Part 21

In Germany the burgomeister is not chosen for his political views, or for his theories of any sort, or for his popularity; he is chosen because of his ability for the work he is to perform, and he is retained in office as long as he performs that work properly. It is so with all municipal departments and the result is order and efficient administration. When a German city wants a mayor, it seeks one by inquiring among other cities; sometimes it advertises for him. It would be quite impossible, of course, for our cities to advertise for mayors, not that there would be any lack of applicants, since everyone is considered capable of directing the affairs of a city in this country. Of course everyone is not capable; few of the persons chosen are capable at the time they are chosen. Many of them become very capable after they have had experience, but they gain this experience at the expense of the public, and about the time they have gained it, their services are dispensed with, and a new incompetent accidentally succeeds them.

The condition is due partly to the fact that we are of a tradition that is concerned with governing exclusively, and not administering; our conception is of an executive, a kind of lieutenant or subaltern of the sovereign power, and in our proverbial fear and jealousy of kings we see that he does not have too much power or develop those powers he has by a long tenure of office.

The officials of a German city are pure administrators, and nothing else; they are not governors or censors. They are not charged in fact with police powers at all. And if they were, they would not have questions of such delicacy to meet, for the police there are for the purpose of protecting life and property, and they are not expected to regulate the personal conduct and refine the morals of the community, or to rear the young. They have not confused their functions with the _censores mores_ of old Rome, or like us, with the beadles of New England villages of colonial times. That is, the Puritan spirit is not known there, at least in the intensified acerbity in which it exists with us; moral problems, oddly enough, are left to parents, teachers or pastors. The police over there are generally a part of the military organizations. It would be better of course, to bear the ills we have than to transplant any military system to our soil, for state police in America would become mere Cossacks employed to keep the laboring population in subjection. But if the state is to undertake to regulate the moral conduct of the inhabitants of cities, it should provide all the means of regulation and take all the responsibility, including the onus of violating the democratic principle. If the state is to regenerate the land by the machinery of morals police, it should have its own morals police, tell them just how to proceed to compel the inhabitants of cities to be moral, and pay them out of the state treasury.

LII

It is, however, a curious characteristic of our people, or of the vocal minority of them, that while they insist on every possible interference with every private and personal right, in the field of moral conduct, they nevertheless will tolerate no interference whatever with property rights. Thus it was precisely as Cossacks that many employers of labor insisted on my using the police to cow their workmen whenever there was a strike.

During my first term it befell that our city was torn by strikes, all the union machinists in town walked out, then the moulders, and at last a great factory wherein automobiles were made was “struck,” as the workingmen say. It is impossible to give an idea of the worry such a condition causes officials. It is more than that sensation of weariness, of irritation, even of disgust, which it causes the general public. This is due partly to the resentment created by the interference with physical comfort, and even peace of mind, since there is in us all something more than a fear of disorder and tumult, in that innate love of harmony which exists potentially in humanity. But to the official there is a greater difficulty because of the responsibility to which he is held. People intuitively regard strikers as public enemies, and while the blame for the irritation caused by strikes is visited on the direct and apparent cause, that is, the strikers themselves; it is visited, too, on the official head of the local government, who is supposed to be able somehow to put a stop to such things. The general or mass intelligence will not as yet go much deeper than the superfices of the problem, or seek to understand the causes of economic unrest and disorder; it still thinks in old sequences and puts its trust in the weapons of the flesh.

I think I shall never forget the first call I had from a delegation of manufacturers during the early days of those strikes. They came in not too friendly spirit, but rather in their capacity of “citizens and tax-payers,” standing on their rights, as they understood them, though they in common with most of us and with the law as well, had only the most hazy notions as to what those rights were, and perhaps still hazier notions as to their duties. “We come,” said the spokesman, “representing two millions of dollars’ worth of property.”

They could not have put their case more frankly. But I, as I was able to recall in that moment, represented two hundred thousand people, themselves among them of course. And here at the very outset was the old conflict in its simplest terms, of man against property. Now, in that old struggle, while I had made no sacrifices in the cause and have been of no especial service in it, I had nevertheless given intellectual assent to the general propositions advanced in favor of the human side, the side of man. By prejudice, or perversity, or constitutionally, I considered men of more value than factories. I had perhaps never heard of a strike, for instance, in which my sympathies were not impulsively with the strikers. I could always see that poor foreigner, whose body had lain there on the cold damp rocks at Lemont so many years before, and somehow I could not get out of my mind’s eye the figures of the workmen on strike, many of them hungry and desperate as their wives and children were; they seemed to me to be in straits more dire than their harried and harassed and worried employers, though I could feel sorry for them, too, since even if they were not hungry, they, too, were the victims of the anarchy of our industrial system. They had of course no social conscience whatever, but perhaps they could not help that. But there they were, bringing their troubles to the mayor, whom perhaps they did not wholly regard as their mayor, since they had some prescience of the fact that in that mayor’s mind was always the memory of those throngs of workingmen who had looked up to him with some of the emotions of confidence and hope. There was alas little enough that he could do for those workingmen, but, especially in such an hour, he must at least not forget them. Of the relative rights of their present quarrel he had little knowledge; but he had envisaged enough of life to know, without too much sentimentalizing them, that, while they were often wrong, they were somehow right when they were wrong. That is, their eternal cause was right.

What the manufacturers wanted, as they put it, was “protection,” a term with vague and varying connotations. As was the case in all the strikes of all the years of my experience in the mayoralty, they felt that the police were not sufficiently aggressive, or that the Chief of Police had not detailed sufficient men to afford them protection. I did not raise the question, though it occurred to me, as to what the police were doing to protect the strikers, who were citizens, too, and tax-payers, or at least rent-payers and so indirect tax-payers, but when I asked the Chief, the big-hearted Perry Knapp reported that the strikers were complaining, too, and out of his collection of works on Lincoln, he brought me one which contained a letter the great president wrote to General John M. Schofield, when he assigned that officer to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in May, 1863, to succeed General Curtis. Curtis had been the head of one party as Governor Gamble had been the head of the other, in what Lincoln called the pestilent factional quarrel into which the Union men had entered. “Now that you are in the position,” wrote Lincoln, “I wish you to undo nothing merely because General Curtis or Governor Gamble did it, but to exercise your own judgment, and do right for the public interest. Let your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harass and persecute the people. It is a difficult rôle, and so much the greater will be the honor if you perform it well. If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one and praised by the other.”

How Lincoln knew human nature! It seemed as good a model as one might find, since we, too, were in the midst of a little civil war, and we always tried to pursue that course. What the manufacturing employers wished, of course, was for us to use the police to break the strike; that we did not deem it our duty to do. What we tried to do was to preserve the public peace and--since our industry in its present status is war--to let them fight it out. We tried to see to it that they fought it out along the lines laid down, in fixing the relative rights of the industrial belligerents, by the Courts of Great Britain, and this policy had the virtual approval of our own courts when in an ancillary way it came under discussion there. But we had difficulty in maintaining the peace, not only because the strikers, or more likely their sympathizers, broke it now and then, but because when the strikers were not breaking it, the employers seemed bent on doing something to make them. They did not intend it for that purpose of course; they simply thought in old feudal sequences. They hired mercenaries, bullies provided as “guards” by private detective agencies. It kept the police pretty busy disarming these guards, and greatly added to their labors because the guards were always on the point of hurting some one.

LIII

There was one of the employers, indeed, who grew so alarmed that he came one morning to the office predicting a riot at his plant, that very afternoon at five o’clock, when the works were to shut down for the day. This man was just then operating his factory with strike breakers and he was concerned for their safety. Indeed his concern was expressed in the form of a personal sympathy and love for them which was far more sentimental than any I had ever been accused of showing toward workingmen. He was concerned about their inalienable right to work, and about their wives and little children, and about their comfort and peace of mind; indeed it was such a concern, such a love, that, had he but shown the moiety of it to his former employees, they never could have gone out on strike at all.

At five o’clock that day then, with the Chief of Police, I visited the plant to observe, and if possible to prevent the impending riot. The works had not yet closed for the day, but in the street before the black and haggard and ugly buildings where they had toiled, the strikers were gathered, and with them their wives, with bare and brawny forearms rolled in their aprons, and their children clinging timorously about their skirts. It was a gray and somber afternoon in spring, but there was in the crowd a kind of nervous excitement that might have passed for gayety, a mood that strangely travestied the holiday spirit; perhaps they regarded the strike as an opportunity for the sensation lacking in their monotonous lives. There were several hulking fellows loafing about whom the Chief of Police recognized as private detectives, and as a first step in preventing disorder, he ordered these away. Presently the whistle blew its long, lugubrious blast, the crowd gathered in closer groups, and a silence fell. Sitting there with the Chief in his official buggy, I waited; the great gates of the high stockade swung slowly open, and then there issued forth a vehicle, the like of which I had never seen before, a sort of huge van, made of rough boards, that might have moved the impedimenta of an embassy. In the rear there was a door, fastened with a padlock; the sides were pierced with loop holes, and on the high seat beside the driver sat an enormous guard, with a rifle across his knees. This van, this moving arsenal containing within its mysterious interior the strike breakers, and I was told other guards ready to thrust rifles through those loop holes, moved slowly out of those high gates, lurched across the gutter into the street, and rumbled away, and as it went it was followed by a shout of such ridicule that even the guard on the front seat lost his menacing gravity and smiled himself, perhaps with some dawning recognition of the absurdity of the whole affair.

There was no riot, though when the employer came to see me the next day I could assure him of my surprise that there had been none, since there was an invitation to disorder almost irresistible in that solemn and absurd vehicle, with its rifles and loop holes and guards and cowering mystery within. And I could urge upon him too a belated recognition of the immutable and unwritten law by which such an invitation to trouble is sure to be accepted. I almost felt, I told him, like heaving a stone after it myself to see what would happen. He finally agreed with me, dismissed his guards, and dismantled his rolling arsenal, and not long afterward was using its gear to haul the commodities they were soon manufacturing in those shops again.

And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works, until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together. It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect in the present status of productive industry in this world.

The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them, and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was not picketed by the strikers, they did not even visit it, so far as I know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said, as though he must exculpate himself: “Oh well, you know--Mayor Jones. We haven’t forgotten him and what he was.”

LIV

It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause, that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree in which they were all to be solved by a formula so brief that it could be printed on a visiting card. The complaint these scientists made of our movement was that its ameliorations in city life were retarding that evolution of which they were the inspired custodians and conservators; some of them spoke of it as though it were but a darkling part of that vast conspiracy against mankind in which the capitalists were so shamelessly engaged. If we had only let things alone, it was urged, they might grow so desperate that no one but the Socialists would be capable of dealing with the appalling situation.

But this was the attitude only of that coterie which, unselfishly, no doubt, with the purest of motives, and only until the industrial democracy could be organized and rendered sufficiently class-conscious to take over the work, was directing the destinies of the Socialist party, very much to the fleshly eye in the same manner that the Republican machine controlled that party or the Democratic machine its party, or, before we were done, certain persons attempted to control the Independent movement. So far as I could discern, there was not much difference in them all; the Socialists seemed to rely on all the old weapons that had so long been employed in the world, and so long failed; they seemed to contemplate nothing more than replacement of old orthodoxies with new, old tyrannies with new tyrannies; in a word, to preserve the old vicious circle in which humanity has been revolving impotently and stupidly down all the grooves of time.

I could not have been a Socialist because life had somehow taught me that this is a world of relativities, in which the absolute is the first impossibility. I could share, of course, their hope, or the hope of some of them in a well ordered society, though with many of them the dream seemed to be beautiful chiefly because they expected to order it themselves; they who felt themselves so long to have been the slaves were to become the masters; their hard and too logical theory of classes circumscribed their vision so that they could imagine nothing more clearly, and possibly nothing more delightful than a bouleversement which would leave them on top.

I could recognize with them the masters under whom we all alike were serving in this land, and respect them as little as we might, or detest them as we would, they presented whatever advantage there is in familiarity; if nothing more inviting than a change in masters were proposed, one would prefer those one had to others whose habits and whims he did not know. One could be pretty sure that the new masters would use the same old whips and scorpions, or if new ones, with a sting more bitter. They proposed as much, indeed, in their rigid form of organization, with a discipline more irksome and relentless, what with their signing of pledges, and their visitations and committees of inspection, and trials for heresy and excommunications. They reminded me of those prosecutors who could behold no defect in the penal machinery save that it had not been sufficiently drastic; they would replace all old intolerances and ancient tyrannies by others no different save that they were employed in the opposing cause, and were to be even more intolerant and tyrannical.

That is, the Socialists provided for everything in the world except liberty, and to one whose dissolving illusions had left nothing but the dream of liberty in a world where liberty was not and probably never was to be, there was no allure in the proposal to take away even the dream of liberty.

None of them of course would be impressed by these objections--was not the great cure for social ill written and printed on a card?--nor would they consider them even until they had been submitted to the prescribed test of a joint debate, about the most futile device ever adopted by mankind, and a nuisance as offensive as any that ever disturbed society. It was of course the only amusement they had, as popular as running the gauntlet was with the Indians, and they liked to torture a capitalist to make a Socialist holiday. It is of course quite useless to argue with one who is always right, one whose utterances have the authority of revealed truth, but inasmuch as society had not yet been developed to a point of communal efficiency sufficient to keep the streets clean, it seemed idle to undertake the communal control of production and distribution. And however wrong I may be in every other thing, I am quite sure that I am right in this, that in their analysis of society they have failed utterly to take into account that classic of the ironic spirit, the great law of the contrariety of things, according to which the expected never happens, at least in the way it was expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was planned.

But there is a more fundamental law--that of the destructive power of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on force--and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone! Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work itself out.

It seemed to me that the single-taxers had a scheme far better than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions, democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with reformers.

LV

But I would not be unfair, and I counted many friends among the Socialists of my town and time whose best ideals one could gladly share. They were immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they had made a fairly valid indictment against society as it is organized, or disorganized. But like Mr. H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist, these exceptions, in Mr. Wells’s words, were by no means fanatical or uncritical adherents. To them as to him Socialism was a noble, and yet a very human and fallible system of ideas. To them, as, again to him, it was an intellectual process, a project for the reshaping of human society upon new and better lines--the good will of the race struggling to make things better. This broad and tolerant view was the one to which they held, though they seemed too closely to identify all the good will in the race, operating, as I believe it to be, in many ways and through many agencies, as Socialism, and the pontifical Socialism taught in our town, at least, was so explicitly a class hatred that most of the time it was anything in the world rather than good will. Anyone with a good heart could be a Socialist on Mr. Wells’s terms, if it were not his inevitable fate to be assured by the orthodox custodians of the party faith, the high priests who alone could enter the holy of holies and bear forth, as occasion required, the ark of the covenant, that Mr. Wells’s Socialism is no Socialism at all and that he is no man to consult or accept.