Part 10 (2/2)
What do you know of Main Street?”
J.W. thought he could make up for the ear question. So he said, boldly, ”Joe Carbrook, I can name every place from here to the livery barn north, and from here to the bridge south, on both sides of the street.
Want me to prove it?”
”No, J.W., I don't. I reckon you can. But I believe you're still as blind as I've been about Main Street, just the same. I know Chicago pretty well and I doubt if there's as big a percentage of graft and littleness and dollar-pinching and going to the devil generally on State Street or Wabash Avenue as there is an Main Street, Delafield.”
”You're not trying to say that our business men are crooks, are you, Joe?” J.W. asked, with a touch of resentment. ”You know I happen to be connected with a business house on Main Street myself.”
”Sure, I know it, and there's Marshall Field's on State Street, and Lyon & Healy's on Wabash Avenue, and Hart, Schaffner & Marx over by the Chicago River; just the same as here. But I--well, of course, there's a story back of it all. Mother heard a couple of weeks ago that one of our old Epworth League girls was having a hard time of it--she's working at the Racket store, helping to support her folks. They've had sickness, and the girl doesn't get big wages. So mother asked me to look her up.
Mother can't get about very easily, you know, and since I'm studying medicine she seems to think I'm the original Mr. Fix-It. I made a few discreet inquiries, discreet, that is, for me, and can you guess who that girl is? You can't, I know. Well, she's Alma Wetherell, and that's the identical girl who gave me such a dressing down one day at the Cartwright Inst.i.tute four years ago. Remember? Say, J.W., that day she told me so much of the deadly truth about myself that I hated her even more for knowing what to say than I did for saying it. But she had a big lot to do with waking me up, and I owe her something.”
J.W. had not remembered the Inst.i.tute incident. But he recalled that Alma was at Cartwright that summer, and he had seen her at church occasionally since he came home from college. She was living in town and working in some store or other he knew, but that was all.
”What did you find out?” he asked Joe.
”I found out enough so that Alma has a better job, and things are going easier at home. But that was just a starter. My brave John Wesley, do you remember your college sociology and economics and civics and all the rest? Never mind confessing; you don't; I didn't either. But I began to review 'em in actual business practice. First I told the right merchant what sort of a bookkeeper I had found slaving away for ten dollars a week on the dark, smelly balcony of the Racket--and he's given Alma a job at twenty in a sun-lighted office. Then I told Mr. Peters of the Racket what I had done, and why. He didn't like it, but it will do him good. That made me feel able to settle anything, and I'm looking around for my next joy as journeyman rescuer and expert business adjuster.
Honest, J.W., I've not seen near all there is to see, but I'm swamped already. You've got to come along, you and some others, and see for yourself what's the matter with Main Street.”
Not all at once, but before very long, J.W. shared Joe's aroused interest. Pastor Drury was with them, of course; and the three called into consultation a few other capable and trustworthy men and women.
Marcia Dayne had come home for a few weeks' holiday, and at once enlisted. Alma Wetherell was able to give some highly significant suggestions.
There was no noise of trumpets, and no publicity of any sort. Mr. Drury insisted that what they needed first and most was not newspaper attention, and not even organization, but exact information. So for many days a group of puzzled and increasingly astonished people set about the study of their own town's princ.i.p.al street, as though they had never seen it before. And, in truth, they never had.
It was no different from all other small town business districts. The Gem Theater vied with the Star and the Orpheum in lavish display of gaudy posters advertising pictures that were ”coming to-morrow,” and in two weeks of observation the investigators learned what sort of moving pictures Delafield demanded, or, at least what sort it got. They took note of the Amethyst Coterie's Sat.u.r.day night dances--”Wardrobe, 50 cents, Ladies Free”--and of the boys and girls who patronized the place.
The various cigar and pocket-billiards combinations were quietly observed, some of the observers learning for the first time that young men are so determined to get together that they are not to be deterred by dirt or bad air or foul and brainless talk.
The candy stores with soda fountains and some of the drug stores which served refreshments took on a new importance. Instead of being no more than handy purveyors of sweets, of soft drinks and household remedies, they were seen to be also social centers, places for ”dates” and telephone flirtations and dalliance. Much of their doings was the merest silly time-killing, but generally the youthful patrons welcomed all this because it was a change from the empty dullness of homes that had missed the home secret, and from the still duller and wasting monotony of uninteresting toil.
It was Pastor Drury who suggested the explanation for all these forms of profitless and often dangerous amus.e.m.e.nt. He was chatting with the whole group one night, and merely happened to address himself first to J.W., Jr.
Your great namesake, J.W., was so much a part of his day that he believed with most other great religious thinkers of his time that play was a device of the devil. His belief belonged to eighteenth-century theology and psychology. But even more it grew out of the vicious diversions of the rich and the brutalizing amus.e.m.e.nts of the poor. Both were bad, and there was not much middle ground. But here on Main Street we see people, most of them young, who feel, without always understanding why, that they simply must be amused. They feel it so strongly that they will pay any price for it if circ.u.mstances won't let them get it any other way. And Main Street is ready to oblige them.
There could be no amus.e.m.e.nt business if people were not clamoring to be amused. And we know now why we have no right to say that all this clamor is the devil's prompting. Isn't it queer that the church is only now beginning to believe in the genuineness and wholesomeness of the play instinct, though it is a proper and natural human hunger? Literally everybody wants to play.
”People pay more for the gratification of this hunger than they do for bread or shoes or education or religion. They take greater moral risks for it than they do for money. We have seen people who undoubtedly are going to the devil by the amus.e.m.e.nt route, unless something is done to stop them. They go wrong quicker and oftener in their play than in their work. Are we going to be content with denouncing the dance hall and the poolroom and the vile pictures and the loose conduct of the soft-drink places and Electric Park? Haven't we some sort of duty to see that every young person in Delafield has a chance at first-hand, enjoyable, and decent play?”
All agreed that the pastor was right, though they were not so clear about what could be done.
But commercialized amus.e.m.e.nt was not all they found in their quiet voyages of discovery up and down Main Street.
The chain stores had come to Delafield--not the ”5 and 10” only, but stores which specialized in groceries, tobacco, shoes, dry goods, drugs, and other commodities. Alongside of them were the locally owned stores.
Altogether, Main Street had far too many stores to afford good service or reasonable prices. With all this duplication on the one hand, and absentee-control on the other, Main Street was a street of underlings--clerks and salespeople and delivery men. That condition produced low wages and inefficient methods, many of the workers being too young to be out of school and too dense to show any intelligence about the work they were supposed to do. Cheap help was costly, and the efficient help was scarcely to be found at any price.
The investigators were frankly dismayed at the extent and complexity of the situation. They had thought to find occasional cases calling for adjustment, or even for the law. But instead they had found a whole fabric of interwoven questions--amus.e.m.e.nts, wages, compet.i.tion, cooperation, ignorance, vulgarity, vice, cheapness, trickery, ”business is business.” True, they had found more honest businesses than shady ones, more faithful clerks than s.h.i.+rkers, more decent people in the pleasure resorts than doubtful people. But the total of folly and evil was very great; could the church do anything to decrease it?
And that question led the little company of inquisitive Christians into yet wider reaches of inquiry. J.W. and Joe and Marcia at Mr. Drury's suggestion agreed to be a sort of unofficial committee to find out about the churches of Delafield. He told them that this was first of all a work for laymen. The preachers might come in later.
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