« p. 91-101: Chautauqua
The Hotel Athenäum, Chautauqua
p. 101-104
There is always something to do in America.
I said once before that in my hotel, the Hotel Athenäum, a young student first explained to me the wonderful institutions and problems of Chautauqua. This student, a graduate of Columbia University in New York, wasn’t living at the Hotel Athenäum at the time, but instead was working there.
He was the one who showed me to my room. He was a clerk in the hotel.
I had been having troubles with my suitcase at the port. I was barely in my room, I rang three times, a young man came in and said: I am the porter. He looked like how Wilamowitz-Moellendorf might have looked in his younger years. I asked myself how someone looking like that could be a porter and explained my situation. (I had no idea how things worked at this hotel.) A quarter of an hour later, he brought my suitcase on his shoulder. This porter was a stocky young man.
I later learned he was studying to be a doctor. I also learned that the maid who fixed my bed was a college girl, just like the woman who served four hundred guests the Table d’hote with thirty other college girls. And the elevator boy was going to a secondary school, and all the clerks were college people. They all worked, they all worked hard to earn some of their tuition for the next semester. And in the evenings, when everyone was done with their work, then the dainty millionaire’s wives from Cincinatti sat with the girls who waited on their tables, and my good friend from Kentucky sat with an elevator boy in the lobby of the beautiful building, and they talked about many things, about what their hometowns were like in this large country. The old gentleman asked for advice from the elevator boy about some piece of Latin from a professor’s lecture he didn’t understand, and the elevator boy had to hurry his explanation, because Number So-and-So was ringing and wanted ice water brought to his room.
The object lessons in the Hotel Athenäum brought me to a conclusion I had to collect out of a hundred scattered facts. I am certain that now I will do a much better job of understanding everything I see and hear in the states.
The class system doesn’t seem to exist over here, or at least it exists in an entirely different form than in Europe. Just imagine a German student working as a waiter, or the daughter of an upper-class family performing some sort of low manual labor. As the French say: vous voyez ça d’ici.
No, the classes in America aren’t like they are in Europe. The differences between one working man and another working man are considerably smaller here than in Europe, where people are barricaded against each other with all these work classifications, which the classes themselves regulate, distribute, count and rate into small subdivisions.
Of course, a man who makes a million dollars a year still lives in an entirely other caste than a man who only makes a thousand. And I’m pretty sure that all the clubs and lodges express something of caste and class. But when a well-educated man takes on a job that should be beneath him over the course of a summer or even a year, and still not lose touch with his class, that means we’re in America and not in Europe. This is the democratic spirit, and I don’t know how close it comes to the ideals of socialism.
I don’t know. All I know is that the struggle of the classes plays out here more like an economic struggle, that is, it’s tidier, without any of the hatred and trickery, the caste system, the snobbish ambition, the social climbing, the swindling or all the other junk that Europe forces on us. I also know that the battle is between people and not between armies, like in Europe, where someone pushes himself upward through letters of nobility, titles and follies of the worst sort. I learn all this from my little object lessons in the hotel lobby. In America, the struggle of labor against capital, the great coming world war, against which there is no arbitration and no Hague, must be fought with the sort of bloodiness that has not been seen in the history of mankind’s struggles.
It is my last hour in Chautauqua, leaving behind all the lecture halls, the amphitheater, the lovely buildings sitting together in the forest, where people learn and multiply their abilities. I take my traveling bag back to the iron railing I came across on the first day. I give back my ticket, which had cost me some three dollars for these three and a half days, and with that I ceased to be Chautauquan.
It is a beautiful summer day, my last one in the states for a long time, because now I’m going over the Ontario to Toronto.
The sun shines down on Chautauqua Lake, on the buildings, the forest and all the yellow people within them. As I pass by Palestine, three small children sit on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and float little paper ships from Tiberias to Capernaum.