Demos

I

SOMETHING eager about the frank, open face, something unprofessional about the excited wave of the arm instead of the usual annoying jerk of the thumb, made me pull the car sharply to the curb in North Philadelphia and beckon to him to get in. At my suggestion he shoved his battered cardboard suitcase, tied with a knotted string, into the rumble seat, and clambered in beside me, voluble in his appreciation of the lift. His activity and alacrity had not prepared me for his broad Southern accent.

The traffic along Roosevelt Boulevard at eight in the morning left me no time to reply to his talk with more than an occasional monosyllable, or even to heed it except in fragments, but my inattention did not seem to bother him. It was a glorious summer morning, still cool, though the light haze promised a hot day, and he was obviously in good spirits. There was a faint odor of carbolic acid about him which suggested a night with the Salvation Army or in some ‘ flop-house ’ — and his gregarious soul longed to expand in fellowship.

He came from South C’lina, — Spartanburg, — where he had worked for a contractor for eleven years. His boss had gone bankrupt, and after a period of unemployment he had set out to see what the world had to offer one with a strong pair of arms and a willing spirit; but he had found the market rather glutted with these particular commodities, and after a fruitless search northward, through Knoxville, Louisville, and a disheartening week in Chicago, had turned east. He was not yet broken, not even frightened, though he had sold his last suit of clothes in Chicago for two dollars; but he was puzzled, and there was a hint of indignation and exasperation in his tone.

‘Ah was alius taught that if a man was willin’ to work there was plenty fer him to do! ’

My sympathetic murmur encouraged him to air his grievances. The state of affairs of which he felt himself to be a victim was the fault of the government — of Hoover’s government.

‘It wouldn’t a happened if he had n’t a let the banks fail. He would n’t give ’em any money. He would n’t give anyone any money. Why, on his ranch out West he only hires Mexicans and don’t pay them more’n their livin’. He says that a workin’man don’t need more’n a dollar a day — he says that’s plenty fer ’em.’

I said that this hardly seemed enough.

‘I’d like to see him try’n’ live on a dollar a day,’ he went on angrily. ‘He lives off’n the fat of the land. He’s got millions — made millions out of Fords.’

Startled, I protested mildly, but he was firm.

‘Sure, he got a rake-off off’n every Ford made. Ford got all his stuff in duty-free and he split with Hoover. That’s why Ford told all his men they’d be fired if they did n’t vote fer Hoover.’

I asked if he thought that Roosevelt would do any better than Hoover.

He was not sure. Hoover had got things into such a mess that maybe no one could do anything now, but if anyone could, Roosevelt could. His admiration for the President knew no bounds.

‘He’s a friend of the workin’man, and he’ll see that he’s treated fair. Course,’ he added apologetically, ’he ain’t an eddicatcd man like Hoover, but then he ain’t all fer the rich people.’

This apology was interesting. Roosevelt, the poor man’s friend, had apparently been decorated with the poor man’s virtues; the scion of New York’s aristocracy had become a hero in homespun. Hoover, on the other hand, although born on a farm and self-made in his fortunes, being not the people’s but the bankers’ friend, had been metamorphosed into a variation of the city ‘slicker’ with a college education.

I objected that by a workingman’s standards Mr. Roosevelt would have to be classed as a rich man; but his faith was able to remove mountains of objections.

‘Yeah, they say he’s got money, all right, but he come by it honestly — out’n that place he’s got down in Georgia fer cripples. Fairly mints money out’n it.

‘ But he does a heap o’ good with it, too,’ he added hastily, lest his hero seem mercenary.

I realized that I had picked up no ordinary wanderer, but Fama herself in disguise, one of the blind mouths of Demos crying in the night. The man was certainly no moron; his blue eyes were bright and shrewd, and his square, ruddy face beamed with cheerfulness. I felt that somehow this amazing mass of misinformation, this base ascription of base motives, was significant. Here was a modern Thersites speaking for his kind, his views on the times dredged from the subliminal depths of society; for I suspect that in the spirit if not the letter of his beliefs he spoke for untold millions of the electorate.

II

An Italian funeral procession which held us up in North Trenton turned the conversation on to ‘furriners.’

‘They say Hoover’s a furriner. Would n’t be a bit surprised; he certainly did n’t have no feelin’s fer the American people. There’s too many furriners in this country. Hoover let ’em in. They got all the jobs an’ a white man cain’t git a job now. They oughta all be sent back to their own country. Some says you cain’t do it because they own too much property here, but ah say pay ’em fer their property and send ’em back.

‘An’ all Americans in other countries oughta be made to come back here,’ he added, in an effort to be absolutely fair about the whole thing.

Even if allowed to remain, he did not feel that a foreigner ought to be paid as much as a ‘ white man.’ I reminded him that he had blamed Hoover for his treatment of the Mexicans on his ranch, but the fault, it seems, was in hiring Mexicans in the first place. Once hired, even the grasping Hoover’s wages were adequate for them.

‘A white man cain’t earn no more money’n that in Mexico; why should they git more here?’

I could think of no answer to that, and by an easy transition the talk drifted from foreigners to gangsters. I was surprised to learn what a hero Dillinger had become. A victim of social oppression under the hated Hoover, he was but wreaking a merited revenge on society for having been unjustly ‘railroaded’ into the penitentiary. That he robbed the rich, particularly bankers, marked him as a friend of the poor.

‘They arrested him at first fer a thing he never done. I don’t blame him. If I seen Dillinger right here along the road now an’ I could do him a good turn, I would. Whenever I sees Dillinger’s name in the papers, I read it. That’s more’n I do about Lindbergh.’

A touch of scorn at the mention of Lindbergh’s name showed that the once popular idol had fallen. His opposition to Roosevelt over the air-mail cancellations had apparently ranked the Lone Eagle among the forces of evil.

Beyond Adams Station a Negro lying in the shade by the side of the road introduced the racial question by moving a languid thumb in the direction of New York as we passed.

‘Ah reckon there is white men up here would a give him a ride,’he observed scornfully.

He expatiated upon the whole Negro problem. The nigger thinks that up North every man will call him ‘mister’ and invite him in to dinner. But that ain’t so. He’s treated worse in the North than in the South.

The Northerners had put a nigger in Congress. He did n’t even seem resentful. It was apparently what he expected of Northerners or of Congress, I could n’t tell which, and he — De Priest, I assume — had been trying to get part of the Capitol turned into a restaurant for niggers.

There were even more preposterous things going on: ’He tried to introduce a law agin’ lynchin’ th’ other day.’

My passenger spat scornfully on to the road. ‘That’s just the way with niggers. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile. As long as there’s niggers,‘/ he added firmly, ’there’ll be lynchin’.’

‘ But are n’t there laws against lynching already?’ I asked. ‘Yeah,’ he conceded, ‘some counties has laws, but they don’t amount to nothin’.’

He sensed that I was not fully in accord with him on this point and, since I was a Northerner, was willing to go a little into the philosophic justification for his attitude: —

‘This is a white man’s country. Let the niggers go back to their own country if they don’t like it.’

‘ But they did n’t come here of their own accord,’I protested. ‘They were brought by force.’

‘Yeah, but as slaves. Let ’em stay slaves or else go back to their own country. They got a country of their own just like we have.’

He seemed to feel that the Negro, having come to America as a slave, had violated a contract in obtaining his liberty, and therefore was unworthy of consideration.

‘But Africa’s not as nice a place to live in as America,’I added — logic and sense having apparently nothing to do with the discussion.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That ain’t our fault!’

III

From the ramp beyond Newark, blue and unreal against the horizon, we saw the sky-piercing towers of Manhattan. It took him a little time to realize what they were.

‘Boy, it’s a big town!’ And then softly, ‘Too big!’

It was his only suggestion of loss of courage. The sight of the commerce on the Jersey side aroused his animation.

‘Boy, there’s a heap of factories here! ’

As we approached the Holland Tunnel the almost-deafening roar of the traffic was pierced by a policeman’s whistle and we were suddenly stopped by two men in plain clothes wearing police badges who ordered us to the side of the road and began to question us. I suppose that my alien license plate had caused us to be singled out from the stream of traffic for special inspection.

Our account of ourselves was generally satisfactory, though the inspector, a tall, long-nosed, grimy fellow in illfitting clothes, had considerable difficulty in understanding the Carolinian’s speech. It would be hard to exaggerate the divergence between the civilizations which they represented, yet they had much in common: both were shrewd, suspicious, and ignorant. The Southerner was scornful, the New Yorker condescending.

‘ Y’ gottany guns?’

He took our startled silence for incomprehension and felt it necessary to descend to what I assume he regarded as the vernacular: —

‘Y’ gottany shootin’ irons with yuh to pr’tect y’selves with?’

We said that we had not and were allowed to proceed. My companion, greatly puzzled by the cleverness of our interlocutor, asked again and again what he had said and why he had said it, and finally decided that the ‘feller’ was a fool. He was not as much impressed by the Holland Tunnel as by the entrance fee. The actuality of the tunnel probably exceeded the powers of his imagination, but by standing up in the open car he could count five dollars’ worth of toll moving right before his eyes.

‘Boy, they sho’ mint money out’n this thing!’

I let him out at Twelfth Street, somewhat bewildered by the city but not a whit dismayed.

‘This is sho’ a busy town,’ he observed quietly.

He pulled his disreputable suitcase from the rumble seat and wrung my hand warmly in parting. He wished that; he might pay me for the ride, but was at present insolvent. Something in his manner suggested that an offer of help would not be welcomed. He reckoned that there would be a pile of restaurants in this town and thought that he would begin his career as a dishwasher.

I forbore from saying that there were probably a ‘pile’ of dishwashers in the town also, but waved him an encouraging farewell as I swung back into the uptown traffic.