CHAPTER III
OPEN SESAME!
My next effort was "Manassas," a novel of the Civil war. I poured into it. all my dream of what America might be, and inscribed it: "That the men of this land may know the heritage that has come down to them." But the men of this land were not in any way interested in the heritage that had come down to them. The men of this land were making money. The newspapers of this land were competing for advertisements of whiskey and cigars and soap, and the men who wrote book -reviews for the literary pages of these newspapers were chuckling over such works of commercial depravity as "The Letters of a Self -Made Merchant to His Son." They had no time to tell the public about "Manassas"; though Jack London called it "the best Civil War book I've read," and though it is my one book which no severest critic can say has any propaganda motive. Charlotte Perkins Gilman told me a story of how she persuaded an old Civil War veteran to read it. The old fellow didn't want to read any book about the war by a youngster; he had been through it all himself, and no youngster could tell him anything. But Mrs. Gilman persisted, and when she met him again she found him with shining eyes and a look of wonder on his face. "It's the War!" he cried. "It's the War—and he wasn't even born!"
It happened that at this time Lincoln Steffens was publishing his terrible exposes of the corruption of American civic life. Steffens did for the American people one specific service. He knocked out forever the notion, of which E. L. Godkin and his "New York Evening Post" were the principal exponents, that our political corruption was to be blamed upon "the ignorant foreign element." Steffens showed purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all; and he traced back the corruption, showing that for every man who took a bribe there was another man who gave one, and that the giver of the bribe made from ten to a thousand times as much as he paid. In other words, American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures
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