that kind of thing. But I have several books. One is a magazine called "The Detroiter," with the subtitle "Spokesman of Optimism." It is full of news of new hotels and new factories and new athletic clubs and all kinds of expansion. It fairly bursts from its covers with enthusiasm—and with business banalities about Detroit's "onward sweep," her "surging ahead," her "banner year," and her "efficiency." "Be a Booster," it advises, and no one can say that it does not live up to its principles. Indeed, as I look it over, I wonder if I have not done Detroit an injustice in giving to Cleveland the blue ribbon for "boosting." The Detroit Board of Commerce even goes so far in its "boosting" as to "boost" Detroit into seventh place among American cities, while the "World Almanac" (most valuable volume on the one-foot shelf of books I carried on my travels) places Detroit ninth.
Like Cleveland, I find that Detroit is first in the production of a great many things. In fact, the more I read these books issued by commercial bodies, the more I am amazed at the varied things there are for cities to be first in. It is a miserable city, indeed, which is first in nothing at all. Detroit is first in the production of overalls, stoves, varnish, soda and salt products, automobile accessories, adding machines, pharmaceutical manufactures, aluminum castings, in shipbuilding on the Great Lakes and, above all, in the manufacture of motor cars. And, as the Board of Commerce adds significantly, "That's not all!"
But it is enough.
The motor-car development in Detroit interested me particularly. When I asked in Buffalo why Detroit was "surging ahead" so rapidly in comparison with certain other cities, they answered, as I knew they would: "It's the automobile business."
But when I asked why the automobile business should have settled on Detroit as a headquarters instead of some other city (as, for instance, Buffalo), they found it difficult to say. One Buffalonian informed me that Detroit banks had been more liberal than those of other cities in supporting the motor industry in its early days. This was, however, vigorously denied in Detroit. When I mentioned it to the president of one of the largest automobile concerns he laughed.
"Banks don't do business that way," he declared. "The very thing banks do not do is to support new, untried industries. After you have proved that you can make both motor cars and money they'll take care of you. Not before. On the other hand, when the banks get confidence in any one kind of business they very often run to the opposite extreme. That was the way it used to be in the lumber business. Most of the early fortunes of Detroit were made in lumber. The banks got used to the lumber business, so that a few years ago all a man had to do was to print 'Lumber' on his letterhead, write to the banks and get a line of credit. Later, when the automobile business began to boom, the same thing happened over again: the man whose letterhead bore the word 'Automobiles' was taken care of." The implication was that sometimes he was taken care of a little bit too well.
"Then why did Detroit become the automobile center?" I asked.
The question proved good for an hour's discussion among certain learned pundits of the "trade" who were in the president's office at the time I asked it.
First, it was concluded, several early motor "bugs" happened to live in or near Detroit. Henry Ford lived there. He was always experimenting with "horseless
carriages" in the early days and being laughed at for it. Also, a man named Packard built a car at Warren, Ohio. But the first gasoline motor car to achieve what they call an "output" was the funny little one-cylinder Oldsmobile which steered with a tiller and had a curved dash like a sleigh. It is to the Olds Motor Company, which built that car, that a large majority of the automobile manufactories in Detroit trace their origin. Indeed, there are to-day no less than a dozen organizations, the heads of which were at some time connected with the original Olds Company. This fifteen-year-old forefather of the automobile business was originally made in Lansing, Mich., but the plant was moved to Detroit, where the market for labor and materials was better. The Packard plant was also moved there, and for the same reasons, plus the fact that the company was being financed by a group of young Detroit men.
It was not, perhaps, entirely as an investment that these wealthy young Detroiters first became interested in the building of motor cars. That is to say, I do not think they would have poured money so freely into a scheme to manufacture something else—something less picturesque in its appeal to the sporting instinct and the imagination. The automobile, with its promise, was just the right thing to interest rich young men, and it did interest them, and it has made many of them richer than they were before.
It seems to be an axiom that, if you start a new business anywhere, and it is successful, others will start in the same business beside you. One of the pundits referred me, for example, to Erie, Pa., where life is entirely saturated with engine and boiler ideas simply because the Erie City Iron Works started there and was successful. There are now sixteen engine and boiler companies in Erie, and all of them, I am assured, are there either directly or indirectly because the Erie City Iron Works is there. In other words, we sat in that office and had a very pleasant hour's talk merely to discover that there is truth in the familiar saying about birds of a feather.
When we got that settled and the pundits began to drift away to other plate-glass rooms along the mile, more or less, of corridor devoted to officials' offices, I became interested in a little wooden box which stood upon the president's large flat-top desk. I was told it was a dictagraph. Never having seen a dictagraph before, and being something of a child, I wished to play with it as I used to play with typewriters and letter-presses in my father's office years ago. And the president of this many-million-dollar corporation, being a kindly man with, of course, absolutely nothing to do but to supply itinerant scribes with playthings, let me toy with the machine. Sitting at the desk, he pressed a key. Then, without changing his position, he spoke into the air:
"Fred," he said, "there's some one here who wants to ask you a question."
Then the little wooden box began to talk.
"What does he want to ask about?" it said.
That put it up to me. I had to think of something to ask. I was conscious of a strange, unpleasant feeling of being hurried—of having to reply quickly before something happened—some breaking of connections.
I leaned toward the machine, but the president waved me back: "Just sit over there where you are."
Then I said: "I am writing articles about Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit. How would you compare them?"
"Well," replied the Fred-in-the-box, "I used to live in Cleveland. I've been here four years and I wouldn't want to go back."
After that we paused. I thought I ought to say something more to the box, but I didn't know just what.
"Is that all you want to know?" it asked.
"Yes," I replied hurriedly. "I'm much obliged. That's all I want to know."
Of course it really wasn't all—not by any means! But I couldn't bring myself to say so then, so I said the easy, obvious thing, and after that it was too late. Oh, how many things there are I want to know! How many things I think of now which I would ask an oracle when there is none to ask! Things about the here and the hereafter; about the human spirit; about practical religion, the brotherhood of man, the inequalities of men, evolution, reform, the enduring mysteries of space, time, eternity, and woman!
A friend of mine—a spiritualist—once told me of a séance in which he thought himself in brief communication with his mother. There were a million things to say. But when the medium requested him to give a message he could only falter: "Are you all right over there?" The answer came: "Yes, all right." Then my friend said: "I'm so glad!" And that was all.
"It is the feeling of awful pressure," he explained to me, "which drives the thoughts out of your head. That is why so many messages from the spirit