Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  But the war in the 19th Ward of Chicago is not yet over. There are hints, there are rumors, and there are whispers in the saloons and cafés and the question that is being whispered is “Who will be the next man to die?”

  There are many answers.

  Chicago Never Wetter Than Today

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  July 2, 1921

  CHICAGO.—For a time after Prohibition set in there was a romantic aura about obtaining liquor in Chicago. The wily hooch-seeker was accustomed to make various cabalistic signs to the watchful bartender. Cults of the lifted finger and the thumbed ear flourished. There was a certain pride in being “known.” That has all passed.

  Anyone wanting a drink in Chicago now goes into a bar and gets it. Known or unknown, he will obtain it if he has seventy-five cents. It is safe to say that no one in Chicago is ever more than three blocks away from a saloon where whiskey and gin are sold openly over the bar.

  Visitors from other parts of the States are astonished and amazed. It seems unbelievable. But the explanation is very simple.

  In Chicago the city police take no part in enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment. Chicago always voted wet, and the Chicago police, with the splendid bovine mind of the American “Bull,” still consider it wet.

  There are eight federal Prohibition-enforcement officers in Chicago. Four of them are doing office work, the other four are guarding a warehouse. And the city is, except for the price of liquor, as it was before Prohibition became a reality over the rest of the country.

  Then there is beer. St. Louis was the greatest brewery city in the States. When Prohibition came into effect, the St. Louis brewers believed that the end had come to the brewery business, and at once turned their big plants into soft-drink factories. Chicago saw the handwriting on the brewery wall, but didn’t believe it for a moment. They shut down for a while and then commenced making beer again—real beer—with a greater percentage of alcohol than had been allowed for a long time before the Eighteenth Amendment.

  Now we have the interesting spectacle of the St. Louis breweries fighting to have Prohibition enforced. For the tremendous flow of real beer from the Chicago breweries, that have been running full blast, is killing the demand for near beer.

  When the breweries first started on their old pre-Prohibition schedule of production, there was a great deal of beer to be had in the city, but it cost fifty cents a stein. Then some bars and restaurants started cutting prices and now real beer can be had all over the city for thirty cents a stein—fifteen cents a glass or fifty dollars a barrel.

  The other day in a Loop restaurant I saw three mounted policemen seated at a table with tall steins of beer before them. Their horses were hitched outside the restaurant. As we sat at our table the headwaiter came up and requested that we excuse him just a moment while he moved the table. We rose, the table was pushed to one side, and a trapdoor opened. Out from the trapdoor four white-uniformed bartenders rolled twelve barrels of beer. As they were rolled across the floor, past the policemen’s table, the three looked lovingly at the big brown casks.

  “It’s the real old stuff, Bill,” said one appreciatively, “the real good old stuff.”

  So much for police enforcement of Prohibition.

  Of course there are shakedowns. Every bartender who runs openly has to pay his bit for police protection, and that keeps the price of liquor up. To combat this necessity for charging a high tariff for drinks the “Athletic Club” has appeared.

  The Nowata Athletic Club is a type of this institution. Its reason for existence is to eliminate the weekly slush fund for police. So far it is highly successful.

  Passing a lynx-eyed, derby-hatted, red-faced observer who stands with his hand toying with an electric bell at the entrance, you climb three flights of stairs to the clubrooms. Entrance is barred by a chain lock, and is only effected by presenting a blue card bearing your name and number, and the name of the club. After the card is scrutinized, you are admitted to the clubrooms.

  Furnishings of the Nowata Club consist of a number of tables and chairs. As soon as you are seated a Negro waiter appears with a number of drinks equal to the number of men in the party. The charge is only fifty cents a drink and the whiskey is slightly older than that bought over the adjacent bars.

  “Fred,” the waiter is instructed, “there are some gentlemen here who want to become members of the club.”

  “Yassuh?” Fred is very dignified. “If they will be so kind as to write theah names on this slip of papah, I will be honohed to tendah them membeahship cahds.”

  In a short time the membership cards are brought to the members of the party and the Nowata Club’s membership is again increased.

  There never has been any record of anyone being blackballed at the Nowata Club. Its membership is well over a thousand now and it bids fair to be the largest club in Chicago.

  Brokers, board of trade operators and men from the La Salle Street bond houses form the bulk of its membership.

  Present conditions cannot last in Chicago. The government will send more Prohibition agents or there will be a less liberal administration, but it is a strange situation at present, a city legally bone-dry, in which liquor is one of the leading occupations.

  Condensing the Classics

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  August 20, 1921

  They have nearly finished with their job of condensing the classics. They are a little group of earnest condensers, said to be endowed by Andrew Carnegie, who have been laboring for the last five years at reducing the literature of the world into palatable morsels for the tired businessman’s consumption.

  Les Misérables has been cut to ten pages. Don Quixote is said to run to about a column and a half. Shakespeare’s plays would be cut to eight hundred words each. The Iliad and the Odyssey might reduce to about a stick and a half apiece.

  It is a splendid thing to bring the classics within range of the tired or retired businessman, even though it casts a stigma on the attempt of the colleges and universities to bring the businessman within range of the classics. But there is a quicker way to present the matter to those who must run while reading: reduce all literature to newspaper headlines, with a short news dispatch following, to give the gist of the matter.

  Take Don Quixote for example:

  Crazed Knight in Weird Tilt

  MADRID, SPAIN (By Classic News Service) (Special).—War hysteria is blamed for the queer actions of “Don” Quixote, a local knight who was arrested early yesterday morning when engaged in the act of “tilting” with a windmill. Quixote could give no explanation of his actions.

  William Blake would reduce well.

  Big Cat in Flames

  Heat-maddened brute terrorizes jungle

  RAJPUTANA, INDIA, JUNE 15 (By Classic News Service) (Special).—William Blake, widely known English poet, arrived here today in a state of nervous collapse after a series of nerve-racking adventures in the Rajputana jungle. Blake was lost without food or clothing for eleven days.

  Blake, still delirious, cries, “Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night.”

  Local hunters have gone out in search of the beast. The “forest of the night” is believed to refer to the Nite River, a stream near Rajputana.

  Then there is Coleridge:

  Albatross-Slayer Flays Prohibition

  “Ancient” Mariner in bitter assault on bone-dry enforcement

  Cardiff, Wales, June 21 (By Classic News Service) (Delayed).—“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink” is the way John J. (Ancient) Mariner characterized the present Prohibition regime in an address before the United Preparatory Schools here yesterday. Mariner was mobbed at the end of his address by a committee from the Ornithological Aid Society.

  Operas are much too long—there’s Pagliacci—it doesn’t even merit a large headline.

  Riot in Sicily, 2 Dead, 12 Wounded

  Palermo, Sicily, June 25 (By Classic News Service).—Two are dead and half a s
core wounded as the result of a brawl started in the local opera house here last night. Giuseppe Canio, a ring-leader of the rioters, committed suicide.

  Shakespeare was obviously verbose and his plots are too sensational. Here’s the gist of Othello:

  Slays His White Bride

  Society girl, wed to African war hero, found strangled in bed

  Jealousy, fanned into fury by primitive jungle rage, is believed by the police to have caused the death of Mrs. Desdemona Othello of 2345 Ogden Avenue.

  It was just a little over two years ago that Captain Frank Othello stepped off the transport at Hoboken. On his breast glittered the decorations bestowed by an admiring sovereign. His dark face gleamed with pleasure as he saw the lithe figure.

  There would be more—much more—perhaps. Shakespeare wasn’t so verbose after all. The Othello case would fill almost as much space in the newspapers as the Stillman case. Special articles, psychoanalysts’ reports, discussions of intermarriage by women feature writers would flood the papers. Perhaps Shakespeare is pretty well condensed as he is.

  Muscle Shoals: Cheap Nitrates

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  November 12, 1921

  Muscle Shoals means Clam Shallows, but it did not mean even that to most Canadians or Americans until Henry Ford dragged the name out of the wartime morass where it had sunk in company with Hog Island and Eagle Boat and other great war hopes.

  Mr. Ford brought Muscle Shoals, Alabama, back into public consciousness when he made an offer to the United States War Department, a few months ago, to buy or lease the great government nitrate plant there for a period of 100 years.

  Muscle Shoals is a rocky, shallow place in the Tennessee River in North Central Alabama, where the United States government has built a great concrete-constructed plant for making death and life. It was designed as a death factory, and the largest dam in America was thrown across the river to furnish water power for the manufacture of ammonium nitrate, the base of high explosives. But when the armistice came, scientists set to work converting the grim war plant into an aid to life, and it is now a producer of commercial nitrogen, the element that must be given the soil in order to grow the crops that feed North America and the world.

  For years engineers had advocated the construction of a dam across the Tennessee River at the shallows where Muscle Shoals’ rocks prevent the passage of steamers up and down the stream.

  The country adjacent to Muscle Shoals was surveyed, as a result of this agitation, several years ago. When the United States entered the war, and were at once in need of nitrate in large quantities for explosives, the advocates of Muscle Shoals as a power site pressed their claims to President Wilson and through him convinced the congressional board that the needed nitrate plant should be built at Sheffield, Alabama, three miles from the shoals. A dam was ordered built at the shoals to furnish power for the nitrate project, and at the same time render the river navigable.

  After careful consideration the United States government finally decided to build their plant for the manufacture of ammonium nitrate by the cyanamide process and to operate it by steam-generated electrical power until the dam was completed. The nitrate plant was practically completed and in operation two months before the armistice was signed.

  It was an interesting situation, a situation interesting to everyone who eats, that forced the United States into the building of the Muscle Shoals nitrate plant. Nitrogen is the base of all explosives, at the same time it is the absolutely indispensable fertilizing element for the growth of the world’s great staple crops, corn, wheat, grains and grasses.

  Twenty-three years ago Sir William Crookes, the British scientist, made the startling statement that the world was rapidly approaching starvation. Sir William laid this to the concentration of an increasing population into cities and the consequent multiplication of food demands upon each acre of tilled land. He pointed out that the grain-eating habit of mankind was rapidly robbing the soil of its nutrition, that there was not enough agricultural land to keep the race going for more than a few decades and that nothing could avert world famine except the development of new sources of nitrogen and the discovery of new methods to apply this gaseous element to the soil in new and usable forms.

  Although Sir William’s forecast was too pessimistic (he predicted general starvation by 1933), he served a valuable turn to the world by calling attention to the problem of supplying “fixed” nitrogen.

  Before the war, the world’s nitrate supply was found in the sodium mountain beds located in the arid, desert plateau of northern Chile and Peru. Germany saw that she was amply supplied with “Chile nitrates” before she made war. She valued the Chilean source so greatly, however, that she lost a part of her fleet off the Falkland Islands when Von Spee’s patrolling squadron was wiped out by the British navy.

  Confronted by the sudden need of commercial nitrates for the manufacture of ammunition in the United States, the government started the building of the Muscle Shoals plant, and, until it was completed, imported the Chilean product, releasing to the farmers only one-sixth of the 600,000 tons of imported nitrates they need annually.

  The Wilson Dam, which is to furnish power for the operation of the nitrate plants, is still some months from completion. With the single exception of the Aswan Dam across the Nile in Upper Egypt, and perhaps the Vyrnwy Dam, in Wales, it will be the largest dam in the world.

  Although many subprojects will undoubtedly develop out of the Muscle Shoals great water power, due to its great manufacturing situation, its fundamental purpose is the manufacture of nitrogens, and it is as such that Mr. Ford, and recently other agencies, have offered to take it over from the government. Pressure, however, has been brought to bear on the U.S. government to refuse to appropriate money to complete the Wilson Dam, which is the generative heart of the whole project.

  The annual loss in depreciation and interest on the already half-constructed dam will be greater than the appropriation needed to complete it. At the rate at which work was being carried on, the entire dam will be completed in about twenty-two more months.

  When completed, in whosever hands it may be, the Muscle Shoals plant will give all of North America what it vitally needs—a source of cheap nitrates for farm consumption. All these nitrates are imported from Chile at present, and their cost will be cut to the bone by American production. Cutting down the cost of nitrates will be a valuable step in reducing the cost of production of all grains and will be a shortcut to lowering the present price of bread.

  It seems a long way from a wartime plant on the shallows of the Tennessee River to a reduction in the price of a loaf of bread on a Toronto table, but it is a straight way, if the Muscle Shoals plant is carried on and completed.

  On Weddynge Gyftes

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 17, 1921

  Three traveling clocks

  Tick

  On the mantelpiece

  Comma

  But the young man is starving.

  That is the beginning of a poem in the best of late 1921 rhythms. The rest of it will never be finished. It is too tragic. It deals with a subject too tragic for this typewriter to chatter about. It is a poem about wedding gifts.

  A day will come when I shall be able to hear the words “wedding gift” spoken without suffering the acute nervous sensation of a man who steps unconsciously upon the tail of a large and hitherto silent cat, at the same time thrusting his hand unknowingly into a mass of closely curled rattlesnakes. That day is not yet here.

  It started with our rich friends. In common with most other poor people, we have a few rich friends. A rich friend is a wonderful potentiality. You always have a vague sort of feeling that when your very rich and very close friend decides to join his very rich ancestors in one of the more exclusive Elysian residential districts, he may do something very handsome for you in the way of a bequest. You also have a feeling that when you marry, your richest friends may do something very fitting about it
all.

  All our friends did. They all gave us traveling clocks. Now one traveling clock is a delight; two traveling clocks are a pleasure; three traveling clocks are unnecessary, and four traveling clocks are ridiculous. The traveling clock is evidently the dernier cri in wedding gifts. We have four of them. That ought to be the dernier shout.

  There are a number of things we need badly, and a large assortment of things we could use. We need towels, spoons, to replace the tarnished ones that are constantly becoming rusty and scratching the mouths of careless guests, and we need a great deal of money.

  When an assortment of checks came from old family friends, at first it seemed sad that the blue slips of paper should be the only reminders of their personalities. Later, when we discovered that large, blue, iridescent fruit bowls were to be the only reminders of the personalities of eighty percent of our friends, we changed our minds. Of course, I have a few friends who remind me of large, blue, iridescent punch bowls but their number is limited.

  I once had a friend who reminded me of a large, blue, iridescent traveling brewery, but I recall no friend who reminds me of a suede leather traveling clock. And while I have had a number of friends who were perfect pictures, I have never had a friend who was a perfect picture frame. The gift as an expression of personality is a huge fallacy. What personalities are to be suggested to us by a handsome soup ladle or a Sheffield silver vegetable dish? Even the checks only suggest the personalities of the landlord, the milk man, the telephone company and the grocer.