American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
On the whole, I believe that a child who grows up in the Docena Village,
and is educated there, has actually a better chance than one who grows
up in most Alabama towns, or, for the matter of that, in towns in any
other State which has not compulsory education. Moreover, I doubt that
there is in all Alabama another kindergarten as truly charming as the
one we visited at Docena, or that there is, in the State, a schoolhouse
of the same size which is as perfect as the one we saw in that camp.
In another camp old houses have been remodeled, giving practical
demonstration of what can be done in the way of making a hovel into a
pretty home by the intelligent use of a little lattice-work, a little
paint, and a few vines and flowers. Old boarding-houses in this
neighborhood have been converted into community houses, with
entertainment halls, shower baths, and other conveniences for the men
and their families. Thus tests are being made to discover whether it is
possible to encourage among certain classes of foreign laborers, whose
habits of life have not, to put it mildly, been of the tidiest, some
appreciation of the standard of civilization represented by clean,
pretty cottages, pleasant meeting houses, and shower baths.
I have not told about the billiard tables, bowling alleys, and game
rooms of the clubs, nor about the model rooms fitted up to show
housewives how they may make their homes attractive at but slight
expense, nor about the annual medical examination of the children, nor
about the company dentists who charge their patients only for the cost
of gold actually used, nor about the fine company store at Edgewater
Mine, nor about the excellent meats supplied by the company butchers,
nor about the low prices of supplies, nor about the effort to
discourage employees from buying cheap furniture at high prices on the
installment plan, nor, above all, about the clean, decent, happy look of
the families we chanced to see.
Even had I the space in which to tell of these things, it is perhaps
wiser that I refrain from doing so. For I am aware that in speaking
anything but ill of a great corporation I have scandalously outraged
precedent. Nor does it argue well for my powers of observation, or those
of my companion. I feel confident that where our limited visions
perceived only prosperity and contentment, certain of my brother
writers, and his brother illustrators would, in our places, have rent
the thin, vaporish veil of apparent corporate kindliness, and found such
foul shame, such hideous malignity, such grasping, grubby greed, such
despicable soul-destroying despotism, as to shock the simple nature of a
chief of the old-time Russian Secret Police.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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