WHY I WROTE "THE MIDLANDERS"

...The tramp of the young men up the hill...

...It is a good sign, and The Mid-landers was trying to voice a bit of it...

...As Kipling had it, he sees the world where the lath and plaster are knocked off...

...It was after the last edition had gone to press, the late watch off duty at the police station, the Morgue book had its last charles tenney jackson Author of "The Midlanders," "The Day of Souls," and other stories, who has caught and put into romance the progressive spirit of the Mid-West...

...Time and again I wandered back to Madison to sense this same pregnant faith and militancy of endeavor...

...I imagine it was sitting in and listening to the wrangles of a small, earnest and vividly interesting group of young men at various times of sojourn during the past four years in Madison...

...I never did either until I found what the big game is...

...Well, he typified what I was after: The young man in revolt...

...the hour when the men of the midnight details were through and ready for their brief hour of fellowship, ushered in with the gray dawn before they sought their beds...

...Of them and their works shall emerge divine conveyers of gospels...

...To question the Things That Are for the sake of the Things That May Be...

...And he proceeded to argue at length and with emphasis on what he called the "new journalism"—mark you the word, for he was a "newspaper man...

...Say, that's all easy,—and yet you think you're sorry for me...

...A nation, like an army, will travel on its belly, and here, up and down and along the great rivers', is the soil, the space, the air, the food and water for the millions and the hundreds of millions of Americans to come...

...Always, there was in me the inescapable consciousness that here, of all America, the dominant note of power, of vision, of idealism would be struck when the years of the melting pot are done...

...He came out of the ruck and grind of city reporterdom, and had with him just as much of the cynic ruthlessness to the larger aspect and the sweeter aspiration of social growth and political idealism as the rest of us bring through the game—no more, no less, And after working awhile in this town he wandered back one day to his old town and his old hangout with the "gang...

...And the one-time police reporter slowly sat forward and delivered himself: "Say, you fellows...

...AND IF I had to fix on a concrete point nearer than the subconscious absorption of Midland thought and color, it would be to name another altogether local and provincial matter...

...I've been there a year and I can't ever again get back to your idea of newspaper work,—rolling a little bull and brown paper in the morgue office every afternoon and then strolling over to the police station to say: 'Well, Lieut., what's on the book to-day?' I tell you, you fellows don't know how much zing there is in the real, big game...

...It is fine, it is inspiring—I am noticing to-day, in another and kindrod group, this determining idealism fight its way into the day's work of whom, pray tell me...

...Vice and virtue, the appeal of mere sentiment, simple affection or honesty, the emotion of abstract issues and the power of visioning, all get to be curiously slurred in the imaginations of these bright young men who look squarely on life nightly down where the lath and plaster are off...

...there were later memories of sojourns in the raw and" restless cities of the Mid-West valley, and of wanderings on its mighty river from St...

...They shall illustrate Democracy and the Kosmos...

...You can't get away from the idea that there is vital significance not only to the state and to a party, but also to the future development of social institutions and policies in the stuff we get hold of as newspaper men out there and send on to publicity...

...Here will be the seat of power and thought and population, for the rich valleys of the world, where the bread is raised, will always dictate in the end to the rest of the nations...

...I will not go so far as to call him spiritually regenerate, but he has glimpsed the bigger, thing not only of newspaper making and politics, but of the ethical revolution of which he is part...

...He knows the "inside story," why this is featured, and that suppressed...

...some forty-thousand dollar fire over the river, or some poor gink is found in the lake where the strong-arm men croaked him and threw him...

...I remember my sturdy old grandfather, a Wisconsin pioneer, one of the earliest regents of its University—always the iconoclast, the rebel, questioner of faiths and forms and conventions, courts and constitutions, to whom the dictum of any authority was ever nothing other than a challenge for it to prove its justification by the analysis of reason—declaring to me, one day, when I told him I was going to leave the University and strike off for Mexico or California: "See here—look at this map...

...It might be the University Club, or at Mr...

...here, first in the states of the Mississippi Valley, class-consciousness took on a nationalism of spirit, the social war became a conflict of native American conscience and not the mere bread-hungry preachment of a foreign and urban proletariat...

...In this inevitable impact of old and new ideals surely the American novelist shall find his drama, his perspective, his people, his problems...

...for the police reporters' theory of life is that without the "Inside Story," moral phenomenon is non-existent...

...the states stretching from the Rockies to the upper Ohio, from the Gulf to Canada...

...And although The Midlanders wandered far from the mark, taking to itself the face of romance, yet it was a sense of the spirit of youth that dares and questions, that disturbs precedent and subverts constitutions, in short, the insurgent Zeitgeist that led first to my attempt to trace this in its beginnings in the rural Midlands...

...to reject whatever the fathers built if it will not serve the sons—so the literature of the New Democracy must become...

...You drift in here every morning after three o'clock and tell your adventures...

...They shall be complete men and women—their pose brawny and supple, Their drink water, their blood clean and clear...

...Who is "the man higher up," who "gets his bit...

...HERE, surely, in its never-ending outcries from the days of Populism to the Progressivists of the present, began this amazing renaissance of democracy...

...and, I take it, if the "Wisconsin Idea" was born of anything, is triumphant with anything, means anything for all the future, it is this same "Tramp of The Young Men Up The Hill...

...there were recollections of a brief schooling in Madison, ill-ordered and reluctant enough, but yet sensing the impendency of question and challenge to an older order which was beginning with the rising star of Robert La Follette in the state—these had their part...

...and into this group, about its beer and skittles on the table, wandered the one-time police reporter...

...The things that my lady passes by hurriedly in her morning paper lest they be called to the attention of her young daughter are the daily, familiar purview to him...

...Here, in the Mississippi Valley is the place of the young men...

...whom the "good's are found upon," why fair name and good repute are sedulously shielded in one case and why the "frame-up" destroys another—in fact, life takes the police reporter up by the scruff of the neck and crams into his young years so much of the amazing complexes of human motives and relations that he straightway has moral indigestion...

...Kirch's, or whatever particular back room we, of the homeless Fourth Estate, could hang out, but always there was an ethic ardor, a stimulating rejection of standards, a restless purpose of truth under the badinage...

...Paul to the Gulf...

...or the city desk has you chasing off to nail some cheap grafter whom you can't show up when you get him...

...The young men up the hill in the snow to the class rooms...

...That will, some day, smash all the constitutions, subvert all the privileges, question all the creeds—and reject all the falsehoods...

...Walt Whitman...

...He sat and ate with the old gang, and he listened for a time to the talk...

...That we are next to discussions and economic experiments that the whole United States is watching, and close to personalities whose fortunes mean something to great movements...

...When I sit here and listen to this stuff I'm sorry for you...

...thumbing...

...They are nonchalantly sympathetic to what is good—with the mental reservation that they shall withhold judgment until they discover just whose interest is served by that exploitation of that good...

...Travel, if you like, but remember always that the heart of America will be, at last, where the air, bread, and water are widest and freest...

...Strong and sweet shall their tongues be— Poems and materials of poems shall come from their lives...

...They shall be finders and makers...

...A group of police reporters...

...Talk about newspaper work, you're just nibbling around the edges...

...A phrase here, an illumination there—slowly the Mid-West consciousness of question and revolt, the typical instances, the characters of the human drama evolved to me who already had the fullness of atmosphere, the appositeness of sympathy and desire for interpretation...

...the affairs of sensation that hang poignant on the town's tongue even from the modicum of truth that can be printed, are the commonplace of the day's work...

...There was a boyhood into which is forever fixed, along with the sun and air and freedom of the prairies, the first resenting cry from the Nebraska ranchers against a dimly understood social and economic injustice, a vagrant boyhood lived without authority or respect for tradition...

...Stitgen's or Mr...

...Now a police reporter is a subject upon whom, it is popularly supposed, the Street, the Morgue, the Cage, the City Court, and all those furtive, grimed and sodden agents of the under-shift of life have worked their will...

...WHEN the editor of La Follette's asked me why I wrote The Midlanders there came to me so many complex and unvoiced remembrances, gathered so significantly and woven so closely into half a lifetime that I was at a loss to place a finger on one motive or incident as a beginning...

...In that day, perhaps, the novelist of America can present life with the truth, the simplicity, the freedom and nobleness which the new men and women will demand and honor...

...Wirka's or Mr...

...NOW, what I am getting at, and what bearing it has on The Midlanders by illustration of the palpable moral challenge in the Mid-West consciousness that had so much to do with inspiring the book, is just this: This summer I met a onetime police reporter who had come to Madison and gone into newspaper work here...

...I tell you out at Madison I've got into a bigger newspaper game than you fellows ever dreamed of...

...Here shall be his art, his ethic beauty, his spiritual achievement, for the ceaseless war of class predicated on the money-greed of men and the clinging to law-sanctified precedent, will encompass all other problems...

...cried one of these enthusiasts, one night...

...to face the past without reverence, the present without cant and the future without fear...

...The easy, languid chaff of the West Side killing, and when the tip would go out about raiding Kelley's joint, and why the State's case suddenly fell down in the aldermanic bribery prosecution, and just what particular hurried and secret interview of the Prominent Society Matron to "The Old Man Up Stairs" resulted in the suppression of the details of the Hink-Jinks divorce bill—the gang passed all this about knowingly and indifferently, and then they commiserated with the one-time police reporte' in being "ditched out there in Madison and out of the game...