Read Online The American: A Middle Western Legend by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

graystone mansion that was his; he had been only twelve years in Chicago, and the achievement was no small one. Actually, he had grown with the city, grown with the brutal, creative vigor of it.
    How well he recalled what kind of a place Chicago had been in 1875! There, already, America’s peculiar triumph, the railroads, converged. From the west and southwest the cattle came, by the millions, to be gutted, blooded, and rendered; a crazy-quilt of a city grew around the process of slaughter. Coal came from the south, iron from the north. Lumber drifted in through the lakes. Five hundred miles of Godforsaken street alternated between ice and mud, and an endless vista of shacks and sprawling factories spread like fast-multiplying mold. Here, a whole creed of power, success, wealth, and brute energy came into being. Alongside the horsecars came cattle riders from the vast prairie lands westward, and alongside the sooty trains were magnificent carriages. From the east, the south, the west, from the across the seas, workingmen poured in by the hundreds of. thousands—Yankees, Rebels, Germans, Irish, Bohemians, Jews, Slavs, Poles, Russians—hard, desperate men who fought to put enough in their bellies to maintain life, and always it seemed that for every job there were two men; and even as these men fought, others fought them, a new kind of giant, emperor, king, the man of the million dollars and the hundred million dollars. So there was blood let, and violence, and such a ferment as existed nowhere else in all the known world, and still into every corner of the earth Chicago sent forth her hungry cry for men, and more men.
    This was it, his city, making him and made out of him. A man should stand on what is his own.

V
    He went down to breakfast, and when he was at the foot of the stairs, his wife said to him, “Isn’t it a fine morning, dear?” “A fine morning—yes, a fine morning,” he answered. She was wearing a gray skirt and a white blouse, crisp, clean, and bright; a person whom mornings agreed with, she smiled confidently. It might be said about her, if you were to say one thing to define her, that she was poised, and it was poise the Judge needed and appreciated. If it came to him that other people were speaking about her childlessness, and what a shame it was that a man like the Judge had no children, his reaction was furious anger; what did they know, and what did they understand of marriage and of what a man wanted of a wife?
    As they sat down at the table, he looked at her again, nodded, and returned her smile. As usual, his paper was folded alongside his plate. As he unfolded it, he was already spooning into the heavy applesauce. “Cream?” his wife asked him. He nodded. He read, in the large black head, ANARCHISTS TO DTE TODAY. Then he took his second spoonful of sauce. ANARCHISTS TO DIE TODAY.
    Emma, his wife, poured heavy, yellow-tinted cream onto his fruit as he read, “At long last, after a year and a half, finis will be written to the Case of the Anarchists, and honest citizens can draw a deep breath and sleep soundly in their beds once more. We express our approval that in spite of so much malignant pressure put to bear, the verdict—”
    His wife interrupted him by asking what it was.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t think,” she said, “that it’s good for you to read at meals. I don’t think it’s good for your digestion, and it certainly isn’t polite.”
    â€œPolite?”
    â€œIt’s simply bad manners, Pete.”
    He always bowed to his wife when it came to manners. He had been congratulated many times, by those of his friends who knew about such things, on his wife’s impeccable taste. Of taste, he had a small and carefully and painfully acquired stock, and while he trusted it, he did not stretch it. As long as he lived, he would not forget his first formal dinner, in the not so distant past, where the