Book VI: Chapter IV

by Sherwood Anderson

　　It is difficult not to be of two minds about the manifestation nowcalled, and perhaps rightly, "The Madness of the Marching Men." In onemood it comes back to the mind as something unspeakably big andinspiring. We go each of us through the treadmill of our lives caughtand caged like little animals in some vast menagerie. In turn we love,marry, breed children, have our moments of blind futile passion andthen something happens. All unconsciously a change creeps over us.Youth passes. We become shrewd, careful, submerged in little things.Life, art, great passions, dreams, all of these pass. Under the nightsky the suburbanite stands in the moonlight. He is hoeing his radishesand worrying because the laundry has torn one of his white collars.The railroad is to put on an extra morning train. He remembers thatfact heard at the store. For him the night becomes more beautiful. Forten minutes longer he can stay with the radishes each morning. Thereis much of man's life in the figure of the suburbanite standingabsorbed in his own thoughts in the midst of his radishes.

　　And so about the business of our lives we go and then of a suddenthere comes again the feeling that crept over us all in the year ofthe Marching Men. In a moment we are again a part of the moving mass.The old religious exaltation, strange emanation from the man McGregor,returns. In fancy we feel the earth tremble under the feet of the men--the marchers. With a conscious straining of the mind we strive tograsp the processes of the mind of the leader during that year whenmen sensed his meaning, when they saw as he saw the workers--saw themmassed and moving through the world.

　　My own mind, striving feebly to follow that greater and simpler mind,gropes about. I remember sharply the words of a writer who said thatmen make their own gods and realise that I myself saw something of thebirth of such a god. For he was near to being a god then--ourMcGregor. The thing he did rumbles in the minds of men yet. His longshadow will fall across men's thoughts for ages. The tantalisingeffort to understand his meaning will tempt us always into endlessspeculation.

　　Only last week I met a man--he was a steward in a club and lingeredtalking to me by a cigar case in an empty billiard-room--who suddenlyturned away to conceal from me two large tears that had jumped intohis eyes because of a kind of tenderness in my voice at the mention ofthe Marching Men.

　　Another mood comes. It may be the right mood. I see sparrows jumpingabout in an ordinary roadway as I walk to my office. From the mapletrees the little winged seeds come fluttering down before my eyes. Aboy goes past sitting in a grocery wagon and over-driving a ratherbony horse. As I walk I overtake two workmen shuffling along. Theyremind me of those other workers and I say to myself that thus menhave always shuffled, that never did they swing forward into thatworld-wide rhythmical march of the workers.

　　"You were drunk with youth and a kind of world madness," says mynormal self as I go forward again, striving to think things out.

　　Chicago is still here--Chicago after McGregor and the Marching Men.The elevated trains still clatter over the frogs at the turning intoWabash Avenue; the surface cars clang their bells; the crowds pour upin the morning from the runway leading to the Illinois Central trains;life goes on. And men in their offices sit in their chairs and saythat the thing that happened was abortive, a brain storm, a wildoutbreak of the rebellious the disorderly and the hunger in the mindsof men.

　　What begging of the question. The very soul of the Marching Men was asense of order. That was the message of it, the thing that the worldhas not come up to yet. Men have not learned that we must come tounderstand the impulse toward order, have that burned into ourconsciousness, before we move on to other things. There is in us thismadness for individual expression. For each of us the little moment ofrunning forward and lifting our thin childish voices in the midst ofthe great silence. We have not learned that out of us all, walkingshoulder to shoulder, there might arise a greater voice, something tomake the waters of the very seas to tremble.

　　McGregor knew. He had a mind not sick with much thinking of trifles.When he had a great idea he thought it would work and he meant to seethat it did work.

　　Mightily was he equipped. I have seen the man in halls talking, hishuge body swaying back and forth, his great fists in the air, hisvoice harsh, persistent, insistent--with something of the quality ofthe drums in it--beating down into the upturned faces of the mencrowded into the stuffy little places.

　　I remember that newspaper men used to sit in their little holes andwrite saying of him that the times made McGregor. I do not know aboutthat. The city caught fire from the man at the time of that terriblespeech of his in the court room when Polk Street Mary grew afraid andtold the truth. There he stood, the raw untried red-haired miner fromthe mines and the Tenderloin, facing an angry court and a swarm ofprotesting lawyers and uttering that city-shaking philippic againstthe old rotten first ward and the creeping cowardice in men that letsvice and disease go on and pervade all modern life. It was in a wayanother "J'Accuse!" from the lips of another Zola. Men who heard ithave told me that when he had finished in the whole court no man spokeand no man dared feel guiltless. "For the moment something--a section,a cell, a figment, of men's brains opened--and in that terribleilluminating instant they saw themselves as they were and what theyhad let life become."

　　They saw something else, or thought they did, saw McGregor a new forcefor Chicago to reckon with. After the trial one young newspaper manreturned to his office and running from desk to desk yelled in thefaces of his brother reporters: "Hell's out for noon. We've got a bigred-haired Scotch lawyer up here on Van Buren Street that is a kind ofa new scourge of the world. Watch the First Ward get it."

　　But McGregor never looked at the First Ward. That wasn't botheringhim. From the court room he went to march with men in a new field.

　　Followed the time of waiting and of patient quiet work. In theevenings McGregor worked at the law cases in the bare room in VanBuren Street. That queer bird Henry Hunt still stayed with him,collecting tithes for the gang and going to his respectable home atnight--a strange triumph of the small that had escaped the tongue ofMcGregor on that day in court when so many men had their names bruitedto the world in McGregor's roll call--the roll call of the men whowere but merchants, brothers of vice, the men who should have beenmasters in the city.

　　And then the movement of the Marching Men began to come to thesurface. It got into the blood of men. That harsh drumming voice beganto shake their hearts and their legs.

　　Everywhere men began to see and hear of the Marchers. From lip to lipran the question, "What's going on?"

　　"What's going on?" How that cry ran over Chicago. Every newspaper manin town got assignments on the story. The papers were loaded with itevery day. All over the city they appeared, everywhere--the MarchingMen.

　　There were leaders enough! The Cuban War and the State Militia hadtaught too many men the swing of the march step for there not to be atleast two or three competent drill masters in every little company ofmen.

　　And there was the marching song the Russian wrote for McGregor. Whocould forget it? Its high pitched harsh feminine strain rang in thebrain. How it went pitching and tumbling along in that wailing callingendless high note. It had strange breaks and intervals in therendering. The men did not sing it. They chanted it. There was in itjust the weird haunting something the Russians know how to put intotheir songs and into the books they write. It isn't the quality of thesoil. Some of our own music has that. But in this Russian song therewas something else, something world-wide and religious--a soul, aspirit. Perhaps it is just the spirit that broods over that strangeland and people. There was something of Russia in McGregor himself.

　　Anyway the marching song was the most persistently penetrating thingAmericans had ever heard. It was in the streets, the shops, theoffices, the alleys and in the air overhead--the wail--half shout. Nonoise could drown it. It swung and pitched and rioted through the air.

　　And there was the fellow who wrote the music down for McGregor. He wasthe real thing and he bore the marks of the shackles on his legs. Hehad remembered the march from hearing the men sing it as they wentover the Steppes to Siberia, the men who were going up out of miseryto more misery. "It would come out of the air," he explained. "Theguards would run down the line of men to shout and strike out withtheir short whips. 'Stop it!' they cried. And still it went on forhours, defying everything, there on the cold cheerless plains."

　　And he had brought it to America and put it to music for McGregor'smarchers.

　　Of course the police tried to stop the marchers. Into a street theywould run crying "Disperse!" The men did disperse only to appear againon some vacant lot working away at the perfection of the marching.Once an excited squad of police captured a company of them. The samemen were back in line the next evening. The police could not arrest ahundred thousand men because they marched shoulder to shoulder alongthe streets and chanted a weird march song as they went.

　　The whole thing was not an outbreak of labour. It was somethingdifferent from anything that had come into the world before. Theunions were in it but besides the unions there were the Poles, theRussian Jews, the Hunks from the stockyards and the steel works inSouth Chicago. They had their own leaders, speaking their ownlanguages. And how they could throw their legs into the march! Thearmies of the old world had for years been training men for thestrange demonstration that had broken out in Chicago.

　　The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of itnow in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapersof that day to realise how the imagination of men was caught and held.

　　Every train brought writers tumbling into Chicago. In the eveningfifty of them would gather in the back room at Weingardner'srestaurant where such men congregate.

　　And then the thing broke out all over the country, in steel towns likePittsburgh and Johnstown and Lorain and McKeesport and men working inlittle independent factories in towns down in Indiana began drillingand chanting the march song on summer evenings on the village baseballground.

　　How the people, the comfortable well-fed middle class people wereafraid! It swept over the country like a religious revival, thecreeping dread.

　　The writing men got to McGregor, the brain back of it all, fastenough. Everywhere his influence appeared. In the afternoon therewould be a hundred newspaper men standing on the stairway leading upto the big bare office in Van Buren Street. At his desk he sat, bigand red and silent. He looked like a man half asleep. I suppose thething that was in their minds had something to do with the way menlooked at him but in any case the crowd in Weingardner's agreed thatthere was in the man something of the same fear-inspiring bignessthere was in the movement he had started and was guiding.

　　It seems absurdly simple now. There he sat at his desk. The policemight have walked in and arrested him. But if you begin figuring thatway the whole thing was absurd. What differs it if men march comingfrom work, swinging along shoulder to shoulder or shuffle aimlesslyalong, and what harm can come out of the singing of a song?

　　You see McGregor understood something that all of us had not countedon. He knew that every one has an imagination. He was at war withmen's minds. He challenged something in us that we hardly realised wasthere. He had been sitting there for years thinking it out. He hadwatched Dr. Dowie and Mrs. Eddy. He knew what he was doing.

　　A crowd of newspaper men went one night to hear McGregor at a bigoutdoor meeting up on the North Side. Dr. Cowell was with them--thebig English statesman and writer who later was drowned on theTitanic. He was a big man, physically and mentally, and was inChicago to see McGregor and try to understand what he was doing.

　　And McGregor got him as he had all men. Out there under the sky themen stood silent, Cowell's head sticking up above the sea of faces,and McGregor talked. The newspaper men declared he could not talk.They were wrong about that. McGregor had a way of throwing up his armsand straining and shouting out his sentences, that got to the souls ofmen.

　　He was a kind of crude artist drawing pictures on the mind.

　　That night he talked about labour as always--labour personified--hugecrude old Labour. How he made the men before him see and feel theblind giant who has lived in the world since time began and who stillgoes stumbling blindly about, rubbing his eyes and lying down to sleepaway centuries in the dust of the fields and the factories.

　　A man arose in the audience and climbed upon the platform besideMcGregor. It was a daring thing to do and men's knees trembled. Whilethe man was crawling up to the platform shouts arose. One has in minda picture of a bustling little fellow going into the house and intothe upper room where Jesus and his followers were having the lastsupper together, going in there to wrangle about the price to be paidfor the wine.

　　The man who got on the platform with McGregor was a socialist. Hewanted to argue.

　　But McGregor did not argue with him. He sprang forward, it was a quicktiger-like movement, and spun the socialist about, making him standsmall and blinking and comical before the crowd.

　　Then McGregor began to talk. He made of the little stuttering arguingsocialist a figure representing all labour, made him thepersonification of the old weary struggle of the world. And thesocialist who went to argue stood with tears in his eyes, proud of hisposition in men's eyes.

　　All over the city McGregor talked of old Labour and how he was to bebuilt up and put before men's eyes by the movement of the MarchingMen. How our legs tingled to fall in step and go marching away withhim.

　　Out of the crowds there came the note of that wailing march. Some onealways started that.

　　That night on the North Side Doctor Cowell got hold of the shoulder ofa newspaper man and led him to a car. He who knew Bismarck and who hadsat in council with kings went walking and babbling half the nightthrough the empty streets.

　　It is amusing now to think of the things men said under the influenceof McGregor. Like old Doctor Johnson and his friend Savage they walkedhalf drunk through the streets swearing that whatever happened theywould stick to the movement. Doctor Cowell himself said things just asabsurd as that.

　　And all over the country men were getting the idea--the Marching Men--old Labour in one mass marching before the eyes of men--old Labourthat was going to make the world see--see and feel its bigness atlast. Men were to come to the end of strife--men united--Marching!Marching! Marching!