by Colin Asher
“I fulfill my obligations even if I have to rob a warehouse to do it,” one of Nelson’s most memorable characters says in The Man with the Golden Arm. His name is Sparrow. He makes his money stealing dogs, shoplifting, and running drugs, but he thinks of himself as a businessman.
Sparrow sometimes plays the clown, but he was speaking earnestly about his sense of obligation. His best friend, Frankie Machine, doesn’t pick up on his tone though. The conversation bores Frankie, so he responds lightly.
“That’s the problem with the whole country, all you businessmen cheatin’ the peoples so fast ’n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal,” he jokes.
“I don’t think there’s any difference,” Sparrow responds evenly, “a businessman is a hustler with the dough to hustle on the legit ’n a hustler is a businessman who’s either gone broke or never had it. Back me up with five grand tonight ’n tomorrow mornin’ I get an invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce ’n no questions asked.”
Frankie and Sparrow are speaking in Chicago a few years after the conclusion of World War II. They can sense the social order realigning around them, and they know virtue has become fungible—less meaningful than it once was, but harder to claim; as tangible as five thousand dollars, and just as difficult to get your hands on. Sparrow is stuck on the wrong side of that divide, but instead of resigning himself to his fate, or embracing a nihilistic view of the world, he adheres to his own personal code and rejects the idea that wealth and virtue are synonymous.
Nelson’s discipline began “sliding off” after he took Taft’s course. Like an alcoholic returning to the bottle, first he tried a little, and then he tried a lot. He started eating more, stopped taking cold showers, and began responding when people spoke to him. Then, in the spring of 1930, he moved into a boardinghouse at 714 Iowa Street and began sleeping with his landlady. “I think I began to recognize that pleasure wasn’t necessarily evil,” he said.
That was around the time Nelson decided to become a journalist. It was a compromise position—it promised neither the aesthete’s life he envisioned after discovering Meditations, nor the prestige of becoming a sociologist, but it was a realistic option. He couldn’t afford to stay in school long enough to earn a graduate degree, and he had realized that asceticism wasn’t a career. Whatever journalism’s shortcomings were, it was better than retreading tires for a living.
After Nelson made his choice, he pursued his new trade with the same energy he showed when he transformed himself into a Stoic. He took nine journalism courses in his last three semesters of college, and worked as a court reporter for the student paper, the Daily Illini. He earned a spot on the banquet committee of the Illinois State Press Convention in November 1930, and the next month he stayed on campus through the winter break and served as the Illini’s assistant editor for the holidays.
Nelson was well positioned for a job by the spring of 1931. He had been writing for the paper for at least a year, and his grades were good—in his last two semesters, he earned seven As, four Bs, and a C in headline writing. He joined the Journalism Alumni Association after he took his finals, and sat for a test the Illinois Press Association offered to graduating seniors. He passed, and received a wallet card that could be presented to potential employers. It said: Nelson Abraham is a capable “editor, columnist, foreign correspondent, copywriter.”
Nelson received his BSJ—Bachelor of Science in Journalism—on June 16, 1931, and then prepared to return to Chicago and launch his career. His future seemed certain, and when he pictured it, he conjured a bucolic scene—a steady job with a little newspaper, collared shirts, and a comfortable retirement. “I had tremendous faith” in the “little card” the Press Association gave me, he said. It meant “I could be whatever I wanted to be.”
* This was not entirely a matter of choice. Nelson would have had a hard time assembling a social life on campus. Student life revolved around fraternities at the time, and most of them disallowed Jews.
† It’s likely that this story—like all stories about Isaac—is partly apocryphal. That said, Goldie told it for at least twenty years without Gerson contradicting her.
‡ Credit for reporting this story belongs to Ed Borman, a Daily Illini reporter who wrote a series of articles in 1939 that detailed the arrangements Champaign’s brothel operators reached with the city’s mayors and police between 1925 and 1939.
§ “What he wants to say is that we live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectables,” Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1956. “Nelson was basically an underworld groupie,” William Styron wrote forty years later.
The Past Receded Like a Wave Just Spent
(June 18, 1931–January 1933)
Nelson entered the City News Bureau of Chicago wearing a dark suit and walked toward the general manager’s office. Glasses framed his brown eyes, and a conservative tie hung down the front of his high-collared dress shirt.
The bureau, a local wire service, was a proving ground for young journalists. Its office was notoriously filthy, and its staff was known for being unruly and tenacious—they kept a bottle of Scotch hidden in the flush tank of the toilet in the bathroom, and they approached their work the way soldiers would. They covered every corpse that reached the morgue, every news conference downtown, and every serious court case in the city with no expectation of gratitude or glory. They made duplicates of every story they filed, placed the copies inside canisters, inserted those canisters into pneumatic tubes, and sent them flying toward the city’s six largest papers at twenty feet per second. Editors skimmed those stories when they reached their destinations, and if they had merit, they appeared in the paper later that day beneath someone else’s byline.
Nelson waited to be acknowledged when he reached the general manager’s office. The man’s name was Isaac Gershman, and he had been with the bureau for fourteen years. He had a head shaped like an egg, and he spoke in staccato bursts.
I’m looking for a job, Nelson said when he had Gershman’s attention.
There’s no reason to even ask for your name, Gershman replied. Too many people need work now.
He wasn’t exaggerating. It was the spring of 1931, and the economic crisis that would later be called the Great Depression was a year and a half old. Chicago’s unemployment rate was twenty-five percent.
Nelson must have persisted, or begun to look desperate, because Gershman reversed himself immediately.
OK, he said, tell me your name. Then he turned and told his secretary, “Add this young man’s name to our list of applicants!”
“I’ll phone you as soon as we have an opening,” the secretary told Nelson. Then she went back to her work.
Nelson took a seat and resolved to remain in the office until he had been hired. He didn’t realize Gershman had been placating him, or that he was never going to receive a call. He waited, maybe for hours, until the secretary told him to leave, and then he limped back to his parents’ house at 4834 North Troy Street.
The Abraham family home was a crowded, despairing place that spring—thick with regret and frustrated ambition. Gerson’s garage was failing and his savings had vanished. He had invested his retirement money in swampy Florida land a few years earlier, and now it was gone. Bernice and her husband, Morris Joffe, were living on the second floor with their two-year-old son, Robert, but they weren’t paying rent. Morris lost his job after the stock market crash in 1929, and when the Albany Park Bank closed a year later, he lost five thousand dollars—every cent he had saved. Bernice was still working as a substitute teacher with the Chicago school district, but the city was paying her in scrip that had no cash value.
Nelson’s family hid their struggles from him while he was away at college, so returning home was like entering a funhouse version of his old life. Gerson had been earning a steady income when Nelson left for Urbana-Champaign. Joffe had been setting money aside to buy a house, and Bernice had been receiving checks regula
rly. Nelson had not been expected to shoulder any responsibilities then, but now his family was relying on him.
Nelson was confident the News Bureau would hire him at first, but he expanded his job search when he realized they never would. Chicago was home to the American, the Daily News, the Evening Post, the Herald Examiner, the Tribune, the Southtown Economist, and the Citizen, among others, and he intended to apply to every one of them.
Nelson had been only vaguely aware of the country’s economic crisis while he was in college. The Daily Illini ran stories about unemployment, emergency relief, and the Dow’s fluctuations while he was on staff, but those things seemed distant and abstract on campus.* Stock prices fell, rose, and fell again, but life in Urbana-Champaign was not much affected and it wasn’t clear there was any reason to worry. Recovery was announced more than once, and President Herbert Hoover kept insisting the dawn was about to break on the horizon. “I am convinced we have now passed the worst,” he said, “and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover.”
But Nelson felt the Depression’s impact acutely when he returned to Chicago. He sensed its presence in his home, read about its casualties in the papers, and saw its victims in the streets. The city was a purgatory that year, he wrote later—the past had receded “like a wave just spent,” the future was unknowable, and millions were trapped in “the slough of the waters,” waiting helplessly for the next wave in the set to thunder up the beach and scatter them like grains of sand.
Chicago’s social fabric was already badly frayed by the time Nelson began looking for work in June. Three-quarters of the city’s banks had closed and left their depositors penniless. The sidewalks were clogged with panhandlers, and the daily papers were filled with news of violence and desperation that grew more ominous by the day. A homeless child, no more than five or six years old, was discovered sleeping outside the St. Clair Hotel with a dog standing guard over him near the end of the month, and five days later a nightclub singer named Clementine McHugh shoved a chloroform soaked rag down her throat after being fired. When the police investigated her death, they found eighty-eight cents in her hotel room, and a note that read, “I’m tired of it all. I have made a failure of everything.”
Then a heat wave settled over the city and lingered for weeks. Hundreds of thousands of people jammed the Lake Michigan shore to cool off, and those who couldn’t afford train fare stayed home and baked. “Suffering was general,” the Tribune reported. Dozens died from the heat; a few drowned in scrums on the beaches. The parks became campgrounds in July as hundreds of women, turned away by the city’s overburdened shelters, took up residence in them. The government began defaulting on its payrolls that month as well, and Communist Party activists led marches through the streets every day to demand emergency relief, a moratorium on evictions, and the end of capitalism.†
By August, Chicago was a puddle of gasoline waiting for a match—and on the third day of the month, the police struck one.
Two officers, a real estate agent, and two bailiffs visited the 5000 block of South Dearborn Street that afternoon to evict a seventy-two-year-old woman named Diana Gross. They entered her apartment when she answered their knock, and they began to empty it. They carried her furniture outside and piled it on the sidewalk, and then did the same with her clothes, dishes, and keepsakes.
Gross’s neighbors watched them work. Then a few left the block to find representatives of the local Unemployment Council—a Communist Party front group. They found them leading a march nearby, and spread news of Gross’s eviction through the crowd. A few minutes later, five thousand activists wearing buttoned shirts and fedoras flooded Dearborn Street, surrounded the bailiffs and the police, and began carrying Gross’s possessions back inside her apartment.
Police reinforcements arrived on the scene before the activists were finished, and forced their way into the crowd. They were outnumbered, so they seized a few of the group’s leaders, threw them in a van, and drove away. Three officers arrived on foot then, and found themselves facing an angry crowd. They expected to find other police on the scene, but there were none. They drew their pistols in fear, and the crowd surged.
Twenty-five additional officers mobbed the block then, and found the three men who preceded them “bleeding from knife cuts and blows with bricks, stones, and sticks.” They began shooting, and a protestor returned fire from a doorway. The crowd fractured, and the police took cover inside a storefront and fired into the street blindly until it cleared.
By nightfall, three black protesters were dead. One was a Communist Party activist who arrived on the scene expecting to become a target. Before he reached Gross’s apartment, he told a friend, “If there is shooting I expect to be killed because I shall be on the front rank.” He was unarmed, but the police shot him five times. The second man to die had joined the protest on a whim. He panicked when the police began firing into the crowd, grabbed an officer’s gun, and was shot immediately. The last man to die, another activist, suffered the worst fate. The police abducted him during the melee in front of Gross’s house, threw him in a van, shot him in the head, mutilated his body, and then dumped it in Washington Park, where the Communist Party gathered before marches.
Mayor Anton Cermak was vacationing on a yacht during the fighting, but he came ashore to be briefed by an aide and issue a statement. “A ruthless policy of suppression would, in the present situation, only incite further disorders,” he said. “. . . [A] policy of conciliation must be adopted.” He urged people to remain calm, and he temporarily suspended all evictions. It was a prudent decision.
Sixty thousand activists marched down State Street five days later, carrying the bodies of the two activists who had been killed by the police. A red flag fluttered at the head of the procession, and banners reading JOIN THE FIGHTING PARTY OF YOUR CLASS moved through the crowd. Forty thousand people gathered on the sidewalks to watch the parade, and Communist Party members solicited them for donations.
By the end of summer, signs reading WE DO NOT PAY RENTS had begun to appear in apartment windows throughout the city. Serious people were talking about the possibility of a second American revolution, and Nelson was preparing to leave town. He had been searching for work for three months with no luck, and figured he would face less competition outside Chicago.
Nelson left home in the fall wearing his only suit. He was twenty-two—baby-faced, broke, maybe half as tough as he imagined himself to be.
He traveled alone, and his route was haphazard—sometimes north, and sometimes west. Occasionally, drivers noticed him walking along the shoulder of the road, spotted his high-collared shirt, mistook him for a priest, and pulled over to offer him a ride. But more often he walked, or rode in empty freight cars. He slept in homeless shelters when he was lucky enough to find one, and slept outside when he wasn’t. His life was as joyless as it had been while he was a Stoic, but far less dignified—he went where his rides carried him, and ate what he was given or nothing at all.
Every time Nelson entered a new town, he visited the office of the local newspaper, presented his Press Association card, and asked for a job. But the answer was always some version of no. When he stopped in small towns, they told him to look for work in the cities. And city papers invariably told him to try finding work at a small-town paper.
After a month or so, Nelson reached Minneapolis. He was four hundred miles from home, and it was getting cold. He went to Fourth Street, found the Journal’s office, went inside, and asked for work.
Their answer surprised him. “Well, sit down and try your hand,” an editor said. So Nelson did. He spent the day writing headlines, and at the end of his shift he was encouraged to return the next morning.
The Depression had hit Minneapolis just as hard as it hit Chicago. Tens of thousands of people were unemployed, and earlier that year a few hundred of them mobbed a grocery store and began emptying its shelves. The store’s owner tried to scare them off with a pistol, but to no avail. The crowd attacked whe
n they saw the gun, broke the owner’s arm, and continued about their business.
But the city felt like an oasis to Nelson. First, the Journal put him behind a desk. Then a grocer gave him food, and a hotel offered him a room with a view of the Foshay Tower—a thirty-two-story slate building modeled after the Washington Monument. Both extended him credit.‡
Nelson settled in at the paper and began to feel his life was finally coming together. Then, at the end of his first week, he saw people lining up for their checks and took his place in the queue. When he reached the front of the line, he asked for his.
“We can’t pay you,” the man in charge said. “You’re just getting experience. There’s a man out of town and you’re just filling in for him.”
This came as a surprise. “Well, then I have to leave,” Nelson said.
“Well, thanks for coming around,” the man said.
Nelson was still in Minneapolis when it began to snow. He had sixty cents and a half-empty bottle of liquor to his name, and he spent his days in bed, eavesdropping on the rooms below his.
Most of them were occupied by prostitutes. Nelson hadn’t realized that when he moved in, but when he stopped working and began to spend more time in the hotel, it became obvious. The sound of their commerce seeped through the floor, and he spent hours imagining himself into their lives. They must be miserable, he thought—piteous, sickly. “I began fancying the very wallpaper to be crawling with disease,” he wrote later.
One night, while Nelson was watching the snow fall outside his window, someone knocked on his door. The sound startled him. He opened it and found a young Swedish woman standing in the hallway, smiling. She was wearing flimsy pajamas, and there was a sweater draped over her shoulders.
Nelson stepped aside to let her in.
“Somebody told me you were drinkin’ Rock an’ Rye up here all by yourself,” she said.§ “Ain’t you lonesome? I thought you’d give me a drink.”