Part 27
People wanted to see the fellow whose name had become familiar to them over the breakfast table. They wanted to see what manner of man he was (and some were disappointed); they wanted to know if he could speak as he wrote (and presently they knew he didn’t); they wanted to pay back by hospitality, by booking seats for the theaters, by friendly words afterward, for some of the things he had written at a time when they had wanted to know.
One of the first little thrills I had was when I stood at the desk of the Vanderbilt hotel, ten minutes after getting away from the dockside, where scores of telegrams were waiting for me, inviting me to speak at all sorts of places with strange and alarming names, and having picked up the receiver in answer to the urgent calls, heard the voice of a telephone girl saying, “Welcome to our city, Philip Gibbs!... and here’s another call for you.” I have always remembered that little human message from the girl at the switchboard.
I was still a journalist, though about to become a lecturer, and _The New York Times_ desired me to write a series of articles recording--rapidly!--my first impressions of New York. It still seems to me a miracle that I was able to do so, for I was caught up by the social life of New York like a straw in a whirlpool, and my head was dazed by the immensity of the city, by its noise, its light, its rush of traffic, its overheated rooms, its newspaper reporters, its camera men, and, when I staggered to my bedroom for a moment’s respite, by the incessant tinkle of the telephone which rang me up from scores of addresses in New York city, from Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, the Lord knows where.
I wrote those articles, blindly, subconsciously, like a man in a nightmare, and they came out rather like that, with a sort of wild impressionism of confused scenes, which seemed to please the American people.
They were vastly amused, I was told, by one phrase which came from my nerve ganglia all quivering with the first walk through Broadway at night. I confessed that I felt “like a trench cootie under the fire of ten thousand guns.” Now a cootie is a louse, as I had lately learnt, and that simile tickled my readers to death, as some of them said, though it expressed in utter truthfulness the terror of my sensation as a traffic dodger down the Great White Way.
But that terror was easily surpassed when I faced for the first time an audience in the Carnegie Hall. As I drove up with my brother, and saw hundreds of motor cars setting down people in evening dress who had come to have a look at me (and paid good money for it), with the odd chance of hearing something worth while--poor dears!--I was cold with fright. My fear increased until I was stiff with it when, having shaken hands with my brother and received his hearty pat on the shoulder, like a man about to go over the top with the odds against him, I went through a little door and found myself on a large stage, facing a great audience. I was conscious of innumerable faces, white shirt fronts, and eyes--eyes--eyes, staring at me from the great arena of stalls, and from all the galleries up to the roof. As I made my bow, my tongue clave, literally, to the roof of my mouth, my knees weakened, and I felt (as some one afterward told me I looked) as cheap as two cents.
What frightened me excessively was a sudden movement like a tidal wave among all those people. They stood up, and I became aware that they were paying me a very great honor, but the physical effect of that movement was, for a moment, as though they were all advancing on me, possibly with intent to kill!
My chairman was my good and great comrade, Frederick Palmer, the American war correspondent. I am told he made a fine introductory speech, but I did not hear a word of it, and was only wondering with a sinking heart whether I should get through my first few sentences before I broke down utterly. It was a fearful thought, to make a public fool of myself like that!...
I had one thing in my favor--a strong, far-reaching voice, and I had been told to pitch it to the center of the top gallery. I know they heard. A young foreigner I know--not an American--a most friendly and candid soul, told me that he had heard every word, and wished he hadn’t. Attracted by the title of a book of mine, “The Soul of the War,” he had bought four tickets for himself and friends, believing that at last he would hear the inner meaning of the war and its madness, in which he had found no kind of sense. But when he heard my straightforward narrative of what the British Armies had done, he sighed deeply, and said, “Sold again!” and tried to sleep. My loud, clear-cut sentences hammered into his brain, and would not allow him even that consolation.
That first audience in the Carnegie Hall was immensely kind, extraordinarily generous and long-suffering. They applauded my stories of British heroism as though it had been their own heroes, laughed at my attempts to tell Cockney anecdotes, and did not let me know once that I was boring them excessively. Some spirit of friendship and good will reached up to me and gave me courage. Only once did they laugh in the wrong place, and then they couldn’t help themselves. It was when for the sixth time or more I glanced at my wrist watch and then in a sudden panic that it had stopped and that I had spoken an hour too long, put it to my ear!
The way off the platform was more difficult than the way on. I had come through one little door, but there were six of them exactly the same. At the conclusion of my speech, I bowed, walked rapidly to one of the doors, and found it would not budge! I returned again and bowed to the audience before trying another door. No, by heaven it wouldn’t open! Again I returned and bowed, and made another shot for a swing door. At the fourth try I went through.... That experience of doors that wouldn’t open became a nightmare of mine in American sleeping cars when I suffocated from overheated pipes.
I have lectured a hundred times since then, made large numbers of speeches (sometimes as many as five a day) in American cities, faced every kind of audience from New York to San Francisco and across the Canadian border, in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and never conquered my nervousness, so that, if I am called upon for a speech at a public dinner in England, now, I suffer all the pangs of stage fright until I am well under way. But at least my experiences in the United States helped me to hide behind a calm and tranquil mask, and not to give myself away so utterly as that first time in Carnegie Hall.
It was on my second visit, and at my opening lecture in the same great hall, that I obtained--by accident--the most wonderful ovation which will ever come to me in this life. It was my night out, as it were, most memorable, most astonishing, most glorious. For it _is_ a glorious sensation, whatever the cynic may say, to be lifted up on waves of enthusiasm, to have a great audience of intelligent people cheering one wildly, as though one’s words were magic.
It was none of my doing. My words were poor commonplace stuff, but I stood for something which the finest audience in New York liked with all their hearts that night--England, liberty, fair play--and against something which that audience hated, disloyalty to the United States, discourtesy to England, foul play.
It was the Sinn Feiners who did it. A friend of Ireland, and advocate of Dominion Home Rule, I was one of the last men they should have attacked. But because I was an Englishman who dared to lecture before an American audience, they were determined to wreck my meeting, and make a savage demonstration. I was utterly unaware of this plot. I was not speaking on the subject of Ireland. I was talking about Austria, and was trying to tell an anecdote about an Austrian doctor--I never told it!--when from the middle gallery of the Carnegie Hall which was densely packed from floor to ceiling, there came a hoarse question in a stentorian voice with an Irish accent: “_Why don’t you take the marbles out of your mouth?_” Rather staggered, and believing this to be a criticism of my vocal delivery and “English accent,” I raised my voice, but it was instantly overwhelmed by an uproar of shouts, catcalls, whistlings, derisive laughter, abuse, and a wild wailing of women’s voices rising to a shriek.
For a few moments I could not guess what all the trouble was about. I stood there, alone and motionless, on the platform, suddenly divorced from the audience, which I watched with a sense of profound curiosity. All sorts of strange things were happening. Men were going at each other with fists in the gallery, where there was a seething tumult. In the stalls I was aware of a very fat man in evening dress wedged tightly in his seat and bawling out something from an apoplectic face. Two other men tried to pull him out of his chair. In scattered groups in the stalls were ladies who seemed to be screaming at me. Other ladies seemed to be arguing with them, hushing them down. One lady struck another over the head with a fan. People were darting about the floor or watching the scrimmage up above. From the front row of the stalls friendly faces were staring up at me and giving me good counsel which I could not hear.
Over and over again I tried to speak above the tumult. I carried on about that Austrian doctor, and then abandoned him for another line of thought. I stuck it out for something like half an hour before there was comparative silence--the police had come in and dragged out the most turbulent demonstrators--and then I continued my speech, interrupted frequently, but not overwhelmed. Everything I said was applauded tremendously. Some reference I made to England’s place in the world brought the audience to its feet, cheering and cheering, waving handkerchiefs and fans, and when I finished, there was a surge up to the platform, and thousands of hands grasped mine, and generous, excited, splendid things were said which set my heart on fire.
As I have said, it was not my doing, and it was not any eloquence of mine which stirred this enthusiasm. But that audience rose up to me because they were passionate to show how utterly they repudiated the things that had been said against England, how fiercely angry they were that a friendly visitor to the United States should be howled down like this in the heart of New York. Again it was my luck, and I was glad of it.
It was not the last time I had to face hostile groups. I decided to give a lecture on the Irish situation in which I would tell the straight truth, fair to Ireland, fair to England. The Sinn Feiners rallied up again. The fairer I was to Ireland, the madder they became, while the other part of the audience cheered and cheered. In the midst of the commotion, a tall black figure jumped on to the platform. “Hullo!” I thought. “Here I die!” But it was a Catholic priest, Father Duffy, a famous chaplain of the American Army, who announced himself as an Irish Republican, but pleaded that I should have a fair hearing. They just howled at him. However, by patience and endurance I broke through the storm and said most of what I wanted to say.
The next morning I was rung up on the telephone by an emotional lady. She had a great scheme, for which she desired my approval and collaboration. She had arranged to raise a bodyguard of stalwart society girls who would march to the hall with me, on the evening of my next lecture, and in heroic combat put to flight the Irish girls who were to parade with banners and insulting placards.... I utterly refused to approve of the suggestion.
My lecture agent, Mr. Lee Keedick, enjoyed those “Sinn Fein tea parties,” as they were called, with such enormous gusto, that there were some friendly souls who suggested that he had incited them for publicity purposes! But he missed the best, or the worst. In Chicago, on St. Patrick’s Eve, I was three-quarters of an hour before I could utter a single sentence. It was what the press called next morning a “near riot” and there were some Irish-American soldiers there, in uniform, who fought like tigers before they were ejected by the police.
For the first time in my life I had a police bodyguard wherever I went in Chicago. Two detectives insisted on driving in my taxicab, and they were both Irishmen, but, as one explained in a friendly manner, “It’s not your life we’re troubling about, Boss. It’s our reputation!”
Boston, from Mr. Keedick’s point of view, was a disappointment. A great row was expected there, being the stronghold of the Sinn Fein cause, and when I appeared, behind the stage, there was a large force of police stripped for action. The police inspector came to my dressing room, and demanded permission to precede me on the stage and announce to the audience that if there was any demonstration he would put his men on to them. I refused to give that permission. It seemed to me the wrong kind of introduction for an Englishman to an American audience. As a matter of fact, they behaved like lambs, in the best tradition of Boston, and I was quite disconcerted by their silence, having become used to the other kind of thing which I found exhilarating.
Stranger things happen to an English lecturer in the United States than in any other country. At least they happened to me. I shall never forget, for instance, how in the middle of a speech to the City Club of New York, I was thrust into a taxicab, hurried off to the 44th Street theater, received with a tremendous explosion (a flashlight photo!) in the dressing room of Al Jolson, the funny man, thrust into the middle of a harem scene (scores of beautiful maidens) and told to make a speech on behalf of wounded soldiers while the audience raffled for an original letter from Lloyd George to the American nation.
Surprised by my rapid transmigration from the City Club, and by my presence in an Oriental harem, very hot, rather flustered, and not knowing what to do with my hands, I kept screwing up a bit of paper which had been given to me at the wings, and by the time I had finished my three-minutes’ speech it was a bit of wet, mushy pulp. When I left the stage, a white-faced man in the wings who had been making frantic signs to me, informed me coldly that I had utterly destroyed Lloyd George’s letter to the American nation which had just been raffled for many hundreds of dollars.... After that I went back to finish my speech at the City Club.
XXVI
When I first visited the United States in 1919, the whole nation was seething with a conflict of opinion between pro-Wilsonites and anti-Wilsonites.
It was not a mere academic controversy which people could discuss hotly but without passion. It divided families. It caused quarrels among lifelong friends. The mere mention of the name of Wilson spoilt the amenities of any dinner party and transformed it into a political meeting.
In my first article for _The New York Times_, recording my impressions of America, I slipped out the phrase that “I was all for Wilson.” I received, without exaggeration, hundreds of letters from all parts of the United States, “putting me wise” to the thousand and one reasons why Wilson’s doings in Paris would be utterly repudiated by the Senate and people. He had violated the Constitution. He had acted without authority. He had tried to commit the United States to his scheme of the League of Nations against their convictions and consent. On the other hand, there were many people who still regarded him as the greatest leader in the world and the noblest idealist.
Ignorant, like most Englishmen, of the parties and personalities of American politics, at that time, I kept my ears open to all this, but couldn’t avoid falling into pitfalls. I made a delightful “gaffe,” as the French would say, by turning to one gentleman in the Union Club before he acted as my chairman to the lecture I was giving there, and asked him to tell me something of Wilson’s character and history. It was Mr. Charles Hughes, ex-governor of New York, and defeated candidate for the Presidency against Wilson himself.
It was the last question which I ought to have asked, as people explained to me later. But I shall never forget the fine and thoughtful way in which Mr. Hughes answered my question and the subtlety with which he analyzed Wilson’s character, without a touch of personal animosity or a trace of meanness. I was aware that I was in the presence of a great intellect, and a great gentleman.
I had the opportunity of talking to Mr. Hughes in each of my three visits, and when he was Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Washington, and each time I was more impressed with the conviction that he was likely to become one of the greatest statesmen of the world, and, unlike many great statesmen, had a fine and delicate sense of honor, and a desire for the well-being, not only of the United States but of the human race.
Between my first and second visits Wilson’s tragedy had happened, and the United States had refused to enter the League of Nations. The Republican party had swept the country, inspired by general disgust and disillusionment with the Peace of Versailles, by a tidal wave of public opinion against any administration which would involve the United States in the jungle of Europe’s racial passions, and by a general desire to be rid of a government associated with all the restrictions, orders, annoyances, petty injustice, extravagance, and fever of the War régime. As a friend of mine said, the question put to the electors was not “Are you in favor of the League of Nations?” but “Are you sick and tired of the present administration?” And the answer was, “By God, we are!”
President Harding reigned in place of President Wilson. Owing to the kindness of a brilliant American journalist named Lowell Mellett who had acted for a time as war correspondent on the Western front, and who seemed to have the liberty of the White House, the Senate, Congress, and every office, drawing-room, and assembly at Washington, I was received by the President, and had a little conversation with him which ended in a message to the British people through _The Review of Reviews_, of which I had become editor. It was a message of affection and esteem for the nation which, he said, all Americans of the old stock regarded still as the Mother Country--a generous and almost dangerous thing to be said by a President of the United States.
A tall, heavy, handsome man, with white hair and ruddy face, the new President seemed to me kind-hearted, honest and well-meaning, without any great gifts of genius or leadership, and a little timid of the enormous responsibility that had come to him. A year later I saw him again, and had the honor of introducing my son Tony. He was surprised that I had a son of that height and age, and it reminded him instantly of an anecdote referring to Chief Justice White and a little lawyer who introduced a tall, husky son to him. “Ah,” said the Chief Justice, “a block of the old chip, I see!”
It was due to my friend Mellett again that I had the opportunity, and very extraordinary honor, for a foreign journalist, of giving evidence before the House Committee on Naval Disarmament. It was a Committee appointed to report on the possibility of calling the Washington Conference. I was summoned to give evidence in the House of Congress without any time to prepare notes or a speech, and when I took my place like a mouse in a hole in the center of a horseshoe of raised seats occupied by about twenty-five members of the Committee, I was in a state of high tension which I masked by a supreme effort of nerve control. For I was, to some extent, speaking not only on behalf of Great Britain, and taking upon myself the responsibility of expressing the views of my own people, but on behalf of all idealists in all nations who looked to the United States for leadership in the way of international peace. I knew that I must be right in my facts and figures, that I must say nothing that could give offense to the United States, and nothing that would seem like disloyalty to England, while telling the truth, as far as I knew it, without reserve, regarding England’s naval and military burdens, the dangers existing in Europe, and the sentiment of the British people.
After a preliminary statement lasting ten minutes or so, to which the Committee listened in absolute silence, I was closely and shrewdly cross-examined by various members, and had to answer very difficult and searching questions. It was one of my lucky mornings. I came through the ordeal better than I could have hoped. I was warmly congratulated afterward by members of the British Embassy who told me I had said the right things, and I honestly believe I did a tiny bit of good to England and the world that day. _The New York Times_ and other papers published my address verbatim and it went on to the records of Congress. Anyhow, it did no harm, and I was thankful enough for that.
My lectures on the second visit had nothing to do with the War, except in its effects, and I spoke entirely on the subject of European conditions, always with a strong plea to the United States to come in boldly and throw her moral and economic influence on the side of international peace and reconstruction. From the very first I took the line, which I held with absolute conviction, that Germany would be unable, after the exhaustion of war, to pay the enormous indemnities demanded by the Peace of Versailles, and that if Germany were thrust into the mire and went the way of Austria, Europe would not recover from financial ruin. At the same time I pointed out the rights and justice of France, and gave her view fairly and generously, as I was bound to do, because of my illimitable admiration of French heroism, my enormous pity for French sacrifice, my certain knowledge of French danger. My argument was for economic co-operation between the peoples of Europe, as the only means of saving that civilization, with demobilization of hatreds as well as armies, and a new brotherhood of peoples after the agony and folly of the war.
I risked my popularity with the American people in making speeches like that. I could have got easy applause by calling upon the old god of vengeance against the Germans for at that time in the United States there was less forgiveness than in England for all the evil and suffering caused by Germany, less tolerance of “pacifists,” as much brutality in the average mob. But though I aroused some suspicion, some hostility, on the whole American audiences listened to my argument with wonderful enthusiasm and generosity.