Part 15
Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West, I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole, after four terms in a mayor’s office testing them, I still believe to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs; representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say--non-partizan city elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the task, this was the program.
We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory possible by his great pioneer work in destroying the superstition of party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their party confreres and conspirators from the city--machine politicians to whom they turned for advice--but gain a cheap _réclame_ at home by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the “good” people were always insisting on the “moral” issue; urging us to turn aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official attention on the “bad” people--and wreck our movement. Our immediate purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of transmuting twenty-five millions in green paper into twenty-five millions in gold, and thereby absorb the commercial values of half a century. To do this it was necessary to win elections for years, and to win elections, one must have votes, and “bad” people have votes, equally with “good” people, and if one is to judge from the comment of the “good” people on the election returns, the “bad” people in most cities are in the majority. On that point, I believe, the reformers and the politicians at least are agreed. More than this, we had to obtain from reluctant legislatures the powers that would put the city at least on equal terms with the corporations which had always proved so much more potent than the city. Such was the struggle our movement faced, such was the victory to be won before our city could be free from the triumvirate that so long had exploited it, the political boss, the franchise promoter, and the country politician. The Free City! That was the noble dream.
Well might the wise and sophisticated laugh at their mayor and call him dreamer! It was, and, alas, it is a dream. But youth is so sublimely confident, and counts so little on opposition. Not the opposition of those who array themselves against it--that was to be expected, of course, that was part of the glorious conflict--but the opposition from within the ranks, the opposition on the hither side of the barricade. For youth thinks, sometimes, that even opponents may be won, if only they can be brought to that vantage ground whence one inevitably beholds the fair and radiant vision. It had not expected the falling away of followers, of supporters, even of friends--the strangely averted eye on the street, the suddenly abandoned weekly call, the cessation of little notes of encouragement, the amazing revelations of malignity and bitterness at election times, and the flood increasing in volume at each succeeding election. One man, thought to be devoted to a cause, fails in his desire to secure an office; another you refuse a contract; he whom you neglected to favor in January punctually appears in the opposition ranks in November, one by one they drop away, and multiply into an army. Even in the official group in the City Hall and in the council, there are jealousies, and childish spites, and pitiable little ambitions and with them misunderstanding, gossip, slander, anonymous attacks, lies, abuse, hatred, until youth makes the awful discovery that there is, after all, in human nature, pure malice, and youth must fight hard to retain its ideals, so continually are all the old lovely illusions stripped away in this bewildering complication of little tragedies and comedies we call life.
To be sure, youth might have known, having read the like in books from infancy, and having made some reflections of its own on the irony of things, and indulged from time to time in philosophizings. But that was about the experience of others, from which none of us is wise enough to learn. Most of us indeed are not wise enough to learn from our own. It is all a part of life. What a thing human life is, to be sure, and human nature! _Ay di mi!_ as Carlyle used to say. Patience, and shuffle the cards!...
... I had no intention of recalling such things. Did not Jones say that when the Golden Rule would not work, it was not the fault of the Rule, but because one did not quite know how to work it? I have no intention of setting down the failures or the little successes of four terms as mayor. Nor shall I write a little history of those terms in office; I could not, and it would not be worth while if I could. I shall not attempt in these pages a treatise on municipal government, for if the task were rightly executed, it would be a history of civilization. Non-partizanship in municipal elections, municipal ownership, home rule for cities,--who is interested in these? I have discussed them in interviews--(“Is there to be a statement for us this morning, Mr. Mayor?”)--and speeches numerous as autumn leaves, and like them, lost now in the winds to which they were given.
After all, it is life in which we are all interested. And one sees a deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage it as--just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition, or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. He may discern there the operations of universal and inexorable laws, and realize the tremendous conflict that everywhere and in all times goes on between privilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it make him the slave of its own _clichés_, as Socialists for instance, when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse, emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula “Economic determinism.”
But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know not where nor how, and all pretty much alike. And government, be its form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with those strange embracing gestures, “I believe in _all_ the people.”
XXXVIII
However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes, separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel, a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer, who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding office; whether the East Side is receiving its due consideration in comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of morals is to prevail--these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever before him.
And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees--of aged men--demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction. I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well; “I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.”
Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their difficulties. I remember one poor soul whose husband was in the penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being good to prisoners.”
Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each new attempt at explanation she said:
“You are the father of all.”
It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula. This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.
It may have been because, in some way, it had got abroad that I was a reformer myself. It was at a time when there was new and searching inquiry, and a new sense of public decency, the result of a profound impulse in the public consciousness, and I had been of those who in my town had opposed the political machines. Constructive thinking and constructive work being the hardest task in the world, one of which our democracy in its present development is not yet fully capable, the impulse spent itself largely in destructive work. That was natural; it is a quality inherent in humanity. My friend Kermode F. Gill, the artist-builder and contractor of Cleveland, once told me that while it is difficult to get men to carry on any large construction, and carry it on well, and necessary to set task masters over them to have the work done at all, there is a wholly different spirit in evidence when the work is one of demolition. If a great building is to be torn down, the men need no task masters, no speeding up, they fly at it in a perfect frenzy, with a veritable passion, and tear it down so swiftly that the one difficulty is to get the salvage. And in the course of building public works I have observed the same phenomenon. While the forces are tearing down, while they are excavating, that black fringe of spectators, the “crow line” the builders call it, is always there. But when once the work is above ground, and construction begins, when the structure lifts itself, when it aspires,--the crow line dissolves and melts quite away. This, in a sense, is true of man in any of his operations. When the great awakening came, after the first shock of surprise, after the first resolve to do better, the public went at the work of demolition, all about the arena the thumbs of the multitude were turned down, and we witnessed the tragedy of men who but a short while before had been praised and lauded for their possessions, and used as models for little boys in Sunday-school, suddenly stripped of all their coveted garments, and held up to the hatred and ridicule of a world that can yet think of nothing better than the stocks, the pillory, the jail, and the scaffold.
In Edinburgh I was shown a little church of which Sir Walter Scott was once a vestryman, or deacon or elder or some such official, and in the door still hung the irons in which offenders were fastened on Sunday mornings so that the righteous, as they went to pray, might comfort themselves with a consoling sense of their own goodness by spitting in the face of the sinner. Many of our reforms are still carried on in this spirit, and are no more sensible or productive of good.
The word “reformer,” like the word “politician” has degenerated, and, in the mind of the common man, come to connote something very disagreeable. In four terms as mayor I came to know both species pretty well, and, in the later connotations of the term, I prefer the politician. He, at least, is human. The reformers, as Emerson said, affect one as the insane do; their motives may be pious, but their methods are profane. They are a buzz in the ear.
I had read this in Emerson in my youth, when for a long time I had a veritable passion for him, just as in a former stage, and another mood, I had had a veritable passion for books about Napoleon, and, at another, for the works of Carlyle, and the controversy excited by the reckless Froude; but the truth--as it appears to me, or at any rate, the part of a truth--was not borne in upon me until I came to know and to regard, with dread, the possibility that I might be included in their number, which I should not like, unless it were as a mere brother in humanity, somewhat estranged in spirit though we should be.
XXXIX
The disadvantages of being classed as a reformer are not, I am sure, sufficiently appreciated; if they were the peace of the world would not be troubled as constantly as it is by those who would make mankind over on a model of which they present themselves as the unattractive example. One of those advantages is that each reformer thinks that all the other reformers are in honor committed to his reform; he writes them letters asking for expressions of sympathy and support, and, generally, when he finds that each of the others has some darling reform of his own which he is determined to try on an unwilling public, he is at once denounced as a traitor to the whole scheme of reform in the universe. Another disadvantage is that reformers never are reëlected, and I might set forth others, were it my intention to embark on that interesting subject.
I am moved to these observations, however, by the recollection of an experience, exasperating at the time, though now of no moment, since it has cured itself as will most exasperations if left long enough to themselves. Its importance, if it have any importance at all, may be ascribed to its effect of having saved me from any such fatal classification, unless I were far enough away from home, where almost anyone may be regarded as a reformer. To be sure, as I was just saying, in the days immediately following my first election, I was regarded by many of the sacred and illuminated host of reformers in the land as one of them, since I was asked to join in all sorts of movements for all sorts of prohibitions,--of the use of intoxicating liquors and tobacco and cigarettes, and I know not what other vices abhorred by those who are not addicted to them,--but it was my good luck, as it seems now to have been, to be saved from that fate by as good and faithful an enemy as ever helped a politician along. The Democrats had been placed in power that year in Ohio, and with Tom Johnson, many of us felt that it was an opportunity to secure certain changes in the laws of Ohio relating to the government of cities, that is, we felt it was time to secure our own reforms; everyone else, of course, felt the same way about his reforms. We had organized late in the previous year an association of the mayors of the cities in the state for the purpose of making changes in the municipal code that would give the cities a more mobile form of government and greater powers, in other words, it was the first definite movement in favor of home rule for cities, a liberation for which we struggled for almost a decade before we achieved any measure of success. We had drafted a new municipal code and had met at Columbus early in that January in which I took my office, to put the finishing touches to our code before presenting it to the legislature, and one morning I strolled into the hall of the House of Representatives before the daily session had been convened.
There was in the House at that time a newly elected member whom Johnson had supported for election and no sooner was he in his seat than he opposed every measure Johnson espoused, and, under the warming applause his disloyalty won from Johnson’s enemies, he became an opponent of the mayor more vociferous than effective. He was exactly, I think, of that type described by Emerson, who in the course of saying everything worth saying, or that will be worth saying for the next two hundred years, said: “Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the state must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat; so much life as it has in the character of living men is its force.”
I knew this young civilian then only as one of the Johnson group and as that was sufficient introduction, in the _camaraderie_ that existed between those of us who were devoted to the same cause, I stopped, at his salutation, and chatted with him for a moment. He had asked my opinion on a bill he had introduced, a measure to prohibit or regulate public dances in cities, or some such thing, and when I failed to evince the due degree of interest in the young man’s measure, he was at once displeased and tried to heat me to the proper degree of warmth in the holy cause of reform. He began, of course, by an indignant demand to know if I was in favor of the evils that were connected with public dances, and when I tried to show him that my inability to recognize his measure as the only adequate method of dealing with those evils did not necessarily indicate approval of them, he struck the prescribed attitude, held up his right hand and said something in the melodramatic style, about the oath of office I had taken not many days before. I saw at once then that I was dealing with a member in high standing of the order of the indurated sectarian mind, whose fanaticism makes them the most impossible persons in the world, and having never been certain which of the advice in the Proverbs should be accepted, I yielded to a fatal habit of joking--the history of the Republic is strewn with the wrecks of careers that were broken by a jest--and told him that I had taken my oath of office before a notary public, and that perhaps it had not been of full efficacy on that account.
And then I went away, and forgot the incident. It was revived in my memory, however, and intensified in its interest for me the next morning, when on getting back home, I saw in the newspapers a despatch from Columbus, under the most ominous of black headlines, stating that I had told the distinguished representative, on the very floor of the House, under the aegis, one almost might say, of the state, that I had no reverence for my oath of office, and did not intend to respect it. Here was anarchy for you, indeed, from the old pupil of Altgeld!