I could learn held that the men had received a fair trial and exceptional consideration, were definitely or presumably guilty of murder, and the law should take its course. In some circles the subject was a closed issue; its discussion was taboo. Even an expression of doubt was regarded as an index of sympathy with the two Anarchists on trial. Many reached this decision with regret; more, with the stern resolve that the menace which these men represented should be dealt with summarily and effectively. As often happens in cases where prejudice is involved, there arose the distortion of the false issue; men meaning to be fair in discussion and conclusion are influenced by substituted issues that intrude and distort judgment. In this " case, most unfortunately, the issue approached that of a challenge to American institutions, thus naturally arousing strong feelings and a state of mind unfavorable to tolerance and a suspended judgment. All this appears in and between the lines of the protests against Miss Millay's article.

My dominant reaction to the judgments that prevailed through the recent gitation and its continuation in the present aftermath of opinion, viewing it all as an objective exhibit in the psychology of prejudice, is far from reassuring. We come out of the affair with 10 very creditable record; we didn't seep our heads or our hearts as well unler control as might be expected of a eople so privileged in education, in vailable leadership, in tolerant tradiion. I still retain the conviction that he American mind is big enough to nanage a Sacco-Vanzetti agitation more composedly, more wisely. And this olds as well if we accept the conclusion hat the way adopted was the right one. Our common name for this over-emoionalized and unwisely emotionalized ype of judgment is hysterical. To the ditorial comment that there is no ysteria in Miss Millay's words the leters of protest take exception. Much lepends upon how loosely or how rigidly ve use the term. There is certainly as nuch of it in the protests as in the fero of the poet's wrath, while the threat of cancellation of subscriptions as a form if protest suggests a childish petulance ongenial to hysteria. What impresses ne as peculiarly intolerant is the asserion that The Outlook should have delined to open its pages to a statement pposed to its own position. If that is he accepted idea of editorial responsiility, we have much to learn. The pub

lication of this article is a fine example of editorial tolerance; may it be abundantly followed! Equally commendable is the consideration given to the subject in the quieter period of the aftermath. When feeling runs high, reason runs low. Wise deliberation is possible when there has been time for calm reflection. The haste to get back to business as usual and forget the past is an indication of defective mental hygiene; it is poor morale. We were, and perhaps still are, eager to forget the Great War and throw away the lessons of the most momentous if disquieting piece of history of the modern period. This impatience is of a piece with the intolerance that eases the way to prejudice. It is not along that route that psychological sanity or moral salvation lies.

tionalism in such burning issues, and Miss Millay's sincerity commands respect. Emotionalism, like rationalism, has its nobilities and degradations. It is a mistake to suppose that emotionalism is all detriment without redeeming assets. The Outlook prints an equally emotional statement on the other side, equally worthy of respect, and especially so as the writer so frankly acknowledges that she is thinking personally-"selfishly" for her little children, and thinks the world is safer for them with the law upheld; but her attempt to make a hero of the Governor of Massachusetts shows all too sadly the pitfalls of emotionalism.

As a student for many years of the psychology of conviction and the writer of a book with that title, I naturally look upon this as an additional "case" which I should be tempted to include if the volume were expanded. In the mass of comment that flooded the press through the summer and finds its echo in The Outlook's protestants is the frequent statement that, since trial by jury and the safeguards of review constitute (Continued on page 373)

W

HAT earthly use is there in

wearing out a fairly good portable typewriter telling what the South would do to Al Smith and why it would do it, when nobody, except perhaps the statistical shark, knows anything about what the South is?

Oh, I suppose there are other exceptions to the rule-certain New England cotton-mill owners, for instance. And probably still others, possibly some whom I do not credit with any knowledge. Freeman, the historian, said that a rule is not disproved even when the exceptions outnumber the conformable cases. So, if a majority of persons in the United States could be proved to know something about the South, the rule of ignorance would still apply.

To the average person living in the North the South is still what it was to Dan Emmett when he wrote "Dixie""a land of cotton, persimmon seed, and sandy bottoms"-minus the poetic license. Minstrel Dan used "bottoms" merely for the sake of making a poor rhyme with "cotton." He thought, as most persons do now, of sandy hillsides and pine plateaus.

I have had ample opportunity of knowing that the cotton and pine plains conception persists. The United States Department of Agriculture used to send. me South on cotton missions. I was born in a State which seceded, and therefore must have been "fotch up" in a cotton patch. As a fact, I saw no cotton growing until I was myself grown.

Not long ago I walked through a stretch of New York forest with one of the best-informed men in that State, and I remarked that the forest growth did not differ much from that of Middle Tennessee. "Except," he said, "that you have a great deal more pine." From the slope of the mountains westward for three hundred miles Tennessee, like its sister to the north and the northern parts of its sisters to the south, is a hardwood region with no indigenous pine trees in it. The only sizable pines that I ever saw until I journeyed to far parts were three or four in old man Milus Thompson's front yard, transplanted from the coast country more than a century before.

I had a letter this morning from a man who is sitting in the shadow of the Library of Congress writing a book of

American history. He has learned some things. "It seems to me," he says in the letter, "that you Tennesseans have been

remiss in not advertising the part your G

State played from Jackson's time on."

What is the use? The consolidated advertising genius of Camels and Egyptian Deities and the other thirty-one best cigarettes could never make people know anything about Hugh Lawson White or John Bell-or anything about Polk except to name him by rote among the Presidents, as coming after Harrison, just as Q comes after P. They do know something about Davy Crockett, simply because he was an accidental backwoods statesman who could not spell very well and managed to get killed at the Alamo.

But the North is always hopeful of the South. Persons connected with publishing have told me recently that, at last, the South is about to produce some real literature-which, if true, is more than the rest of the country is doing, according to my antiquated understanding of what constitutes literature. But the point is this: They do not seem to remember that the fiction of a generation ago would have been even poorer stuff than it was but for the output of Charles Egbert Craddock, George W. Cable, James Lane Allen, O. Henry, et al. What, apparently, they have utterly forgotten is that about all the really distinctive fiction ever produced in America was turned out by Joel Chandler Harris and Mark Twain, the latter of whom may have been born in Missouri (that is a mooted question), but was conceived in Tennessee. They probably never have known how thin American poetry would be without Poe and Lanier. And, just to show that I

OVERNOR ALFRED E. SMITH, of New

York, appears in a fair way to be nominated for the Presidency by the National Democracy (if there is such a thing as a National party, which, editorially, I should deny), and there are indications that the Solid South will not be solidly for him.

Now this fact is not so much resented, as it is attributed to ignorance. There is a feeling that the great Governor of New York is to be deprived of the honor which is his due by the unenlightenment of the Southern mountaineers.

Lord! A Southern mountaineer is no more a part of the Solid South than a hookworm is of a Porto Rican Negro. Southern mountaineers are, ever were, and forever will be Republicans. Their unbreakable attachment to the Republican Party is, with the possible exception of a certain quickness in the trigger finger, their worst fault. And they all have it. The sheriff of any Southern mountain county would be hard put to it to find enough mountaineer Democrats to pack a coroner's jury.

There are, to be sure, some Democrats in the Southern mountains, because mere residence in the mountains does not constitute a mountaineer. But the peeple who live in the Southern mountains are so nearly all Republicans and s completely out of sympathy with the rest of the South that the late Congress man Walter P. Brownlow tried for years to have a new State created out of the mountainous parts of Virginia, West Vir ginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Car olina, and Georgia.

Such a State, so far as its dominant population is concerned, would be much less akin to the South than Vermont and Utah are. (Those, I believe, are the only States that have never failed, in modern times, to go Republican.)

Mountain ignorance, then, may be dismissed as an element in the disinclination of the South toward Governor Smith. The mountains are no more disinclined to him than they are to all Democrats.

But I do not suppose that the recitation of this fact in political geography will penetrate any considerable number of minds. The average person in this country apparently has no more idea of the exact physical location of the Southern mountains than a Modernist has of the exact physical location of heaven. I have a friend in an important position in the Government Printing Office who is astonished every time I see him that, when I am at home in Tennessee, I do not step over every other night to sit till bedtime with his other friend in Elizabethton, Tennessee. And my explanation that Elizabethton is nearer Washington than it is to my home in Tennessee does not make the slightest. impression on him. His other friend is in the mountains of Tennessee and I am in the middle basin of Tennessee. Therefore we ought to swap the time of day over the back fence.

NOT THE DIXIE OF COTTON AND PERSIMMONS The photograph of these Hereford cattle was taken in Madison County, Alabama

popular mind. Readers of The Outlook must not take this sentence-or themselves too seriously. Of course, their minds are not trivial. But contingencies have to be guarded against, and there is no knowing what papers, periodicals, publications, and posters may take into their heads to reproduce this article or parts of it.

Let the illustrations suffice, then, for the fact of the common belief that the South is so ignorant that it does not know beans. Well, of course, it does not. That knowledge is reserved for

Boston. But the South knows cow-peas. And cow-peas are a better crop than beans for soil improvement, anyhow.

Every section appears ignorant to every other section and is ignorant, from the other section's view-point. You know yourself that the man who does not know what you know is an ignoramus, no matter what else he may know. And sections are just multiples of men.

I do not like to puncture self-conceits; I own considerable property of that kind myself, and therefore do not want destruction of it to become a habit. But I cannot well avoid saying in this connection that the South does not regard the Eastern seaboard as possessed of all knowledge and all understanding. And I stand with my section, as my granddad did in the sixties. Even the ignorance of the Southern mountaineers is not unparalleled. If anybody cares to go along with me, I undertake to act as guide to places along the highway between New York City and Atlantic City and to places in New York State not fifty miles from New York City where ignorance and its attendant depraved practices are such as to make the most ignorant neighborhood of the Southern mountains appear, by comparison, like a settlement of scholars and saints.

Well, enough of that too much, by a long shot.

I cannot prove my conclusion, and, if I could, the fact would remain that proof does not get anywhere with a jury

Courtesy of the Southern Railway

made up of the whole people. Readers will have to take my word for it that the South is just like the rest of the country, only different. It contains just the same proportion of wise men and fools, of patriots and demagogues, of horse sense and-but why carry the comparison further?

N

ow the South does not want Governor Alfred E. Smith for President. That statement is completely true despite the fact that all of the South except the so-called border States would probably swallow him. But, as matters stand today, he would be forced down. their throats and there would be an aftermath.

The Southern opposition to Governor Smith is not based on ignorance. It is based on settled convictions, well reasoned out.

First, the South believes that the Constitution ought to be lived up to, and that the Eighteenth Amendment, as much as the First Article, is a part of the Constitution,

I am perfectly well aware of the tendency to ask, "What the heck does the Constitution mean to the South?" But I recite the fact that the South is square with its own conscience in regard to the Constitution. It believed, when it seceded, that the other section was violating Constitutional guaranties. It has been accused of disregarding the Negro Amendments, but it actually never has. Lawless men in it, a few, have practiced forms of peonage, but the South's position has been that the Federal Government freed the Negroes without provid

ing for their protection, that they had to be protected and guarded and guided, that the Southern people among whom they lived had to take up the burden and bear it to the end. They have borne it and are bearing it valiantly. Whatever has been done for the advancement of the Negro since emancipation has been, despite the efforts of well-meaning Northern philanthropists, mainly the work of the South. And whatever the South has done which may have appeared to some in other sections as oppression of the Negro has been done to secure tolerable government for Negroes and whites alike.

The South has done nothing with regard to the Negro Amendments which should estop it from demanding observance of the liquor Amendment.

And the South does not believe that under an Administration headed by Alfred E. Smith observance of the Eighteenth Amendment would be encouraged.

The South may be wrong in that belief, but it has reasonable grounds for holding such a belief. If the fact is not as the South believes, and if those who are seeking to advance the interests of Governor Smith have any of the essence of real wisdom, they will proceed to reason with the South as intelligent man with intelligent man. They will get nowhere by assuming that the South does not know what it is doing or thinking.

over the South now for something over four weeks, and I have not seen one drunken man. Neither have I been drowned in offers of drink. I have an old reporter's reputation to live up to in the South, and I have taken every drink offered me. They have consisted of two glasses of home-made peach cider and three or four glasses of home-made grape wine. I have no doubt that I could have secured other offers of drinks if I had sought them. But the idea that every man who comes down here is, alcoholically speaking, a poor virtuous Joseph in the hands of a lustful Potiphar's wife that is the silliest twaddle I ever heard.

The South is suspicious of Governor Smith because he is a Tammany politician. It has been told that Tammany has repented, but it has not seen that Tammany has yet brought forth fruits meet for repentance.

It is probable that Tammany has found a new faith and has shown its faith by its works. If that is true, and if the supporters of Governor Smith are wise, they will present the facts to the South as they would present any set of facts to any set of intelligent men.

I

COULD go on through the list of the Southern objections to the candidacy of Governor Smith. I could talk of the religious prejudice against him. But I have yet to be convinced that there is any more of that in the South than there is in the Middle West, or in western New York State, or on Long Island.

The only point I am seeking to make is this: That, if there is hope anywhere of winning the South to the cause of Governor Smith, that hope can be realized only by an intelligent campaign directed to intelligent men and women.

Of course, we know that this will be merely a pretty little fiction, that there is not a great deal of intelligence anywhere, that all of us are wise only when we are not otherwise. But, if anything is to be accomplished in Governor Smith's behalf, there has got to be a realization that all sections are wise and otherwise in about the same proportions.

This advice to Governor Smith's supporters is gratuitous. I am nobody's man for 1928. But in 1924 I came half a shade nearer to being a Smith man than, for instance, a McAdoo man. I was first, last, and all the time for John W. Davis. That ought to identify me quite definitely. So far as I can ascertain, I was the only one except, perhaps, John W. Davis.

Helen Hayes's new play, "Coquette," is such a play.

Southern fathers, of the present generation, can easily resent the implication that Southern parents are fairly represented by Dr. Besant, the coquette's father. Southern girls acquainted with the traditional flirtatious attitude of their sex toward their men relatives and friends can quickly point out the moment where Norma Besant fell away from the ideal heroine and precipitated a tragedy. Defenders of Southern gentlemen in the rough (we mean rough diamonds) will find small difficulty in settling upon the exact instant when Norma's thunder-cloud lover played the cad.

Certainly, none of the people involved in this play of Ann Preston Bridgers's— as polished up by George Abbott-act ideally; or there would be no play. What they do manage to do, however, is to act exceedingly humanly; and produce as a result as heart-stirring and poignant a drama as can be endured by the average theatre-goer.

First of all, it poses the question: At what point is a father justified in killing an obviously unsuitable suitor for the hand of his daughter, when the daughter, unfortunately, loves the suitor?

Northerners perhaps will be inclined to answer, At no point. For Southerners, we presume this is Ann Bridgers's answer. For the author of this play is a Southern girl who has persuaded her producers to stake their money-and many evenings of Helen Hayes's invaluable time on the belief that she has discovered the exact point: namely, when the suitor tells the truth (like a cad) about his relations with Norma Besant, and the doctor, assuming the statements are a slur upon her good name since she, out of fear, does not

instantly admit their truth-gets out the pistols.

After this moment, in the second act, the tragedy is inevitable, and for sheer heartrending sadness is hard to equal.

Our Own Theatre List

Still With Us

"Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. Done with vini, rum, and pistols.

"The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history which might have been a great play if genuine emotion had been substituted for wisecracking. An amusing evening, as it is. New Faces

"The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck. -Vaudeville and melodrama, with vaudeville taking the tricks. "Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor.

"Escape," The Booth.-Strung on a thin thread, but the most satisfying play on Broadway.

"Porgy," Guild Theatre.-A colorful presentation of Negro life on the Charleston water-front.

"The Good Hope," Civic Repertory Theatre. -A slow tragedy of the men who comb the sea for fish and the women they leave behind.

"Trial of Mary Dugan," National.-Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial. "Balieff's Chauve-Souris," Cosmopolitan."Mother Goose" under one arm, the "Arabian Nights" under the other. "An Enemy of the People," Hampden's Theatre.-It's bitter; but it's Ibsenand true.

Musical Shows

"Hit the Deck," Belasco.-Louise Groodyand a fast show.

"The Five O'clock Girl," Forty-fourth Street Theatre. Has nearly everything. "Good News," Chanin.-We haven't seen it, but our friends like it.

"The Mikado," Royale.-Our old friends Gilbert and Sullivan excellently represented. "The Merry Malones," Erlanger's.-George Cohan-and everybody dances. "Manhattan Mary," Apollo.-Ed Wynn. What more?

You don't miss the suitor so much as Norma does. But Norma has an unborn child by him, and her father is tried for murder-and her choice is to go on the stand and slander her dead lover by stating he had seduced her against her will, or else see her father hung.

This is unsolvable, perhaps, in any way except the one Norma takes-which is a way that leaves no eyes dry in the theatre.

The setting before which Helen Hayes plays this brief flutter of gayety and emotion, ending in love and death, is small-town social life in the South, with

its new country clubs and flappers and its old-fashioned fathers and codes of honor. The plot is brief. Norma Besant falls in love with a young man of pleasing personality and insufficient breeding. Her father disapproves. She tries to "handle" both men, in true Southern feminine fashion-and fails, precipitating the tragedy.

This is practically the whole story. It calls for some talk about muddle-headed chivalry opposing itself to the genuine. realities of a new generation. It contains many scenes of what might be called "Southern Tarkington," which are equally touched with laughter and tears. And there is in it an almost unforgetable portrait by Miss Hayes of a youthful coquette's progress from superficial flirtation and light caresses to an almost unbearably tragic situation wherein love has gone forever and life has lost its attraction.

Beyond this it might be called a tract against what has been termed one of the most contemptible of men-the "possessive" father: the man who loves his own ego and his own ideas of what constitutes happiness for his daughter far more than he does the daughter herself. In this case the father's failure really to love his daughter intelligently is made all the sharper by the traditional Southern training which he has given her-a chivalric "protection" which has deprived her of any means of knowing how to meet the realities of life for herself, and has substituted for it his own pistol.

The humor and sanity of the play nevertheless keep it from being a tract on anything so definite as this, and allow it to remain a piece of human nature poignantly and honestly portrayed. For the father is, in reality, but one outstanding character in the midst of a tragedy of youth, not the least of which is Norma's kid brother-as excellent a characterization of a young Southern gentleman of eighteen as we have ever seen. Tarkington himself never did anything so good.

The play is "theatre," of course, and not a transcription of life. But the proof of its vitality lies in the fact that it is possible to argue seriously concern(Continued on page 371)