Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity. Take leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to collect them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by shapes, veins, stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those early years that there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of one thing or another that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of classification. I suspect that I did not get much beyond a glib naming of parts.

Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women were as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as well as of botany.

What had happened was undoubtedly that the tumults, the challenges of my day had finally penetrated my aloofness, and that I was feeling more and more the need of taking a part in them. The decade I spent in Poland and on The Chautauquan had a background not so unlike that of the present decade. At its beginning we were only fifteen years from a civil war which had left behind not only a vast devastated region with the problem of its reconstruction, but the problem of a newly freed people. It had left bitterness which in intensity and endurance no war but a civil war ever leaves. We had had our inflation, a devastating boom followed by seven years of depression, outbreaks of all the various forms of radical philosophy the world then knew. Youth talks glibly of communism today as if it had just appeared in the country; but Marxian Communists transferred the headquarters of the International to New York City in the seventies. More conspicuous than the Communists were the Anarchists. Every city in the United States had its little group, preaching and every now and then practicing direct action. Indeed, they were a factor in all the violent labor disturbances of the period.