SOURCE: Friberg, Ingegerd. “The Clash of American Dreams in Carl Sandburg's Poetry.” Moderna Sprak 74, no. 1 (1980): 3-20.

[In the following essay, Friberg probes Sandburg's poetry as it presents a tension between two ideals—America as a paradise and America as a land of progress—and as it promotes the possibilities of a socialist society in America.]

In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal Leo Marx studies the two well-known American dreams: America as the Garden of Eden and America as the Land of Progress. He traces these dreams through a discussion of the beliefs of Primitivists, Progressivists, and representatives of the “Middle Landscape,” covering such fields as economy, philosophy, and literature. He makes clear how the two dreams gave rise to two ideals, developing out of the situation of the first settlers. They were seen as separate ideals at first but were then kept in a balance of harmony one with the other for some time. Finally, it was realized that they would have to clash, and when they did, a situation arose which engaged writers of many kinds.

In his lecture on the “Confrontation with the Machine in American Literature and Life,” presented at Helsinki to The Nordic Association for American Studies Conference of 1979, Leo Marx gave a preview of his forthcoming book Pastoralism Reconsidered, in which he will trace the two dreams/ideals into the 1960's and 1970's. His argumentations were, as ever, convincing and at the same time challenging. How strong a hold can the philosophy of the early settlers still have over American minds? In his lecture he pointed to an undermining of these ideals, an undermining becoming noticeable only after the Second World War.

When Leo Marx discusses the two dreams, which are often given the qualities of myth, he concentrates on writings in prose. In this essay I intend to show how the two dreams have served as great themes also in poetry, and that the undermining of them seems to have started earlier than suggested above. Carl Sandburg was a poet who felt the pull of both ideals strongly and also experienced the clash between them, an experience which inspired in him the theme of the people demanding a Socialist society. At the Helsinki conference Leo Marx posed the open question “Why has the Socialist movement not taken hold of the minds of American workers?” That question can hardly be given a satisfactory answer. However, in this paper I want to show the presence in Carl Sandburg's poetry of a strong enthusiasm for such a society. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that there was a time during the first decades of the 20th century when Socialism was taking hold of the minds of American workers, especially in the Midwest, Sandburg's own region, a rural landscape with rapidly growing industrial cities.

In my study of Sandburg's symbolic use of certain concepts, such as the city, the prairie, and the people, I propose to show both the existing tension between the pastoral and the urban ways of life, which, in fact, also means a tension between romanticism and realism, and the development of this tension into a socialistic theme. Those three concepts are to be found frequently in Sandburg's poetry. My study is based on poems in Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), Good Morning, America (1928), and The People, Yes (1936).

“Population Drifts,” a short poem in Chicago Poems, contains all three concepts, serving as the carriers of Sandburg's belief in and longing back to life on the prairie, away from the industrialized city, and his pity for the hardworking people of both these landscapes. He might be referring to his own parents in the lines

She and her man crossed the ocean and the years that marked their faces
                    saw them haggling with landlords and grocers …

The family in the poem represents the struggling immigrants as one definite part of the people. In all Sandburg's poetry the people are often seen as sturdy and strong and filled with a passion for life, like the woman in this poem. We also see them sick and down-hearted, like the children in this poem; we see them working hard, like the two who “have jobs in a box factory”; yet, we also see the people wondering

                                                                                          … what the wishing is and
the wistful glory in them that flutters faintly when the glimmer of
spring comes on the air or the green of summer turns brown.

The two who are busy folding pasteboard in the factory do not sense what their yearnings are—the poet does however. At the time of writing the poem Sandburg believed in a kind of agrarianism rather than in industrialism, a belief that is reflected in the last lines of the poem:

They do not know it is the new-mown hay smell calling and the wind of the plain praying for them to come back and take hold of life again with tough hands and with passion.

The same invigorating belief recurs in “Laughing Corn” in Cornhuskers:

The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with conquering laughter.
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

However, the title “Population Drifts”—indeed the poem as a whole—has several meanings. It stands for the wave of immigrants coming to America during the latter part of the 19th century, and for the moving of mostly young people from the countryside to the industrialized cities. Finally, it can be said to stand for man's capacity of wishing, of dreaming himself away from the present and from reality, in this case from the city back to the plains, to the prairie. This little poem introduces to us what has been called the “two Sandburgs,” the tension between realism and romanticism; thematically expressed, it brings out the clash between the old dreams of America as Nature's Garden, or the Garden of Eden, and America as the Land of Progress, and the consequences of the clash for the people.

For Sandburg the city essentially means Chicago. In the poem “Chicago” (in Chicago Poems), he gives a powerful description of that city. He personifies the city by describing it in terms of the people and their work:

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

It is a city bustling with life; it produces the means of life, like meat, bread, and tools, and it is the centre of life, distributing the means for living. However, it has also an underworld, wicked, crooked, and brutal, where people are hungry, get hurt, and are killed. The city seems cruel, but that is not the final impression that Sandburg intends to leave on the reader. He likes this city because it is also

alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

It represents progress. It is

a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities.

It is a city that is coming. It is

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding.

It is a young city, a city of laughter and hope for the future:

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
                    Laughing!
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.

To a Swede this poem is reminiscent of a well-known “city” poem by August Strindberg, “Esplanadsystemet” (“The Boulevard System”), which has a similar atmosphere of hard work, and dust, and dirt, and which also ends on a note of optimism as the younger generation with the new socialistic ideas speaks to the older generation:

Här rivs för att få ljus och luft.
Är icke det tillräckligt?(1)

Sandburg's description of Chicago has a kind of counterpart in prose in Frank Norris's short story “A Deal in Wheat,” where the starving and depressed lower class is described as a large but neglected group of people, trapped in the machinery of business, society, and industrialism. Being starkly naturalistic, Frank Norris's story is far more pessimistic than is Sandburg's poem. The same is true of a more recent story “A Mother's Tale” by James Agee, in which Chicago really is described as the Butcher of the World. Sandburg manages to make the overall impression of his poem an optimistic one by connecting the powerful words indicating hard work, in the first lines of the poem, with the pride and the laughter of Youth, at the end of the poem, symbolizing his persistent belief in progress. Thus, we notice how Sandburg's longing for the prairie and the open spaces is, at least occasionally, replaced by his admiration for the rapidly growing city. However, we should also notice how his admiration is held back by his anger at the hard living conditions of the workers in the city. The evident clash between the dreams provides nourishment for socialistic ideas.

As a contrast stands out a short impressionistic poem, “The Skyscraper Loves Night” (from Smoke and Steel), in which Sandburg's love for the city is not disquieted. The personified skyscraper in love with night becomes a romantic symbol of the city.

There are poems, however, in which Sandburg describes the city in thoroughly pessimistic terms. In “The Harbor” (from Chicago Poems) the city is like a prison with “huddled and ugly walls.” The people represented by the women, with “hunger-deep eyes” … “haunted with shadows of hungerhands,” are contrasted with the poet who enjoys the freedom of life that Nature represents. We noticed the same idea in “Population Drifts”; we find it again in the poem “They Will Say,” also from Chicago Poems. The latter poem appears all the more sentimental and pathetic in that he makes children the victims of the city:

Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
          You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
          And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
          And the reckless rain; you put them between walls.
To work …

Bu using the image of walls in describing a city, Sandburg achieves the same effect as Theodore Dreiser does in his novel Sister Carrie (finally published only nine years before Sandburg's Chicago Poems), and as Joseph Conrad does in The Nigger of the Narcissus (published in 1897). The walls of the city shut the people out from real life, if they do not have the means to break through them. For Theodore Dreiser, for example, the means to break through was money.

Sandburg hints at the lack of this means when he ends the poem “They Will Say” thus:

To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

In a much later poem, No 65 of The People, Yes, the power of money becomes the main theme:

Money is power: so said one.
Money is a cushion: so said another.
Money is the root of all evil: so said
          still another.
Money means freedom: so runs an old saying.
And money is all of these—and more.
Money pays for whatever you want—if
          you have the money.
Money buys food, clothes, houses, land,
          guns, jewels, men, women, time to be
          lazy and listen to music.
Money buys everything except love,
          personality, freedom, immortality,
          silence, peace.

In “The Harbor” Sandburg, like Dreiser in his description of Sister Carrie, is more romantic. The “I” of the poem, perhaps the poet himself, can break out of the city regardless of money; he can see the wide spaces and the free waters; the flying gulls, “veering and wheeling free in the open” become the symbols of the poet's imagination, carrying him away from reality.

Where does Sandburg's imagination—or is it nostalgia?—take him? One answer was given in “Population Drifts,” where “the wind of the plain is praying for them to come back.” The plain, the prairie, is used as a symbol with many meanings in Sandburg's poetry. The first poem in Cornhuskers is simply called “Prairie.” The poet himself was born on the prairie; the prairie is the origin of life; the prairie is old:

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.

It will still be there when the cities are gone, as it was there before the cities came, before the pioneers came in their wagons:

The running water bubbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.

The prairie represents history, the past. It holds the dust of the Indians:

I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother
To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay,
The singing women and their sons a thousand years ago

The prairie is everlasting, it is there in peace as well as in war. It nourishes those who go to war:

… I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.

The prairie has seen cities rise and develop:

Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke—out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise—out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples—
Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round the world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.
Out of long houses and stumps—canoes stripped from tree-sides—flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims—in the years when the red and the white men met—the houses and streets rose.

The Indians had to leave the prairie to give the white men room to build skyscrapers:

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

To the prairie a thousand years is a short time. The prairie is like God—omnipresent and eternal—to it as to God a thousand years is like one day. The prairie witnesses the people's different chores at different seasons of the year. The prairie is the mother of men:

They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.
They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic,
.....They are mine, the horses looking over a fence …
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barbwire.

Everybody and everything belong to the prairie, because the prairie is the mother, the origin of life. The prairie is also the continuation of life, the promise of a future:

There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley

The morning star and the dawn over the prairie promise another day, a tomorrow, a future:

I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
          a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
          only an ocean of tomorrows,
          a sky of tomorrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
          at sundown:
                    Tomorrow is a day.

Thus, the prairie stands for the original American dream, but the dream seems to have changed of late. From having symbolized the blessings of Nature, as opposed to the curses of the city, the prairie later in the poem stands for progress. The prairie, thus, becomes the symbol of the land of promise, the symbol of America with all its possibilities. Sandburg's poetic description of the prairie as untouched land which has to give way to civilization has its counterpart in prose in the well-known passage at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. On the surface the two dreams may seem to be reconciled; the resources of the land have been put to use. However, the price paid for this use has been too high. The slums pictured in Chicago Poems and the Valley of Ashes of The Great Gatsby witness the failure of all reconciliatory attempts. This is the point where Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden ends, and where he sees a political turn in the development of the “machine-in-the-garden” situation:

The resolutions of our pastoral fables are unsatisfactory because the old symbol of reconciliation is obsolete. But the inability of our writers to create a surrogate for the ideal of the middle landscape can hardly be accounted artistic failure. By incorporating in their work the root conflict of our culture, they have clarified our situation. They have served us well. To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is in some measure the responsibility of artists, it is in greater measure the responsibility of society. The machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics.

In Sandburg's poetry the problem of reconciliation is transformed into a political theme, embodying the conflicts between the optimism of progress and the pessimism of its consequences for the human condition; it turns into a socialistic theme. In the short poem “Flat Lands” (in Cornhuskers), this theme is not yet clearly stated, but we see the untouched prairie being called upon to yield land to the growing cities, to serve civilization:

Flat lands on the end of town where real estate men are crying
          new subdivisions,
“Lots for Sale—Easy Terms” run letters painted on a board—
          and the stars wheel onward, the frogs sob this April night.

At the same time, however, as the prairie yields housing space to the living, it also covers up death and creates new life. It takes on its original symbolic meaning in “Grass” (in Cornhuskers), where it symbolizes rebirth in Nature:

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 Gettisburg
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.

The prairie in its role of an Earth Mother is important in Sandburg's poetry: it creates new life, it provides nourishment, and it offers healing strength to human beings who have been hurt by the artificial life of the new big cities of the Machine Age. Thus, the two themes of the city and the prairie meet and are of real importance in Sandburg's poetry only in so far as they serve the greatest of his themes, the people. It has already been stated that Sandburg at one time believed more in agrarianism than in industrialism. Of course, this way of thinking is not new. The idea of living close to Nature was in America called Populism. In his thesis, The Influence of Populism on Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg (Temple University, 1957) Michael Yatron explains the terms Populism thus:

Populism expressed a way of life that was in opposition to the major developments taking place in America. It was a way of life characterized by simplicity, hard work, honesty, thrift, and value in terms of toil and time. In sum, Populism was the collective protest of the agrarian segment of America against changes it resented and feared. In its literary manifestations Populism, though championing economic reforms for the benefit of ‘the people,’ was essentially nostalgic.

Sandburg's nostalgia in the populistic sense is clearly discernible, for instance, in “Population Drifts” and in “The Harbor.” It is there in what has here been called the tension between realism and romanticism. However, Sandburg is more than nostalgic in his kind of Populism. He considers himself one of the people. In “I Am the People, the Mob” (in Chicago Poems), the title itself indicates his identification with the people. The people is the great force in society:

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history.—

From the people came great men like Napoleon and Lincoln. The people endure hardships and forget them, and as long as the people can forget, the world just goes on:

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Then the people will begin to use their force for their own sake, to fight for their own human rights. Thus, as Harry Golden says in his book on Sandburg,² “Most of Sandburg's work is a definition of values.”

Sandburg's zeal in wanting to play an important part in a newly urbanized society has taken the form of a prayer and is expressed in construction-site terms in “Prayers of Steel” (in Cornhuskers):

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

Strong feelings of identification with his fellowman dominate the ending of “Always the Mob” (in Cornhuskers), while in the body of the poem Sandburg gives examples from all over the world and all through history of the strength of the people—the mob:

I am born in the mob—I die in the mob—the same goes for you—I don't care who you are.
I cross the sheets of fire in No Man's Land for you, my brother—I slip a steel tooth into your throat, you my brother—I die for you and I kill you—It is a twisted and gnarled thing, a crimson wool:
One more arch of stars,
In the night of our mist,
In the night of our tears.

In “The Liars (March, 1919)” (in Smoke and Steel), Sandburg is the spokesman of the people, encouraging them not to obey the next time they are ordered by “the Liars”—the authorities—to fight their wars for them:

So I hear The People tell each other:
          Look at today and tomorrow.
          Fix this clock that nicks off millions
          When The Liars say it's time.
          Take things in your own hands.
                    To hell with 'em all,
          The Liars who lie to nations,
          The Liars who lie to The People.

In his poetry Sandburg wants to show the people how important they are. Just as they would be strong enough to take things in their own hands and refuse to go out to fight the wars, so they are the ones who do the work of everyday; without the people there would be no cities. This is the theme of the long poem “The Windy City,” the introductory poem of Slabs of the Sunburnt West. It is a poem written in praise of Chicago as it lies there in between the open spaces of the prairie and the Great Lakes. Thus, it becomes a symbol of Sandburg's divided heart, his love of both the rural and the urban at the same time, embodied in his admiration for and belief in the people—the working-men with their wives and children—who through their work rebuild the city every day:

Every day the people get up and carry the city,
carry the bunkers and balloons of the city,
lift it and put it down.
                    “I will die as many times
                    as you make me over again,
                    says the city to the people,

But what do the people get in return?

Forgive us if the monotonous houses go mile on mile
Along monotonous streets out to the prairies—
If the faces of the houses mumble hard words
At the streets—and the street voices only say:
“Dust and bitter wind shall come.”
.....And if geraniums
In the tin cans of the window sills
Ask questions not worth answering—
And if a boy and a girl hunt the sun
With a sieve for sifting smoke—
Let it pass—let the answer be—
“Dust and bitter wind shall come.”

Then finally, the last two sections are turned into loving descriptions of the city—the city by night and the windy city of the four seasons. The ending of the poem is ambiguous. “The winkers of the morning stars” ought to promise a future, but instead the cities are counted out and their numbers forgotten.

We are left with the same uncertainty in “Between the Worlds” (in Good Morning, America). The two worlds the poet seems torn between in this poem are those of the past and of the future (elsewhere in Sandburg's poetry most often symbolized by the prairie and the city):

And he said to himself
in a sunken morning moon
between two pines,
between lost gold and lingering green:
I believe I will count up my worlds.
There seem to me to be three.
There is a world I came from which is Number One.
There is a world I am in now, which is Number Two.
There is a world I go to next, which is Number three.
There is the next place—
And he took a look out of a window
at a sunken morning moon
between two pines,
between lost gold and lingering green.

However uncertain Sandburg might be about his belonging to, or belief in, the past (the prairie world) or the future (the world of the city), there are never any doubts in his mind about his belief in the people, and—as we have seen—he believes in the city as long as he can say “the people are the city.” But in “My People” (in Smoke and Steel), he wonders about their future:

My people are gray,
          pigeon gray, dawn gray, storm gray.
I call them beautiful,
          and I wonder where they are going.

In “Upstream” (in Slabs of the Sunburnt West), in spite of everything, Sandburg believes in the future of strong men “pulled” on by strong mothers. In “The Old Flagman” (in Good Morning, America), however, we see people on the verge of giving up, except for the flagman, who is an old Chicago policeman wounded by city life. He has now withdrawn from working life in order to rest, but spends his last years stopping the trains to save people who want to commit suicide by throwing themselves on the rails.

A large number of short poems give us glimpses of the lives of the people, all of which lead up to his long poem “The People, Yes,” published in 1936 as a book containing 107 numbered shorter poems. It can be seen as one long poem about immigrants, settlers, rich and poor Americans, a poem with a socialistic theme more or less clearly expressed. In an essay called “Carl Sandburg: Fire and Smoke,”³ Gay Wilson Allen says this about The People, Yes:

It was written during the great economic depression, and when it appeared in 1936 many critics hailed it as a sociological document and a political philosophy. Reading it today we can see it was neither. It is rather a psalm—written out of Sandburg's religion of humanity.

These “psalms” contain songs, tall tales, slogans, sayings, and proverbs of the people. What makes the deepest impression, though, is the way Sandburg uses these ingredients in creating poetry about the people and for the people. In poem No 2 Sandburg explains what kind of poem the reader has in front of him:

This is the tale of the Howdeehow powpow,
One of a thousand drolls the people tell of themselves,
Of tall corn, of wide rivers, of big snakes,
Of giants and dwarfs, heroes and clowns,
Grown in the soil of the mass of the people.

Having told his readers that the poem originates in the people, he describes the people by means of questions and statements and by using a sometimes symbolic language, as in poem No 4:

And where is a symbol of the people
          unless it is the sea?

The people work for the country in war and peace:

From the people the countries get their armies.
By the people the armies are fed, clothed, armed.
Out of the smoke and ashes of the war
The people build again their two countries with two flags
Even though sometimes it is one land, one blood, one people.
.....                    And after the strife of war
                    begins the strife of peace.

(No. 15)

The description of the people is coloured by socialistic ideas in poem No 17:

“The people is a myth, an abstraction.”
And what myth would you put in place
          of the people?
And what abstraction would you exchange
          for this one?
.....“Precisely who and what is the people?”
Is this far off from asking what is grass?
          what is salt? what is the sea? what is
          loam?
What are seeds? what is a crop? why must
mammals have milk soon as born or they
          perish?
And how did that alfalfaland governor
          mean it: “The common people is a mule
          that will do anything you say except
          stay hitched”?

The common people—free, or not free, in relation to employers—need a spokesman, a leader, and Sandburg poses a new type of questions:

Who shall speak for the people?

(No. 20)

Who knows the people, the migratory harvest hands and berry pickers
          the loan shark victims, the installment house wolves,
          who knows the people?
Who knows this from pit to peak? The people, yes.

(No. 21)

The answer, “The people, yes,” is developed further in poem nr 22:

The people is a lighted believer and
          hoper—and this is to be held against
          them?
The panderers and cheaters are to have
          their way in trading on these lights
          of the people?
.....The people is a knower whose knowing
          grows by what it feeds on
The people wanting to know more, wanting.
The birds of the air and the fish of the sea
          leave off where man begins.

The word “wanting,” as a characteristic of the people, recurs in poem 35:

The sea moves always, the wind moves always.
They want and want and there is no end to their wanting.
What they sing is the song of the people.
Man will never arrive, man will be always on the way.
It is written he shall rest but never for long.
The sea and the wind tell him he shall be lonely, meet love,
          be shaken with struggle, and go on wanting.

In the next poem the word “wanting” becomes part of the question of controlling the dollar, expressed in historic words:

                                        We are a house divided against itself. We are millions of
hands raised against each other. We are united in but one aim—
getting the dollar. And when we get the dollar we employ it to
get more dollars.

And those who have not yet got it are still wanting and hoping:

“I am holding my own,”
said more than one pioneer.
“I didn't have anything
when I landed here
and I ain't got anything now
but I got some hope left.
I ain't lost hope yet.
I'm a wanter and a hoper.”

Thus, Sandburg introduces the theme of ownership. In poem 57 it develops into a theme of equal shares of work and profit:

          “I hold
if the Almighty had ever made a set of men
that should do all 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.”

However, in spite of the injustices of society, the people do their chores:

Without the daily chores of the people
the milk trucks would have no milk
the markets neither meat nor potatoes
the railroad and bus timetables
would be on the fritz
and the shippers saying “Phooey!”
And daily the chores are done
with heavy toil here, light laughter there,
the chores of the people, yes.

(No. 62)

This is the introductory stanza of a long poem consisting of a series of jokes and tall tales leading up to an explanation of how the laughter and the jokes of the people are compatible with their hard work and their poverty:

          The people laugh, yes, the people laugh.
They have to in order to live and survive under lying politicians, lying labor skates, lying racketeers of business, lying newspapers, lying ads.
The people laugh even at lies that cost them toil and bloody exactions
For a long time the people may laugh, until a day when the laughter changes key and tone and has something it didn't have.

The laughter is also a foretoken of revolt:

Time goes by and the gains are small for the years go slow, the people go slow, yet the gains can be counted and the laughter of the people foretokening revolt carries fear to those who wonder how far it will go and where to block it.

Thus the people are becoming a strong force, creating history and shaping the future as suggested in a series of questions both at the beginning and at the end of poem 71:

What is history but a few Big Names plus
          People?
.....Who can fight against the future?
What is the decree of tomorrow?
Haven't the people gone on and on
          always taking more of their own?
How can the orders of the day
          be against the people in this time?
What can stop them from taking
          more and more of their own?

But who realizes the strength of the people? And how are the people treated? Answers are given in poem 86, where the question is phrased, “Yes but the people what about the people?”

Sometimes as though the people is a child to be pleased or fed
.....And seldom as though the people is a caldron and a reservoir
Of the human reserves that shape history,

Therefore, once more, Sandburg turns into poetry all the work done by the people. Poem 97 becomes a catalogue of all kinds of job holders and job hunters, and Sandburg shows the equal importance of all of them and the threat poised in their gathered strength.

In the last ten poems of the long cycle “The People, Yes,” Sandburg sums up the various themes and brings forth the starving, the unemployed and the hard-working people as a united force revolting against injustices in society. In poem 99, “The Man in the Street Is Fed,” his socialistic pathos from “I Am the People, the Mob” is clear:

The man in the street is fed
with lies in peace, gas in war,

The man in the street is badly treated; he cannot even find a job. He wants to sell “the power of his hand and brain,” but “there are no takers.” This does not disturb anybody, as long as “he cannot connect.” As long as he does not understand the injustices of society, nothing happens. If anybody, however, gives the people ideas, faiths, slogans, he awakens something within them:

Whoever touches the bottom flares of them,
Connects with something prouder than all deaths
For they can live on hard corn and like it.
.....Give them a cause and they are a living dynamite.

That is what Sandburg is doing in this great poem. He is giving the people a cause and pointing out to them that if they do not fight for justice themselves, nobody else will. The wealthy and the leading classes of society do not care about the man in the street:

“What do we care? Is he any of our business? If he knew how he could manage.

They pretend not to notice:

“The system of free competition we now have has made America the greatest and richest country on the face of the globe.

However, the future will bring a change for the people; they are strong, “they are the game fighters who will die fighting.” The people might not all of them understand their own strength, but some do:

“The people,” said a farmer's wife in a Minnesota country store
          while her husband was buying a new post-hole digger,
“The people,” she went on, “will stick around a long time.
“The people run the works, only they don't know it yet—you wait
          and see …”

(No. 105)

In the short poem “Sleep Is a Suspension Midway” (No 106), the people are shown in a state of awakening awareness:

          The people sleep.
          Ai! ai! the people sleep.
Yet the sleepers toss in sleep
and an end comes of sleep
and the sleepers wake.
          Ai! ai! the sleepers wake!

Finally, the climax is brought about in the last of the poems (No 107), “The People Will Live On,” which shows the many facets of the “greatest of themes”:

The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.

It shows how the people move:

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond

It shows the people reaching

for lights beyond the prisms of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.

The people will live on because nobody can take away aspiration and hope:

          You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
          Time is a great teacher
          Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
          the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
          keeps, the people march:
                    “Where to? what next?”

Thus, the poem—and the whole cycle of poems—ends in questions probing the future. The long poem—seemingly socialistic—does not give a definite answer.

Sandburg could not give a definite answer in 1936. At the beginning of the 20th century he had been an ardent believer in Socialism and an active member of the American Socialist Party. In 1908 he wrote in his pamphlet You and Your Job:

One reason I am a Socialist is because the Socialists were the first to fight to abolish child labor, and today the Socialist Party is the only one that has dared to declare in its platform that it will do all in its power to remove all conditions that make it possible for human beings anywhere to be underfed and overworked.

We have seen these ideas reflected in his poetry. In 1917 he and his wife, together with some other well-known Socialists, left the Party because they wanted to support America's entry into the War. Harry Golden says in his book on Carl Sandburg:

The Socialists of America never recovered from the schism produced by the wide-open split on the war against Germany, and when Franklin D. Roosevelt came along, those who had waved the flag had no more battlefields on which to plant it. The first hundred days of the New Deal effectively scattered the Socialist movement in America.

Although Sandburg left the Socialist Party, and although Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933 made some of the Socialist agitation meaningless, Sandburg never ceased to be what he himself called a hoper and a believer. He saw in the basic Socialist ideology a way of reconciling his own undermined beliefs—as well as those of many of his fellow-countrymen—in the two American dreams: the Machine in the Garden could be a positive force only if the people were not made its victims. Essentially, Sandburg believed in the free man; he hoped for a people's society of free men:

The free man willing to pay and struggle and die
                    for the freedom for himself and others
Knowing how far to subject himself to discipline
          and obedience for the sake of an ordered so-
          ciety free from tyrants, exploiters and
          legalized frauds—
          This free man is a rare bird and when you meet
          him take a good look at him and try
          to figure him out because
Some day when the United States of the Earth
          gets going and runs smooth and pretty there
          will be more of him than we have now.

(“The People, Yes,” no. 87)

A poem like the one just quoted shows Sandburg as the political independent he was after 1917, a stand that, later in his life, he found compatible with an active support of the Democratic Party; he campaigned both for Franklin D. Roosevelt in each of his four campaigns, and for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Thus, out of the clash between the two American dreams in the early decades of this century grew Sandburg's particular brand of Socialism. In his lecture in Helsinki, Leo Marx discussed the counter-culture of the modern postwar period as growing out of the clash between the same dreams. In a speech given at Berkeley in 1964 by a student, Marx saw a clear expression of a modern cry for stopping the machine, stopping it by all means—even at the price of one's own life. Sandburg's optimistic belief in “population drifts” towards a free society, created through man's capacity for longing and dreaming, seems to have been replaced by utter pessimism, as reflected both in movements in contemporary society and in recent works of literature.

Notes

1. Here wreck we to gain air and light.Isn't this perhaps sufficient? (Translator: Alrik Gustafsson).

2. Carl Sandburg (Fawcett Publications, 1961)

3. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1960:LIX:3