The 42nd Parallel

J. Ward Moorehouse

When Ward came back from his second honeymoon abroad he was thirtytwo, but he looked older. He had the capital and the connections and felt that the big moment had come. The war talk in July had decided him to cut short his trip. In London he’d picked up a young man named Edgar Robbins who was in Europe for International News. Edgar Robbins drank too much and was a fool about the women, but Ward and Gertrude took him around with them everywhere and confided in each other that they wanted to straighten him out. Then one day Robbins took Ward aside and said that he had syphilis and would have to follow the straight and narrow. Ward thought the matter over a little and offered him a job in the New York office that he was going to open as soon as he got home. They told Gertrude it was liver trouble and she scolded him like a child when he took a drink and on the boat back to America they felt he was completely devoted to both of them. Ward didn’t have to write any copy after that and could put in all his time organizing the business. Old Mrs. Staple had been induced to put fifty thousand dollars into the firm. Ward rented an office at 100 Fifth Avenue, fitted it up with Chinese porcelain vases and cloisonné ashtrays from Vantine’s and had a tigerskin rug in his private office. He served tea in the English style every afternoon and put himself in the telephone book as J. Ward Moorehouse, Public Relations Counsel. While Robbins was drafting the literature to be sent out, Ward went to Pittsburgh and Chicago and Bethlehem and Philadelphia to reëstablish contacts.

In Philadelphia he was walking into the lobby of the Bellevue Stratford when he met Annabelle Marie. She greeted him amiably and said she’d heard of him and his publicity business and they had dinner together, talking about old times. “You certainly have improved,” Annabelle Marie kept saying. Ward could see that she regretted the divorce a little but he felt he couldn’t say the same for her. The lines on her face had deepened and she didn’t finish her sentences, and had a parrot screech to her voice. She was tremendously made up and he wondered if she took drugs. She was busy divorcing Beale who she said had turned homosexual on her. Ward said dryly that he had married again and was very happy. “Who wouldn’t be with the Staple fortune back of them?” she said. Her little air of ownership irritated Ward and he excused himself right after dinner, saying he had work to do. Annabelle looked at him through halfclosed eyes with her head to one side, said “I wish you luck,” and went up in the hotel elevator in a shrill cackle of laughter.

Next day he took the Pennsylvania to Chicago, traveling in a drawing room. Miss Rosenthal, his secretary, and Morton, his English valet, went with him. He had his dinner in the drawing room with Miss Rosenthal, a sallowfaced girl, shrewd and plain, who he felt was devoted to his interests. She had been with him in Pittsburgh with Bessemer Products. When the coffee had been cleared away and Morton had poured them each out a swallow of brandy that Miss Rosenthal giggled over a great deal declaring it would go to her head, he started to dictate. The train rumbled and lurched and now and then he could smell coalsmoke and the hot steamygreasy body of the engine up ahead, hot shiny steel charging through the dark Appalachians. He had to talk loudly to be heard. The rumble of the train made the cords of his voice vibrate. He forgot everything in his own words… American industry like a steamengine, like a highpower locomotive on a great express train charging through the night of old individualistic methods…. What does a steamengine require? Coöperation, coördination of the inventor’s brain, the promoter’s brain that made the development of these highpower products possible… Coördination of capital, the storedup energy of the race in the form of credit intelligently directed… labor, the prosperous contented American working man to whom the unprecedented possibilities of capital collected in great corporations had given the full dinnerpail, cheap motor transport, insurance, short working hours… a measure of comfort and prosperity unequaled before or since in the tragic procession of recorded history or in the known regions of the habitable globe.

But he had to stop dictating because he found he’d lost his voice. He sent Miss Rosenthal to bed and went to bed himself, but he couldn’t sleep; words, ideas, plans, stockquotations kept unrolling in endless tickertape in his head.

Next afternoon at the LaSalle he had a call from Judge Bowie C. Planet. Ward sat waiting for him to come up, looking out at the very pale blue Lake Michigan sky. In his hand he had a little filing card on which was written:

Planet, Bowie C… Tennessee Judge, married Elsie Wilson Denver; small copper lead interests…. Anaconda? unlucky oil speculator… member one-horse lawfirm Planet and Wilson, Springfield, Illinois.

“All right, Miss Rosenthal,” he said when there was a knock at the door. She went off into the other room with the filing card.

Morton opened the door to let in a roundfaced man with a black felt hat and a cigar.

“Hello, judge,” Ward said, getting to his feet and holding out his hand. “How’s everything? Won’t you sit down?” Judge Planet advanced slowly into the room. He had a curious rolling gait as if his feet hurt him. They shook hands, and Judge Planet found himself sitting facing the steelbright light that came through the big windows back of Moorehouse’s desk.

“Won’t you have a cup of tea, sir?” asked Morton, who advanced slowly with a tray glittering with silver teathings. The judge was so surprised that he let the long ash that he’d been carrying on his cigar to prove to himself he was sober drop off on his bulging vest. The judge’s face remained round and bland. It was the face of a mucker from which all the lines of muckerdom had been carefully massaged away. The judge found himself sipping a cup of lukewarm tea with milk in it.

“Clears the head, judge, clears the head,” said Ward, whose cup was cooling untasted before him.

Judge Planet puffed silently on his cigar.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I’m very glad to see you.”

At that moment Morton announced Mr. Barrow, a skinny man with popeyes and a big adamsapple above a stringy necktie. He had a nervous manner of speaking and smoked too many cigarettes. He had the look of being stained with nicotine all over, face, fingers, teeth yellow.

On Ward’s desk there was another little filing card that read:

Barrow, G. H., labor connections, reformer type. Once sec. Bro. locomotive engineers; unreliable.

As he got to his feet he turned the card over. After he’d shaken hands with Mr. Barrow, placed him facing the light and encumbered him with a cup of tea, he began to talk.

“Capital and labor,” he began in a slow careful voice as if dictating, “as you must have noticed, gentlemen, in the course of your varied and useful careers, capital and labor, those two great forces of our national life neither of which can exist without the other are growing further and further apart; any cursory glance at the newspapers will tell you that. Well, it has occurred to me that one reason for this unfortunate state of affairs has been the lack of any private agency that might fairly present the situation to the public. The lack of properly distributed information is the cause of most of the misunderstandings in this world… The great leaders of American capital, as you probably realize, Mr. Barrow, are firm believers in fairplay and democracy and are only too anxious to give the worker his share of the proceeds of industry if they can only see their way to do so in fairness to the public and the investor. After all, the public is the investor whom we all aim to serve.”

“Sometimes,” said Mr. Barrow, “but hardly…”

“Perhaps you gentlemen would have a whisky and soda.” Morton stood sleekhaired between them with a tray on which were decanters, tall glasses full of ice and some open splits of Apollinaris.

“I don’t mind if I do,” said Judge Planet.

Morton padded out, leaving them each with a clinking glass. Outside the sky was beginning to glow with evening a little. The air was winecolored in the room. The glasses made things chattier. The judge chewed on the end of a fresh cigar.

“Now, let’s see if I’m getting you right, Mr. Moorehouse. You feel that with your connections with advertising and big business you want to open up a new field in the shape of an agency to peaceably and in a friendly fashion settle labor disputes. Just how would you go about it?”

“I am sure that organized labor would coöperate in such a movement,” said G. H. Barrow, leaning forward on the edge of his chair. “If only they could be sure that… well, that…”

“That they weren’t getting the wool pulled over their eyes,” said the judge, laughing.

“Exactly.”

“Well, gentlemen, I’m going to put my cards right down on the table. The great motto upon which I have built up my business has always been coöperation.”

“I certainly agree with you there,” said the judge, laughing again and slapping his knee. “The difficult question is how to bring about that happy state.”

“Well, the first step is to establish contact… Right at this moment under our very eyes we see friendly contact being established.”

“I must admit,” said G. H. Barrow with an uneasy laugh, “I never expected to be drinking a highball with a member of the firm of Planet and Wilson.”

The judge slapped his fat thigh. “You mean on account of the Colorado trouble…? You needn’t be afraid. I won’t eat you, Mr. Barrow… But, frankly, Mr. Moorehouse, this doesn’t seem to me to be just the time to launch your little project.”

“This war in Europe…” began G. H. Barrow.

“Is America’s great opportunity… You know the proverb about when thieves fall out… Just at present I admit we find ourselves in a moment of doubt and despair, but as soon as American business recovers from the first shock and begins to pull itself together… Why, gentlemen, I just came back from Europe; my wife and I sailed the day Great Britain declared war… I can tell you it was a narrow squeak… Of one thing I can assure you with comparative certainty, whoever wins, Europe will be economically ruined. This war is America’s great opportunity. The very fact of our neutrality…” “I don’t see who will be benefited outside of the munitionsmakers,” said G. H. Barrow.

Ward talked a long time, and then looked at his watch, that lay on the desk before him, and got to his feet. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. I have just time to dress for dinner.” Morton was already standing beside the desk with their hats. It had gotten dark in the room. “Lights, please, Morton,” snapped Ward. As they went out Judge Planet said, “Well, it’s been a very pleasant chat, Mr. Moorehouse, but I’m afraid your schemes are a little idealistic.” “I’ve rarely heard a business man speak with such sympathy and understanding of the labor situation,” said G. H. Barrow. “I only voice the sentiments of my clients,” said Ward as he bowed them out.

Next day he spoke at a Rotary Club luncheon on “Labor Troubles: A Way Out.” He sat at a long table in the big hotel banquet hall full of smells of food and cigarettes, and scurrying waiters. He spread the food a little round his plate with a fork, answering when he was spoken to, joking a little with Judge Planet, who sat opposite him, trying to formulate sentences out of the haze of phrases in his mind. At last it was time for him to get to his feet. He stood at the end of the long table with a cigar in his hand, looking at the two rows of heavyjowled faces turned towards him.

“When I was a boy down along the Delaware…” He stopped. A tremendous clatter of dishes was coming from behind the swinging doors through which waiters were still scuttling with trays. The man who had gone to the door to make them keep quiet came stealthily back. You could hear his shoes creak across the parquet floor. Men leaned forward along the table. Ward started off again. He was going on now; he hardly knew what he was saying, but he had raised a laugh out of them. The tension relaxed. “American business has been slow to take advantage of the possibilities of modern publicity… education of the public and of employers and employees, all equally servants of the public… Coöperation… stockownership giving the employee an interest in the industry… avoiding the grave dangers of socialism and demagoguery and worse… It is in such a situation that the public relations counsel can step in in a quiet manly way and say, Look here, men, let’s talk this over eye to eye… But his main importance is in times of industrial peace… when two men are sore and just about to hit one another is no time to preach public service to them… The time for an educational campaign and an oral crusade that will drive home to the rank and file of the mighty colossus of American uptodate industry is right now, today.”

There was a great deal of clapping. He sat down and sought out Judge Planet’s face with his blue-eyed smile. Judge Planet looked impressed.