Part 3

In such an atmosphere as that in the Ohio of those days it was natural to be a Republican; it was more than that, it was inevitable that one should be a Republican; it was not a matter of intellectual choice, it was a process of biological selection. The Republican party was not a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution like those Emerson speaks of in his essay on Politics, rooted like oak-trees in the center around which men group themselves as best they can. It was a fundamental and self-evident thing, like life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or like the flag, or the federal judiciary. It was elemental, like gravity, the sun, the stars, the ocean. It was merely a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the Eskimo dons fur clothes. It was inconceivable that any self-respecting person should be a Democrat. There were, perhaps, Democrats in Lighttown; but then there were rebels in Alabama, and in the Ku-klux Klan, about which we read in the evening, in the Cincinnati _Gazette_.

One of the perplexing and confounding anomalies of existence was the fact that our neighbor, Mr. L----, was a Democrat. That fact perhaps explained to me why he walked so modestly, so unobtrusively, in the shade, so close to the picket fences of Reynolds Street, with his head bowed. I supposed that, being a Democrat, it was only natural for him to slink along. He was a lawyer and a gentleman; my grandfather spoke with him, but from my mind I could never banish the fact that he was a Democrat, and to explain his bent, thoughtful attitude I imagined another reason than the fact that he was a meditative, studious man.

Lawyers, of course, were Republicans, else how could they deliver patriotic addresses on Decoration Day and at the reunions of the 66th regiment? It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then to congress, then--governor, senator, president. They could not, of course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party, and to see to it that its members held office under the government.

In those days the party had many leaders in Ohio who had served the nation in military or civil capacity during the great crisis; scarcely a county that had not some colonel or general whose personality impressed the popular imagination; they were looked up to, and revered, and in the political campaigns their faces, pale or red in the flare of the torches of those vast and tumultuous processions that still staged the political contest in the terms of war, looked down from the festooned platforms in every public square. And yet they were already remote, statuesque, oracular, and there was the reverent sense that somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been happily solved, rather than in the real present.

V

But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young, fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars. Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had long espoused the principle of Free Trade.

This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.

He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must have been an impression that for years our district was represented by this one man.

I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke, whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”

He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,--even though he were but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him from his sports,--anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration never forgot it afterward.

I have no idea now what it was he said, perhaps I had as little then, but his black hair, his handsome face, his beautiful voice, and the majestic music of his rolling phrases were wholly and completely charming. He was explicitly an orator, a student of the great art, and he formed his orations on the ancient Greek models, writing them out with exordium, proposition, and peroration, and while he did not perhaps exactly commit them to memory, he, nevertheless, in the process of preparing them, so completely possessed himself of them that he poured forth his polished sentences without a flaw.

His speech on Free Trade, delivered in the House of Representatives, February 18, 1881, remains the classic on that subject, ranking with Henry Clay’s speech on “The American System,” delivered in the Senate in 1832. In that address Frank Hurd began with the phrase, “The tariff is a tax,” which acquired much currency years after when Grover Cleveland used it.

Everyone, or nearly everyone, told me of course that Frank Hurd was wrong, if he was not, indeed, wicked, and the subject possessed a kind of fascination for me. In thinking of it, or in trying to think of it, I only perplexed myself more deeply, until at last I reached the formidable, the momentous decision of taking my perplexities to Frank Hurd himself, and of laying them before him.

I was by this time a youth of eighteen, and in the summer when he had come home from Washington I somehow found courage enough to go to the hotel where he lived, and to inquire for him. He was there in the lobby, standing by the cigar-stand, talking to some men, and I hung on the outskirts of the little group until it broke up, and then the fear I had felt vanished when he turned and smiled upon me. I told him that I wished to know about Free Trade, and since there was nothing he liked better to talk about, and too, since there were few who could talk better about anything than he could talk about the tariff, we sat in the big leather chairs while he discoursed simply on the subject. It was the first at several of these conversations, or lessons, which we had in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the old Boody House, and it was not long until I was able, with a solemn pride, to announce at home that I was a Free-Trader and a Democrat.

It could hardly have been worse had I announced that I had been visiting Ingersoll, and was an atheist. Cleveland was president, and in time he sent his famous tariff reform message to Congress, and though I could not vote, I was preparing to give him my moral support, to wear his badge, and even, if I could do no more, to refuse to march in the Republican processions with the club of young men and boys organized in our neighborhood.

For the first time in my life I went on my vacation trip to Urbana that summer with reluctance, for the first time in my life I shrank from seeing my grandfather. The wide front door opened, and from the heat without to the dark and cool interior of the hall I stepped; I prolonged the preliminaries, I went through the familiar apartments, and out into the garden to see how it grew that summer, and down to the stable to see the horses; but the inevitable hour drew on, and at last, with all the trivial things said, all the personal questions asked, we sat in the living-room, cool in the half-light produced by its drawn shades, the soft air of summer blowing through it, the odd old Nuremberg furniture, the painting of the Nuremberg castle presented to my grandfather by the American artist whom he had rescued from a scrape, the tall pier glass, with the little vase of flowers on its marble base, and my grandfather in his large chair, his white waistcoat half unbuttoned and one side sagging with the weight of the heavy watch-chain that descended from its large hook, his white beard trimmed a little more closely, his white hair bristling as aggressively as ever--all the same, all as of old, like the reminders of the old life and all its traditions now to be broken and rendered forever and tragically different from all it had been and meant. He sat there looking at me, the blue eyes twinkling under their shaggy brows, and stretched forth his long white hand in the odd gesture with which he began his conversations. Conversations with him, it suddenly developed, were not easy to sustain; he pursued the Socratic method. If you disagreed with him, he lifted three fingers toward you, whether in menace or in benediction it was difficult at times to determine, and said:

“Let me instruct you.”

For instance:

“Do you know why Napoleon III. lost the battle of Sedan?” he might abruptly inquire.

“No, sir,” you were expected to say. (You always addressed him as “sir.”)

“Let me instruct you.”

Or:

“Do you know who was the greatest English poet?”

“No, sir,” you would say, or, perhaps, in those days you might venture, “Was it Shakespeare, sir?”

Then he would look at you and say:

“Let me instruct you.”

This afternoon then, after I had inspected the premises, noticed how much taller my cousin’s fir-tree was than the one I called mine (we had planted them one day, as little boys, years before), and after I had had a drink at the old pump, which in those days, before germs, brought up such cold, clear water, and after I had ascended to my cool room upstairs, and come downstairs again, and we had idly talked for a little while, as I said, he sat and looked at me a moment, and then said:

“Do you understand this tariff question?”

In those days I might have made the due, what I might term with reference to that situation, the conventional reply, and so have said:

“No, sir.”

In these days I am sure I should. But I hesitated. He had already stretched forth his hand.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He drew in his hand, and for an instant touched with his long fingers the end of his large nose. I plunged ahead.

“I am in favor of Free Trade, sir.”

He did not extend his hand. He looked at me a moment, and then he said:

“You are quite right; we must support Mr. Cleveland in the coming contest.”

And then he sank back in his chair and laughed.

He was always like that, following the truth as he saw it, wherever it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days. He spent them in a wheel-chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry, and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,--if the roses were in bloom,--he would say to his colored house-boy:

“Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here.”

Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend, to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:

“Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?”

“I found him master of his own house!” he blazed.

In 1896 he supported Mr. Bryan, and his Republican neighbors said:

“Poor old Major Brand! His mind must be affected!”

It was an effort for him to get out to the polls, but he went, beholding in that conflict, as he could in any conflict however confused and clouded, the issue of free men above any other issue. He did not get out much after that, even when that last summer the few remnants of the 66th regiment gathered in Urbana to hold the annual reunion. He could not so much as get up town to greet his old comrades, and they sent word that in the afternoon they would march in review before his home. He was wheeled out on the veranda, and there he sat while his old regiment, the fifty or sixty gray, broken men, marched past. They saluted as they went by, and he returned the salutes with tears streaming down the cheeks where I had never seen tears before. And he said with a little choking laugh:

“Why, look at the boys!”

It was not long after, that six of us, his grandsons, bore him out of the old home forever. And on his coffin were the two things that expressed him best, I think--his roses and his flag.

VI

The incalculable influence of the spoken word and the consequent responsibility that weighs upon the lightest phrase have so long been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not ebb, and in those hours truths are sometimes spoken--for instance, by newspaper reporters, who, their night’s work done, turn to each other for relaxation and speak those thoughts they have not dared to write in their chronicles of the day that is done. The thought itself is only a vagrant, encountered along the way back to such an evening, when a reporter uttered two little words that acquired for me a profound significance.

“Oh, nothing.” Those were the exact words, just those two, and yet a negative so simple contained within itself such an affirmation of an awful truth, that I have never been able to forget them, though for a time I tried. Charlie R---- and I had gone one night, after the paper had gone to press, into a little restaurant in Chicago to get some supper. It was sometime in the year 1891, and, in our idle gossip, the hanging of the anarchists, then an event so recent that the reporters now and then spoke of it, had come up in our talk.

“Where were you when that occurred?” he asked.

“In Toledo,” I answered.

“What did people think of it there?”

“Of the hanging?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him, I suppose, in some astonishment. What did people in Toledo think of the hanging of the Chicago anarchists! Could any question have been more stupid, more banal? What did any people, anywhere, think of it? What was customary, what was proper and appropriate and indispensable under such circumstances? In a word, what was there to do with anarchists except to hang them? Really, I was quite at a loss what to say. It seemed so superfluous, so ridiculous, as though he had asked what the people in Toledo thought of the world’s being round, or of the force of gravity. More than superfluous, it was callous; he might as well have asked what Toledo people thought of the hanging of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, or of the suicide of Judas Iscariot. And I answered promptly in their defense:

“Why, they thought it was right, of course.”

He had his elbows on the table and was lighting a cigarette, and as he raised the match, his dark face, with its closely trimmed pointed beard, was suddenly and vividly illuminated by the yellow flame. His eyes were lowered, their vision fixed just then on the interesting process of igniting the end of the cigarette. But about his puckered lips, about his narrowed eyes there played a little smile, faint, elusive, and yet of a meaning so indubitable that it was altogether disconcerting. And in that instant I wondered--it could not be! It was preposterous, absurd!

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

The end of the cigarette was glowing, little coils of fire in the tiny particles of tobacco; he blew out the match and the smile disappeared from his face with its ruddy illumination, and he tossed the charred stick into his coffee cup.

Were there, then, two opinions? Was it possible that anyone doubted? When _anarchists_ were in question! Still, on that kindly face before me there lingered the shadow of that strange expression, inscrutable, perplexing, piquing curiosity. And yet by some strange, almost clairvoyant process, it had gradually acquired the effect of a persistent, irresistible and implacable authority, in the presence of which one felt--well, cheap, as though there were secrets from which one had been excluded, as though there were somewhere in this universe a stupendous joke which alone of all others one lacked the wit to see. It gave one a disturbed, uneasy sensation, a _mauvaise honte_.

The innate sense of personal dignity, the instinct to retire into one’s self, the affectation of repose and self-sufficiency which leads one lightly to wave aside a subject one does not understand, to pass it over for other and more familiar topics--these were ineffectual. Curiosity perhaps in a sense much less refined than that in which Matthew Arnold considered it when he exalted it to the plane of the higher virtues, broke down reticence, and, at last I asked, and even begged my companion to tell me what he meant. But he was implacable; he had reached, it appeared, a stage of development in which the opinions of others were of no consequence; an altitude from which he could regard the race of men impersonally, and permit them to stumble on in error, without the desire to set them right. It was quite useless to question him, and in the end the only satisfaction he would give me was to say, with an effort of dismissing the subject:

“Ask some of the boys.”

For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths! Yes, decidedly a shock, to leave one shaken for days. If there were any doubt as to what to do with anarchists, what was the use of going on with the study of the law? I went out from that cheap little restaurant in Fifth Avenue, into Chicago’s depressing midnight streets--and the oak tree never took root again. For, as Charlie R---- had lightly suggested, I asked the boys, and by the boys he meant, of course, the reporters.

They were boys in spirit, though in the knowledge of this world they were as aged men, some of whom had seen so much of life that they were able to dwell with it only by refusing any longer to accept it seriously. They formed in that day an unusual group, gathered in the old Whitechapel Club, and many of their names have since become known to literature. They, or most of them, had worked on the anarchist cases, from the days of the strike in McCormick’s reaper works, down to the night when the vivid pen of Charlie Seymour could describe the spark that soared in a parabolic curve from the alley into Haymarket Square, and then to the black morning of the hanging; and they knew.

It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men. And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems that trouble and perplex mankind.

VII

In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed, wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had a deep and perspicacious understanding, and it will be easy to imagine that the cursory comments on passing phases of the human spectacle of such minds as those of Charles Goodyear Seymour, Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Ben King, Opie Reed, Alfred Henry Lewis, and his brother William E. Lewis, Frederick Upham Adams, Thomas E. Powers, Horace Taylor, Wallace Rice, Arthur Henry, and a score of others were apt to be entertaining and instructive, though they were uttered with such wit and humor that they were never intended to be instructive.

The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in “newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near the buildings of the _Chicago News_ and the _Chicago Herald_, and it somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of work, but of sympathetic spirit. For a while the club was nameless, but one afternoon a group were sitting in one of the rooms when a newsboy passed through the alley and cried: “All about the latest Whitechapel murder!” Seymour paused with a stein of beer half lifted, and said: “We’ll call the new club the ‘Whitechapel Club.’”