Baltimore Evening Sun (13 May 1911): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

A man in his shirt sleeves boarded a Gay street car yesterday morning bearing two extremely filthy fish baskets. Scales and slime covered them, and they gave forth a perfume not of Araby. The fellow forced them into a corner of the platform, and in a short while the legs of three passengers had touched them. Three pairs of breeches to be scoured—at 50 cents a pair!

Why does the United Railways permit such things? Board any of the Baltimore street lines in the early morning and you are pretty sure to meet a paperhanger with his bucket of paste, a painter with his pots or a plumber with his furnace and acid bottle. Within the last five years it has cost me $9 to obliterate the marks of such encounters. Once I backed into a plumber’s acid bottle and lost a brand-new pair of paataloons. The acid made a large stain and the scourer to whom I took the garment found that he couldn’t rub it out. He charged 40 cents for trying. Then a tailor charged 60 cents for cutting out the burnt spot and putting in a patch. But the pantaloons were never the same again. They had cost $5.89. Their actual value, after the affair, was $2.50. Besides, I had spent $1 in having them made habitable. Again, I had wasted $1 worth of time.

The street cars of Baltimore are very large, and there is ordinarily plenty of room on the platforms for a few packages. No fair man objects to the presence of these packages, even when they are large and crowd him against the gate. The trolley is not only the poor man’s touring car but also his express wagon. The company does well to permit colored women to bring their baskets of wash aboard. Even an occasional stepladder or birdcage or armchair or phonograph or rocking-horse is made welcome by the affable smokers on the platform.

But certainly that is a bad rule which permits passengers to suffer actual damage from deadhead freight. Why should a paperhanger be permitted to clutter up a platform with his ladders, his rolls of paper and his dirty buckets of paste? Most paperhangers have decency enough to cover their paste with paper, but a few have not. I have seen, I suppose, fully 50 passengers get paste upon their overcoats or trousers. Some noticed the fact and swore loudly. Others went off without knowing that they had been branded.

It is useless to appeal to the conductor. His sympathy is almost always on the side of the honest toiler. His mind seems unable to grasp the fact that the man damaged may be a toiler, too—that his very eagerness to protect and cherish his pantaloons is presumptive proof that he had to put in hard labor to get them. Car conductors yield to the central fallacy of Socialism. They cannot rid themselves of the notion that only the man who works with his hands and at some conspicuously dirty trade is a true toiler. Cleanliness they too often confuse with plutocracy.

But why doesn’t the company issue an edict against dirty freight? Why not bar paperhangers, plumbers and painters, save when they go unarmed? Or, better still, why not run freight cars?

From a local paper’s passionate strophes upon the Broadway Carnival:

“Welcome was the invisible emblem which greeted the eyes of the visitors.

The italics are mine. From the same eloquent rhapsody one learns that thousands of persons came early and sat upon the curbstones “thinking of the gayety to follow.” “They seemed to have a premonition of what was coming.” Later “they were glad they came.”

The New Journalism, it appears, is a branch of the New Thought. Passing over bald externals, it penetrates the mind, sniffs the spirit, roots around in the subconscious.

Such silly writing, unfortunately, is not confined to the paper I have quoted, nor even to the local papers in general. You will find it in full flower in every other American city, save, perhaps, New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago. The reason therefor lies in the fact that the provincial reporter is constantly writing against space. The average Baltimore or New Orleans or Cincinnati paper gives about 20 columns a day to local news. The actual local news of an average day in Baltimore, New Orleans or Cincinnati might very well go into four columns. What is the result? Simply a copious outpouring of balderdash.

Pick up a Baltimore paper any day and you will find many a solid column without the slightest suspicion of news in it. Here is a long account of some fourth-rate man’s death, followed by the grave announcement that the event has “much shocked” certain of his friends. The friends are mentioned by name. In the next column is the “news” that some tedious Baltimore boomer is “enthusiastic” over this or that absurdity. Then one notes that Collector Stone has been congratulated about something or other. Then that Mayor Mahool has written a letter to some unknown person, telling him that Baltimore is a great city. Then that the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association is thinking of launching into some vast scheme that will never be heard of again.

Naturally enough a reporter who has to write such stuff day after day acquires a large stock of sonorous but empty phrases. The art of telling a true story, simply and dramatically, passes from him. He becomes a virtuoso of the platitude, a wholesaler of rubbish, a frenzied space-killer. For a while hew rites nonsense deliberately. Then he begins to write it automatically.

Not only Baltimore is deafened by boomers. In Buffalo they are raging too. Up there they print a strident, ridiculous monthly called “The Live Wire” and employ an arch-boomer who subscribes himself “student of cities and expert of big business.” This arch-boomer, it would seem, is a litterateur of sorts. Here is a sample of his Addisonian style: