Part 18

During three of my four terms in that office the nasty quarrel about morals raged. As I look back and think now with what virulence it did rage, it appeals to me as a remarkable psychological phenomenon. Of course it was bad for those who engaged in it, and bad for the town as well, for such an exaggerated idea of conditions was given that the police in neighboring cities, clever rogues that they were, could always excuse and exculpate themselves for any of their delinquencies by saying that the thieves that had come to town hailed from Toledo, or that those they could not catch had gone and taken refuge there. But I did not engage in the discussion nor permit the police officials to do so. There was no time, since there was so much other work to do, and we went on as well as we could with what Tom Johnson used to call the policy of administrative repression, improving moral conditions with such means as we had. We did succeed in eliminating the wine rooms, in closing the saloons at midnight, and finally, after a tremendous effort, in extirpating professional gambling. It was of no consequence that it did not have any effect upon criticism, for we did not do it to stop criticism, and the discussion went on until I had been elected for the third time, and immediately after that election when a large majority of the people had again spoken their minds on the subject, it was considered the proper time to reopen the discussion and to hold a so-called civic revival. The young, uncultured man they brought to town to conduct that revival, could have known nothing whatever of life, and was wholly unconscious of the great economic forces which, with so much complexity and friction, were building the modern city. He came to call on me before he opened his revival that he might have, as he said, a personal, private and confidential talk. When I asked him how the city could be regenerated, he said he did not know, but this fact did not prevent him from telling the audiences he addressed that week just what should be done, and that he, for instance, could nobly do it, and in the end they sent a committee to me to tell me what to do, if not how to do it. I asked the committee to reduce their complaints to writing, to point out those evils which they considered most objectionable, and to propose means of combating them. The committee went away and I confess I did not expect to see them again because I had no notion that they could ever agree as to the particular evils, but after some weeks they had come to terms on a few heads, and filed their complaint pointing out several specific vices in town, and as a remedy proposed that they be “prevented.” I replied to them in a letter in which I said all I could think of at that time or all I could think of now on this whole vexed problem. It was printed in pamphlet form and rather widely circulated, and finally published as a little book.[B] I do not know that it convinced anybody who was not convinced already. I think we got along a little better afterward than we had before, and by the time my fourth term was done the phenomenon of the discussion, if not the vice, had disappeared. After my letter was sent to the committee, it was said that they would reply to it, but they never did, and instead invited the Reverend William A. Sunday to come to the city to conduct a revival. It was announced by some that he came to assault our position, but when he arrived Captain Anson, the old Chicago baseball player, under whom Mr. Sunday had played baseball in his younger days, happened to be giving his monologue at a variety theater that week, and he and Mr. Sunday together called on me. I do not know when I have had a pleasanter hour than that we spent talking about the old days in Chicago when Anson had been playing first base and I had been reporting the baseball games for the old _Herald_. That, to be sure, was after the days of Billy Sunday’s services in right field, but it was not too late for me to have known and celebrated the prowess of that famous infield, Anson, Pfeffer, Williamson and Burns, and we could celebrate them again and speculate as to whether there were really giants in those days whose like was known on earth no more.

Mr. Sunday conducted his revival with the success that usually attends his efforts in that direction, but he did not mention me or the administration until the very close of his visit, when he said that we were doing as well as anybody could be expected to do under all the circumstances.

XLV

When I referred to the general rule that policemen are disliked and condemned I should have noticed certain exceptions. The traffic squad for instance is generally held in a respect and affection that is part of the civic pride of the community. Those fine big fellows on the corner, waving this way or that with a gesture the flowing traffic of the street, are greeted with smiles, and, as they assist in the perilous passage of the thoroughfares, sometimes with thanks and benedictions. The reason, of course, is simple; they are not engaged in hurting people, but in helping people, and so by the operation of the immutable law, they attract to themselves the best feelings of the people.

And this is what we tried from the first to have all our policemen do, to help people and not to hurt them. It was what Jones had tried to do, and he had begun with one of the most interesting experiments in policing a city that has been made in our country. He took away the clubs from the policemen. He could have made at first no greater sensation if he had taken away the police altogether, the protest was so loud, so indignant, above all so righteous. What sense of security could a community feel if the policemen were to have no clubs, how would the unruly and the lawless be kept in check when they no longer beheld this insignia of authority in the hands of the guardians of the peace? And perhaps to reassure the righteous and truly good Jones gave the policemen canes and ran the great risk of making them ridiculous.

I am not sure that he would have cared much if he had, since he had so little respect for the police idea, and of course he had as little regard for organization. I remember once that at a session of the old police board he opposed the creation of new sergeants; he said a sergeant always seemed as superfluous to him as a presiding elder in the Methodist Church. With an elected board of police commissioners over it the police force was pretty certain to be demoralized, of course, as is any executive department of government which is directed by a board, for with a board, unless all the members save one are either dead or incapacitated, discipline and efficiency are impossible. We got rid of the board system in Ohio after two or three sessions of the legislature had been wrestled with, and though the “mayor’s code” was never enacted, many of its ideas were adopted in amendments to the municipal code, so that we approached the most efficient form of city government yet devised in our rather close resemblance to the federal plan.

The time came, however, when the old elected board of public service was succeeded by a director of public service appointed by the mayor, and the old board of public safety by a director of public safety appointed by the same authority, though that was not until I had entered on my third term in the mayor’s office. When that time came I appointed as Director of Public Service Mr. John Robert Cowell, a Manxman who managed the department of public works admirably, and to the post of Director of Public Safety Mr. John Joseph Mooney, whose services and assistance I had already had on the board of public safety when that was appointed by the mayor. And Mr. Mooney was able to work out many of the improvements we hoped to make in the police department.

And as Jones had taken the clubs away from the policemen and given them canes, we took away the canes and sent them forth with empty hands. Jones had the idea of doing away with clubs from London where he observed the bobbies who control the mighty traffic in the streets of London. We were therefore able to realize the whole of his ideal in that respect, and our city, I think alone of all American cities, could not merit the reproach that a Liverpool man once made to me when we were discussing superficial appearances in the two nations. “The most offensive thing in America to me,” he said, “is the way in which the policemen parade their truncheons.” The public made no complaint at the disappearance of the canes, but the policemen did; they felt lost, they reported, without something to twirl in their hands. We thought of letting them have swagger sticks, but finally decided that they should be induced to bear themselves gracefully with their white gloved hands unoccupied. The white gloves were the subject of amusement to the boors in town, who could always be amused at any effort at improvement, but with them on, and the new uniforms we had patterned after the uniform worn by the New York policemen, the members of the department soon began to have a pride in themselves.

And that was exactly what we were trying to inculcate, though it was difficult to do, and almost impossible, one might think, since for generations policemen have been the target for the sarcasms and abuse of every voice of the community. The wonder is, with such an universal conspiracy as exists in America to give policemen a bad name, that they have any character left at all. Surely each community in various ways has done everything it could to strip its policemen of every shred of reputation and self respect and with these gone, character might be expected shortly to follow. Of course the new uniforms were ridiculed too, but we did not let that discourage us.

There was the civil-service law to help, and we were of old devoted to the spirit and even to the letter of that, though once the letter of that law compelled us to an injustice, as the letter of any law must do now and then. We had reorganized the police department on a metropolitan basis, and had done the same with the fire department, and in this department there were accordingly created three new positions of battalion chiefs, for which captains were eligible. The oldest ranking captain in the department was Dick Lawler, by everyone in the department from the chief down conceded to be the best fireman in the department, with a long and untarnished record of devoted duty and quiet, unassuming bravery. And it was his natural ambition to round out that career as one of the chiefs. The examining board held a written test, and as Lawler was more accomplished in extinguishing, or, as his comrades expressed it, in fighting fire, and much more comfortable and at home on the roof of a burning building than he was at a desk with a pen in his hand, he did not do very well. When, for instance, he read a long hypothetical question, setting forth certain conditions at a fire and asking the applicant where, under such circumstances, he would lay the hose, Lawler wrote down as his answer, “Where it would do the most good,” and on that answer the board marked him zero. The board marked him zero on so many answers indeed that the net result was almost zero, and he failed.

It was a kind of tragedy, in its little way, as he stood in my office that morning on which he came to appeal from the board, with tears in his eyes. But the law was obdurate and I was helpless. But I did point out to the examining board the absurdity of such methods of testing a man’s ability, and after that they allowed a man’s record to count for fifty per cent. And it was not long until a vacancy occurred among the chiefs--and Lawler was appointed.

XLVI

The questions put to Lawler were perhaps no more absurd than many a one framed by civil-service examiners. In any event the written examination is apt to do as much harm as good, and for policemen and firemen we came to the conclusion that it was almost wholly worthless, once it had been determined that an applicant could write well enough to turn in an intelligible report. The initial qualification on which we came to rely and to regard as most important was the physical qualification. There is no way to tell by asking a man questions whether he will be a good policeman or not; the only way to find that out is to try him for a year. But his physical condition can be determined, and on this basis we began to build the police force, under the direction of Dr. Peter Donnelly, one of the ablest surgeons in the country, whose tragic early death was seemingly but a part of that fate which took from us in a few short years so many of the best and brightest of the young men in our movement. The death of Peter Donnelly left us desolate because he had a genius for friendship equal to that genius as a surgeon which enabled him to render a great social service.

He was perfectly rigid in the examinations to which he subjected applicants for positions in the department, and wholly inaccessible to any sort of influence in favor of the unfit. In the old days, which by many were regretted as the good old days, the only qualification an applicant needed was a friend on the police board, and as a result the force was encumbered with the lame, the halt, and the blind; there were drinkers if not drunkards among them, and the paunches which some bore before them were so great that when they took their belts off and hung them up in those resorts where they accepted the hospitality of a midnight meal, the belts seemed to be as large as the hoops of the Heidelberg tun. We rid the force of these as quickly as it could be done, and the recruits who replaced them were, because of Dr. Donnelly’s care and service, superb young fellows, lithe and clean, who bore themselves with self respect and an ardent pride in that _esprit de corps_ we were enabled to develop.

But before that spirit could exist there were defects other than physical that must be removed; there were old jealousies and animosities, some of a religious, or rather a theological nature--relic of an old warfare between the sects that once devastated the town with its unreasoning and remorseless and ignorant hatred; a St. Patrick’s day had once been celebrated by dismissing a score or more of Irishmen from the police department. There were other differences of race origin, and in doing away with all these, so far as it could be done, Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, had to his assistance the ability and the tact of two crusted old characters on the force, one of them the Chief of Police, Perry D. Knapp, and the other Inspector John Carew, whose hair had so whitened in the days he served the city as a detective that he was called Silver Jack. He was one of the ablest detectives anywhere, though prejudice and jealousy had kept him down for a long time. I had known him in my youth, and later in the courts, and now that I had the chance I put him at the head of the detective department, and when I was tired of the troubles which harassed him and me during the day, I tried sometimes to forget them at night by writing stories in which he figured as the clever detective he was.

And as for Perry Knapp, I suppose there was not another chief of police like him anywhere. Over his desk was a picture of Walt Whitman, and in his heart was the love for humanity that Whitman had, and in his library were well read copies of Emerson and a collection of Lincolniana I have often envied him. He had served in close association with Jones, who had made his position difficult by promoting him over the heads of others in the department who ranked him, and he was the heir of all the old distrust of Jones’s attitude toward life. Nevertheless, he found a way to apply Jones’s theories to the policing of a city without any of that ostentation which in some cases has brought such methods into disfavor. I cannot, of course, describe his whole method, but he was always trying to help people and not to hurt them. He established a system by which drunken men were no longer arrested, but, when they could not be taken home as were those club members with whom he tried in that respect at least to put them on a parity, they were cared for at police headquarters until morning, and then with a bath and a breakfast, allowed to go without leaving behind to dog their footsteps that most dreadful of all fates, a “police record.” No one will ever know how many poor girls picked up in police raids he saved from the life to which they had been tempted or driven, by sending them back to their homes when they had homes, or in some manner finding for them a way out of their troubles. And I shall always remember with a pleasure that there is such good in humanity after all, when I recall that boy in the workhouse whom a father in a far-off city was seeking. The boy was working with other prisoners on a bit of public work in one of the parks that winter morning, and after he had secured a parole, the Chief drove out to the park, and got the boy, clothed him with garments he had bought himself, bought a railway ticket and sent the boy away to Chicago and his home. If he had waited until the lad was brought in at night, he explained, the old man would have lost a whole day of his son’s companionship!

That is what I mean when I say that a government should be made human, or part of what I mean; such incidents are specifically noticeable because they stand out in such contrast against the hard surface of that inhuman institutionalism the reformers with their everlasting repressions and denials and negatives are trying to make so much harder. Charley Stevens, the old circus man whom I appointed as Superintendent of the Workhouse, very successfully applied the some principle to the management of that institution, which he conducted with his humor and quaint philosophy more than by any code of rules. He usually referred to his prison as the Temple of Thought, and he abolished from it all the marks of a prison, such as stripes and close cropped polls, and all that sort of thing. He was criticized, of course, since the conventional notion is that prisoners should be made to appear as hideous as possible; I am pretty sure that reformer disapproved who one Sunday afternoon went down there and asked the superintendent if he would permit him to preach to the inmates and was told by Stevens that he would like to accommodate him, but that he could not just then break up the pedro game. There were those who said that he was making it too easy for the prisoners, and yet every now and then some of them would escape, and when they were brought back, as they usually were, they were met only with reproaches and asked why they could not leave their addresses when they went away so that their mail could be forwarded. There were, however, two escaping prisoners who never were returned. They got away just in time to make a sensation for the noon editions of the newspapers, and as I was on my way to luncheon I met Stevens, standing on the street corner, very calmly, while the newsboys were crying in our ears the awful calamity that had befallen society. When I asked what he was doing, he said that he was hunting the escaped prisoners. “I’ve been to the Secor and the Boody House,” he said, naming two leading hotels, “and they’re not there. I’m going over to the Toledo Club now, and if they’re not there, I don’t know where to look for them.”

It may be that in these little incidents I give the impression that he was a trifler, but that is not the case. He knew, of course, that so far as doing any good whatever in the world is concerned, our whole penal system is a farce at which one might laugh if it did not cause so many tears to be shed in the world. But he did try to be kind to the inmates, and by the operation of the parole system succeeded to an extent commensurate with that attained by Dr. Cooley of Cleveland. Of course it was all done under the supervision of Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, who rightly characterized our whole penal system when he said:

“Whenever you send one to prison you send four or five; you send a man’s wife and his mother, and his sister and his children, who are all innocent, and you never do him any good.”

But the workhouse, though under Mr. Mooney’s direction, was not connected with the police department, except in the archaic minds of those who thought if we were only harsh and hard enough in our use of both, we could drive evil, or at least the appearance of evil, out of the city, and leave it, standing like a rock of morality, in the weltering waste of immorality all about us.

XLVII

In no respect has the utter impotence of medieval machinery in suppressing vice been more definitely proved than in the great failure of society in dealing with what is called the social evil. Whenever my mind runs on this subject, as anyone’s mind must in the present recrudescence of that Puritanism which never had its mind on anything else, I invariably think of Golden Rule Jones and the incidents in that impossible warfare which worried him into a premature grave. He was an odd man, born so far out of his time that the sins of others never troubled his conscience. He was so great, and knew so much of life, more perhaps than he did of history, on every page of which he would have found the confirmations of the opinions life had taught him, that he divined all lewdness, all obscenity to be subjective and not objective, so that he found less to abhor in the sins of the vicious than in the state of mind of their indefatigable accusers and pursuers. And he had his own way of meeting their complaints. Once a committee of ladies and gentlemen called upon him with the demand that he obliterate the social evil, off-hand and instantly. They were simple, brief and to the point. They informed him that the laws providing for chastity were being broken, that there were prostitutes in the city, and in short, urged him to put a stop to it.

“But what am I to do?” he inquired. “These women are here.”

“Have the police,” they said, a new, simple and happy device suddenly occurring to them, “drive them out of town and close up their houses!” They sat and looked at him, triumphantly.

“But where shall I have the police drive them? Over to Detroit or to Cleveland, or merely out into the country? They have to go somewhere, you know.”

It was a detail that had escaped them, and presently, with his great patience, and his great sincerity, he said to them:

“I’ll make you a proposition. You go and select two of the worst of these women you can find, and I’ll agree to take them into my home and provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into your home, under the same conditions, and together we’ll try to find homes for the rest.”

They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly hopeless this strange man was, they went away.

XLVIII

To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the scientific investigations of the clinical laboratory, and on the same brilliant thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of Bohemia, who, when the population increased too rapidly, prohibited marriages for a number of years that proved, of course, to be the most prolific the land had ever known.