more of a surprise in the third inning by keeping the Yanks from scoring. In the next inning Mack took him out to save him for the third game of the next season’s first series with Brooklyn.

Embarrassing Moments

The present series is as full of embarrassments to the newspaper men as to the Giant pitchers. No bevy of admiring fans stormed the press coop to stare at me today, but something happened during Scott’s last ailment that was just as bad. It must be explained that my seat in Yankee park is right on the borderline between the newspaper section and the section reserved for Bronx people. One of the last named had asked 50 questions and I had answered them all, as I am very democratic. Well, along came the man who sells hot dogs, and he offered some to my Bronxean friend. He took two and he stretched out his hand toward me with one of them in it. Well, after all, a hot dog is something to eat, which don’t often happen to a newspaper man during a World Series, so I says, “Yest, thank you,” and took the hot dog and went to it. In a few minutes, above the roar of the crowd, I seems to hear somebody calling me. It turned out to be the hot dog salesman, and what he was saying was, “Ain’t you going to pay for your hot dogs?” Well, I hustled around and got 15 cents and pretended like I had been intent on my work and had forgotten to pay, but several people laughed out loud. It is these kinds of things that leave a sore. The incident depressed me so much that you will half to read other experts for full details of the game.

Picture Card People

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/November 23, 1910

The picture card people have come back to town.

They’ve been away all summer—most of them—but now they’re here again all ready for the game—the game they take so much in earnest.

Who are the picture card people?

Why, don’t you know? They’re the “workers,” the “earnest workers” who are so busy telling other people how to run their affairs that they never have any affairs of their own to run at all. There is a man in the pack once in a while, but most of the picture cards are women.

I met the Queen of Clubs the other day, and just as I met her we saw the Queen of Diamonds coming down the street. I was asking the Queen of Clubs about her mother—the mother is delicate and a little lonely, and she misses the Queen of Clubs dreadfully—and I was in hopes that the Queen of Clubs was going to stay at home with mother this winter; but, dear me, she’s never thought of such a thing. Her work is calling her, her earnest work.

The Queen of Diamonds was glad to see us—that is, she was glad to see the Queen of Clubs. She used to be rather fond of me, I think, before she became an earnest worker, but now she looks upon me as a frivolous butterfly because I never have time to go down into the slums and tell the laundress how to iron her clothes and the scrubwoman how to bring up her family.

All I can do is my best to bring up my own family and help the laundress and the scrubwoman out once in a while with a dollar or so extra. So the Queen of Diamonds hasn’t much use for me and my kind, for that’s the joke about the playing card people. They think that no one is in earnest except those who are playing their fascinating and picturesque game.

“What will your work be this winter?” asked the Queen of Clubs of the Queen of Diamonds.
“Oh,” sighed the Queen of Diamonds, “the Russian Jews. I find them so interesting.”
“Ah,” said the Queen of Clubs, “I shall stick to my Italians.” And I slipped away and left them discussing the theory of “Freedom as It Is Found in the College Settlement.”

I don’t think they even knew I had gone.

The Queen of Diamonds used to be a clever, warm-hearted, witty girl. She was the life of her whole family, but she caught the settlement fever, and now she never remembers that she has any family of her own at all.

She worries over the Russian Jews, she’s concerned about the Italians, and, oh, the Huns—what shall we do to uplift them? And her own little sister is getting into very frivolous company, and her own brother smokes a good many more cigarettes than are good for him, and her own mother is slipping into neglected old age, and she never sees it. She’s so busy playing the game.

They’re good people, the picture card people; clever, too, most of them; but, oh, if they would only realize that one woman who earns her own living and takes care of her own children and cooks her own food—the very woman they are so anxious to uplift, as they call it—is worth any two dozen little picture card theorists in the world.

The Queen of Clubs visits the tenements, and the tenements laugh when they see her coming. Poor Queen of Clubs, and she so dead in earnest, too! But after all it is rather funny to see an unmarried woman roosting on the edge of wash-tubs trying to tell the mother of a family how to be a mother.

Her theories are all very hygienic and very fine; but, dear me, there’s the rent to pay and the clothes to wash and the children to dress. Nobody but the picture card people have time enough to stop and theorize about hygiene. So the tenement mother listens as politely as she can and wonders and lets it go at that.

Poor picture card people! How seriously they take themselves and their well meant little game!

Personalities

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/January 27, 1910

If I had a dozen daughters, do you know what I would do with them?

Fine them ten cents every time any one of them began to talk personalities and nothing but personalities.

Me, mine; you, yours; she, hers; he, his—I’m getting to hate the very words.

Men can talk five minutes at a time without dragging in a personality. I wonder why the average woman can’t?

I heard two young fellows talking for half an hour the other day. They discussed a boxing match, a polo game, Peary and Cook, Stevenson’s “Wreckers,” the difference between American football and the English game and a dozen other absolutely impersonal things.

Then they went out somewhere, and their two sisters came into the same room, and for one solid hour the air was heavy with what she said and how he looks and whether she had a good nose and whether he really danced well or not—personalities, personalities, personalities. The room was so suffocated with little ideas about little people that I kept wanting to open the window and let in a regular winter blizzard, so we’d all get a chance to breathe.

Now, both of those girls are just as bright as their bright brothers.

They’ve seen as much of the world, are as well educated and at heart just as kindly, yet you couldn’t interest them in anything that didn’t happen to someone they know, not if you pulled down the eternal heavens to do it. I wonder why?

I’m going to tie a bell to the tea table in my living room, and every time my little girl begins to tell what she said or how she looked I’m going to ring that bell and make her pay a forfeit.

I don’t want her to grow up a little-minded personality monger if I can help it.

I want her to grow up into a woman that her husband can talk to five minutes without having to weigh every word for fear she’s going to make a personal application of every syllable he says.

Why, Tom, I never do that.

Oh, Joe, why, who did you ever know that talked that way? Where did the woman live, do you suppose?

How many times have you heard a woman spoil the point of a good story by her eternal personalities and personal questions?

Come on, girls; let’s talk about the weather or the horse show or the way the Fiji islanders prefer their cooking—anything to get away from the eternal he, she, you and I.

Making Life Rosy

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/November 28, 1910

“Unhappiness is a crime,” says Mrs. Hodgson Burnett. “Light the pink lamp and everything will be rosy.”

That’s a pretty idea about the pink lamp. I wish I had one right here on my desk this minute.

It’s the only lamp to have in the family, when you come right down to it.

But once in a while, Mrs. Burnett, don’t you have a mood when you want to yank the pink shade off the lamp and look at yourself, and your clothes, and your friends, and your books, and your life as it is, without the shade casting a rosy glow over it all?

I do. I have one right now.

And it’s all about a woman with a Mona Lisa smile.

She smiles so continuously, my Mona Lisa friend; sometimes I do wish she’d cry a little or get mad or slam a door or do something really human—just for a change.

I told her my troubles a few minutes ago—bad idea telling your troubles. People never want to hear them, anyway. Now, what I wanted when I told my troubles was not advice and not consolation. I didn’t want to be consoled; I wanted sympathy.

I wanted my friend to lean across the table and say to me: “Why, your poor soul, what an awful time you are having. How on earth do you stand it at all?” And I would have cried into my coffee cup a second or two, and lo, the whole thing would have passed away like snow before the sunshine—I’d have cried away all my miseries and been ready to laugh all the rest of the day.

What did my friend really do?

She smiled her Mona Lisa smile and said: “Why do you trouble your heart? These things are all unreal. Why grieve yourself over them at all?” And I felt like throwing the sugar bowl at her head, just to show her that there really was something real in the world besides her theories.

The smile and the rosy shade and the philosophy are the finest things in the world; but, oh, what a relief it is to get good and mad once in a while, say so, and be done with it.

I’d rather a friend of mine would quarrel with me like a fishwife than smile when she felt like saying something that really wouldn’t look well in print.

There’s nothing in the world so delightful as the woman who smiles—when her heart is in the smile.

When it isn’t. do you know anything very much more irritating?

Old Maid Teachers for College Girls

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/October 13, 1910

President Frederick P. W. Hamilton of Tufts College is worried about the college girl. He says that the college girl will never do as much as she should in the world ’till she gets someone to teach her besides a corps of old maids.

“The highly cultured, middle aged, unmarried woman is a fine type individually,” says President Hamilton, “but it is not the proper type to create the atmosphere for girls at the formative period of their lives.”

Well, perhaps you’re right, President Hamilton, but what in the world are we going to do about it?

Who do you want for teachers in our women’s colleges—men?

Do you think that men are the proper type to “create the atmosphere for girls at the formative period of their lives”?

The average man understands an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl just about as well as an elephant understands a mockingbird.

I may not care for the manners nor the outlook nor the general appearance of a nice, comfortable hen, but I’d rather have her bring up a flock of chickens any day in the week than to trust those chickens to the most amazing eagle who ever cleft the ambient air with his defiant wings.

And the married women aren’t teaching in colleges, thank you, professor.

They have all they can do to teach the little tykes at home.

So what are you going to do about the old maid teacher in the girls’ college?

Let her alone, I say. She is not the ideal person in the ideal place, but she’s the nearest we seem to be able to come to right now; and, whisper, President Hamilton, don’t you think you lay a little too much stress upon the importance of the personality of college teachers, anyway?

It only takes four years for a girl to go through college.

A good deal of that time she’s making fudge and getting ready for the senior prom. and writing letters home and having crushes on some other girl and looking at a photograph of some young fellow back home and writing letters to Harvard or to Yale or wherever her particular student happens to be at that particular time. She isn’t taking college half so seriously as you seem to think, and as for forming herself on the model of teachers there, did you ever hear a bunch of college girls sit around and roast marshmallows—and the teachers, at the same joyous moment?

The average college girl is just about as much affected by the average college teacher as the average college boy is affected personally by the average college professor.

I wish you would cross your heart, President Hamilton, and tell us honestly and truly just exactly how much you think that is.