  THE FIRST AMERICAN CIVILIZATION The full record of J.W.'s commercial career must he left to some other chronicler, but an occasional reference to it cannot be omitted from these pages. Pastor Drury's brother Albert, a Saint Louis business man who knew the old city by the Mississippi from the levees to the University, was a citizen who loved his city so well that he did not need to join a Boosters' Club to prove it. The two Drurys saw each other, as both averred, all too seldom. On the infrequent occasions when they met, as, for instance, during a certain church federation gathering which had brought the minister down to Saint Louis from Delafield, their "visiting" was a joyous thing to see. Lounging in the City Club one day after lunch, with every other subject of common interest at least touched on, Brother Albert turned to Brother Walter: "And how goes the church and parish of Delafield? You told me long ago that you wanted to stay there ten years; it's more than eight now. Does the ten-year mark yet stand?" "Yes, Al., it still stands, if nothing should interfere," said Walter. He had never told his brother the reason back of that ten-year mark, and he was not ready, even yet, for that. Of late he had taken to wondering when and how the Experiment would come to its crisis. He wanted some help just now, and here might be an opening. So he went on, "I've been working away at several special jobs, as you know I like to do, and one of them has a good deal to do with a young fellow named Farwell, John Wesley Farwell, Jr., who'll be the mainstay of the best hardware store in Delafield before long if he sticks to it. Everybody calls him 'J.W.,' and he's the sort of boy that has always interested me, he's so 'average,'" He paused; his thoughts busy with the Experiment. "Well," his brother broke in, after a moment, "what's this young John Wesley Methodist been doing?" "It isn't altogether what he has been doing, but it's what I'd like to see him get a chance to do," explained the preacher. "He's tied to the store and to Delafield, so far, and I've reasons for wanting him to see some parts of this country he'll never see from Main Street in our town." "Well, brother mine, maybe he could be induced to leave that particular Main Street. There's where we get the best citizens of this village. Has he any objections to making a change—to travel, for instance?" "I don't know," said Walter; "probably not. He's young, and has a pretty good education. I do know that he's ambitious to make himself the best hardware man in our section, and I believe he'll do it, in time. Personally, I _want_ him to travel. But how would anybody go about getting him the chance?" Albert Drury laughed. "That's easy, only a preacher couldn't be expected to see it. If any country boy really knows the stuff he handles, whether it is hardware or candy or hides, he can get the chance all right. This town wants him. Don't you know that the big wholesale houses recruit their sales forces by spotting just such boys as your John Wesley Farwell may be? But what do you mean by calling him average, if he's such a keen judge of hardware?" "Oh, well, he _is_ more than average on hardware, but he's so beautifully average human; one of those chaps who do most of the real work of the world." "All right, old man; I'm not sure that I follow you; but, anyway, I may be of some use. I'll tell you what I'll do; I know the very man. Peter McDougall, who's a friend I can bank on, is sales manager of the Cummings Hardware Corporation. Nothing will come of it if Peter is not impressed, but all I need to do is to tell him there's a prospective star salesman up at Delafield, and his man who has that territory will be looking up your John Wesley before you have time to write another sermon. By the way," he added, "what part of the country did you say you wanted young Farwell to see?" "I didn't say," the preacher admitted, "but I would like him to see something of the Southwest. I want to see what will happen when he bumps up against the sort of civilization that followed the Spanish to America." "Well, of course, you know that wholesale hardware houses don't run salesmen's excursions to help Methodist preachers try out the effect of American history on their young parishioners, no matter how lofty the motive," and Albert Drury poked his brother in the ribs. "But supposing this boy is otherwise good stuff he'll be in the right place, if he goes with the Cummings people. A big share of their business is in that end of the world." If J. W. had been told of this conversation, which he wasn't, he might not have been quite so mystified over the letter from the great Peter McDougall, which came a few weeks after the preacher's return from Saint Louis. McDougall he knew well by reputation, having heard about him from every Cummings man who unpacked samples in Delafield. And to be invited to Saint Louis by the great man, with the possibility of "an opening, ultimately, in our sales force," was a surprise as interesting as it was unexpected. Naturally, J.W. could not know how much careful investigation had preceded the writing of that letter. The Cummings Corporation did not act on impulse. But he would have accepted the invitation in any case. And that is enough for the present purpose of the story of J.W.'s first business venture away from Delafield. Not without some hesitation did he close with the Cummings offer; but after he had talked it all over with the folks at home, and then all over again out at Deep Creek with Jeannette Shenk, who was both sorry and proud, it was settled. Reaching Saint Louis, the canny McDougall looked him over and thought him worth trying out; so over he went to the stock department. Then followed busy weeks in the buildings of the Cummings Hardware Corporation down by the river, learning the stock. He discovered before the end of the first day that he had never yet guessed what "hardware" meant; he wandered through the mazes of the vast warehouses until his legs ached much and his eyes ached more. At last came the day when he found himself on the road, not alone, of course, but in tow of Fred Finch, an old Cummings salesman who had occasionally "made" Delafield. The Cummings people did not throw their new men overboard and let them swim if they could. They had a careful training system, of which the stockroom days were one part, and this personally conducted introduction to the road was another. Albert Drury had been sufficiently interested in his brother's wish to drop a hint to McDougall, to which that hard-headed executive would have paid no attention if it had not fitted in just then with the requirements of his sales policy. But the hint sent J.W. out with Finch over the longest route which the house worked for trade. On the map this route was a great kite-shaped thing, with its point at Saint Louis, and the whole Southwest this side of the Colorado River included in the sweep of its sides and top. To Fred Finch it was a weary journey, but J.W. gave no thought to its discomforts. He was seeing the country, as well as learning to sell hardware, and both occupations were highly absorbing. Before long he found too that he was seeing a new people. Storekeepers he knew, as being of his own guild; the small towns were much like Delafield, when you had become used to their newer crudeness of architecture and their sprawling planlessness; and the people who used hardware were very much like his customers at home. He had no fear of failing to become a salesman, after the first few experiences under Finch's watchful eye; his father had taught him a sort of salesmanship which experience could only make more effective. He knew already never to sell what he could see his customer ought not to buy, and he knew always to contrive as much as possible that the customer should do the selling to himself. The elder Farwell used to say, "Let your customer once see the advantage that buying is to him, and he won't care what advantage selling is to you." Now, as has been said before, this is not a salesman's story. Let it suffice to say that before the two got back to Saint Louis J. W. knew he had found his trade. He was a natural salesman, and so Fred Finch reported to Peter McDougall. "If it's hardware," he said, "that boy can sell it, and I don't care where you put him. He can sell to people who can't speak English, and I believe he could sell to deaf mutes or the blind. He knows the line, and they know he knows it. Why, this very first trip he's sold more goods on his own say-so than on the house brand. Said he knew what the stuff would do, and people took that who usually want to know about the guarantee." All of which Peter McDougall filed where he would not forget it. But to go back to the trip itself. Along the railway in Kansas J.W. began to see box-cars without trucks, roughly fitted up for dwellings. Dark-skinned men and women and children were in occupation, and all the household functions and processes were going on, though somewhat primitively. "Mexicans," said Finch, as J.W. pointed out the cars. "Section hands; when I first began to make this territory you never saw them except right down on the border, but they have moved a long way east and north. I saw lots of them in the yards at Kansas City last time I was there." J.W. watched the box-car life with a good deal of curiosity. Here and there were poor little attempts at color and adornment; flowers in window boxes and bits of lace at the windows. Delafield had plenty of foreigners, but these were foreigners of another sort. They seemed to be entirely at home. "I suppose," he said to Finch, "these Mexicans have come to the States to get away from the robbery and ruin that Mexico has had instead of government these last ten years and more." "Yes," Finch answered, "thousands of 'em. But not all. Some of these Mexicans are older Americans than we are. We took 'em over when we got Texas and New Mexico and California from Old Mexico. They were here then, speaking the Spanish their ancestors had learned three hundred years ago and more. But they're all the same Mexicans, no matter on which side of the Rio Grande they were born. Of course those born on this side have had some advantages that the peons never knew." "But do you mean," J.W. wanted to know, "that they are not really American citizens?" Fred Finch said no, he didn't mean exactly that. Certainly, those born on this side were American citizens in the eyes of the law, and those who came across the Rio Grande could get naturalized. But that made little real difference. A Mexican was a Mexican, and you had to deal with him as one. J.W. was not quite satisfied with that explanation, but he preferred to wait until he had seen enough so that he could ask his questions more intelligently. So he kept relatively still, but his eyes did not cease from observing. As the trip progressed, and the jumps between towns became longer, the young salesman had time to see a good deal. In the far Southwest he became aware that the increasingly numerous Mexican population was no longer a matter of box-car dwellers, more or less migratory. It was a settled people. Its little adobe villages, queer and quaint as they seemed to Middle-Western eyes, were centers of established life. And he discovered that in these villages always one building overshadowed all the rest. One day as they were headed towards El Paso he ventured to mention this to his traveling companion. "Seems to me," he said, "that none of these little mud villages is too poor to have a church, and mostly a pretty good church too. How do they manage it?" Now Finch was no student of church life, but he did know a little about the country. "That's the way it is all over this Southwest, my boy, and across the line in Old Mexico it's a good deal more so. My guess is that the churches and the priests began by teaching the people that whatever else happened they had to put up for the church, and from what I've noticed I reckon that now nothing else matters much to the church. It has become a kind of poor relation that's got to be fed and helped, whether it amounts to anything or not. But it's a long way from being as humble and thankful as you would naturally expect a poor relation to be." During the El Paso layover the two of them took a day across the International Bridge. J. W. had watched the Mexicans coming over, and he wanted to see the country they came from. "You'll not see much over there," a friendly spoken customs official told him. "It's a pretty poor section of desert 'round about these parts. You ought to get away down into the heart of the country." |
"Yes, I suppose so," J.W. responded, "but there isn't time on this trip. Are such people as these coming over to the United States right along?"
"I should say they are," said the man of authority with emphasis. "In the last four or five years the Mexican population of the United States has about doubled; three quarters of a million have crossed the Rio Grande somewhere, or the border further west. You people from the East make a big fuss over immigration from Europe, but you hardly seem to know that a regular flood has been pouring in through these southwestern gateways. You will some day."
What they saw on the Mexican side of the bridge was, as the customs man had said, nothing much. But J.W. came away with a strange sense of depression. He had never before seen so much of the raw material of misery and squalor; what he had observed with wondering pity in the villages on the American side was as nothing to the unrelieved hopelessness of the south bank of the river.
That night in the hotel lobby J.W. noticed a fresh-faced but rather elderly man whom he recognized as one whom he had seen over in Mexico earlier in the day. With the memory of what he had seen yet fresh upon him, J.W. ventured a commonplace or two with the stranger, and found him so genial and interesting that they were still talking long after Fred Finch had yawned himself off to bed.
"I thought I remembered seeing you over there," said the unknown, "and you didn't look like a seasoned traveler; more like the amateur I am myself, though I do get about a little."
"I'm no seasoned sightseer," said J.W.; "this is my first time out. And that's maybe the reason I've developed so much curiosity about the people we saw to-day. Do you know much about them?"
"Who? the Mexicans?" The other man smiled, and then was suddenly serious. "My friend, I begin to think I'm making the Mexicans my hobby. I don't know who you are, but if you are really interested in the Mexicans as human beings I'd rather tell you what I know than do anything else I can think of to-night. It isn't often I find a traveling man who cares."
"Well, I do care," J.W. asserted, stoutly. "They're people, folks, aren't they? And it looks as though they could stand having somebody get interested in them a little."
"Ah, I see now what you are; you are that remarkable combination, a traveling man and a Christian. Am I right?"
"Why, I suppose so," said J.W., with a smile and a touch of the old boyish pride in his name. "My initials, as you might say, are 'John Wesley,' and I'm not ashamed of them."
"And that means you are not only a Christian, but a Methodist? My dear man, we must shake on that. I'm a Methodist myself, as the stage robber said to Brother Van, with the romantic name of Tanner. Got my first interest in Mexico and the Mexicans when my daughter married a young Methodist preacher and they went down there as missionaries. I make a trip to see them and the babies about once a year. But now I am getting interested in these people as an American and, I hope, a Christian who tries to work at the business. What did you say your other name was?"
J.W. hadn't said, but now he did, and the two settled to their talk. This William Tanner, some sort of retired business man, certainly seemed to know his Mexico. And he had that most subtle of all stimulants to-night, a curious and sympathetic hearer. By consequence he was eager to give all that J.W. would take.
Before long J.W. had edged in a question about the church. He said, "You know, Mr. Tanner, we have a pretty good Roman Catholic church in my home town, though Father O'Neill doesn't tie up much to what the other churches are trying to do, and some of his flock seem to me pretty wild, for sheep. Now, these churches down here are all Roman Catholic too, yet they certainly don't look any kin to Saint Ursula's at Delafield. Are they?"
It was the sort of question which William Tanner had asked himself many a time when he first came to Mexico. "This is the way of it, Mr. Farwell," he said. "The church came to Mexico, and to all Latin America, from Spain and Portugal. It had a few great names, we must acknowledge, in those early times. But in a little while it settled down to two activities—to make itself the sole religious authority and to get rich. It was a church of God and gold, and as a matter of course it preached that it was the supreme arbiter of life and death in matters of faith, and extended its authority into every relation of life. It brought from the lands of the Inquisition the idea of priestly power, and there was none to dispute it in Latin America, as there was in the colonies of our own country. It gave the people little instruction, and no responsibility or freedom. It made outward submission the test of piety and faith. And so when Spain lost its grip on the western hemisphere the church found itself with nothing but its claim of power to fall back on. Well, you know that would work only with the ignorant and the superstitious."
"Mexico, and all Latin America for that matter, clear to the Straits of Magellan, is a land of innumerable crosses, but no Christ. The church has had left to it what it wanted; that is, the priestly prerogatives; it marries, baptizes, absolves, buries, where the people can pay the fees, and the people for various reasons have not cared that this is all. If they are afraid, or want to make a show, they call in the church; if they don't care, or if they are poor, they go unbaptized, unmarried, unshriven, and do not see that it makes any difference. They have no understanding of the church as a Christian institution; in fact, I think it would puzzle most of them to tell what a true church ought to be. Now, all this is the church's reward for its ancient choice, which, so far as I can see, is still its choice. To the average Latin American the church is, and in the nature of things must be, a demander of pay for ceremonial, and a bitterly jealous defender of all its old autocratic claims. That is of the nature of the church."
"But I don't understand," interposed J.W. "If the people have no real use for the church, why do they support it? It certainly is supported."
"That, Mr. Farwell, is the tragedy of the church in all these lands," said Mr. Tanner, soberly. "The church began by looking to its own interests first. It wanted great establishments and a docile people. It found the gospel hard to preach to the natives—the real gospel, I mean. The cruelties and greed of the conquest had made impossible any preaching of a ministering, merciful, and unselfish Christ. In fact, the vast majority of the priests who came over from Europe brought with them no such ideas. The church was ruler, not missionary. And so far as it dares it sticks stubbornly to that notion even to this day. So it has had to make practical compromise with the paganism and superstition it found here. Many of its religious observances are the aboriginal pagan practices disguised in Christian dress and given Christian names. The church has sold its birthright for the privilege of exploiting the credulity and the fears of the people. It has made merchandise of all its functions. Now, after the centuries have come and gone, both church and people through long custom are willing to have it so. The people have their great churches, with incense and lights and all the pomp of medÆival days. But they have no living Christ and no thought of him. The priests have their trade in ceremonial and their perquisites, but they have no power over the hearts of men."
As his new acquaintance paused for breath after this long answer to a short question, J.W., remembering something Fred Finch had said, brought the remark in: "The man who is showing me the ropes as a hardware man tells me that all over Latin America the church is likely to be the one real building in every town and village. Is that also something that the people are so used to that they don't notice it any more?"
"Oh, yes," Mr. Tanner assented. "I suppose the contrast between the church and the miserable little hovels around it never occurs to any of them. It has always been so. The church has built itself up out of the community, and for the most part it puts very little back. It conducts schools, to be sure; and yet eighty per cent of the Mexican people are illiterate, it has some few institutions of help and mercy; but the whole land cries out for doctors and teachers and friendly human concern."
"Is that really so?" J.W. asked. "Do the people really want our missionaries, or are we Protestants just shoving ourselves in? I can see that something is desperately wrong, but we are mostly Saxon, and they are Latins. Do these people want what to them must seem a queer religion and a lot of strange ideas?"
"So long as they do not understand what we come for, naturally they are suspicious. When they find out, they take to mission work and missionaries with very little urging. I wish you would meet my son-in-law," Mr. Tanner said with positiveness. "Why, the one tormenting desire of that man's life is to see more missionaries sent down into Mexico; more doctors, more teachers, more workers of every sort. He writes letters to the Board of Foreign Missions that would make your heart ache. The church at home couldn't oversupply Mexico with the sort of help it desperately needs if it should turn every recruit that way, and disregard all the rest of the world's mission fields."
"Do you mean," asked J.W., who was seeing new questions bob up every time an earlier one was answered, "do you mean that so many missionaries could be used on productive Christian work right away? Or is it that we ought to have a big force to prepare for the long future of our work in Mexico?" Now, J.W. was not so sure that this was an intelligent question, but he had heard that in some mission fields it was necessary to wait years for real and permanent results.
His companion saw nothing out of the way in the question. It was part of the whole problem. "I mean it both ways," he said. "What I've seen of our Methodist work down in these parts, particularly its schools and one wonderful hospital, makes me sure we could get big harvests of interest and success right off. We're doing it already, considering our relatively small force and our limited equipment."
"But all Latin American work takes patience. I've made one trip down as far as Santiago de Chile, and what is true in Mexico is, I guess, about as true in other parts. The Roman Catholic Church has been here four hundred years, and its biggest result is that the people who don't fear it despise it. Latin America is called Christian, but it is a world in which what you and I call religion simply does not count. Well, then, that's what makes me talk about the need of persistence and patience. The bad effects of three or four hundred years of such religion as has been taught and practiced between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn can't be got rid of in a hurry. Wait till Mexico has had a real chance at the Christ of the New Testament for three hundred years, and then see!"
J.W. had yet another question to ask before he was ready to call it a day. "If all that you say is so—and I believe it is, Mr. Tanner—why should so many of the Mexicans hate the United States? They do, for I've heard it spoken of a good deal lately, and I remember what was always said when some one proposed that we should intervene to make peace and restore order in Mexico. It would take ten years and a million men, and all Mexico would unite to oppose us. You talk about how much the Mexicans need us and want us. But a great many of them surely don't want us at all."
"I know what that means," Mr. Tanner admitted. And it is true. We are all influenced by the past. Look at the history of our dealings with Mexico. The very ideas we fought to establish as the charter of our own freedom we repudiated when we dealt with Mexico three quarters of a century ago. We had every advantage, and what we wanted we took. Certainly, we have done better by it than Mexico might have done, but I never heard that reason given in a court of law to excuse the same sort of transaction if it touched only private individuals. Then, in late years big business has gone into Mexico. It has had to take big chances. It has paid better wages than the peon could earn any other way. It has a lot to its credit; but it has been much like big business in other places, and, anyway, the admitted great profits have enriched the foreigner, not the Mexican.
"Besides, Mexico is not the States. As you say, it is Latin in its civilization, not Saxon. It does not want our sort of culture. And some of our missionaries, both of the church and of industry, have thought that the Mexican ought to be 'Americanized.' That's a fatal mistake in any mission field outside the States. All in all, you can see that it isn't entirely inevitable that the Mexican should understand our motives, or appreciate them when he does understand. But that's all the more reason for bearing down hard on every form of genuine missionary work. It's the only thing that we Americans can do in Mexico with any hope of avoiding suspicion or of our presence being acceptable to the Mexicans in the long run. We've got to fight the backfire of our American commercialism, and the prejudice which is as real on the Texas side of the river as it is on the other; for if the Mexican thinks in terms of 'gringo,' the American of the Southwest is just as likely to think in terms of 'greaser.'"
When J.W. and Mr. Tanner parted for the night it was with the mutual promise that they would have another talk some time the next day, but the promise could not be kept. The retired business man heard from some of his business in the early morning, and had just time to say a hurried farewell. As he put it, "I thought I had retired, but unless I get back to look after this particular affair I may have to get into the harness again, and that is not a cheerful prospect at my age. So I go to business to avert the danger of going back to business."
A little later the two hardware salesmen were in El Paso again, after a couple of side trips. J.W. took advantage of a long train wait to hunt up the city library. He wanted to know whether Mr. Tanner was right in saying that the Latin-American question was much the same everywhere.
He wrote a letter to Mr. Drury that night, having thus far used picture postcards until he was ashamed. In the letter he took occasion to mention his talk with the "missionary father-in-law," and his own bit of reading up on the subject.
Said he: "I guess that man Tanner was right. He did not speak much of the difference between the people of one country and those of another, which rather surprised me. He said nothing of the two great classes, the rulers with much European blood, and the peons, largely or altogether Indian. There must be all sorts of Latin Americans, rich and poor, mixed blood of many strains, Castilian and Aztec and Inca, and whatever other people were here when Columbus set the fashion for American voyages. But this is where this 'missionary father-in-law' hit the heart of the trouble: Latin America has all sorts and conditions of men, but everywhere it has the same church. And it is a church that can't ever make good any more. It might, at the beginning, but it can't now. It has a reputation as fixed as Julius CÆsar's. I'm hardly ready to set up as an expert observer, being only a cub salesman on his first trip, but, Mr. Drury, I believe I can see already that the only chance for these people to get religion and everything else which religion ought to produce, is for us to send it to them. Maybe that would stir up the church down here, and help to give it another chance at the people's confidence, though I'm not sure."
Our church ought to send doctors; the amount of fearful disease that flourishes among the poorer people is just frightful. If Joe Carbrook were not so set on going to the Orient, he could do a big work here, and so could a thousand other doctors. It would be so much more than mere doctoring; it would be the biggest kind of preaching.
And the church should send teachers. You know I believe in conversion; but if the Mexicans I have seen are samples of Latin America's common people, they need teachers who have the patience of Christ a good deal more than they need flaming evangelists who make a big stir and soon pass on. Because these folks have just _got_ to be made over, in their very minds. They are not ready for the preaching of the gospel until they have seen it lived. Long experience has made them doubtful of living saints, though plenty of them pray to dead ones.
This is the whole trouble, Mr. Drury, it seems to me. They've known only a church that had got off the track. Any religious work that reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary, but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want it—any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it, they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for that, in spite of what the priest says. They think enough to be afraid, but not enough to be sure of anything. The missionaries have to teach them a new set of religious numerals, if you get what I mean, before it is any use to teach them the arithmetic of the gospel.
"I'm beginning to see that everything among the Latin Americans runs back to the need of Christian living. The wrong notion of religion has got them all twisted. I know Delafield is a long way from being Christian, but the difference between Delafield and such a pitiful mud village as I've seen lately has more to do with the sort of Christianity each place has been taught than with anything else whatever. But I never thought of that before."
As Pastor Drury read that letter his heart warmed within him. He said to himself, "John Wesley, Jr., is 'beginning to see,' he says. Please God he musn't stop now until he gets his eyes wide open. The thing is working out. He's groping around for something, and some day he'll find it."
