Part 4

I suppose the grewsome connotations of the name led to our practice of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting. When he came back from the Dakotas, where he had been reporting the Sioux War, Seymour brought back from the battles a number of skulls of Indians, and blankets drenched in blood, which were hung on the walls of the club. From that time on it became the practice of sheriffs and newspaper men everywhere to send anything of that kind to the Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years it had a large collection of skulls of criminals, and some physicians discovered, or thought they discovered, differences between these skulls and the skulls of those who were not criminals, or, if they were, had not been caught at it.

These and the ropes of hangmen and the various mementos of crimes were the decorations of the club rooms, and on Saturday nights the hollow eyes of those skulls looked down on many a lively scene.

Admission to the club was obtained in a peculiar way. An applicant for membership had his name proposed, and it was then posted on a bulletin-board. He was on probation for thirty days, during which he had to be at the club at least five days in the week, in order to become acquainted with the members. Within that time any member could tear his name down, and that ended his candidacy. When his name finally came up for voting it required the full vote of the club to get him in.

And then we grew prosperous, and acquiring a building farther down the alley, we had it decorated in a somber manner, with a notable table, shaped like a coffin, around which we gathered. But the prosperity and the fame of the club led to its end. Rich and important men of Chicago sought membership. Some were admitted, then more, and as a result the club lost its Bohemian character, and finally disbanded.

VIII

Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the coterie, a young man with such a _flair_ for what was news, with such an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any, a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie Almy and Ben King, but their fate had the mellowing kindness of the fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing humor.

When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian’s droll face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home--say a murder in South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave them.

His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days, and Mr. Dunne was so clever in adapting his terse style to the needs of the daily reportorial life that when one night a private shot a comrade in the barracks at Fort Sheridan, and Mr. Dunne was detailed to report the tragedy, he found it in every detail so exactly like Kipling’s story “In the Matter of a Private,” that he was overcome by the despair of having to write a tale that had already been told. He resisted the temptation, if there was any temptation, nobly and wrote the tale with a bald simplicity that no doubt enhanced its effect. He had not then begun to report the Philosophy of Mr. Dooley, though there was a certain Irishman in Chicago responsive to the name of Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, whom, in his capacity of First Ward Democrat, Mr. Dunne frequently interviewed for his paper without the cramping influences of a previous visitation on the Colonel, and these interviews showed much of the color and spirit of those Dooley articles which later were to make him famous. He already knew, of course, and frequently enjoyed communion with the prototype of Mr. Dooley, Mr. James McGarry, who had a quaint philosophy of his own which Mr. Dunne one day rendered in a little article entitled “Mr. McGarry’s Philosophy.” The familiarity so wounded Mr. McGarry, however (he was a man of simple dignity and some sensitiveness), that Mr. Dunne thereafter adopted another name for the personage through which he was so long and so brilliantly to express himself, though it was not until after the Spanish War that the wide public was to recognize the talent which was already so abundantly recognized by Mr. Dunne’s friends.

Charlie Seymour did not read as much as some of his companions; perhaps it was that fact that gave such an original flavor to what he wrote. His elder brother, Mr. Horatio W. Seymour, was the editor of the _Herald_, a newspaper famed for the taste and even beauty of its typographical appearance. It looked somewhat like the New York _Sun_, and under Mr. Seymour was as carefully edited. It was the organ of the Democracy in the northwest, and I suppose no direct or immediate influence was more potent in bringing on the wide Democratic victory in the congressional election of 1890 than the brilliant editorials on the tariff which Mr. Horatio Seymour wrote. They were, I remember, one of the delights of Frank Hurd, and it was through Hurd’s influence that I was on the staff of that paper, reporting political events.

We were all more or less employed in reporting political events in that stirring year, and were kept busy in following and recording the sayings of the orators of both parties. It was characteristic of Mr. Dunne that after a sober column giving the gist of a speech by Joseph B. Foraker, then lately governor, and afterward senator of Ohio, in which he waved the bloody shirt in the fiery manner which in those days characterized him, Mr. Dunne should have concluded his article sententiously: “Then the audience went out to get the latest news of the battle of Gettysburg.”

But it was typical of Charlie Seymour that when he was detailed to accompany Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the Billion Dollar Congress, he should have been so fascinated by the whiskers of the Illinois farmers who crowded about the rear platform of the Speaker’s train, that he devoted half a column to a description of those adornments which long was celebrated as a classic in the traditions of Chicago reporters, to be recalled by them as they would recall, for instance, certain of the sayings of the late Joseph Medill.

Mr. Medill, of course, moved in an element far above that which was natural to the reporters, and the figure of the great editor of the _Tribune_ filled the imagination completely. I used to like his low-tariff editorials, though they became high-tariff editorials during national campaigns, the rate of percentage of protection rising like a thermometer in the heat of political excitement,--a tendency the rate invariably reveals the nearer its objective is approached.

Mr. Medill, as was well known, was not an admirer of President Harrison, and there came down into our world an evidence of the fact in a story which Mr. Frank Brooks, a political writer on the _Tribune_, told us. It was at the time that President Harrison made one of those speaking tours which, beginning with President Johnson’s “swing around the circle,” have grown increasingly familiar to those of the electorate who observe their presidents and rush to the railway station to hear them speaking as they flash by. His managing editor had assigned Mr. Brooks to go to Galesburg, catch the President’s special and make the journey with him, and just as he was giving directions as to the column or two which Mr. Brooks was to send in daily, Mr. Medill went shuffling through the editorial room, bearing a great pile of those foreign exchanges he was so fond of reading. The managing editor explained to Mr. Medill the mission he was committing to Mr. Brooks, and the old editor stood a moment looking at them, then raised his ear-trumpet and said in his queer voice:

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’d just been telling Mr. Brooks to go down to Galesburg to-night, catch the President’s special, and send us a column or so each night of his speeches.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Medill, and then he drily added: “_What for?_”

IX

It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest perhaps when they are won. When I reached the station that morning, Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes, with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved, there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness, maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps, then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder. Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has departed the spirit of the republic.

“It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing,” said Mr. Phelps to us reporters, “a sight you could witness in no other country in the world. There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were nobody.”

Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for any of us to have conversation with our premier. Mr. Blaine had just come from Ohio where he had been speaking in McKinley’s district, and he understood the political situation so perfectly that he said, in the frankness of a conversation that was not to be reported, that McKinley was certain to be defeated; indeed he foresaw, though it required no very great vision to do that, the reverse that was to overtake his party in the congressional elections.

With my interest in the tariff question, which then seemed to me so fundamental, I did not lose the opportunity to ask Mr. Blaine about his reciprocity project: but after a while the conversation turned to more personal subjects. When he learned that I was from Ohio, he asked me suddenly if I could name the counties that formed the several congressional districts of the state. I could not, of course, do that, and I supposed no one in the world could do it or ever wish to do it; but he could, and with a naïve pride in the accomplishment he did, and then astounded me by saying that he could almost match the feat with any state in the Union.

It was the only enthusiasm the poor man showed all that day, and when we reached South Bend, there was a _contretemps_ that might have afforded Mr. Phelps further food for reflection on the lack of ceremony in America. When the premier stepped off the train into the wet mass of snow that covered the dirty platform of the ugly little station, there was nowhere to be seen any evidence of a reception for the distinguished guest. There was an old hack, or ’bus, one of those rattling, shambling, moth-eaten vehicles that await the incoming train at every small town in our land, with a team of forlorn horses depressed by the weather or by life, but there was no committee of eminent citizens, no band, nothing. The scene was bare and bleak and cold, and the premier was plainly disgusted.

He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr. Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve, but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some rich man’s house.

The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped in,” to use our midwestern phrase, they displayed that bucolic indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty, and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr. Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity, all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair, nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics and political etiquette--if there are such things--require, and Mr. Blaine himself most have had some consciousness of his partial failure, some dissatisfaction with his effort, for I was just about to put my story on the wire at six o’clock when he appeared, with his rich host, and asked for me. I talked to him through the little wicket of the telegraph office, and the conversation began inauspiciously by the rich man’s peremptorily commanding me to let him see my stuff; he wished, he said, to “look it over”! I was not as patient with his presumption then as I think I could be now, for I had not learned that it was the factory system that produces such types, men who bully the women at home and the women and clerks and operatives in their shops, and I denied him the right, of course. He became very angry, and blustered through the little window, while the operator, an old telegrapher I had known in Toledo, sat behind me waiting to send the story clicking into Chicago on _The Herald’s_ wire. After the rich man had exhausted himself, Mr. Blaine took his place at the window and in a mild and calm manner, asked me for my copy, saying that he was not well, and that he had made some slips in his speech which he did not care to have go to the country. It was those unfortunate or fortunate babies of the protective tariff system, and he said that the correspondent of a press association had agreed to make the excisions if I would do so, and he would consider it a favor if I would oblige him.

The charm of his manner had been on me all that day, and I had been feeling sorry for him all day, too, and I was sorrier for him then than ever, and half ashamed of some of the things I had written, but I explained to him that I had been sent by my paper in the hope that he might say something to the disadvantage of his own cause, and that my duty was to report, at least, what he had said. It was one of the hardest “noes” I ever had to say, and at last as he turned away, I regretted, perhaps more than he, and certainly more than he ever knew, that I could not let him revise his speech--since that is what most of us desire to do with most of our speeches.

When that campaign ended in the overthrow of the Republican majority in Congress, and I was sent to interview Ben Butterworth on the result, he said, in his humorous way: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was not altogether cast down by the result; in his place in Congress as a representative from a Cincinnati district he had risen to denounce the tariff, and so had his consolation. To me it seemed as if the people had at last entered the promised land, that that was the day the Lord had made for his people, but Mr. Butterworth could point out that our government was not so democratic as the British government, for instance, since it was not so responsive to the people’s will. Over there, of course, after such a reverse the government would have retired, and a new one would have been formed, but here the existing administration would remain in power two years longer, and then, even if it lost in the presidential election over a year must elapse before a new Congress would convene, so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.

X

However, there were other interests and other delights with which to occupy one’s self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor General of the World’s Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and assigned to the World’s Fair, and there were so many distinguished men from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was very much like politics in its superficial aspects. There was, for instance, the World’s Columbian Commission, a body created under the authority of Congress, composed of two commissioners from each state, appointed by its governor, and that body exactly the size of the senate was like it in personnel and character. The witty Thomas E. Palmer of Michigan was its president, and there were among its membership such men as Judge Lindsay, later senator from Kentucky, Judge Harris of Virginia, who looked like George Washington, and many other delightful and pungent characters. But no personality among them all was more interesting than Colonel James A. McKenzie, Judge Lindsay’s colleague from Kentucky. He was tall and spare of frame, and his long moustache and goatee, and the great black slouch hat he wore made him in appearance the typical southerner of the popular imagination. He was indeed the typical southerner by every right and tradition, by birth, by his services in the Confederate army, by his stately courtesy, by his love of sentiment and the picturesque, by his wit and humor and eloquence, and his fondness for phrases. His humor sparkled in his kind blue eyes, and it overflowed in that brilliant conversation with which he delighted everyone about him; he could entertain you by the hour with his comments on all phases of that life in which he found such zest. He had been known as “Quinine Jim,” because as congressman he had secured the reduction or the abolition of the duty on that drug, so indispensable in malarial lands. He was fond of striking phrases; he it was who had referred to Blaine as a Florentine mosaic; and his reference to Mrs. Cleveland as “the uncrowned queen of America” had delighted the Democratic convention at St. Louis which renominated her husband for the presidency. And again at Chicago, on that memorable night of oratory in 1892 in seconding the nomination of Cleveland on behalf of Kentucky he stood on a chair and referred to his state as the commonwealth “in which, thank God, the damned lie is the first lick, where the women are so beautiful that the aurora borealis blushes with shame, where the whiskey is so good as to make intoxication a virtue, and the horses so fleet that lightning in comparison is but a puling paralytic.”