CHAPTER III

The Fiftieth Anniversary

“I WONDER what happened to those who did not graduate.”

The remark was made at the fiftieth reunion of my high school graduating class, after someone had come up with the statistic that only one hundred and twenty out of an original entering class of nearly four hundred had made the grade.

“I wonder,” said another, “what happened to the boys who got out of grammar school and never entered high.”

CHAPTER IV

On Underwriting an Evil

I VOTED for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. I haven’t voted in a presidential election since.

CHAPTER V

The Single Taxer

A FEW YEARS after I got out of college I accidentally met up with Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. I had heard about the book but knew nothing of its content, so that when I picked it off a friend’s shelf and read the introduction, while he was shaving, I had no idea of what I was in for. The style of the writing interested me and I borrowed the book for further reading mainly because of this fact. I thought Henry George was one of the nineteenth century essayists who had passed me by, and undertook to read him for this reason only.

CHAPTER VI

Henry George and the Classicists

I BECAME INTERESTED in economics—or political economy, as he calls the discipline—by studying Henry George. His treatment of the subject removes from it the “dismal” label that had long been attached to economics. His clear-cut definitions of vital terms, his impeccable logic, his use of telling illustrations and, above all, the well-rounded Victorian sentences in which he clothes his ideas, make the subject pleasurable.

CHAPTER VII

Wandering Through the Years

WHEN I GOT OUT of college I was all set to be a poet. I might have succeeded in this glorious ambition if I had been born thirty years later, when the formless stuff that now goes by the name of poetry (and which consists of one metaphor explaining another) came into vogue. But, my ideals had been Shelley and Keats and Byron, and I soon realized that my muse was not up to it. Besides, I acquired a wife who needed regular sustenance. Therefore, I turned to teaching as a career; that promised some regularity of income.

CHAPTER VIII

About Socialism and Socialists

I WAS A SHAVER of ten or twelve when, on doing errands for my father, I ran into Grand Street. That was, and is, a thoroughfare in downtown New York, but in those days it was an institution, made so by a number of establishments along the street called “coffee saloons.” These, I presume, served other foods, but when I patronized them in the afternoons they purveyed only mugs of coffee and hunks of cake.

CHAPTER IX

The National Swindle

WHEN I WAS MARRIED, in 1909, I earned eighteen dollars a week, and my wife managed to pay all the household bills and save a few dollars every week from this salary. But, then, as she reminded me no end of times, steak was eighteen cents a pound in those days. And I myself can remember making my midday meal on a mug of beer and a liberal “free lunch” sandwich for a nickel.

CHAPTER X

On Doing Something About It

A YOUNG FELLOW has to have a “cause.” Utopianism is as natural a disease for the boy of college age as was measles in his childhood. My malady was anarchism. I don’t know whether I took to Kropotkin and Prudhon because they furnished me with arguments with which to refute the socialists on the campus or because they wrote much about individualism, which seems to be ingrained in my make-up.

CHAPTER XI

Isolationism

WHEN WORLD WAR I broke out in 1914, the Chicago Tribune announced with considerable pride that it was sending a parcel of reporters to Europe to “cover” the battles and the capitals of the warring nations. This was something new in American journalism. What had constituted foreign news previously were reports of what royal families were doing, affairs in which peeresses were involved, or a “passion” murder. Most of these stories were taken bodily from the European press.

CHAPTER XII

The Alchemy of Adjustment

THE ALACRITY with which the American people took to the multitude of interventions imposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, known collectively as The New Deal, simply emphasized the capacity of the human being to adjust himself to any conditions put upon him. So long as these conditions permit him to live. Within a year after he had got into office Mr.