Butterfly Ship in a Little Breeze

4 Simple Steps To A Mindfulness Based Stillness Meditation

Meditation is one of the simplest things to do. All you need is something comfortable to sit on, a timer, and quiet. Set the timer, sit, close your eyes, and become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations arising when you turn your attention inward. Notice how your mind will run with a thought. When it does, simply bring your mind back to paying attention.

Cultivating a mindfulness based stillness meditation practice

Preparation, Relaxation, Mindfulness, and Stillness.

1. Preparation is the easy part, the practical details of where you will meditate, your posture, deciding what specific kind of meditation you will try, and everything relating to how you set yourself up to begin the meditation. Preparation involves establishing comfort and ease. We create a conducive external and internal environment for meditation by preparing the location, our posture and our attitude.

2. Relaxation. Here we simply take the time needed to relax our body and mind. A tight or tense body often accompanies a busy or restless mind. We use relaxation techniques to create more spaciousness in the body, which helps in calming the mind and bringing our attention into the present moment. Starting with your right foot, working your way up to the top of your head, then back down the other side of your body to your left foot, relax your body, and at the same time, begin to quiet your mind.

3. Mindfulness is simply paying attention to the present moment. This may or may not be a challenge. Let go of thoughts of judgement, mind reaction, past, future. Let all thoughts flow out. Just be here, now.

4. Stillness. Gradually, by just paying attention without reacting, we become aware of a stillness. Sounds, sensations, even emotions and thoughts just come and go. Free of judgment. Free of reaction. We notice a background of stillness against which sounds, sensations and thoughts come and go, appear and disappear. We become aware of the still and silent presence in just noticing the movement of sounds, sensations and thoughts. In this stillness, awareness is open and undistracted. Stillness is not a static nothingness; it is alive, alert and non-reactive presence.

I normally meditate between 16 to 71 minutes(normal on Sundays) each day. The longest I have meditated in one day was 9 hours (in 3 180 minute sessions). Wow! what a mind awakening experience.

Enjoy Meditating!

I have been among the cultured, followers of the collective, and they have taught me the foundation of their doctrines. But the more thoroughly I examined their course, their thoughts, their feelings, their mysteries, the less clearly I saw the light. They are tales invented attempting to inspire me with perceived truths of an imaginary freedom under the false hope of good which never comes, and engages me in inevitable unhappiness. The cultured collective is dark and fraught with storms.

I do not follow the cultured collective. Mankind is too young for me to any longer consider such a course as the right way. I follow God, the light within. I am free. I love. I am calm. My life course is clear. I live in joy.

I do not live my life simply meandering smoothly through green valleys of flowers shaded by pleasant trees, or observing the calm sea, so silent, so indifferent – troubled by vague uneasiness. I do not share in the great majority. I recognise the social value, I see the social order. There is something alarming to me in these delights.

A fever exist in my soul, in my blood, asking for a wilder course. In my heart I live more dangerously. I was prepared at birth for the jagged rocks and treacherous shoals of change and the excitement of the unknown, forever in the light, the light of God. I follow the way shower, the son of God – Jesus.

Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous – not just to some people in some circumstances – but to everyone all the time.

If you have not often felt the joy of doing a kind act, you have neglected much, and most of all yourself

You have not lived a perfect day, unless you have done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

If many should conquer in battle a thousand and a thousand more, and I should conquer myself, I will be the greater victory.

The greatest of victories is the victory over oneself. No person, group, nation, or any other can turn into defeat the victory over oneself.

I will focus my energy and soul to learn, understand, and experience the joy of victory over myself. Victory over myself occurs in only one way – surrender to God!

We all have inherited from God our nobility. All persons are distinguished by high birth as we are all children of God. This is reality. Any lesser thought is an illusion.

There is only one way in the world to be aware of your nobility, to be distinguished. Follow God. Your instinct! Be what god intended, yourself, and you’ll be somebody and live in joy, in bliss, as god intended. Be a blind follower of kaos, of those who have no connection with god, and you will have the oblivion, the anxiety, the sorrow you desire.

It is of paramount importance to me to find people who can teach me how to become aware, and more aware, of god. You can tell who they are as they themselves are connected to god and live in joy.

The challenge is to see god in everything, everywhere, at all times, to love every person, even when my ego tendency is not love them because I dislike the actions I observe.

When we observe people, we are seeing a part of god. When we observe their behaviors, do we see god? Liking or disliking their actions, do we see their godliness? When I see their godliness, I am acknowleding they too are part of god. I unconditionally love the god within each person which is seperate from their actions. When I forget this, I am disconnected from god.

Humility is the strength of the strong and the weapon with which the wise conquer their foes.

Jupiter – King of the Gods

For whatever men say in their blindness, and spite of the fancies of youth, there’s nothing so kingly as kindness, nothing so royal as truth, nothing so sacred as honor, and nothing so loyal as love.

For good is not in pursuing, Nor gaining of great nor of small, But just in the doing, and doing
As we would be done by, is all.

Cloud Diagram

Meditation will help us to awaken, and help create a day of mindfulness.

Meditate to awaken the spirit. It is not enough to just sit down, and then with mundane motivation, proceed into meditation. Rather, friend, let us bring forth a virtuous motivation, specifically the spirit of awakening.

Tread the path of perfect giving, of patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom. What you’re doing is essential.

A Few Motivation Possibilities of a Virtuous Meditation
God Awareness
Breathing
Clarity of Mind
Continuity of Mind
Emptiness
Human Life
Death
Impermanence
Suffering
Equilibrium
Love
Release of Negative Energy
Sensing the Body as Light
Purification
Liberation
Compassion
Inner Heat
Charity
Serenity
Joy
Enlightenment
God Awareness

Cirrus Clouds

I am a primary existence. I am a distinct portion of the essence of god and contain a certain part of God in myself. I am awake!

Are you ignorant to your noble birth? My appeal to you, friend, is do not be a poor wretch, knowing nothing about the god within.

Awaken!

Stratus Clouds

To be loveless, uncaring, and unforgiving is to be a fool. No fool is more foolish than one who eagerly expounds love, care, and forgiveness while failing to love, care, and forgive.

It is not by the onward sweep of truth and right we stay. It is by our follies we hold heaven away.

2011
Saturday, Bakersfield, Furnace Creek, Death Valley. Sunset Camp Ground, Site #34. Up at 6h10, Breathing, Praying, Reading, Slept Well. Off with Boy Scouts to Death Valley. Rode with John Whitaker in his 1988 Chevy Surburban. Thank you John! We travelled through Ridgecrest via Hwy. 58 through Trona Pinnacles, onward to Furnace Creek Death Valley National Park Pleasant ride. Nice to be with Scouts of Troop 188. One of the Scouts, LT, Little Tommy, fell at the Pinnacles while running down a very rocky Pinnacle. Bumped head and side, and was scratched on hands. Once we arrived, he ended up being helicoptered to Las Vegas. Seemed minor, turned out to be minor. I think Park ranger over-reacted. It was her and Tommy fathers call. Had an excellent dinner of Chicken and Steak Fajitas and home-made flour tortilla’s – excellent. Thank you Rick and Petra! Went to Death Valley History Talk at Sunset Campground camp fire. Well done. Nice walk to/from camp site (Texas Campground, Furnace Creek, #34). After, back to camp. Set around Camp Fire for a while with Scouts and Rick. Nice and warm. Nice casual conversation. Feels good to be here. Beautiful Starry Night with waxing gibbous moon. To sleep 23h00. Thank you God for this day filled with love and great awareness of nature.

Cumulus Clouds

I face nothing alone; God’s presence is always with me. There is no darkness capable of withstanding the light of God. I am safe. I am comforted.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?–Psalm 27:1

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call not to be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Understanding the meaning of Knowledge and Faith helps provide an understanding of wholeness. Understanding wholeness will help us on our path to enlightenment.

Knowledge and Faith are very complimentary terms.

Knowledge is acquired by all experience and is a justified true belief. The justification comes from my senses, teachers, mindfulness, and all other interactions of my thinking and feelings. Knowledge can be shared with others.

Faith is my belief in the trustworthiness of my experience. The apex of my faith is manifested in meditation when all is still and quite. Faith can only be shared with God.

I experience a trusting belief in a transcendent reality, a Supreme Being, Universal Mind, God, Jesus the Christ. Experiencing wholeness, I am awake, I love.

My Friend, Awaken!

To choose to live awakened is to be useful to yourself and the world, and in deed, to live a life of joy.

I pray you do not choose to live your life asleep or drunk, spending life uselessly, living life in the dark.

I ask you to be patient, my friend. Be patient toward all unresolved questions in your heart and learn to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not seek the answers which can not be given to you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now.

Gradually, without noticing it, the answers come.

I have heard said no man ever sank under the burdens of the day. It is when tomorrows burdens are added to the burdens of today the weight becomes more than a man can bear, and sorrow is certain.

I never need burden myself so. When I find myself so burdened, I have forgotten this: The burdens I bare are of my own doing, not god’s.

Leave the future to god, yes even tomorrow, and be present. Live today, be aware of today, and you will find your burdens to be light.

Do not worry about everyday life, whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing?

Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?

Why do you have so little faith?

Don’t worry about these things, saying, What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear? These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and God will give you everything you need.

Don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

The Razors Edge
The road to joy is very narrow, like a razors edge, and the road is difficult. There, at the end of the road, the end of our lives, is a narrow gate, very few will ever find it. Through the Gate is the Kingdom of God.

Significance
Interval training allows you to exercise at higher levels of intensity compared to continuous aerobic exercise. When you alternate between short bouts of very-high-intensity exercise with lower-intensity exercise, your body is able to process lactic acid build-up, therefore reducing fatigue. You are then able to burn calories and fat at a faster rate compared to less intense, longer aerobic exercise.

Improved Ability to Burn Calories and Fat
Training at such high intensities utilizes your body’s short-term energy systems: the ATP-PCr systems and the glycolytic system. The ATP-PCr system makes use of creatine phosphate stores in your muscle for high-intensity exercise lasting no more than 10 seconds. When the exercise bout lasts for up to 3 minutes, you are using mostly muscle glycogen, the stored form of glucose. When you consistently train at high intensities using these systems, you increase your capacity to work harder, thereby more calories and fat at a faster rate.

Post-Exercise Calorie and Oxygen Consumption
At rest, your body needs oxygen and calories from carbohydrates, fat and protein to maintain life. You need more calories and oxygen to perform exercise, especially at high intensities. Once you stop exercising, your body still requires calories and oxygen as it works to bring you back to resting levels. Your body uses more calories and oxygen after high-intensity interval training than after steady-state aerobic exercise to return to a resting state.

Time Frame
The key to interval training is exercising at high intensities for at least 10 seconds, but no more than three minutes. The National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends specific work-to-rest ratios for interval training: if your work interval lasts up to 10 seconds, use a ratio between 1:12 and 1:20; if your work interval lasts 15 to 30 seconds, your ratio is 1:3 to 1:5; if your work interval lasts from one to three minutes, use a ratio of 1:3 or 1:4. For instance, if you sprint for 20 seconds, using a ratio of 1:3, your rest period should be 60 seconds.

Considerations
You can burn calories and fat faster when you do interval training at least two days a week. However, you need to use a different work-to-rest ratio to prevent over-training and to reduce your risks of injury. For example, your first session could be a sprint for 15 seconds with a walk of 45 seconds for 20 minutes total. Your second session of the week could be a sprint for 60 seconds and a walk for three minutes for 30 minutes total. Keep in mind that your 60-second sprint is faster than your run, but slower than your 15-second all-out effort. There needs to be at least two days between interval sessions.

Heavy Weather At Sea

When I am troubled about anything, I have forgotten this – all things happen according to the universal nature; and forgotten this, a man’s wrongful act is nothing; and further I have forgotten this, everything which happens, always happened so and will happen so, and now happens so everywhere; forgotten this too, how close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence. And I have forgotten this too, every man’s intelligence is a god, and is an efflux of the deity; and forgotten this, nothing is a man’s own, but his child and his body and his very soul came from the deity; forgotten this, everything is opinion; and lastly I have forgotten every man lives the present time only, and loses only this.

Everything is opinion, and opinion is in my power. Take away then, when I choose, my opinion. There is calm, everything stable, and waveless. I see the universe as it is. Whole.

After Glow

I am made free, not by refusing to recognize anything above me, but on the contrary, by revering something is above me. For by revering it, I rise to its level, and by my recognition I attest to the fact I, and in fact everyone, bear the stamp of the higher existence and are capable of achieving it. I am aware, I am one with God.

My misfortunes were great. My life was a continuous struggle, and I rarely found rest. I hardly entered upon life when the battle with evil began, choosing to live away from god awareness.

Many years ago, I repented, I returned to god, awarness of god in all. I have surrendered to god’s will. God has shown me my strength of mind with which I have is greater then any misfortunes or struggles I will ever experience. I will never give up on God, on Love. I live in joy, I love, in always, and forever.

BY
BAXTER HATHAWAY
Department of English, Cornell University
AND
JOHN MOORE
Department of English, Montana State University

Those who have handled sciences have been either
men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of
experiment are like the ant; they only collect and
use: the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cob
webs out of their own substance. But the bee takes
a middle course; it gathers its material from the flow
ers of the garden and of the field, but transforms
and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this
is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies
solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does
it take the matter which it gathers from natural his
tory and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the
memory whole, as it finds it; but lays it up in the un
derstanding altered and digested.

From FRANCIS BACON S Novum Organum

Preface

FROM all sides we are deluged with words: in newspaper articles,
radio broadcasts, lectures, and advertisements, on billboards, in maga
zines, in the speech of friends. Words swarm upon us and fuse with our
thoughts as they have done in no other period in history. The tech
niques of influencing men by suggestion and by appeals to the emotions
of fear, pride, and ambition and to mass prejudices have never been
more fully employed than they are today. In the midst of this flood of
words the college student tries to keep his attention fixed on the words
that communicate honest thought, on the words by which sincere men
and women attempt to bring order out of chaos and make valid com
ments about the shifting patterns of experience. At least this is what
the ideal college student should attempt to do. His main object is learn
ing, and learning necessarily involves contact with reputable thoughts of
others as they are expressed in words. He does not want his instructors
to fool him by the use of the irrational methods of the advertiser or the
propaganda devices of the demagogue. His interest, for the present at
least, is in words that make sense, that is, words that can be tied down to
the realities they name.

In turn, the college student must learn how to use words so that
they will make sense, for he must express his thoughts about his own
experiences so that others will understand what he means. His natural
instinct is to imitate the models that he finds on all sides, to cast his
thought into the molds established by his predecessors and contem
poraries. His problem is to choose the form best suited to the ideas he
wants to express.

x PREFACE

Within the limits of honest thought there are many kinds of prose,
and one of the major requirements in learning to write well is to
understand the nature of thought and the prose structures that cor
respond to the several kinds of thinking. The intention of a writer
should determine the structure of his writing. Knowledge of sound
structure is one of the goals toward which every writer should aim.

If we are concerned with sense, we are not concerned with words
as detached entities, nor with writing problems as devices for decorat
ing the substance of thought. The thought itself is of prime importance
and must determine the words used to communicate it adequately.
Clever writing which divorces words from thought may temporarily
tickle the reader s fancy, but the writer who falls into the habit of
striving for temporary effect is going in the wrong direction if he
wishes to learn to write well.

It is with the expression of ideas which he has thought out for him
self that the writer faces the full problem of organization. When he
duplicates the ideas of another writer, his attention is really upon the
words rather than upon the ideas they represent and much of his
work has thus been done for him by another. Even in writing an
account of a process or a description of a mechanism, the student
writer is relying upon the thought and the organization of another on
the inventor of the process or mechanism. For this reason this book
avoids discussion of the kinds of prose that go by the names of
“Exposition of a Process” or “Exposition of a Mechanism” and limits
itself to original perception and thought.

The student is asked to work with the expression and substantiation
of ideas, and, more particularly, with the kind of ideas that can be
substantiated. He must not generalize wildly nor use words without
regard for the communicable meanings that the words should carry.
The standards used in this book for distinguishing among different
kinds of thinking and writing are: (1) the subjectivity or objectivity
of data, and (2) the level of particularity or generality, that is, con-
creteness or abstractness, of statements based upon data. By analyzing
writing in terms of these standards, the student can come to know
better what ideas are and what makes them sound or unsound.

An understanding of the differences between levels of generalization
is important. A generalization is a statement not about individuals
doing particular things about classes of things. The statement “My

PREFACE xi

brother fed his dogs at six o clock this evening” is a relatively concrete
statement. It concerns one person doing a certain thing at a certain
time. The statement “He is fond of pets” is more general since it is
not limited to one particular time or to one particular pet. The state
ment “Human beings like pets” is far more general. The best test for
the level of generalization of any statement is to ask how many particu
lar actions or perceptions it comprises. Before accepting a general state
ment, we might ask ourselves how many separate experiences the writer
must have had to be absolutely certain of the truth of his conclusion.

When a writer wishes to make statements which the reader can
recognize as valid, he must speak from concrete experiences that have
a bearing upon the point he is making. As readers, we cannot be sure
that we are dealing with sense unless we can translate the general
izations made by the writer into concrete experiences and test them
against these experiences. If a writer tells us that “Politicians are a heart
less race of men with no care for the well-being of society” we test the
truth of his statement by referring it to politicians we know. We must
beware of the generalization based upon little or no concrete ex
perience.

It is true that by inference we can often make certain sound general
izations about large classes of things upon the basis of experience of
a few instances only. When a biologist has explored the anatomy of a
few lobsters and has found similar intestinal tracts in all of them, we
do not ask that he examine the intestinal tracts of all lobsters before
drawing conclusions about them. Here, however, the reasoning in
volved is partly deductive; that is, it is based upon larger general
izations already accepted. We already believe that lobsters are animals
and that other animals have intestinal tracts. Likewise, we have learned
to rely up to a point on the constancy of nature. The experiences out
of which we generalize are, indeed, often not our own; provided that
we have faith in the reliability of the statements others make about
their experiences, we accept them and can base our conclusions upon
them as well as upon our own experiences.

But something is seriously wrong when adult minds readily accept
generalizations that come fully manufactured in the form of whisper
ings from the world about us, when they trust these generalizations
without inquiring into the experiences upon which they are based or
into the trustworthiness of the person doing the generalizing. Often

xii PREFACE

no set of concrete experiences does in reality exist, and usually the
identity of the original generalizer is unknown. The generalization is
merely a “fairyland” statement, a part of a world of words that does
not correspond to real life experiences. Writing that contains unchecked
generalizations of this kind is likely to be bad writing or worse,
dangerous writing. It is not aimed at truth. By its aid, groups in society
continue to believe what they want to believe, ignoring the real world.

Many well-intentioned writers commit errors of faulty generalization
by writing on subjects about which common sense should tell them
that they lack a sufficient fund of concrete experiences. The high school
orator who knows just what the Security Council of the UN should do
about, say, Yugoslavia is usually making this error. Without having
been to Yugoslavia, without knowing much about the economic con
ditions there or how they affect individual men, women, and children,
without knowing who controls those economic conditions, without un
derstanding the emotions of the people or the causes of those emotions,
often without even reading carefully firsthand accounts of reporters
on the scene, he somehow feels capable of solving Yugoslavia s prob
lems by applying a few elementary principles of political science
learned in the classroom. Perhaps he will find, if he attempts to get to
the bottom of politics in his own home town, that human problems are
a little more complex than he thinks.

Arriving at sound generalizations is, then, a difficult task. Neverthe
less, sound ideas are manufactured by human beings essentially like
ourselves. How do they do it? First, they turn to matters about which
they know something, matters with which they have had experience. Or,
if they have not had a sufficent number of experiences relating to their
idea, they devise means of having more. Finally, they use methods of
observation and thought which should carry a reasonable degree of
reliability. The average student is capable of following these procedures.

This book does not, for the most part, contain the sort of essay,
full of high level generalizations, which is often put before the college
student of composition as a model to imitate. True, most of us should
read, during the years when we are coming to maturity, the writings
of men of wide learning and deep insight, of men who face the difficult
questions of the significance of life on our planet. But if we hope to
arrive at that same point of experience and wisdom, we should serve
an apprenticeship nearer the base of the pyramid. The selections in

PREFACE xiii

this book often deal with important problems, but they deal with them
in such a way that the student can see the methods by which the
authors have reached their conclusions. The student is thus able to un
derstand how to embark upon investigations that will enable him to
duplicate the models set before him.

The arrangement of the articles in the text is from the concrete to the
abstract. The first section is concenied with the reporting of concrete
fact. The student will learn how good writers have a knack of seeing
particulars accurately and clearly. The second section presents essays
that arrive informally at generalizations. The writers of these essays per
ceive related facts and draw conclusions without embarking upon the ex
tensive research necessary for scientific accuracy. The third section
presents secondary source papers typical of the kind of “library paper”
that has proved valuable in college courses. The articles in the fourth sec
tion are based on primary source materials. These articles differ from
those in the second section in that the approach to the material is more
formal. The fifth section, comprised of case histories, once more shows
clearly the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, the gen
eral and the specific, in the creation of ideas. The sixth section gives
examples of numerous kinds of organization useful in the orderly presen
tation of ideas. The seventh section, consisting of “appreciations,” illus
trates human value judgments, subjective and often personal. The eighth
section, refutations, has obvious utility in providing models for student
writing. The final section, which gives an example of high level general
ization, offers the only form which the student cannot expect to dupli
cate well.

BAXTER HATHAWAY
JOHN MOORE

Contents

PREFACE IX

Section 1. OBSERVING AND REPORTING 1

WILLIAM FAULKNER: Wagon on the Road 6
FREDERIC PROKOSCH: After the Crack-Up 7
JOHN DOS PASSOS: The Camera Eye (14) 13
GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY: Night in the Woods 14
FRANCIS PARKMAN: The Buffalo 17

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: Ice 22

FAIRFAX DOWNEY: The Last Days of St. Pierre 24
Sample Theme Subjects 34

Section 2. INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 35

LOUIS ADAMIC: Thirty Million New Americans 38
LOVELL THOMPSON: How Serious Are the Comics 56
MRS. TROLLOPE: An Englishwoman in Ohio 63
BERGEN EVANS: I Pick Em Up 70
w. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS: The Negro Scientist 76
BRUCE BLIVEN: Westchester Women 87
PHILIP RAHV: Paleface and Redskin 91
Sample Theme Subjects 96

Section 3. SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 99

A. GRENFELL PRICE: The Causes of Failure of White

Man in the Tropics 107
FRANK LUTHER MOTT: Popular Sports in America,

1850-1865 125
Sample Theme Subjects 129

xvi CONTENTS

Section 4. PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 131

GEORGE GALLUP AND SAUL FORBES RAE: Thirty Dollars

a Week 135
EDWARD JENNER: An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects

of the Variolae Vaccinae, Known by the Name

of the Cow Pox 143
MADGE M. MCKINNEY: Training for Citizenship in the

Secondary Schools of New Yor/c City 149
BERTRAM B. FOWLER: Sharecroppers of the Sea 162
PAUL FATOUT: Yarning in the Eighteen Fifties 171
Sample Theme Subjects 184

Section 5. CASE HISTORIES 187

KIMBALL YOUNG: Projection of Parental Ambitions

upon Children 191
JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN: The Ring and the Conscience 194

EDWARD A. STRECKER AND FRANCIS T. CHAMBERS, JR. : *

Psychology of Alcoholism 206
RUTH L. PORTERFIELD: Women Available 213
KIMBALL YOUNG: A Case Study of Intracommunity

Conflict 222

WELLSON WHITMAN: Three Southern Towns 226
DONALD DAVIDSON: Brother Jonathan and Cousin

Roderick 242
Sample Theme Subjects 252

Section 6. TRADITIONAL PATTERNS IN

ORGANIZATION 253

FIRST PATTERN: Enumeration

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING: The Changing World 258
HOMER CROY: You Wouldn t Know the Old Farm Now 261
JAMES BRYCE: The Results Democratic Government
Has Given 272

SECOND PATTERN: Classification

CHARLES TODD AND ROBERT SONKIN: Ballads of the OklBS 276

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON: On Various Kinds of Thinking 284

CONTENTS xvii

THIRD PATTERN: Component Parts
TACITUS: Germania 298

BRUCE WINTON KNIGHT: How to Round Up Cannon
Fodder 312

FOURTH PATTERN: Cause

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: Rumor 326
JULIAN HUXLEY: Mice and Men 327

FIFTH PATTERN: Concession

CLIFFORD BARRETT: Mans Moral Responsibility 342
RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The American Scholar 348

SIXTH PATTERN: Analogy

DOROTHY GRAFLY: Art Criticism for Human Beings 352
WILSON FOLLETT: Are Children Vegetables? 354
HAMILTON BASSO: Italian Notebook: 1938 356
PAUL PARKER: The Iconography of Advertising Art 359

SEVENTH PATTERN: Comparison

JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS: Jefferson and Hamilton Today 367
ALDOUS HUXLEY: America and Europe 378
Sample Theme Subjects 387

Section 7. APPRECIATIONS 389

JAMES HUNEKER: Night and Its Melancholy Mysteries:

The Nocturnes of Chopin 393
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET: The “Conquistador” of

Archibald MacLeish 395
E. B. WHITE: Once More to the Lake 399
Sample Theme Subjects 406

Section 8. REFUTATIONS 409

THOMAS PAINE: The French Revolution 412
THEODORE DREISER: If Man Is Free, So Is All Matter 423
MAX WYLIE: Washboard Weepers 431
Sample Theme Subjects 439

Section 9. HIGH LEVEL GENERALIZATIONS 441

EDWARD M. MILLER: A Westerner Views the U.S.A. 444

THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

1. OBSERVING AND REPORTING

Observing and Reporting

A LTIIOUGH it is possible to reason logically upon false assump-
jLjL tions, the ideas and conclusions which are the result of a thought
process are only as sound as the facts which set that process in motion.
If the facts are not to be trusted, the conclusions drawn from them are
not to be trusted. Therefore, the first principle of sound thinking and
good writing is accuracy of observation.

Unfortunately, habit is one of the most dangerous enemies of ac
curacy of observation, for we often look at things without seeing them
at all. When we look at familiar objects what we see is determined
largely by what we expect to see. It is true that if these commonplace
things have undergone a sudden change since we last saw them, we
are jarred out of our mental lethargy and look at them afresh. If the
change is gradual, however, we fail to notice it.

Sometimes we accept a formula for an object or situation without
troubling to check it against our own original observation. For example,
the society around us tells us that a girl coming home from a dance is
always “starry-eyed.” For years students have written in themes that
girls coming home from dances are starry-eyed. Perhaps we can legiti
mately ask if they really are. Are all of them starry-eyed? Is the ob
server really looking at them as individuals or is he merely taking for
granted that they look like that because the stereotype tells him so?

A writer whose work contains such stereotypes may be called de
ductive minded. He applies to each situation a neat set of reactions
and ready-made formulas without bothering to check them against
the actual facts. The inductive minded writer, on the other hand, is

4 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

constantly aware of the changeability of the world around him. He
knows that no two objects or situations, however familiar, are exactly
alike and that no set of principles can be applied, untested, truthfully
more than once. He looks directly at the situation he wishes to de
scribe or evaluate and reports what he sees as accurately as he can.
The deductive minded person has the simpler time of it but he is not
the better writer.

Stereotyped writing is not good writing. The writer bores his reader
because he does not tell him anything new. He is not looking at the
world through his own eyes and consequently has little to say that is
worth the saying. Stereotyped thinking, upon which such writing is
based, is more dangerous. In this kind of thinking the writer arrives
at judgments that are based upon stereotypes upon preconceived no
tions of what, for example, any individual in a class is like. The rich
woman is arrogant and selfish; the Negro janitor is lazy, light-hearted,
and irrepressibly fond of singing; the old professor is lovable but absent-
minded and pedantic. Judgments about individuals based upon such
stereotypes can cause trouble because often they are not based upon
reality. We do not see at all what is in front of us. Instead we see, as
if in a mirror, the picture that is already in our minds. Too often we
do not know how the picture got into our minds in the first place, but
when we analyze our reactions we realize that we did not consciously
put it there. Instead, we absorbed it from the people around us; they
absorbed it from others; and on and on the chain goes.

Writing and thinking both come hard when the writer cannot see
for himself. Observing is his first step toward having ideas of his own
that are worth communicating. The nonobserver usually tries to hide
the poverty of his observing by writing about something with which
he can have had few contacts; he frequently denies the possibility
of originality of thought and expression because he supposes that every
body else borrows ideas just as he does. He forgets that men make ideas
by looking at the world around them and telling what they see there.

The observer who looks for himself soon finds plenty of ideas in his
head. Because he has built up for himself a mass of material of his own
about which he can say something, he no longer belongs to the class
of student writers who have nothing to say. Most of us need to orient
ourselves by looking at the world around us. It is the dulling force of
habit that leads us to believe that the world is brighter and more ex-

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 5

citing somewhere else. Brightness and excitement are made by the
minds of men who see meaning in what they touch upon.

All reporting, even of simple sense perceptions, reflects somewhat
the individual doing the perceiving. It is impossible to be entirely ob
jective. For purposes of discussion, however, we may say that a writer
is being objective when he describes sensations as they are immediately
apparent to his five senses. As soon as he makes a judgment or describes
the train of thought started in his own mind by these sensations his
reporting becomes subjective.

The selections that follow present the kind of writing in which few
judgments are made. The writers are coming to few conclusions; prin
cipally they are looking at the world and telling what they see there.
They are presenting scenes, attempting to communicate to the reader
concrete experiences. As will be noted elsewhere in this book, one of
the best ways to create good writing of any kind is to keep vivid this
sense of concrete experience. The student should begin here observing
how the writers of these passages obtain their effects.

The observations presented in this section fall into two main cate
gories. The first, of which the selections from Faulkner, Prokosch, Dos
Passos, and to a lesser extent Perry are examples, exhibits considerable
subjectivity. The things and events described are seen through the eyes
of a particular observer and colored by his state of mind. The second
kind the group comprised by Parkman, Thoreau, and Fairfax Downey
represents greater objectivity. These writers distinguish more clearly
what is outside themselves from what is inside.

Paradoxically, objective reporting is the more sophisticated or arti
ficial of the two kinds of observation. The child divides a perception
into its subjective and objective parts less readily than an adult does.
For many special purposes the growing child gradually learns to make
the distinction. The adult writer must sometimes relearn the art of
infusing objective reporting with the subjective at those times when
it is desirable to do so. It must be remembered, however, that in many
kinds of writing newspaper writing, for instance any admixture of
the subjective is undesirable.

THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

WAGON ON THE ROAD*

By William Faulkner

1. THE WAGON mounts the hill toward her. She passed it about a
mile back down the road. It was standing beside the road, the
mules asleep in the traces and their heads pointed in the direction
in which she walked. She saw it and she saw the two men squatting
beside a barn beyond the fence. She looked at the wagon and the
men once: a single glance all-embracing, swift, innocent and pro
found. She did not stop; very likely the men beyond the fence had
not seen her even look at the wagon or at them. Neither did she
look back. She went on out of sight, walking slowly, the shoes un
laced about her ankles, until she reached the top of the hill a mile
beyond. Then she sat down on the ditchbank, with her feet in the
shallow ditch, and removed the shoes. After a while she began to
hear the wagon. She heard it for some time. Then it came into sight,
mounting the hill.

2. The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and un-
greased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry slug
gish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewiney
silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady
and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does riot seem to progress. It
seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and for
ever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the
mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of
it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like
the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes be
tween darkness and day, like already measured thread being re
wound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial
and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it
seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though
it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape.

* From Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner. Reprinted by courtesy
of Random House, Inc.

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 7

ANALYSIS

1. At first reading this selection may well appear to be the simple, perceptive re
porting of a static scene. Is it really that? , t , , , A< ,

a. What is the difference between the scene reported in the first paragraph^ and
that in the second? t ^

b. From whose point of view is the whole scene seen and heard and felt?

2. Consider particularly the use of verbs in this selection.

a. What do you notice about the time element as indicated by the verb tenses?
What are the significant changes and why are they made?

b. Has the problem of time any bearing on the larger one of perception, of re
porting what one sees?

3. a. Is the girl who appears in the first paragraph still the central person in the
second?

b. Is she experiencing the thoughts and sensations recorded in the second par
agraph?

4. Are there any evidences of subjective reporting in this selection? If so, what
are they?

5. Is there any point to this selection, any generalization which the reporting leads
up to? Or is the writer presenting a scene for its own sake?

6. a. What words or phrases in this passage have precise, literal applications?
What ones do not?

b. List the figures of speech in this passage.

c. Which of the following phrases are used literally? Which are used figura
tively?

“The sharp and brittle crack and clatter”

“Dry sluggish reports”

“Hot still pinewiney silence”

“Mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis”

“Like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road”

“Like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool”

“As though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape”

d. Do figurative expressions aid in making the reporting more subjective?

e. If some other person were looking at this scene might his perceptions be dif
ferent from the ones given here?

/. How important are figures of speech in the communication of the exact “feel
ing” of a perception?

THE CRACK-UP*
By Frederic Prokosch

i. THE CLOUDS parted, the sun appeared once more. In less than a
minute all the moisture seemed to have been sucked back out of

* From The Asiatics (1935), by Frederic Prokosch. Published by Doubleday
and Company, Inc.

8 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

the earth. The wet glimmer faded from the rocks, the grasses grew
sere and mottled again.

2. And it was hot. Unbearably so for a few minutes, until the air
grew dry and light again. Even after the sky had become solidly
blue once more, some faint oppression remained hanging in the air.
High overhead I saw three hawks circling. I could see their shad
ows in the hollow declivity at my side, twisting and turning like
strange creatures under water.

3. I sat down on the brown gravel. Alone in the middle of enormous
Asia. But, thought I, this isn t solitude; this isn t real loneliness at
all. The whole sun-stricken country seemed alive, each pebble
shone with vitality.

4. I walked toward a small mound not far from the plane. I didn t
want to be near the plane itself. It terrified me. It looked like a
great clumsy bird shattered upon the rocks, its tiny head folded
forward, nothing left to it at all, dead and hollow with fright.

5. I felt very thirsty. I stood upon the hillock and looked all around.
To the north, the haze of the hills and the remote forests; to the
south, the glistening salty stretches; to the east, endless brown
earth; to the west, endless brown earth. Below me on my right a
serpentine path ran through the mounds and the boulders. It was
a dried-up river bed, cracked with the spring sunlight, shimmering
like copper dust.

6. I walked down toward the tufted shore. Everything was dry. Not
a drop.

7. But then I saw in a dark hollow a little red gleam. Yes, there
among the shadows of the rocks a few drops of water were still
waiting. Waiting to be sucked into earth and air until nothing was
left.

8. I lay down flat and leaned over the little red pond. The water
smelled like corroded lead. I drank, and I could feel it gliding all
the way down into my belly like a slim warm snake. I looked at the
water again and I could see tiny red animalcules floating in its
hairy recesses. I began to feel sick again.

9. I started to rise, but a delicate weariness tugged at me and held
me back. So I turned back and lay down upon the smooth brown
river dust and closed my eyes.

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 9

10. Physical uneasiness can instill odd thoughts into the mind
thoughts frilled up in all their elaborateness, in all the bizarre in
tuitive fullness of a dream. I thought for a few seconds that I was
dying, was on the very verge of death, was almost dead. “Are you
afraid of death?” I could hear the old countess whimpering through
the perfumed curtains: “What do you think of death? When do
you want to die?” Dimly I could hear her voice continuing. “Think
about death/ she whispered, “think of these thousands of creatures,
here in Teheran, here in Persia, here in Asia. Moving across the
sand, living in mud, crawling through the alleys of the dark neg
lected cities, dying in the reeds beside a river without a name, liv
ing and dying with nothing, not even a scrap of paper to state that
they existed; dying and living, living and dying, the two processes
growing faster and faster as our world grows older and staler,
now almost as indistinguishable as the colors in a revolving wheel.
Where s the one? Where s the other? Here s a living one that s
dead, here s a dead one still alive, a living one s dead life slowly
dying, a dead one s living death slowly dying. What can you make
of it? Anything? Anything at all?”

11. I was feverish, of course. This is what I thought that for a brief
while I actually had died, that for a few seconds I was dead, had
entered the darkness, was experiencing the first throbs of a dis
solution about to spread inside me as at the sound of a gong. And
then, there was a confusion of signals. Something went wrong at
the switches, some misunderstanding occurred, some slight error
on the control boards. By the merest accident I slipped back into
life. I was alive.

12. But everything exists forever, nothing ever vanishes completely.
Each second goes off into space and is held there forever, traveling
and spreading with unalterable speed, the sight of it now reaching
Betelgeuse on an unbelievable arrow of light, the tiniest ray of it
now filtering through the circles around Saturn. Somewhere now
is flashing the sight of Hannibal crossing the Alps, of Xerxes passing
into Asia Minor, of the first apeman rising out of the green twi
light of the swamps. And somewhere, I thought, I am still dead.
At some point in space a million miles away a flash of light is now
carrying me outward caught in the momentary state of death. And

10 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

now ten thousand miles farther. And now still farther. Somewhere
I am still dead, thought I, and 111 carry the thought of that with
me for the rest of my life.

13. I opened my eyes. It was growing dark already. A mile away
across the waste I could see the plane leaning upon the rocks like
a huge moth, wings brittle in death. Now I felt really and pro
foundly alone. It was a new thing; I could never have imagined it.
It was as if I were wearing a mask, or were made out of wax, or
were growing scales instead of skin. My body was beginning to feel
unreal. The fading light on the dead stalks two feet away might as
well have been the gleam of a star in the deep heaven.

14. I turned and looked at the dry river bed. High above it, passing
slowly through the gathering dusk, I could see faint shapes passing
westward. The shapes of the newly dead. A regular caravan of
them. There they were, the dim astonished spirits moving out of
their old life. To hell, or to heaven? There was no telling. Some
looked stiff and virtuous, others limp and degenerate. Some appeared
to be overwhelmed with delight, others bleak with detestation.
Most of them surprised me; they were people of a kind whose
existence I should never have suspected. People who had spent
their life in some sort of hiding. But now they had to move into
the open; they couldn t hide any longer: women with their hair
shaved, hands clasped in prayer; others without eyes, horribly fat,
the capitalists of the spirit; others dead of starvation, with faces
like lamps in a forsaken alleyway; others hideously, exhaustingly
insane; a few with faces made wonderfully expressive by lust, re
vealing every possible variety of degradation and decay; the un
employed ones, dead without hope, eyes not knowing where to
look for mercy and mouths wide open in a voiceless, grief -stricken
shriek of accusation; several quite rigid with solitude, men like
dried trees, arms raised in supplication cripples and suicides;
those dead in battle, lips pressed together with a sudden devastat
ing understanding, eyes bleeding; four or five with eyes exquisitely
tender there were the protected ones, the stupid ones, the lucky
flowerlike ones whom life hadn t touched; and finally the children,
with hard malicious eyes and bodies beautiful as ferns. More and
more of them, more and more thickly they seemed to pass, now
like a herd of dark slender animals, now like a great funnel of fog

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 11

swiftly expanding. Then they grew hazy. The sky grew darker.
Soon they would be gone, soon it would all be over, none would be
left. None at all, nothing, not a trace.

15. When I opened my eyes again the sky was dark, the land was
hidden in a strange flickering shadow. Firelight. And high above
me, the usual stars. Then I felt my body moving gently, and when
I looked again I saw that I was lying on a couch and that a dark
bare-chested man was gently massaging me.

16. When he saw that I was awake he stopped and looked at me
questioningly. He murmured in a rich low voice something that I
couldn t understand. I stared blankly. He murmured something
else. Still I didn t answer. Then he said, in a broken almost in
comprehensible accent, “Perhaps Englishman, speaking English?”

17. I nodded. He looked pleased.

18. I raised my head and glanced around. I was lying on a rug out
side a tent, and beside this tent stood another tent, and beyond this
a third one, large and elaborate. I could see slender tree trunks
shining in the firelight, and lying on the grass in front of the fire
four great spotted dogs, jowls resting between their paws.

19. “Very sick,” said the big brown man, “very sick.” He shook his
head sadly. “But better now, much better.” He nodded his head.

I breathed deeply. “Did you find me?” I asked him.
He looked puzzled for a moment. Then he smiled and nodded
again.

“And you brought me here?”

He thought for a moment. “No, camel brought you here.”

I pointed at the tents. “Your home?”

20. He smiled again, a great white-toothed rich-lipped smile. Sweat
was dripping from his bearded chin and his eyebrows. “No, not
home.” He nodded toward the largest of the tents. “Prince Ghura-
guzlu he go hunting here.”

21. I could see naked, sweating boys passing back and forth in front
of the fire, carrying pots and dishes in and out of the tent. A fierce-
eyed old man in a huge white turban was squatting beside the fire,
stirring and stirring away in a big black bowl.

22. “Do you serve Prince Ghuraguzlu?” said I. He nodded. “What is
your name?”

23. He looked embarrassed. “Rama Singh,” he replied, gazing down-

12 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

ward. His eyelids shone like satin, his lashes cast long slanting
shadows on his cheek bones.

24. He must have brought me several miles, thought I. We were in
the hills, the earth smelled rich and mossy, the larch trees were
rustling in the hot night wind.

25. Presently Rama Singh rose and walked into the big tent. A min
ute or two later he reappeared. He leaned over me. “Feeling bet
ter?”

I nodded.

“Prince Ghuraguzlu desiring to see you.”

26. He put his strong male-smelling arm under me and helped me
to my feet. Then he led me slowly into the tent.

ANALYSIS

1. Make an outline of this selection.

a. What are the main divisions of your outline?

b. Are they based on chronological sequence? On the distinction between hallu
cination and sanity?

2. a. When you are trying to describe the sensations you have had in an hallu
cination or a dream can you express your experiences in the same way that you
would if you were describing a real-life situation?

b. To which of the five senses do you refer most in describing a dream?

c. If you can trace the component parts of your dream back to experiences you
have had in real life, do you find that your memory of these real experiences
is more or less vivid than your memory of the dream? How do the elements
of your description compare with those in this passage?

3. a. At what point does the first part of this selection end?

b. Has the observation up to this point been primarily objective or primarily
subjective?

c. Might any observer be expected to note precisely the same objects and to
have the same feelings about them?

d. Is it clear at all times which of the observations given here are objective and
which are colored by the narrator s feelings?

4. List the metaphors and similes used in this selection. Compare these figures of
speech with those used in the Faulkner selection.

5. Underline the particular words and phrases that indicate to the reader the tran
sitions from observation of the external world to observation of the world of the
narrator s mind.

6. Note that during his hallucination the narrator is expressing many generaliza
tions that would normally be made only after much observation. Some of these
generalizations are translated into concrete form, as when he sees people repre
senting problems of morality rather than the problems themselves.

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 13

a. How does this reporting of sensation and perception differ from the report
ing in the first part?

7. a. Are more figures of speech in the part concerned with the narrator s mental
wanderings than in the more objective parts?

b. Are the figures from the first part similar to those in the second? How do
they differ?

THE CAMERA EYE (14)*
By John Dos Passos

i. SUNDAY NIGHTS when we had fishballs and baked beans and Mr.
Garfield read to us in a very beautiful reading voice and every
body was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop because he
was reading The Man without a Country and it was a very ter
rible story and Aaron Burr had been a very dangerous man and
this poor young man had said “Damn the United States; I never
hope to hear her name again” and it was a very terrible thing to say
and the grayhaired judge was so kind and good and the judge
sentenced me and they took me far away to foreign lands on a
frigate and the officers were kind and good and spoke in kind
grave very sorry reading voices like Mr. Garfield and everything
was very kind and grave and very sorry and frigates and the blue
Mediterranean and islands and when I was dead I began to cry
and I was afraid the other boys would see I had tears in my eyes

2. American shouldn t cry he should look kind and grave and very
sorry when they wrapped me in the stars and stripes and brought
me home on a frigate to be buried I was so sorry I never remem
bered whether they brought me home or buried me at sea but
anyway I was wrapped in Old Glory

ANALYSIS

1. Compare this selection with the one by Frederic Prokosch.

a. How are they alike? How do they differ?

b. Are the similarities and differences determined by the kind of reporting or
observing in each?

2. How much of this selection deals with concrete material? How much of it
does not?

* From The 42nd Parallel ( 1930), by John Dos Passos. Published by Houghton
Mifflin Company. Reprinted by permission of the author.

14 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

Is there any evidence in the organization or the writing in this passage to in
dicate a “point,” a judgment that the author is making? If so, what is the na
ture of the judgment?

Examine the words Dos Passos uses here and comment on their effectiveness in
aiding or obscuring the land of reporting and observing the author is doing.

NIGHT IN THE WOODS*

By George Sessions Perry

1. LATER, there being two axes and Harmie having a cold, Sam went
with Mamma to cut some wood and was beaten at it and proud of
Mamma. Then, near dark, the wind lay and Sam ate a couple of
sweet potatoes, called the dogs, and went to the woods.

2. Now he was a tall man striding through the naked woods, which
were clothed only with falling night, to hunt down the furred ani
mals; following Zoonie and the cur, who were busily reading and
editing the tangle of trails on the woods floor, disregarding the field-
mice and rabbit trails, the bird tracks and those of the domestic
stock that had wandered here, and the faint, lingering traces of
squirrel musk.

3. The dogs were transfigured. They were no longer winners after
buttermilk or fire heat, were no longer slinkers or sluggards, but
were roaming the dark woods with the strange dignity of things
doing what they were born to do, of things afire with mastery and
fierce intention.

4. Now Zoonie was chipping the brittle night to pieces with his
small, fast, sharp bark, and Sam knew an animal was marooned in
the night there above the little dog. It proved to be a possum, and as
Sam climbed the blackjack tree, armored as it was with toothed
bark, he was full of the hot flush of the chase and the haunting
minor dissonance of sympathy that goes out to a thing that is
alone and is doomed and that knows it.

5. Sam could not push it out on the ground because the dogs would
slash it and ruin the fur. So with a stick and the light he toyed
with the beast until it began to play dead. Once it began the pre
tense, Sam knew it would continue that all night.

* From Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. Copyright 1941
by George Sessions Perry. Reprinted by arrangement with The Viking Press,

N. Y.

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 15

6. Soon he climbed down the tree with it, holding onto its hairless
tail, and fought off the dogs, though the cur was so fierce in his
determination to get his teeth into the possum that Sam was for
a moment afraid of him. Even so, Sam pretended not to be, and
beat him away with a heavy stick.

7. When the dogs were launched again and Sam had walked
two hundred yards, he heard a rattling in the leaves nearby and
went to it. Suddenly the light fell on a skunk, all shining and black
in the radiance of the lantern, perfectly confident that whatever
manner of creature was approaching, that creature would know
what would happen to him if he came any closer.

8. As Sam set the lantern down, the skunk, with thrilling poise,
turned his stern to Sam and eyed him critically over his shoulder,
sure of his weapon.

9. Sam was afraid that the slight but abrupt noise of cocking the
gun would startle the skunk and launch him on his offensive of
chemical warfare. But Sam also knew that in any conflict the
worst thing of all is to be afraid. Firmly his right thumb drew back
the hammer which would drive home the firing pin. At the re
sultant clicking sound, which seemed sharp and loud in the tense
silence, a tremor ran over the skunk. Then through the notch in
the rear sight and just above the lump of darkness which was the
front sight, Sam could see the skunk s left eye, bright and calm.
Slowly, so as not to spoil the aim, Sam s trigger finger closed, and
in a single instant the skunk was a dead thing.

10. Where a moment ago it had been all loveliness and calm cer
tain threat, it was now a lump of meat to be denuded with great
care, to be robbed of its shining coat and left in nakedness to
freeze and thaw and rot.

11. And now the dogs were barking somewhere off in the night, far
ahead, to be reached before the quarry should run through the
intermeshing treetops and escape. Sam picked up his things and
began running to them.

12. When Sam came in next morning just at dawn, having taken a
sight on the north star which was the only one he knew defi
nitely, since the two stars that form the front of the cup of the
Big Dipper point outward toward it he had the hides of seven pos
sums, one skunk, one coon and one ring-tail, and an amount of

16 . THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

respect for Mamma s yellow cur that was Mamma-big. In the first
place, to tree a ring-tail is not a sorry dog s job, and the coon, which
had made his final stand on a log in the middle of a creek, had
fought that yellow dog magnificently and shrewdly, had half
drowned him several times. But the yellow dog had never yielded an
inch, oblivious of everything except his driving desire to fight and
kill, while Zoonie attacked from the rear, until Sam had been able
to shoot the coon.

13. There had also been some pretense made at a fox race when
the dogs happened on one, but he was out of their class when it
came to speed and soon convinced them.

14. Now Sam was coming into the yard and the kids ran to meet
him and he let them take his burdens. Mamma, who was standing
in the kitchen door, said come tank up on breakfast and then get
some sleep and she d wake him up later for a big roast-possum
dinner. Sam had brought home four, it being out of the question
to carry more, and Mamma said she d just roast them all and use
the left-overs for sandwich meat for the kids.

15. After breakfast he got out of his clothes and went to bed, falling
almost immediately into that exotic, delicious daytime sleep that
waits for those who have hunted hard, who have not slept through,
but lived through, the raw violence of the night.

ANALYSIS

1. Study the author s methods of describing feelings and large, complicated per
ceptions.

a. Mark off the outstanding descriptions.

b. Rewrite four of these descriptions and try to give the same meaning in terms
of precise detail, rather than through figurative language.

a. a. Point out the passages where the author has carefully put in details; for ex
ample, “the skunk s left eye* instead of simply “the skunk s eye”; “Firmly his
right thumb drew back the hammer which would drive home the firing pin.”

b. Rewrite these sentences by using summary phrases; for example, “He cocked
the gun.”

c. How important are the details to the effectiveness of the whole selection?

3. Note where the detailed account of the night s actions breaks off and the sum
mary begins. Note also that the author describes in some detail two or three
other adventures in the middle of the summary.

a. Why did he not proceed to these before starting to summarize?

b. What would the effect have been if he had described in detail all the events
of the night?

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 17

4. Note that two incidents are described in detail in the first part of the selection:
the killing of the possum and the killing of the skunk.

a. How many paragraphs are devoted to the possum incident? How many to
the skunk?

b. Would one paragraph have been sufficient for each of these incidents?

c. What is gained or lost by treating these incidents so fully?

5. a. How many major divisions can you find in the entire selection? Or to ask
the same question in another way: the paragraphs can be reduced to what
number without undue violence to customary principles of paragraphing?

b. Why has the author made many more paragraphs than this minimum
number?

6. To what extent is the paragraphing based upon logical divisions of thought?
To what extent upon chronological divisions?

7. Is this selection primarily subjective or objective reporting? Defend your de
cision.

THE BUFFALO*
By Francis Parkman

i. THE GROUND was none of the best for a race, and grew worse
continually as we proceeded; indeed, it soon became desperately
bad, consisting of abrupt hills and deep hollows, cut by frequent
ravines not easy to pass. At length, a mile in advance, we saw a
band of bulls. Some were scattered grazing over a green declivity,
while the rest were crowded together in the wide hollow below.
Making a circuit, to keep out of sight, we rode towards them, until
we ascended a hill, within a furlong of them, beyond which noth
ing intervened that could possibly screen us from their view. We
dismounted behind the ridge, just out of sight, drew our saddle-
girths, examined our pistols, and mounting again, rode over the
hill, and descended at a canter towards them, bending close to our
horses necks. Instantly they took the alarm: those on the hill de
scended, those below gathered into a mass, and the whole got
into motion, shouldering each other along at a clumsy gallop. We
followed, spurring our horses to full speed; and as the herd rushed,
crowding and trampling in terror through an opening in the hills,
we were close at their heels, half suffocated by the clouds of dust.
But as we drew near, their alarm and speed increased; our horses,
being new to the work, showed signs of the utmost fear, bounding

* From The Oregon Trail (1920), by Francis Parkman. Published by Little,
Brown and Company.

18 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

violently aside as we approached, and refusing to enter among the
herd. The buffalo now broke into several small bodies, scampering
over the hills in different directions, and I lost sight of Shaw;
neither of us knew where the other had gone. Old Pontiac ran like
a frantic elephant up hill and down hill, his ponderous hoofs
striking the prairie like sledge hammers. He showed a curious mix
ture of eagerness and terror, straining to overtake the panic-stricken
herd, but constantly recoiling in dismay as we drew near. The fugi
tives, indeed, offered no very attractive spectacle, with their
shaggy manes and the tattered remnants of their last winter s hair
covering their backs in irregular shreds and patches, and flying
off in the wind as they ran. At length I urged my horse close behind
a bull, and after trying in vain, by blows and spurring, to bring
him alongside, I fired from this disadvantageous position. At the
report Pontiac swerved so much that I was again thrown a little
behind the game. The bullet, entering too much in the rear, failed
to disable; for a buffalo requires to be shot at particular points, or
he will certainly escape. The herd ran up a hill, and I followed in
pursuit. As Pontiac rushed headlong down on the other side, I saw
Shaw and Henry descending the hollow on the right, at a leisurely
gallop; and in front, the buffalo were just disappearing behind the
crest of the next hill, their short tails erect, and their hoofs twin
kling through a cloud of dust.

At that moment I heard Shaw and Henry shouting to me; but
the muscles of a stronger arm than mine could not have checked
at once the furious course of Pontiac, whose mouth was as insensi
ble as leather. Added to this, I rode him that morning with a snaf
fle, having the day before, for the benefit of my other horse, un
buckled from my bridle the curb which I commonly used. A
stronger and hardier brute never trod the prairie; but the novel
sight of the buffalo filled him with terror, and when at full speed
he was almost incontrollable. Gaining the top of the ridge, I saw
nothing of the buffalo; they had all vanished amid the intricacies of
the hills and hollows. Reloading my pistols, in the best way I could,
I galloped on until I saw them again scuttling along at the base
of the hill, their panic somewhat abated. Down went old Pontiac
among them, scattering them to the right and left; and then we
had another long chase. About a dozen bulls were before us, scour-

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 19

ing over the hills, rushing down the declivities with tremendous
weight and impetuosity, and then laboring with a weary gallop
upward. Still Pontiac, in spite of spurring and beating, would not
close with them. One bull at length fell a little behind the rest,
and by a dint of much effort, I urged my horse within six or eight
yards of his side. His back was darkened with sweat: he was
panting heavily, while his tongue lolled out a foot from his jaws.
Gradually I came up abreast of him, urging Pontiac with leg and
rein nearer to his side, when suddenly he did what buffalo in such
circumstances will always do: he slackened his gallop, and turn
ing towards us, with an aspect of mingled rage and distress, low
ered his huge, shaggy head for a charge. Pontiac, with a snort,
leaped aside in terror, nearly throwing me to the ground, as I was
wholly unprepared for such an evolution. I raised my pistol in a
passion to strike him on the head, but thinking better of it, fired
the bullet after the bull, who had resumed his flight; then drew
rein, and determined to rejoin my companions. It was high time.
The breath blew hard from Pontiac s nostrils, and the sweat rolled
in big drops down his sides; I myself felt as if drenched in warm
water. Pledging myself to take my revenge at a future opportunity,
I looked about for some indications to show me where I was, and
what course I ought to pursue; I might as well have looked for
landmarks in the midst of the ocean. How many miles I had run
or in what direction, I had no idea; and around me the prairie was
rolling in steep swells and pitches, without a single distinctive fea
ture to guide me. I had a little compass hung at my neck; and ig
norant that the Platte at this point diverged considerably from its
easterly course, I thought that by keeping to the northward I
should certainly reach it. So I turned and rode about two hours in
that direction. The prairie changed as I advanced, softening away
into easier undulations, but nothing like the Platte appeared, nor
any sign of a human being: the same wild endless expanse lay
around me still; and to all appearance I was as far from my object
as ever. I began now to think myself in danger of being lost, and
reining in my horse, summoned the scanty share of woodcraft that
I possessed ( if that term is applicable upon the prairie ) to extricate
me. It occurred to me that the buffalo might prove my best guides.
I soon found one of the paths made by them in their passage to

20 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

the river: it ran nearly at right angles to my course; but turning
my horse s head in the direction it indicated, his freer gait and
erected ears assured me that I was right.

3. But in the meantime my ride had been by no means a solitary
one. The face of the country was dotted far and wide with count
less hundreds of buffalo. They trooped along in files and columns,
bulls, cows, and calves, on the green faces of the declivities in front.
They scrambled away over the hills to the right and left; and far
off, the pale blue swells in the extreme distance were clotted with
innumerable specks. Sometimes I surprised shaggy old bulls graz
ing alone, or sleeping behind the ridges I ascended. They would
leap up at my approach, stare stupidly at me through their tangled
manes, and then gallop heavily away. The antelope were very
numerous; and as they are always bold when in the neighborhood
of buffalo, they would approach to look at me, gaze intently with
their great round eyes, then suddenly leap aside, and stretch
lightly away over the prairie, as swiftly as a race horse. Squalid,
ruffianlike wolves sneaked through the hollows and sandy ravines.
Several times I passed through villages of prairie dogs, who sat,
each at the mouth of his burrow, holding his paws before him in
a supplicating attitude, and yelping away most vehemently, whisk
ing his little tail with every squeaking cry he uttered. Prairie dogs
are not fastidious in their choice of companions; various long,
checkered snakes were sunning themselves in the midst of the
village, and demure little gray owls, with a large white ring
around each eye, were perched side by side with the rightful in
habitants. The prairie teemed with life. Again and again I looked
toward the crowded hillsides, and was sure I saw horsemen; and
riding near, with a mixture of hope and dread, for Indians were
abroad, I found them transformed into a group of buffalo. There
was nothing in human shape amid all this vast congregation of
brute forms.

4. When I turned down the buffalo path, the prairie seemed changed:
only a wolf or two glided by at intervals, like conscious felons, never
looking to the right or left. Being now free from anxiety, I was at
leisure to observe minutely the objects around me; and here, for the
first time, I noticed insects wholly different from any of the varieties
found farther to the eastward. Gaudy butterflies fluttered about my

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 21

horse s head; strangely formed beetles, glittering with metallic luster,
were crawling upon plants that I had never seen before; multitudes
of lizards, too, were darting like lightning over the sand.
5. I had run to a great distance from the river. It cost me a long ride
on the buffalo path, before I saw, from the ridge of a sandhill, the
pale surface of the Platte glistening in the midst of its desert val
ley, and the faint outline of the hills beyond waving along the sky.
From where I stood, not a tree nor a bush nor a living thing was
visible throughout the whole extent of the sun-scorched landscape.
In half an hour I came upon the trail, not far from the river; and
seeing that the party had not yet passed, I turned eastward to meet
them, old Pontiac s long swinging trot again assuring me that I was
right in doing so. Having been slightly ill on leaving camp in the
morning, six or seven hours of rough riding had fatigued me ex
tremely. I soon stopped, therefore, flung my saddle on the ground,
and with my head resting on it and my horse s trail-rope tied loosely
to my arm, lay waiting the arrival of the party, speculating mean
while on the extent of the injuries Pontiac had received. At length
the white wagon coverings rose from the verge of the plain. By a
singular coincidence, almost at the same moment two horsemen ap
peared coming down from the hills. They were Shaw and Henry,
who had searched for me a while in the morning, but well knowing
the futility of the attempt in such a broken country, had placed
themselves on the top of the highest hill they could find, and picket
ing their horses near them, as a signal to me, had lain down and
fallen asleep. The stray cattle had been recovered, as the emigrants
told us, about noon. Before sunset, we pushed forward eight miles
farther.

ANALYSIS

1. a. How does this selection compare with the two preceding as to the subjec
tivity of the reporting?

b. At what points do the writer s feelings color his perceptions?

c. Does this subjectivity affect the tone of the selection as a whole?

2. Does the fact that the author is taking part in the action described affect the
nature of the reporting of the action?

3. The paragraphs are long here. Could they be broken into smaller paragraphs
without change of wording?

a. Examine especially Paragraph 2 in this connection. Note that the order is
almost entirely chronological.

22 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

b. In what respect do Paragraphs 3 and 4 violate the strict chronological
pattern?

4. In Paragraphs 3 and 4 Parkman is generalizing upon perceptions. He is not de
scribing each perception as it comes to him, but is making general statements
about groups of perceptions. His generalizations are, however, so close to single
perceptions here that we would call the passage highly concrete.

a. Examine these two paragraphs closely to see exactly what is meant here.

5. What metaphors and similes can you find in this selection?

ICE*
By Henry David Thoreau

i. THE POND had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest
and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general
freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being
hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that
ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can
lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on
the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only
two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the
water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows
in the sand where some creature has traveled about and doubled on
its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis worms
made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased
it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are
deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of
most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to
study it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you
find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to
be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are con
tinually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet compara
tively solid and dark, that is, you see .the water through it. These
bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter,
very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them
through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square
inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendic
ular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex up
ward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles

* FiomWdden (1854).

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 23

one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within
the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I some
times used to cast in stones to try the strength of the ice, and those
which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very
large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came
to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those
large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had
formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake.
But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian sum
mer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color
of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and
though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air
bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together,
and lost their regularity; they were no longer one directly over an
other, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlap
ping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The
beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom.
Being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied
with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling
sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed
around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the
two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper,
and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge,
a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was sur
prised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with
great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of
five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there
between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch
thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had
burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the
largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the in
finite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the
under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each,
in its degree, had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath
to melt and rot it. These are the little air guns which contribute to
make the ice crack and whoop.

24 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

ANALYSIS

1. Is Thoreau s report of Walden Pond in winter subjective reporting or objective
reporting? What evidence can you find in support of your opinion?

2. a. What order does Thoreau follow in examining the ice?

b. Does he follow some clearly marked path from general or over-all picture to
one that is more minute?

c. Does he merely assemble details that seem to him to be significant; or does
he allow the picture of the pond to grow on the reader through the accumula
tion of the details?

3. a. Is Thoreau trying to make a “point” or “points” in this selection?

b. If so, what is the relation between his points and the details of observation
that he makes?

4. Study the words used here the adjectives, the verbs, the images.

a. To what extent does word choice indicate objective or subjective reporting?

5. a. What is the function of time in this selection?

b. How does it help the kind of reporting Thoreau is doing here?

6. Thoreau wrote this passage as one long paragraph.

a. Into how many main parts can this paragraph be divided?

b. Mark off the places where one subdivision ends and the next begins.

c. Which of these divisions receives the fullest treatment?

7. Note the places where Thoreau attempts to give precise measurements for ice
and bubbles.

a. Does this accuracy influence perceptibly the effect of the piece on the reader?

LAST DAYS OF ST. PIERRE*
By Fairfax Downey

THE PLANTER

1. How GRACIOUSLY had fortune smiled on Fernand Clerc! Little past
the age of forty, in this year of 1902, he was the leading planter of
the fair island of Martinique. Sugar from his broad cane fields, mo
lasses, and mellow rum had made him a man of wealth, a millionaire.
All his enterprises prospered.

2. Were the West Indies, for all their beauty and their bounty, some
times powerless to prevent a sense of exile, an ache of homesickness
in the heart of a citizen of the Republic? Then there again fate had

* From Disaster Fighters, copyright, 1938, by Fairfax Downey. Courtesy of
G. P. Putnam s Sons.

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 25

been kind to Fernand Clerc. Elected a member of the Chamber of
Deputies, it was periodically his duty and his pleasure to embark
and sail home to attend its sessions home to France, to Paris.

3. Able, respected, good-looking, blessed with a charming wife and
children, M. Clerc found life good indeed. With energy undepleted
by the tropics, he rode through the island visiting his properties. Tall
and thick grew the cane stalks of his plantation at Vive on the slopes
of Mont Pelee. Mont Pelee Naked Mountain well named when
lava erupting from its cone had stripped it bare of its verdure. But
that was long ago. Not since 1851 had its subterranean fires flared up
and then but insignificantly. Peaceful now, its crater held the lovely
Lake of Palms, whose wooded shores were a favorite picnic spot
for parties from St. Pierre and Fort-de-France. Who need fear tow
ering Mont Pelee, once mighty, now mild, an extinct volcano?

4. Yet this spring M. Clerc and all Martinique received a rude shock.
The mountain was not dead, it seemed. White vapors veiled her
summit, and by May second she had overlaid her green mantle with
a gown of gray cinders. Pelee muttered and fumed like an angry
woman told her day was long past. Black smoke poured forth, il
lumined at night by jets of flame and flashes of lightning. The gray
ish snow of cinders covered the countryside, and the milky waters
of the Riviere Blanche altered into a muddy and menacing torrent.

5. Nor was Pelee uttering only empty threats. On May fifth, M. Clerc
at Vive beheld a cloud rolling from the mountain down the valley.
Sparing his own acres, the cloud and the stream of smoking lava
which it masked, enveloped the Guerin sugar factory, burying its
owner, his wife overseer, and twenty-five workmen and domestics.

6. Dismayed by this tragedy, M. Clerc and many others moved from
the slopes into St. Pierre. The city was crowded, its population of
twenty-five thousand swollen to forty thousand, and the throngs that
filled the market and the cafes or strolled through the gorgeously
luxuriant Jardin des Plantes lent an air of added animation, of al
most hectic gaiety. When M. Clerc professed alarm at the behavior
of Pelee to his friends, he was answered with shrugs of shoulders.
Danger? On the slopes perhaps, but scarcely here in St. Pierre down
by the sea.

7. Thunderous, scintillant, Mont Pelee staged a magnificent display
of natural fireworks on the night of May seventh. Whites and Negroes

26 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

stared up at it, fascinated. Some were frightened but more took a
childlike joy in the vivid spectacle. It was as if the old volcano were
celebrating the advent of tomorrow s fete day.

8. M. Fernand Clerc did not sleep well that night. He breakfasted
early in the household where he and his family were guests and again
expressed his apprehensions to the large group of friends and rela
tives gathered at the table. Politely and deferentially for one does
not jeer a personage and man of proven courage they heard him
out, hiding their scepticism.

9. The voice of the planter halted in midsentence; and he half rose,
his eyes fixed on the barorr^eter. Its needle was actually fluttering!

10. M. Clerc pushed back his chair abruptly and commanded his car
riage at once. A meaning look to his wife and four children, and
they hastened to make ready. Their hosts and the rest followed them
to the door. Non, merci, none would join their exodus. An revoir. A
demain.

11. From the balcony of their home, the American Consul, Thomas
Prentis, and his wife waved to the Clerc family driving by. “Stop,”
the planter ordered and the carriage pulled up. Best come along,
the planter urged. His American friends thanked him. There was
no danger, they laughed, and waved again to the carriage disappear
ing in gray dust as racing hoofs and wheels sped it out of the city
of St. Pierre.

THE GOVERNOR

12. Governor Mouttet, ruling Martinique for the Republic of France,
glared up at rebellious Mont P^lee. This peste of a volcano was de
ranging the island. There had been no such crisis since its captures
by the English, who always relinquished it again to France, or the
days when the slaves revolted. A great pity that circumstances be
yond his control should damage the prosperous record of his ad
ministration, the Governor reflected.

13. That miserable mountain was disrupting commerce. Its rumblings
drowned out the band concerts in the Savane. Its pyrotechnics dis
tracted glances which might far better have dwelt admiringly on the
proverbial beauty of the women of Martinique. . . . Now attention
was diverted to a cruder work of Nature, a sputtering volcano. Par-
bleu! It was enough to scandalize any true Frenchman.

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 27

14. Governor Mouttet sighed and pored over the reports laid before
him. He had appointed a commission to study the eruption and get
at the bottom of I affaire Pelee, but meanwhile alarm was spreading.
People were fleeing the countryside and thronging into St. Pierre,
deserting that city for Fort-de-France, planning even to leave the
island. Steamship passage was in heavy demand. The Roraima, due
May eighth, was booked solid out of St. Pierre, one said. This would
never do. Steps must be taken to prevent a panic which would scat
ter fugitives throughout Martinique or drain a colony of France of
its inhabitants.

15. A detachment of troops was despatched by the Governor to St.
Pierre to preserve order and halt the exodus. His Excellency, no man
to send others where he himself would not venture, followed with
Mme. Mouttet and took up residence in that city. Certainly his pres
ence must serve to calm these unreasoning, exaggerated fears. He
circulated among the populace, speaking soothing words. Mes en-
fants, the Governor avowed, Mont Pelee rumbling away there is only
snoring soundly in deep slumber. Be tranquil.

36. Yet, on the ominous night of May seventh, as spurts of flame
painted the heavens, the Governor privately confessed to inward
qualms. What if the mountain should really rouse? Might it not then
cast the mortals at its feet into a sleep deeper than its own had been,
a sleep from which they would never awaken?

THE CHIEF OFFICER

17. Ellery S. Scott, chief officer of the Quebec Line steamship Rora
ima, stood on the bridge with Captain Muggah as the vessel bore
down on Martinique. A column of smoke over the horizon traced
down to the 4500-foot summit of Mont Pelee. So the old volcano was
acting up! Curiosity on the bridge ran high as anchor was dropped
in the St. Pierre roadstead about six o clock on the morning of May
eighth. But all seemed well ashore. The streets, twisting and climb
ing between the bright-colored houses, were filled with crowds in
gay holiday attire.

18. Promptly the agents came aboard. The volcano? But certainly it
was erupting and causing inconvenience. But there was no danger,
regardless of the opinion of that Italian skipper yesterday who had
said that had he seen Vesuvius looking like Pelee, he would have de-

28 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

parted from Naples as fast as he was going to leave St. Pierre. Al
though the authorities refused him clearance and threatened penal
ties, he had sailed in haste, with only half his cargo.

19. By the way, the agents continued, the passenger list was to be
considerably augmented: sixty first-class anxious to leave St. Pierre.
Here they were boarding now with bag and baggage. Could they be
humored, and the Roraima sail for St. Lucia at once, returning to
discharge its Martinique cargo? the agents inquired of Captain
Muggah.

20. Chief Officer Scott, ordered below to inspect the stowage, thought
of his boy in the forecastle. A good lad this eldest son of his. Used
to say he d have a ship of his own some day and keep on his father
as first mate. No, his father planned a better career than the sea for
him. The boy was slated to go to college and be a lawyer. This
would be his last voyage.

21. Stowed shipshape and proper as Scott knew he would find it, the
cargo plainly could not be shifted without a good deal of difficulty.
The Martinique consignment lay above that for St. Lucia, and it
would be a heavy task to discharge at the latter port first. Scott so
reported.

22. The agents hesitated briefly. To be sure, sixty first-class passengers
were to be obliged if possible but ah, well, let them wait a little
longer. The Roraima would sail as soon as the upper layer of cargo
was landed.

23. Ship s bells tolled the passing hours. Pelee yonder growled hoarsely
and belched black smoke. A little before eight, Chief Officer Scott
apprehensively turned his binoculars on the summit.

THE PRISONER

24. It was dark in the underground dungeon of the St. Pierre prison,
but thin rays of light filtered through the grated opening in the
upper part of the cell door. Enough so that Auguste Ciparis could
tell when it was night and when it was day.

25. Not that it mattered much unless a man desired to count the days
until he should be free. What good was that? One could not hurry
them by. Therefore Auguste stolidly endured them with the long
patience of Africa. The judge had declared him a criminal and
caused him to be locked up here. Thus it was settled and nothing

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 29

was to be done. Yet it was hard, this being shut out of life up there
in the gay city hard when one was only twenty-five and strong
and lusty.

26. Auguste slept and dozed all he could. Pele*e was rumbling away in
the distance each day the jailer bringing him food and water
seemed more excited about it but the noise, reaching the sub
terranean cell only as faint thunder, failed to keep the Negro
awake. . . .

27. Glimmerings of the dawn of May eighth filtered through the grat
ing into the cell, and Auguste stirred into wakefulness. This being a
fete day, imprisonment was less tolerable. What merriment his
friends would be making up there in the squares of St. Pierrel He
could imagine the sidelong glances and the swaying hips of the mu
latto girls he might have been meeting today. Auguste stared sul
lenly at the cell door. At least the jailer might have been on time
with his breakfast.

28. The patch of light in the grating winked out into blackness. Ail
Ai! All of a sudden it was night again.

II

29. On the morning of May eighth, 1902, the clocks of St. Pierre ticked
on toward ten minutes of eight when they would stop forever.
Against a background of bright sunshine, a huge column of vapor
rose from the cone of Mont Pel6e.

30. A salvo of reports as from heavy artillery. Then, choked by lava
boiled to white heat by fires in the depths of the earth, Pelee with a
terrific explosion blew its head off.

31. Like a colossal Roman candle it shot out streaks of flame and fiery
globes. A pall of black smoke rose thousands of feet in the air, dark
ening the heavens. Silhouetted by a red, infernal glare, Pelee flung
aloft viscid masses which rained incandescent ashes on land and sea.

32. Then, jagged and brilliant as the lightning flashes, a fissure opened
in the flank of the mountain toward St. Pierre. Out of it issued an
immense cloud which rushed with unbelievable rapidity down on
the doomed city and the villages of Carbet and Le Precheur.

33. In three minutes that searing, suffocating cloud enveloped them,
and forty thousand people died!

34. Fernand Clerc, the planter, watched from Mont Parnasse, one

30 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

mile east of St. Pierre, where he had so recently breakfasted.
Shrouded in such darkness as only the inmost depths of a cavern af
ford, he reached out for the wife and children he could not see and
gathered them in blessed safety into his arms. But the relatives, the
many friends he had left so short a while ago, the American consul
and his wife, who had waved him a gay goodbye them he would
never see alive again. . . .

35. In that vast brazier which was St. Pierre, Governor Mouttet may
have lived the instant long enough to realize that Pelee had in truth
awakened and that eternal sleep was his lot and his wife s and that
of all those whose flight he had discouraged. . . .

36. Down in that deep dungeon cell of his Auguste Ciparis blinked in
the swift-fallen night. Through the grating blew a current of burn
ing air, scorching his flesh. He leaped, writhing in agony and scream
ing for help. No one answered.

37. Leaving a blazing city in its wake, the death cloud from the vol
cano rolled over the docks, and the sea, hissing and seething, shrank
back before it. Aboard the Roraima, Chief Officer Scott lowered his
glasses precipitately from Pelee. One look at that cloud bearing down
like a whirlwind and he snatched a tarpaulin from a ventilator and
pulled it over him. The ship rolled to port, almost on her beam ends,
then back to starboard. Her funnels and other superstructure and
most of her small boats were swept off by the mighty blast laden
with scalding ashes and stone dust. Badly scorched, Scott emerged
from his refuge to catch a glimpse of the British steamer Roddam
plunging by toward the open sea, her deck a smoking shambles. Of
the other sixteen vessels which had been anchored in the roadstead
there was no sign.

38. Staggering toward the twisted iron wreckage of the bridge, the
Chief Officer beheld the swaying figure of Captain Muggah. From
the hideous, blackened mask that had been his face a voice croaked:

39. “All hands! Heave up the anchor!”

40. All hands! Only Scott, two engineers, and a few members of the
black gang who had been below responded. In vain Scott scanned
the group for his son. He never saw the lad again.

41. The anchor could not be unshackled. “Save the women and chil
dren,” the captain ordered. During attempts to lower a boat, the

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 31

captain disappeared. Later he was pulled out of the water in a dy
ing condition.

42. Now the Roraima was afire fore and aft. Amid the shrieks and
groans of dying passengers, Scott and three more able-bodied men
fought the flames, helped by a few others whose hands, burned raw,
made it torture to touch anything. Between dousing the fire with
bucketfuls from the sea, Scott tried to give drinks of fresh water to
those who begged pitifully for it, though their seared, swollen throats
would not let them swallow a drop. Tongues lolling, they dragged
themselves along the deck, following him like dogs.

43. When the French cruiser Suchet steamed up to the rescue, the
only survivors among the passengers were a little girl and her nurse.
Twenty-eight out of a crew of forty-seven were dead.

44. The eyes of all aboard the Suchet turned toward shore. There at
the foot of a broad, bare pathway, paved by death and destruction
down the slope of Mont Pelee, lay the utter ruins of the city of
St. Pierre.

Ill

45. Not until the afternoon of May eighth did the devastation of St.
Pierre cool sufficiently to allow rescuers from Fort-de-France to
enter. They could find none to rescue except one woman who died
soon after she was taken from a cellar.

46. “St. Pierre, that city this morning alive, full of human souls, is no
more!” Vicar-General Parel wrote his Bishop. “It lies consumed be
fore us, in its winding sheet of smoke and cinders, silent and des
olate, a city of the dead. We strain our eyes for fleeing inhabitants,
for men returning to bury their lost ones. We see no one! There is
no living being left in this desert of desolation, framed in a terrify
ing solitude. In the background, when the cloud of smoke and cin
ders breaks away, the mountain and its slopes, once so green, stand
forth like an Alpine landscape. They look as if they were covered
with a heavy cloak of snow, and through the thickened atmosphere
rays of pale sunshine, wan, and unknown to our latitudes, illumine
this scene with a light that seems to belong to the other side of the
grave.”

47. Indeed St. Pierre might have been an ancient town, destroyed in

32 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

some half-forgotten cataclysm and recently partly excavated an
other Pompeii and Herculaneum. Cinders, which had buried its
streets six feet deep in a few minutes, were as the dust of centuries.
Here was the same swift extinction Vesuvius had wrought.

48. Here was no slow flow of lava. That cloud disgorged by Pel6e
was a superheated hurricane issuing from the depths of the earth at
a speed of ninety miles an hour. Such was the strength of the blast,
it killed by concussion and by toppling walls on its victims. The fall
of the fourteen-foot metal statue of Notre Dame de la Garde Our
Lady of Safety symbolized the dreadful fact that tens of thousands
never had a fighting chance for their lives.

49. But chiefly the death cloud slew with its lethal content of hot
steam and dust. So swiftly did it pass that its heat did not always
burn all of the light tropical clothing from its prey, but once it was
inhaled into the lungs that was the end. Some had run a few
frantic steps; then dropped, hands clutched over nose and mouth.
Encrusted by cementlike ashes, corpses lay fixed in the contorted
postures of their last struggle, replicas of the dead of Vesuvius pre
served in the Naples museum. Fire had charred others or incinerated
them to a heap of bones. A horrible spectacle was presented by
bodies whose skulls and abdomens had been burst by heat and gases.

50. People who had been indoors when the cloud descended perished
where they stood or sat, but the hand of death had marked most of
them less cruelly. They seemed almost still alive, as each shattered
building disclosed its denouement. There a girl lay prone, her arms
about the feet of an image of the Virgin. A man bent with his head
thrust into a basin from which the water had evaporated. A family
was gathered around a restaurant table. A child held a doll in her
arms; when the doll was touched, it crumbled away except for its
china eyes. A clerk sat at his desk, one hand supporting his chin, the
other grasping a pen. A baker crouched in the fire pit under his
oven. In one room of a home a blonde girl in her bathrobe leaned
back in a rocking chair. Behind her stood a Negro servant who ap
parently had been combing the girl s hair. Another servant had
crawled under a sofa. Not far away lay the body of a white woman,
beautiful as a Greek statue, and like many an antique statue
headless.

51. Mutilated or almost unmarred, shriveled in last agony or seeming

OBSERVING AND REPORTING 33

only to have dropped into a peaceful sleep, lay the legions of the
dead. After the finding of the dying woman in a cellar, the devasta
tion was searched in vain for survivors.

52. Then four days after the catastrophe, two Negroes walking through
the wreckage turned gray as they heard faint cries for help issuing
from the depths of the earth.

53. “Who s that?” they shouted when they could speak. “Where are
you?”

54. Up floated the feeble voice: “I m down here in the dungeon of
the jail. Help! Save me! Get me out!”

55. They dug down through the debris, broke open the dungeon door,
and released Auguste Ciparis, the Negro criminal.

56. Some days later, George Kennan and August F. Jaccaci, American
journalists arriving to cover the disaster, located Ciparis in a village
in the country. They secured medical attention for hfe severe burns,
poorly cared for as yet, and obtained and authenticated his story.
When the scorching air penetrated his cell that day, he smelled his
own body burning but breathed as little as possible during the mo
ment the intense heat lasted. Ignorant of what had occurred, not
realizing that he was buried alive, he slowly starved for four days in
his tomb of a cell. His scant supply of water was soon gone. Only
echoes answered his shouts for help. When at last he was heard and
freed, Ciparis, given a drink of water, managed with some assistance
to walk six kilometers to Morne Rouge.

57. One who lived where forty thousand died! History records no
escape more marvelous.

ANALYSIS

1. a. Examine carefully the divisions of this selection and try to determine why
the author organized his material in this way.

b. What effect on die whole pattern of the reporting does the account of dif
ferent individuals and their actions have?

2. a. Why did the author choose the particular persons he did?

b. Is his choice intended to be representative?

c. Is it intended to cover, by specific and typical instances, what might have
been covered by a more generalized reporting?

3. a. Is there any evidence in the passage that the author was present and that
he is therefore giving an eye-witness account of the disaster?

b. What changes in organization and approach seem to indicate that the ma
terial here has been gained through other than first-hand sources?

34 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

4. Can you find any places in this selection which might be classified as subjective
reporting?

SAMPLE THEME SUBJECTS

An Indian stick game

An evening spent at a wake

A native village in New Guinea

The last day of fishing on the Blackfoot

Old men watching an excavation

A sorority tea

Hayrakers

A family of immigrants

A race-track tout in action

Children buying candy

Women in a hat shop

Men on the production line

A game of bridge in the afternoon

On the subway

Circus people

A library reading room

Sensations on regaining consciousness

Sensations in a dentist s chair

Gloomy Sunday

Homesickness

These are subjects that do not involve generalizations. In handling them,
simply present a scene that would correspond to action shots taken by a
movie camera. If more than one paper is written here, make one objective
and one subjective.

2. INFORMAL INDUCTIONS

Informal Inductions

AT THIS POINT we begin to concern ourselves with making gen
eralizations and arriving at conclusions. When we generalize, we
have in mind not one situation but many situations that are related in
some way. We think of many situations having certain elements in com
mon, and we arrive at conclusions we consider true about these elements.
Consider, for instance, the article “I Pick Em Up” on page 70. The
writer is in the habit of picking up hitchhikers. He is not writing about
one experience only; he has had many. He is trying to express his gen
eral attitude toward picking up hitchhikers. Again, W. E. 13. DuBois,
in “The Negro Scientist,” is acquainted with the life stories of several
Negro scientists. By examining somewhat closely the case of each, he
attempts to determine whether or not Negroes can become competent
scientists. This process of arriving at conclusions about a class of peo
ple, objects, or ideas is what logicians call induction.

Suppose you notice that your neighbor s Siamese cat has a kink in
its tail. At first you assume that the kink is merely a peculiarity of the
single animal. Perhaps it has had an accident. But later on you come
across another Siamese cat with a kink in its tail. Your interest now
aroused, you check on other Siamese cats and find that each has a
similar kink. You have by now become thoroughly convinced that
Siamese cats as a class have kinks in their tails. In arriving at a conclu
sion about the class of animals, you are making a generalization or in
duction.

An informal induction is one in which the writer does not endeavor
seriously to make a thorough study of all the members in the class
about which he is writing; or, as the case often is, does not set up any

38 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

research machinery by which he can reasonably expect to arrive at
a demonstration that should satisfy every reader. Although the line
between informal and formal inductions l is sometimes hard to draw,
the distinction can be made practically by using the writer s method
of approach to his material as a measuring stick. If he has noticed
somewhat at random or from his chance experiences with his subject
some related phenomena and has drawn conclusions from them, the
result is informal induction. It is not implied here that informal in
ductions are inferior products; some of the ideas that govern our
lives were arrived at informally. The formal induction, however, is an
investigative job. The writer of such a piece outlines his problem and
determines what he needs to do to arrive at sound conclusions; he
devises methods for gathering his material and maintains scientific or
objective control of it.

In writing articles that carry informal inductions, the student should
turn to his own experiences. He should go not to the unusual experi
ences he has had but to the ones that recur constantly. There is a
knack to the discovery of subjects for these papers but mastery of it
is not at all difficult, and when the student has achieved his mastery
he should no longer have trouble in finding subjects to write about.
The key to the knack lies in the act of turning away from the unusual
to the usual as subject matter, in the act of turning away from the one
striking experience to the little experiences which do not amount to
much individually, but which taken together amount to an idea of
more significance than strange happenings or violent accidents can
ever give.

THIRTY MILLION NEW AMERICANS

Louis Adamic

i. WITHIN its population of slightly less than one hundred and
thirty million, the United States has today over thirty million citi
zens the overwhelming majority of them young citizens who
are the American-born children of immigrant parents of various

1 For formal inductions see Section IV, Primary Source Papers.
* From My America ( 1938), by Louis Adamic. Published by Harper and Broth
ers. Copyright, 1938, by Louis Adamic.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 39

nationalities: German, Italian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Cro
atian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Jewish, Russian, Carpatho-Russian,
Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish,
Danish, Dutch, French, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian,
Armenian, Syrian, Lett, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, and, of course,
English, Scotch, and Irish. The country as a whole is but dimly
cognizant of this fact arid its implications which, in my opinion,
are of fundamental and urgent importance in America s contem
porary social and cultural scene. It should perhaps particularly in
terest those Americans who consider themselves of the old Anglo-
Saxon stock: for here is a tremendous new element what will it
do to the old stock? to the country? how will it affect the de
velopment of civilization arid culture, of racial types on this conti
nent?

2. These questions had vaguely interested and perturbed me al
ready in the late 1920 s and the earliest 1930 s, but I did not really
go into them till 1934. I have told that in the spring of that year
I went on a lecture tour. It took me to the great industrial centers
of New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan,
Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, where the population
is preponderantly “foreign.” Actually, however, my trip was not
so much a series of speaking engagements as an attempt a device
to get some clear idea, if possible, of this immense mass of so-
called “second-generation” citizens, numerically predominant in
some of the most important cities and towns, whom I choose to
designate the New Americans. I spoke, or rather tried to speak,
more or less on the subject of this chapter, to about fifty audi
ences of anywhere from one hundred to twenty-five hundred men
and women and young people, in big towns like Pittsburgh, Cleve
land, Akron, Detroit, Chicago, South Bend, Milwaukee, St. Paul,
and Duluth, and smaller communities like McKeesport, Canons-
burg, Ambridge, Farrell, Sharon, and Strabane, Pennsylvania; Lo-
rain, Ohio; Flint, Michigan; and Hibbing and Eveleth, Minnesota.
Some of my audiences were almost wholly “foreign,” others mixed
“foreign” and old-stock American. At the time I knew very little
about the subject; I merely sensed its importance; and, to keep go
ing for an hour or so, I discussed things more or less akin to it
and at the end, admitting my ignorance, invited my listeners to

40 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

get up and say anything they liked in relation to my remarks.
Those who were too diffident to talk in a crowd, I asked to speak
to me after the lecture or call me at the hotel or write me a letter.
Many of them, both old-stock Americans and New Americans, re
sponded to this invitation. Some of them then asked me to their
homes. Others wrote me long letters. And the result was that be
fore my tour was half over I began to think that these New Ameri
cans twenty-six million of them in 1930 and increasing at the
rate of perhaps more than a million a year constituted one of the
greatest and most basic problems in this country; in some respects,
greater and more basic perhaps than, say, the problem of un
employment, and almost as urgent.

3. This problem has existed, in nearly the same proportions that it
exists today, for a long time, but few people have shown eagerness
and ability to deal with it in a broad, fundamental way, or even
to discuss it. Much attention most of it, as already suggested, ill-
focused has been paid to the problem of the foreign-born; but
not to that of their children, the American-born seconcT generation.
There is no acute or intelligent appreciation of it. Very little is
being done about it; and the longer it is neglected the worse it
will become, both for the New Americans and in the long run for
America as a whole.

4. In this chapter it is not my ambition to present the problem in
all its details, ramifications, significances, for it is a vastly compli
cated one and different in every locality and in every racial group;
and, frankly, I still have a great deal to learn about it. My purpose
here is merely to give as strong and broad a general suggestion
as I can of its character and what I think might be done concern
ing it.

5. The chief and most important fact (the only one I shall stress
here) about the New Americans is that all too many of them are
oppressed by feelings of inferiority in relation to their fellow-citi
zens of older stock, to the main stream of American life, and to
the problem of life as a whole; which, of course, is bad for them
as individuals, but, since there are so many of them and their
number is still rapidly increasing, even worse for the country.

6. These feelings of inferiority are to some degree extensions of
their parents feelings of inferiority as immigrants in a country so

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 41

drastically different from their native lands. The fathers and
mothers of these millions of New Americans were naturally at a
disadvantage even in the most friendly surroundings, and the sur
roundings were seldom wholly and continually friendly. As for
eigners, in many cases not speaking the English language, they
occupied inferior positions in the country s social, economic, and
political life. Most of them were workers, performing, by and large,
the meanest tasks and receiving meager wages. All too often in one
form or another, they bumped up against racial or general anti-
immigrant prejudice. Old-stock American workers looked askance
at them. When work slackened, they were laid off, as I suggest in
the first chapter of this section, before native employees. Many of
them lived in the worst districts of their cities and towns, and were
called Hunkies or Bohunks, Squareheads, Dagoes or Wops, Polacks
or Litvaks, Sheenies or Kikes. They were frequently and unavoid
ably discriminated against. And in the face of all this, they in
evitably felt, as individuals and as members of their immigrant
groups, somewhat inferior in their relation to America and to other
people here, and their tendency was to segregate themselves and
mingle as much as possible only with their own nationals. And, just
as inevitable, that feeling and that tendency were extended to the
children, these New Americans, who shared their parents lives and
experiences, and who too were (and still are) called Hunkies and
Dagoes by children of Anglo-Saxon origin, and whose names
names like Zamblaoskas, Krmpotich, and Wojiezkowski were (and
are) subjects for jokes on the part of ignorant teachers, at which
the whole school laughed.

7. But in this respect the majority of New Americans, as individuals,
are in an even more unfortunate and uncomfortable position than
were (or still are) their immigrant parents. The latter, even if
they were uneducated peasants or laborers, living here on the
lowest social-economic levels, had in them a consciousness, or at
least a powerful instinctive feeling, of some kind of racial or cul
tural background. They knew who they were. They remembered
their native lands. They were Italians or Croatians, Finns or Slo
venians; and that meant something to them. Many came from coun
tries which culturally and perhaps in some other respects were
superior to the United States, which as a new country had not

42 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

yet had time to develop along those lines; and when oppressed by
feelings of inferiority induced by their circumstances in America,
could take partial refuge in their racial and cultural backgrounds.
Some of the better educated ones, who did not have merely in
stinctive feelings about the culture and history of their old coun
tries, but were also intellectually conscious of their heritage, could
even look clown upon America and consider themselves superior to
old-time Americans, thus counterbalancing or compensating them
selves as persons from time to time for the unpleasant feelings
about their immigrant status in the New World. This was unhealthy
socially in the long run, for it was not reaching out toward an
understanding with America, real or basic, but it did help indi
vidual immigrants to stand up as men and women.

8. Unlike their parents, who are (or were) aware not only of their
European background but of having made the transition from
Europe to America and gained a foothold here, most New Amer
icans have no consciousness or instinctive feeling of any racial or
cultural background, of their being part of any sort of continuity in
human or historic experience. Some of them seem almost as if
they had dropped off Mars and, during the drop, forgotten all
about Mars. I know this to be so; I talked to scores and scores
of them in more than a dozen different cities and towns, not only
during that tour in 1934, but on several occasions and in various
connections since then. In the majority of cases, the immigrant
parents uneducated working people or peasants from the vari
ous European countries were too inarticulate to tell their sons
and daughters who they (the parents) really were, and thus trans
mit to them some feeling or knowledge of their background.

9. The average Slavic peasant, for instance, who came to this coun
try during the last twenty or thirty years in nine chances out of
ten is unable to inform his children adequately who he is, what
his old country is like, what his background (which, ipso facto, is
his children s background) consists of. He tells his numerous sons
and daughters that he is a Pole, a Croatian, a Slovak, a Slovenian;
but that is about all. The children do not know what that really
means. The man acts as if he were proud of being what he is,
at least in the privacy of his home; for his instincts and his memo-
lies of the old country occasionally make him act that way. To

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 43

his children, however, who are growing up under anything but
the best influences of American life and who do not know that
behind their father s pride is a rich and vital past, he very often
seems not a little ridiculous, certainly not worthy of their respect.
To them he is just a Hunky or Polack, a “working stiff,” a poor,
pathetic creature constantly at somebody s mercy and repeatedly
stepped upon, and as such not much according to American stand
ards standards which they pick up in the movies and from
other powerful agencies in American life. Often they are half
ashamed of him. The immigrant mother frequently finds herself
in the same situation. There is a mutual lack of understanding;
the children as they grow older have begun to grasp at superficial
and obvious American realities, and sink themselves in America
as far as they can by adopting the easiest, most obvious ways of
the country of their birth. And the results arc unsatisfactory fam
ily life, personal tragedies of all sorts, maladjustments, social per
versities.

10. It is not unusual for boys and girls in their late or even their
middle teens to break away from the homes of their immigrant
parents, and eventually to repudiate entirely their origin and to
Anglicize their Polish, Croatian, Finnish, or Lithuanian names,
which old-time Americans find so difficult to pronounce and so
amusing. But that, of course, does not solve their problem. In most
instances it only makes it worse, though as a rule they do not
realize that. I met New Americans of this type; they were invari
ably hollow, absurd, objectionable persons.

11. However, the situation of many of those who do not break with
their parents, change their “foreign” names, and wholly repudiate
their origin is but little better than of those who do. They were
born here and legally, technically, are citizens of the United States;
but few even in the most fortunate homes have any strong
feeling that they belong here and are part of this country. For, by
and large, the education which is inflicted on them in public
schools and high schools and in parochial schools, or in colleges,
fails to make them Anglo-Saxon Americans or to give them any
vital and lasting appreciation of the American heritage, while their
Anglo-Saxon schoolmates, purposeful ly-by-accident stumbling over
their feet and calling them Hunkies and Dagoes, and their teachers,

44 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

making fun of their names, increase their feeling that they are not
indigenous Americans, but outsiders who are more or less tol
erated. Their instincts, if they have any, are at cross-purposes.
They are bewildered persons, constantly oppressed, as I have said,
by feelings of inferiority. Their personalities are faint, lopsided,
out of focus.

12. These feelings of inferiority manifest themselves variously. Some
of the New Americans turn themselves inside out and become
chauvinistically patriotic; only their chauvinism has no basis in
any vital feeling. It is insecure, empty, mere lip-service, intended
only to impress the dominant Anglo-Saxon element, with which
they have to cope; and hence worse for the development of their
own characters than chauvinism that has some basis in convic
tion or feeling in racial or national background. And where there
is any sincerity in this sort of “patriotism” it is based solely on
shallow materialistic concepts, which they have picked up in school
and elsewhere. “This is the greatest country . . . we have the big
gest buildings . . . the best ice cream . . . more automobiles,
more bathtubs than all the rest of the world,” etc. Without realiz
ing it, these New Americans are ready for any sort of shallow,
ignorant nationalist or fascist movement which will not directly
attack the new racial strains in America s population; and thou
sands of them perhaps would have no great trouble in bringing
themselves to deny their parents, pose as old-stock Americans, and
serve even a movement which would terrorize the immigrants and
their children as the Hitler movement in Germany terrorized the
Jews.

13. Other New Americans turn their inferiority inside out in another
way. They become loud and tough, sometimes actively anti-social.
But let me hasten to repeat that this last group is not so numerous as
generally imagined by those who occasionally glance at crime and
the juvenile-delinquency statistics, or who read the headlines. The
surprising thing to me is that there is not more delinquency among
the New Americans. And I should add too that the chauvinists
mentioned above are not very numerous either. These categories
together include less than five per cent of the New Americans.

14. The majority of the grownup New Americans just hang back
from the main stream of life in this country, forming a tremendous

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 45

mass of neutral, politically lifeless citizenry; while their younger,
fellow New Americans, boys and girls in their teens (about twelve
million of them), now in 1938 attending public and parochial
schools and high schools, show dangerous signs of becoming the
same kind of neutral, unstirring citizens unless something is done
about it. There is among them little aggressiveness, little spirit of
any sort. Most of them merely hope to get along, to get by, some
how. Without a vital sense of background, perennially oppressed
by the feeling that they are outsiders and thus inferior, they will
live outside the main stream of America s national life. This is
especially true of groups which linguistically and culturally are
farthest removed from the Anglo-Saxon, and still more of groups
which, besides being unrelated to the Anglo-Saxon, are (or till
lately have been) suppressed or subject nationalities in Europe.

15. And these widespread personal inferiority feelings are producing
in large sections of this New American element actual inferiority in
character, mind, and physique. There is no doubt, by and large,
in bodily and personal qualities many of the immigrants children
do not favorably compare with their parents. They cannot look one
in the eye. They are shy. They stutter and stammer. If an old-
stock American, or anyone of some standing, is due to come to
their house, they fuss and fret with their parents. They force their
peasant mothers to go to the hairdresser, to put on American ladies
dresses and high-heeled shoes which often make the mothers in
congruous figures. Then, when the visitor arrives, they tremble
at what the old lady or old man might say, or that he might mis
pronounce English words even worse than usually. Their limp
handshakes gave me creepy feelings all the way from New York
to the Iron Range in Minnesota. Those handshakes symbolized
for me the distressing tendency on the part of this vast and grow
ing section of America s population toward characterlessness, lack
of force and spirit, and other inferior personal qualities.

16. From whatever angle one looks at it, this is a serious matter for
the New Americans as individuals and for America. Thirty million
or even fifteen or twenty million, a probable number to which
most or all of my generalizations here are directly applicable
are a lot of people, and this “second generation” will be (many
already are) the fathers and mothers of the third generation, and

46 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

it is not impossible that in two or three decades half of the popu
lation of the United States will be of these new cultural and na
tional strains.

17. What then should be done what can be done about it?

18. In going about the country in 1934, and subsequently, I met
several New Americans of whom most of the things I say above
are not true. None of them was totally free of personal inferiority
feelings (in fact, I find that even very few old-stock Americans
are entirely free of them), but they were, nevertheless, fine-look
ing young men and women, boys and girls, keen and alert, ar
ticulate, ambitious, personally charming. Some were still in high
school, one or two in college, and doing well as students; in fact,
rather better than old-stock American students. Three or four of
the boys were locally prominent football and baseball players. 1
Their handshakes were firm and they looked me in the eye. A few
had a lively sense of humor which they could apply to themselves.
Their laughter had a healthy ring. They knew something of what
was going on in the country, in the world. Some of them”, although
still very young, seemed to know what they wanted from life.
Two or three had literary ambitions. One told me he would try
to get into politics “in a big way,” by which I understood that
the United States Senate was not beyond his gaze; and his name
was Wojciezkowski. Another, attending the University of Pitts
burgh, thought he would get a job in a steel mill and become a
labor leader. In a bleak iron town in Minnesota I met a pretty
girl of Slovenian parentage who was the best student in her school,
had a vivid personality, and seemed entirely normal in all her atti
tudes. And so on, and so on. They impressed me as real, solid per
sons who would be an asset to any country.

19. Nearly all of them, in their childhood and later, had been un
pleasantly affected by their parents humiliating experiences as
immigrants and industrial workers, and had had disagreeable ex
periences of their own which touched them vitally. They had been
called Hunkies, Polacks, Litvaks, Dagoes. Many of them had had

1 Athletes with “foreign” names, as generally known, are not unusual. But
most of them, in high schools and colleges as well as in more or less profes
sional sports, are New Americans who are exceptional in the sense as stated in
this and the ensuing few paragraphs.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 47

(and were still having) difficulties with their names. A young
man of Lithuanian parentage in Pittsburgh, and attending the
university there, who was attractive, “clean cut” in the best Ameri
can sense, but whose surname was Lamblagoskas, told me that
when he was a young boy in McKeesport the teacher had been
too lazy or too indifferent to take the trouble to pronounce his
name, so she had called him only Johnnie, while all the other
children in class had both a first name and a surname. Then the
two-name children had begun to call him “J ust Johnnie” or “John
nie the Litvak,” which annoyed him very much. As in hundreds
of thousands of similar instances, this, in conjunction with other
experiences of that nature, produced in him an acute inferiority
complex which oppressed him for years “until,” as he put it, “I
sort of worked myself out of it.”

20. A young man of Slavic origin, whose surname also was difficult
for Anglo-Saxon tongues, told me that in his boyhood he had
suffered a great deal because old-stock American boys called him
“Sneeze-it,” because in school one day the teacher had said that
his name could not be pronounced but thought that perhaps she
could sneeze it. “But now,” he said to me, “things like that don t
bother me very much.”

21. Others in this category with whom I came in contact had had
and were still having inevitably, let me repeat other troubles
on account of being immigrants children; but these troubles were
not seriously affecting them, were not preventing them from de
veloping into balanced, strong and healthy, charming human be
ings.

22. Why? There are at least two explanations. One is that most of
them lived, during at least part of their lives, in comparatively
favorable economic circumstances, and their parents managed to
give them some schooling in addition to the legal requirement,
which helped them more or less to work themselves out of their
various second-generation complexes. The other explanation (prob
ably not unrelated to, but I think more important than, the first)
is that, in all cases without exception which came to my atten
tion, their fathers and mothers were wise and articulate enough to
convey to them something of their backgrounds in the old countries;
tell them what it meant to be a Finn, a Slovenian, a Serbian, a

48 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

Croatian, a Slovak, a Czech, a Pole, or a Lithuanian, and inspire
in them some respect for that meaning; make them conscious of
their backgrounds and heritage, give them some sense of con
tinuity, some feeling of their being part of America, in which im
migrants like themselves played an important role part of some
thing bigger and better than the bleak, utterly depressing existence
led by them and their neighbors in the grimy steel mill and iron and
coal mining towns where they lived.

23. During my 1934 trip and later I met, as I say, scores of these
New Americans. Among them were some of the most attractive
people I have encountered anywhere. Some of these I already have
mentioned. Another was a girl born and still living in Cleveland
whose father and mother were Slovenians; and there is no doubt
in my mind that much of her charm issued from the fact that she
was keenly conscious of her parents native land and culture. Two
years before they had taken her on a visit to Slovenia, and she
had discovered a tiny country which is physically as lovely as
anything she had seen in America, with an old, mellotv culture,
a rich folklore, a considerable modern literature, and interesting
folkways behind which there are centuries of wisdom and a long,
unbroken chain of experience on the part of a quiet, peace-loving
little nation that has lived there for a thousand years.

24. Still another of these exceptional New Americans was a young
six-footer of Finnish parentage on the Iron Range in Minnesota.
He had never been to Finland, but knew a good deal about the
basic cultural qualities of that country from his mother s word-
pictures of it. He also had a fluent command of the Finnish lan
guage which did not interfere with indeed, enriched his Eng
lish. He knew dozens of Finnish folk ballads and lyrics and sang
them well, and had read and reread in the original the great Fin
nish epic poem “The Kalevala.” He was quietly proud of his peo
ple s achievements on the Iron Range both in the mines and on
the land, and thought that Minnesota was his country. Despite
the bleakness of the region, and the hard life led there by most
of the people, especially the Finns, he loved the Iron Range. His
people had worked and suffered there for decades and converted
great parts of it into farming country, although before they came
nobody had thought it could ever be made suitable for anything.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 49

25. In short, he was conscious of his background; he had a sense of
continuity, of being part of a great human experience, which was
part of the still greater American adventure. Largely, I think, in
consequence of this, a strength of character was discernible in his
every move and utterance.

26. I could give several more such cases of exceptional New Ameri
cans, but that would be, in the main, repeating what I tell of the
girl in Cleveland and the boy in Minnesota. All of them repre
senting, however, but a small minority were conscious and, in
a greater or lesser degree, proud of their racial groups back
ground in the old countries, and some also of their racial groups
background and history in this country. They had a sense of con
tinuity, a feeling of being a part of something. And they, I think,
are the answer to the question: What should be done about the
problem sketched in this chapter?

27. The answer is that the New Americans, whose inarticulate and
otherwise inadequate through no fault of their own parents
have been unable to give them much along these lines, should be
helped to acquire a knowledge of, and pride in, their own herit
age and makeup; and this help should come, in very large part,
from already established and functioning social and cultural in
stitutions and agencies schools, libraries, settlement and com
munity houses, newspapers, lecture forums, and so on in co
operation with a central organization which should be formed for
the purpose of devising ways to disseminate information about
the several racial or national groups represented among the thirty
million “second generation” citizens, of studying the problem and
working out programs of action for its gradual solution or ameliora
tion, from the point of view of honest, intelligent concern for the
country s future.

28. By now it is obvious to many people interested in the problem
that it is impossible and, what is more, undesirable to make the
offspring of Lithuanians or Serbians into Anglo-Saxons; that the
aim should be rather to help them become real men and women
on the pattern of their own natural cultures. There should be recog
nition of the fact that America is not purely an Anglo-Saxon
country; if only by virtue of numbers, it is also something else.
A new conception of America is necessary. There is no doubt that

50 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

in the few places where no attempts have been made by “patri
otic” old-time Americans to force immigrants children into the
old-stock American mold as, for instance, in the Bohemian com
munities in Nebraska and Texas, where Bohemians already are in
the fourth generation; in the little city of Hamtramck near Detroit,
where the public school system consistently encourages the large
Polish group there to keep its individuality; in O. E. Rolvaag s
Norwegian settlements in the northwest; in some of the foreign
“colonies” in New York City, notably the Ukrainian one on the
Lower East Side; or in several small Polish, Italian, and Finnish
rural communities in New England, upstate New York, and else
wherethe development of character, mentality, and physique in
the New American element has been vastly more felicitous than
where such attempts have been made.

29. Social and cultural institutions and agencies in various cities and
towns where the problem stares them all in the face wherever
they turn already are beginning to do things to help New Ameri
cans develop more or less on the pattern of their backgrounds.
To give a few examples: in Cleveland the excellent public li
brary organization, with its scores of branch libraries, has begun
to help the New Americans to learn something about themselves,
their parents native lands and their national groups* history in
this country, particularly in Cleveland. All three of the big news
papers there have special reporters covering the “foreign sections”
of the city, and print feature articles about the various foreign
groups contribution to the growth and development of Cleveland.
Public school and high school teachers in Cleveland, as in one or
two other cities, whose classes are anywhere from forty to eighty
per cent “foreign,” are becoming eagerly interested in “second-
generation problems” which face them in the form of numerous
neurotic and backward or “problem” children who, for no ap
parent reason, burst out crying in the middle of a lesson. Of late
teachers nearly everywhere, I am told, have advanced so far that
they take the trouble to learn the correct pronunciation of diffi
cult Polish, Yugoslav, Lithuanian, Czech, Finnish, and Slovak
names, and to caution the old-stock American boys and girls not
to call the New American children Hunkies, Wops, and other such
names of derision.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 51

30. In more than half of the cities and towns which I visited in 1934
and since I found the so-called International Institutes, some of
them part of the Y.W.C.A., which with their clubrooms, reading
rooms, lectures, social affairs, exhibits of European peasant arts,
and printed matter are beginning to attempt to do something
for the second generation, especially the girls. In Flint, Michigan,
in Toledo, Ohio, and in one or two other places, I came upon
purely local organizations, some of them officered and run by such
exceptional New Americans as I have described above, aiming to
help the general run of New Americans to fight their feelings of
inferiority.

31. I came upon professional social workers who were doing re
search in certain phases of the problem and knew a great deal
about the local departments thereof. The directors of most of the
settlement-houses in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee
were more or less awake to the situation as it existed locally and
in most cases, however, without having any real understanding
of it were also trying to do something about it. The same could
be said of various settlement-house workers, teachers, a few min
isters, and other agencies elsewhere.

32. All these efforts or, rather, beginnings of efforts are local, how
ever; usually honest enough but very restricted in scope, The In
ternational Institutes, for instance, appeal largely to girls. There is
no central or national organization interested in the thing as a
countrywide problem, which it undoubtedly is, and, as I have tried
to show here, a tremendous and important one important to old-
stock Americans and to Americans of the third and fourth gen
eration no less than to these New Americans, and to America as a
whole.

33. The organization I have in mind, which let us designate here as
XYZ, would have, during the next twenty or thirty years, a vast
and complicated task to perform namely, to give these millions
of New Americans a knowledge of, and pride in, their own makeup,
which, to some extent, would operate to counteract their feelings
of inferiority about themselves in relation to the rest of the coun
try; and, simultaneously, to create a sympathetic understanding
toward them on the part of older Americans, so that the latter s
anti-”foreign” prejudice, which is partly to blame for inferiority

52 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

feelings in the new racial groups, would tend to lessen and ulti
mately be reduced to a minimum.

34. It would be a great educational-cultural work, the basic aim of
which would be: (i) to reach, in one way or another, almost
everybody in this country with the fact that socially and culturally
the United States, as it stands today, is an extension not only of
the British Isles and the Netherlands but, more or less, of all Eu
rope; (2) with constant reiteration and intelligent elaboration of
that fact, to try to harmonize and integrate, so far as possible, the
various racial and cultural strains in our population without sup
pressing or destroying any good cultural qualities in any of them,
but using and directing these qualities toward a possible enhance
ment of the color and quality of our national life in America.

35. Probably the first group to be reached by XYZ are the public
school and high school teachers in communities with large “foreign”
populations. They should be helped to find out who these young
sters filling their classrooms and responding to such names as
Adamovicz, Kotchka, Zamblaoskas, Hurja, Balkovec, and Pavelka
really are. They should be informed that the children of Yugoslav
Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian parents, for instance, have, by
virtue of their birth, a great heritage which reaches a thousand
years into European history and almost five hundred years into
American history that there is good reason for believing that
Yugoslavs were on Columbus ships when he discovered this con
tinent that Yugoslav marines touched this continent in their own
ships only a few years after Columbus that Yugoslavs were in
California before the Yankees arrived there, and were pioneers in
two of California s now most important industries, fruit-growing
and fishing that in the last fifty years Yugoslavs, hundreds of
thousands of them, have been among the competent workers in
America s most important industries, mining and steel-making, and
as such have contributed enormously to the upbuilding of this
country that Nikola Tesla and Michael Pupin came from Yugo
slaviathat Henry Suzzallo, one of America s most important
educators, was a second-generation American, born in California,
of Yugoslav parents that Ivan Mcstrovich, the sculptor, whose
works are to be seen in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York,
and elsewhere, is a Yugoslav; and so on. I mention here what the

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 53

teachers should be helped to find out about the Yugoslav strain,
because I know more about it than any other; but they should be
informed also about the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Hun
garian, and the other strains so that occasionally, preferably at
some dramatic moment, as, for instance, after a clash between an
Anglo-Saxon boy and a “Hunky” boy, they could talk about them
in class.

36. The XYZ might develop a special literature on the subject of
New Americans, addressed to teachers; it might have competent
speakers able to address teachers conventions, college student
bodies and faculties, women s clubs, and other groups.

37. It might start a campaign for the revision of history textbooks,
giving recognition to recent immigrant groups from Eastern Eu
rope, the Balkans, and elsewhere for their contributions to the
upbuilding of America as she stands today. Such revisions should
mention, perhaps, that in this upbuilding of modern America at
least as many “Hunkies” and “Dagoes” died or were injured as
early American colonists were killed in subduing the wilderness
and in the War for Independence. The part played by the newer
groups should be fitted into the history of the American adven
ture as a whole. This revision of textbooks might, indeed, be among
its first and most important tasks.

38. It might start a press service for English-language newspapers
published in cities and towns whose population includes a large
proportion of “foreigners” and for English pages of foreign-lan
guage newspapers. This service should include vividly written, au
thentic material on the backgrounds, history, culture, and con
tributions of the different “foreign” groups to the upbuilding of
America, and stories of individual and group achievement.

39. It might publish pamphlets in English dealing with various
phases of the problem; start a library of all available literature and
material on the subject; make special efforts to stimulate interest
and participation in the folk arts.

40. It might utilize the radio for this work, with special programs in
cluding, let us say, music and folksongs of the various nations.
It might try to draw the motion picture industry into its enterprise.
Eventually it might arrange essay contests dealing with the his
tory and contribution of the different “foreign” groups and other

54 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

appropriate topics, open to New Americans in high schools and
colleges, with suitable prizes such as scholarships or trips to the
native countries on which New Americans could discover their par
ents old countries.

41. But enough of these suggestions. I make them largely to eluci
date the problem further. Perhaps, if the national XYZ organiza
tion is not formed in the near future though I feel certain that
eventually something like it will be formed local groups already
interested in the matter possibly will find them helpful.

42. I realize, of course, that the problem I sketch here is closely tied
up with the socio-economic system under which we live; that, next
to their being more or less strangers here, the worst factors behind
the inferiority feelings of these millions of New Americans are
poverty and its sister-evil, ignorance, both of them brought over
by the immigrants and then fostered by conditions here; and that
the cure for most of the second-generation ills lies, ultimately, in
the solution of our socio-economic problem. I doubt, however,
whether the latter problem will be quickly and satisfactorily solved
in this country if we permit to develop in our population a vast
element, running into tens of millions, which is oppressed by acute
feelings of inferiority and, largely as a result of those feelings, is
becoming actually inferior human material bewildered, politi
cally neutral, economically unaggressive, culturally nowhere. If this
element is left alone in the face of its growing economic difficul
ties, and in the face of the organized and unorganized prejudice
against it on the part of “patriotic” older Americans, there might
eventually be no help for it. I imagine that hundreds of thousands
of New Americans already are hopeless as potential constructive
elements in any sort of vital, progressive civilization and culture;
and if their number is permitted to increase, they will let me re
peatprofoundly affect the future of this country in a way that
no one would want to see it affected.

43. On the other hand, if something is done about the problem in
the spirit of the above general suggestions, I believe that the ma
jority of the New Americans and the generation that they will
produce will have an opportunity to become a great body of self-
respecting, constructive citizenry; and that, with the diverse racial
and cultural backgrounds they inherited from their immigrant

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 55

parents, they will enrich the civilization and deepen the culture of
this New World.

ANALYSIS

1. This essay is subject to more formal controls than are most informal induc
tions. The problem was defined and a device created to enable the writer to
arrive at his answers before the journey was begun that was to provide the
material.

a. Analyze carefully Paragraph 2 to determine how rigidly controlled the in
vestigation actually was. Do you come to the conclusion that Mr. Adamic kept
careful tab on his findings throughout his trip? That he put each of his human
guinea pigs through the same routine of questions so that he would be sure of
having constants to work with? That his problem allows for exact conclusions
of the kind that can be tabulated on a chart? Is this, in other words, an exact
analysis of a controlled investigation, or is it the purposeful but uncontrolled
gathering of material in the course of a lecture tour?

2. a. If Paragraph 2 tells the reader how the problem has been set up, what does
Paragraph 1 do?

b. Would it be wise to reverse the order of these paragraphs?

3. Show how Mr. Adamic narrows the scope of his inquiry in Paragraphs 4 and 5.

4. In Paragraphs 6-11 the writer gives a somewhat detailed explanation of the
conditions that exist and their causes.

a. How often in this extended passage does he refer to specific cases?

b. Do we have confidence that he has specific cases in mind while he is mak
ing his analysis?

c. What techniques does he use to bring his discussion down to the concrete?

5. Note the partition of ” feelings of inferiority ” into the principal subclasses in
Paragraphs 12-15, and the paragraphing that devotes one paragraph to each of
tlie first two subclasses and two to the third.

a. How is the topic of each of these four paragraphs developed?

b. Why is the third class given two paragraphs?

6. Why is Paragraph 17 so short?

7. Paragraphs 18-21 give us an insight into the exceptions, into the part of the
evidence that Mr. Adamic has not explained as yet, since it runs counter to the
main body of his evidence.

a. How is he using this material? Explain the logic of his procedure here.

b. Is his use of the material an example of the saying that the exception proves
the rule? Note the more extended use of cases from his experience in this
section.

8. Paragraphs 22-26 attempt to explain why these exceptional cases are excep
tional.

*z. Go back to Paragraph 17. How is Mr. Adamic s development answering the

question asked there?

b. How can you describe this method of development?

9. Note the development given to the two causes. Why is so little space devoted

56 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

to the first (one third paragraph) and so much to the other? Note again the
use of examples.

10. Note how Paragraph 27 once more shifts our attention to the main body of
evidence. How does it follow naturally after Paragraph 26?

11. Paragraph 28 describes a goal to be reached. Paragraphs 29-32 show the ef
forts being expended to reach this goal. In what sense are the final concluding
paragraphs 42 and 43 necessary?

HOW SERIOUS ARE THE COMICS?*
By Lovell Thompson

I

1. EVER SINCE the turn of the century when the Yellow Press was
named after Outcault s Yellow Kid, the war of the comics has
been savagely fought. It has been a bitter civil war with parents
on one side and their children on the other. Under leaders like
Charles W. Eliot and Kate Douglas Wiggin, and publications like
the New Republic and the Chicago Daily News, the parents have
been winning the battles but losing the war. That is because the
elders find themselves regularly reading the comics and have to
fall back on that old line: “We read them to see how bad they
are.” After half a century of successful attack by the comics we
ought to be considering the terms of surrender. We should rise
above the battle and take the cold long view.

2. The newest outrage of the enemy has been the comic magazine.
It is only a few years old but it is deeply entrenched. The best
evidence of this is the fact that it has forced out the marble as
childhood s medium of exchange.

3. The child s marble, curving, pellucid, used to carry a mystery in
its center. The alley, impenetrable, unyielding, self-contained, had
in its depth an answer such as no jewel ever gave. When you had
it in your hand, you knew it was a sphinx s eye. The future that
children sought beneath the marble s surface has for a moment
almost become explicit in the comic magazine.

4. If you have ever found yourself guiltily reading one of your
child s comic books and exchanging it hastily for the Times Book
Review as someone enters the room, you know that there seems a

From the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1942. Reprinted by permission of the
author.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 57

sinful unreality about this superworld. It is too easy and too in
human. There are no real problems and no real answers. It is a
long procession of tawdry Charles Atlases accompanied by a mini
mum of reading matter of no distinction whatever. It is the world
of the Batman and Captain Marvel, of Superman and the Phan
tom. It is a criminal world and an idealistic world; it is sadistic
and romantic. In it time and space are reduced to secondary
nuisances. You may have the career of Jimmy Doolittle and that
of Michelangelo side by side and Flash Gordon s rocket ship not
much more than a stone s throw from Jimmy. Can a mind nurtured
on this predigested wood pulp hope to have form or direction when
it grows up?

5. Thinking back in search of an answer, I have often wondered
why our parents forbade us such comics as Buster Brown, who
lived in the days of Alexander s Ragtime Band and the leg-o -
mutton sleeve. He was a moral if misguided little boy. His virtues
are clear when you compare him with a modern killer of fiends
such as the Batman, a fiend s fiend. Whatever may be the vices
of Superman, Buster was hopelessly good. In retrospect he looks
like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

6. There are many strips which look similarly harmless. Moon Mul-
lins still devotes himself exclusively to the simple old vices of
wine, women, and song; and the improbabilities of Orphan Annie
are lost in the flow of refugee children. Will our children in their
turn look back and find Superman as far short of reality, and are
we repeating the error of our parents? Did our parents forbid
us Blister because they knew that Batman follows Buster? (And
what could follow Batman I know not. ) They said that the funny
page was bad training for the grown-up world. It was not a way
to nurture the habit of reading and study. That was what they
said, but it wasn t quite what they meant; the comics are not a
bad preparation for Life magazine or the “Roto” section.

7. Today only a library will yield forth Buster and his blacksheep
brother the Yellow Kid, but if you look back there you will find
that they represent the two sides of the industrial revolution. Times
changed, but not the soul of Buster. Annie, too, has her fixed pe
riod. Hers is the generation between wars the lost generation.
Sad, wise, humorless little Annie is the child of Farewell to Arms.

58 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

8. Only on December 7 did the world catch up even to such comics
as Terry and the Pirates. Terry had been Far East-minded since
his beginning in the middle 1920 s. He is a transfigured boy scout
learning to cope with the wisdoms and cruelties of the East. He
seems to grow at half-speed, and even at this leisurely pace it has
taken us half a generation to catch up to his time by putting an
army of Terries in China. Being Terry-minded hasn t done any of
those soldiers any harm, and some are likely to read Terry nostal
gically for many years. When you read Moon Mullins you re back
three decades to the era when father carried his shoes in his hand
if he came in after midnight. When you exchange Moon for An
nie you move from the old prewar world to the newer postwar
world. When you read Terry you have moved on from the era
of the lost generation into today. And when you read a really re
cent strip like Superman? Do not doubt it, you read a caricature
of tomorrow.

9. The tendency of the comics is to prolong a period by anticipat
ing it before it arrives, sustaining it during its brief passage, and
maintaining its illusion after it is gone.

II

10. Man has always feared change. When he has been shown the
future he has resented it. When he finds it in the comics he resents
it no less and he forbids his child to have anything to do with
it. That is why our parents were instinctively against Buster. For
us the problem is the same as it was for our parents, and it is
really our problem, not our children s.

3.1. There are only two ways to meet this problem: one is to shut
your eyes to it, and the other is to open your arms to it. In terms
of their generation, all that is said about the comic magazines by
parents who confine themselves to the daily or Sunday funnies is
true. It was bad enough when four pages became eight and when
all eight came out in color. But to be able to sit down and read
sixty-four pages of colored comics for ten cents and then read
sixty-four more on a swap, and finally become a child with a li
brary of this feebly vicious material, certainly seems the goalless
excess of decadence. This is a sub-hell where the devil himself is
disciplined.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 59

12. True or not, this is true for you. In Buster our parents felt a
new, picture-minded world and they resented it. Like our parents,
we scent a changed world in the comics that our children read
and we stick with Moon, with Orphan Annie, and with Terry, find
ing there a refuge from the front page and from the Batman.

13. Do not let a tempted eye which has strayed out of the lost world
of Mutt and Jeff and Gasoline Alley into the present of Terry and
the Pirates and Smilin Jack Martin go into the world of tomorrow.
There you are afraid. There only the men of tomorrow can take
it. Do not try to deal with the world of Flash Gordon. Don t try to
get around with Zatara the magician, with Captain Marvel, or
with the Shadow, or the Flame, or the Torch, or the Phantom, or
Toro, or Lightning, or Captain America and Bucky, or Spy Smasher,
or Magno, or Bullet Man and his flame Bullet Girl. Don t slip into
the new dark age with Prince Valiant. Even Superman can hardly
take that stuff. Leave the world of tomorrow to the men of to
morrow, but remember that the men of tomorrow are the children
of today.

Ill

14. That is how to shut your eyes to the menace. If you are to open
your arms to it, you must look more deeply into your own guilty
reading of the comics and into that of your child whose guilt you
have cultivated. Suppose that you wish to look into the sphinx s
eye. How can the nightmares that you see there come true?

15. For one thing, when you look at the comics you read and the
comics your child reads, you will realize and perhaps nobody has
ever had such a chance to realize it before how different is your
child s stake in the world from your own. Before your eyes, and with
the dime that he chisels off you, that child is planning the new
world, searching for new strength to deal with the old evil which
has found wheels and wings. He has already discounted your
world the old world.

16. His search is not without effort and discrimination. You will find,
for example, that a few of the thoughtful people interested in child
education have begun to point out that the children who read
comics are also the children who read books. They are, in fact,
simply children who read. It s even thought that the comics tend

60 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

slightly to make readers of children who might not otherwise get
the reading habit. Children develop definite patterns of taste in
comics: some like it hot, some like Mickey Mouse, some prefer to
dwell even in the familiar old, old world of their grandparents
with the Katzenjammers. A “good” child will select what at first
glance%will look to you like the worst comics. Each child s selec
tion will give you something of a glimpse of his particular world
problem. If you know the gamut of the comics, there can be for
you a terrifying pathos in that pile of magazines in your child s
life. For there are the dangers he accepts, which you, as you cling
to Annie and Terry to escape the headlines, try not to foresee.

17. Not all comics deal with imaginary men of tomorrow. There is
a comic magazine called True Comics. It is intended to be up
lifting and is a fight-fire-with-fire sort of tactic, started by Parents
Magazine. It was bad to start with, but now it is full of hard fact
in a Superman package. Your child reads it and he thinks that
everyone knows that Chiang Kai-shek was a stockbroker who got
wiped out in a depression in 1920 and that he divorced a first
wife to marry Mayling Soong. He has a method of learning certain
kinds of information far more efficient than any you encountered.
The picture-caption-diagram-caption never was put to really ef
fective use in the days when our minds were open, the clays when
we learned the things we remember. In the comics this most ef
fective technique works overtime, and the things that it teaches
are very far from the trivial misdemeanors of Buster Brown. This
is the making of 1960, for that is when some of these children will
find themselves in power.

18. As you go yet more deeply into the pile of comics, you will see
how, under the stimulus of the comic horror of tomorrow, this
same child begins to turn to the practical side of miracle making.
Next the shelf that holds the comics you will find a shelf of maga
zines with titles such as Mechanix Illustrated and Modern Design.
You will find them amongst the mess of model airplane parts not far
from the discarded streamlined train. With the same affection that
you learned to spot an Overland or Maxwell these children iden
tify a P-40 or a B-26. They live in a world of strange machines,
a less social world than ours more lonely; a world where the
law is likely to fail and a man must be able to look out for him-

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 61

self. Those are a few of the ways by which the comic is trans
mitted into fact. And there are other more contemporary ways in
which you can watch this unreal world of tomorrow being con
verted into the real world of today.

IV

19. Our comics are on the noses of our fighting planes, and do you
remember where you met the Jeep? He was sent to Olive Oyl from
the heart of Africa by her Uncle Ben Zene. He was almost Segar s
last gift to the world before he died and Thimble Theatre passed
into other hands. In 1936 Olive would have sold you that Jeep
his name was Eugene for five bucks. The Jeep was a magic little
animal who looked to be by Rikki-Tikki-Tavi out of Krazy Kat;
he had a very red nose and all the answers. He had to be fed
orchids. Well, there are a lot of Yankee mechanics concocting
spare parts for jeeps in a land where there are plenty of orchids
and no spare parts.

20. In the comic world a top-flight German official flew secretly to
England from Germany only a short time before Hess did. To a
comics-reading child the Hess flight would seem a thing to be
expected. Finally, I know a little girl who wears her cardigan
sweater buttoned once at the neck and flung back over her
shoulders, the arms hanging free like dislocated wings. That s
Superman style and it will be a mode in ten years when that little
girl is grown.

21. When I was a child, my friends and I fought a war with lead
soldiers that lasted nearly a year. It outstripped the war of 14
then in progress. It became by spring a war with a fluid front
based on strong points, a highly mechanized force, and enormous
fire-power concentrated in the hands of one man. A few of our
tactics still grimly await fulfillment.

22. So, as the war of 39 has always been my War and Terry s War
and perhaps even Daddy Warbucks s War, the struggles of 60
are those that go on now in the comics which we wisely denounce.
Like all men in the storybooks and out of them, when we are
shown the future we scoff with our minds and with our souls we
fearfully await fulfillment. Meanwhile, however, if you have stom
ach for tomorrow, don t feel guilty about adding the Phantom to

62 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

your repertoire. You can have the Twentieth Century all at once
instead of day by day. Between Puck, the comic weekly founded
around 1900, and Planet Comics you have time on a map. You can
determine your progress and know what s around the bend.
23. It s all, all right with me. I can take it if the children can; there s
only one thing that worries me, and that is: How will those chil
dren face their children, who will be the men of the day after
tomorrow? After Captain America what?

ANALYSIS

1. An understanding of the thought process behind this article may not be easy to
arrive at. The following suggestions should be of some help:

a. The main idea of the article is to be found in the single sentence that com
prises Paragraph 9.

b. The author had, no doubt, arrived at his main point in his own mind, in part
at least, before he thought of the specific examples mentioned in Paragraphs
5-8. These specific examples he then cited first to carry the reader with him to
his main point.

c. In Paragraphs 19-21 the author gives four more concrete examples. These
he could not well have thought of unless he had first had in mind the idea that
they support.

d. The other parts of the article contain little concrete evidence. They contain
speculation upon the evidence given elsewhere.

e. Therefore, we will conclude that the author first framed a question for him
self the question stated at the end of Paragraph 4. The second step in the
thought process was to arrive at a hypothesis, a tentative answer after a pre
liminary examination of the evidence at his command. The third step, an im
portant one, was to check this hypothesis by bringing to bear upon it all the
items of evidence that he could think of.

/. This process, though informally used here, is roughly the scientific method
of procedure in induction.

Go through the article carefully with these items in mind. At what points does
the reasoning fall short of the scientific method?

2. Of what use is the introductory material that precedes the framing of the ques
tion at the end of Paragraph 4?

3. a. What kinds of comics does the author use to illustrate and support his gen
eralization?

b. Has he left out any significant groups?

c. Is he under any obligation in an informal article to cover the whole field?

4. a. Are there any places in the article where the conclusions are stated along
with a specific body of particulars?

b. Do any other articles in this chapter employ the same technique?

5. a. lias Paragraph 11 been given any concrete foundation or is this thought
unattached?

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 63

b. Why are there only two ways? Is the author convincing us here? Note that the
topic sentence of Paragraph 11 is also the topic sentence for the section includ
ing Paragraphs 11-18.

AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN OHIO*
By Mrs. Trollope

1. MOHAWK, as our little village was called, gave us an excellent
opportunity of comparing the peasants of the United States with
those of England, and of judging the average degree of comfort
enjoyed by each. I believe Ohio gives as fair a specimen as any
part of the Union; if they have the roughness and inconveniences
of a new state to contend with, they have higher wages and
cheaper provisions; if I err in supposing it a mean state in point
of comfort, it certainly is not in taking too low a standard.

2. Mechanics, if good workmen, are certain of employment, and
good wages, rather higher than with us; the average wages of a
laborer throughout the Union is ten dollars a month, with lodging,
boarding, washing, and mending; if he lives at his own expense he
has a dollar a day. It appears to me that the necessaries of life,
that is to say, meat, bread, butter, tea, and coffee (not to mention
whiskey), are within the reach of every sober, industrious, and
healthy man who chooses to have them; and yet I think that an
English peasant, with the same qualifications, would, in coming to
the United States, change for the worse. He would find wages
somewhat higher, and provisions in western America considerably
lower; but this statement, true as it is, can lead to nothing but
delusion if taken apart from other facts, fully as certain, and not
less important, but which require more detail in describing, and
which perhaps cannot be fully comprehended, except by an eye
witness. The American poor are accustomed to eat meat three
times a day; I never inquired into the habits of any cottagers in
western America, where this was not the case. I found afterward
in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the country, where
the price of meat was higher, that it was used with more economy;
yet still a much larger portion of the weekly income is thus ex-

* From Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).

64 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

pended than with us. Ardent spirits, though lamentably cheap, 1
still cost something, and the use of them among the men, with
more or less of discretion, according to the character, is universal.
Tobacco also grows at their doors, and is not taxed; yet this too
costs something, and the air of heaven is not in more general
use among the men of America than chewing tobacco. I am not
now pointing out the evils of dram-drinking, but it is evident, that
where this practice prevails universally, and often to the most
frightful excess, the consequence must be, that the money spent to
obtain the dram is less than the money lost by the time consumed
in drinking it. Long, disabling, and expensive fits of sickness are
incontestably more frequent in every part of America than in Eng
land, and the sufferers have no aid to look to, but what they have
saved, or what they may be enabled to sell. I have never seen
misery exceed what I have witnessed in an American cottage
where disease has entered.

But if the condition of the laborer be not superior to that of the
English peasant, that of his wife and daughters is incomparably
worse. It is they who are indeed the slaves of the soil. One has
but to look at the wife of an American cottager, and ask her
age, to be convinced that the life she leads is one of hardship,
privation, and labor. It is rare to see a woman in this station who
has reached the age of thirty, without losing every trace of youth
and beauty. You continually see women with infants on their knee,
that you feel sure are their grandchildren, till some convincing
proof of the contrary is displayed. Even the young girls, though
often with lovely features, look pale, thin, and haggard. I do not
remember to have seen in any single instance among the poor, a
specimen of the plump, rosy, laughing physiognomy so common
among our cottage girls. The horror of domestic service, which the
reality of slavery, and the fable of equality, have generated, ex
cludes the young women from that sure and most comfortable re
source of decent English girls; and the consequence is, that with
a most irreverend freedom of manner to the parents, the daughters
are, to the full extent of the word, domestic slaves. This condi
tion, which no periodical merrymaking, no village fete, ever occurs

1 About a shilling a gallon is the retail price of good whiskey. If bought whole
sale, or of inferior quality, it is much cheaper.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 65

to cheer, is only changed for the still sadder burdens of a teeming
wife. They marry very young; in fact, in no rank of life do you
meet with young women in that delightful period of existence
between childhood and marriage, wherein, if only tolerably well
spent, so much useful information is gained, and the character
takes a sufficient degree of firmness to support with dignity the
more important parts of wife and mother. The slender, childish
thing, without vigor of mind or body, is made to stem a sea of
troubles that dims her young eye and makes her cheek grow pale,
even before nature has given it the last beautiful finish of the
fullgrown woman.

4. “We shall get along,” is the answer in full, for all that can be
said in way of advice to a boy and girl who take it into their
heads to go before a magistrate and “get married.” And they do
get along, till sickness overtakes them, by means perhaps of bor
rowing a kettle from one and a teapot from another; but intem
perance, idleness, or sickness will, in one week, plunge those who
are even getting along well into utter destitution; and where this
happens, they are completely without resource.

5. The absence of poor-laws is, without doubt, a blessing to the
country, but they have not that natural and reasonable dependence
on the richer classes which, in countries differently constituted,
may so well supply their place. I suppose there is less almsgiving
in America than in any other Christian country on the face of the
globe. It is not in the temper of the people either to give or to
receive.

6. I extract the following pompous passage from a Washington
paper of February, 1829 (a season of uncommon severity and dis
tress), which I think justifies my observation.

7. “Among the liberal evidences of sympathy for the suffering poor
of this city, two have come to our knowledge which deserve to be
especially noticed: the one a donation by the President of the
United States, to the committee of the ward in which he resides,
of fifty dollars; the other a donation by a few of the officers of
the war department to the Howard and Dorcas societies, of seventy-
two dollars/ When such mention is made of a gift of about nine
pounds sterling from the sovereign magistrate of the United States,
and of thirteen pounds sterling as a contribution from one of the

66 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

state departments, the inference is pretty obvious, that the suf
ferings of the destitute in America are not liberally relieved by in
dividual charity.

8. I had not been three days at Mohawk-cottage before a pair of
ragged children came to ask for medicine for a sick mother; and
when it was given to them, the eldest produced a handful of cents,
and desired to know what he was to pay. The superfluous milk of
our cow was sought after eagerly, but every newcomer always
proposed to pay for it. When they found out that “the English
old woman” did not sell any thing, I am persuaded they by no
means liked her the better for it; but they seemed to think, that
if she were a fool it was no reason they should be so too, and ac
cordingly the borrowing, as they called it, became very constant,
but always in a form that showed their dignity and freedom. One
woman sent to borrow a pound of cheese; another half a pound of
coffee; and more than once an intimation accompanied the milk
jug, that the milk must be fresh and unskimmed: on one occa
sion the messenger refused milk, and said, “Mother only wanted
a little cream for her coffee/

9. I could never teach them to believe, during above a year that I
lived at this house, that I would not sell the old clothes of the
family; and so pertinacious were they in bargain-making, that
often, when I had given them the articles which they wanted to
purchase, they would say, “Well, I expect I shall have to do a turn
of work for this; you may send for me when you want me.” But
as I never did ask for the turn of work, and as this formula was con
stantly repeated, I began to suspect that it was spoken solely to
avoid uttering that most un-American phrase “I thank you.”

io. There was one man whose progress in wealth I watched with
much interest and pleasure. When I first became his neighbor,
himself, his wife, and four children, were living in one room, with
plenty of beefsteaks and onions for breakfast, dinner, and supper,
but with very few other comforts. He was one of the finest men I
ever saw, full of natural intelligence and activity of mind and
body, but he could neither read nor write. He drank but little
whiskey, and but rarely chewed tobacco, and was therefore more
free from that plague-spot of spitting which rendered male col
loquy so difficult to endure. He worked for us frequently, and often

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 67

used to walk into the drawing-room and seat himself on the sofa,
and tell me all his plans. He made an engagement with the pro
prietor of the wooded hill before mentioned, by which half the
wood he could fell was to be his own. His unwearied industry
made this a profitable bargain, and from the proceeds he pur
chased the materials for building a comfortable frame (or wooden)
house; he did the work almost entirely himself. He then got a job
for cutting rails, and, as he could cut twice as many in a day as
any other man in the neighborhood, he made a good thing of it.
He then let half his pretty house, which was admirably constructed,
with an ample portico, that kept it always cool. His next step was
contracting for the building of a wooden bridge, and when I left
Mohawk he had fitted up his half of the building as an hotel and
grocery store; and I have no doubt that every sun that sets sees
him a richer man than when it rose. He hopes to make his son a
lawyer, and I have little doubt that he will live to see him sit in
Congress; when his time arrives, the woodcutter s son will rank
with any other member of Congress, not of courtesy, but of right,
and the idea that his origin is a disadvantage, will never occur
to the imagination of the most exalted of his fellow citizens.

11. This is the only feature in American society that I recognize as
indicative of the equality they profess. Any man s son may become
the equal of any other man s son, and the consciousness of this is
certainly a spur to exertion; on the other hand, it is also a spur to
that coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect,
which is assumed by the grossest and the lowest in their intercourse
with the highest and most refined. This is a positive evil, and, I
think, more than balances its advantages.

12. And here again it may be observed, that the theory of equality
may be very daintily discussed by English gentlemen in a London
dining room, when the servant, having placed a fresh bottle of
cool wine on the table, respectfully shuts the door, and leaves
them to their walnuts and their wisdom; but it will be found less
palatable when it presents itself in the shape of a hard, greasy
paw, and is claimed in accents that breathe less of freedom than
of onions and whiskey. Strong, indeed, must be the love of equal
ity in an English breast if it can survive a tour through the Union.

13. There was one house in the village which was remarkable for

68 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

its wretchedness. It had an air of indecent poverty about it, which
long prevented my attempting an entrance; but at length, upon
being told that I could get chicken and eggs there whenever I
wanted them, I determined upon venturing. The door being
opened to my knock, I very nearly abandoned my almost blunted
purpose; I never beheld such a den of filth and misery: a woman,
the very image of dirt and disease, held a squalid imp of a baby
on her hip bone while she kneaded her dough with her right fist
only. A great lanky girl, of twelve years old, was sitting on a bar
rel, gnawing a corn cob; when I made known my business, the
woman answered, “No, not I; I got no chickens to sell, nor eggs
neither; but my son will, plenty I expect. Here, Nick” (bawling
at the bottom of a ladder), “here s an old woman what wants
chickens.” Half a moment brought Nick to the bottom of the lad
der, and I found my merchant was one of a ragged crew, whom I
had been used to observe in my daily walk, playing marbles in
the dust, and swearing lustily; he looked about ten years old.

14. “Have you chicken to sell, my boy?”

“Yes, and eggs too, more nor what you ll buy.”

15. Having inquired price, condition, and so on, I recollected that
I had been used to give the same price at market, the feathers
plucked, and the chicken prepared for the table, and I told him that
he ought not to charge the same.

16. “O, for that, I expect I can fix em as well as ever them was,
what you got in market.”

“You fix them?”
“Yes, to be sure, why not?”
“I thought you were too fond of marbles.”
He gave me a keen glance, and said, “You don t know I. When
will you be wanting the chickens?”

17. He brought them at the time directed, extremely well “fixed,”
and I often dealt with him afterward. When I paid him, he always
thrust his hand into his breeches pocket, which I presume, as be
ing the keep, was fortified more strongly than the dilapidated out
works, and drew from thence rather more dollars, half-dollars,
levies, and fips, than his dirty little hand could well hold. My
curiosity was excited, and though I felt an involuntary disgust
towards the young Jew, I repeatedly conversed with him.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 69

18. “You are very rich, Nick,” I said to him one day, on his making
an ostentatious display of change, as he called it; he sneered with
a most unchildish expression of countenance, and replied, “I guess
twould be a bad job for I, if that was all I d got to show.”

19. I asked him how he managed his business. He told me that he
bought eggs by the hundred, and lean chicken by the score, from
the wagons that passed their door on the way to market; that he
fatted the latter in coops he had made himself, and could easily
double their price, and that his eggs answered well too, when he
sold them out by the dozen.

20. “And do you give the money to your mother?”

“I expect not,” was the answer, with another sharp glance of
his ugly blue eyes.

“What do you do with it, Nick?”

His look said plainly, what is that to you? but he only answered,
quaintly enough, “I takes care of it.”

21. How Nick got his first dollar is very doubtful; I was told that
when he entered the village store, the person serving always called
in another pair of eyes; but having obtained it, the spirit, activity,
and industry, with which he caused it to increase and multiply,
would have been delightful in one of Miss Edgeworth s dear little
clean bright-looking boys, who would have carried all he got to
his mother; but in Nick it was detestable. No human feeling seemed
to warm his young heart, not even the love of self-indulgence, for
he was not only ragged and dirty, but looked considerably more
than half starved, and I doubt not his dinners and suppers half
fed his fat chickens.

22. I by no means give this history of Nick, the chicken merchant,
as an anecdote characteristic in all respects of America; the only
part of the story which is so, is the independence of the little man,
and is one instance out of a thousand, of the hard, dry, calculat
ing character that is the result of it. Probably Nick will be very
rich; perhaps he will be president. I once got so heartily scolded
for saying that I did not think all American citizens were equally
eligible to that office, that I shall never again venture to doubt it.

70 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

ANALYSIS

1. a. What is the relationship between the comparison of the peasants of the
United States with those of England and the whole purpose and conclusion of
the article?

b. Where does Mrs. Trollope state her conclusion?

2. a. Explain the function and purpose of the first five paragraphs.

b. Are there any particulars in this part of the essay that support the frequent
generalizations ?

c. Did Mrs. Trollope, however, have concrete evidence in mind?

3. a. Point out the number and kinds of particulars Mrs. Trollope uses in the
essay. What main kinds are there?

b. Does she use material wholly substantiated by personal experience or does
she rely on occasion upon more indirect evidence?

4. a. What do you think of Mrs. Trollope s reasoning and conclusion?
b. Does it seem justified in view of the evidence she uses?

5. Why is this passage called ” informal ” induction? Explain.

I PICK EM UP*
Bij Bergen Evans

1. WHEN A BOY of high school age was sentenced in St. Louis last
year for the murder of five different people from whom he had
begged rides along the highway, a hundred tales of horror were
substantiated.

2. You hear them everywhere: X had his pocket picked by a hitch
hiker, Y was sued, and Z now sleeps in the old churchyard! And
when the wind cries in the chimney and the lights burn blue, we
are told even more eerie things. There is the seductive girl in
sables who said that her Duesenberg had broken down and begged
a lift to the next town. Overpowered by her charm, the simple
Samaritan forgot that the next town was just across the state line
and just under the Mann Act, and now he is the haggard and
bankrupt victim of blackmail. Then there is the fragile old lady
from beneath whose petticoat peeped the cuffs of a man s trousers
or from whose knitting bag protruded the muzzle of a machine
gun I forget which. At any rate, the kindhearted motorist who
was about to let her get into his car saw it in the nick of time and

* From Scribners Magazine, February, 1939. Reprinted by permission of the
author.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 71

stepped on the accelerator. She s become quite a legendary figure,
this dear old menace. She flits in the dusk on the outskirts of Chi
cago and appears in the dawn southwest of Denver. Late revelers
have passed her on the Boston Post Road and the winter visitor
sees her in Florida, where her artillery is sometimes hidden under
Spanish moss and sometimes wreathed in orange blossoms.

3. She proves that “You never can tell.” And the narrator of her
exploits has an unfailing warning: “Don t pick em up! Don t pick
any of em up!”

4. Still, I go on picking them up.

5. There is an element of danger in picking up a stranger along
the highway. Not all of the stories are myths. People have been
robbed, people have been sued, and people have been murdered
by chance passengers.

6. Even so, I believe that for every instance of murderous ingrati
tude on the part of those who have begged rides there could be
cited many instances of sincere gratitude.

7. I have picked up scores of vagrants. They have driven for me,
have helped me with the tires and have fixed things about the
car, and not one has ever threatened me.

8. That is, I think not one. There is one experience about which I
am still uncertain. It was in California, south of Salinas on the way
to Los Angeles. The man was standing by a railroad crossing,
and I was too intent upon the possibility of an approaching train
to examine him carefully, or I would never have stopped, for he
was one of the toughest mugs I have ever seen. Tough in every
way his appearance, his manner, and his speech. There was an
alarming friendliness about him too, a tendency to thwack me on
the back or dig me in the ribs at critical moments on hills and
curves. But as the day wore on, my concern vanished; he seemed
to be a simplehearted bear, boisterous and boastful but innocent
enough. After dark, however, he became silent, and my first impres
sion of him revived a little. Beyond Ventura we had to make a
detour. It was spitting rain, and the dirt road twisted through an
impenetrable blackness. After about half an hour of complete si
lence, in which time we had passed no houses or ears, he suddenly
said, “What d you do if somebody stuck you up, some guy you d

72 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

picked up maybe?” Startled, I could think of nothing but the
truth: “I would try to stop the car,” I said, “but I would probably
be so scared that I would step on the gas and go over the cliff.”
And then, having regained my composure a little, “There s a lot
of insanity in my family.”

9. He didn t say a word, simply kept as far over on his side of the
seat as he could get, with his hands plainly visible and motionless
in his lap, until we came to the first street lights of Los Angeles;
then he seized his paper parcel and, asking me to stop, scrambled
out.

10. Safety, one way or the other, though, hasn t very much to do
with it. I pick them up because I am sorry for them. Their appeal
is elemental; they are footsore, tired, and hungry, and it s a little
thing to let them sit in the car for a while.

11. But chiefly I pick them up because they are amusing and in
teresting. Strangers have none of the middle ground of talk; there
is nothing between the weather and the stuff they live by.

12. You ll find everything, if you pick enough of them “up, from re
bellious boys (“Anything to get outa that dump!”) to quiet, be
wildered men reduced to vagabondage by some swift change in
the methods of production. They have spent their best years learn
ing a trade and cannot believe that they are no longer wanted;
somewhere in the world there must be use for a man who can
blow glass or work in wrought iron. They plead their cases with a
tired persistence while the tires whine the miles away.

13. In contrast are those who are wanderers because they like the
life and who support themselves by various ingenious occupations.
The most bizarre member of this group that I ever encountered
was a tattooed sword swallower. The tattooing, he told me, was to
hold the interest of the crowd until enough people had collected to
make it worth his while to swallow the sword. He allowed me to ex
amine the short, dirty saber and the dirtier poker which he was
accustomed to thrust into his vitals, and on my expressing the
proper degree of astonishment, he even offered to teach me the art.
Since it required, however, years of practice with polished ivory
rods on an empty stomach, I declined with thanks. You got used
to it in time, he urged; he could do it on a full meal. But I still
declined. Later I had the queasy satisfaction of watching him per-

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 73

form. He recognized me in the audience, honored me with a ges
ture of salutation, and insisted that I was not to contribute.

14. More pleasant to remember is a little boy I picked up one sum
mer evening in Utah, between Nephi and Moroni, where the road
turns east and south to pass between the Nebo and the San Pitch
ranges. I had been crawling all afternoon at about five miles an
hour through great herds of sheep that were moving north towards
Provo. The air had been acrid and choking with dust, and the
bleatings and patter of hoofs at first pleasant had become
highly irritating after three or four hours. One of the herders told
me that I would find a clear road twenty miles to the east, and
so at Nephi I cut over to it.

15. And it was on the connecting road, on the brow of a rise be
tween the mountain ranges, that I came on this boy, a child of
about ten, trudging along with a lamb in his arms. He did not
ask for a ride, but he seemed so tiny, so alone in the vastness of
the hills and the twilight, that I stopped and asked him if he would
like to get in. He said, yes, thank you, he would like it very much
because it would get him home in time for supper; he had ten
miles to go and was hungry. Seated in the car with the lamb in
his lap, half-hidden under his jacket, he explained that it was a
lostling, one whose mother had died. Ordinarily, he said, the
shepherds feed them from bottles or find a sheep whose lamb has
died and tie the dead lamb s skin around the orphan for the
ewes, though they will not feed a strange lamb, seem to know their
own solely by smell. But during the annual migrations there is no
time for such attentions and the lostlings, too weak from lack of
food to keep up with the herd, are left to die.

16. The sheepherders will gladly give them to anyone who wants
them. And so he had taken to walking along behind the herds,
waiting for a chance stray. It was hard work for a child. The day
that I picked him up he had followed the herds fifteen miles and
had carried the lamb five on the way home. He had started, he
told me, early in the morning, carrying a lunch, and if I had not
given him a ride he would not have reached home before mid
night. The possibility did not alarm him; he had often walked that
far before. His father, a farmer, staked him to skim milk to feed
his lambs. The year before, he had acquired a flock of thirty-four

74 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

and this year already had eighteen. At the mention of such num
bers I became more respectful; I had picked up a man of sub
stance.

17. I don t generally pick up boys in their teens, but I make an
exception of CCC boys. I like their energy and cheerfulness and
their enthusiasm for the camps. I have picked them up by the
dozens, in all parts of the country, and have yet to find one who
was disgruntled or bitter. They are proud of being members of
their camps. Many of them are beginning to be conscious of so
ciety, its benefits and responsibilities, and are thrilled at the dis
covery.

18. One CCC boy whom I picked up in western Pennsylvania only
a few months ago asked me if I would stay and have supper with
him at the camp. I was astonished to learn that he was allowed
to have a guest, and he was astonished that I was astonished. And
a little hurt. Why shouldn t he have a guest? What did I think
it was, a prison? Ashamed, I made some floundering apology and
stayed for a very good supper.

19. College boys, on the other hand, are rarely interesting. A college
sticker on a suitcase is as good as a green light to me. They ve
all had too much psychology and spoil the natural charm of their
ignorance by trying to be charming. They are little Dale Carnegies
and proceed to put you at your ease.

20. They are too anxious to find out your interests. Whereas it is the
man with overmastering interests of his own who makes the way
seem short. Give me a crank or a crackpot every time, a fellow
who can t wait to get into the car before he starts to expound or
argue. Communism or some crazy diet, it s all one with me so
long as he is excited about it.

21. One of my most vivid recollections is of a man whom I did not
pick up. His name was Brother John, and I saw him in Prescott,
Arizona, one morning several years ago. A rodeo was scheduled
for the afternoon, and the streets were gay with ten-gallon hats,
fleecy chaps, bright shirts, brisk little cow ponies, and all the other
paraphernalia of the professional West. A microphone had been
set up on the steps of the courthouse, and through rumbling am
plifiers ballads and ballyhoo came in intermittent thunder. Now
and then the man at the mike would ask some local celebrity to say

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 75

a word or two. Several politicians had assured the crowd of their
undying devotion to its interests when a more interesting possi
bility presented itself in the form of Brother John. He was a
prophet, he said, and his ruddy face, magnificent white beard, and
flowing locks bore him out. He was barefooted and dressed in a
sort of toga of white samite or percale, or whatever it was that
prophets were wearing that season. In his hand he held a staff
to which a banner was attached, and around his neck was hung on
a red cord what seemed to be the nozzle of a fire hose.

22. The announcer asked him if he would care to address the peo
ple, and he said that he would. Thrusting himself through the
crowd, he mounted the courthouse steps with solemn dignity and,
applying the small end of his fire nozzle to his lips, blew into the
microphone a blast which when amplified, almost tore away the
cornice. And then in a voice scarcely less terrible, cried out
the single word “Repent!”

23. That were a man to pick up! I never round a curve without look
ing eagerly down the road to see if he is not striding before me.
And someday I will overtake him and offer him a ride. And then
with his bare feet on the dashboard and his trumpet clearing
all before us what brave things I shall learn! He will tell me of
God s wrath, of Judgment Day and all the hardships of a prophet s
life. He will speak of Beulah and of Signs to Come, lay bare
the mystery of Mormon underwear, and justify the Amish Breth
ren because they use no buttons!

24. What a poor tiling is safety compared with this!

ANALYSIS

a. What is the conclusion or generalization that the induction points to in this
article? Is it clearly stated? Where?

b. Could such a conclusion be arrived at through other sources of information
than those the author uses? What are they?

Note carefully the way the article begins.

a. Is this beginning a clear part of the inductive pattern?

b. How does it fit in with the rest of the article?

c. Where in the text does the author turn from the beginning to the actual body
of the article?

d. Point out the writing devices he uses to make this and other transitions be
tween parts of his organization.

76 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

3. a. How many specific or particular incidents does the author use to support and
clarify his conclusion?

b. Do these incidents follow a clearly arranged and logical order, or a rhetor
ical order, one that is used merely because it has interest and creates emphasis?

4. a. Does Evans state his conclusion more than once?

b. Does he relate directly his conclusion to each incident used to support it?

5. What changes would have to be made in this article to ” formalize ” the induc
tion, that is, to shift die pattern away from infonnal induction?

6. Note the concessive pattern of the organization of the article as a whole, with
the break coming at Paragraph 10. Note also the pattern of classification that is
to be found from Paragraph 10 to the end.

THE NEGRO SCIENTIST*
By W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

1. I WAS on a dining car in Ohio last November when a little brown
boy and his mother stopped at my table. She said he wanted to
meet a man who had known his grandfather. I soon learned who
the boy was. He had passed an intelligence test in Cincinnati lately
and scored an I.Q. of 170, one of the highest in the city. I also re
membered his grandfather. A always represented to me a trag
edy in science. He was thin, brown, had close-curled hair, was
ill-dressed and excessively shy. This man, a born student, was
graduated from the University of Z in 1891 and became as
sistant in the Department of Biology. There he began his study of
insects. His chief was called to the new University of Chicago

when it was organized in 1892 and invited A to be his assistant.

But unfortunately the chief soon died and no one at Z or Chi
cago desired a colored assistant.

2. A became a teacher in a small colored Methodist school in

South Atlanta which had at the time about a dozen college stu
dents, no laboratories and few books. He received inadequate pay
and a heavy teaching load. Nevertheless he stuck to his work. Be
tween 1908 and 1933 he published nine interesting studies of in
sect behavior in Psyche, the Biological Bulletin, and the Journal of
Animal Behavior. He watched the dance of the mellissodes and
the habits of the mud dauber, the bees and the ant lion. These

* From The American Scholar, Summer, 1939. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers and the author.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 77

brought him notice and attention among scientists in both America
and Europe; but the only appointment carrying a living wage that
he was able to get was in the Negro Sumner High School in St.
Louis. There he stayed until he died of overwork. He was a prom
ising scientist; with even fair opportunity he ought to have ac
complished much; but his color hindered him.

3. Some time ago a great American scientist noted in public print
how few Negroes had made their mark in science. They were heard
of in music and literature, on the stage, in painting and in some
departments of public life, but not often in exact science. I called
his attention to the fact that it was not easy for an American Negro
to pursue science and he admitted that there might be difficulties.
But I think that along with most Americans his private belief was
that the exact and intensive habit of mind, the rigorous mathe
matical logic demanded of those who would be scientists is not
natural to the Negro race.

4. I believe he was wrong and for that reason I am going to point

to the careers of several Negroes, in addition to A , who seem

to have had the mental equipment requisite for scientific accom
plishment and who have done work of a high order, but who never
had the best facilities or even a good opportunity to accomplish
first-rate work opened to them. To avoid unpleasant notoriety I
have substituted letters for the names of persons and institutions.
Judgment here is of course not infallible and it is quite possible
that in some cases difficulties of temperament and personality, in
ability to fulfill the earlier promise of a career and a number of
other things hampered these men rather than a mere matter of
color prejudice. But I do not think so and to show the reasonable
ness of my thesis I want to set down the main facts of their careers.
There are twelve Negro scholars listed in American Men of Sci
ence. Of these, eight were teaching in Negro colleges; three were
teaching in white institutions and one was in a museum of Natural

History. Two or three men, like B whom I mention below,

were omitted although they deserve inclusion.

5. Dr. B entered medical school just as S. Weir Mitchell gave

the hospitals for the insane that bitter drubbing in which he ac
cused them of simply incarcerating the insane while they did noth
ing to further the study of insanity. Out of this attack arose a new

78 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

movement in American psychiatry. Dr. B was one of the earli
est workers in the new field. He was graduated at the Y

Medical School and given a place on the staff of X Insane

Asylum in New England. There he became in succession intern,
assistant pathologist, pathologist and director of psychiatry from
1891 to 1920. He began systematic and laboratory experiments,
from time to time read the results of his findings before the Ameri
can Medico-Psychological Society and other organizations, and was
a member of the chief psychiatric societies of the United States.
He was regarded as one of the leading authorities on psychiatry
in the United States evidenced by the fact that as work in psy
chiatry was organized in various points throughout the nation,

Dr. B was time and again asked to join the new staff being

brought together. As soon, however, as it was learned by cor
respondence or interview that he was colored the invitations were
withdrawn or the matter was allowed to drop.

6. Between 1909 and 1931 Dr. B was connected with the med
ical school of Y University and taught there for ^twenty-two

years as Instructor in Neurology, Lecturer in Neuropathology, As
sistant Professor and Associate Professor of Neurology. During his
last five years with the institution he served as the actual head of
the Department of Neurology, a position which was vacant, but
he never received the title. Finally a white assistant professor was
made professor and placed at the head of the department. Dr.

B resigned. He refused to complain. “I thoroughly dislike

publicity of that sort and despise sympathy. I regard life as a bat
tle in which we win or lose. As far as I am concerned, to be van
quished, if not ingloriously, is not so bad after all.” He docs, how
ever, admit that “with the sort of work I have done, I might have
gone farther and reached a higher plane, had it not been for my
color.”

y. Another case is that of C . C is an instructor in the

W Medical School and chief of the Wassermann Laboratory

in the State Health Department. His test for syphilis is said to be
better than the Wassermann test in some respects. Yet this man,
who is one of the foremost authorities on syphilis in the United

States, has received no promotion at W , occupies no assured

position and recently refused a distinction conferred upon him by

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 79

a Negro organization for fear that emphasis upon his color would
handicap him even more than it has already.

8. D is professor of zoology at a Negro university. His work

in the biology of the cell surface is outstanding. He has contributed
a chapter to Cowdry s General Cytology and to a similar German
work. His own volume, The Biology of the Cell Surface, has just
been published. For twenty-five years he has worked during the

summers at the celebrated laboratories at V . As the leading

authority in methods there he was consulted by staff and students
alike. Contrary to almost invariable precedent, however, he has

never been named an instructor at V and has never but once

received a call from a leading university. That came in his earlier
career and was an offer of an assistantship. Although he was a
friend of the greatest American scholar of general physiology, a

man who admired him and his work, D was never invited to

occupy a research position. Finally he ceased going to V be
cause of the treatment which his wife had to endure one summer

when he took her with him. D was once vice president of

the American Society of Zoologists but he never became president,
a quite usual promotion. There seems to be no explanation for the

treatment of D but his color. Personally both he and his wife

are modest, pleasant and unassuming.

9. E was professor of chemistry at a colored university but

was forced to resign for reasons which the president and many of
the trustees did not regard as adequate. There was no question
as to his training and his ability in chemistry. He became Gradu
ate Research Counselor at U , a well known Western univer
sity. From 1934 to 1937 his course in chemistry was currently re
ported to be the most popular in the institution and despite his
Negro blood he stood well with the president and the administra
tion. But any chance for continuing his work there or for securing
promotion was frustrated by the propaganda of the American Le
gion. He resigned and became the head of the Research Depart
ment of the T Company where he has twelve white chemists

working under him. Commerce welcomed what the educational
world rebuffed.

10. F is Associate Professor of Pathology at S University. He

was a long time in getting his promotion and according to latest

80 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

information has never had any classes assigned him. Yet he is said
to know his subject well.

11. Discrimination has also been evident in the social sciences. For

years O University had a Negro librarian. He was a man of

training and ability, was handsome and alert, held office in the
state organization and stood high among librarians. But he told
me he was convinced his library would not be developed and
would get no adequate appropriation so long as he remained in
charge. The authorities would not oust him but they would not
foster the library or follow his recommendations. He believed that
there he was at the end of his career and he resigned to become
librarian of a colored college where he felt he was at least wanted
and needed.

12. It has been difficult for Negroes to become fellows of the Ameri
can College of Surgeons. Many years ago a Negro from Chicago
was elected. Since that time there have been several others who
according to general report deserved election but could not get it.

H had done excellent work in research, had had several papers

published and was head surgeon in one of the greatest hospi
tals of America but it was a hospital that served a Negro neigh
borhood. After many rebuffs he was elected to the College re
putedly because he was backed by white colleagues who belonged

to N , one of the most powerful political organizations of

America. Without their determined assault it is very doubtful that
despite his outstanding work he would have been accepted on his
merits.

13. As I have said, it would not be possible for an outsider to prove
that in all these instances the scientific work was flawless or that
difficulties of personality did not in some cases hinder promotion.
Yet certainly, taking them all together and examining the work
done and the character of mind and technique, it seems fair to
conclude that had these men not been of Negro descent they would
have been offered a broader and better chance to carry on scien
tific work.

14. For a young man a career in science depends almost entirely
upon academic appointment and promotion. Even persons of in
dependent means need the academic atmosphere, the use of labora-

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 81

tories, scientific collections and other facilities and the inspiration
of intercourse with scientific men. What usually happens, therefore,
is that a young man of ability in any particular field is during or
after his college years picked out by a department and given an
appointment as laboratory assistant or instructor. After that his rise
to a permanent position and to an opportunity to do first-class work
depends in large part upon his own capacities.

15. In the case of Negroes, however, these gates to selection are
usually closed. One president of a leading New England college

said of G (a cream-colored young man with curly hair) that

he was the “most brilliant student of a generation.” In addition he
was handsome, healthy, well-bred and had pleasing manners. He
was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, led his class and was valedictorian.
He was never offered a position at any first-class institution. Instead
he became an instructor at a Southern Negro institution but was
unhappy in his work. He changed his specialty from English to
anthropology and studied abroad. His work on blood groups is
quoted with approval by Huxley and Haddon. He is now on a
fellowship at R University.

16. White instructors throughout the country testify that they have
had in their classes Negroes of unquestioned ability to pursue ca
reers in science. One of them says:

Nineteen of the leading professors of chemistry in the great univer
sities of the country were questioned as to their experience with the
Negro graduate student in chemistry. Their replies were highly gratify
ing to one interested in the advance of the Negro in higher education.
. . . One biochemist of international reputation speaks of a Negro stu
dent who, to his mind, “is one of the most promising young physiological
chemists in America. He has a keen, analytical mind, remarkable re
search technique, and in spite of the fact that he was the only Negro do
ing major work in our department, he was accepted as an equal by the
forty or more graduate students majoring in this division/ . . . Profes
sors W. A. Hopkins, W. A. Noyes, and J. H. Reedy (by quotation) of the
University of Illinois, listed nine Negro chemists (all but two of them
former students at Illinois) who have done outstanding work or give
great promise of productive careers in chemistry. A chairman of a great
university department of chemistry, himself known internationally for his
work in analytical and physical chemistry, writes of a Negro student and
doctoral candidate, who, in a class of ninety in organic chemistry “easily

82 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

held his own with the best white students. In all of his chemical work,
he has shown the same proficiency.” l

17. It is probable that similar testimony might be gathered from
other areas of the scientific world. Nevertheless most institutions,
even those of first rank, shrink from facing this matter of color
discrimination and appointing a man of ability despite his color.
For instance, one president of Q during his three years in
cumbency simply refused to admit Negro students. A professor at

A objected to granting a fellowship to a colored man. The

student s ability and desert were unquestioned but “what could
he find to do after he pursued such a course” and consequently
“would he not become bitter like Du Bois?” Fortunately he was
overruled and the fellowship was granted.

18. I once received from the Department of Economics at W

College, one of the oldest and greatest in the land, very flattering
testimony of the work in economics done by a Negro graduate stu
dent, H , and a request to use my influence to have him placed

in a colored institution. The matter was brought to the attention

of the president of Atlanta University and he went to W . He

was told that H was a student of marked ability and had done

first-class work. “Indeed,” said the head of the department who was
talking to Mr. Hope, “if he were not a colored man we would give
him an appointment here.” Mr. Hope looked so white it is possible
the speaker did not realize to whom he was speaking.

19. At certain universities there has been evidence of discrimination

in granting the Ph.D. degree to Negroes. At S University, for

example, it is said that because of the unbending prejudice of one
professor the doctorate in history is almost never granted to a
Negro. In a recent comprehensive examination passed by a Negro

candidate, M , the secretary of a national scientific association,

said to me, “I am glad Professor was not present or he would

never have passed!”

20. From all this it is obvious that if young colored men receive
scientific training almost their only opening lies in the Negro uni
versity of the South. This in itself has much to commend it. It

1 S. W. Geiser, Fellow of the A.A.A.S.; head of the Department of Biology,
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas; author of “Lecture Outlines
in General Biology/ Opportunity, February, 1935.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 83

should mean that some of the best-trained Negroes are going to
teach their own youth and give them the advantage of superior
education. But the difficulty here, of course, is that very few of
these institutions have the facilities for research, nor can they
grant teachers the time to devote to it. The young scientist who
goes to such an institution is usually given a heavy load of teach
ing covering several branches of scientific work. If he can find
any time for research he not only has few facilities at his disposal
at the institution, but he has a body of college students handi
capped by restricted high school and elementary school training.
Few of them have seen laboratories before coining to college or
have been used to rigorous scientific methods. Their English and
their mathematics have suffered from poor teachers and short
school terms.

21. Not only docs the young Negro scientist find difficulty in pur
suing scientific research in a Negro institution. He lives usually in
an intellectual desert so far as the surrounding world is concerned.
State libraries will lend books to colored students but usually the
reader must be segregated in separate and often inconvenient
rooms. Even in the Federal State Department in Washington,

K (the dean of a colored college who was working in the

archives) was placed in a room by himself. The libraries of col
leges for white students will often lend books to colored institu
tions. Throughout the South some social study gatherings and some
learned societies admit Negroes, but with various discriminations.
In general the libraries, museums, laboratories, and scientific col
lections in the South are either completely closed to Negro in
vestigators or are only partially opened and on humiliating terms.

22. Of course those colored graduates of Northern colleges who live
in the South are never affiliated with the local alumni groups. This
even goes so far as to discrimination against colored members of

Phi Beta Kappa. One man (L ) writes me, “Some years ago

I refused to make the full payment on my pledge for the construc
tion of the new Phi Beta Kappa building at W , because I had

heard that Negroes were not to be admitted to the exercises at
the opening.”

23. In the matter of scholarships and prizes difficulties are often
raised in the case of colored candidates. Today it is practically in>

84 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

possible for a Negro in the South even to enter the Rhodes Scholar
ships examinations. The Institute of International Education long
hesitated to send colored men abroad as exchange students but
lately has been prevailed upon to change its policy. In the high
schools, through vocational advice and the general direction that
teachers exercise over students, Negroes are repeatedly turned
from contemplated careers in science. When a boy or girl wants
to specialize in physics or biology he is asked, “Why do you choose
this subject? What career will there be for you in it?” I have had
many letters from students telling me of such advice and asking if
it is true that there would be no chance for Negroes in certain lines
of scientific work.

24. In the semiscientific, technical field, Negroes have a fair repre
sentation. The National Technical Association, as their society is
called, has a membership of three hundred, made up of one hun
dred thirteen mechanical and electrical engineers, thirty-eight ar
chitects, twenty-three chemists and five men engaged in physical
and biological research. It is interesting to remember *that Lewis
H. Latimer, a colored man, was one of the original Edison Asso
ciates.

25. One may say in answer to all this: so what? After all there are
plenty of white men who can be trained as scientists. Why crowd
the field with Negroes who certainly can find other socially neces
sary work? But the point is that ability and genius are strangely
catholic in their tastes, regard no color line or racial inheritance.
They occur here, there, everywhere, without rule or reason. The
nation suffers that disregards them. There is ability in the Negro
race a great deal of unusual and extraordinary ability, undiscov
ered, unused and unappreciated. And in no line of work is ability
so much needed today as in science.

26. I can remember the disappointment I myself met with in pursu
ing a scientific career. I started to work many years ago in soci
ology, a science then so new that Harvard would not recognize it
and gave me a Ph.D. in history instead. Nevertheless I intended
to use social science for the solution of the problems of the Negro
and in November, 1897, I submitted to the American Academy of
Political and Social Science my plan for an inquiry into that diffi
cult area of social relationships. In 1899 I followed that up with a

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 85

book, The Philadelphia Negro, in which I pointed out that the
study of the Philadelphia Negro had been made along the lines
laid down in 1897, and was “thus part of a larger design of ob
servation and research into the history and social condition of the
transplanted Africans.” I went on to say:

It is my earnest desire to pursue this particular form of study far
enough to constitute a fair basis of induction as to the present condition
of the American Negro. The department of history and economics of
Atlanta University, where I am now situated, is pursuing certain lines of
inquiry in this general direction. I hope that funds may be put at our
disposal for this larger and more complete scheme. Finally, let me add
that I trust that this study with all its errors and shortcomings will at
least serve to emphasize the fact that the Negro problems are problems
of human beings; that they cannot be explained away by fantastic
theories, ungrounded assumptions or metaphysical subtleties. They pre
sent a field which the student must enter seriously, and cultivate care
fully and honestly. And until he has prepared the ground by intelligent
and discriminating research, the labors of philanthropist and statesman
must continue to be, to a large extent, barren and unfruitful.

27. I then went to Atlanta University where for thirteen years I
worked at the carrying out of the plan. During those years I pub
lished fourteen monographs on the Negro problem. In the mono
graph of 1912 I said:

There is only one sure basis of social reform and that is Truth a care
ful, detailed knowledge of the essential facts of each social problem.
Without this there is no logical starting place for reform and uplift. Social
difficulties may be clear and we may inveigh against them, but the
causes proximate and remote are seldom clear to the casual observer and
usually are quite hidden from the man who suffers from, or is sensitive
to, the results of the snarl. . . . The study is, therefore, a further carry
ing out of the plan of social study of the Negro American, by means of
an annual series of decennially recurring subjects covering, so far as is
practicable, every phase of human life. This plan originated at Atlanta
University in 1896. The object of these studies is primarily scientific a
careful research for truth conducted as thoroughly, broadly and honestly
as the material resources and mental equipment at command will allow.
… In this work we have received unusual encouragement from the
scientific world, and the published results of these studies are used in
America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Very few books on the Negro prob
lem, or any phase of it, have been published in the last decade which
have not acknowledged their indebtedness to our work.

86 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

28. But to my great disappointment the work had to be given up.
We asked only $5000 a year for its continued pursuit and out of
that was paid my salary of $1200. The work was not of first-rate
importance. It was handicapped by lack of funds, lack of trained
personnel and faulty scientific method. The astonishing thing about
those Atlanta University publications was that from 1896 to 1910
we were the only institution in the world to make a social study
of the results of the contact of the white and Negro race in Amer
ica; and no matter how poorly that work was done it was recog
nized as important and unique by leaders of thought in practically
every country in the world. For a quarter-century no study of the
Negro or of race conditions in the South could be published with
out reference to and quotation from our work. Some of the best-
known students of social science of our day Frank B. Sanborn,
Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, Walter F. Wilcox, Florence
Kelley, J. H. Dillard, Franz Boas attended our conferences and
cooperated in our work. Yet we were unable to rais* thfi $5000 a
year necessary to keep it going.

29. For twenty-five years I had to turn my attention to a career of
propaganda, in an effort to convince the people of this country that
Negroes ought to be given chances as men. In the last few years
large sums of money have been given to Southern institutions,
white and colored, and to departments of Northern institutions
for pursuing under more favorable circumstances, with larger re
sources, with better technique and with better-trained people the
same program of work we had begun in 1896. It is perhaps too
much to say that our work failed solely because Negroes were do
ing it, but certainly America was not disposed to help until white
folk took it up.

ANALYSIS

i. The following gives you, briefly, the organization of this article: (1) intro
duction, (2) statement of the problem, the thesis maintained, and discussion
of the method used, (3) examination of cases, (4) general causal analysis,
with two principal subdivisions, (5) conclusion, (6) author s own case.
a. Go through the article carefully with this organization in mind marking off
the division points.

a. What is the effect of introducing the selection with a concrete scene? Is this
device a common one? Is it one that you might well use in writing of your
own?

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 87

3. Note that the author also states his problem in terms of a concrete situation:
the public statement by a great American scientist. Student writing all too
often is in a vacuum, unattached to any particular body of ideas or events.
Most students, consequently, need to learn how to give their papers focus by
using a reference similar to the one made by the author here to the great
American scientist.

4. The structure of this selection is quite formal. There may be some doubt about
the Tightness of including it in this section on informal induction. In Para
graph 5, for instance, the author takes considerable space to discuss the limita
tions of his study, his methods of procedure, and his omissions. These are
usually features of a formal research paper. Some of the selections in Section
IV may actually be less formal.

a. Can you discover the reasons for its inclusion here under informal induc
tion? Is the author claiming demonstration, or is he proceeding somewhat
carefully in showing what he means?

5. Is there any pattern behind the order in which the cases appear?

6. Note the topic sentences in Paragraphs 11 and 12.

7. a. Why has the author not used his case material that appears in Paragraphs
15-20 in the earlier presentation of cases?

b. What is the main point of the section comprised by these paragraphs?

c. Study the pattern of the causal reasoning involved.

8. a. How does the subject matter in Paragraphs 21-24 differ from the subject
matter in Paragraphs 15-20?

b. Does Paragraph 14 prepare for discussion of all the material in Paragraphs
15-24?

9. If Paragraph 25 is the real conclusion, what is the author doing thereafter?
What effect has this continuation?

WESTCHESTER WOMEN*
By Bruce Bliven

1. I HAVE been talking lately to my friend Beatrice, whom I have
known for many years and of whose reliability as a witness I am
certain. Beatrice, patting her permanent delicately with two fingers
and smoothing down her neat tan uniform, with its white pique
collar and cuffs, deposes and says:

2. “I am a member of the sales force in one of New York s big smart
stores. I work in the branch up in Westchester County. Never
mind the exact name of the town; let s not get personal. Sure, I m
a college graduate: Wellesley 9 33. Lots of the girls are college

* From the New Republic, July 27, 1938. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers.

88 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

women, nowadays. Some of them don t have to work, and do it
for fun. I need to, like most of the others.

3. “Our customers in the branch store are drawn exclusively from
the upper-middle-class women of Westchester. The poor people
who are within buying distance are afraid to enter our door, on
account of the high prices. In three years I have learned plenty
about wealthy women: plenty to turn your stomach, I mean. Don t
get me wrong; I don t suggest that Westchester is a bit worse
than any other place in the whole country where the average in
come in normal times is $10,000 a year and up. The women I see
are good typical specimens of what happens when a lot of people
don t have to work for their livings, have never had any real edu
cation, and exercise power that outruns the limits of their char
acter.

4. “The most striking thing about these women is their amazing
rudeness. I don t mean that they deliberately set out to hurt your
feelings. I mean that they are so naively selfish and egotistical that
it never occurs to them to respect the wishes, or to have considera
tion for the sensibilities, of people whom they class as servants
which means everyone they meet, except their own circle. Girls
in the beauty shop tell me that two of these women will come
in together and loudly discuss the most horrifyingly personal details
of their own lives and those of their friends as though they were
being served by robots instead of human beings. If there was
ever anybody who believed in the divine right of royalty, it is the
American upper class, thinking about itself. Maybe this is why
they hate Roosevelt so terribly because he is the only person who
ever said boo to them and said it in such a way that they had to
listen.

5. “Another impressive thing about them is that so many are dis
honest. Our store, like all others in its class, has charge accounts
and permits the return of unsatisfactory merchandise. The way
Westchester women abuse this privilege is a disgrace. I am con
fident that our prices could be a good deal lower if it weren t for
the financial burden caused by this kind of business.

6. “One of these women will come in and spend the morning shop
ping when she has no intention of buying anything. It gives her
somewhere to go while her husband is in town, and she likes to

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 89

look at the new merchandise. She will iDuy* hundreds of dollars
worth, taking up hours of the time of one or more sales people.
It will be delivered next morning, and the following day, back it
all comes. She knows she doesn t intend to keep it, and the sales
girl knows, but we re not allowed ever to hint at this knowledge,
though we may try gently to discourage her from sending home an
unreasonable amount.

7. “Perhaps even worse is the woman who buys far beyond her
husband s ability to pay. She simply tries to blackmail him into
permitting her an impossible degree of extravagance. You d be
surprised if you knew how many Westchester women have had
their charge accounts in all stores closed, on orders from their
husbands.

8. “Many of them, regardless of their financial status, will abuse
the charge-account privilege in another way, by ordering goods,
using them and then sending them back to the store. Even if they
have plenty of money, they think it is smart to trick the store in
this way. A woman who is going to an important social affair will
buy an evening gown, have it altered and sent home, and then a
few days later she sends it back on the ground that she did not
like it. The gown shows conclusively that it has been worn for
many hours, perhaps several times. They will do the same thing
with hats, coats and even household equipment. Our chinaware
department will tell you of women who have sent home a com
plete set of dinner ware and then returned it for credit without
even having it washed thoroughly, so that remnants of food are
still on the plates.

9. “An all-time record for this kind of thing, in my experience at
any rate, was a woman who came into the shop wearing, under
her dress, a bathing suit she had bought a few days earlier. She
went into a dressing room, peeled off the suit, said calmly, This
suit just simply didn t work out/ and asked for a credit on her
account. Only the other day, an important customer came in with
a coat that she had had for a week, announced she didn t like it
and asked us to take it back. We found in one pocket a very dirty
handkerchief, and in the other a lipstick. It will cost dollars to
have that coat made presentable again so that it can go back in
stock. Much of the merchandise sent back for credit has been so

90 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

badly used that it can never be sold again, at least to our clientele
at our prices.

10. “The customers don t seem to know it, but they do a salesgirl
harm if they order merchandise through her that afterwards comes
back. The girl is of course penalized by having the amount de
ducted from her total sales; that is only fair. But more than that,
if an unusually large percentage of her sales don t stick, she is likely
to be discharged, on the ground that there must be something
wrong with her selling ability or she wouldn t have so many dis
satisfied customers.

11. “One thing I must say is that older women are usually the worst
offenders. If the daughter of one of these wealthy families goes
to college and then takes a job of any kind, she seems to absorb
some feeling of business ethics. Some of these younger women
buy the way a man does walk in, say what they want, look at
a couple of choices, make a selection, and are out and away. No
man ever returns anything he has bought for himself, and busi
ness women are pretty good about it, too. The only complaint I
can make about the men who come into our store, trailing behind
a Westchester woman, is that about sixty per cent of them will
make a pass at you if they get a chance. Well, I m not complaining
exactly; I would feel worse if they didn t, I guess.

12. “I don t want to go philosophical on you, but I must say that
looking at the kind of women I meet makes me a little gloomy
about the future of our civilization, and whither are we trending,
and all that. These women and their husbands and fathers are
supposed to be the finest flower of American civilization. Some of
them, certainly, are swell; I m not talking about the exceptions,
but the averages. If all the money and advantages leave the average
with very few morals or manners that will bear inspection, what s
the answer?”

13. To which the reporter can only echo, What, indeed?

ANALYSIS

i. In talking about the structure of this selection, we are, of course, talking about
the long quotation. The first and last paragraphs merely provide a framework
for the quotation. The second and third paragraphs introduce the idea. Note
that Paragraph 2 (like Paragraph 4 of The Negro Scientist) discusses limita-

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 91

tions, scope of the problem, and exceptions, and gives the speaker s creden
tials.

2. The charges against Westchester women fall into two classes.

a. Mark off the places in the text where these occur. How many paragraphs
are devoted to each?

b. Are any actual cases cited to support the first of these? Is the support
adequate?

c. Are any actual cases cited to support the second? Is the support adequate?

3. In outlining this selection, what do you do with Paragraphs 11 and 12?

4. Where is the main point stated? Does it arise from the secondary generaliza
tions or directly from the cases cited?

PALEFACE AND REDSKIN*
By Philip Rahv

1. VIEWED historically, American writers appear to group themselves
around two polar types. Paleface and redskin I should like to call
the two, and despite occasional efforts at reconciliation no love is
lost between them.

2. Consider the immense contrast between the drawing-room fic
tions of Henry James and the open air poems of Walt Whitman.
Compare Melville s decades of loneliness, his tragic failure, with
Mark Twain s boisterous career and dubious success. At one pole
there is the literature of the low-life world of the frontier and
of the big cities; at the other the thin, solemn, semiclerical culture
of Boston and Concord. The fact is that the creative mind in
America is fragmented and one-sided. For the process of polari
zation has produced a dichotomy between experience and con
sciousness a dissociation between energy and sensibility, between
conduct and theories of conduct, between life conceived as an op
portunity and life conceived as a discipline.

3. The differences between the two types define themselves in
every sphere. Thus while the redskin glories in his Americanism,
to the paleface it is a source of endless ambiguities. Sociologi
cally they can be distinguished as patrician vs. plebeian, and in
their esthetic ideals one is drawn to allegory and to the distilla
tions of symbolism, whereas the other inclines to a gross, riotous

* From The Kenyan Review, Summer, 1939. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers and the author.

92 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

naturalism. The paleface is a “highbrow,” though his mentality
as in the case of Hawthorne and James is often of the kind that
excludes and repels general ideas; he is at the same time both
something more and something less than an intellectual in the
European sense. And the redskin deserves the epithet “lowbrow”
not because he is badly educated which he might or might not
be but because his reactions are primarily emotional, spontane
ous, and lacking in personal culture. The paleface continually
hankers after religious norms and tends toward a refined estrange
ment from reality. The redskin, on the other hand, accepts his en
vironment, at times to the degree of fusion with it, even when re
belling against one or another of its manifestations. At his highest
level the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere; at his
lowest he is genteel, snobbish, and pedantic. In giving expression
to the vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the redskin is
at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, com
bining aggression with conformity and reverting to the crudest
forms of frontier psychology.

4. James and Whitman, who as contemporaries felt only disdain
for each other, are the purest examples of this dissociation. In
reviewing Drum Taps in 1865 the young James told off the grand
plebeian innovator, advising him to stop declaiming and go sit in
the corner of a rhyme and meter school, 1 while the innovator, snort
ing at the novelist of scruples and moral delicacy, said “Feathers!”
Now this mutual repulsion between the two major figures in Ameri
can literature would be less important if it were mainly personal
or esthetic in reference. But the point is that it has a profoundly
national and social-historical character.

5. James and Whitman form a kind of fatal antipodes. To this, in
part, can be traced the curious fact about them that, though each
has become the object of a special cult, neither is quite secure
in his reputation. For most of the critics and historians who make
much of Whitman disparage James or ignore him altogether, and
vice versa. Evidently the high valuation of the one is so incongru
ous with the high valuation of the other that criticism is chroni-

1 In A Backward Glance Edith Wharton relates that in his old age James
liked to recite Whitman s poetry. But if he changed his mind about Whit
man he certainly kept it a secret so far as any public expression is con*
cerned.

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 93

cally forced to choose between them which makes for a breach in
the literary tradition without parallel in any European country.
The aristocrat Tolstoy and the tramp Gorky found that they held
certain values and ideas in common, whereas James and Whitman,
who between them dominate American writing of the nineteenth
century, cannot abide with one another. And theirs is no unique or
isolated instance.

6. The national literature suffers from the ills of a split personality.
The typical American writer has so far shown himself incapable
of escaping the blight of one-sidedness : of achieving that mature
control which permits the balance of impulse with sensitiveness,
of natural power with ideological depth. For the dissociation of
mind from experience has resulted in truncated works of art,
works that tend to be either naive and ungraded, often flat, repro
ductions of life, or else products of cultivation that remain ab
stract for the reason that they fall short on evidence drawn from
the sensuous and material world. Hence it is only through inten
sively exploiting their very limitations, through submitting them
selves to a process of creative yet cruel self-exaggeration, that a
few artists have succeeded in warding off the failure that threat
ened them. And the later novels of Henry James are a case in
point.

7. The palefaces dominated literature throughout the nineteenth
century, but in the twentieth they have been overthrown by the
redskins. Once the continent had been mastered, with the plebeian
bourgeoisie coming into complete possession of the national
wealth, and puritanism had worn itself out, degenerating into
mere respectability, it became objectively possible and socially
permissible to satisfy that desire for experience and personal
emancipation which heretofore had been systematically frustrated.
The era of economic accumulation had ended and the era of
consummation had arrived. To enjoy life now became one of the
functions of progress a function for which the palefaces were
temperamentally disqualified. This gave Mencken his opportunity
to emerge as the ideologue of enjoyment. Novelists like Dreiser,
Anderson, and Lewis and, in fact, most of the writers of the
period of “experiment and liberation” rose against social con
ventions that society itself was beginning to abandon. They helped

94 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

to “liquidate” the lag between the enormous riches of the nation
and its morality of abstention. The neo-humanists were among the
last of the breed of palefaces, and they perished in the quixotic
attempt to re-establish the old values. Eliot forsook his native land,
while the few palefaces who managed to survive at home took to
the academic or else to the “higher” and relatively obscure forms of
writing. But the novelists, who control the main highway of lit
erature, were and still are nearly all redskins to the wigwam born.

8. At present the redskins are in command of the literary situation,
and seldom has the literary life in America been as intellectually
impoverished as it is today. The political interests introduced in
the nineteen thirties have not only strengthened their hold but also
brought out their worst tendencies; for the effect of the popular
political creeds of our time has been to increase their habitual hos
tility to ideas, sanctioning the relaxation of standards and justify
ing the urge to come to terms with semi-literate audiences.

9. The lowbrow writer in America is a purely indigenous phenome
non, the true-blue offspring of the western hemisphere, the juvenile
in principle and for the good of the soul. He is a self-made writer
in the same way as Henry Ford is a self-made millionaire. On the
one hand he is a crass materialist, a greedy consumer of experi
ence, and on the other a sentimentalist, a half-baked mystic lis
tening to inward voices and watching for signs and portents. Think
of Dreiser, Lewis, Anderson, Wolfe, Sandburg, Hemingway, Stein
beck, Saroyan: all writers of genuine and some even of admirable
accomplishments, whose faults, however, are not so much literary
as faults of raw life itself. Unable to relate himself in any signifi
cant manner to the cultural heritage, the lowbrow writer is always
on his own; and since his personality resists growth and change, he
must constantly repeat himself. His work is ridden by compulsions
that depress the literary tradition, because they are compulsions
of a kind that put a strain on literature, that literature more often
than not can neither assimilate nor sublimate. He is the passive
instead of the active agent of the Zeitgeist, he lives off it rather
than through it, so that when his particular gifts happen to coin
cide with the mood of the times he seems modern and contem
porary, but once the mood has passed he is in danger of being
quickly discarded. Lacking the qualities of surprise and renewal,

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 95

already Dreiser and Anderson, for example, have a “period” air
about them that makes a rereading of their work something of
a critical chore; Faulkner s horror stories do not always retain any
recognizable value; and one suspects that Hemingway, that peren
nial boy-man, is more accurately understood as a descendant of
Natty Bumppo, the hero of Fenimore Cooper s Leatherstocking
tales, than as the portentously disillusioned character his legend
makes him out to be.

10. As for the paleface, in compensation for backward cultural con
ditions and a lost religious ethic, he has developed a supreme talent
for refinement, just as the Jew, in compensation for adverse social
conditions and a lost national independence, has developed a su
preme talent for cleverness. (In this connection one might recall
T. S. Eliot s description of Boston society, as “quite uncivilized,
but refined beyond the point of civilization.”) Now this peculiar
excess of refinement is to be deplored in an imaginative writer,
for it weakens his capacity to cope with experience and induces
in him a fetishistic attitude to tradition; nor is this species of re
finement to be equated with the refinement of artists like Proust
or Mann, as in them it is not an element contradicting an open and
bold confrontation of reality. Yet the paleface, being above all a
conscious individual, was frequently able to transcend or to devi
ate sharply from the norms of his group, and he is to be credited
with most of the rigors and charms of the classic American books.
While it is true, as John Jay Chapman put it, that his culture is
“secondary and tertiary” and that between him and the sky “float
the Constitution of the United States and the traditions and forms
of English literature” nevertheless, there exists the poetry of
Emily Dickinson, there is The Scarlet Letter, there is Moby Dicky
and there are not a few incomparable narratives by Henry James.

11. At this point there is no necessity to enter into a discussion of
the historical and social causes that account for the disunity of
the American creative mind. In various contexts a number of critics
have disclosed and evaluated the forces that have worked on this
mind and shaped it to their uses. The sole question that seems
relevant is whether history will make whole again what it has
rent asunder. Will James and Whitman ever be reconciled, will
they finally discover and act upon each other? Only history can

96 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

give a definite reply to this question. In the meantime, however,
there are available the resources of effort and of understanding,
resources which even those who believe in the strict determination
of the cultural object need not spurn.

ANALYSIS

1. State in as simple a sentence as you can the generality, the final judgment or
conclusion, that Mr. Rahv reaches in this article. Underline sentences in the text
that express this conclusion.

a. Is the conclusion stated at the beginning, end, or in both places?

b. What is the value, for an article of informal induction, of the position in the
article that the conclusion occupies?

2. a. Point out in the article the place where the author begins his assembly of in
stances that make up the inductive procedure.

b. How many specific incidents or illustrations does he use?

3. Consider the first sentence in the third paragraph. How does the author demon
strate the validity of the statement? Is this a pattern of induction?

4. What, basically, determines the “informal” nature of the induction in this
article?

5. a. To what extent does the author rely on the use of James and Whitman as
“typical” illustrations of his point?

b. Can you name others that might also illustrate much the same thing, other
writers you are familiar with unmentioned by Mr. Rahv?

c. Could illustrative instances be used from fields other than writing and liter
ature? What are some?

6. Explain the nature of the last paragraph in the article, its relationship to the
rest of the selection, its importance as a conclusion to the inductive process.

SAMPLE THEME SUBJECTS

Is it worth while for children to take music lessons against their wills? Think of
as many examples as you can, analyze them, draw conclusions, explain.

I notice in this morning s paper that Superman says “Thisaway” for ” This way.”
Can a casual search through one set of comic strips give you enough evidence
for some analysis and generalization upon the nature of the language used by
comic strip characters?

Are high school teachers better teachers than college professors? Your experi
ence with college teaching techniques may be limited as yet, but you should be
able to draw some tentative conclusions.

Have you read many detective stories? If so, what can you say about them? Are
detective stories today as good as they used to be? Is it true that the murderer
is always the character from whom you least expect evil action? Are the plots of
detective stories becoming more intricate? In what ways does one detective story
differ from another?

INFORMAL INDUCTIONS 97

Do you know a number of people who read detective stories? Why do they do
it? Does their reading harm them? Are they wasting their time? Can you marshal
evidence from your experiences to support whatever assertions you choose to
make?

Why do we speak only of detective stories? About what other kinds of reading
matter are you an authority or semiauthority? Western stories? Love romances?
True Story magazines? James Joyce ( Ulysses communicated important meanings
but Finnegan s Wake is too experimental)? Magazine verse? Do modern novels
contain too many “four letter words”? The number of possible subjects here is
almost infinite.

Did art classes in grade school help those students who had no natural aptitude
for drawing or modeling? Think of examples, several of them, before you come
to rigid conclusions.

Do athletics prove harmful to classroom work? Here again, as with the rest of
these suggested subjects, think of as many instances as you can. Are athletes
“dumb”?

What are the effects on college freshmen of being away from home for the first
time?

Do college students have as much “school spirit * as high school students? ( Note
the difference between this subject and the hackneyed subject, “School Spirit.”
An essay on “School Spirit” usually involves many borrowed generalizations, un
checked, subjective, and unoriented to actuality, and it can usually be written
without reference to actual experience. This subject demands specific analysis
of actual behavior.)

The hitchhiker s point of view (the opposite face of the article by Bergan
Evans ) .

Can you arrive at any generalizations about the food served in restaurants? To
what extent do the restaurants of your region specialize in the kind of cookery
that is peculiar to the region? What can you say about tipping from your ex
periences?

The manners of customers ( for anyone who has clerked in a store ) .
Are businessmen, in general, honest or dishonest?

Is it true that teachers, generally, have certain favorites and give them better
marks than they deserve?

Is there a caste system in the army?

In Chaucer s day, if we can judge by Chaucer s testimony, one could tell a man s
occupation by his dress and by his mannerisms. To what extent is this true today?

How religious is the average man today?

Tastes in furniture, in pictures over the mantlepiece, in domestic architecture, in
bric-a-brac.

What comments can you make, from your own observation, about the prevalence
of certain species of game, birds, or plants in your region? One may notice that,
in many of these suggested subjects, two lines of development are possible: (1)

98 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

to work out a new, rather specific idea, applicable often to a limited territory;
(2) to handle an old, more general subject from the fresh point of view of your
own experiences with it. Of the latter kind of development here, you might try
to determine how well cats, dogs, possums, or any other kind of animal with
which you are acquainted, can think.

3. SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS

Secondary Source Papers

A KIND of writing with which every college student is faced sooner
or later is the secondary source paper, or, as it is often referred to,
the library investigative paper or the term paper. It should be clearly
understood at the beginning that this kind of writing differs radically
from most kinds in that it frankly involves the use of facts, interpreta
tions, and opinions that are the property of other writers. Papers of
this kind are original in a different sense from most papers. Because
the materials are borrowed, it is necessary to indicate by means of
footnotes the extent and the source of all borrowing even though the
footnotes occupy a large amount of the space on each page. The chief
originality of such papers lies in the blending, or putting together of
information, interpretations, and authoritative opinion taken from many
different sources, together with the organizing anew of these materials
and the sound interpretations that bind the materials together.

Even if English instructors in their weaker moments say that they
can tell the value of a library paper by examining the footnotes it
contains, the student should not be led to believe that he has only to
get together a loose string of quotations. Quotations appear frequently
in most library papers, but they must be well integrated into the paper.
The student must remember that he is still the writer of the paper
and must control his material. His is still the brain that fits the pieces
together and fabricates the unity which every good piece of writing
should possess. Quotations or paraphrased passages he must use as he
would use other material more clearly his own,

102 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

The library paper is a compilation of materials that have already
been sifted from raw material by other writers; henee it is called a
secondary source paper. The writer is collecting and arranging facts
and judgments from other writers. He may discriminate between true
and false data as he finds them treated by other writers, but he does
not undertake an extensive search for primary data himself. In theory,
the student should be able to write a primary source paper more easily
than a secondary source paper; in practice, the opposite is true,
since in his scholastic experience he has been required more often to
put together the thoughts of other writers than to create thoughts
from raw material. For this reason, the progression in this book is
from secondary source papers to primary source papers.

The library paper is, then, the kind of job that entails work with
secondary sources, with articles, chapters of books, compilations of
material that deal with the subject of the student s choice. Usually he
picks a topic for investigation, goes to the library, familiarizes himself
with the bibliographical guides that should prove useful to him in
finding the available material on his subject, uses the card catalogue of
the library to find what pertinent books it has, and checks with the
Readers Guide to Periodical Literature to discover what recent maga
zine articles touch upon his subject. While he is working with these
bibliographical aids, he assembles a list of books, articles, and news
paper items that appear to have bearing on his subject. This list is the
working bibliography. It is wise to assemble this bibliography on
three-by-five cards, one bibliographical item on each card, so that
some of the cards can be rejected and the whole alphabetized, with
some cards separated from the others as more important. The stu
dent who tries to keep lists of references on standard notebook or
typewriting size sheets of paper will soon find himself confused by
the tangled mass of materials he possesses.

After he has achieved a promising looking bibliography, and not
until then, the student should collect the volumes he needs from the
library stacks and begin his reading. As he reads he should take notes.
Since note-taking is an art in itself, some further comment will be
made on it later. Notes also should be taken on cards, not on full-sized
pieces of paper. The notes all taken, the student is then ready to be
gin his writing, provided his bibliographical references have uncovered
a sufficient amount of pertinent material. By organizing his notes tQ

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 103

make them correspond to the outline he has decided upon for his
paper, he has his materials at his side and can start to write.

Footnotes acknowledging the source of all borrowed ideas, informa
tion, or opinions arc inserted at the bottom of the page on which the
material is used (for form of footnotes, see below). Quotations less
than three lines long are inserted normally into the text and are sur
rounded with quotation marks. Quotations longer than three lines are
single spaced and slightly indented. In manuscripts a line is drawn
across the bottom of the page between text and footnotes. A bibliog
raphy is made up, and, except for necessary revisions, the job is done.
The student who follows this process step by step will find that the
task is not so difficult as it may at first appear, but he should not put
off beginning work until shortly before the paper is due. He will find
himself overwhelmed if he does. lie will be wise to follow directions.

Since a few special problems require fuller treatment here, these
will now be taken up separately in more detail.

FINDING A SUFFICIENTLY SMALL SUBJECT

Most students try to tackle massive problems, problems which, if
handled properly, would call for the writing of a large book. The first
job, then, is to find a limited subject. Say the student is interested
in Indians. That is a big subject. Consequently, he must limit it. He
narrows his subject to the Navajos. The subject is still too big. He
cuts it down to “The Economics of Navajo Life.” That is better but
perhaps still too big. He finally settles upon, “Changes in the Patterns
of Navajo Economic Life Due to the Introduction of Modern Agri
cultural Machinery.” Now he has a subject that he can exhaust,
that he can fully develop in the time and space at his disposal. If,
by using his ingenuity in the library, he cannot find enough material
on this narrow subject, he may need to broaden it again somewhat.
But if he can find the material scattered in many places, he should
have a good paper as a result of the narrowing.

A special caution here is to avoid the subject already fully handled
in some work available in the library. The average student is incapable
of resisting the temptation to rely too heavily on a job that is already
well done and even tries to hide the fact of his dependence somewhat
dishonestly. If he is well along in his work and suddenly discovers
an article that does just what he is doing, he should try to change

104 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

his subject so that he can still use the material he has gathered but
with emphasis on a different point.

LEARNING WHEN TO USE FOOTNOTES

You should use footnotes whenever you use ideas, information, or
opinions that are not your own, whether you quote this material or
paraphrase it. At times, when you use extensive material from one
place in one source, you can make one footnote reference to all the
material. In such cases, you should usually let the reader know at the
time when you begin your borrowing that you are going to embark
upon a large-scale borrowing. The single footnote reference then ap
pears at the end of the passage. More commonly, however, you will
use materials from several sources on each page. In these more typical
cases, you insert the number referring to the footnote after each seg
ment of borrowing. A footnote referring to a very small borrowing
comes after the first mark of punctuation following the borrowing.

LEARNING TO MAKE FOOTNOTES IN PROPER FO&M
Although forms used in footnoting vary considerably from journal
to journal or department of human inquiry to department of human
inquiry, most journals and departments of human inquiry are sticklers
for consistent and intelligible form. Consequently, the student should
learn one system so that he can handle it well. It is not practicable to
describe all variants, but one form is presented here. It is recom
mended that the student learn to use this form accurately for immedi
ate use. If he discovers later that the department within which he is
working specifies a different form, he can without much difficulty
learn the new form simply because he has come to understand the
main principles.

A. References to books in one volume:

1 John Brown, The Casablanca Conference (New York, 1945), p. 62.

2 C. D. Abrams, Europe Today (Boston, 1941), pp. 37-46.

B. References to books in more than one volume:

1 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edinburgh,
1787), II, 377.

2 Wilson Williams, Aspects of Sociology (Boston, 1910), III, 227.

8 Adam Protheroe, “Remarks on Junius” (1785), British Essayists of the 18th
Century, ed. J. M. Markham (London, 1866), VII, 97-99.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 105

C. References to periodicals:

1 Raymond B. Ball, “In Defense of Women/ Scribner s Magazine, CLXXXV
(1942), 677.

2 Richard Johnson, “The World We Live In,” Colliers, XCI (June 5, 1933), 87.
8 “How Magnesium Is Made,” Fortune, XXVII (September, 1940), 82-87.

D. References to newspaper articles:

1 Martin S. Lewis, “Senator Lodge Attacks Tariff Bill,” Chicago Tribune (July
7, 1919), p. 17.

2 “More Grass in the Parks,” Lewiston Journal (May 10, 1940), p. 2.

3 “Truman Attends Wheat-Growers Convention,” New York Times (November
20, 1946), p. 18.

E. References to standard editions of plays and poetry:

References are made to plays by author, title, act, scene, and line;
to poems by author, title, canto (if the poem is divided into cantos),
and line (abbreviate to v. or vv. for “verse” and “verses”).

1 William Shakespeare, King Lear, V, iii, 17-22.

2 Thomas Otway, Venice Preservd, II, i, 46.

3 John Milton, Paradise Lost, VI, 66-71.

4 Robert Frost, “Mending Wall/* vv. 17-18.

5 Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest,” v. 216.

After a reference has once been made to a certain work, future foot
note references to that work are often shortened:

17 John Brown, The Casablanca Conference, p. 64.

18 Ball, “In Defense of Women/* p. 680.

19 Williams, Aspects of Sociology, II, 79.

Sometimes, instead of this shortened form for later references, stand
ard abbreviations are used. These are:

a. ibid. an abbreviation for ibidem, meaning “in the same place,”
underlined to indicate italics since it is a Latin word. Ibid, can be used
if the footnote being made refers to the same work as that described
in the footnote just preceding it. If a new page in the same work is
specified, the page number follows:

20 Ibid., p. 80.

b. loc. cit. meaning “in the place cited/* usually used with author s
name.

c. op. cit. meaning “in the work cited,” likewise usually used with
author s name. Op. cit. will take the place of the title. It cannot be used,

106 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

of course, if more than one work by one author has already been re
ferred to.

21 Lewis, op. cit., p. 37.
Other abbreviations often used are:
cf . compare this with
passim scattered throughout these pages
ff . and the pages following
ed. edited by

It should prove interesting to the student to compare this suggested
form in the construction of footnotes with the forms used by the
writers of the two research articles given in this section.

LEARNING How TO TAKE NOTES

In your reading it is well to take notes on cards that are approxi
mately four by six inches. Only one segment of material should be
put on one card. If the student has any notion that he may use the
material he is gathering from the page in front of him in^more than
one place in his own paper, he should take his notes on more than
one card, so that he can shuffle the notes around to fit his own or
ganization. This is an important principle in note-taking. When a stu
dent has to use material on one card in more than one place, he is
likely to lose sight of part of his material.

The student should avoid taking too many notes. It is a waste of
time to attempt to copy out whole articles. The proper taking of notes
involves a certain amount of guesswork in deciding what material is
essential and what is not. Long passages can often be summarized so
that later reference can be made to them if necessary. Any material
representing direct quotation should be transcribed with utmost fidel
ity, and the original author s words other than key words should
not appear in paraphrases on note cards. If paraphrase is called for,
the student should use his own words. Furthermore, he should mark
off distinctly quoted passages from paraphrased passages on his note
cards. A good system to use is to surround quoted passages with clear
quotation marks, surround one s own thoughts or comments with
brackets, and leave paraphrased material with no distinct marking.
Notes should be full, in complete sentences, legibly written, so that
they remain clear when cold.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 107

THE CAUSES OF FAILURE

OF
THE WHITE MAN IN THE TROPICS*

By A. Grenfell Price

1. Excellent research on the West Indies by British and American
historians makes it possible to enumerate and examine some of
the reasons for the failure of a number of these settlements. 1

2. The discovery of the West Indies by Christopher Columbus in
1492 was followed by a great burst of Caribbean colonization,
so that by 1502 there were 12,000 Europeans in the island of Haiti.
But Spain was not left for long in her monopoly. France was in
the field before the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1562-1563
John Hawkins brought England into the slave trade, and from
1586 onwards Dutch and Flemish ships traded in the Caribbean.
Colonization followed. In 1607 the French attempted to grow to
bacco in Cayenne. English efforts to settle Guiana failed, but in
1623 Thomas Warner established in St. Christopher the first Eng
lish colony in the Caribbean. In 1625 an English expedition occu
pied Barbados. The deluge of northern whites had begun.

3. The following years, 1625-1637, were vital in West Indian his
tory. “Swarms of English and French colonists poured like flies
upon the rotting carcase of Spain s empire in the Caribbean/ 2 By
1643 there were 37,200 whites in Barbados, a population of more
than two hundred to the square mile. The whole island was di
vided into plots of from five to thirty acres, upon which small
white planters and their white servants raised tobacco or cotton.
St. Kitts and Nevis were densely populated by small planters, each
holding a few acres and cultivating them with the help of white
servants. 3 The north European settlement of Jamaica came later,
but events moved on similar lines. When the English captured

From A. Grenfell Price: White Settlers in the Tropics, published by the
American Geographical Society of New York.

1 See, for example, Lord Olivier, Jamaica: The Blessed Island (London, 1936).

2 A. P. Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493-1688 (Lon
don, 1933), p. 149.

3 C. S. S. Higham, The Development of the Leeward Islands under i\ie Res
toration (Cambridge, 1921).

108

THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

the island in 1655 it was estimated that the population of the capi
tal was “half Spanish and Portuguese or their descendants, and
half slaves.” 4 Owing to deaths from yellow fever and dysentery,
the English had difficulty in populating the island, but, according
to Bryan Edwards, there were, by 1673, 7768 whites as contrasted
with 9504 Negroes. 5

For reasons to be discussed in detail the ensuing period saw a
fall in white population. In some islands this fall was absolute,
and in all islands ruled by north Europeans it was relative to the
number of Negroes. The table below of the white and black or col
ored population in Barbados, St. Kitts, and Jamaica, illustrates the
decline.

BRITISH WEST INDIES POPULATION TYPES: HISTORICAL *

BARBADOS

ST. KITTS

JAMAICA

IT/? M Black or
White r, 7 i
Colored

TI77 ., Black or
White r, 7 -,
Colored

White Black or
Wmte Colored

*

1640-1643

37,000 6,000

20,000 . . .

1667-1678
1786-1791
1807-1809

20,000 40,000
16,167 62,115
15,566 69,119

to
30,000
1,897 1,436
1,900 20,435

8,500 9,500
23,000 260,093
15,000 356070

1911

1,348 24 935

1921-1922

15,000 180,000

14476 817,643

Statistics mainly from V. T. Harlow, History of Barbados (Oxford, 1926), Ap
pendix B, p. 338; C. S. S. Iligham, The Development of the Leeward Islands
under the Restoration (Cambridge, 1921), p. 145; L. J. Ragatz, The Fall of the
Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (New York, 1928), pp. 30,
124.

A great mass of evidence indicates that the experiment of estab
lishing north European workers in the West Indian tropics failed,
at any rate in the British islands, partly through the poor quality
of the workers and their inadequate numbers. The period of the
“Great Emigration,” 1618-1648, saw many Englishmen of good
type cross the seas to avoid the tyranny of the Stuart kings; but
when the Civil War broke out in 1642, the tide ceased to flow.

4 F. Cundall, Historic Jamaica (London, 1915), p. 6.

6 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies
in the West Indies (London, 1793), I, 244.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 109

Further, North America proved more attractive to the best English
immigrants than did the Caribbean, to which flocked adventurers
and persons of low character who were anxious to make money
rapidly by any legal or illegal means. In the words of Ragatz:

No considerable body of persons inspired by motives higher than the de
sire to extract the greatest possible amount of wealth from them in the
shortest possible time ever reached the smiling shores of the Caribbean
colonies. Save during the civil wars of the sixteen hundreds, no haven of
refuge from persecution was sought there. Few landed to establish homes
and to raise their station in a new world. Instead, the islands became the
goal of spendthrift bankrupts, eager to recoup their wasted fortunes, of
penniless younger sons of gentility desirous of amassing means sufficient
to become landed proprietors in the homeland, and the dumping-ground
for the riffraff of the parent cotmtry.

6. Like the Spaniards, the English on some islands at first attempted
to utilize Indian labor, but the Caribs soon died out under slavery,
and the estate owners turned to white labor and to Negroes. White
servants came from three sources rebellions, kidnapping, and
indentures but in almost all cases these servants were little bet
ter than slaves. It was a disgraceful policy, shamefully executed,
and it filled the British West Indies with undesirables from the
motherland, with foreigners from any European country that would
offer a supply, and with Negroes. “As could only be expected in
such a community, all ideas of a decent colonial society, of a bet
ter and greater England overseas, were swamped in the pursuit
of an immediate gain.” 7 To quote Whistler s “Journal of the Bar
bados” (1655), “This Illand is the Dunghill wharone England doth
cast forth its rubidg.” 8 About the same time Venables described
the planters as “fearful, prophane, debauch d persons.” Later writ
ers, such at Pitman, Higham, Harlow, and Ragatz, drew sad pic
tures of a selfish, ill-educated, and cruel planter aristocracy tyran
nizing over a poverty-stricken mass of enslaved white servants.

6 L. J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-
1833 (New York, 1928), p. 3.

7 J. A. Williamson, “The Beginnings of an Imperial Policy,” in The Cambridge
History of the British Empire (New York and Cambridge, England), I
(1929), p. 236.

s Henry Whistler s Journal, March, 1654-55, in C. H. Firth, ed., Narrative of
General Venables (London, 1900), pp. 145-147, quoted in F. W. Pitman,
The Development of the British West Indies, 1700-1763 (New Haven, Lon
don, 1917), p. 6.

110 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

7. Nor were many of the officials and military much better. During
the administration of Governor Ricketts in Barbados a comely Ne
gress reigned at Government House and enjoyed most of the privi
leges of a wife. 9 The rank and file of the West Indian regiments
consisted of the lowest grade of men wearing the British uniform.
Governor Valentine Morris of St. Vincent wrote in 1777 that “those
which have been sent out these last twelve months, are in general
the very scum of the earth. The Streets of London must have been
swept of their refuse, the Gaols emptied … I should say that
very Gibbets had been robbed to furnish such Recruits . . . lit
erally, most of them fit only to fill a pit with,” 10

8. While the character of the white workers in the West Indies was
so unsatisfactory as to render failure likely, the treatment that many
received was sufficiently scandalous to render that failure almost
assured. Contemporary eyewitnesses, such as Ligon in Barbados,
give examples of the most barbarous undernourishment, cruelty,
and overwork. 11 Governor Russell, writing from Barbados in 1695,
stated that the whites were “domineered over and used like dogs,
and this in time will undoubtedly drive away all the commonalty
of the white people and leave the Island in a deplorable condi
tion.” 1L> Harlow, Pitman, and others who have used the original
documents, consider that “brutal treatment and miserable condi
tions were prevalent” and sketch a ruinous labor regime. Condi
tions seem to have been been similar in the French islands. Du
Tertre (1667) notes that the French, who colonized Guadelupe
and Martinique, experienced a heavy mortality owing to famine,
sickness, and the cruelty of the overseers who treated the en
feebled colonists “worse than the slaves in Barbary,” driving them
“by blows and by severity to work in clearing the woods in all
weathers.” 13

9. Returning to the subject of the British islands, one finds that
there was a general agreement among contemporary writers that

9 Ragatz, op. cit., p. 33.

10 Ibid., pp. 31-32.

11 Richard Ligon, A True 6- Exact History of the Island of Barbados (Lon
don, 1657), pp. 43-45.

12 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies (Lon
don, 1693-1696, No. 1738), p. 446.

13 R. P. du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles (Paris, 1667-1671), I, pp.
78-81,

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 111

the European servant was in a less favored position than the Ne
gro. 14 A slave was a permanent possession, and it was to the ad
vantage of the master to preserve him. On the other hand, a white
laborer was available only for a restricted period, during which a
master might work him to death in order to avoid paying him the
stipulated amount of sugar at the end of his time. Contemporary
records show that cases of murder and torture were not infrequent
and that sick servants were turned off and left to perish miserably.
10. There were, of course, good masters and conditions, and diet
improved when the governments and planters became alarmed at
the growing preponderance of Negroes and attempted to increase
the ratio of whites to blacks by the so-called Deficiency Laws,
which compelled every master to keep a proportion of white serv
ants. Yet, as late as 1695, Governor Russell noted that there was
a great dearth of white servants owing to neglect and sickness.
Servants received no encouragement, as they were paid only forty
shillings when their time expired. In contrast, the other colonies
offered much greater inducement, and servants left Barbados as
soon as they were free. The Governor advocated that white peasant
proprietors should receive votes in the Assembly, in the belief that
planters would “sometimes give the poor miserable creatures a
little rum and fresh provisions and such things as would be of
nourishment to them … in the hopes of getting their votes.” 16
But matters were beyond remedy. As Jeaffreson wrote from St.
Kitts, the terms offered failed to attract “a sufficient number of
honest immigrants,” for, whereas the early planters had had a
superabundance of European recruits of the best quality, the rage
for adventure had by then diminished, and petty tradesmen and
peasants of the old country had received discouraging reports of
the insecurity of life in islands “infested by pirates, destructive
fevers and bloody wars.” 16 Hence, the planters had to look for
labor to African slaves or to English convicts, while the free immi
grants went to New England, where life was more orderly, de
cent, and devout than in the unhappy West Indies, from which
one governor could write that for forty orthodox parishes he had one

14 V. T. Harlow, History of Barbados (Oxford, 1926), Chapter 7.

15 Calendar of State Papers, 1693-1696, p. 447.

10 J. C. Jeaffreson, A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century (London,
1878), Vol. I, Chapter 7.

112 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

drunken orthodox priest, one drunken sectary priest, and one
drunken parson who had no orders. 17

11. From circumstances such as these, the Deficiency Laws failed
to raise the ratio of white to black. Even when groups of white
settlers were brought in, as after emancipation (in 1834), they re
ceived no preferential treatment over the Negro and were quickly
absorbed. On the whole, one can fully agree with Harlow that
“generally speaking . . . the weight of evidence proves incon-
testably that the conditions under which white labor was procured
and utilized in Barbados” (and one could add other islands) were
“persistently severe, occasionally dishonorable, and generally a dis
grace to the English name/ 18 One can, perhaps, go further and
say that under such a policy and treatment it was almost impossible
fqr white workers to succeed.

12. ^/A third cause of the white decline was international warfare and
private buccaneering, which ruined several of the islands and as
sisted in giving the West Indies their bad name. Higham, for ex
ample, writes:

The French War of 1666-67 marks a turning point in the history of the
Leeward Islands; before the war the islands had progressed steadily, and
had been largely settled; by the French successes the islands were prac
tically ruined, and had to start their economic life anew. The exodus from
St. Christopher is estimated by Du Tertre at 8000, but probably the num
ber was about 5000 exclusive of slaves. 19

At this time, Barbados, “the principal pearl in his Majesty s crown/
was almost bankrupt of men and money, while Surinam had fallen
to the Dutch. Buccaneering also discouraged good immigrants and
induced the bad to take up that profitable profession. A contem
porary wrote of the Scottish Jacobites sent to the West Indies in
1716: “The greatest part of them are gone and have induced
others to go with them a Pyrating . . . the few that remains
proves a wicked, lazy, and indolent people/ 20 Jeaffreson s remarks,
quoted above, indicate how greatly warfare and buccaneering con
spired together to give the West Indies a bad name.
13. ” / A fourth cause of the failure of the whites lay in the administrative

17 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series No. 7, 1669-1674.

18 Harlow, op. cit., p. 306.

19 Higham, op. cit., pp. 143-144.

20 Pitman, op. cit., p. 55.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 113

mistakes, both of the island authorities and of the English govern
ment, which controlled their destiny from outside. In Barbados
and the Leeward Islands the rapid increase of white population
quickly exhausted the soil and forced out the small white settlers
who could not afford expensive fertilizers. 21 The same thing oc
curred in Jamaica, where small planters were driven off the land
cattle and sheep appearing in their place. Heavy taxes, costly pro
visions, high risks, and the low prices for produce accelerated a
process under which the large proprietors gobbled up the small
planters, and many families emigrated to North America to avoid
debt. The class of big planters, which then arose, consisted in many
cases of absentees who frequently left their servants to cruel and
extravagant bailiffs. Even the sons of resident planters were es
tranged by education in England and comparatively few returned.
Nor was the English government sympathetic or helpful to their
white subjects in the Indies; for the motherland crippled them by
a 4/2 per cent duty on exports and other taxes, by the Navigation
Acts, by the slaving monopoly of the Royal African Company, by
the engrossment of all patronage by the king s ministers, and by
the quartering of troops. 22

14. Harlow s research on the documents of Barbados emphasizes the
importance of economic and administrative factors in causing this
decline.

The decrease in the white population was chiefly attributable to the con
centration of land into the hands of a few great landowners and the oust
ing of white labor by black.

A writer of 1667 gives a striking picture of the tide of emigration from
Barbados: “At least 12,000 former landholders and tradesmen have gone
off, wormed out of theire small settlements by theire more suttle and
greedy neighbours between 1643 and 1647 to New England 1200; to
Trinidad and Tobago, 600; between 1646 and 1658 to Virginia and Suri
nam 2400; between 1650 and 1652 to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie-
galante, Grenada, Tobago and Curazoa 1600; with Colonel Venables to
Hispaniola and since to Jamaica 3300.” More than 5000 left Barbados on
the various expeditions to the Leeward Islands during the wars with the
French and Dutch, very few of whom ever returned. After 1667 the
exodus of time-expired servants and others to Carolina and elsewhere

21 Ibid., Chapter 2.

22 J. A. Williamson, “The Colonies after the Restoration,” in The Cambridge
History, I, p. 243.

114 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

consistently outnumbered the arrivals in Barbados from the Mother
Country. In 1670 no less than 2000 colonists left Barbados for other
plantations. 23

15. Other islands experienced the same drift. Governor J. Hart of
Antigua wrote in 1724: “The real cause why there are so few White
People is, that the wealthy Inhabitants of this Island have Ingross d
such vast Tracts of Land that there is not Room for a Number of
poorer Inhabitants to invite them to Settle amongst You.”-*

16. The same trend appeared in Jamaica, although at a later date.
Richard Harris told the Board of Trade (March 20, 1724-25) “The
decrease of Small Freeholds, was by reason of the greater Eating
up or buying out all the lesser planters and keeping vast tracts of
Land unoccupied.” – 5 The rural aristocracy of the West Indies came
from the class that created a similar depopulation in England. The
small white landholders gradually disappeared, and in their place
came cattle and sheep pastures, vacant land, or great sugar es
tates. 26

17. While servants faced conditions of life and labor that almost en
sured failure, the upper classes showed a calamitous inability to
meet the tropical environment in vital matters of housing, clothing,
and^diet.^ Most of the settlements were located so as to fulfill the
agricultural and shipping requirements of the planters and, con
sequently, stood on the hot coastal plains. In the early years nearly
all the houses were of wood, and fires were frequent and destruc
tive. Even as late as the latter half of the eighteenth century many
of the buildings were miserable, thatched hovels, hastily put to
gether with wattles and plaster, damp, unwholesome, and infested
with every species of vermin. 27

18. Then again, the planter s table was one of rude plenty and con-

23 Harlow, op. cit., pp. 339-340.

24 Address to Assembly December 5, 1724, Leeward Islands, 1691-1782, “Orig
inal Correspondence with the Board of Trade,” Colonial Office Papers,
Class 152, XV, R. 130 (quoted from Pitman, op. cit., p. 100). See also
Ragatz, op. cit., Chapter 2, for evils of ” large estates, monoculture, ab
senteeism and antiquated methods.”

25 Jamaica, 1689-1782. ” Original Correspondence with the Board of Trade,”
Colonial Office Papers, Class 137, XVI, R. 8 ( quoted from Pitman, op. cit.,
p. 108).

26 Pitman, op. cit., pp. 108-109.

27 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (London, 1774), II, p. 22.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 115

trary to every law of modern tropical diet. Drunkenness was preva
lent and gambling a consuming vice. 28 Many a young West Indian
immigrant of good family drank himself to death. Friends notified
his parents that he had died of “fever,” and that good old whipping
horse, the tropical climate, took the blame. Clothing was equally
unsuited to the tropical conditions. In the words of one writer,
“Our English Belles … do not scruple to wear the thickest win
ter silks and satins; and are sometimes ready to sink under the
weight of rich gold or silver brocades. . . . The winter fashions of
London arrive here at the setting in of hot weather. . . . Surely
nothing can be more preposterous and absurd than for persons
residing in the West Indies to adhere rigidly to all the European
customs and manners which . . . are certainly improper, ridicu
lous, and detrimental in a hot climate.” 29

19. While the diet and clothing of the planter class were excessive,
the poor suffered from the reverse. Ligon states that the Barbadians
of 1650 worked their white servants from 6 A.M. to 11 A.M. and
from 1 P.M. to 6 P.M. on potatoes mashed in water, or on loblolly,
which consisted of crushed Indian corn. “The servants,” he wrote,
“[had] no bone meat at all unlesse an Oxe dyed.” He paints a sad
picture of their housing: “Their lodging at night [is] a board, with
nothing under, nor any thing a top of them. … If they be not
strong men, this ill lodging will put them into a sicknesse: if they
complain, they are beaten by the Overseer; if they resist, their
time is doubled.” 30 Some of the planters, of course, were more
humane, particularly in later years. Yet, inadequate housing, cloth
ing, and diet continued to produce great harm.

20. A fundamental cause perhaps the main cause of the failure
of white settlement in the Caribbean was the importation of the
Negro. It is usually said that the introduction of this race was due
to the necessities of the environment and that the Negro was a
hardy exotic, admirably equipped for the tropics, whereas the
white was a tender, unsuitable plant. Yet other factors enter the
picture. The planters could force the Negro to work at an economic
and social level that entailed the degeneracy of emigration of white

28 Ragatz, op. cit., pp. 7-8.

29 Ibid., p. 13.

30 Ligon, op. cit., pp. 43-44,

116 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

workers, and for the first few centuries the black was sufficiently
backward, weak, and docile to suffer this exploitation.

21. The English were interested in the Caribbean slave trade from
the time of John Hawkins voyage of 1567-1568, but they delayed
the wholesale introduction of black slaves, owing to the scarcity
of Negroes and the hope of securing white labor. When, for ex
ample, the French captured and ruined the Leeward Islands in the
war of 1666-1667, the slaves on the English part of St. Christopher
numbered only about four hundred, although the English occupa
tion had lasted more than forty years. 31 As early as 1651, however,
Barbados contained 20,000 Negroes, for the planters visited Brazil
to learn sugar planting from the Dutch and purchased slaves from
them. Great prosperity rewarded the new economic and racial
policy, but the result was tragic to the whites. By 1667 no less than
12,000 “good men” had left the island for other plantations, the
11,200 small holdings of 1645 had been included in 745 large es
tates, and the Negroes had increased to 82,023. 32 The sufferings
of the displaced whites were terrible. Faint echoes reached Eng
land and Scotland, and men began to realize that the most cruel
fate for political prisoners was to be “barbadoed.” 33 Twenty years
before, the West Indies had been the goal of hopeful emigrants.
They were now the dreaded haunts of black slavery, savage cru
elty, and vice. 34

22. The Leeward Islands and Jamaica quickly followed the Bar
badian example, with the same results. The usual evils of latif undid
appeared in absenteeism, a decreasing white population, a fluctu
ating one-crop industry, and the growth of a class of degenerate
poor whites. In the past the small planters and their time-expired
servants had formed a sturdy yeomanry, which increased the white
population and provided a valuable militia and a variety of crops.
Now the islands were devoted almost entirely to the one-crop sugar
industry, worked on large estates for absentee capitalists by over
seers and Negro slaves. As the proportion of blacks increased and the
Deficiency Laws failed, the planters inevitably became more op
pressive. Slave rebellions were crushed with fiendish cruelty. In

31 Higham, op. cit., p. 144.

32 Harlow, op. cit., p. 309.
sa Ibid., p. 295.

34 Newton, op. cit., p. 197,

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 117

many cases Negro leaders were burnt alive. Nevertheless, the slave
trade continued on a vast scale. In a report to the Privy Council,
Liverpool merchants estimated that British ships carried 38,000
Negroes annually. Between the years 1744 and 1760 Jamaica alone
purchased more than 100,000 slaves. Owing to the low cost of up
keep the planters began to train the Negroes as artisans, so that
slaves invaded the field of skilled labor. In the words of one ob
server, “I have scene thirty, sometimes forty Christians, English,
Scotch and Irish at worke in the parching sun without shoe or
stocking while theire negroes have bin at worke at theire respective
Trades in a good condition.” 35

23. The growth of the plantation system brought two customary
but damning evils: a half-caste element in the population and a
class of poor whites. In a few striking sentences Edwards traces
the tragic position of the browns social outcasts, hated and en
vied by the natives and lorded over by the dominant race. “Their
spirits,” he wrote, “seem to sink under the consciousness of their con
dition.” The whites forced good-looking women to be their mis
tresses and then, refusing to marry them, accused them as a class
of incontinency. “The unhappy females here spoken of, are much
less deserving reproach and reprehension than their keepers, . . .
excluded as they are from all hope of ever arriving to the honor
and happiness of wedlock, insensible of its beauty and sanctity;
ignorant of all Christian and moral obligations; threatened by pov
erty, urged by their passions, and encouraged by example, upon
what principle can we expect these ill-fated women to act other
wise than they do?” 30

24. We cannot tell how soon the Negro immigration produced a
typical poor white stratum, but later occurrences show that the
evolution is usually swift and inevitable, even when the whites
are not debased by semislavery, cruelty, and neglect. In most of
the island communities white men of the upper classes ravished
the slave women, while the lower class of whites came into eco
nomic competition with the Negroes, were riddled with Negro
diseases, and sank rapidly to the Negro standard of life. Here and
there white groups, such as the “Redlegs” of Barbados, the “Cha
se Harlow, op. cit., p. 309.

* Edwards, op. cit., II, pp. 21-22.

118 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

chas” of St. Thomas, or the British-Dutch of Saba, refused to min
gle and maintained their racial purity, but miscegenation and ab
sorption went on in almost every community and is gradually
coloring the white groups that still survive. The “Black Irish” of
Montserrat and of Jamaica are typical communities in which the
“negrodation” of the whites is complete. The German community
of Seaford, Jamaica, is an excellent example of the process in op
eration and indicates how far it can proceed in less than a hundred
years. 37

25. It is the basic argument of Gorgas and other apologists for
tropical climates that the white failures have been due to tropical
diseases and that, with the progress of scientific medicine, the white
man can thrive as strongly in the tropics as in the temperate zone.
This vital problem has received little attention from West Indian
historians. Nevertheless, there peeps from the pages of their his
tories a story of tropical sickness, which was undoubtedly an im
portant cause of the British decline.

26. The whites introduced many diseases to the tropics, either from
Europe or through the importation of African slaves. How terrible
could be the mortality among nonimmune persons when confront
ing exotic diseases two examples will show. In 1520 a sick Negro
in the train of Narvaez introduced into Mexico an epidemic of
smallpox so appalling that it broke the resistance to Cortez. 38 In
St. Louis, Mauritius, an epidemic of malaria killed 22,231 persons
out of 80,000 in 1867-1868 and might easily have depopulated the
island in the same way that the disease is believed to have devas
tated ancient Greece and large tracts of Italy and Spain. 39 Among
white immigrants to the West Indies the mortality was very grave.
When, in 1635, the French colonized Guadelupe and Martinique
with pauvres, engagez from Dieppe, they experienced a heavy
mortality from the sickness that followed upon famine and over
work. 40 The British, too, complained greatly about health. Ligon
wrote that in Barbados, about 1650, the inhabitants and shipping
“were so grievously visited with the plague, (or as killing a dis-

37 See pp. 92-94, above.

38 H. R. Carter, Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its
Place of Origin (Baltimore, 1931), p. 53.

S9 Ibid., p. 72.

40 Du Tertre, op. cit. t I, pp. 78-81.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 119

ease,) that before a month was expired, after our Arivall, the living
were hardly able to bury the dead.” 4l The voyage, said the same
author, “takes many passengers,” as did “ill dyet” and “strong
waters,” through which many brought diseases on themselves. The
men suffered particularly. Ten men died for every one woman, for
the men were “the greater deboystes [debauched].” Barbadian dis
patches in the “Calendar of State Papers” contain numerous la
ments such as the following: “Sickness and bad weather have been
very prevalent, and we have lost many from small-pox and violent
fevers.” 42

27. Among the military forces in the tropics the mortality was noth
ing short of frightful. Of 19,676 men sent to the British West In
dies in 1796, no less than 17,173 died within five years, and de
parture for Caribbean service was viewed as a voyage to the grave.
To this many factors contributed. Physically the soldiers were of
poor stamp. Primary laws of hygiene and diet were ignored. Bar
racks were generally located on waste land near marshes, and yel
low fever took its toll. Quarters were neither roomy, airy, nor
clean. Bathing was infrequent. The authorities forced men to
wear the traditional scarlet, designed for use in European climates,
and issued salt meat five times a week under the standard Old
World rationing. Lastly, new rum, a veritable poison, formed the
customary drink. Under such conditions the home governments
were appalled by shocking death returns and in 1795 sought to
solve the problem of West Indian defence by organizing Negro
companies, recruited through purchase from among the best-con
ditioned slaves. 43

28. So far we have traced a variety of factors that contributed to
the failure of the whites in the British West Indies. There re
mains the fundamental and most mysterious problem of all the
question of how far the collapse was due to the tropical climate
per se.

29* There is a vast amount of evidence in West Indian history that
appears to indicate that the climate affected the whites unfavora
bly and prevented them from engaging in hard work. Pitman be-

41 Ligon, op. cit.y p. 21.

42 Calendar of State Papers, 1685-1688, Nos. 374, 540, 871; 1693-1696, No.
1738; quotation from No. 540, 1686, p. 139.

48 Ragatz, op. cit., p. 32.

120 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

lieves that the English moral constitution broke down under a
tropical sun and that by the second generation it became apparent
that only African slaves could withstand the tropical conditions. 44
Ragatz considers that “climatic conditions made an economic sys
tem based on free European workers impossible.” 45 Yet, as we
have seen, the white settlement of Barbados was extensive and
vigorous before it was ruined by war, capitalism, overcrowding,
soil exhaustion, and the introduction of the Negro with his dis
eases. Landowners, such as Christopher Jeaffreson of St. Kitts
(1676-1686), made no complaint that the white workers were un
suitable or ineffective, but demanded more white servants, even
of the criminal class. 46 About the same date Colonel Codrington
of St. Kitts emphasized the greater superiority of the colonial
troops over soldiers from England. In his opinion “a hundred disci
plined men enured to hardships will be worth four hundred of
mere new-raised men; . . . for we in these parts are generally ac
customed to a hardy and active kind of life.” 47 The island regi
ments were specially selected for severe mountain work, and they
acquitted themselves^ well.

30. One hundred years later, in 1788, when Negro slavery was all-
important, a Committee of the Lords and Commons made an ex
tensive survey of the West Indies, in order to ascertain whether
the sugar industry could be worked with white labor or with freed
Negroes. As might be expected, the evidence, which was largely
that of the planters, was strongly against any liberation of the
slaves. European witnesses stated almost unanimously that under
such a climate the whites could not carry out the hard labor of
the sugar industry, however well they were fed. “As far as experi
ence can determine,” they wrote, “the same exposure to the sun
which cheers the African is mortal to the European. Nine in ten
of them would die in three years.” 48 French planters expressed the
same belief. 49

44 Pitman, op. cit. y p. 61.

45 Ragatz, op. cit., p. 3.

46 Jeaffreson, op. cit., Chapter 7.

47 Calendar of State Papers, 1689-1692, No. 977, p. 293.

48 Report of the Lords of the Committee of the Council Appointed for the
Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations,
1788-39, Part 3, A 37, 39.

* Ibid., Appendix, Q. 37, 38, 39.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 121

y
/

31. Yet, amid a welter of condemnation from biased sources comes
the significant opinion of a small planter in Barbados. It was “very
possible,” he said, that free Negroes could cultivate canes, while
Europeans, inured to common labor and not unduly proud, “might
also cultivate their lands well,” especially for cotton, where the
labor was much lighter than for canes. “The constitution of the
human body, when brought up to hard labor, soon accustomed it
self to the climate by opening the pores to easy perspiration, but
men of debauched habits of mind or body would seldom live to
a second year.” 50

32. As previously indicated, a number of communities of north Euro
pean peasant workers have survived in the West Indies until the
present time, and some of these show less deterioration than one
would expect, considering their fight against isolation and other
factors not purely climatic in type.

33. Writing about 1793, Bryan Edwards, the Jamaican historian,
gives some views on West Indian planters that are extremely im
portant for the light they throw on the evolution of tropical whites.
Edwards thought that the West Indian climate displayed its influ
ence more strongly on the persons of the native-born than on
their manners or on the faculties of their minds. They were obvi
ously a taller race than the Europeans but in general not propor
tionately robust. They were all distinguished by freedom and by
suppleness of joints, which enabled them to move with ease and
agility and gracefulness in dancing. They also excelled in pen
manship and in the use of the small sword. Their eye sockets were
deeper than among the natives of Europe, which guarded them
against the continuous glare of the sun. Their skin felt cooler
than that of the European, which proved that nature had contrived
some peculiar means of protecting them from the heat. Possibly
the climate increased their sensibility, which contributed to cre
ate an impatience of subordination. On the whole this attitude was
beneficial as awakening frankness, sociability, benevolence, and
generosity. Though the method of living differed in no respect
from that of the European residents, they were rarely liable to
those inflammatory disorders that frequently proved fatal to the
latter. The women lived calm and even lives, marked by habitual
50 Ibid., Paper No. I, Appendix, p. 30, Questions 32, 33, Aug. 18, 1787-88.

122 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

temperance and self-denial. They took no exercise, except dancing,
and had no amusement or avocation to compel them to much
exertion of either mind or body. Their diet was abstemious to a
fault, and lemonade was their strongest beverage. Their food at
the principal repast was a vegetable mess, seasoned with cayenne
pepper. Their mode of life and the hot oppressive atmosphere
produced lax fiber and pale complexions. They seemed to have
just risen from a bed of sickness. Their voices were soft and spirit
less, and every step betrayed languor and lassitude. Eminently and
deservedly applauded for heart and disposition, no women on earth
made better wives or better mothers.

34. Under the climate the children s mental powers developed early,
exceeding those of European children of the same age in a degree
that was unaccountable and astonishing. Subsequent mental ac
quirement did not keep pace with early progress, but that might
be due to the want of proper objects for exercising the faculties.
The climate undoubtedly encouraged early and habitual licentious
ness, which was against mental improvement. Among snch of the
native-born as escaped the contagion and enervating effects of
youthful excesses were found men of capacities as strong and
permanent as among any people whatever. Edwards strongly de
nied that the Creole whites in general possessed less capacity and
stability of mind than Europeans or that they had less quality of
heart. Frank, kindly, and truthful, they treated the slaves far bet
ter than did the adventurers from Europe. Indolence was too pre
dominant, but it was rather an aversion to serious thought and
deep reflection than due to slothfulness and sluggishness of na
ture. When the springs of the mind were set in motion both sexes
had warm imaginations and high spirits. 51

35. Although Edwards is describing a planter aristocracy which ob
viously suffered from isolation, insufficient exercise, and contact
with a substratum of Negroes, we shall see that his description is
applicable in certain respects to the present generation of north
Queensland whites, and that here, too, a tendency to conserve
muscular, heat-producing energy is appearing, which possibly fore
casts some decline/ 2

51 Edwards, op. cit., II, pp. 10-14.

52 R. W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics, Commonwealth of Australia,

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 123

36. The history of these British West Indian Islands has been closely
examined in order to enumerate and examine the complex con
trols that caused the failure of most white settlements in the west
ern hemisphere. In Barbados, St. Kitts, and Jamaica the British
established for a considerable period flourishing groups of white
workers, which were ultimately destroyed by war, faulty economic
policy and administration, bad housing, diet and liquor, cruelty,
the influx of workers of a lower economic standard, the plantation
system, the exhaustion of the soil, diseases, and possibly climate
per se. The historical method, ably applied by experienced stu
dents, has listed factors that produced the British failures, but
what scientist would dare to evaluate from this evidence the rela
tive importance of the various controls? Nevertheless, two out
standing and incontestable factors deserve emphasis. First, the pre-
scientific invasions showed that white races, both northern and
Mediterranean, could survive in favorable parts of the tropics for
many generations in the face of stupendous difficulties and without
modern scientific aids. Second, there were very few examples of
the white man s successful resistance in the tropics to the compe
tition of races of lower economic and social status.

ANALYSIS

1. Study first the organization of the article. The body of the article lists causes for
the failure of white settlers in the West Indies. With what paragraph does this
listing begin?

2. a. If we assume that the introduction has the task of preparing for the listing of
causes, what are the main subdivisions in the introduction?

b. How arc facts arranged in Paragraphs 2 and 3?

3. In a research paper of this kind it is customary for the author to state near the
beginning the scope of his undertaking and the conditions that exist or that
have been created to make discussion possible and sound conclusions probable;
in addition there is usually a distinct marking off of the limits of the inquiry. To
what extent does Paragraph 1 satisfy these demands?

4. In the body of the article seven distinct causes are listed.

a. What are these causes?

b. Mark off the areas devoted to the discussion of each one.

5. What is the topic sentence in Paragraph 5? Study the development of the dis
cussion beginning this paragraph.

Department of Health, Service Publication (Tropical Division), No. 7
(1925), pp. 73-74.

124 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

6. Paragraphs 6-10 form one division of thought. What has the author done by in
serting Paragraph 7 into the middle of this section?

7. In Paragraph 7, why has the author made reference to conditions on French
islands, when he is primarily concerned with British islands?

8. Is Paragraph 9 an explanation of Paragraph 8?

9. Note the concessive pattern of paragraph development in Paragraph 10. Note
also how the last half of Paragraph 10 picks up the idea expressed in Para
graph 5.

10. What is the internal organization of Paragraph 13? Of -which of the subdivisions
of Paragraph 13 are Paragraphs 1416 an amplification?

11. How is the general conclusion of the article foreshadowed in Paragraph 17?

12. Note the division into rich and poor in Paragraphs 18-19 for purposes of anal
ysis. This may be called the partition of a problem.

13. How important is Paragraph 20 in the scheme of the whole article? As summary?
As statement of the principal thesis?

14. How is the discussion of the slave trade that begins with Paragraph 21 slanted
toward the thesis expressed in Paragraph 20? Trace out carefully the lines of
the causal reasoning found here.

15. Note the causal pattern of paragraph development in Paragraph 27.

16. Note the concessive pattern of the argument in Paragraphs 29-32.

17. What principle has been used in the division of material in Paragraphs 33-34?

18. Note that Paragraph 35 provides a conclusion for the discussion of climate as
a factor and that Paragraph 36 summarizes the findings of the whole article.

a. Is the author too careful in his concluding remarks?

b. Has he actually convinced us of more than he claims to have done?

C. How satisfactorily docs this concluding paragraph pull together all of the
parts of the article?

19. Much of this article is summary of generally known historical facts. Some of the
facts are less known and require special documentation and reference.

a. Make a study of the author s principles of documentation. Does he primarily
quote opinions of historians, generalizations made by historians, evidence from
first hand observers, or statistical evidence?

b. Does he expend disproportionate energy in attempting to find support for
certain points he wishes to make?

20. Study the forms of the footnotes and explain why each form is used.

21. Explain the use of footnotes at the end of paragraphs in which the footnote does
not follow quotations.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 125

POPULAR SPORTS IN AMERICA, 1850-1865*
By Frank Luther Mott

1. HORSE racing and prize fighting were the spectacular sports of
the day. Physical culture exercises made gains in some educational
institutions, but the total effect was not impressive. “Physical cul
ture is on the top of the wave,” wrote one of the leaders of the
movement, Dr. Dio Lewis, in the Atlantic in 1862, “but it is as yet
in the talk stage. Millions praise the gymnasium; hundreds seek
its blessings.” 1 Harvard, Yale, and Amherst built gymnasiums in
1859 the first of any adequacy in the country. 2

2. About sports in which people in general could participate one
reads comparatively little in the magazines of the times. There
were some beginnings, but the wave of popular sport interest did
not break over America until after the war. The Autocrat wrote
in the Atlantic Monthly just before that conflict:

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled,
paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never be
fore sprang from the loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. . . . We have a few
good boatmen, no good horsemen that I hear of, nothing remarkable I
believe in cricketing; and as for any great athletic feat performed by a
gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who would run
around the Common in five minutes. 3

3. Interest in horse racing grew almost to a frenzy at some of the
meets during the war, when money was plentiful. The sport may
be followed best in the Spirit of the Times. Flora Temple trotted
a mile in 2.19% in 1859; and Dexter, for which Robert Bonner of
the New York Ledger later paid $33,000, beat that mark in 1865
with 2.18/1 Bonner and Commodore Vanderbilt were rivals among
nonprofessional drivers of fast trotters: at an exhibition contest
between them (no money being wagered, as Bonner never bet
on a horse race ) Bonner drove a team two miles 4 in 5.01/4.

* Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Frank Luther Mott, A His
tory of American Magazines, Volume II, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1938.

1 Atlantic Monthly, X (August, 1862), p. 129.

2 Science, VIII (July 2, 1886), p. 1.

s Atlantic Monthly, I (May, 1858), p. 81.

* Science, XXI (May, 1868), p. 523.

126 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

But the greatest popular excitement in sports was aroused by
certain prize fights of the period. The outstanding hero of fisticuffs
was the “Benecia Boy” John C. Heenan. The Morrissey-Heenan
bout in 1858, the drawn battle between Heenan and Sayers in
England in 1860, and the Heenan-King fight in 1863 were the high
points of the period. When Heenan lost to the Englishman King
after twenty-five rounds, there was as much mourning in some
quarters as over a lost battle in the Civil War. When Heenan left
for England in 1860 to encounter Tom Sayers, Vanity Fair pub
lished “The Benecia Boy s Farewell,” ending:

111 wind our colors round my loins
The blue and crimson bars
And if Tom does not feel the stripes,
I ll make him see the stars 1 5

Leslie s Lady s Magazine printed a picture of two boys caught
fighting and explaining their black eyes to their mammas: “We ve
only been playing at being Tom Sayers and the Benecia Boyl” 6
There was, of course, much moral indignation vented against the
brutality of these fights. Leslie s Illustrated began by condemning
prize fighting as “identified with all the coarsest, lowest vice of our
cities” and declaring it “the very last subject that should be men
tioned in a paper which finds its way into decent families”; 7 but it
ended by sending a special correspondent and a trained artist to
London to report the Heenan-Sayers battle and by giving many
pages to affairs of the ring. Religious and other journals generally
attacked prize fighting, however: the Heenan-King bout was “dis
graceful to England and not much less so to America,” concluded
the Northwestern Christian Advocate. 8

Baseball was showing its first indications of popularity. We read
of games of twenty or thirty innings, with scores of seventy to fifty
and thereabout. Pitchers are warned against pitching too wildly;
umpires are commended for firmness. “Carriages surrounded the
grounds, and the smiles of the fair encouraged the players.” A
Chicago correspondent of Porters Spirit of the Times says: “The

5 Vanity Fair, I (January 14, 1860), p. 45.

6 Frank Leslie s Lady s Magazine, XV (October, 1864), p. 288.

7 Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, IX (December 31, 1859), p. 66.

8 Northwestern Christian Advocate, XII (January 6, 1864), p. 6.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 127

Excelsior is the pioneer ball club of the city; it was organized a
year ago this Spring [1858]. We have now four clubs that play
under the New York rules, and one or two in process of organiza
tion.” The same journal, which ordinarily reported baseball games
alongside cricket matches, recorded the founding of the first im
portant league the National Association:

The first convention was, it will be remembered, held last year [1857]
to devise a new set of Rules and Laws for Baseball. The call originated
with the old Knickerbocker Club. … A strong effort will be made [this
year] to have eleven fielders on a side. 10

6. The Sunday Mercury, of New York, claimed the title “the Father
of Baseball,” as it had been the first to encourage the sport by re
porting matches. 11

7. Boat races, especially in intercollegiate sport, and chess and bil
liards were followed in the Spirit of the Times and, after 1853, in
Frank Queen s New Yorfc Clipper. Croquet was a new fad, just
imported from England. The “stirring, healthful conflict” of this
game, as played by women in hoopskirts and men in top hats, was
decidedly picturesque. 12 As to billiards, the Round Table remarked
in 1865: “There is no more exquisite foolery of our day than the
mania for playing billiards which has developed itself in this
country in the last five or six years.” 13 The Billiard Cue (1856-74)
was a modest monthly of four folio pages edited by the famous
billiardist, Michael Phelan, as a house organ for his manufacturing
business. The Chess Monthly ( 1857-61 ) was also a New Yorker.

8- The greatest general sports periodical of these years was Wilkes
Spirit of the Times, which was begun in 1859 by George Wilkes,
founder of the National Police Gazette and a former editor of
Porters Spirit of the Times. Within two years Wilkes s paper,
aided by the beginning of the war, had put the old Spirit out of
business. 14 Racing, field sports, and the stage came within the pur-

9 Porter s Spirit of the Times, VI (June 25, 1859), p. 216.
1 ibid., IV (March 13, 1858), p. 21.

11 See Journalist (January 7, 1888), p. 3.

12 Saturday Evening Post (December 26, 1863), pp. 1, 4.
is Round Table, II (October 14, 1865), p. 88.

i 4 See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1938), p. 480. But note the following data:
Porter withdrew from the original Spirit of the Times in 1856 and, with
George Wilkes as associate editor, founded Porters Spirit of the Times

128 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

view of Wilkes Spirit of the Times. The California Spirit of the
Times was a sports weekly in San Francisco. 15 The New York Clip-
per was founded in 1853 by Frank Queen as a sporting and amuse
ment journal; but it was very miscellaneous and printed some
fiction, verse, and music. Eventually it became the great news
journal of professional performers on the stage, in circus rings,
and on athletic fields. Its news of all sports and of the details of
the stage in many cities makes it an invaluable record up to the
middle eighties. 16

ANALYSIS

i. Since this article is taken from a history of American magazines, it is apparent
that Frank Luther Mott was not attempting to make a complete and inde
pendent study of popular sports in America during the period between 1850
and 1865. Had he attempted that task, the article would have been much longer
and he would have turned to many other sources of information. Instead, the
area that he is investigating is much narrower than the title given it here
suggests.

a. Write a title of your own that more accurately describes what he has done
in his article.

(1856-59). Porter died in 1858, and Theodore E. Tomlinson and other
friends continued to conduct the paper. With these men Wilkes soon dis
agreed, and he withdrew angrily from association with them and began on
September 10, 1859, Wilkes Spirit of the Times. Porters Spirit of the Times
suspended some weeks later, and the original Spirit of the Times ended
June 22, 1861, leaving Wilkes in command of the field. He dropped his own
name from the title in 1868, and in 1873 adopted numbering to conform to
his claim that his was the original Spirit of the Times. (As to numbering,
see Mott, op. cit., p. 480n. The assumption of that footnote that the Spirits
were all in one line was owing to Wilkes s own purposely misleading state
ments.) See New York Clipper, XXX (October 28, 1882), p. 521, which,
though incorrect in details of the origin of the first Spirit, is helpful. Wilkes s
paper, from which Wilkes himself retired in 1875, leaving E. A. Buck as
half owner and editor, was merged in the Horseman in 1902. See George P.
Rowell and Company, Centennial Newspaper Exhibition (New York , 1876),
p. 186.

15 It began as the Fireman s Journal, giving special attention to sports. In 1878
it became an insurance journal, under the name California Spirit of the
Times and Underwriter s Journal. The inclusive dates are 1854-94.

10 Harrison Trent was owner for the first two years, and James Jones was part
owner 1856-57; otherwise Queen was editor and publisher until his death
in 1882. T. Allston Brown was on the editorial staff and furnished a series
of sketches of actors for early volumes. After Queen s death the estate con
ducted the Clipper for a time, with Benjamin Garno as managing editor,
after which A. J. Borie became editor and publisher. The paper deteriorated
and was purchased by Variety in 1923. See Variety, CI (December 31,
1930), 10, 51; but for its history before the death of Queen, see Clipper,
XXX (October 28, 1882), p. 521.

SECONDARY SOURCE PAPERS 129

b. Is this limitation apparent in the first paragraph?

c. Are there places in the article where the material is tangential to his main
purpose?

2. Since it is a segment of a larger work, this article lacks an adequate introduc
tion. Supply an introductory paragraph for it.

3. Because of what condition of authorship in the mid-nineteenth century is Pro
fessor Mott unable to supply authors names in his footnotes?

4. To what other sources could Professor Mott have gone for material had he been
making a thorough survey of sports at the time of the Civil War?

5. a. How closely does the paragraphing correspond to the outline of the article?

b. Is any one section given more than one paragraph?

c. How does the subject matter change in the final paragraph?

6. Point out the places in the article where Professor Mott draws inferences from
his evidence.

7. a. Can you point out places where fuller documentation is possible?

b. The writer of a research paper usually does not give footnote references to
material that is common knowledge. Are any of the statements here of this kind?

8. a. In Paragraph 2, what statement does the quotation from the Autocrat sup
port? Who was the Autocrat?

b. What is the topic sentence of this paragraph?

c. What connection do you find between it and the rest of the paragraph?

9. Note the development of Paragraph 4, on prize fighting. What are the major
subdivisions of the paragraph?

10. What can you say in general about Professor Mott s methods of developing
paragraphs?

11. What are the principal features of the sentence construction here? How effec
tive is the result?

SAMPLE THEME SUBJECTS

The development of jet-propelled aircraft

South American students in the United States

The “One Hundred Great Books” concept of higher education

The Negro and the labor unions

The effectiveness of youth centers in preventing juvenile delinquency

The conflict between consumers cooperatives and small business enterprises

Should TVA be subject to taxation as private utility corporations are?

Standards of living in coal mining areas

Freight rates and the development of Western industry ( or Southern industry )

The effect of air transportation on city planning

The effect of the Erie Canal on the settlement of the Western Reserve

The development of mass production methods in industry

The breakup of Tory estates following the Revolutionary War

The biography of Sara Teasdale, Joe Louis, Henry Ford II, or Orson Welles

The licensing of radio stations

130 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

The block-booking system in the motion picture industry

The frontier is still open in Alaska

The use of airplanes in the forest service

Uses of the light metals

American sailing craft of the nineteenth century

4. PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS

Primary Source Papers

THE PRIMARY source paper, like the secondary source paper,
involves direct research or investigation. To see the difference be
tween these two kinds of research papers it is necessary first of all to
distinguish between primary and secondary sources. The library paper,
which we discussed in the preceding section, works with secondary
sources.

If, in making a study of the kinds of trees to be found on the
campus, we go directly to the trees themselves, to identify them, to
count the number of each species, to note their groupings, or to make
other observations about them, the trees become primary source ma
terial in our investigation. If, on the other hand, our search takes
us to the library where we dig out articles about the trees on the
campus (if any such articles are to be found there), we are turning
to secondary sources. The secondary source, in other words, is the
treatment of the material with which we are concerned, or some part
of it, by another writer. The raw material has already been passed
through his mind, and while it is our task when dealing with secondary
sources to create a unity of our own by putting together evidence or
details gathered from many sources, we do not then come into direct
contact with the raw material found in a life situation.

We should not suppose, however, that library materials cannot be
used as primary sources. Take, for instance, a paper in which the
writer is making a study of changes in advertising techniques over the
last fifty years. Presumably, in gathering material, he goes to maga
zines and newspapers of the period under consideration and looks
at the advertisements to be found there. Each single advertisement in

134 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

that case is as much a primary source for evidence as each tree on the
campus is for a paper on campus trees. When he turns from a study
of advertisements themselves to search for articles on advertising, he
is turning to secondary sources. The article “Yarning in the Eighteen
Fifties” that appears later in this section deals with primary sources.
We note that the author is not turning to critical judgments about the
literature of the 1850 s, even though he could find plenty of them if he
looked for them. Instead, he is himself going directly to the stories
and novels, and arriving at conclusions after a study of what he finds
there. Literary research is often of this kind. Studies can be made of
the characters created by a novelist, of the verse techniques or the
figures of speech used by a poet, or his attitude toward women or
politics or religion as he reveals it in his writings. Although studies
that take the researcher to animate objects are more commonly found,
the primary source study that concerns the contents of books, maga
zines, newspapers, directories, or catalogues must be considered in
the same broad classification.

As a research paper, the primary source paper usually exhibits more
complete research machinery than does the informal induction. This
machinery may include the formal demarcation of a field for investi
gation, the setting up of the boundaries within which the writer intends
to make a thorough study, and the adoption of methods of approach
to the material by which sound conclusions can be anticipated. Con
sequently, the writer often devotes some space in his paper to a dis
cussion of his demarcations and of his methods.

Several kinds of primary research are open to the student writer. An
obvious one is the reportorial investigation, in which the writer goes
to the field, makes inquiries among those who may know the answers
to his questions, finds leads to other sources of information, and at
tempts to collect all the pertinent data. Of this kind is Bertram Fowler s
“Sharecroppers of the Sea” included in this collection. A sample of
research among books, Paul Fatout s “Yarning in the Eighteen Fifties,”
has already been mentioned. A third kind is the “poll” paper, repre
senting an attempt to draw conclusions on the state of public opinion.
In such a paper the writer is not interested in authoritative opinion
but in discovering what people as a mass are thinking. Since it is usu
ally impossible to interview all the members of the group in ques
tion, the writer must devise a satisfactory cross section to represent the

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 135

whole. The setting up of this cross section often demands careful at
tention. It also is necessary to formulate questions carefully so that
clear-cut answers will result. Unless the writer asks several closely inte
grated questions of each person interviewed or receiving the question
naire, he is likely to find himself with insufficient data upon which to
build satisfactory conclusions.

The average student in a college class in composition will find the
exercise in writing this kind of paper of considerable practical value to
him in his later life. The other kinds of writing discussed in this book
are of equal importance, but they are called for less often in the rou
tine business of everyday professional life. More important than prac
tice in the application of the principles involved in this sort of paper
is the benefit that accrues from the careful, objective often scientific
analysis of a problem.

THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK*
By George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae

1. THE AVERAGE person in any community cannot fail to notice how
sharply different levels of income and comfort cut across the Ameri
can social scene. He is aware of the plight of families on relief,
of the middle-class families struggling to make ends meet, and of
the people who are well to do and economically secure. Through
the movies and the daily newspapers he comes to know about the
Joads and cafe society. How does he react to the economic and
social differences he sees about him? Is America becoming “class
conscious,” as the proletarian writers of the last few decades have
confidently predicted? What does the ordinary citizen think “the
American standard of living” should be?

2. As America enters a strange new decade, public opinion research
already provides some tentative answers to these questions. The
subject will figure conspicuously in future public-opinion studies
studies which will have weather-vane significance for the kind of
country America is to be. Let us look at the present indicators.

3. As far as the economic reality is concerned, the picture is clear.

* Reprinted from The Pulse of Democracy by George Gallup and Saul F. Rae
by permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Copyright, 1940, by George Gallup
and Saul F. Rae.

136 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

Even in the boom of 1929, only about six million families had in
comes of $3000 a year or more; the great majority earned far less.
Eighteen million families more than half the population of the
United States earned less than $1500. Then came the cataclysm,
and within two or three years the national income of the United
States had dwindled to almost half what it had been in 1929, drag
ging living standards downward all along the line. Especially hard
hit were the eighteen million families who had been getting along
on less than $1500 a year. The shrinkage in family income provided
little chance to build even a small reserve against such hazards as
unemployment, old age, and sickness.

4. The economic protest of these sectors of the population was
translated into political terms in 1932. In the presidential election
of that year, American voters cast twenty-three million ballots for
Franklin D. Roosevelt. It just equaled the total Democratic vote
cast for Al Smith in 1928 together with the total Democratic vote
obtained by John W. Davis in 1924. It was the largest vote any
presidential candidate had ever polled, and it announced the be
ginning of political action among the millions of American families
with small incomes. Even in 1937 the underlying problem of in
security among the lower economic levels still existed. Standing
in the Washington rain to deliver his Second Inaugural, on Jan
uary 20, 1937, President Roosevelt declared that the need to solve
it was the greatest challenge to American democracy. “In this na
tion,” he said, “I see tens of millions of its citizens a substantial
part of the whole population who at this very moment are de
nied the greater part of what the veiy lowest standards today call
the necessities of life. I see,” he summarized, “one third of a nation
ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished/

5. Many Americans are concerned over the same picture which the
President painted. But despite the inequalities of life at different
levels of the economic pyramid, there is little evidence that the
people themselves are dividing into self-conscious class blocs. If
there are problems to solve, the dominant attitude is still that they
will be solved not through the impact of hostile classes, but through
unified national effort. The historian Charles A. Beard placed his
finger on the central reason for this when he wrote of the “sub-

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 137

jective consciousness” of the American people, a consciousness not
solely of immediate economic surroundings such as unemployment
and scanty diet, but also of common membership in a “middle
class” which has a future as well as a past. The extent of this con
sciousness of belonging to the middle class culturally and so
ciallywas clearly indicated in an Institute survey conducted in
1939.

6. “To what social class in this country do you think you belong,”
voters were asked, “the middle class, the upper, or the lower?” It
made little difference whether the voter was a Democrat or a Re
publican, whether he lived in a city or in the country, whether he
worked in a factory or owned the factory himself. In all cases,
nearly nine Americans in ten said they viewed themselves as mem
bers of the middle class:

Upper Class 6 per cent

Middle Class 88 per cent

Lower Class 6 per cent

7. With the sense of belonging to the middle class goes a whole
pattern of thought. The average American believes in most of the
traditional accompaniments of middle-class life. He believes in
the value of education. If he could have more of it, he would like
to have more training in business subjects and English. He believes
in “opportunity” although not quite as firmly as he once did
and he believes in property and in owning some himself if he can
manage it.

8. Side by side with his subjective belief in a middle-class status,
however, the average American has a sharp realization that his
life is not secure. The facts here were revealed in another 1939
survey in which the Institute asked: “If you lost your present job
(or business) and could not find another, how long do you think
you could hold out before you would have to apply for relief?”
The survey found seventeen persons in every hundred already on
relief or on one of the Federal government s work projects. Nine
teen out of a hundred said they could hold out one month or less,
sixteen could hold out one to six months, thirteen could hold out
six months to three years, and thirty-five thought they could hold

138 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

out three years or more. // the groups who say they could hold out
-for six months or less are added to those persons now on relief, the
total includes a majority of the people of the entire country.
9. The study showed that, although skilled and unskilled laborers
suffer from the greatest insecurity, many members of the white-
collar classes clerks, office workers, and people in the service
trades fear the future too. Indeed, nearly a quarter of these peo
ple told interviewers they would exhaust their reserves within a
month s time.

10. When the same poll asked to what income group people felt
they belonged, nearly a third said “the lower class”:

Upper-Income Group 1 per cent

Upper Middle 6 per cent

Middle 41 per cent

Lower Middle 21 per cent

Lower 31 per cent

11. It is not strange, then, that American elections have see,n a notice
able class factor at work ever since the early thirties. Millions of
lower- and middle-income voters crossed over to the Democratic
party in 1932 and have remained there since. During this period,
the Republican party has had its center of gravity in the upper-
income levels, while the Democratic center of gravity has been
among the “lower third” and voters on relief.

12. Simple proof of this growing relationship between economic in
security and the political alignments of recent years can be
found in the survey breakdowns of this insecurity question asked
in 1939:

For Roosevelt Against Roosevelt

Persons now on relief 81 per cent 19 per cent
Those who could hold out

one month or less 61 per cent 39 per cent

One month to six months 58 per cent 42 per cent

Sk months to three years 56 per cent 44 per cent

Three years or more 55 per cent 45 per cent

13. The key to why people now vote Democratic or Republican lies
in the economic stratification of the American people. At the ex-

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 139

tremes of the economic scale, political positions are coherent and,
to a large extent, predictable. But between the extremes lies the
middle-income group which is likely to become an increasingly de
cisive factor in future elections.

14. All through the first and second administrations of President
Roosevelt the Institute has found this middle group holding the
balance of power on issues as well as in elections. What income
characterizes this group? If you put that question at random to
a few well-to-do brokers and bankers they are likely to tell you,
“About $5000 a year” just as Mr. Morgan identified the middle
class, before a Senate committee, as those families which could
afford to have a servant. But actually the middle-income group in
the United States, numbering nearly one half of the whole voting
population, averages between $1000 and $2000 a ijear per family.

15. John Jones is a typical member of this group. He lives in a small
Eastern city. He works for a hardware store. He has a wife and
two children. He earns $30 a week. Nearly every dollar he earns
goes for immediate necessities such as rent, food, clothing, and
carfare. Yet, whether he knows it or not, he is a “typical” member
of the middle-income group, and on his vote the course of Ameri
can political life probably depends.

16. What is an adequate standard of living for the average Ameri
can family? The Great Depression first focused attention on this
vital question, and provoked response from many economists, ex
perts, and welfare associations. A few years ago the government
considered that the average family of four required at least $2500
a year for continued subsistence. Certain New Deal planners like
Mordecai Ezekiel set an objective of $2400 or $2500 for a family
of this size. William Green, of the American Federation of Labor,
has named a goal of $3600 for the skilled workman and his de
pendents.

17. The Institute therefore felt it would be valuable to let the people
express themselves on the question of income standards, and to
add the view of the general public to the estimates of the theorists
and social planners.

18. Five hundred interviewers covered voters in every state and
every income group in the country and found almost all persons

140 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

interviewed eager to express their own ideas. People in all walks
of life were asked:

19. “What is the smallest weekly amount a family of four must have
to live decently?”

20. And:

21. “How much income a year do you think the average family of
four needs for health and comfort?”

22. No sums were suggested. The voters wrote in whatever sums
they chose. Their aggregate answers to the first question estab
lished for the first time a nation-wide consensus on what the mini
mum standard of “decency” should be. The sum averaged $30 a
week approximately $1560 a year for the typical family of four
among all those interviewed.

23. Professional workers, businessmen, and skilled laborers named
a higher figure for decency than other groups. Farmers, who fre
quently enjoy a noncash income in farm produce and other things,
named a lower figure. Similarly, city dwellers named a higher
amount than residents in small towns and rural districts:

24. Typical persons living in the “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nour
ished” lower third gave $23 as the weekly sum needed, or approxi
mately $1200 a year.

25. Here are median amounts named by important population groups
throughout the United States:

Median Weekly a

A . J Same on
Amount v 7 .

Bam

for Decency
(in Dollars) ( Dollars)

Professional and white-collar

workers 35 1820

Merchants and businessmen 35 1820

IN THE . laborers 35

OPINION OF: ,-, ne> ,0

Farmers 25 1300

“Lower Third” 23 1196

U. S. average (median) 30 1560

26. What would public opinion s idea of the “decency” standard of
$30 a week mean? Undoubtedly it would continue to mean a very
modest standard of living. The typical family spends about thirty-
three cents out of every dollar for food today, and a $30-a-week
income allows about $10 a week to feed four persons. The next

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 141

highest amount goes for the home, including rent, light, heating,
and furniture. The family with $30 a week has about $9 a week
to spend on its home. This leaves ten or twelve cents out of every
dollar for clothing and ten or twelve cents for transportation. When
these slices have been taken out, a family with a $30 income has
between $4.50 and $6 for everything else for medicine and doc
tor s bills, for books and education, for entertainment and insur
ance and savings. When the second question was asked to find
out what voters thought would be necessary for a “health-and-
comfort” standard, the median figure set was $38 a week, or $1950
a year. According to the surveys, almost two thirds of all American
families in 1937 were living well below the health-and-comfort
standard set by public opinion. The difference between the two
standards in real terms would be a difference of quality in food,
perhaps a bit more for rent and for comforts, laborsaving devices,
and recreation.

27. Across the United States there is, of course, the widest var
iation in cost of living. It is not surprising, therefore, to find
that voters in the Institute s income-standard survey tended to set
somewhat different money standards depending on where they
lived.

38. In the South, public opinion set a $20 median as the decency
standard, but the paradox is explained by the fact that the South
includes millions of Negroes living at depressed standards who ex
pressed their delight at the thought of getting $12 or $15 a week.
When the Institute s investigators talked with Negro men and
women, many of them replied that they could “get along” on four
or five dollars. The average sum these Southern Negroes named
was only $12, which is far below the minimum standards set by
both public opinion and income economists. With Negroes ex
cluded, the average income wanted by white Southern families
was $25 a week.

29. The farm states of the Middle West asked less than the figure
of the national average, while the Pacific Coast states and the in
dustrial states of the Middle Atlantic area asked more. States in
the Great Lakes (East Central) and those in the Rocky Mountain
section voted for $30.

30. The following table shows how much money the voters of the

142 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

different sections considered necessary (1) for minimum decency,
and (2) for health and comfort:

^ Oa , 7 Hcalth-and-

Decency Standard ^ , . c . -, ,

, y 7 x Comfort Standard
o j.- (per week) / 7 x

Sections (per week)

New England states $30 $39

Middle Atlantic states 35 39

East Central states 30 38

West Central states 25 33

South (excl. Negroes) 25 33

Rocky Mountain states 30 38

Pacific Coast states 35 38

U. S. average (median) 30 38

Southern Negroes 12

31. How did this picture of “what ought to be” compare with the
actual state of affairs? Government research studies on the division
of the national income indicate that the typical family of four lives
on far less than the amount which public opinion feels to be es
sential for a “decency” minimum standard. The research figures
for income vary with different estimates. But the main lines of
the income-distribution study conducted by the Brookings Institu
tion for 1929 still hold good. And in that year the Institution found
that nearly six million families had less than $1000 and that twelve
million families, or more than 42 per cent, had less than $1500.

32. Such studies of income distribution, whether condensed in the
official estimates or in the stones people tell of their own insecurity,
acquire profound importance when measured against what public
opinion thinks the standards ought to be. So long as this chasm
remains between what people have and what they think they need,
protest movements and welfare legislation are bound to have a
real basis in our democracy. The discovery, that, while 88 per cent
of the American people feel themselves members of the middle
social class, 31 per cent place themselves in the lower economic
class, illuminates one of the grave social facts of our times. But
such discrepancies between aspirations and actualities must first
be brought to light before they can be solved. The people s own
story, as told through such surveys of public opinion, may one day
play a part in the ultimate solution.

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 143

ANALYSIS

1. a. What do the authors propose to do with the findings of their public opinion
poll?

b. Is the formulation of this question made before or after the results of the
poll are known?

c. What significance does the position of this formulation have in a primary
source paper?

2. a. What restrictions or limitations are placed on the data used in this survey?
b. What checks are used to assure a reasonably accurate cross section and a
reasonably accurate conclusion?

3. Examine the nature of the tabulated results and the means the authors use to
explain and generalize from these results.

4. a. Make a brief outline of this article to show the order and organization fol
lowed.

b. What is the relation of this order to the pattern of reasoning?

5. List the similarities and the differences between this article and “Training for

Citizenship in the Secondary Schools of New York City.” Compare especially
the areas covered in each survey and the resulting chances for accuracy of
prediction from the findings in the two areas.

AN INQUIRY INTO THE CAUSES AND EFFECTS
OF THE VARIOLAE VACCINAE, KNOWN BY
THE NAME OF THE COW-POX *

By Edward Jenner

THE DEVIATION of man from the state in which he was originally
placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of
diseases. From the love of splendor, from the indulgence of luxury,
and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarized himself
with a great number of animals, which may not originally have
been intended for his associates.

The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady s lap.
The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the
forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog,
the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought
under his care and dominion.

There is a disease to which the horse, from his state of domesti-

* Edward Jenner (1749-1823), an English physician, examined twenty-three
cases under this heading in 1798, from which three have been chosen to illus
trate his methods.

144 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

cation, is frequently subject. The farriers call it the grease. It is
an inflammation and swelling in the heel, from which issues matter
possessing properties of a very peculiar kind, which seems capable
of generating a disease in the human body (after it has under
gone the modification which I shall presently speak of), which
bears so strong a resemblance to the smallpox that I think it highly
probable it may be the source of the disease.

In this dairy country a great number of cows are kept, and the
office of milking is performed indiscriminately by men and maid
servants. One of the former having been appointed to apply dress
ings to the heels of a horse affected with the grease, and not pay
ing due attention to cleanliness, incautiously bears his part in
milking the cows, with some particles of the infectious matter ad
hering to his fingers. When this is the case, it commonly happens
that a disease is communicated to the cows, and from the cows
to dairy maids, which spreads through the farm until the most of
the cattle and domestics feel its unpleasant consequences. This dis
ease has obtained the name of cow-pox. It appears on the nip
ples of the cows in the form of irregular pustules. At their first
appearance they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a
color somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an
erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy
be applied, frequently degenerate into phagcdcnic ulcers, which
prove extremely troublesome. The animals become indisposed, and
the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin
to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics em
ployed in milking, and sometimes on the wrists, which quickly
run on to suppuration, first assuming the appearance of the small
vesications produced by a burn. Most commonly they appear about
the joints of the fingers and at their extremities; but whatever parts
are affected, if the situation will admit, these superficial suppura
tions put on a circular form, with their edges more elevated than
their center, and of a color distantly approaching to blue. Adsorp
tion takes place, and tumors appear in each axilla. The system be
comes affected the pulse is quickened; and shiverings, succeeded
by heat, with general lassitude and pains about the loins and
limbs, with vomiting, come on. The head is painful, and the pa
tient is now and then even affected with delirium. These symptoms,

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 145

varying in their degrees of violence, generally continue from one
day to three or four, leaving ulcerated sores about the hands,
which, from the sensibility of the parts, are very troublesome, and
commonly heal slowly, frequently becoming phagedenic, like those
from whence they sprung. The lips, nostrils, eyelids, and other
parts of the body are sometimes affected with sores; but these
evidently arise from their being heedlessly nibbed or scratched
with the patient s infected fingers. No eruptions on the skin have
followed the decline of the feverish symptoms in any instance that
has come to my inspection, one only excepted, and in this case a
very few appeared on the arms: they were very minute, of a vivid
red color, and soon died away without advancing to maturation;
so that I cannot determine whether they had any connection with
the preceding symptoms.

5. Thus the disease makes its progress from the horse to the nipple
of the cow, and from the cow to the human subject.

6. Morbid matter of various kinds, when absorbed into the system,
may produce effects in some degree similar; but what renders the
cow-pox virus so extremely singular is that the person who has been
thus affected is forever after secure from the infection of the small
pox; neither exposure to the variolous effluvia, nor the insertion of
the matter into the skin, producing this distemper.

7. In support of so extraordinary a fact, I shall lay before my reader
a great number of instances.

8. Case I. Joseph Merret, now an under gardener to the Earl of
Berkeley, lived as a servant with a farmer near this place in the
year 1770, and occasionally assisted in milking his master s cows.
Several horses belonging to the farm began to have sore heels,
which Merret frequently attended. The cows soon became affected
with the cow-pox, and soon after several sores appeared on his
hands. Swellings and stiffness in each axilla followed, and he was
so much indisposed for several days as to be incapable of pursuing
his ordinary employment. Previously to the appearance of the dis
temper among the cows there was no fresh cow brought into the
farm, nor any servant employed who was affected with the cow-
pox.

9. In April, 1795, a general inoculation taking place here, Merrett
was inoculated with his family; so that a period of twenty-five

146 THE EXPOSITION OP IDEAS

years had elapsed from his having cow-pox to this time. However,
though the variolous matter was repeatedly inserted into his arm,
I found it impracticable to infect him with it; an efflorescence only,
taking on an erysipelatous look about the center, appearing on the
skin near the punctured parts. During the whole time that his
family had the smallpox, one of whom had it very full, he remained
in the house with them, but received no injury from exposure to
the contagion.

10. It is necessary to observe that the utmost care was taken to ascer
tain, with the most scrupulous precision, that no one whose case
is here adduced had gone through the smallpox previous to these
attempts to produce that disease.

11. Had these experiments been conducted in a large city, or in a
populous neighborhood, some doubts might have been entertained;
but here, where population is thin, and where such an event as
a person s having had the smallpox is always faithfully recorded,
no risk of inaccuracy in this particular can arise.

12. Case II. Sarah Portlock, of this place, was infected with the
cow-pox when a servant at a farmer s in the neighborhood, twenty-
seven years ago. In the year 1792, conceiving herself, from this
circumstance, secure from the infection of the smallpox, she nursed
one of her own children who had accidentally caught the disease,
but no indisposition ensued. During the time she remained in the
infected room, variolous matter was inserted into both her arms,
but without any further effect than in the preceding case.

13. Case XVII. The more accurately to observe the progress of the
infection I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the
purpose of inoculating for the cow-pox. The matter was taken
from a sore on the hand of a dairymaid, who was infected by her
master s cows, and it was inserted on the fourteenth day of May,
1796, into the arm of the boy by means of two superficial incisions,
barely penetrating the cutis, each about an inch long.

14. On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness in the axilla
and on the ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and
had a slight headache. During the whole of this day he was per
ceptibly indisposed, and spent the night with some degree of rest
lessness, but on the day following he was perfectly well.

15. The appearance of the incisions in their progress to a state of

PR/MARY SOURCE PAPERS 147

maturation were much the same as when produced in a similar
manner by variolous matter. The difference which I perceived was
in the state of the limpid fluid arising from the action of the virus,
which assumed rather a darker hue, and in that of the efflorescence
spreading round the incisions, which had more of an erysipelatous
look than we commonly perceive when variolous matter has been
made use of in the same manner; but the whole died away (leaving
on the inoculated parts scabs and subsequent eschars ) without giv
ing me or my patient the least trouble.

16. In order to ascertain whether the boy, after feeling so slight an
affection of the system from the cow-pox virus, was secure from
the contagion of the smallpox, he was inoculated the first of July
following with variolous matter, immediately taken from a pustule.
Several slight punctures and incisions were made on both his arms,
and the matter was carefully inserted, but no disease followed. The
same appearances were observable on the arms as we commonly
see when a patient has had variolous matter applied, after having
either the cow-pox or smallpox. Several months afterwards he was
again inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect was
produced on the constitution.

17. After the many fruitless attempts to give the smallpox to those
who had had the cow-pox, it did not appear necessary, nor was it
convenient to me, to inoculate the whole of those who had been
the subjects of these late trials; yet I thought it right to see the
effects of variolous matter on some of them, particularly William
Summers, the first of these patients who had been infected with
matter taken from the cow. He was, therefore, inoculated from a
fresh pustule; but, as in the preceding cases, the system did not
feel the effects of it in the smallest degree. I had an opportunity
also of having this boy and William Pead inoculated by my
nephew, Mr. Henry Jenner, whose report to me is as follows: 1
have inoculated Pead and Barge, two of the boys whom you lately
infected with the cow-pox. On the second day the incisions were
inflamed and there was a pale inflammatory stain around them. On
the third day these appearances were still increasing and their
arms itched considerably. On the fourth day the inflammation
was evidently subsiding, and on the sixth day it was scarcely
ceptible. No symptoms of indisposition followed,

148 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

18. “To convince myself that the variolous matter made use of was
in a perfect state I at the same time inoculated a patient with some
of it who never had gone through the cow-pox, and it produced
the smallpox in the usual regular manner.”

19. These experiments afforded me much satisfaction; they proved
that the matter, in passing from one human subject to another,
through five gradations, lost none of its original properties, J. Barge
being the fifth who received the infection successively from Wil
liam Summers, the boy to whom it was communicated from the
cow. . . .

20. Although I presume it may not be necessary to produce further
testimony in support of my assertion “that the cow-pox protects
the human constitution from the infection of the smallpox,” yet it
affords me considerable satisfaction to say that Lord Somerville,
the President of the Board of Agriculture, to whom this paper was
shown by Sir Joseph Banks, has found upon inquiry that the state
ments were confirmed by the concurring testimony of Mr. Dolland,
a surgeon, who resides in a dairy country remote from this, in
which these observations were made. . . .

ANALYSIS

i. What is the purpose and accomplishment of the first part of this article ( From

the beginning to “Case I”)?

a. Is the author here reasoning with later evidence in mind or is he proceeding

from the unknown to the known?
i. Point out the evidences in the text that indicate Jenner s awareness of the

scope and the limitations of his subject in each of the “cases * given here.

a. Why is it essential here that the author place controls on his area of inquiry?

3. In what ways is this paper similar to “Thirty Dollars a Week”? How do the
two articles differ? List the points of similarity and the points of difference.

4. Does it seem to you from the cases given here that Jenner has covered a large
enough area to get a “cross section” that makes his conclusion valid?

5. What importance does the last specific experiment explained in the final para
graphs of the article have on the whole article?

6. You will notice that this article is dated 1798.

a. Examine the article and list evidences that you find in the style that seem
to mark it as having been of an earlier time.

b. What kinds of words do you find that seem to indicate its age?
C. What are the dominant sentence patterns?

d. Read a contemporary scientific account of an experiment and compare the
methods of writing with those of Jenner. What conclusions do you arrive at
concerning changes in style?

PR/MARY SOURCE PAPERS 149

TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP IN THE SECONDARY
SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY*

By Madge M. McKinney

1. EDUCATORS are justly perturbed that election scandals and ineffi
ciency in government have not declined with increased educational
facilities. They are eagerly groping for methods by which higher
standards of citizenship can be developed. Their points of view
sometimes diverge; they do not always agree upon what is good
training or upon what are the best civic attitudes. Their termi
nology is not always uniform; what one calls patriotism, another
calls nationalism, but they all seek the same end the development
of an intelligent, interested, and active citizenry. Many serious ob
servers believe that until such standards are attained the morale
of the American government will not be improved.

2. A knowledge of present conditions is essential to the develop
ment of new standards. The following article represents a survey
of the citizenship training in nine of New York City s largest high
schools. The material was obtained from answers to a question
naire filled in by three hundred and nine students who had recently
graduated from these schools, and from statements made by the
teachers of the social sciences, by the heads of the departments
of history and civics, by the director of civics, and by the associate
superintendent in charge of the high schools. Such sources have
their limitations. The questionnaire was presented to groups of
college freshmen and sophomores in four institutions of higher
learning in New York City. They represented a selected group of
high school graduates; the large number that never attended college
were not reached. Most of the questions, however, were objective
in character, and it is doubtful that they would have been answered
differently by non-college students.

3. It was intended originally that the survey should cover all of the
New York City high schools. This undertaking proved to be too
ambitious, and nine representative schools were selected. They in
cluded a girls* school, a boys school and a coeducational school

* From The Social Studies, November, 1934. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers.

150 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

from each of New York s largest boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn,
and the Bronx. Two of them professed to be college preparatory,
and their students were selected on a scholarship basis; but the
data obtained from them proved that they were not unlike the
other schools with regard to civic training. All were academic in
stitutions; the conclusions are not applicable to industrial schools.

4. Every effort was made to obtain as accurate information as pos
sible. The papers of the students who had spent less than three
years in the high school from which they were graduated were dis
carded and most of the students whose answers were used had
spent four years in the same institution. In general, the answers
checked themselves when thirty-five or forty students from the
same school answer a factual question in the same way, the chances
are that their memories serve them well. Where the questions per
tain to an attitude rather than a fact, the answers are less con
clusive; but even then group reactions are significant.

5. The survey can be divided into three fields of inquiry: ( 1 ) Formal
civic education or classroom work. Most of this information was
obtained from staff members. (2) The development of nationalism
outside of the classroom. (3) Political experience obtained in
school and civic attitudes developed through this experience.

6. The requirements for graduation from the New York high schools
include one unit in American history and civics, and an additional
half unit in civics. 1 The half unit, in community civics, is usually
given in the first year of high school. The unit in American history
and civics is generally given in the senior year. The civics in this
course pertains to our national government and occupies about six
weeks of the time. This means that in the four years of high school
training only about thirty classroom hours are set apart for the
formal study of the problems of the federal government and the
machinery with which it attempts to solve them.

7. The textbooks were selected by heads of departments from an
approved list drawn up by a committee appointed by the associ
ate superintendent in charge of the high schools. Eight of the
schools had adopted Rexf ord s Our City New York 2 as a text for

1 Requirements for Graduation is published in a leaflet issued by the Superin
tendent of Schools. One unit is five periods per week for one year.

2 Rexford, Frank A., ed., Our City New York. New York: Allyn & Bacon,
1924-1930. Dr. Rexford was formerly director of civics in the New York

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 151

community civics. AH nine of the schools used Muzzy s History of
the American People 3 for the history course, although some of them
supplemented it with other texts. There was less uniformity in the
choice of texts for the course in advanced civics. Magruder s Amer
ican Government, 4 Woodburn and Moran s The Citizen and the Re
public, 5 Guitteau s Government and Politics in the United States, 6
and Mathews Essentials of American Government 7 were variously
selected by the different schools. One school did not use a text.

8. A few questions were asked of the students in an effort to dis
cover what materials, other than textbooks, were used, and what
special attitudes, interests, and habits were cultivated. In answer
to the question, Were you required to keep abreast with current
events in connection with your study of civics and American gov
ernment? two hundred and fifty-two students said Yes, thirty-two
said No, twenty-five did not answer. Evidently the majority of
the classes did spend some time on current events of a civic na
ture. But where did they get their information? One hundred and
ninety-three said they subscribed to small current-events papers
through their school. Classroom bulletin boards were devoted to
news articles in all the schools, and about one third of the students
made scrap books of political events. More than half of the students
said they were tested on this part of the work. These answers in
dicate that the study of civics was well seasoned with information
upon current questions, but they do not show how comprehensive
such information was, nor does it follow that the students were de
veloping a taste for the longer articles of the popular press.

9. They were next asked if they were encouraged to read the gov
ernmental news in the daily papers, and if so to indicate whether
conservative, liberal, or radical papers were recommended.

10. The answers to this question are set forth in the following table:

schools. The first edition of this book was written by high school students. It
was later revised to conform with the new laws. Civics teachers assisted in the
revision.

3 Muzzy, David S., History of the American People. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1927.

4 Magruder, Frank Abbot, American Government. New York: Allyn & Bacon,
1927-1932.

- Woodburn, James Albert and Moran, T. F., The Citizen and the Republic.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1921-1928.

6 Guitteau, William Backus, Government and Politics in the United States. Bos
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911-1918.

7 Mathews, J. M., Essentials of American Government. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1927.

152 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

TABLE I
TYPES OF PAPERS THE STUDENTS WERE ENCOURAGED TO READ

Papers

Number of
Mentions

Papers

Number of
Mentions

Conservative
Liberal
Radical
Conservative and

52
21

Liberal 20

Liberal and Radical
All types
Not encouraged at all*
No reply

2
11
79
124

* These students wrote “No” after all types.

11. Any interpretation of the answers must take into consideration
the fact that this question was more subjective than most of those
included in the questionnaire. The large number that omitted it
also detracts from its value. Unfortunately it was so framed that
an omission may have been intended to indicate that the student
was not encouraged to read any paper probably that was the
purpose back of some of the omissions. One or two things about
these answers, however, do seem significant. First, nearly half of
those who answered it wrote No after all types of papers, or wrote
sometimes in very large letters Not encouraged at all. Second,
the type of paper most generally read is interesting. Conservative
papers lead the list. This may not be so significant as it seems be
cause of the subjectiveness of the question and because conserva
tive papers frequently contain more governmental news and are
therefore more useful in a civics course. That thirty-three students
said they were encouraged to read more than one type of paper
indicates that a few teachers are trying to develop the students
powers of discrimination. The fact that the radical papers were not
exclusively recommended by any teacher will cause no great sur
prise among educators but it might be used to contradict the state
ment occasionally made in the press that New York educational
institutions encourage radicalism.

12. In answer to the question, Were controversial questions freely
discussed in the classroom? the majority of the students in every
school said they were and that all sides of the questions were pre
sented. There was, however, more disagreement on this question
than on most of them, and probably the only conclusion that can

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 153

be drawn is that the majority of the students questioned were not
conscious of suppression.

13. New York students are frequently accused of being provincial.
Doubtless, students everywhere are inclined to judge the rest of
the country through the stereotypes of their community, but in
New York City this tendency is emphasized by the fact that most
of the teachers are born, raised, and educated within the metro
politan area. Illustrations of provincialism are plentiful. A gradu
ate of one of the New York City high schools once said to the
writer, “How was the eighteenth amendment ever adopted, I have
never met anyone who believed in it?” Again in 1928 many stu
dents were sure that Alfred E. Smith would be elected, and, if the
memories of the graduates are at all reliable, it is still being taught
in some of the schools that nothing but his religion prevented him
from becoming President. All other elements that entered into that
campaign such as Coolidge prosperity, the influence of Tammany
Hall, and prohibition are given little or no weight in the New
York stereotype of that election. One question was put into the
questionnaire to see whether any effort was being made to coun
teract this tendency. The question was Were you encouraged to
read the newspapers of other localities? It may not have been a
fair criterion of the broadening influence that it was designed to
measure, particularly in a city that has so many excellent news
papers, and the answers are given without any attempt to evalu
ate them. One hundred and ninety-eight students answered No,
fifty-five answered Yes, and fifty-six did not answer.

14. Still another type of educational activity was investigated. How
far was the government itself used as a primary source in the
study of civics? Was its structure and operation a part of the labora
tory equipment?

15. All but one of the schools studied had conducted student trips to
Washington so that those students who could afford to go could
visit the seat of the Federal government. These trips were care
fully supervised and could easily be called a part of the formal
training of those who participated in them. About twelve per
cent of the students questioned had gone on these trips; probably
a still smaller percentage of the entire student body had had such

154 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

an opportunity since those who go to college usually represent
the more prosperous families. Local trips, more easily afforded,
might have had a wider influence. These seem to have been neg
lected.

TABLE II
PLACES VISITED IN CONNECTION WITH THE SCHOOL WORK

Extra
Places Credit for
Visiting

Required
to
Visit

Conducted
Trip

Total
Visits

City Hall

11

38*

2

51

Statue of Liberty

20

10*

12

42

Fraunces Tavern

8

25*

6

39

Ellis Island

8*

9*

12*

29

A Court

13

9

3

25

Museum of the City

of New York

10

9*

5

24

Jumel Mansion

6

12*

18

Museum of the American

Indian

7

7

3

17

Roosevelt House

6

5

5

16

Dyckman House

4

6

2

12

Van Cortlandt House

4

4

8

New York Historical

Society

2

5

7

* Practically all of these were from the same high school. Note: Seventeen vol
unteered the information that they were not encouraged to make any such
visits.

16. A number of local places of historic and civic interest were listed
and the students were asked to indicate those they were given extra
credit for visiting, those they were required to visit, and those to
which they were conducted by a teacher. The city hall received
the most visits. Only about one sixth of the students had visited
it and most of them were from the same school. Approximately one
eighth of the students had been to Fraunces Tavern, and about
one seventh had visited the Statue of Liberty in connection with
their school work. Ellis Island, where it is possible to see a Federal
agency at work, was visited by less than one tenth of the students
questioned, and a still smaller percentage had visited the other
places listed. These numbers seem very small considering the cheap
and rapid transportation facilities in New York City.

17. It is only fair to note that at the very time that this material was

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 155

being collected, Dr. Frank A. Rexford, Director of Education at the
Museum of the City of New York, was arranging and publishing
itineraries to many places of historic and civic interest in New York
City, so that this type of education is now being stimulated, and
greatly facilitated, by an outside force.

18. One other question pertained to the method of presenting the
information concerning the government. This question was:

Was there any dramatization of the following in your high school?
A A party caucus
B A national convention
c A city council
D League of Nations Assembly
E Other governmental bodies
F A presidential election

19. According to the answers, the League of Nations Assembly had
been dramatized in one school. It evidently had made a great im
pression for nine tenths of the students remembered it. Ten others
said there had been some dramatization, but their answers were
so scattered usually one from a school as to make them in
credible.

20. A few general conclusions can be drawn from this section of the
survey. It has been noted that there is considerable liberty in the
selection of the textbooks. It is significant that three times as many
hours are spent upon the government of New York City as are given
to the national government and that only about thirty hours in the
entire high school curriculum are formally assigned to the latter.
In spite of the fact that the former director of civics maintained
that “the city itself is the text and laboratory for the study of Civics
in the Schools,” 8 relatively few of the students who were ques
tioned in this study had seen the different governmental bodies of
the city or had visited its historic museums as a part of their formal
training. Little use was made of newspapers or of other materials
than textbooks, but with such tools as they had the students were
given freedom to think as they would, and in most cases to express
their thoughts. There was little or no evidence that the tools were
selected for the purpose of developing one particular point of view.

8 This is quoted from Dr. Rexford in a booklet by Harold G. Campbell, Beyond
the Classroom^ New York: Herald-Nathan Press, 1930, p. 99.

156

THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

21.

22.

23.

TABLE HI
PICTURES RECALLED BY THE STUDENTS

Pictures

Number of
Mentions

Pictures

Number of
Mentions

American Pictures

Foreign Pictures

Historic scenes*

128

Religious pictures

34

Presidents portraits

126

Famous paintings

32

Statesmen s portraits

29

Scenic places

27

Martha Washington

25

Roman scenes

20

Government buildings 23

Authors and orators

20

War memorials

21

Greek scenes

17

American colleges

20

Warriors

12

American educators

13

Cathedrals

11

American authors

11

Scientists

7

Scenic places

5

Artists

6

American reformers

1

Musicians

3

American actors

1

Others

24

Total

403

Total

213

* Historic scenes included such pictures as WasJiington Crossing the Delaware,
The Landing of the Pilgrims, The Purchase of Manhattan.

Much has been written of the nationalistic training in other coun
tries. We are told that Germany, Italy, and Russia surround their
youth with national symbols and patriotic ceremonies. An attempt
was made to find out what influences of this type existed in the
New York high school training, outside of the classes in history and

civics.

The bylaws of the board of education lay the foundation for such
influences; they require that all teachers either be citizens or have
made application for citizenship. They also provide that assembly
periods be held at least once a week which shall include exercises
of a patriotic nature, a salute to the flag, and the singing of “The
Star-Spangled Banner.” These requirements were generally carried
out in the schools investigated. Assembly periods were sometimes
less frequent than the law prescribed but the nature of the exer
cises followed the spirit of the law.

Two of the very first questions on the questionnaire were aimed
at this phase of the student s training. They were:

What picture do you remember that hung on the walls of either
the classrooms, the auditorium, or the halls of your high school
building?

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 157

What songs do you remember singing most often in (a) the as
sembly, (b) the music class?

24. These questions were placed at the beginning so that they would
be answered before the students were conscious of the nature of
the study, and the papers were collected too soon for the answers
to be changed. The response may be judged by the following tabu
lation of the answers.

TABLE IV
SONGS RECALLED BY THE STUDENTS

In Assembly: In Music Class:

Songs Numbers of Number of

Mentions Mentions

Patriotic Songs

The Star-Spangled Banner 198 10

America 56 12

American Folk Songs 34 74

America the Beautiful , 28 5

Others 22 10

Totals lK8 TIT

Non-Patriotic Songs

School Songs** 181 47

Hymns*** 83 34

Opera 44 169

Foreign Folk Songs 24 57

War Songs 1 18

Others 48 71

Totals “381 “396

* Negro Spirituals and Indian Songs were included in American Folk Son^s.
* Many school songs were of a patriotic nature, such as “When DC Witt

Clinton Was Governor of New York.”

* 0<> “God of Our Fathers” was one of the hymns most frequently mentioned;
many others were semipatriotic.

25. Almost two thirds of the pictures remembered were distinctly
American, and seven eighths of the American pictures were defi
nitely historic or patriotic in character. Nearly half of the mentions
of songs that the students recalled singing in assembly periods
had nationalistic themes. If we included in this group the hymns
and school songs which were semi-patriotic, there would remain
only sixteen per cent which had no patriotic influences. The spread
is somewhat different in the music class but even there more than

158 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

one fifth of the songs remembered were of a patriotic nature. It is
true that these statements are a little ambiguous; the “number of
mentions” is not synonymous with the number of songs sung, for
the same song was recalled by many students. Table III is open
to the same criticism. It is probable, however, that the songs re
membered by a large number of students were most frequently
sung, and that the pictures most often mentioned were hung in the
most prominent places. In any case the recurrence of the same
names on many papers indicates that they made a vivid impres
sion on the students minds. The mentions, therefore, offer a tan
gible, though a crude way of weighing such influences.

26. Answers to subsequent questions gave evidence of other nation
alistic stimuli. The salute to the flag was generally given at assem
bly meetings. National holidays were usually celebrated with
patriotic speeches or patriotic music. In two schools, arrangements
were made so that the students could listen to the President s
inaugural address over the radio. Armistice Day was observed by
a few minutes of silence in all the schools. Besides pictures, other
American symbols adorned the rooms. Two hundred and twelve
students remembered that American flags were displayed in the
buildings, twenty-six recalled seeing armor used in American wars,
and thirteen said other war relics decorated the buildings. Patri
otic plays or pageants had been given in all the schools. And finally,
in fulfillment of the requirements for graduation from the high
schools all candidates for graduation had to sign a pledge of loy
alty to the United States and to the State of New York, unless
they were excused by the associate superintendent in charge of the
high schools. As near as the associate superintendent could re
member only four students had been so excused in the preceding
six years. One was the son of a British consul; the others were not
explained.

27. An attempt was made to find out the extent to which nationalistic
materials were generally used in the classrooms. It has already
been indicated that patriotic music was sung during the music
period. Did other departments use similar material? A list of pa
triotic speeches, poems, etc., was submitted and the students were
asked to check once any that they had studied during their high

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 159

school course and twice any that they had memorized in full or
in part. Table V shows how they responded.

28. Since these selections scarcely would have been studied in the
assembly period, nationalistic material must have been used in the
classrooms. Some of them must have been studied in connection
with courses other than history and civics. Other departments
therefore must be presenting material which tends to produce an
emotional reaction in the student and helps to develop a nationally
conscious citizenry.

TABLE V
NATIONALISTIC MATERIAL USED IN THE CLASSROOM

Patriotic Selections

Studied

by

Memorized
in Full or
Part by

Washington s Farewell Address

153

15

Burke s Conciliation Speech

143

14

Lincoln s Gettysburg Address

130

118

The Man Without a Country

108

4

Preamble to the Declaration of

Independence

98

88

Preamble to the Constitution

79

131

Paul Revere s Ride

65

18

Old Ironsides

65

39

Cooper s The Spy

50

Franklin s Autobiography

49

1

Scott s Love of Country

49

58

Barbara Frietchie

44

5

Concord Hymn

43

18

Irving s Life of Washington

43

1

A Perfect Tribute

35

5

Sheridan s Ride

34

2

The Blue and The Grey

27

8

29. One question more objective in character was included. The stu
dents were asked how many stanzas they could repeat of a number
of patriotic songs. Their answers make one skeptical of the effec
tiveness of this type of training. Over three fourths of them thought
they knew the words of one or more stanzas of the first three songs
on the list, but it seemed rather surprising that less than half of
them said they could repeat as many as two stanzas of The Star-

160 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

Spangled Banner. Even this cannot be attributed entirely to school
training, since these songs are often heard at church, club or
theatre.

30. One question was directed at these outside influences. It was
What patriotic motion picture shows have you seen in the last year?
A total of three hundred forty-one visits to such plays was reported.
The picture Abraham Lincoln led the list with ninety-six visits;
All Quiet on the Western Front came next with fifty-two visits.
Eighteen students said they had been given time out of school to
see such pictures. Strictly speaking, the question is relevant to this
study in their case only. The popularity of these plays, however,
does point to one more nationalistic influence, and it suggests an
interest in historic and patriotic things that may have been awak
ened in the school room.

31. One other patriotic influence is the Junior Red Cross. There is
a branch of this society in each of the schools. Its chief function
seems to be to raise money to help handicapped children receive
an education. Its nationalistic influence lies in its affiliation with
the National Red Cross whose patriotic purposes and traditions
are common knowledge. This organization cannot have a great in
fluence in the schools, for very few of the students questioned were
cognizant of its existence.

32. Lack of space eliminated from the study other nationalistic in
fluences, among them being the very names of the schools, most
of which are those of presidents, governors or other statesmen.
There are also influences which might prove to be nationalistic
if they were analyzed; among these are the student publications,
particularly those sponsored by the history departments. An analy
sis of these sheets, however, would take considerable time, and
without such an analysis no conclusions can be drawn.

33. In summary it can be said that New York City does not trust its
youth to the influence of foreign teachers, that it surrounds them
with nationalistic symbols and pictures in the school buildings,
that nationalistic songs are sung and patriotic rites are performed
in assembly meetings, that patriotic literature is frequently used
in the classroom, and patriotic plays are presented by various school
organizations, and finally that the students are required to sign a
pledge of allegiance before graduation. Thus from matriculation

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 161

until graduation the student is under the influence of stimuli that
are intended to arouse a loyalty to his country.

TABLE VI
PATRIOTIC SONGS MEMORIZED BY THE STUDENTS

NUMBER OF STANZAS THEY CC3UIJ) REPEAT Number of

One or Two or Three or Students not
None More More More Answering

The Star-Spangled Banner 2

284

131

66

23

America 3

262

166

71

53

America, The Beautiful 9

236

139

62

64

The Battle Hymn of the

Republic 24

142

62

29

143

Kipling s Recessional 63

27

16

7

219

Hail Columbia 29

130

26

19

150

John Brown s Body 49

38

18

10

222

ANALYSIS

1. Study the approach to the problem that this article handles. Be able to explain
clearly how this article differs from those in the section on Secondary Source
Papers.

2. What limitations are placed here on the field of inquiry covered? Why is such
limitation necessary? What is its significance?

3. Explain the main technique used in this paper to gather the materials that lead
to the conclusion. Are there any evidences that the conclusion is in any way
anticipated before the results of the survey are known?

4. Make a careful study of the kinds of questions asked in the survey and be able
to explain the nature and function of each. Are any questions asked that require
more than a brief, easily tabulated answer? Why not?

5. Study the statistical tables and comment on the significance of such a device
for clarifying material of this nature.

6. a. Explain the technique used to generalize and comment on the results of the
survey.

b. Are comments placed in a single division or do they follow each parallel
grouping of the questions?

c. What significance does the order used have on the clarity and validity of
this as a primary source paper?

162 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

SHARECROPPERS OF THE SEA*
By Bertram B. Fowler

THERE are a hundred places like the cove in Frenchman s Bay
where George Bradley has his shack. Some of them are better,
some worse. The coast is dotted with shacks like George s. Some
of them, also, are better. And some are worse. The coves and the
shacks along the strip of coast from Portland to the Canadian
border represent a new problem. Or, perhaps I should say, the
sign of a trend. Something has happened to Maine, just as it has
happened to the farmers of the Middle West. It is the appearance
of the same evil that has blighted the whole of the South. Tenancy
has come to replace ownership. It is there, showing the same face
of ugliness along the Maine coast that one finds in the sharecrop
pers shacks from Arkansas through the South and East to the
coastal plain and the sea.

Let us study more closely the case of George Bradley who lives
in the cove on Frenchman s Bay. His shack faces the massive bulk
of Cadillac Mountain and Bar Harbor. He can see the yachts of
the summer people lifting white wings against the sharp blue of
the sky. The nearer view isn t so impressive. Waist-deep in the
tide wash stands an old canning factory. It is several hundred
yards out from the rocky shore, out where there was sufficient
depth of water for boats to pull alongside and unload their fish.

The boats have vanished now. The pier that connected the can
nery with the shore has rotted away. Here and there a pile leans
disconsolately, a perch for the scavenging sea gulls. The cannery,
with its blank windows staring out of the still substantial brick
walls, stands as a monument to a day that has passed, to a pros
perity that to George has become like a half-forgotten legend.

There are thousands of such monuments along the coast. There
are the wharves, sagging, season by season slipping into the water.
There are the funereal heaps of lobster pots rotting in the fog and
bleaching in the sun. There are the fish-drying racks the wreck-

* From Scribners Magazine, May, 1937. Copyright, 1937, by Bertram B.
Fowler. Reprinted by permission of the author.

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 163

age of some of them are still there reminders of a day when the
fishing communities along the Maine coast were communities of
owners, the prosperous symbols of a democracy that was authentic
and apparent.

5. Look at George s shack and you are looking at a segment of a
pattern that is appearing. The shack is unpainted, unlovely, stand
ing on high piles just above the high-water line. It has two rooms
kitchen and bedroom. There are seven in the Bradley family five
children, George, and his wife. In the two rooms there are no com
forts or conveniences, only a squalor that is deadening and de
pressing.

6. Perhaps, in some of the blighted areas of Alabama or Kentucky
or Arkansas, George s shack would not rate more than passing
comment. But this is Maine! And when Americans think of Maine
they are conscious of a sensation of something like smugness. Maine
is so sound, so stable. Its people are sturdy, self-reliant, self-respect
ing. Which was true once.

7. Americans by the thousands whir through Maine on their wheels
of air and rubber. The change has taken place beneath their eyes
without their understanding what has happened. They see for the
most part the great midway of the filling stations, the tourist homes,
the We Take You Inns, the clusters of roadside cabins with such
esthetic titles as “Maine Idyll.” These people usually miss the
shacks of the George Bradleys. The coves they visit are studded
with summer cottages, hotels, and inns. If they do see the shacks,
they fail to notice and understand the trend of which they are
symbols.

8. The reason is there, in the piled-up lobster pots, in the unpainted
boats careened on the beaches. It is written in the smudge of
smoke that the beam trawler traces across the blue of the sky off
Bar Harbor. The shacks, the rotting wharves, the disintegrating
fishing gear and lobster pots all these are effects. Cause and ef
fect pass unnoticed by the summer visitors. To them the grayness
of the shacks, the fantastic angles taken on by falling wharves are
picturesque. The tragedy is softened by the esthetic shades with
which sun and wind and rain paint their damage.

9. Mass production in fishing, the centralization of ownership and

164 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

control of the industry, the depredations worked by unsound meth
ods of fishing, the disappearance, one by one, of the fish by which
they live these constitute the cause of the change.

10. Let us look more closely at George Bradley s case. He did not
always live in a shack on the rim of the cove. There was a time
when he reaped an abundant harvest from the sea. In a lobster
season he has made as high as fifty dollars a day. He has made
twenty dollars a day hand trawling. He has seen the season when
he and his neighbors cleared thousands of dollars on the herring
catch. Such figures speak of prosperity. But they shrink a little
when one stops to figure the hazards of the trade. There are days
when no boats can go out. There are lobster traps lost in storms.
There is the wreckage of trawl gear during the season. There is
the upkeep of boats and motors.

11. George has always kept the accounts of his fishing. His books
showed the results of three months lobster fishing this spring. For
the three months he averaged twenty-three cents a day above ex
penses. Here are the figures that can be duplicated a thousand times
along the coast, the figures that show the swift and relentless extinc
tion of the lobster, the harvest upon which five thousand families
along the Maine coast depend. Here George s economic problem is
linked directly to the tragedy of waste that is wiping out one more
of the national resources.

12. This spring George, like hundreds of others, turned his back on
lobster fishing. He admitted, after years in which his catch had
fallen off steadily, that as a livelihood, lobster fishing was finished.

13. He started trawling. He got up at three in the morning to start
in his motor boat for the fishing grounds. He set his two or three
miles of hook-festooned line and fished for hake. Once it had been
haddock. But now market catches of haddock by the individual
fishermen are part of the past. In the past, hake was a despised
fish, with practically no market value. The inexorable urge of cir
cumstances forced the markets to sell hake to the consumers,
even as it had been forced years earlier to popularize the then-
despised haddock.

14. Having set his two or three miles of trawl, George waited an
hour, then hauled the interminable length of line back into his
boat. An average day s catch was a thousand pounds. He freighted

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 165

that to the buyer at the fish stand in a neighboring cove and got
forty cents a hundred for his fish. With his four dollars he went
home, paid a dollar for the gasoline he had used, a dollar and
a half for bait for the next day. There were other incidentals, lu
bricating oil, motor repairs, fishing gear all to come out of the
four dollars. The result is there for all to see in the shack on the
rim of the cove, in George s boat that will one day be unfit to
venture to sea in. It is tragically apparent in George s children,
who get an insufficiency of milk and eggs. George himself shows
the result. He works too long hours, suffers from exposure on an
unbalanced diet, too much fish, not enough of meat and proteins.

15. Leave the cove in which George lives and go along the coast.
The problem will be before you as you go. It is there, the hope
lessness that in some instances is degenerating into shiftlessness
and chronic despair. For, in all the blighted sections of America,
the pattern is uniform. First, poverty, destroying self-respect and
courage. Later, hopelessness, bitter and enervating. The last stage
is the stage of shiftlessness, the abandonment of hope, a supine
willingness to accept relief, to lie down when standing upright
becomes impossible.

16. In one town I walked on the beach and found a fisherman calk
ing the widening seams of an upturned boat. I asked him if he were
getting ready to go fishing. He looked at me and laughed.

17. “What s the use of goin fishin?” he said, “I fished for three
weeks this spring. At the end of three weeks I was just four dollars
deeper in debt than I had been when I started. What s the use?”

18. I decided to follow the question through. I decided to try to find
out what had happened to this community. The blight was appar
ent. It screamed at me from the unpainted houses, the slovenly
streets, the dour suspicion with which the inhabitants looked at the
stranger who asked questions.

19. I talked to a local fish dealer. He sold the fishermen their boats,
gear, gasoline, and oil. He bought their fish when they came back
from fishing. He stared sourly out of his window onto the bay. There
were three wharves immediately below us. All three were sagging,
falling into the tide.

20. “The fishermen are no good!” he said bitterly. “They don t want
to work. They re shiftless! They re lazy. They d rather live on relief

166 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

than make an honest living fishing.” He said a lot more things about
the fishermen, none of them complimentary.

21. “There was a time,” he went on, “when you could get them to
fish. But not now!” He turned away from the window. “Me, I m
through. I ve made a little money in thirty years of hard work. I m
going to retire. I m going to get out of it.” He brightened while he
said it. He looked like a man who saw an escape from some sort of
a nightmare.

22. I inquired further. I found a merchant who leaned over his dusty
counter and gave another angle of the problem. He told me about
the fish dealer. That man owned more than fifty per cent of the
boats that fished out of the harbor. The fisherman who sold his fish
to any one but that particular dealer lost his boat. He had to
sell to the one market at the price offered. The fishermen had thus
become sharecroppers of the sea. They worked on the owners terms
or sat in rebellious idleness.

23. Up on the hill I found the minister, but he couldn t tell me any
thing. He was new to the community a weary old man who had
not even been accorded the housewarming customary in the Maine
of old. Perhaps his treatment was not indicative, but the sagging
wharves were. And so was the careened boat on the beach.

24. I traveled along the coast and stopped again. There was a fisher
man to whom I talked. A baby played in the yard. It was a barren
yard, devoid of flowers or any touch of an owner s pride. The wife
came to the door and looked at me with a dull boredom that was
freighted with the same tragedy that I had seen in the old minister s
eyes.

25. “I went out today/ the fisherman told me. “I went out at four
o clock. I got back at noon. After I got my fish unloaded and my
trawl baited it was nigh night. I just figured out the day. I made
just fifty cents over and above bait, gas, and oil. Sure, I ll go out
tomorrow. Perhaps the catch will be bigger. Perhaps prices will be
a little better. But I doubt it.”

26. What he said, and his manner of saying it, echoed the cry that is
so commonly heard along the coast. “Tomorrow, maybe. But I doubt
it.” It is a sort of universal monotone, the accents of hopelessness.

27. The cause is there on the surface for all to see. There had been an
era in which these people had been owners of an industry. They

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caught their fish and brought them to a port where the people
owned their own units of processing. They split their fish, salted and
dried them. When they sold they sold a partially finished product.

28. Then came the change that the modernization of marketing meth
ods has worked. Iced or frozen fillets began to replace the salt fish.
The local fish dealers began to buy fish direct from the boats as the
fishermen came in. The local dealer sold to another dealer in Port
land, who in turn sold to a dealer in Boston, who sold again to the
retail outlets. All had to have a profit. Retail prices remained prac
tically unchanged. Therefore, prices to the fishermen dropped lower
and lower, until they were swallowed by production costs and pov
erty swept a whole section of the population into its embrace. The
fishermen were carrying on their backs a vicious system of distri
bution.

29. Prices have not borne any relation to the abundance of the sup
ply. The lobster dinner at hotel or restaurant, for example, has been
priced the same for nearly twenty years. Yet, twenty years ago the
fishermen caught many times the weight of lobsters per trap as he
does today. He gets practically the same price per pound for his
twenty-pound catch today as he did for his one hundred-pound
catch ten years ago.

3.0. With the change in the marketing methods of fish other than lob
sters there appeared a new technique in fishing, or rather a modern
ization of an old technique. The beam trawler appeared on the
fisherman s horizon and began a system of fishing that today threat
ens to deplete the fishing grounds and do for some of our most val
uable food fish what an earlier generation did for the passenger pi
geon, the heath hen, and the buffalo. The modern, high-powered
beam trawler drags its net across the bottom, taking whatever is be
fore it. It kills the young fish by the countless millions. It drags its
way across the spawning grounds and destroys millions of pounds
of fish that should be the catch of years to come. It is mass produc
tion in the fishing industry, giving the consumer the immediate ben
efit of low prices and quantity production. But, unrestrained by
laws or regulations, it is wiping out the existing supply of fish. And
as the fish go, so goes the coast of Maine.

31. Not all the villages have been ruined by marketing methods or
the beam trawlers. There are other causes of the prevalent poverty.

168 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

In out-of-the-way corners of the coast you can find the disconsolate
clusters of houses slipping into ruin. These are the deserted villages,
the communities where the inhabitants gave up the unequal strug
gle and went south to the factory towns.

32. I found two or three such villages at the mouth of the Kennebec.
The streets were grass-grown lanes. In front of the villages the surf
growled on the rocks, and the gulls screamed over the desolation. I
found an old native and talked to him about what had happened
here. When I asked him why, he swung his arm toward the river
and said, “Shad!”

33. In this particular section every one looked to the spring and the
annual shad run. The people made most of their livings on their
tiny farms. The shad came in the spring as a cash crop. Before them
came the smelts, another cash crop. Now, with the river polluted by
industrial plants, the shad have vanished. The smelts come, but in
decreasing numbers. So the villages stand deserted.

34. The old native I talked with was making hay. He needed help
and couldn t get any. Some of the unemployed were working on the
roads under WPA. These fellows didn t care about leaving relief to
take such a seasonal job as haying. It was too hard to get back on
relief again. To some of the others haying was too strenuous. But
that wasn t all the native told me. He was above the average level
of intelligence. He knew what was happening to the section of the
country in which he had lived his life. He had thought things
through. “Even if I could get one of those fishermen, I d have to
feed him up for three weeks before he d be of any use to me.”

35. This man knew the havoc that unbalanced diets had worked
among the fishermen. Others do not, and snort derisively about
shiftlessness and laziness. But the native is right. A whole section of
the population does not change without cause. There is a reason for
shiftlessness and inability in Maine, as in any other section of the
country.

36. In Maine the trend is clear and well-defined. The rulers of dis
tribution fit into the picture with the plantation owner of the South,
with the absentee owner of the Middle West. The pattern is the na
tional pattern of tenancy. When the primary producer loses owner
ship, he becomes a sharecropper. In the West and South it is owner-

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 169

ship of the land that has been lost. In Maine it is ownership of the
units of individual production, the boats and fishing gear.

37. In Maine you will find the remnants of what was once an authen
tic democracy. The town halls are still there, those institutions that
were so essentially the symbols of democracy. In these town halls
the citizens gathered to take an active part in the government of
their social, political, and economic affairs. To my mind, they voted
intelligently because they voted as property owners, as men in
whom the interest of the community was vested. They constituted
the economic foundation which governs the political setup which
seems fundamentally sound. The owners of the wealth of a nation
should, in my opinion, control the political destinies of the nation.

38. Ownership is vanishing along the Maine coast. Therefore, the
dereliction of old political beliefs. Ownership has gone, and with it
the self-reliance and responsibility which accompanied it. There
fore the following of strange banners, the flocking of the old people
to the standard of the Townsendites. When ownership vanishes, de
mocracy disappears.

39. The slide from ownership to tenancy in Maine has been accom
panied step by step by the disintegration of a section of the popu
lation. The route of the march from democracy during the past few
decades is so clearly defined as to allow of no doubt as to the cause.
The wharves have rotted and fallen into the water, the houses have
degenerated into shacks, the fish houses and the drying racks have
tumbled down in exactly the same ratio to the inexorable down
ward trend of the morale of the people and the decadence of the
communities.

40. To the east of Maine lies Nova Scotia, where on a section of the
coast the same situation existed for years. There St. Francis Xavier
University carried out a plan of education and action and began to
salvage the villages. In Nova Scotia, cooperation has proven the
truth of the theory of democracy. The renaissance of the Nova Sco-
tian fishing villages has paralleled exactly the return of ownership
to the people of the communities.

41. There, the people began to own cooperatively those things which
a system of modern distribution had made impossible of ownership
individually. Cooperatively, the people in the Nova Scotian villages

170 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

began to unite to win back ownership. United, they were invincible.
They have proved this by remaking a whole section of the coast.
42. One way or another Maine must do it also. Otherwise, it will con
tinue to slip until it is just another blighted area, its people chron
ically hopeless and inherently shiftless. It will slip until Washington
finds itself facing another area of the nation where a costly scheme
of resettlement has become vitally necessary.

ANALYSIS

1. Study the first paragraph closely. Since the author is concerned with a whole
region, why does he give the reader the impression at the beginning that he is
especially concerned with George Bradley and Frenchman s Cove?

a. How do you characterize this technique?

b. Does the first paragraph tell us plainly what the article as a whole is about?

2. a. Does the author really begin to look at George Bradley s case in Para
graph 2? If not, where does he begin?

b. Is he merely making concrete references when his eye is on the generality
all the time here?

3. What do Paragraphs 6 and 7 add? Could they be left out easily?

4. Note the insertion of the first attempt to explain the causes for the conditions,
in Paragraphs 8 and 9.

5. This is a research study that takes the author into die field to gather material.

a. How much does he tell us of his movements up and down the Maine coast.

b. Are we satisfied that he has done all that he should have done?

c. What are the natural limits of his problem?

6. a. Where does the study of George Bradley s case end? Why has he looked in
detail at this one case?

b. If he had so wanted, could the author have used as well other cases from
among those he has mentioned? The minister s? The fish dealer s?

c. Determine what new material the author has gained from each new inter
view that he reports.

7. a. Are there any areas in the field of the author s inquiry that are not touched
in the article?

b. How does their omission affect the conclusions reached here, if at all?

8. Note the search for causes again in Paragraphs 27-35. The causal pattern of
reasoning deserves careful study here.

9. What is the author doing in Paragraphs 36-39?

10. Note the comparison with Nova Scotia in Paragraph 40. This is both a. rhetor
ical and a logical device. Study it.

11. Does the author propose any solutions that lie beyond the immediate area cov
ered by his data? What are they?

12. Note the use of concrete details in the development of Paragraph 7.

13. Are there any evidences of bias on the part of the author? Point them out and
explain what they do to the effectiveness and validity of the article as a whole.

PRIMARY SOURCE PAPERS 171

YARNING IN THE EIGHTEEN FIFTIES*
By Paul Fatout

The sobbing and sighing is endless. Everybody . . . goes about with
an enormous sorrow at his heart. 1

1. When Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849 the stimulus he had brewed
for American writers died with him. His famous 1842 review of
Twice-Told Tales, memorable because of its original rules for a new
genre, the short story, was ignored by his contemporaries. Exerting
little or no influence during his own time by virtue either of criti
cism or example, he remained a literary pariah. And after his death
his life served only as a horrible example for Puritans of polite let
ters to shudder over. Today, more than eighty years after, time flips
a gesture of derision at the shades of Poe s detractors. His reputa
tion, boomerangecl from Europe with the tag of foreign approval
dear to all good patriots, has grown to a luxuriance tropic enough
to make him a twentieth century candidate for psychological dis
section. Fame has reached its apogee.

2. In the decade following his death, however, Poe was forgotten as
completely as if he had never lived. These ten years were low tide
in American letters. The ebb left rank malarial flats breathing a mi
asma poisonous with affectation and sentimentality. The air was
loaded with the very germs Poe tried vainly to destroy. Save Haw
thorne no writer of tales survived the epidemic. To be sure there
was the brief glory of Fitz-James O Brien but even he, despite the
valiant aid of an edition of his stories as late as 1925, 2 is almost lost
in undisturbed dust that mercifully covers forgotten years. There
are no high points in the fifties. The now dusty landscape was sub
merged then in a deluge of feminine fiction that flowed to low tide
in rivers of sticky complacency and floods of enervating tears. As
Hawthorne testily wrote to Ticknor in 1855:

America is now wholly given over to a d d mob of scribbling

women. I should have no chance of success while the public taste is oc-

* From the American Scholar, Summer, 1934. Reprinted by permission of
publishers and the author.

1 Review of Fashion and Famine by Ann S. Stephens. Putnam s. Vol. 4. August,
1854. pp. 218-19.

2 Collected Stones by Fitz-James O Brien. Edited by Edward J. O Brien. 1925.

172 THE EXPOSITION OF IDEAS

cupied with their trash and should be ashamed of myself if I did suc
ceed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamp
lighter, and other books neither better nor worse worse they could not
be and better they need not be when they sell by the hundred thousand. 3

3. The success of Harriet Beecher Stowe s Uncle Toms Cabin in
1852 when one hundred thousand copies were sold in eight weeks
probably induced many a woman to attempt a novel. Sara Willis
Parton s first book, Ruth Hall, sold fifty thousand copies in eight
weeks in 1854. Maria Cummins, author of the lachrymose Lamp
lighter, “one of the best and purest of its class that has emanated
from an American mind,” 4 Susan Warner who wrote The Wide
Wide World, very popular throughout the fifties, the polynomic Mrs.
E.D.E.N. Southworth; and others of their kind must have been glit
tering examples spurring on platoons of hopeful aspirants. Their ef
forts so littered the literary scene that even editors, like Hawthorne,
sometimes viewed them with alarm. A reviewer in Putnam s com
ments a little fearfully:

A most alarming avalanche of female authors has been pouring upon
us the past three months, nearly all of whom are new. 5

Knickerbocker s is more irritable and brutal:

We now have women-poets, women-sentimentalists, women-statesmen,
women-historians, women-preachers, and women-doctors, ct id omne
genus, and the cry is, “still they come.”

The North American Review, fondly reproachful, waves a chiding
finger: