Part 13

At Independent Headquarters, then, that autumn, political meetings were held, in which local affairs--the street-car situation especially and the relation it bore to the machines of political parties--were discussed. Because of those changes the legislature was always making in the government of cities, three councilman at large were to be elected. This was in the year 1904, in the midst of a national campaign. Roosevelt was running for president for his second--or his first term, depending on the point of view--and three of those men who had voted for that street railway ordinance, and were ready to vote to pass it over the mayor’s veto, were candidates on the Republican ticket for councilmen at large. The Independents who had marched with Johnson Thurston determined to nominate a city ticket, and they honored me by offering me the place at the head of that ticket as their candidate for councilman at large. I was writing another novel just then and battling as usual against interruptions, and so I begged off; it was not the campaign I feared, but, as I told them, the fear that I should be elected. We nominated a ticket, and went into the campaign, speaking every night, and in November, though Roosevelt carried the city by fifteen thousand, our candidates for councilmen at large were elected. Clearly, then, the non-partizan movement had not wholly died with Golden Rule Jones; his soul, like the soul of John Brown, was marching on, and still somehow led by him, and inspired by his spirit, there had sprung forth, like Greek soldiers from the dragon’s teeth, in Toledo a democratic municipal movement. First of all the cities in America, she had taken the initial step in freeing herself, the step all cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their masters--that of non-partizan municipal elections.

XXXII

The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not all care to hold office, even if most people do smile indulgently when the modest disinclination is expressed. Perhaps such scepticism is quite natural in a land so saturated in privilege that even office holding is regarded in that light--or was until recently, for now a new conception is expanding in the public consciousness and there is hope that ere long public office will be regarded as a responsibility. I was quite sure that I did not care to be a councilman--that weekly wrangle, by night, in a room choking with the fumes of cheap tobacco, known as the session of the common council, was far from my tastes. And when the mayoralty was suggested to me I was quite as certain that I did not wish that. For it was not long after the death of Jones that it was suggested; by Tom Johnson for one, who, in his blunt way, told me that I should run for the place; and by Steffens, who, just then in Cleveland, was writing the article in which Tom Johnson was celebrated as “the best mayor of the best governed city in America,” and Steffens found time now and then to come over to Toledo to see us. “And another thing,” he wrote to me after one of these visits, “you’ll have to run for mayor.” He reached this conclusion, I believe, by a process of inversion. He had been talking with some of the machine politicians, and it was their objection to me as a candidate that caused him to see my duty in that light. I was at one with them on that point, at any rate; they could have been no more reluctant to have me run than I myself was. Tom Johnson, when the Democrats met in their state convention at Columbus that year, might propose me for governor, and the delegation of his county, Cuyahoga, and the delegation from my own county of Lucas vote for my nomination, but that stroke of political lightning was easily arrested by rods that had been more accurately and carefully adjusted, so that I could take the manuscript of “The Turn of the Balance” and go to Wequetonsing on the shores of Little Traverse Bay, where the days are blue and gold, and there is sparkling sunshine, and a golf links where one may find happiness, if he is on his game, or if he is not, consolation in that noble view from the hill--the tee at the old fourth and the new twelfth hole--when he may, if he wish, imagine himself in Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples--which is no more beautiful. Meredith Nicholson, a hale old Hoosier friend, as James Whitcomb Riley used to phrase it, was there, too, near the spot where he wrote that excellent novel, “The Main Chance,” and in that country place with him and other charming friends near by I spent the summer. But when I came home in the autumn the campaign was already on, and the Independents had all but nominated me as their candidate for mayor.

They were forced to make their nominations by petition, and on the petitions proposing me for the office there were many thousands of names, pages that were stained with the grime and dust and grease of factories and shops--a diploma in its way, which might have made one proud, had not the prospect been one to make one so very unhappy. For I knew what the mayoralty had done to Jones. I had come to realize in my association with him that there is no position more difficult than that of the mayor of a large city in the America of our times, for the city is a kind of microcosm where are posited in miniature all the problems of a democracy, and the fact that they are in miniature only increases the difficulty. My ambitions lay in another field, and besides I had a feeling against it, dim and vague, though since adequately expressed in one of those fine generalizations which Señor Guglielmo Ferrero makes on his brilliant page; “there is no sphere of activity,” he says, writing of the perils of political life, “which is so much at the mercy of unforeseen accidents or where the effort put out is so incommensurable with the result obtained.” It is, of course, one of the privileges of the citizen in a democracy to be “mentioned” for public office; if no one else mentions him he can mention himself, and whenever someone else does mention him there are many who ascribe to his originality the credit for the suggestion.

It seems difficult for our people to understand any man who really does not desire public office in a land where it has so long been regarded purely as a privilege to be bestowed or a prize to be contested. I suppose that even the blunt and grim old warrior Sherman caused the people to smile when he said that if nominated for the presidency he would not accept and if elected he would not serve. They wondered what he meant, and for a time it never occurred to them that he meant just what he said.

But the day came at last when I must decide, and to a committee of the Independents I said that I should give them an answer in the morning. I thought it all over again in the watches of the night,--and the unfinished manuscript on my library table--and at last, since somebody had to do it, since somebody had to point out at least the danger of risking the community rights in the hands of a political machine, I said I would accept. I suppose that it is but an expression of that ironic mood in which the Fates delight to deal with mortals that it should be so easy to get that which one does not want; the Independents insisted on my standing for the office, but the only humor in that fact was just then too grim for pleasure, though there is always a compensation somewhere after all, and gloomy as I was that morning at the prospect of the bitter campaign and the difficulties that would follow if I were elected, I could laugh when “Dad” McCullough, the old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of his committee not to hear him, said:

“Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?”

His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it!

And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall, before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to which we had been used in Jones’s campaigns were revived and repeated with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by “Dad” McCullough as “bearing down on the infirmities of the law,” was now represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos.

To this “moral” issue that had served for so many years, the “good” people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certain of the clergy to lead them rallied instantly about the machine, and for six weeks reveled in an inspection of all the city’s vices, and mouseled in the slums and stews of the tenderloin for examples of the depravity which they declared it was the purpose and design of the Independents to intensify and perpetuate. Their own candidate had been in power for a year and a half and these conditions had existed unmolested, but when some of our speakers indicated this inconsistency in their attitude they only raged the more.

But notwithstanding all this, the issue was clear; the machine had helped to make it clear, not only by its long opposition to Jones, but more recently by its efforts for the street railway company. It was the old issue between privilege and democracy, that has marked the cleavage in society in all ages. The people were trying to take back their own government, for the purpose, first, of preventing the street railway company from securing another lease of the city’s streets for a quarter of a century, by which, incidentally, the company would realize profits on about twenty-five million dollars of watered stock. But the people were not to be deceived; they were not to be turned off the trail so easily; and the entire ticket was elected, so that at the beginning of that new year the Independents were in control of every branch of the government, not only in the city, but in the county as well.

XXXIII

I have spoken of the Independents as though they were an authentic political party, when it was one of their basic principles to be no party at all. They were Republicans and Democrats who, in the revelation of Jones’s death, had come to see that it was the partizan that was responsible for the evil political machines in American cities; they saw that by dividing themselves arbitrarily into parties, along national lines, by voting, almost automatically, their party tickets, ratifying nominations made for them they knew not how, they were but delivering over their city to the spoiler. As Republicans, proud of the traditions of that party, they had voted under the impression that they were voting for Lincoln; as Democrats they thought they were voting for Jefferson, or at least for Jackson, but they had discovered that they had been voting principally for the street railway company and the privileges allied with it in interest.

And more than all, they saw that in the amazing superstition of party regularity by which the partizan mind in that day was obsessed, they were voting for these interests no matter which ticket they supported, for the machine was not only partizan, it was bipartizan, and the great conflict they waged at the polls was the most absurd sham battle that ever was fought. It seems almost incredible now that men’s minds were ever so clouded, strange that they did not earlier discover how absurd was a system which, in order to enable them the more readily to subjugate themselves, actually printed little wood-cuts of birds--roosters and eagles--at the heads of the tickets, so that they might the more easily and readily recognize their masters and deliver their suffrages over to them. It is an absurdity that is pretty well recognized in this country to-day, and the principle of separating municipal politics from national politics is all but established in law. Mr. James Bryce had pointed it out long before, but Jones seemed to be almost the first among us to recognize it, and he probably had not read from Mr. Bryce; he deduced the principle from his own experience, and from his own consciousness, if not his own conscience, perhaps he had some intimation of it from the Genius of These States, whose scornful laugh at that and other absurdities his great exemplar Walt Whitman could hear, echoed as from some mountain peak afar in the west. But it was no laughing matter in Toledo in those days. Men were accused of treason and sedition for deserting their parties; it made little difference which party a man belonged to; the insistence was on his belonging to a party; any party would suffice.

I have no intention, however, of discussing that principle now, but it was the point from which we had to start in our first campaign, the point from which all cities will have to start if they wish to be free. The task we faced was relatively greater than that which Jones had faced; we had a full ticket in the field, a candidate for every city office and a man running for the council in every ward in town. Jones had run alone, and though he succeeded there was always a council and a coterie of municipal officials who represented the other interest in the community. Of course he had made our work possible by the labor he had done, great pioneer that he was. He had been his own platform, as any candidate after all must be, but with our large movement it was necessary to reduce our principles to some form and we tried to do this as simply as we could. We put forth our belief that local affairs should be separate from, and independent of, party politics, and that public officers should be selected on account of their honesty and efficiency, regardless of political affiliations; that the people should be more active in selecting their officials, and should not allow an office-seeker to bring about his own nomination; that the prices charged by public service corporations should be regulated by the council at stated intervals; and that all franchises for public utilities should first be submitted to a vote of the people, that the city should possess the legal right to acquire and maintain any public utility, when authorized so to do by direct vote of its people, that every franchise granted to public service corporations should contain an agreement that the city might purchase and take over its property at a fair price, whenever so voted by the people, and that no street railway franchise should be extended or granted, permitting more than three-cent fares, and unless it includes provision for universal transfers, satisfactory service, and reasonable compensation for the use of bridges, and we demanded from the legislature home rule, the initiative and referendum and the recall.

Perhaps it was not such a little platform after all, but big indeed, I think, when one comes to consider its potentialities, and if anyone thinks it was easy to put its principles into practice, let him try it and see! It was drawn by that Johnson Thurston of whom I spoke, and by Oren Dunham and by Elisha B. Southard and others, citizens devoted to their town, and already with a prescience of the city spirit. They succeeded in compressing into those few lines all we know or need to know about municipal government, and ages hence our cities will still be falling short of the ideal they expressed on that little card. There were many who went with us in that first campaign who did not see all the implications of that statement of principles; none of us saw all of them of course. The movement had not only the strength but the weaknesses of all so-called reform movements in their initial stages. Those who were disappointed or disaffected or dissatisfied for personal reasons with the old party machines, no doubt found an opportunity for expression of their not too lofty sentiments, although later on when they saw that it was merely a tendency toward democracy they fell away, not because the movement had deserted its original ideals but because they at last understood them.

As I now look back on that first campaign, on the experience I had so much dreaded, the perspective has worked its magic, and the hardships and difficulties have faded away, even, I hope, as its enmities have faded away, though remembering Jones’s admonition to “draw the sting” I tried to keep enmities out of it. Since I could not bring myself to discuss myself, I resolved not to discuss my opponents, and I went through the campaign without once mentioning the name of one of them--there were four candidates for mayor against me--without making one personal reference to them. And never in any political campaign since have I attacked an opponent. It was enough to discuss the principles of our little platform; and the first task was to get the electors to see the absurdity of their partizanship and to make clear the necessity of having a city government that represented the people or, since that phrase is perhaps indefinite, one that did not represent the privileged interests of the city.

The campaign was like the old Jones campaigns, though not altogether like them.

The legislature, which is always interfering as much as possible with the cities, had changed the time of holding the municipal elections from the spring to the autumn, one change wrought by a legislature in cities that the people approved, since instead of those raw spring winds we now have the glorious weather the autumn usually brings us in the lake regions, with a sparkling air and a warm sun, and a long procession of golden days, on which one really should be playing golf, if one could play golf in the midst of a political campaign, which one could not, since art and politics, or at least the practice of them, are wholly incompatible.

There was no old gray Molly to jog about from one meeting to another, and if there had been, she could not have jogged fast enough for the necessities of that hour; and we established new precedents when Percy Jones, the son of the Golden Rule Mayor, drove me about at furious speed in his big touring car, the “Grey Ghost” the reporters called it, and it streaked through the night, with its siren singing, from place to place until I had spoken at half a dozen meetings. Every day at noon it wheeled up to the entrance of the factories and shops as the men were coming out for their noon hour. And such meetings I believe were never held anywhere; there was an inspiration as the men crowded about the car to hear the speeches; they were not politicians, they were seeking nothing, they were interested in their city; and in their faces, what is far above any of these considerations, there was an eager interest in life, perhaps a certain hunger of life which in so many of them, such were the conditions of their toil, was not satisfied.

XXXIV

As I sat and looked out over the crowds that poured from the shops and stood, sometimes for the whole of the noon hour, in discomfort perhaps if the wind was off the lake, and saw the veritable hunger for life that was in their faces, a hunger surely which no political or economic system, however wise and perfect, could satisfy, I could not help thinking that it was a pity the clergy did not understand these people better, for, after all, the message of the Carpenter who came out of Nazareth was for the workers and the poor, and He had passionately thrown Himself on their side. It might have been suggested to that pastor who complained bitterly that his own pews were empty on Sunday evenings while the streets outside his church were crowded with people who for one evening at least were joyous and free from care, that the Master whom he served would have asked no better congregation than they and no better auditorium than the street.

But this pastor was used to making suggestions, not to receiving them; he was not of a mind as open as that one who actually came to me once to ask me how he could get the workingmen to hear him preach. He had not failed, he said, to go to them; he had advertised on a placard hung at the entrance of a factory where two thousand men were working that on a Monday at noon he would speak to them. They had known of him, for he had recently been celebrated in the newspapers as having inaugurated a crusade to close the cheap theaters, whose lurid melodramas,--I believe lurid is the word in that connection unless the melodramas are “novelized” and sold for a dollar and a half,--he said, were detrimental to morals, as no doubt they were. And so when he appeared, punctually, on that Monday noon, at the rendezvous appointed by his poster, the workingmen were ready and, when he stood up to preach to them, they received him with a deafening din, made by pounding on pieces of metal they had brought from the shop, so that the poor fellow could not speak at all, and when, with roars of awful laughter they unfurled some ribald banner fresh from the paint shop of their establishment, advising him to go to hell where he was always consigning so many of his fellow human beings, he went away quite broken-hearted. It was in that mood and perhaps a little chastened by his experience that he came to see me. I could agree with him, of course, that the men had acted like the perfect barbarians they could be at times, but there was nothing I could do for him, nothing I could tell him. I learned long ago that you cannot tell a man anything unless he knows it already!

And yet that preacher’s case was perfectly simple. He had come to the city not long before, and of course, had come from the country. His training and his experience had all been rural, he knew nothing whatever of the life of our cities or of their problems; he thought only in agrarian sequences. He had a little code of conduct consisting of a few perfectly simple negatives, namely, men should not use tobacco, or liquor, or attend theaters or circuses, or play with colored cards, or violate (that is, do anything pleasant on) the Sabbath day. And whenever he saw people doing any of these things it was his duty to dissuade them from doing them, and if he could not dissuade them, then it was the duty of the authorities to force the people to stop doing these things by sending policemen after them. Poverty was caused either by drink, or by idleness, though usually by drink, and if the saloons were closed, drinking would cease!