The Driver — Inside the Classic

had been selfishly seized by three magazine writers who had no telegraph stuff to file. They had retired. The rest of us took possession of a fairly large lounging room and settled ourselves for the night on cots, pallets and chairs.

The lean-minded man from Cleveland, reclining on the hotel desk with his feet on the cigar case, started an untimely discussion.

“We’ve sent off a lot of guff about this thing,” he said, “and not a word of what it means. Not a man here has tried to tell what it means.”

“Leave that to the editorial writers and go to sleep,” said St. Louis from under his hat. He had made his bed in the swivel chair.

“It means something ... it means something,” said Cleveland.

“Well, what?” asked a petulant voice.

“It’s a joke,” said St. Louis, not moving. “People have to laugh,” he added. “Go to sleep or be still.”

Another voice: “What does it mean, you Cleveland? I saw you reading Plutarch. What does it mean?”

“These people are asking questions to which there is no answer,” said the Cleveland man, lifting on his elbow. “Why is anybody hungry in a land of surplus food? Why are able bodied men out of work while we have such roads as the one we traveled to-day? I don’t know. I’m asking.”

A man whom we had hardly noticed before, anæmic, shrill and hairy, sat up on his mattress and thrust a naked bent arm out of his blanket.

“I’ll tell you what it means,” he shouted. “Wall Street has sucked the country dry. People may perish, but Wall Street will have its profit and interest. Labor may starve, but the banking power will keep money sound. Money in itself is nothing,--merely a convenience, a token by means of which useful things are exchanged. Is that so? Not at all. Money no longer exists for the use of people. We exist for the sake of money. There is plenty everywhere, but people cannot buy because they are unemployed and have no money. Coxey says, ‘Create the money. Make it abundant. Then people may work and be prosperous.’ Well, why not? Wall Street says if you make money abundant you will ruin the country. Hell! The country is already ruined. We laugh. Yet what we have seen to-day is the beginning of revolution. As people have freed themselves from other tyrannies, so they will free themselves from this money tyranny.”

He stopped, out of breath and choking, and a singular hubbub arose. Everyone awake had been listening attentively, and now, just as they lay, not an arm or a leg stirring, all those huddled, inert forms became vocal, shouting:

“Populist! Right-o! Put him out! Douse him!”

Accents of weariness, irritation and raillery were inseparably mingled. Yet the overtone was not unfriendly. We could be light and cruel with the Army of the Commonweal of Christ, because its whole figure was ludicrous, but there was no love among us for Wall Street or the money power. Those names stood for ideas of things which were commonly feared and hated and blamed for all the economic distress of the time.

Above, the plutocratic magazine writers were pounding on the floor. The hairy agitator, breathing heavily, melted back into his mattress, heavy in his conscience, no doubt, for having written a very sarcastic piece about that Easter Day event. We saw it afterward in his Chicago paper. The fat reporter from Cincinnati began to snore.

For a long time I lay awake, thinking.

What were we doing here? Reporting the news. News of what? One hundred inconsequent men dreaming in the mud,--was that news? No, not intrinsically. As a manifestation of the frustrate human spirit it might serve as material for the reflective fictionist, or text for some Olympian humorist, but why was it news to be written hot and dispatched by telegraph?

In their acts of faith, folly, wisdom and curiosity men are moved by ideas. Perhaps, therefore, the discrepancy between the unimportance of this incongruous Easter Day spectacle itself and the interest we bestowed upon it was explained by what it signified--that is, by the motivating idea. This thought I examined carefully.

Two years before this, Jacob S. Coxey, horse breeder, quarry owner, crank, whom no one had heard of until then, proposed to cure the economic disease then afflicting the country by the simple expedient of hiring all the unemployed on public works. Congress should raise half a billion dollars from non-interest bearing bonds and spend the money on national roads. This plan received some publicity as a freak idea; nobody had been really serious about it. What then happens?