Posterity by Dorie McCullough Lawson Read Free Book Online

widespread corruption of local governments. His work changed the way Americans viewed the establishment and introduced a new kind of journalism to the country: investigative reporting.
    A father only late in life, to Steffens's great surprise, he was delighted and fascinated by fatherhood and created a gentle, affectionate atmosphere for little Pete. “The father's place is in the home,” he wrote, “and there I am and there I mean to stay—on guard—to protect my child from education.”
    Here, while in Germany working on his autobiography, sixty-year-old Steffens writes a letter of guidance for the future to his two-year-old son, Pete.

    Carlsbad, June 23, 1926
    Dear Pete:
    This place will suit you I think. Down three flights of stairs is a restaurant through which you will go to either an open cafe in front or on a side toward the town to a large graveled playground. There is not much for a little fellow like you to do on this playground. It is the grown-up idea for a place for kids. A bare yard where there is nothing to break and nothing to get hurt on. Safety first is the law for children, but you will have your ball and we will find you a half-developed
Deutsches Madel
[German girl] to play with, so that you can learn to think in another language. Sometimes we can go in back of the house to a playground for grown-ups. That has a net and balls 'n' everything to amuse the big children who can't play with nothing like a baby. They have a game called tennis which they work at hard rather than do anything useful. It's thought to be degrading to work; and it is. It is a sure sign that your father was an honest man and never got any graft, if you have to work for your living. I hope to arrange it so that you will not be ashamed of me; I leave you my graft and I'll show you how to get more if you need it. If you work, you will work as a scientist or an artist, for fun, not for money. Money
cannot
be made by labor. But work, real work, for what we call duty or the truth, that is more fun than tennis. Sometimes we will sit, you and I, and look at the human beings that crawl around here, and when we have had our fill of that sight we will walk away a few hundred feet and look at the trees, the beautiful, tall straight trees that have no bellies and no bad tastes. They are dignified and well-dressed. I'd like to have you appreciate trees, appreciate the difference between them and men, and then, some day, believe that, under decent conditions it will be possible for human beings to also have souls. They haven't now; only bellies, pockets and the poor beginnings of a mind.
    Your mother and your Cousin Jane will explain this to you, if I am gone. They will tell it to you honestly and humorously, Pete; they will not propagand with you; with all others maybe; but not with Pete. You are to have the straight of it my boy; and the straightest of the straight is that we don't know anything; not any of us; not Jane, not Peter, not I. Nobody understands things as they are and the proof of this is that nobody,—not the greatest scientist, not the tenderest poet, not the most sensitive painter; only for a moment, the kindest lover can see that all is beautiful. I can't, I only believe that.
    It may be wrong; there may be ugliness, like the sick bellies these miserable
Kurgaste
[spa guests] come here to cure, but I have a funny old faith that, if a little fellow like you is shown everything and allowed to look at everything and not lied to by anybody or anything, he, even Pete, might do better even than Joyce did what
Ulysses
was meant to do; he might see and show that there is exquisite beauty everywhere except in an educated mind.
    And an educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents' and his grandparents' generation have got through molding it. We can't help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn