{"id":166,"date":"2014-08-07T08:10:12","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T13:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/?p=166"},"modified":"2014-08-09T21:39:22","modified_gmt":"2014-08-10T02:39:22","slug":"r-kipling-american-notes-chicago-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/r-kipling-american-notes-chicago-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"R. Kipling &#8211; American Notes &#8211; Chicago (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Written in 1891 by Rudyard Kipling about his travels in the United States. I enjoy reading these kinds of first hand accounts. It occurred to me to get some vocal practice and share them with you.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #444444;\">\u00a0<div class=\"gmedia_gallery gmediaShortcodeError\" data-gmid=\"8\" data-error=\"phantom: folder missed or module broken\"><\/div><\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/AHw3HnLOAOE\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n\n\t\t<style type=\"text\/css\">\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 {\n\t\t\t\tmargin: auto;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-item {\n\t\t\t\tfloat: left;\n\t\t\t\tmargin-top: 10px;\n\t\t\t\ttext-align: center;\n\t\t\t\twidth: 33%;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 img {\n\t\t\t\tborder: 2px solid #cfcfcf;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {\n\t\t\t\tmargin-left: 0;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t\/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes\/media.php *\/\n\t\t<\/style>\n\t\t<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-166 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/r-kipling-american-notes-chicago-part-1\/vint41\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/vint41-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/r-kipling-american-notes-chicago-part-1\/larsen-chicago1890\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/larsen-chicago1890-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/r-kipling-american-notes-chicago-part-1\/chicago-c\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Chicago-c-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I know thy cunning and thy greed,<br \/>\nThy hard high lust and wilful deed,<br \/>\nAnd all thy glory loves to tell<br \/>\nOf specious gifts material.&#8221;<br \/>\nI HAVE struck a city&#8211;a real city&#8211;and they call it Chicago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The other places do not count. San Francisco was a<br \/>\npleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.<\/p>\n<p>This place is the first American city I have encountered. It<br \/>\nholds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and<br \/>\nstands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I<br \/>\nurgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by<br \/>\nsavages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is<br \/>\ndirt. Also it says that it is the &#8220;boss&#8221; town of America.<\/p>\n<p>I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country.<br \/>\nThey told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded<br \/>\nand mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble<br \/>\ncrammed with people talking about money, and spitting about<br \/>\neverywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno<br \/>\nwith letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted<br \/>\nat each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for<br \/>\nhim told me that this was &#8220;the finest hotel in the finest city on<br \/>\nGod Almighty&#8217;s earth.&#8221; By the way, when an American wishes to<br \/>\nindicate the next country or state, he says, &#8220;God A&#8217;mighty&#8217;s<br \/>\nearth.&#8221; This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.<\/p>\n<p>Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and<br \/>\nwithout end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the<br \/>\nEast for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those<br \/>\nheld by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable<br \/>\nvistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and<br \/>\ncrowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a<br \/>\ngreat horror.<\/p>\n<p>Except in London&#8211;and I have forgotten what London was like&#8211;I<br \/>\nhad never seen so many white people together, and never such a<br \/>\ncollection of miserables. There was no color in the street and<br \/>\nno beauty&#8211;only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone<br \/>\nflagging under foot.<\/p>\n<p>A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so<br \/>\nmuch an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all<br \/>\nthis turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired,<br \/>\nthat it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one<br \/>\natop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.<\/p>\n<p>He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures<br \/>\nhurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they<br \/>\nwere trying to make some money that they might not die through<br \/>\nlack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as<br \/>\nblack as ink, and filled with un-told abominations, and bid me<br \/>\nwatch the stream of traffic across the bridges.<\/p>\n<p>He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note<br \/>\nthat the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A<br \/>\nHottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism.<br \/>\nThe coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them<br \/>\nthere had no thought of beauty, and, therefore, he was a savage.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>&#8220;Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and<br \/>\nstudded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and<br \/>\nlooking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each<br \/>\nvender stood at his door howling:&#8211;&#8220;For the sake of my money,<br \/>\nemploy or buy of me, and me only!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You<br \/>\nknow then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their<br \/>\narms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women<br \/>\ndolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I<br \/>\nhad sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what<br \/>\nhe calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The<br \/>\nother makes me ill.<\/p>\n<p>And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress,<br \/>\nand by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every<br \/>\nintelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in<br \/>\nlanguage fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together<br \/>\nof telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of<br \/>\nmoney is progress.<\/p>\n<p>I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through<br \/>\nscores of miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few<br \/>\nhundred thousand of these terrible people who talked paisa bat<br \/>\nthrough their noses.<\/p>\n<p>The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who<br \/>\nwas full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion<br \/>\nrequired or the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned<br \/>\nout so many hundred thousand dollars&#8217; worth of such and such an<br \/>\narticle; there so many million other things; this house was worth<br \/>\nso many million dollars; that one so many million, more or less.<br \/>\nIt was like listening to a child babbling of its hoard of shells.<br \/>\nIt was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was<br \/>\nexpected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I<br \/>\nshould admire; and the utmost that I could say was:&#8211;&#8220;Are these<br \/>\nthings so? Then I am very sorry for you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That made him angry, and he said that insular envy made me<br \/>\nunresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand.<\/p>\n<p>About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the<br \/>\nGarden of Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that<br \/>\nher head was not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a<br \/>\ncocoanut-palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him<br \/>\nbreathe heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest her lord<br \/>\nshould miss his footing, and so bring the tragedy of this world<br \/>\nto an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam then,<br \/>\nI should have been sorry for him. To-day I find eleven hundred<br \/>\nthousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father in the<br \/>\nart of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him in that<br \/>\nthey think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies.<br \/>\nConsequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different<br \/>\nways.<\/p>\n<p>In the East bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a<br \/>\nlittle scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In<br \/>\nless favored countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed.<br \/>\nAnd that was on a Saturday night.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all&#8211;a revelation<br \/>\nof barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially<br \/>\ndescribed as a church. It was a circus really, but that the<br \/>\nworshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the<br \/>\nbuilding, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much<br \/>\nluxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic<br \/>\ndesign.<\/p>\n<p>To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a<br \/>\nwonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he<br \/>\ntreated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper<br \/>\nreporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the<br \/>\nnewspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that<br \/>\nhe, and not He, was the centre of attraction. With a voice of<br \/>\nsilver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built<br \/>\nup for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but<br \/>\nwith all the gilding real gold, and all the plate-glass diamond),<br \/>\nand set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very<br \/>\nshrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point<br \/>\ncaught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the<br \/>\nJudgment, and ran:&#8211;&#8220;No! I tell you God doesn&#8217;t do business that<br \/>\nway.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold<br \/>\nand jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest.<br \/>\nHe interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the<br \/>\ncounter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to<br \/>\nenter into daily life. Consequently, I presume he introduced it<br \/>\nas daily life&#8211;his own and the life of his friends.<\/p>\n<p>Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at<br \/>\nsuch hands. But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy<br \/>\nthemselves, and I understood that I had met with a popular<br \/>\npreacher.<\/p>\n<p>Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called<br \/>\nTalmage and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to<br \/>\na very mild specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold and<br \/>\nsilver idols, his hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and<br \/>\nhat-on-the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the sacred<br \/>\nvessels, would count himself, spiritually, quite competent to<br \/>\nsend a mission to convert the Indians.<\/p>\n<p>All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact<br \/>\nof spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and<br \/>\niron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was<br \/>\nprogress, and the net-work of wires overhead was progress. They<br \/>\nrepeated their statements again and again.<\/p>\n<p>One of them took me to their City Hall and Board of Trade works,<br \/>\nand pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big,<br \/>\nand the streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I<br \/>\nsaw the faces of the men who did business in that building, I<br \/>\nfelt that there had been a mistake in their billeting.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, &#8217;tis a consolation to feel that I am not writing to<br \/>\nan English audience. Then I should have to fall into feigned<br \/>\necstasies over the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days<br \/>\nof the great fire, to allude casually to the raising of the<br \/>\nentire city so many feet above the level of the lake which it<br \/>\nfaces, and generally to grovel before the golden calf. But you,<br \/>\nwho are desperately poor, and therefore by these standards of no<br \/>\nac-count, know things, will understand when I write that they<br \/>\nhave managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and<br \/>\nthat the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than<br \/>\nMahajans and not so companionable as a Punjabi Jat after harvest.<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t think it was the blind hurry of the people, their<br \/>\nargot, and their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate<br \/>\ninterests that displeased me so much as a study of the daily<br \/>\npapers of Chicago.<\/p>\n<p>Imprimis, there was some sort of a dispute between New York and<br \/>\nChicago as to which town should give an exhibition of products to<br \/>\nbe hereafter holden, and through the medium of their more<br \/>\ndignified journals the two cities were yahooing and hi-yi-ing at<br \/>\neach other like opposition newsboys. They called it humor, but<br \/>\nit sounded like something quite different.<\/p>\n<p>That was only the first trouble. The second lay in the tone of<br \/>\nthe productions. Leading articles which include gems such as<br \/>\n&#8220;Back of such and such a place,&#8221; or, &#8220;We noticed, Tuesday, such<br \/>\nan event,&#8221; or, &#8220;don&#8217;t&#8221; for &#8220;does not,&#8221; are things to be accepted<br \/>\nwith thankfulness. All that made me want to cry was that in<br \/>\nthese papers were faithfully reproduced all the war-cries and<br \/>\n&#8220;back-talk&#8221; of the Palmer House bar, the slang of the<br \/>\nbarber-shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman<br \/>\ncar porter, the dignity of the dime museum, and the accuracy of<br \/>\nthe excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that<br \/>\nthe paper educates the public. Then I am compelled to believe<br \/>\nthat the public educate the paper; yet suicides on the press are<br \/>\nrare.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Written in 1891 by Rudyard Kipling about his travels in the United States. I enjoy reading these kinds of first hand accounts. It occurred to me to get some vocal practice and share them with you. \u00a0 &nbsp; &nbsp; &#8220;I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard high lust and wilful deed, And&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[54,52,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/206"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theunseenbreath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}