22

the real criminals--they did not threaten the system of society in the slightest. They were inconvenient, uncomfortable and irritating, and had in some way to be controlled for our comfort and the security of our minor possessions. What is the real criminal? The real criminal, I decided, from the point of view of our society, is the workingman who thinks and agitates about his condition.

At that time, about 1905, the I.W.W. was organized. Chicago was its home, and also the home of groups of men and women whose spirit was part and parcel of the later dynamiting enterprises, which resulted inzz from the struggle between the Steel Trust and the Ironworkers Union. I spent several months in Chicago, trying to find out how these anti-social thoughts arose. I wanted to find the workingman who in his personality and history could give me a complete understanding of the origin of the rebellious ideas of Labor. The only way of finding him would be to look around among the unions and talk with the "radicals" at their dances and lectures. I interviewed probably as many as fifty or sixty labor-leaders, only to find that they were not the men I was looking for. But one day over the bar at the Briggs House, a hotel where many labor-leaders stopped, I saw a short stockily built man, talking energetically and with great temperamental force, laughing in a way that was Rabelaisian. He was talking to several companions who were also drinking, about Tolsoi's ideas of non-resistance to evil, and about Tom Paine's "Age of Reason". I knew he was the man I was looking for, and went to the bar and told him so. After several drinks he invited me to dinner at his home the following Sunday, where I met his attractive wife and children.

-23-

Now began an experience with my Labor friend, xx whose name was Anton Johannsen, whom I fully described in my book called 'The Spirit of Labor". Like all early movements intending to better the lot of mankind, there was a spirit of generosity and temperamental elan running through those delightful months in Chicago. The scenes are always either in Johannsen's house where we "rushed the growler", or in the dancehall where the "radicals" met, or in the saloon.

Sometimes the crowd adjourned to a lecture full of the super-heated philosophy of the idealistic anarchist of the over-logical single-taxer. Humanly speaking it was superb. Hope was full and so were we. It must have been somewhat similar to the early nihilistic activities in Russia. To be sure nobody was assassinated in Chicago, as far as I know, and the interesting thing about the nihilistic movement in Russia was not the assassinations which occasionally took place, but the idealistic hope of a number of high-minded men and women of that period, who had a comrade-ship nearer human equality than anything else, I think, that has been recorded in history.

In Chicago at the time I am speaking of, 1905 or thereabouts, there was in radical circles something of the same spirit. It was not so pure, with far less education and background to it, and the human beings who composed it were more or less nervously unsound. But the spirit of it was quite delightful in those early days. It breathed the hope of the intelligent working class. A hope so much more interesting than any mental principle or social propaganda which has attempted to meet and satisfy it. Here again man's feeling was superior to his mind. It is very rare that intelligence in a high

26

IV

Several years ago I had a strong conviction that drinking even to excess was the best thing that a human being could do. I would never have come to such an insane conclusion, which I held for only a few days, had it not been for a business trip that I made to Kansas. This was in Prohibition days. Previous trips to that chaste state had warned me of what I was to be up against. I therefore took a bottle of whiskey with me, for I knew that entirely unsupported my temperament could not survive the strain. I did spend a Sunday there with nothing to do. I knew nobody in town except the hotel-keeper.

The temperature was one hundred and ten degrees in the shade, and I looked around for some more human method of relaxation. So I asked the hotel-keeper where I could get some cigaretts. He told me that nobody could buy cigarettes in Kansas. I asked him whether I could go to a speakeasy and get a drink and a little companionship. He looked at me as if I were a criminal and grunted out something about the fact that there was not any in that clean town. I asked him whether I could go to a movie or a dance-hall.

"There are none such" he said "on the Lord's day." And then he added parenthetically, "There ain't no dirt in Kansas." Although I knew from another person I had met in Kansas that one might be put in jail for many years for carrying with him a bottle of whiskey-

28

drunkards. A stern and cruel dislike of any kind of gayety or sensuous pleasure informed Calvin's government. He tried to destroy or drive away all the "libertines" of the city, and by "libertines" he meant anybody who indulged in any kind of pleasure. The libertines he suppressed were not necessarily the debauched and drunken but anyone who wanted a little "liberty". They were "libertines" because they did not want John Calvin to deprive them of the "liberty" of regulating their personal lives. One reaction from that kind of senseless Puritanism showed itself in Calvin's own family, for to his mortification and sorrow, two women members of his own family "went wrong."

Calvin acted as he did in the name of a religion he did not understand. Our founder of Christianity had love and forgiveness for all. There is nothing Puritanical in the Gospers. Puritanism and Calvinism came in when men had lost the sense of religion and of life.

The next book I wrote, "An Anarchist Woman", was based upon intimate association with people the very opposites of those "dry" respectable ones. They were equally uncivilized but in the opposite direction. But they had the excuse of being factory wrecks--wrecks of the industrial system.

My labor friend, who himself was a well balanced man, was acquainted with a group of people who called themselves "anarchists." They were anarchists only in the sense that they rejected all the values of our conventional society. Two of them, a man and a woman,

28

drunkards. A stern and cruel dislike of any kind of gayety or sensuous pleasure informed Calvin's government. He tried to des-troy or drive away all the "libertines" of the city, and by "li-bertines" he meant anybody who indulged in any kind of pleasure. The libertines he suppressed were not necessarily the debauched and drunken but anyone who wanted a little "liberty". They were "libertines" because they did not want John Calvin to deprive them of the "liberty" of regulating their personal lives. One reaction from that kind of senseless Puritanism showed itself in Calvin's own family, for to his mortification and sorrow, two of women mem-bers of his own family "went wrong".

Calvin acted as he did in the name of a religion he did not understand. Our founder of Christianity had love and forgive-ness for all. There is nothing Puritanical about the Gospels.

Puritanism and Puritanism in general came in when men had lost the sense of religion and of life.

The next book I wrote, "An Anarchist Woman", was based upon intimate association with people the very opposites of those "dry" respectable ones. They were equally uncivilized but in the opposite direction. Yet they had the excuse of being factory wrecks--wrecks of the industrial system.

31

ficial genializing substitutions.

This victim of the factory system was lost to society
through his spirit of romance, just as Alfred Hodder had the same
fate. The following incident illustrates this situation quite
adequately. I had been delegated by a group of friends to act
as dispenser of a certain amount of cash from time to time to this
individual. He was such a charming person that not only did the
barroom proprietor give him a room, meals and unlimited drink in
exchange for his charm, but many other people such as Jack London,
Eugene O'Neill, myself and a number of others entertained him
at our homes for weeks and months at a time.

I held the purse which was replenished from time to time
by the group of us, and especially by his sister who had been in-
duced to resume relations with her long discarded brother. It was
arranged that he should have a room in New York and that, from time
to time, I would hand him a couple of dollars, well knowing that
it would go for drink, and knowing too that he could easily provide
himself with his friend's food. On one occasion I was too busy to
go from my suburban home to New York and, in a misguided, sent him
a check for three dollars.

At that time he was associated with a gang called the
Hudson Dusters. He was not one of them except sentimentally and
romantically but since they were generous to him whenever they had
whiskey, he felt it necessary to be hospitable in return. This

32

sense of hospitality and fair play resulted in his helping them
on one or two occasions in a way that might have landed him in
prison.

It was not that he wanted anything for himself, but he
wanted to play fair with his dear friends, the Dusters.

A few days after I sent him this check I received a tele-
phone call from a friend of mine, a woman who kept a little res-
taurant in the city. She asked me if I had recently sent a check
to our friend. I told her I had and when I mentioned the amount
she whistled audibly over the phone and remarked that she had just
cashed a check for thirty dollars. My romantic friend had done his
sentimental duty by the Dusters. I told the much perturbed lady
that I would be in immediately and would pay the balance.

I thereupon wrote to him and told him that though I loved
him still, *that* I could never more be his agent---that he should
have felt sentimentally toward me as well as towards the Dusters.

When he received my letter he was shocked and surprised.
I know this because sometime afterwards I was talking to a friend
of mine, Jerome Blum, who said that he had recently met our common
friend on Sixth Avenue. It was raining hard and Jerome saw a couple
of blocks away three men sitting on a barrel with an umbrella over
their heads. As he approached them he recognised our friend, who
cordially invited him to join the bunch and offered him a drink. I
became the subject of conversation and my romantic friend complained
bitterly of my conduct. He said "Hapgood always seemed to me a

34

unconsciously, that the tumultuous vividness of my temperamental state was not devoid of interest--nay, of a certain kind of unhappy pleasure to myself.

Incidents in my life when on account of deepest trouble I could not drink, are those which I cannot even describe.

Although, therefore, men drink because of the slighter troubles of life, or because of the tedious greyness of existence or for some comparatively rare nervous maladjustment, drink does not appeal to the human being caught in tragic situations. So that even in the serious side of life the spirit of wine has always an element of lightness.

At the other end of the scale is where the art of drink comes in....the colorful joy of fineness of sensation. This art of wine is now practically impossible in America because of the propaganda element. Everybody is to some extent a dry or a wet fanatic, and neither is capable of purely aesthetic reactions. Of course there are individuals who still feel or are determined to feel--suspicious fact!..the artistic side.

Such a man is Ridgely Torrance, one of our genial poets. A year or two ago he proposed to me and others the formation of a University of wine. His idea was to get together, under the leadership of a few masters who might be called professors, a number of enthusiastic students. They were to go to Europe as a kind of wandering college, tasting and aesthetically cataloguing the qualities of Nuremburger, Pilsner, Berlin/weissbeer, the various vintages of

38

idealistic unwillingness to allow the best to escape. On several occasions there I met a German and his wife drinking Pilsner. He was a manufacturer in one of the Rhine cities but every year he made a pilgrimage, not to Vienna so much as to the Griechenbeizl. It was not only to enjoy the Pilsner or rather it was to enjoy the Pilsner much more deeply than he knew that he went there. It was for the health of his body and soul. When I told him that after drinking four or five liters I ought to stop because it would make me fat he would say, "This beer will never make you fat--ordinary beer will, but not Echtes Pilsner. This beer has nothing whatever about it that is not good for every human being. It is good for his body, for his soul, for his temperament. It makes religion real, it makes social milieu a possibility. Do not believe that it will make you fat if you do not want to be fat, for it helps every man along the line of his deepest desire. It is absolutely impossible to drink Pilsner and to feel it's quality unless you are not only a good man but capable of steady progression in virtue, happiness, and health."

"Even if it did make you fat" he said with an unbelieving smile, "You could get the fat off later, but there are only three places in Germany and Austria where you can drink beer like this. If to see one of the most wonderful girls in the world or one of the most wonderful pictures, or the cathedral at Chartres, or to read one of Goethes poems, or Heine's Harzreise, if this experience were impossible without a slight temporary sacrifice, what man with a soul would not undergo this sacrifice, particularly when it is do deeply pleasant?" To me the sad thing about this ecstasy which corresponded to something

44

is about to break. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" and sometimes is not disappointed.

Another cheerful incident of my immediate present happened last night when I went to a friend's house where two young and pretty and nice girls as respectable as any young girls could be at the present time, had prepared some delicious beer. It was really better than most of the beer that was sold in the old saloon. It was enjoyed by a little bunch of six of us. Two of us played chess, carrying on a pleasant social conversation at the same time with the others; and then we read, with enjoyment, possibly enhanced by the background of conviviality, Gilbert's BabBallads. Those poems, well read by the young girls, seemed better to me than they ever had before, and what is better than feeling most fully the charm of literature?

But of course the speakeasy as it exists and seen apart from its possible developments is a sterile reaction in equal degree with the prohibitionist extreme. The conscious idealization of wine is not the deep reality of it's function. But in a world of propaganda it seems that one extreme or the other is as inevitable as it is ugly.

I am aware that deep in me there is also a propagandist instinct. I would like to believe however that it is thrust upon me by the immediate situation. The Germans have two words for our word reason--one is *die Vernunft* and the other *die Verstand*. *Die Verstand* means the logical faculty, the definite understanding of laws and relations and their application to our life. *Die Vernunft*, however,

46

developed, inconsistent with his work in the University and he knew
no moderation--there was his personal weakness.

But, though his reformation was a gain to the institutions,
what a loss it was to the moment of super-knowledge! One could find
in books, in research, in the words of other scholars what he taught
in the University, but nowhere could be found his total aesthetic
reaction to the meaning of his knowledge except in his cup and, alas,
his cup is turned down!

If this be superstition it is a superstition shared by some
of the greatest souls as revealed in the philosophy and poetry of the
past. Indeed superstition, while it has no doubt a baseless barbaric
ignorance for its foundation in part, yet it is also perhaps partly
supported by some intuitive sense of those realities which science
has not yet reached. We should not believe this, we should in order
to further science believe that all reality is ultimately amenable to
law, but there is nevertheless something in us which rejects such a
belief.

This feeling is sometimes intensified by drink. It is a
state of mind that all highly developed men who have been extreme
drinkers know. But it is a knowledge which it is impossible to com-
municate to the prohibitionist, for it is obvious that the drunkard in
his social manifestation is a deplorable object and often a buffoon.

The idea of the drunken buffoon runs through all the literary
and poetical literature, just as the idea of profounder meaning con-
nected with drink runs through much poetical literature. But a self-
conscious man does not want to make himself the object of condemnation

47

and ridicule even though he knows that he has something.

Many a time I have been in a group of men and women when there was perhaps only one among them who understood what I understood. He and I had been companions, had carried our companionship in the saloon so far that there was probably no aspect of it that we did not feel. When the outsiders about us talked things that knew were true from a practical and, in a limited way, a social point of view, and yet not adequate, what could we say? We could only look at each other and be silent.

The Germans have a phrase "Ein Gottbetrunkene Mensch"--
A man drunk with God--Such a man often seems cynical to good people.
He is not cynical; it is only that he subordinates the law of man
to the deeper law of God. Some of the holy men of the Bible drank
wine even to drunkenness and even the Church uses wine as an incar-
nation of religious significance--why should man put aside what God
has given? An orderly arrangement of men's practical affairs is of
course something which should be zealously taught and observed. But
it should yield at moments to the higher light of spiritual and sen-
suous ecstasy. Love has no need of the practical application of
science and reason. At the moment when we perceive most intensely,
the laws of practical life have little meaning for us. We are living
beyond them although that of course does not mean a violation of them
when there is a tolerance in their administration--a tolerance which
the finest men and women are never without provided they have enough
culture. I have found, when I have been under the influence and have

50

flict was not due to any especial war-guilt on the part of the Germans. That if the causes had of the war had anything to do with guilt at all, the guilt extended through the whole organized western society. The Germans, I alleged, like the French and the Americans and the English were made of the same human clay and that now it was extremely important for the sake of culture and peace not to feel either hostile or antagonistic to them. I was so absorbed in my arguments that I hardly realised what might have taken place. I noticed a rather confused movement among the men in the cafe and afterwards, the next morning when my head was a little clearer, I was told by the keeper of the cafe that one of the men was about to deliver the famous French kick. This consists of a sudden movement of the leg and foot which lands the sabot, or heavy shoe, with terrific force on the side of one's head; in this the Frenchman is an adept; and the act may result in the victim being put out for a time or for eternity. This did not happen because of the understanding interference of two of the other men whose patriotic emotions were not so violently out of hand.

This reminds me of another incident which took place years before in Chicago when I was studying the labor movement there. Sam Parks, at that time a well-known labor leader, was serving a term in jail for some form of graft. I was talking in a saloon with several iron workers, friends of Parks', and I remarked that as a friend of the labor movement I was sorry that it was weakened by leadership of men who did not have the highest morality. In the midst of my argument I was thrown out of the saloon, kicked in the head and ribs and

53

Ages and early Renaissance. The book is dedicated "to my mother, with love and gratitude." I fear that hardly anybody today would dedicate such a book to his mother, although it contains no consciousness of anything wrong about drink except the excess of it. The sources are the old French literature and poems of the time, in which references are made to the kinds of wine and the customs connected with its consumption. Wine and distilled drinks of those days are shown in those old poems to have been subtly interwoven with customs of marriage, birth, death, and hospitality. There is in them the heralding of the delight of wine, and also satire and condemnation of the drunkard who appears in many of the poems as a buffoon fit to be the butt of society's laughter. But that one should stop drinking and cut away all of the delightful customs with which it was associated because there were a number of victims did not occur to normal society.

It has been stated, and I think truthfully, that all virile Western races, except the Arabian, have been sympathetic to drink. When opposition to drink in principle appears, it is due in those races to a lack of culture. So all genial persons of our race have felt a RESENTMENT resentful contempt for the extreme Puritan. "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

To repeat, this writing is not intended to be contravertial in character, but to record experiences and values that have occurred to me in drinking. But yet since argument frequently took

53

Ages and early Renaissance. The book is dedicated "to my mother,
with love and gratitude." I fear that hardly anybody today would
dedicate such a book to his mother, although it contains no con-
sciousness of anything wrong about drink except the excess of it.
The sources are the old French literature and poems of the time,
in which references are made to the distilled drinks of those

54

in a general way to liberty-loving Americans.

"All that the American has achieved has been owing largely to the fact that Government has let him alone. He has carried on his back no royal family, no worse than idle soldiers, no crushing armaments, Almost as free from the touch of Government as the Indian was before the Discovery, he has gone his way in the fields of invention, exploration, development, science, and general education, all for the comfort and behoof, not of the State, but of the man, the woman, and the child. The State reared by such a man must necessarily be great.

"He denounced with a fierce scorn that they richly merit," wrote Theodore Roosevelt of Gouverneur Morris, "the despicable demagogues and witless fools who teach that in all cases the voice of the majority must be implicitly obeyed, and that public men have only to carry out its will."

"In the United states today the erroneous belief has become rather prevalent that the minority cannot properly complain of any course of legislation or governmental conduct deemed necessary by the majority. This has come in part, probably, from what Bryce long wrote of as the fatalism of the multitude, added to lack of constitutional scholarship."

"Thus there grows a self-distrust, a despondency, a disposition to fall into line, to acquiesce in the dominant opinion, to submit thought as well as action to the encompassing power of numbers. The book is an attempt to show in a friendly carefully

57

absurd not to recognise the evils of intemperate abstinence.

"The question," writes Mr. Norton, "respecting prohibitory laws is whether, in the performing of a duty to the class who need the protection of Government, the liberty of those who do not need that aid, and whose conduct never contributed to the conditions which prohibition was instituted to cure, can be frittered away by judicial decisions or openly destroyed by legislative action."

"A second question, really the more important of the two, is this: To what lengths of interference with Liberty and Property will Government go in following the precedents already set? For, as Tacitus saw it nearly nineteen centuries ago, and as it has remained and will remain, "That which is now supported by examples, growing old, will become an example itself."

"What is Liberty?

"The aim, therefore, of patriots," says John Stuart Mill, "was to set limits on the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by Liberty."

"Liberty, therefore, is Limitation on Power. And so wherever a Limitation set by the people for the restraint of Government is removed, there Liberty is lost."

"The constitutional Judicial Department to see that Government goes no farther than its authority extends is an American invention, and it has been recognised by the best minds of the world as the chiefest contribution of genius to the promotion of Liberty. It

75

sea and made away with the lot. It was really rather mean, as
the bootleggers couldn't complain to the law. There should be,
and sometimes is, honor among law-breakers, for not having the
law, what is left but honor?

It may be observed that Provincetown, on account, perhaps, of its beautiful monotony of intense dunes and impressive ocean, needs the relief from this by the modeling of man's hands and acts, breaking up sheer beauty into the forms of art, drama, and human performances. We cannot stand for long pure beauty; we are impelled to do something about it; so, I predict, Provincetown will see before long another interesting experiment in the form of some aspect of literary or plastic art.

78

vities without any real feeling for their inner and freer personal-
ity, free from their practical ambition and their competitive
activities, their desires for distinction and social recognition and
--stripped bare where beauty is most apparent.

Even in the toughest, most unsocial beings, there is some-
thing to be revealed. I remember, many years ago, on the Bowery, I
met a gangster who thought I was a friend of a powerful political
leader who he thought had got him out of jail and prevented him from
returning there. We had some drinks together and when his feeling of
vicarious friendship had been deeply aroused he said, "So you're a
friend of Tim's, are you?"--I had been introduced to him by one of
Tim's lieutenants--"Say--got any enemies is New York? Chicago?..
What, Nowhere?..If you had, " he said, "I'd put 'em out--I'd do
anything for a friend of Tim's, and it wouldn't cost you a cent."
This feeling, considered in itself, is as fine as patriotism, although
of course it lacks wide social values. Even in the name of patrio-
tism, as I have before remarked, great crimes are done; and in the
name of friendship, as in the case of this gangster, likewise crimes
are done. To be sure, people gain from friendship, but they also
gain from patriotism. Few things are pure--that is the privilege of
those most free from economic and social limitations. The prostitute
I referred to, the gangster and the patriot, are not so far removed
at bottom.

I feel impelled again, as so often in this writing, to seek
the immediate balance. Drink goes both to the right and the left,
so to speak. Good suggests the evil, and the evil the good. A fea-
ture of our time where the evil is apparent--although to be sure it

83

79

is the evil of Prohibition rather than of drink--is one which obtains in our political and trade conventions. Conventions of dentists, doctors, of societies of various kinds, seem now to be more interested in their entertainment committees than in their professional or political programs. The question is, how booze, and what kind, can be secured for the occasion. It is even said, though for this I cannot vouch, that the character of the post-prohibition drinking has been an important element in the choice of state and national candidates. Delegates drinking bootleg liquor have a different standard of personality and fitness than those who drank the pre-prohibition distillations. This is not so much because of the difference in quality of the drinks, but because of the changed psychology of a drinking itself. Before prohibition, drinking was only an incidental occupation at those conventions. The man who did not care for drinking did not drink; the man who naturally drank moderately, drank moderately. The drunk got drunk. But now a certain sort of psychosis tends to bind them all together. What might be described as a disgraceful exhibition of the American Legion last year in Boston is an illustration. Certainly there seemed to be only one real thought in the heads of those Legionaires. It would be unthinking to condemn the Legion for this reason. The thing that makes them capable of going unthinkingly together for what is generally supposed to be good, also makes them capable of going unthinkingly together for what is generally supposed to be bad. The responsibility is deeper than the organization.

84

80 80

One of the striking things about the French people is their frugality and economical intelligence. There is extraordinarily little waste in the lives of the great majority. Their domestic life is regular, law-abiding and for the most part extremely virtuous. In other words there is a high degree of intelligent morality in the French. This is combined with liberality in regard to habits of living. When I was in Vence several years ago I was associated with several American artists. We used to meet in a little pension hanging over the beautiful hillside which had a fine view of the Mediterranean. It was kept by a Frenchwoman and her husband in the most economical style. Perhaps she even watered the soup occasionally. She certainly counted the centimes with religious care, and her books balanced. She never failed to make a profit, though her guests were few and for the most part poor, and her prices extremely moderate. But yet this closeness of living did not interfere with the spirit of hospitality and of gay freedom. She drank a little wine herself and was not averse to a cognac occasionally. Her attitude in this respect was charming in the extreme. It was not merely because she made a little more money when people bought the bottle of good red or white wine, but that the spirit of good cheer was so sympathetic to her that she often gave them a bottle free when she felt it was harmonious with the occasion. And occasionally when one of us might have had too much--it preactically always was an American who got into this condition--her native motherliness and hospitality never failed. She has been known to put the guest to bed and to take the coffee or early cognac to him next morning with her own fair hands, to make sure that he began the day right.