TWO TOWELS A DAY
Mayer, Milton
Two Towels A Day By MILTON MAYER LAST WEEK, Time Magazine reported one more horror of war on the home front. The victim, as Time, in its agony, portrays him, is the American hotel guest, who...
...envious, but proud and possessive, and not really hostile at all...
...My second reaction was different...
...I suppose the answer is that it will take another world war or two to persuade them that the picture of pie in the sky, or in somebody else's fist, is not a durable supplement to a steady diet of grits and gravy...
...As long as the boast of Bigger and Better is loud in the mouths of those who have the smallest and worst, the revolution is a long way off...
...It was one of Hearst's great original insights that in America the people on the wrong side of the tracks are actually proud of the people on the right...
...And I really believe that the hideous prospect of only two towels a day, instead of drawing a laugh, draws a sympathetic sigh from those denizens of the slums and shanties who seldom wash, still seldomer dry, and know no such word as "towel...
...I even wonder, as I watch the editors of Time gnashing their teeth on one bath towel and one face towel per day, just how long two towels a day will continue to fascinate, without enraging, the people here at home who have none at all...
...They are designed, and well designed, to appeal to the lowest tastes of the lowest people...
...Inside they sport the Female Body Beautiful...
...The Dispossessed Consider that exclusively American marvel of journalism, the society page...
...I am not one of the rich, by any means, and I find myself living in the flabbiest sort of comfort...
...But their society sections are the most elaborate and fulsome in town...
...And so I suppose the reduction in service at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Ritz-Carlton, and the Biltmore is an affront to millions of Americans who have never seen these marble halls, much less dwealt in them...
...indeed, contrary...
...The rich must really be swilling...
...Pie In The Sky I suppose it's true, just as the big talkers have always said, that the United States is the land of the big money, of milk and honey, and of boundless opportunity if only the Government would quit sticking shovels into the hands of the unemployed and harrassing the enterprisers with taxes...
...Outside they drip adultery, corn syrup, sash-weight murders...
...the editors of Time, the readers of Time, and the rest of those few fortunates who are subject to the horrors contrived by Commissioner McNutt...
...I should think that Commissioner McNutt would have issued his order sotto voce, lest the enemy, or, worse yet, our allies in China, Russia, and the battered back streets of London overhear it...
...And so is the war, if, at this advanced stage, the civilian populace is to be subjected to no more serious a sacrifice than the extra towels which hotel guests have always used for no other purpose than to shine their shoes or wrap around their clean shirts when they pack them prior to checking out...
...The most foul and vulgar papers in this country are the Hearst papers...
...I was weeping, then, for myself and the likes of me...
...Nearly all of America will go right on living somehow, without being in any way touched by the plight of the American hotel guest...
...And, on top of it, his bags are carried, if they're carried at all, by a ; bellboy so decrepit as to require assistance himself...
...The war hasn't touched us, except for the eleven million in the Army and their closest relatives who live from day to day, in increasing numbers, in terror of every approaching Western Union boy...
...The victim, as Time, in its agony, portrays him, is the American hotel guest, who arrives, after a grisly day on the cars, to stand in I line for several hours at the recep-i tion desk and get a room, if he gets | one at all, that hasn't been cleaned up since the last guest departed...
...If we're still rich, when this waltz with Moloch is over, I wonder if the people of Europe and Asia, dying as they are in the streets, will lust after our fruits and vegetables, and what, if anything, they will do about their lust...
...For if anything can be said to be the American Way, it is the attitude on the part of the dispossessed, of proud possessiveness toward the things they haven't got...
...I believe that the 80 per cent who never see the inside of a hotel will be almost as resentful of Commissioner McNutt as the 20 per cent who have to wipe their faces on the bath-mat...
...My first reaction, in passing, was that something like 80 per cent of the people of this country have never seen the inside of a hotel (or of Time Magazine) and never will...
...We are still, it would appear from Commissioner McNutt's most recent tightening of our belts for us, fabulously rich and fat...
...And J then came the punch-line, curt, Iconcise, complete, and bitter: War Manpower Commissioner McNutt has ordered hotels to provide no more than one bath towel and one face towel per day for each guest...
...Our enemies would use it as proof that we are plutocrats, just as they always insisted, and our allies might well begin to wonder when Lend-Lease was actually going to get started...
...By the time Time Magazine got around to the [ punch-line, I was in tears...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 35
