The People’s Poet
“At the age of six,” wrote Carl Sandburg, “as my fingers first found how to shape
the alphabet, I decided to become a person of letters. At the age of ten I had
scrawled letters on slates, on paper, on boxes and walls and I formed an ambition
to become a sign painter … At twenty-one I went to West Point, being a classmate
of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant III—for two weeks—returning home
after passing in spelling, geography, history, failing in arithmetic and grammar.”
Sandburg’s resume was as varied as his art. Driven by sheer want, he quit
school after eighth grade and at the age of fourteen went to work, sweeping and
cleaning the cases at Harvey Craig’s Drug Store, delivering the afternoon rounds
of the Galesburg Republican-Register news, hauling milk for a monthly paycheck
of sixteen dollars, mopping floors, shining shoes, scrounging a dime however he
could. His family was Swedish—it was his second language as a child--but the
boy called himself Charlie to sound more American. Before his twentieth
birthday he would join the armies of jobless vagrant men riding the rails west,
harvesting hay in Kansas, washing dishes in Denver, nearly freezing in boxcars,
narrowly escaping death when there was no room in the boxcars and he fell
asleep on the bumpers. He’d grown up around trains. His father Augustus
worked ten hours a day, six days a week as a blacksmith’s helper for an Illinois
line, the C.B.&Q., and the rumbling clanking rhythms of the rail yards seemed to
inform much of the boy’s later poetry: tough and muscular and lyrical all at the
same time, bearing witness to those hobo tramps.
AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and
was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I
stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon’s
grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers, mothers lifting
their children—these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient
and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient
as the darkness of night—and all broken, humble ruins of nations.
His lifelong allegiance was to the masses, the workers, the laboring people who
built things and poured steel and mined coal, who survived by their wits and by
sheer determination, or who didn’t survive but had their lives and spirits
prematurely snuffed out by the industrial machine, like the eight and nine-yearold girls and boys valued for their nimble hands who labored in the mills:
You never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then for—how many cents a day?
How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?
I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,
In the dark, in the silence, day by day,
And all the blood of you drop by drop
And you are old before you are young.
You never come back.
In 1898, when the nation declared hostilities against Spain, he went. His company
landed near Guantanamo Bay, and the regulars saw shooting, but Charlie mostly
lugged pork and beans in the short but splendid little war where ten times as
many soldiers succumbed to yellow fever and malaria as to enemy fire. He
returned home emaciated to hero’s welcome. But when war fever gripped the
nation again a few years later, Sandburg saw the bloodbath with sad realism.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work –
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
1914, the year the Great War began, also saw Sandburg’s verse in print for for a
national audience alongside more established voices like William Butler Yeats
and Amy Lowell in a newly established magazine titled simply Poetry. The poem
that made him famous appeared in the March issue, part of a cycle of verse about
the midwestern city he’d adopted as his own.
HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning …
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
The Chicago poems struck some readers as vulgar, brash, celebrating the city’s
grimy streets the same way the Ash Can School of painters in New York about
this same time were making prize fights and bare knuckles a subject for serious
art. Popular poetry of the day was more sentimental, like Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”
I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast…
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Sandburg’s images of prostitutes and meat-packing plants seemed crude by
comparison. But the metropolis could inspire quiet contemplation, too.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Pulsing behind all the verse was a kind of reckless exuberance, something bigger
than muckraking or mere social commentary, a vitality captured in an ode from
the Chicago poems titled simply “Joy.
Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sending on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere—
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.
Sandburg’s literary reputation was made. But reputations don’t pay the rent and
he needed money, for by war’s end he had a family to support. Paula Steichen,
like him, was the child of immigrants, her father a copper miner until his health
broke. They’d met working together in the ranks of Wisconsin’s Socialist
Democratic Party, where Carl was a political organizer, paid for every recruit, and
a relentless propagandist. She was what he’d once called his “dream girl”: as he
said, a disreputable gypsy who can “walk, shoot, ride, row, hoe in the garden,
wash dishes, grimace, haggle, live on half-rations, and laugh at luck.” They were
equally committed to each other and to their radical ideals. For Carl, as
breadwinner, newspaper jobs filled the cracks in the household budget, and with
his party connections and bilingualism, a national wire service sent him to
Stockholm to cover the unfolding Bolshevik Revolution from Europe. Suspicious
American officials would barely issue the poet a passport, and when he returned
months later with translations of Lenin and other suspect material, he would
acquire a military intelligence file that followed him all his life.
Unlike true Bolsheviks, however, Carl was never an atheist or opposed to the
spiritual dimensions of existence. After his stint in uniform, he’d managed to
actually resume his schooling and graduate from Lombard College in his
hometown of Galesburg, a school founded by the Universalists where, according
to biographer Penelope Niven, an “atmosphere of intellectual and religious
freedom” prevailed that suited the young man’s unorthodox views. In his private
notebooks from those formative days, he filled his notebooks with prayers from
Robert Louis Stevenson, lyrical passages from the King James Bible, and his
own meditations like a “Credo” where he mused that “I believe in the divinity of
man’s intentions. I believe man is greater than anything he has made … No day
passes but I meet a man in whose eyes are the shadow and flash of heroism.”
What Sandburg despised was not Christianity, but what he called “Churchianity,”
the kind of roaring tent show revivalism that mocked the real spirit of Jesus. In a
diatribe addressed “To A Contemporary Bunkshooter,” for example, he took
sharp aim at the contemporary evangelist Billy Sunday, a poem that appeared in
the International Socialist Review after Sandburg learned the pious fraud owned
stock in a hotel known as prominent brothel.
YOU come along … tearing your shirt … yelling about Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few bankers and higherups among the con men of Jerusalem everybody liked to have this Jesus
around because he never made any fake passes and everything he said
went and he helped the sick and gave the people hope.
I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t throw any scare into
me. I’ve got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus.
He never came near clean people or dirty people but they felt cleaner
because he came along. It was your crowd of bankers and business men
and lawyers hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out of the
running.
This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened good. He threw out
something fresh and beautiful from the skin of his body and the touch of
his hands wherever he passed along.
Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash a whole wagon load
of furniture at every performance. Turn sixty somersaults and stand on
your nutty head.
I like a man that’s got nerve and can pull off a great original performance,
but you—you’re only a bug-house peddler of second-hand gospel—you’re
only shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this Jesus wanted free as
air and sunlight.
I’ve left out some of the stanzas my wife said couldn’t be repeated in church, for
the poem was considered so blasphemous that police seized copies of the
magazine where it first appeared.
Actually, Sandburg’s religion was not so different from that of the man he
admired most, and identified with. Although he said he didn’t believe in
coincidences, he was born on the same day as Lincoln’s father. Abe was another
prairie lad who rose from humble beginnings, whose democratic spirit matched
the poet’s own. The six volume biography that won Sandburg a Pulitzer Prize for
history was twenty years in the making, and the two men’s views of God were
much the same:
I hold,
If the Almighty had ever made a set of men
That should do all of the eating
And none of the work,
He would have made them
With mouths only, and no hands;
And if he had ever made another class,
That he had intended should do all the work
And none of the eating,
He would have made them
Without mouths and all hands.
Sandburg became the first civilian ever invited to address a joint session of
Congress on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. By that time, the man who
described himself as an anarchist and who’d written a poem in praise of a
dynamiter had become an icon and advisor to presidents.
He became a piece of the Americana he collected in books like his American
Song Bag, which documented and preserved ballads and blues and spirituals and
work songs, tunes he performed on countless stages accompanying himself on
acoustic guitar in the troubadour tradition. He wrote children tales, the
Rootabaga Stories, invented for his own three daughters and narrated by an old
Potato Face Blind Man who “seems to love some of the precious things that are
cheap, such as stars, the wind, pleasant words, time to be lazy, and fools having
personality and distinction.” He wrote about the things that shocked his
conscience; his volume on the 1919 race riots won him a lifetime achievement
award from the NAACP. But he also wrote about things that tickled his
funnybone:
Why did the children put beans in their ears
When the one thing we told the children not to do
Was put beans in their ears?
Why did the children pour molasses on the cat
When the one thing we told the children not to do
Was pour molasses on the cat?
In 1945, he and Paula moved to North Carolina, buying an old estate near
Asheville that had belonged to a member of Jefferson Davis’ cabinet. There was
acreage for Paula to raise her prize winning sheep and tend the vegetable garden
that during the couple’s leaner years had been their mainstay. There was also
solitude for Carl who like to sit outdoors hammering at his typewriter on movie
scripts and the dozen projects that might occupy his attention at any given
moment. The natural beauty fed his soul. “To get out into the daylight and fill
your lungs with pure air, to stop and watch a spear of grass swaying in the wind,
to give a smile daily at the wonder and mystery of shifting light and changing
shadow, is to get close to the source of power,” he’d written as a young man. As
an old man, his powers were undiminished.
Carl Sandburg was not formally a Universalist. As he told one interviewer, “I am
a Christian, a Quaker, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Confucian and maybe a Catholic
pantheist or Joan of Arc who hears voices. I am all these and more.” But when
death came, it was Pete Tolleson, minister of the Unitarian Universalist
congregation in Asheville that the family contacted. “You can imagine how
daunted I felt when I got that phone call in 1967,” Pete confides, “but any
uneasiness I felt about the service was quickly put to rest when I met with Mrs.
Sandburg and two of the daughters. We talked at some length, very informally,
and all agreed that Sandburg’s own words could form an appropriate thread to
use in building the service. It was also clear that there was no need for any of
sort of ritualistic ‘final sacrament.’ Sandburg’s own belief was not in a God of
ritual but a God of reality. He knew, far better than many preachers with years in
the pulpit could ever know, the true face of God and the true human reality of the
man, Jesus.”
Two years later, Paula presented the UU Church of Asheville with a check for
$25,000, in keeping with her husband’s dictum: “You can’t go tramping around
from church to church to fulfill your obligations. You’ve got to settle on one
church and throw your life into it, and build it up. Who would want to go to a
picnic all the time and eat out of other people’s baskets? It’s our obligation as
members of one church to give ourselves to it.” Paula’s service was celebrated
there, and Helga and Margaret, the two daughters, finally joined the congregation
whose social hall still bears the name Sandburg Hall.
Carl’s own memorial included these lines from his volume Smoke and Steel
Death comes once, let it be easy.
Ring one bell for me, once, let it go at that.
Or ring no bell at all, better yet.
Sing one song if I die.
Sing John Brown’s Body or Shout All Over God’s Heaven.
All God’s children got shoes. His body’s a’ moulder’in in the grave, but his soul
goes marching on. Because he was the people’s poet. And while he was a
kindred spirit, we can no more claim him for own than we can lay rights to a
sunbeam or a passing storm.