Here's an interesting one.
Today we look back at the "flash forward" to 1920 at the beginning of The Repairer of Reputations as partly a curiosity of retro-futurism and mostly an expression of the narrator's unreliability, but how was it received in its own time?
I couldn't tell you about 1895, but here's a perspective from just over a year before 1920, and just weeks after the end of the Great War.
This is a column from the November 30, 1918 issue of The New Republic, in which "F.H." (whom I assume is editor Francis Hackett) reviews Chambers' "prophecy" and New York's progress toward it. It's at least as notable for what it leaves out as for what it covers: this is a Progressive perspective protesting a lack of progress, so you get a recap of the beautiful riverside parks, but not of the cleansing of Jews and black people. Hackett, an Irish immigrant, does not mention "the checking of immigration [and] the new laws concerning naturalization," because he wants to tell a story of the City not living up to a utopian prediction. There is a reference to lethal chambers, but only figuratively and not in quotation, presumably a wink to the reader already familiar with the original.
Though of course, it's possible that last one might not even have been seen as darkly as we do: in 1918 Progressive intellectuals had not yet reformed their positions on eugenics, and indeed the reference at the end of the column to "the lessons of medical inspection [...being] applied to human welfare" may be just such a suggestion, though I'd charitably assume a New Republic writer would more likely approve of "mere" sterilization than of euthanasia. Chambers would likely have had something picturesque to say, if he were reading The New Republic.
In any case, this is not F.H.'s point: he is concerned here primarily with economic matters, which he contrasts with a Chambers prediction which he asserts sees progress "aesthetically, but only aesthetically." "The reorganizations of society," Hackett says, "did not interest him." I don't think that's entirely accurate: Chambers speaks for example of "the colossal Congress of Religions," after which "bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together." But certainly any moral reformation of society in this "prediction" (such as it is a prediction) is far removed from the Progressives' vision of fundamental economic and class transformation.
In any case, here it is. An immigrant in New York City evaluating the approaching year of 1920 in light of (a very carefully chosen subset of) the "predictions" in The Repairer of Reputations:
WHAT will New York be like in 1945? It is a brave man who'll risk a prophecy but no braver than Mr. Robert W. Chambers was in 1895 when he dared to foretell the New York of 1920. Now that 1920 is just round the corner it is amusing to pick up The King in Yellow and read the cool forecast which opens the first story, The Repairer of Reputations. Strange to say, the words that leap out of the first paragraph are "the war with Germany," a war which he imagines just completed, and the dominant note all through the story is the note of militarism and military service. Shooting at an object he could not see, across a wild space of years, Mr. Chambers scored such hits as this: "the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the throes of Anarchy." But these are only the broad circumstances of his story. He goes into fine particulars about the 1920 New York.
It is natural that a former art-student like Mr. Chambers should have seen the future New York as a beautiful New York; he spoke first of all of architectural changes. "Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a godsend to the population."
The subways have indeed come, and stone quays. But the stone quays, all that there are, are rented by the city to the highest bidders, and the elevated roads still scar great thoroughfares. The real source of New York's downtown congestion, the skyscraper, has never been severely regulated. It acts as a ferocious suction-pump to draw up and spew back hundreds of thousands of downtown workers a day, and until this dilation of New York's heart can be reduced the city will remain a monstrosity in transportation. "Squares laid out"! Manhattan Island is a tight, over-crowded flat, with each piece of furniture fighting every other piece of furniture for the last inch of space. Nothing but legislative dynamite can clear it out--or taxation on the top-layers of Manhattan that will make congestion a fool's game. The city of Mr. Chambers's dream is not much nearer in 1920 than in 1895. And New York's worst enemies are still its best citizens.
"The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of the Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio." So the prophecy continues.
These are rather thin ideas, borrowed from contemporary England and France, but they indicate Mr. Chambers's desire for fine arts institutionalized. What has happened? The moving pictures, chewing-gum of the arts, have become the great popular institution, quite unforeseen by Mr. Chambers. The thickening of apartment-house walls has not kept pace with the spread of mechanical music. Fine arts have no representative in the cabinet, save in the beadledom of Mr. Burleson. And the National Academy of Design is, indeed, like European institutions of the same kind. The things we still need an incubator for young artists, a lethal chamber for old ones, a better means of introducing painters to patrons and students to teachers--these remain to be organized. Perhaps 1945 will see them here.
What will New York be like in 1945? It is impossible to imagine a better New York, a radically better New York, without a change first of all in the avenues of human opportunity. How can you rectify a city that has at its base a foolish wage system, and how foolish is a wage system that looks on the wage-earner as a person without a past or a future, and pretends to protect him in all his inevitable incapacitations--his childhood, his unemployment, his sickness, his old age, his birth and death and marriage--by the puerile counselling of "thrift." So long as there is nothing but "thrift" between millions of New Yorkers and the breakdown of their civilization, you will be bound to have a population that nothing can lift up--not all the penitentiaries and orphan asylums and dispensaries and anti-poverty leagues and money-lenders and public libraries and drinking troughs and fresh air funds and anti-cruelty societies and charity organizations and beggars' licenses and human dog-pounds and free burial and bread-lines in the world. It doesn't much matter, even, whether or not you have "public squares well laid out." Unless the wage system is also well laid out, you'll have little but human driftwood cast up on the park benches, to reproach a clear-
eyed sky.
But of course a right wage system is only the foundation. Think of the visible results in the New York of the next generation if profit did not decide the site of factories. Imagine the shores of the Hudson without its stinking glucose factories on one side and its baleful railroads on the other. Imagine the Hudson River turned to those great uses of recreation and beauty which it so obviously invites, instead of trammelled and polluted by the profiteer. And suppose that the persons who were to find part of their recreation by the shores of the Hudson were persons who had really been permitted to have an education, instead of running the gauntlet of slum mortality and child labor and disease and destitution and misdirected instinct. These are only a few of the rectifications that would have to precede that ennobled city which Mr. Chambers attempted to envisage in the despondency of 1895. He saw it aesthetically, but only aesthetically. The reorganizations of society did not interest him. The better New York, as he saw it, was really the smartened New York as it might have appealed to a man writing to Mr. Dana's New York Sun.
If the wage-earner gets his title to civilization guaranteed, then 1945 may smile on New Yorkers. It will not simply be a new city because the roofs will be flat to receive airplanes, and the flushing of the streets will be arranged in the same clever way that central heating is to be arranged, and snow-melting and dust-cleansing. There will be newness in the emulative power of the great guilds of workmen that control hours and labor conditions and wages and patents and safety appliances, that thrust aside all the silly limitations of profit and profiteers and have the same respect for tangible values in time of peace that a frightened state has in time of war. It will be the grotesqueries of advertising, however, that will be flung out of newspapers when the guilds are in control, not the genuine free discussion of vital issues. And the lessons of medical inspection and chemical laboratories and scientific cooperation will be applied to human welfare rather than destruction, in this remote era when New York will be a great city of free men and women.
Putting it down for 1945 is rather too sanguine. One had better say, the year One of Democracy.
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