Part 14

This was the man’s conception. Of the condition of the workingmen in the cities he had literally no notion. He knew they worked, and that working made them tired, of course, just as it made farmers tired. He saw no difference between the labor in the agricultural field and that in the industrial field. That men who had been shut up in dusty factories for six days, working intently at whirling machines, under the bulb of an electric light, felt, when they came to the one day of rest, that they should like to go outdoors and breathe the air, and have some relaxation, some fun, had never occurred to him. That they had to work so hard, too, that stimulants were perhaps a necessity, never occurred to him, just as it had never occurred to him that when one of these workers left home there was no place for him to go unless he went to a saloon, where there were light and warmth and companionship, and, above all, liberty; or to a cheap theatre or in the summer to a baseball game. And he could not understand why these men resented his suggestion that they give up all these things, and instead do as farmers do on Sunday, or as they pretend to do, that is, stay indoors, or, if they do go out, go out to attend church.

And what was most curious of all, he had not the slightest notion of what we meant when we spoke of the street railway problem. He knew, of course, that it was proposed to reduce the fare a cent or two cents, but that was not important; what were two cents? That there was anything immoral in watering stock, in seizing millions of the communal value, had never occurred to him, and in the midst of all the complexities of city life he remained utterly naïve, bound up in his little code, with not the glimmer of a ray of light on social conditions or problems, or of economics, or, in a word, of life. To him there were no social problems that the Anti-Saloon League could not solve in a week, if wicked officials would only give them enough policemen and a free rein to do it.

And so he wondered why the workingmen would not come to hear him preach, or at least would not listen to him at the door of their shop!

And most of the parsons in the town--at that time, though it is not so any more, so rapidly have changes come in our thought--were of this frame of mind. Not one of them supported our cause; many of them denounced it, and continued to denounce it, for years. Now and then there was one who might whisper to me privately that he understood and favored our efforts, but not one ever spoke out publicly, unless it were to denounce us. And several times they attacked me in their prayers. For instance, if--after I became mayor--I went to deliver an address of welcome, and a preacher was there to open the assembly with prayer, he sometimes would take advantage of the situation and, in the pretense of asking a blessing on the “chief magistrate of our beloved city,” point out my short-comings and read me a lecture on my duties with his eyes shut and his hands folded. To that attack it would have been necessary, I presume, though I am not quite sure of the ecclesiastical etiquette, to reply with my eyes shut and my hands folded, but Jones had said: “When He was reviled, He reviled not again,” and “He that endureth to the end.” It seemed as good a plan as any. I never replied to these or any other of their attacks. Some of the leaders of our movement always insisted that the preachers opposed us because they were influenced, according to the historical precedents, by their economic dependence on the privileged class. But if that is true I am sure the influence was unconscious in most cases, and that they simply did not understand. They were all desperately sincere. That was the chief difficulty with them.

Indeed, I found it better never to reply to any criticisms or attacks whatever. The philosophy of that attitude has been pretty well set forth I think by Emerson, though it has been so long since I have read it that I do not now know in which of his essays or his poems or his lectures he revealed it, though probably it would be found in all three since, shrewd Yankee that he was, he cast every thought he had in three forms. Had he lived in our day he might in addition have dramatized each one of them. But from his advice never to apologize, one may proceed to the virtue of never explaining. It saves an immense amount of time and energy, for since a politician’s enemies are legion, and are constantly increasing in number, and can attack him, as it were, in relays, he must have enormous energy if he is to reply in detail to all of them; he will find himself after a while more desperately involved than was the man in Kipling’s story, who through the Indian Government kept his enemy toiling night and day to answer foolish questions about pigs, and, what was worse, explaining his previous answers.

Telling what one is going to do is equally as foolish as explaining what one has done, or denying what one has not done, and so promises could be dispensed with as easily as retorts and explanations. Long catalogues of promised prodigies and miracles are of course absurd, and the bawling and blowing politician (as Walt Whitman called him) can make them as fluently in his evil cause as can the purest of the reformers. I had been disgusted too often with such performances to be able to enter into competition of that sort, and so let our little platform speak for itself and did not even promise to be good. And the people understood.

I have often heard men complain of the strain and fatigue of political campaigning, and I sometimes think much of their distress arises from the fact that they campaign in ways that are not necessary, if nothing more derogatory is to be said of them. There is of course the fatigue that comes of nervous strain and anxiety, and this is very great, but the haggard visage and the husky voice are all unnecessary. It is no wonder to be sure that some men break down in campaigns, since their cause is so bad that anyone might well be expected to sicken in its advocacy, and in furthering it it is perhaps inevitable that their efforts partake in a measure of its corruption. There is no exercise that is physically more beneficial than speaking, especially speaking in the open air, provided one knows how to use his voice and does not attempt to shout up the wind; and two or three speeches at noon, just before luncheon and four or five more in the evening after dinner may be recommended as an excellent course in physical culture, if when one is done one’s speeches for the evening one will go home and, for an hour, read, say “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer” before he goes to bed. I can recommend these two great American novels with entire confidence in their power to refresh, and in their deep and true and delightful philosophy to correct aberrations in the point of view--of one’s self, in the first place, and of some other things of much more importance than one’s self. If the cause be one in which one believes there is an incomparable exhilaration in it all. And it was with some pride that I came through that first campaign without having lost either my temper or my voice.

There must always remain the memory of those throngs in the meetings, those workingmen who came pouring out of the shops and factories at noon, glad as school boys to be released for a little while from toil, laughing, whistling, engaging in rude pleasantries, jostling, teasing and joking each other, and then, suddenly, pausing, gathering about the motor car, drawing closer, pressing up to the foot-board, and listening, with eager, intent faces, in which there was such instant appreciation of a joke, a pleasantry, anything to make them laugh, and yet somehow the adumbration of a yearning and a hope. Lyman Wachenheimer--who as judge of the police court once had fined Jones for contempt of court, but had come later to agree with him and now was candidate for prosecuting attorney of the county--would stand up in the car, lean over, and speak to them out of the splendid new faith in democracy that had come to him, and the rest of us in our turn would speak. We did not ask them to vote for us; our message was at least higher than that old foolish and selfish appeal. First of all we wished them to vote for themselves, we wished them to vote their own convictions, and not merely to follow with the old partizan blindness the boss or the employer or someone else who told them how to vote. And all too soon for the orators warming to their work--they must speak rapidly, they must speak simply and come to the point, for the demands of the street meeting are obdurate and out under the open sky there is short shrift for insincerity or any of the old pretense and buncombe--the whistle blows, the men turn and scatter, the crowd melts away, a few linger to the last minute to catch the last word, and then they turn and run, and as they go they lift high the perpendicular hand--Walt Whitman’s sign of democracy.... Do you know it? Sometimes one of the section gang working on the railroad, pausing in his labor while the Limited sweeps by, looks up and to the idle one on the rear platform of the observation car, going for his long holiday, he waves his hand in a gesture instinct with grace and the sincere greeting of a fellow human being, and perhaps because--alas!--the moment of their swift and instantly passing communication is isolated from all the complexities of our civilized life, because it is to vanish too soon for the differences men have made between themselves to assert their distinction, there is that one instant of perfect understanding. Sometimes a man in a boat sailing by will hail you with this gesture from his passing craft; he is safe from long contact, he can run a risk and for that little moment yield to the adventure of picking up an acquaintance. Sometimes it is the engineer of a locomotive leaning out of his cab window, giving you perhaps a droll wink, and there are tramps who from a box car will exchange a friendly greeting. And I shall never forget the little Irish sailor up on the boat deck with whom I talked in the early darkness of an autumn evening in the middle of the Atlantic, with the appalling loneliness of the sea as night came down to meet it in mystery, and the smoke from the funnels trailed up off to the southwest on a rising and sinister wind; he told me of his mother and his uncle--“who makes his five guineas a week and doesn’t know the taste of liquor”--and of his little ambitions, and so, after a bit, of the mysteries of life, with a perfect _camaraderie_, as we stood there leaning over the rail, and then, suddenly, when we parted, invested himself with a wholly different manner, and touched his cap in a little salute and left me to the inanities of the smoking-room.

It was something like that, those intimacies, vouchsafed for a moment in our early meetings, whether those at noon or those at night, in the suffocating little halls, or the cold tent, with the torches tossing their flames in your eyes as you spoke, and it was even that way in those curious meetings down in the darker quarter of the town, where the waste of the city lifted up faces that were seared and scarred with the appalling catastrophes of the soul that had somehow befallen them, and there was unutterable longing there.

The one thing that marred these contacts was not only that one was so powerless to help these men, but that one stood before them in an attitude that somehow suggested to them, inevitably, from long habit and the pretense of men who sought power for themselves, that one needed only to be placed in a certain official relation to them, and to be addressed by a certain title, to be able to help them. It was enough to make one ashamed, almost enough to cause one to prefer that they should vote for someone else, and relieve one from this dreadful self-consciousness, this dreadful responsibility.

And these were the people! These were they who had been so long proscribed and exploited; they had borne a few of the favored of the fates on their backs, and yet, bewildered, they were somehow expectant of that good to come to them which had been promised in the words and phrases by which their very acquiescence and subjugation had so mysteriously been wrought--“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Where? And for them, when? Not through the efforts of those who employed cold phrases about “good” government, and “reform,” and “business” administrations, and efficiency methods, and enforcement of the laws, and law and order, and all that sort of thing, and class consciousness, and economic, or any other interpretation of history, or through initiatives, referendums and recalls. What good would any of these cold and precise formulæ do them? Better perhaps the turkey at Thanksgiving, and the goose at Christmas time which the old machine councilman from the ward gave them; of course they themselves paid for them, but they did not know it, and the councilman did not know it; he had bestowed them with the voice of kindness, in the same hearty human spirit in which he came to the wedding or the wake, or got the father a job, or the oldest son a parole from the workhouse, and rendered a thousand other little personal services. Perhaps Bath House John and Hinky Dink were more nearly right after all than the cold and formal and precise gentleman who denounced their records in the council. For they were human, and the great problem is to make the government of a city human.

There were many, of course, even in our own movement, who were not concerned about that; I was strongly rebuked by one of them once in that very first campaign for declaring that we were no better than anyone else, and that all the “good” men of the world could not do the people much good even if they were elected to the city government for life. No, we may have efficient governments in our cities, and honest governments, as we are beginning to have everywhere, and, happily, are more and more to have, but the great emancipations will not come through the formulæ of Independents, Socialists, or single-taxers, nor through Law and Order Leagues, nor Civic Associations. Down in their hearts these are not what the people want. What they want is a life that is fuller, more beautiful, more splendid and, above all, more human. And nobody can prepare it and hand it over to them. They must get it themselves; it must come up through them and out of them, through long and toilsome processes of development; for such is democracy.

“That man’s program will take a thousand years!” Lincoln Steffens had said in despair that day I introduced him to Jones. Yes--or a hundred thousand. But there is no other way.

XXXV

The most efficient executive of which there is any record in history is clearly that little centurion who could say: “For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers; and I say unto one, go, and he goeth; and to another, come, and he cometh; and to my servant, do this, and he doeth it.”

In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say “Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,” and he came--after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come” again, and that sometimes, having said “Do this,” I had to go myself and do it, or leave it undone.

Executive ability is a mysterious quality inhering in personality, and partaking of its mysteries.

I had gone into the mayor’s office feeling that I was about the most ill-prepared man for such a job in the town. Naturally I had turned to Tom Johnson, who had a tremendous reputation as an executive; even his worst enemy, as the saying is, would not deny his wonderful executive ability. I went to him in a sort of despair, and he laughed and leaned over and whispered----

But perhaps after all I should not tell. It was spoken in confidence. And it is ungenerous and unkind to destroy the cherished illusions of the world, almost as unkind, I was about to say, as it is difficult, since there is nothing the world so cherishes and hugs to its sad old withered bosom as it does its illusions. It may be that they are entirely necessary to it, it may be that it could not get along without them. What would this nation have done, after all, if it had not been for executive ability and the judicial temperament? The judicial temperament consists, of course, in nothing more than the calm assurance which enables one to put off till to-morrow problems that should be decided to-day, for if allowed to go long enough problems will solve themselves, just as letters unanswered long enough despatch their own replies.

I had deduced that generalization for myself long ago, while waiting for judges to hand down opinions, and then in decisions reading the well-known formula: “The court does not find it necessary to pass on this particular point at this time.” Why, I applied one time to the Supreme Court, on a Wednesday morning, for a stay of execution on behalf of a man who was to be burned alive in our electric chair on the following Friday, and the judicial temperament who at that time happened to be chief justice calmly said that the application would be taken under advisement and a decision handed down in due course, which, at the earliest, was the following Tuesday morning. But the governor half an hour afterward said, “Oh, well, don’t worry; if the court doesn’t act, I’ll reprieve him,” an example, perhaps, of what I had in mind when I was writing those vague thoughts about making government human. But executive ability! I had, and still have, great admiration and reverence for that----

But Tom Johnson leaned over that afternoon, as we sat there in the committee room of the House at Columbus, and laughed and whispered:

“It’s the simplest thing in the world; decide every question quickly and be right half the time. And get somebody who can do the work. That’s all there is to executive ability.”

I looked at him in amazement. He had grown quite serious.

“There’s another thing,” he added. “Don’t spend too much time in your office. A quarter of an hour each day is generally too long, unless there are a whole lot of letters. Of course,” he went on reflectively, “you can get clerks who can sign your name better than you can.”

XXXVI

The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio. He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a member of the Board of Public Safety--we still had the board plan of government then--and the appointment to office of a young aristocrat afforded the newspapers and cartoonists an opportunity for ridicule which they did not overlook. But I knew the boy. I had seen him play football, for one thing, and I knew how he managed his own business. The vigor and the nerve he had displayed on the football field at once showed in his duties, and the ability and devotion he displayed in his own affairs he applied in the public service. The criticism to which the administration was constantly subjected distressed him; he heard so much of it at the fashionable club where he had his luncheons. One afternoon he came into City Hall with an expression more somber than usual, and as he sat down in my office he began:

“They are saying----”

“Who are saying?” I asked.

“The people,” he replied.

He had come, of course, from his luncheon at the club. His motor car was at the door of the city hall, and I asked him to take me for a drive, and I suggested certain parts of town through which, for a change, we might go. We ignored the avenues and the boulevards, and for two hours drove about through quiet streets far from the life of the town as we knew it and as all men down in the business section knew it--the old third ward, where the Poles lived, and around to the upper end of the old seventh where the shops and factories were, and then on over through the eighth and the ninth, and so up to the Hill, and after we had passed by all those blocks and blocks of humble little homes, cottages of one story, and all that, I asked him if he knew what the folk who lived in them were saying about the administration.

“Why, no,” he answered. “I never talk with any of them.”

“Well,” I ventured to say, “they are the people, they who live in those little houses with the low roofs. It is important to know how they feel, too.”

I always felt that he had a new vision after that; he saw that if government was to mean anything to these persons, it must be made human, and the reforms in the police and fire departments he wrought out in that spirit were such that when he died, in not quite four years, when he was just turned thirty, the cartoonist had long since ceased to caricature him as an idle fop, and the newspaper editorials mourned him, in common with most of the community, as one of the best public servants our city, or any city, ever had.

XXXVII

I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land, where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience, when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique. And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and they were many and respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and that was, that I did not know.