Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son

8. 1915–34: “I am an old man and I know the world”

8 1915–34 “I am an old man and I know the world” After publication of The Subterranean Brotherhood, Julian needed a job. He pitched a series of essays on “Love Stories from the Bible” to the Wheeler syndicate, the same outfit that serialized his prison memoirs. The syndicate marketed the series without mentioning him by name, merely that he was “an American author of national reputation.” Two of the articles survive in proof among Julian’s papers—“Abraham and Hagar” and “The Story of the Nazarite Who Betrayed the Secret of the Lord for the Sake of a Woman”—but not a single newspaper seems to have subscribed.1 Then his friend Sam Chamberlain intervened. Like the Los Angeles Examiner in 1905, the Boston American, another Hearst newspaper, was in financial trouble, and Chamberlain was charged with reviving it. So “to Boston he went . . . taking me with him” as a feature writer.2 Julian was back in harness with the Hearst chain—or back in Hearst’s chains. His first assignment was a plum—covering the 1915 spring training of the Boston Braves in Macon, Georgia, and the Boston Red Sox in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Julian was an avid baseball fan—he thought the game “exactly suits our national temperament” because it “unites physical prowess with quickness and accuracy of brain, science with athletics, mind with body.” He had also covered the World Series between the Philadelphia Athletics and New York Giants as sports editor for the New York American a decade earlier. But in 1915 Boston was the hub of the baseball universe. Julian interviewed George Stallings, manager of the defending world champion Braves, at his home in Haddocks, Georgia, in late February 1915, and he accompanied Stallings and several players to Macon on February 28. For a month Julian rubbed shoulders with such stars as Johnny Evers and Rabbit Maranville of the Braves and Tris Speaker and Honus Wagner of the Red Sox. But the player who most impressed him was a Red Sox rookie named 202 part iii: the shadow Babe Ruth. “He is a born pitcher, no doubt; but he can hit, too,” Julian reported, and “he is only twenty years of age.” He compared Ruth to “a rangy, loose-jointed colt ambling about the pasture. . . . What he will be at twenty-five need not now concern us; but we shall hear a good deal about him during the next five months.”3 At Julian’s request, Ruth stripped to the waist and posed for photos that ran in the Boston American. In April Julian accepted another assignment—a series of photo essays chronicling his sentimental journeys to old haunts in Boston, Salem, Cambridge , and especially Concord. There he posed outside Apple Slump and the Wayside, added a pebble to Thoreau’s cairn at Walden Pond, and interviewed the eighty-three-year-old Frank Sanborn, whose “voice and bearing were hardly altered” after half a century. He was disturbed to discover, however, that the village was overrun with tourists. He complained that he was “expected to step softly around the place” and speak in a “hushed” and “reverential” voice as though it were hallowed ground.4 During the summer and fall Julian contributed several articles to the Boston American along the lines of Bartley Hubbard’s “Solid Men of Boston” series in Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham. He conducted interviews with such pillars of the community as Joseph Lannin, the owner of the Red Julian at Thoreau’s cairn, Walden Pond, May 1915. (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [72/236 vol. 3, p. 113].) chapter 8: 1915–34 203 Julian and Frank Sanborn, May 1915. (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [87/23c scrapbook 2, p. 93].) Sox; industrialist Theodore Vail; and Samuel W. McCall, governor-elect of Massachusetts. In June he profiled the poet and “sob sister” Ella Wheeler Wilcox—“no American woman is more widely loved”—who declared that the European war raging at the moment was “God’s housekeeping,” one of Julian’s few references to the Great War. Wilcox thanked him a day or two later, saying his sketch was “the finest thing ever written about me.”5 Most significantly, Julian interviewed the lawyer Louis Brandeis, who would become an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court the next year. Brandeis, a leading American Zionist, compared the movement...