Push-Face

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I

It is a great thing to be living when an age passes. If you are born in an age in which every impact of its expression is a pain, there is a beautiful poetic vengeance in being permitted to watch that age destroy itself.

What other age could have so offended? Instead of pursuing the real business of life, which is to live, men have turned all their denials and repressions into the accumulation of unessential knowledge and the making of indiscriminate things. Other ages have taken out their repressions in religious frenzies, but this age has taken everything out in motion. It is an elementary fact of sex knowledge that rhythmic motion is part of sex expression. Isn’t it ironical and immoral that those nations which have prided themselves most on their virtue, and have hugged tightest to themselves the puritanic ideal, are the ones that have gone maddest over motion? America, being the most virtuous, obviously has the least sense of humor and has exceeded herself. From the cradle to the turbine engine, from the rocking-chair to the spinnings and whirlings of a Coney Island, she has become a national mechanical perpetual whirling Dervish.

The wheels became rollers which have rolled life out thin and flat.

Then Art cried out with all her voices. In the last few years we have had a return to the beginnings of all the Arts. If there ever comes a time in the world when men will give their attention to the life of Art and understand its movement, they will find it alert and inevitable. Life would follow it trustingly if it were not for the intrusions and hindrances of men. The Thing had happened: Life had made its protest through Art. But this consciousness never reached the unendowed mind. It (the unendowed mind) forced Life to avenge itself by flying into war.

II

“I pray God,” said President Wilson, “that the outcome of this struggle may be that every element of difference amongst us will be obliterated—The spirit of this people is already united, and when suffering and sacrifice have completed this union, men will no longer speak of any lines either of race or association cutting athwart the great body of this nation.”

But the Anarchists, who are never agreeable or content in any country, no matter how perfect, arranged a non-conscription meeting in a hall in Bronx Park the night before registration. So “united was the spirit of this people” that no one attended this non-conscription meeting except the 5,000 who crowded the hall and the 50,000 who stood outside in the streets for several hours.

There were squads of the usual police and dozens of rough raw fellows in soldiers’ uniforms to hold back the crowd and keep it in order,—a crowd that scarcely moved and seldom spoke except in low tones or in foreign languages; a crowd too full for speech, because of this last numbing disappointment in America. The only demonstration it made was to applaud when an echo of the applause inside the hall reached it. Any attempt to get nearer the hall was met with clubs and the fists of soldiers in your face. Nasty little Fords with powerful search-lights raced up and down and about the hollow square. A huge auto truck hung with red lights acted as a mower at the edges. Word went about that it was mounted with a machine gun.

As I was pushed about in the crowd I overheard always the same conversations:

“Is she there”?

“Over there where the light is”?

“Yes, on the second floor.”

“Are there any people inside”?

“Oh it’s full since seven o’clock.”

“Oh!?”

“Will they let her speak?”

“Who? Her”?

Silence.

“Will they get her, do you think”?

“Will the police take her”?

A thin pale Russian Jew, standing on a rock looking over the heads of the crowd, was spoken to by a stranger. “They’ll get her tonight all right.” The Russian looked over to the lighted windows of the hall and said in revolutionary voice: “She’s a fine woman, Emma Goldman.”

Suddenly in the densest part of the crowd a woman’s voice rang out: “Down with conscription! Down with the war!” Several other women took it up. The police charged into the crowd. The crowd made a slight stand. The soldiers joined the police, and with raised clubs, teeth bared and snarling, they drove the crowd backward over itself, beating and pushing. Three times the crowd stood. Three times they were charged. Women were beaten down and run over. Men were clubbed in the face and escaped, staggering and bleeding.

How much of this treatment will it take to obliterate every element of individuality amongst us?

III

In the same week the plutocrats and artists held an Alley Festa for the Red Cross. At a cost of $10,000 they turned the stables of MacDougal Alley into a replica of an Italian street, draped it with much color, daubed it with much paint, hung it with many lights. I hope there were pluts there; the artists we saw were not artists. You can easily pick out the pluts: they look like figures from the wax-works; but the “artists” looked like Greenwich Village. It was a bastard performance, a bastard street, a bastard hilarity, bastard plutocrats and bastard artists, with bastard soldiers guarding the scene.

Between the acts they all congregated in the Brevoort to have drinks. The pluts foregathered,—women in up-town clothes, looking like Mrs. Potter Palmer, with grey marcelled hair and broad stiff black hats, holding the hands and looking neurotically into the eyes of young men who resembled bank clerks. Groups of artists came in, costumed like people fleeing from a fire. I believe they thought they were Neopolitans or something. They all settled clamourously at one table and fell amourously upon each other’s necks. There was nothing personal, nothing unique, nothing imaginative about any of their costumes. One woman sat in the embrasure of a man’s arm, sharing his chair with him. She had short hempy hair, she was dressed in street-gamin clothes, she was at least forty, and her cheek bones were on a line with her nostrils. No human head should be made that way; it’s intolerable except in fish, frogs, or snakes.

The greatest American dancer came in, followed by a little girl and a train of men—bummel-zug dritte classe. She had draped about her a green plush toga, thrown over her shoulder in a fat knot—not apple green, nor emerald green, nor sap green, but a green and texture sacred to railroads. The only other perfect example I have seen of that color and texture was on the great chairs in the station at Mons. She was too-young-looking—a type much admired in my childhood when China dolls lived, with painted China hair undulating above pink and white China faces. When she looked up in conversation her profile made almost a flat line, the chin retiring into the neck as if it had no opinions on the subject, the eyes rolling up but no expression of the face moving up with them. Oh beautiful people, oh beautiful fête!

The music and lights drew the children out of the slums back of Washington Square: fathers holding babies in their arms, and strings of little children trimming the edges of the sidewalks at a respectful distance around the back entrance, were pushed in the face and told to get out, to move on, by policemen and some more rough fellows in khaki—because ... this was a fête for humanity. And it’s all right, this game of push-face: every one plays it. When you’re little children you play it and call it push-face; nations call it government; the “people” are playing it now in Russia and call it revolution.