Red Shirts

THE cultural history of America will remain incomplete until someone writes a chapter on the Volunteer Fireman. Like most chapters in the volume, it must begin with Benjamin Franklin, who organized the first fire company in Philadelphia. The illustrations would of course be by Currier and Ives and the gasoline companies, the old and the modern artistic forces in America, especially now that calendar pictures have disappeared or have become discreet.

For the subject has its modern aspects. Contrary to the belief of naïve city folk, the volunteer fireman did not disappear with the hand pumper and the bustle; he is very much alive in thousands of contemporary communities. In one city of eighty thousand people, for instance, there are nearly twenty volunteer companies. No small number of American males, then, are or have been firemen. Properly understood, this chapter in cultural history will explain many elements in American life. It will be especially profitable reading for those enamored of the class-war theory.

There was Bob Lowes, who, if he is still alive, is undoubtedly on relief. To a Communist he would represent an example of the exploited classes; in the unenlightened era of twenty years ago, he was regarded as an odd-job man. Bob was of course a fireman. Because of the easily interrupted nature of his employment, he was perhaps the most consistent fireman of them all. As one of his favorite clubs met at the firehouse, the law of averages ensured his presence on the engine most of the times it was called. Thus he constantly risked his life in the interests of property.

Bob, however, would have been poor material for a proletarian revolution. It was not that few people in the community thought of Bob as belonging to the laboring class. Rather it was that Bob himself was not class-conscious, or, if he was, his feeling was one of superiority. In that alone did he resemble the modern proletarian.

When there was a fire. Bob was a compeer of Cæsar, Wellington, and Ulysses Grant. It was he who dashed across the street to get the undertaker’s horses; he directed their harnessing, and he drove the engine. The banker’s son and the young lawyer, being awkward at such things, were definitely his inferiors. Only the blacksmith and the railroad brakeman were his equals. He was always the one who fell off the shed roof or gashed his wrist on a pane of glass. For weeks afterward his bandages proclaimed the hero.

Nor was Harvey Schuler a nonentity at a fire. In his small real-estate office he was not imposing, and was inclined to grow timid when R. F. Bates, the town’s richest man, came in. He was regarded as too ‘slow’ for the parties Miss Elsie Bates gave. But when the Bates house caught fire the day Elsie came home from college, and he met her as he came down through the smouldering hole in the roof, he nonchalantly congratulated her on her fine ’housewarming.’ Not only did Miss Bates regard this as witty, but so did the rest of the community. He became a celebrity.

A city man would have to jump off the Empire State Building, hold up J. P. Morgan, or fly the Atlantic blindfold to get the same standing in his community that the volunteer fireman can get by stepping in front of the hose nozzle. Most city people are therefore compelled to remain unknown throughout their lives. Their psychology is that of the spectator whose only part in the game is to throw pop bottles at the umpire. For them government is something outside themselves — a Santa Claus or a Nero, according to one’s taste. The volunteer fireman is not a mere spectator. Furthermore, the firehouse is likely to be the centre of political activity. The man who helps to make the wheels go round does not think like the man who is unknown to half the people in his block, and who looks at government through the eyes of the tabloids.

Then, too, the chance to parade in a uniform, and to feel himself part of a heroic and altruistic organization, satisfies a human need that under other circumstances leads a man to become a Fascist or a Nazi.

The fireman’s way of solving social and economic problems is also typical of us. In a factory we may be efficient, but in public affairs we combine the British ‘muddling through’ with our cherished ballyhoo. The efficient method of meeting the expense of equipment would be taxation; the fireman’s method is to hold a ‘festival.’ Booths are set up in the park; kewpie dolls and floor lamps are bought to be chanced off. For two days the fire truck, heavily manned, roars through the town, collecting from housewives cakes and candies to be raffled off. At Christmas time, charity is managed in much the same way, with the fire truck to deliver the baskets of food. A trained relief worker is a poor substitute for a fireman dressed as Santa Claus.

A fireman will risk his life, but not undergo discipline; he will wear a uniform, but only in parades; in fighting a blaze or in solving social problems he is the personification of the amateur spirit. Above all he must have his joke — in that, too, he is like the first fireman of them all, Benjamin Franklin.