May 20, 1931
When Herbert Croly died in 1930, the magazine was left without its ideological father. Even though his leadership style contained not a trace of charisma, he had meticulously maintained a liberal editorial line. He had permitted sympathy for radicals and published them, but the official editorial position never came too close to socialism. Yet with his passing, his young protégés began insisting on a harder leftism.
Edmund Wilson didn’t have the temperament of a party hack. But the trauma of the Great Depression had launched him toward the Communist Party, where he dabbled on the margins. He wanted “to take Communism away from the Communists,” as he wrote in the magazine in 1931, and to apply the party’s best teachings to American politics. The spirit of the party—with its adoration of the common man—also inspired him to step down as the magazine’s literary editor. (The Daily Worker was keen to hire him; he hesitatingly resisted.) Wilson asked for a pay cut so that he could travel the country reporting on the ravages of economic collapse. Despite Wilson’s befouled politics, these pieces stand the test of time. He managed to capture American life from almost every angle: he interviewed autoworkers, traveled across the South with a Red Cross worker, and wrote about fancy hotels. The title of this piece is also the title of Henry George’s nineteenth-century tract, one of the greatest works of American radicalism.
There is no question that the Empire State Building is New York’s handsomest skyscraper. The first five stories, with their gray façade, silver-framed windows and long rainlike lines in the stone, rise graceful and sheer from the street: one feels a sudden relief as one passes them—they do not crowd and overpower Fifth Avenue as most of the newer Fifth Avenue buildings do. And the successive tiers fall back, each just in time not to make too heavy and dull a wall—till the main towering plinth is reached. Seen close, the long lines of the nickel facings have the look of a silver inlay and the whole long pale and silver strip might be an inlay on the pale even blue of the sky. This towering plinth, though it is the tallest in the city, has almost always an effect of lightness. From far off the gray observation tower looks as light as if it were made of shadows, its silver cap as it catches the sun, as bright and brittle as a Christmas-tree globe. In a warm afternoon sun the building is bisque-pink, with delicate nickel lines: a rainy day makes a pleasant harmony with bright pale facings on dull pale gray; on a chilly late afternoon, the mast is like a bright piece of silverware, an old salt-cellar elegantly chased. And though in a rawer light the building looks less fine, it may still seem as insubstantial as a packet of straw-colored Nabiscos stuck together and stood on end. In the cold dazing light of a winter morning, a bluish-gray block with gleaming silvery edges against a grayish-blue sky, it seems semi-translucent like a cake of ice. Only rarely in glaring midday does it look metallic, functional and hard like a machine-part.
The Empire State Building is the tallest building in the world: it is 1,250 feet high. There is a telescope in Madison Square Park for people to look at the tower through, just as they used to look at the moon. There are 86 stories, not counting the mast; 6,400 windows; and 67 elevators. The building contains 10,000,000 bricks and weighs 600,000,000 pounds—distributed, however, so evenly that “the weight on any given square inch is no greater than that normally borne by a French heel.” The plot on which it stands is only about 200 by 425 feet, but the building contains 37,000,000 cubic feet. It is calculated that, if it were full, there would be 25,000 people working there and 40,000 more people going in and out every day. In the immediate future, however, there will not be by any means that many, because business is extremely bad and even the office buildings already erected are full of untenanted space. Of the offices in the Empire State Building only a quarter have so far been rented, and in moving into it, most of the tenants will merely be leaving further vacancies elsewhere. The Empire State Building was put up at top speed in less than a year: in one case, telephoto had to be employed to get the right materials rushed from Cleveland. And now here it is planted in the business district where nobody needs it at all and where it is sure to make a good deal worse one of the worst traffic-jams in town.
The people responsible for the Empire State Building, who contributed more than half the $52,000,000 required for it, are John J. Raskob of the Democratic National Committee, Pierre du Pont of the Du Pont Powder Company, and the presidents of the Nipissing Mines Company and the Chatham Phenix National Bank and Trust Company. Al Smith is the president of the owning company and is said to get $50,000 a year. Today, the first of May, the day of the formal opening, he looks very compact, decent and well satisfied, in his dark coat and black derby, with his official family around him. It is his two little grandchildren who perform the ceremony of opening the building by cutting a ribbon across the Fifth Avenue entrance. Then the lights are switched on by an electric button pressed by President Hoover in Washington. Then there are speeches on the eighty-sixth floor. Al Smith reads a telegram from President Hoover, who congratulates “everyone who had any part in its conception and construction” on “one of the outstanding glories of a great city.” Governor Roosevelt congratulates them on their “grasp of the needs of the future”—he asserts that the Empire State Building “is needed not only by the city, it is needed by the whole nation.” There are two keynotes today, he says: one is the keynote of vision, the other is the keynote of faith. Mayor Walker, whose administration is under calamitous inquiry and whose impeachment has recently been demanded, congratulates them on having provided “a place higher, further removed than any in the world, where some public officials might like to come and hide.” Then the R.K.O. “Theatre of the Air” broadcasts a radio program.
The entrance hall of the Empire State Building is four stories high and made of gray German marble with an effect of crushed strawberries rubbed into it. On the far illuminated cream of the long ceiling are gold and silver circles, stars and suns, conventionalized geometrical patterns supposed to be derived from snowflake crystals. At the end of the hallway is an enormous flat steely sun blazing on the flat steely Empire State Building with a bombardment of rays like railroad tracks. The elevator doors are black with silver lines and have a suggestion of Egyptian tombs. There are a great many uniformed guards, with guns in holsters, posted around.
The fifty-fifth floor is the show floor. Green marble and green doors: a great empty loft with bright white walls with black ends of wire sticking out of them and crumbs of plaster on the floor. Through the unwashed windows streaked with dirt the windowed square-walled wilderness of buildings has the same dreary yellow as the streaks. If one looks out of an open window, one can see the water-tanks on top of other buildings, somebody’s expensive penthouse done in green and very luxurious with steamer-chairs, an ad which says “Buy Your Furs from Fox” printed in big letters on the roof of a building and aimed at the occupants of the Empire State, and an American flag. Below that, if one leans out, one sees the streets with the pedestrians and the motor cars very small moving straight and slow among them. To the west, the steamboats and barges moving slowly along the Hudson; to the south, the narrowing wedge of the island studded and pronged at the lower end with its own planting of enormous buildings; to the east, the iron blue-gray East River, strung across with black skeleton bridges, a gray airplane above it; to the north, the dwindled Chrysler tower, a tinny scaled armadillo-tail ending in a stiff stinglike drill, the white vertically-grooved flat-headed Daily News Building, the chocolate and guilded Luna Park summits of the American Radiator Company Building, like a large “castle” out of a goldfish bowl. Here the light of the setting sun strikes that crowded mass of upright rectangles and blunt truncated towers, bringing out in the raw stone and drab bricks their yellows without delicacy or brightness, their browns without richness or warmth. Brooklyn, Long Island City, Bronx, Englewood, Hoboken, Jersey City: straight streets, square walls, crowded bulks, regular rectangular windows—more than ten million people sucked into that vast ever-expanding barracks, with scarcely a garden, scarcely a park, scarcely an open square, whose distances in all directions are blotted out in a pale slate-gray. And here is the pile of stone, brick, nickel and steel, the shell of offices, shafts, windows and steps, that outmultiplies and outstacks them all—that, more purposeless and superfluous than any, is being advertized as a triumph in the hour when the planless competitive society, the dehumanized urban community, of which it represents the culmination, is bankrupt.
This big loft is absolutely empty, there is nothing to look at in it—or rather there is only one thing: a crude but genial mural drawn in pencil by, presumably, one of the plasterers or electricians, which, all unknown to the management, confronts every visitor to the fifty-fifth floor. A large male figure is seen standing upright and fornicating, Venus aversa, with a stooping female figure, who has no arms but pendulous breasts. The man is saying, “O, man!” Further along is a gigantic vagina with its name in four large letters written under it.
One is grateful to the man who drew these pictures: he is a public benefactor. He has done something to take the curse off the opening of the Empire State Building.
John Dravic* came to Buchanan six years ago and got a job in the Semlin car-shop. Before that he had been in Pennsylvania. He was born in Jugoslavia and his wife was an Austrian. He was forty and she was thirty. They had two sons, five and six, and two years after they came to Buchanan they had another son.
John Dravic bought a little house in Buchanan on Broda Avenue. There is more variety and more space in Broda Avenue than in most places in mill communities. The mill itself is a big low brick building with a notched roof and it has a picket-fence around it, guarded by a man with a gun in a holster; but outside there are little gardens with—just now, the first days of May—some white flowers as well as green vegetables; a corner saloon with billiard tables and Polish newspapers; an Italian store with vases of gay yellow, white and pink paper flowers in the windows and another with a stuffed eagle spreading its wings; a little backyard apple orchard with apple trees all in white bloom and with their trunks whitewashed up to the branches; and a little slimy and greenish but running stream with the rusty foot of an iron bedstead sticking out of it and a baby-carriage tire lying on the bottom. Across the street from John Dravic’s house are several tiny bright-red brick mansions with little stone terraces built up from the street and thick clumps of creeping pinks, their pink livid beside the brick, oozing over the terraces toward the street. At the foot of the street is the Payson River, fresh and gleaming below its falls, flowing nervously and swiftly past the new greenery of its locust-grown bank. But beyond the river is a waste-darkened canal between a textile mill and a paper mill. The road that goes over the Payson has on one side a splendid green-and-orange Tom Thumb golf-course, with special little heart-shaped chairs, and on the other side a grisly dump for old scrapped car-bodies. And the whole landscape, even in May, coming to life as it is with spring, seems irremediably infected with the disease that blights industrial settlements—so that what ought to be fields and country hillsides are everywhere wastes going bald of grass and the finest country weather is made gassy and tarnished with smoke.
John Dravic’s house is not fancy, as some of the Buchanan houses are—it is a plain two-story affair, dark-green, with a white double porch for both stories. He always let out the bottom floor and lived above: there are four very small rooms and a kitchen and a bath on each. About a year ago an Italian woman and her family rented the bottom floor. She was a big, tall, strong woman from Bologna with gray hair and gray eyes. Her first husband had died of t.b. and she had three tubercular children by him. Her second husband drank and left her. Both the girls had to be sent to the free tuberculosis hospital. The boy had earned a living in a butcher-shop, but when he came down with t.b. too, Mrs. Berelli had to go to work in the mill. And when the slump came she found herself earning only $15 or $20, working four days every other week. Finally she found herself laid off altogether. They didn’t want anybody over forty, and if she went to the factory gate, they’d chase her away like a dog. They were putting in automatic looms which made it possible to produce more with fewer people. One person was supposed to be able to attend to six of the new looms, whereas each weaver had had only two of the old ones. She had to sell her insurance, and lost money on it, but even so she didn’t have enough to live on and pay the rent. One of her girls, who had only had light symptoms, was being sent home from the hospital. Mrs. Berelli appealed to the city for relief, and the city agreed to pay her rent.
John Dravic was her landlord and he wouldn’t have put her out, but he was out of work himself. After five years in the Semlin car-shop he had been laid off last January and there was no hope of their taking anybody back. For a short time after that he had had a job minding the furnace in a New York theatre, but the play went off and the theatre closed, and since then he had had nothing. He walked all over New York and Payson and everywhere within walking distance (because his money was so low that he couldn’t even afford carfare), but he couldn’t find anything to do.
The Dravics were quiet people and kept very much to themselves. They didn’t know anybody well, because they had only been in Buchanan six years, and in a community of mixed Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians and Jews it takes longer than that to make friends—that’s one reason they don’t get together to organize. But Mrs. Berelli liked them and they were nice to her. When Mrs. Berelli had just come back from the hospital after an operation, Mrs. Dravic, who was a delicate woman herself, had always come down every night after she had gotten into bed to see that she was all right. Every morning she would talk to Mr. Dravic when he started out to look for work. He had gotten very gloomy about it. He would say: “You’re the only one workin’ in the house and now you’re not workin’!” She would try to cheer him up by saying: “Well, now that we’re not workin’, we might just as well not worry and go out in the backyard and take a sunbath!” That was what she used to do, though the truth was she didn’t know which way to turn. But she always tried to keep the Dravics’ spirits up, just as whenever she went to see her son in the hospital, she always said she was doing fine, so that he wouldn’t worry about her.
Mr. Dravic, when he was home, used to work hard over a little vegetable garden and a little strip of lawn beside the house. He always kept himself busy. Another thing he used to do was teach his two older boys music. He loved music and had two violins, a ’cello and a guitar. One of the boys learned the violin and the other the ’cello, and they would play trios almost every evening. Sometimes they would get other people in and have an amateur orchestra. John Dravic was extremely fond of his boys. Mrs. Berelli would see them all out walking together: Mr. Dravic was tall and the four-year-old baby was tiny. The oldest boy went to high school and was brilliant. He made little airplanes and boats and he wrote a piece in the high-school paper about how the government in Russia looked after the poor people whereas in America it didn’t care. Mrs. Berelli herself couldn’t understand how the rich people could do such a thing as to let the millworkers starve. Buchanan, Payson and Semlin and all the other neighboring mill towns were full of families out of work. Mrs. Berelli didn’t know why that President in the White House didn’t do something about it.
At last, a few weeks ago, John Dravic decided to go into business. He bought a little corner store which sold soft drinks, cigars and candies, across the river in Payson. Somebody persuaded him it was a good investment and he borrowed $300 to buy it. But it turned out that it wasn’t such a good investment, because there was a much bigger and better candy and cigar store only a few blocks away; and John Dravic had never had any experience at store-keeping: he had never done anything but work in car-shops. He began to get discouraged when he came to realize how meager his stock was, that he had no money to buy any more and that he was $300 in debt. After a week of spending every day sitting alone in the shop and waiting for customers that didn’t come, he got so that he hated to get up in the morning and go there. He never did anything about the slovenly-looking signs which said “Soft Drinks” and “Cigars” scrawled up in watery white print on the insides of the windows and when the pile of Between the Acts boxes which was the sole window display toppled over, he didn’t fix it up again.
Early in the morning of the first of May, sometime between one and two, Mrs. Berelli’s daughter, who was home from the hospital now, came in and waked her up. She had just been waked up herself by an awful bang from the floor above. The next minute, Mrs. Dravic came running downstairs and said that her husband had shot himself. They rushed up and found John Dravic on the floor of the boys’ bedroom: he was reaching with his hands and straining with the upper part of his body as if he were trying to get hold of something to get up by. Mrs. Dravic turned on the light and Mrs. Berelli saw that the bed was all soaking in blood.
All three of the boys were there, with blood like upset paint all over their faces. He had shot them all while they were asleep. A little while before, he had taken the baby out of his crib in the room where Mrs. Dravic slept. She had thought nothing of it at the time, because he did that every night to carry him to the bathroom before he went to bed. But tonight he had taken him in and put him into bed with the two boys.
They were all dead by six o’clock in the morning. Now poor Mrs. Dravic, who yesterday had a family that played trios in the evenings has nothing but four corpses for whom the cheap undertaker has done his best to patch up heads blown out with point-blank pistol shots. The only comfort is that the baby looks pretty good.