Part 11

I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the Chicago _Herald_, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state, many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning--I think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks Street in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the counsels of the Cincinnati politicians--I was walking along Superior Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic strains of “Home Again, Home Again.” There were other bands playing that morning, but the prevailing tune was “The Campbells are Coming”; for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention, McKinley defeated him for governor.

But as I was saying, it was not “The Campbells are Coming” which the band was playing that morning, but “Home Again,” and along the wide street, with an intimate sense of proprietorship that excluded strangers from this particular demonstration, people were saying:

“It’s Tom Johnson, home from Europe!”

It was his own employees who had gone forth to meet him, the men who worked for him in the street railway system he owned in Cleveland in those days, and I thought it rather a pretty compliment that a man’s employees should like him so well that they would turn out to welcome him with a band when he came home from his holiday abroad. I could understand their feeling when an hour later I saw Tom Johnson in the Hollenden Hotel, the center of a group of political friends; he seemed as glad as any of them to be back among so many Democrats. He still had his youth, and there was in his manner a peculiar, subtle charm, a gift with which the gods are rather stingy among the sons of men. I can see him now, his curly hair moist with the heat of the summer day, his profile, clear enough for a Greek coin, and the smile that never failed him, or failed a situation, to the end. He was, I think, in Congress in those days of which I am writing, or if he was not, he went to Congress soon after from one of the Cleveland districts. And while he was there he wrote a remarkable letter in response to a communication he had received from some girls who worked in a cloak factory in Cleveland, asking him to vote against the Wilson tariff bill when it was amended by adding a specific duty to the _ad valorem_ duty on women’s cloaks. The girls, of course, poor things, had not written the communication; it was written by the editor of a protectionist newspaper in Cleveland, and the response which Johnson sent was one of the simplest and clearest expositions of the evils of protection I ever read. I had read it when it was published, and had been delighted, but it was not for a dozen years that I was able to tell Johnson of my delight, and then one day as he and Dr. Frederic C. Howe and I were at luncheon I spoke of the letter. He laughed.

“It was a great letter, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Indeed it was,” I replied.

“A wonderful letter,” he went on. “You know, it completely shut them up around here. The editor of that paper tried for weeks to reply to it, and then he gave it up, and he told me privately some time afterward that he was sure the theory of protection was right, but that it wouldn’t work on women’s cloaks. Yes, it was a great letter.” And then with a sigh, he added: “I wish I could have written such a letter. Henry George worked on that letter for days and nights before we got it to suit us; I’d think and think, and he’d write and write, and then tear up what he had written, but finally we got it down.”

Henry George was the great influence in his life, as he has been the influence in the lives of so many in this world. Johnson had been a plutocrat; he had made, or to use a distinction Golden Rule Jones used to insist upon, he had “gathered,” by the time he was thirty, an immense fortune, through legal privileges. Johnson’s privileges had been tariffs on steel, and street railway franchises in several cities, and thus early in life he was almost ready for that most squalid of all poverty, mere possession. And then suddenly he had a marvelous experience, one that comes to few men; he caught a vision of a new social order.

He was on a railway train going from Indianapolis to New York, and the news agent on the train importuned him to buy a novel. Johnson waved him aside--I can imagine with what imperious impatience. But this agent was not to be waved aside; he persisted after the manner of his kind; he had that weird occult power by which the book agent weaves his spell and paralyses the will, even such a superior will as Tom Johnson’s, and the agent sold to him, not a novel, but Henry George’s “Social Problems.” He was not given to reading; he read only for information, and even then he usually had someone else read to him. Once during his last illness he asked me what I was reading, and I told him Ferrero’s “Rome,” and tried to give him some notion of Ferrero’s description of the political machine which Cæsar and Pompey had organized, and of the private fire department of Crassus, and he said: “Well, I’ll have Newton read it to me.” He used to wonder sometimes half wistfully, as though he were missing some good in life, how it was that I loved poetry so, and it was somehow consoling when Mr. Richard McGhee, that fine Irish member of Parliament, told me one night in the House of Commons that when Johnson made that last journey to England he had read Burns to him, and that Johnson had loved and even recited certain passages from them. Well then, Johnson bought his book, and idly turning the pages began to read, became interested, finally enthralled, and read on and on. Later he bought “Progress and Poverty,” and as he read that wonderful book, as there dawned upon his consciousness the awful realization that notwithstanding all the amazing progress mankind has made in the world, poverty has kept even pace with it, stalking ever at its side, that with all of man’s inventions, labor-saving devices, and all that, there has been no such amelioration of the human lot, no such improvement in society as should have come from so much effort and achievement, he had a spiritual awakening, experienced within him something that was veritably, as the Methodists would say, a “conversion.” There was an instant revolution in his nature, or in his purpose; he turned to confront life in an entirely new attitude, and he began to have that which so many, rich and poor, utterly lack, so many to whom existence is but a meaningless confusion of the senses, a life concept. And with this new concept there came a new ideal.

He at once sought out Henry George, the two became fast friends, and the friendship lasted until George’s dramatic death in the midst of his campaign for the mayoralty of New York. George used to do much of his work at the Johnson home in Cleveland--and used to forget to fasten his collar when he was called from that spell of concentration over his desk to the dinner table. The Johnsons were aristocrats from Kentucky, descended from a long line of southern ancestors. And yet Tom Johnson was a Democrat, from conviction and principle. In fact it seems almost as though the cause of democracy would never have got on at all if now and then it had not had aristocrats to lead it, as ever it has had, from the times of the Gracchi to those of the Mirabeaus and the Lafayettes and the Jeffersons.

Tom Johnson made an instant impression when he went into politics, and he went in on the explicit advice of Henry George. When he arose in the House of Representatives at Washington to make his first speech, no one paid the least attention. It is, I suppose, the most difficult place in the world to speak, not so much because of the audience, but because of the arrangement; that scattered expanse of desks is not conducive to dramatic effect, or to any focusing of interest. The British Parliament is the only one in the world that is seated properly; there the old form of the lists is maintained, opponents meet literally face to face across that narrow chamber. But when Johnson arose at Washington, there were those scattered desks, and the members--lolling at their desks, writing letters, reading newspapers, clapping their hands for pages, gossiping, sauntering about, arising and going out, giving no heed whatever. But Tom Johnson had not spoken many words before Tom Reed, then the leader on the Republican side, suddenly looked up, listened, put his hand behind his ear, and leaning forward intently said: “Sh!” and thus brought his followers to attention before the new and strong personality whose power he had so instantly recognized.

It was a power that was felt in that House. They tried to shelve him; they put him on the committee for the District of Columbia, and no shelf could have pleased him more, or been better suited to his peculiar genius, for it gave him a city to deal with. The very first thing he did was to investigate the revenues of the District, and he made a report on the subject, based on the theories underlying the proposition of the single tax. He tried to have the single tax adopted for the District, and while he failed in that design his report is a classic on the whole subject of municipal taxation, even if, like most classics, it is little read. He made some splendid speeches, too, on the tariff, and by a clever device, under the rule giving members leave to print what no one is willing to hear, he contrived, with the help of several colleagues, to distribute over the land more than a million copies of Henry George’s “Protection and Free Trade,” giving that work a larger circulation than all the six best sellers among the romantic novels.

It is one of the peculiar weaknesses of our political system that our strongest men cannot be kept very long in Congress, and it was Johnson’s fate to be defeated after his second term, but he then entered a field of political activity which was not only thoroughly congenial to him, but one in which for the present the struggle for democracy must be carried on. That field is the field of municipal politics which he entered just at the time of the awakening which marked the first decade of the new century.

XXVIII

When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of _McClure’s Magazine_, Lincoln Steffens said to me:

“I’m going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal government.”

“And what do you know about municipal government?” I asked in the tone a man may adopt with his friend.

“Nothing,” he replied. “That’s why I’m going to write about it.”

We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not talk long about municipal government as we were to do in the succeeding years; we had more interesting subjects to discuss just then.

I had been on a holiday to New England with my friend John D. Barry, and had just come from Maine where I had spent a week at Kittery Point, in the delight of long summer afternoons in the company of Mr. William Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my reverence for him, I had gone there to see. He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less in intensity I am sure than those with which Moses came down out of Mount Horeb. And Steffens and I celebrated them and their writings and that quality of right-mindedness they both got into their writings, and we had our joy in their perfect Americanism. The word had a definite meaning for us; it occurred to us at that time because of some tremendous though unavailing blows which Mark Twain had delivered against our government’s policy in the Philippines, the time falling in that era of khaki imperialism which opened in this land with the Spanish war and too much reading of Kipling, who, if I could bring myself to think that literature has any influence in America, might be said to have induced us to imitate England in her colonial policy. There comes back the picture of Mark Twain as he sat on the veranda of the home he had that summer at Sewell’s Bridge, a cottage on a hill all hidden among the pines; he sat there in his picturesque costume of white trousers and blue jacket, with his splendid plume of white hair, and he smoked cigar after cigar--he was an “end to end smoker” as George Ade says--and as he sat and smoked he drawled a delightful monologue about some of his experiences with apparitions and telepathy and that weird sort of thing; he said they were not to be published during his life, and since his death I have been waiting to see them in print. He had just been made a Doctor of Laws by some university in June of that year, a distinguishing fact known to a caller from the fashionable resort of York near by, who, though somewhat hazy as to Mark Twain’s performances in literature, nevertheless scrupulously addressed him as “Doctor,” and every time he was thus recognized in his new and scholarly dignity, he winked at us from under his shaggy brows. Perhaps that was part of his Americanism, too, unless it were a part of that universality which made him the great humorist he was, and philosopher, too; an universality that makes Mr. Howells a humorist as well as a novelist and a philosopher--the elements are scarcely inseparable--though Mr. Howells’s humor is of a more delicate quality than that of his great friend, and, as one might say, colleague, a quality so rare and delicate and delightful that some folk seem to miss it altogether. Perhaps it was the Americanism of these two great men and their democracy that have won them such recognition in Europe, where they have represented the best that is in us.

I speak of their democracy for the purpose of likening it in its very essence to that of Golden Rule Jones and of Johnson, too, and of all the others who have struggled in the human cause. We owe Mr. Howells especially a debt in this land. He jeopardized his standing as an artist, perhaps, by his polemics in the cause of realism in the literary art, but he was the first to look about him and recognize his own land and his own people in his fiction; that is why it is so very much the life of our land as we know it, and to me there came long ago a wonderful and consoling lesson, when in reading after him, and after Tolstoy and Tourgenieff, and Flaubert, and Zola, and Valdez, and Thomas Hardy, I discovered that people are all alike, and like all those about us in every essential.

Lincoln Steffens did not miss the humor in Mr. Howells’s writing, because he could not miss the humor in anything, though there was not so much humor perhaps in another writer whom we had just then discovered and were celebrating that day in the joy of our discovery. It was to me a discovery of the greatest charm, a charm that lasts to this day in everything the man has written, that charm of the sea and of ships, the romance and poetry of it all which I had felt ever since as a boy I found a noble friend in Gus Wright, an old sailor whose name I cannot speak even now without a quickening of the spirit because of the glamour that invested him when I sat and looked at him and realized that he had hunted whales in the South Pacific and had sailed the Seven Seas. I wish I had written him into the first of these papers, where he belongs; he made two miniature vessels for me, one a full rigged ship, the other a bark--dismantled now, both of them, alas, and long since out of commission....

“You go down to the wharves along the East River,” Steffens was saying, “and you’ll see a ship come in, and after she has been made fast to her wharf, an old man will come out of the cabin, light his pipe, and lean over the taffrail; he’ll have a brown, weather-beaten face, and as he leans there smoking slowly and peacefully, his voyage done, his eye roving calmly about here and there, you’ll look at him, and say to yourself, ‘Those eyes have seen everything in this world!’”

It was a rather big thought when you dwelt on it.

“He’s seen everything in the world,” Steffens went on, “but he can’t tell what he’s seen. Now Conrad has those eyes, he has seen everything, and he can tell it.”

It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were talking, the great Pole who even then had come to a mastery of our language that might shame most of his contemporary writers in it. I would not give “Lord Jim” for all the other sea stories that were ever written, not even if all the novels of Cooper and Scott and Stevenson and Dickens were thrown in. For Joseph Conrad can see all that the old sailor Steffens was imagining that day could see, and far more besides; he can see into the human soul. He had not written “Lord Jim” at that time, or if he had, I had not read it, nor had Steffens written his books about municipal government, to get back to the subject; too often, I fear, have I been thinking about some book of Joseph Conrad when I should have been thinking of municipal government.

I did not know much about municipal government in those days, except what I had learned in Jones’s campaigns and that theoretical knowledge I had obtained in the courts as his attorney, and I had, I fear, the same indifference to the subject most of our citizens have. I should have preferred any time to talk about literature and I should prefer to do so now, since that is really so much more interesting and important. But the fact that we knew nothing about it in those days was not unusual; nobody knew much about it except that Mr. James Bryce had said that it was the most conspicuous failure of the American Commonwealth, and we quoted this observation so often that one might have supposed we were proud of the distinction. Certainly few in America in those days understood the subject in the sense in which it is understood in some of the British cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens’s case a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes, like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its page.

I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the partizan, the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly breeds--the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time.

As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs of the _dilettante_, and even in churches, for the righteous were terrible in their wrath. But when he went more deeply, when he exposed the respectable connections of the machine politicians, some of his admirers fell away, and stood afar off, like certain disciples of old. The citizen was delighted when some city other than his own was under the scrutiny of the sharp eyes that gleamed behind those round glasses, but when he drew near for a local study, there was an uplifting of the hands in pious horror. Cincinnati applauded the exposure of Minneapolis, and St. Louis was pleased to have Philadelphia reformed. Reform is popular so long as someone else is to be reformed.

XXIX

Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that filled Steffens with despair.

“Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?” he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!”

He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afternoon of that spring day, Steffens was somehow depressed; we had walked a block in St. Clair Street in silence when he said:

“Why, that man’s program will take a thousand years!”

It did seem long to wait. There was a time when I thought it might be done in a shorter period, but I have found myself under the necessity of extending the term from time to time. I fear now that Steffens’s estimate of the length of Jones’s program was rather short, but I know of no other way that the program can be carried out. Steffens himself is not so impatient now; he learned much more about our cities than he ever wrote or dared to write, much no doubt that he could not write. Great as was the data he collected, before all the conclusions could be drawn, all the general rules deduced, it would be necessary to have the data of all life, of which the cities are microcosms. The subject, after all, is rather large.

But to some it seemed simple enough; were there not policemen patroling their beats ready to arrest the bad people? Thus in the early days of the awakening in America impatience took on the form it always takes with us, and men flew to the old idols of our race, the constable and the policeman; someone must be hounded down, someone must be put in prison. This was the form which the awakening took in many places, and many reputations were built up in that wretched work, and perhaps the inadequacy of the work is best demonstrated by the instability of the reputations. I suppose that such efforts do accomplish something, even though it be at such fearful cost; they may educate some, but mostly they seem to me to gratify a taste for cheap sensation and reward that prurient curiosity which has always made the contemplation of sin so very fascinating to our race. The reformer was abroad, seeking to make mankind over, but since he has no model more attractive than himself to offer, his work never goes very far, and he returns to his warfare on the cigarette, or in moments of greater courage, on the poor girl whose figure flits by in the darkness, followed by the reformer’s devouring eye.