.. really only a tilting against
the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more
impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois
commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be
re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned
to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last
effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined
strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.
I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing
American ideals and dreams was needed by them.... Ray Stannard Baker,
Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....
I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one. That the
country's business could never again be broken up into a multitude of
small shops and individual competitors.
Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery
type--with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.
But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of
such great folk....
"Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it,
Johnnie," suggested Miss Martin, "and we will make you the poet of the
group."
I think that Ally Merton's clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my
good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I
spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.
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