Part 7

The Democratic party, to be sure, redeemed itself later under the splendid leadership of President Wilson, but at that time, while we recognized the evil of the theory, we seemed to have sunk into a sordid acquiescence in the fact; everybody thought the tariff wrong, but nobody wished to have it done away with so long as there was a chance, to speak in modern American, for him to get in on the graft. The word “graft” was unknown in those days, by all save those thieves in whose argot it was found and devoted to its present general use in the vocabulary. I suppose it is in the dictionary by this time. In any event, it is not strange that the word should have become so current, since for a while we made a national institution of the very thing it connotes.

There was, however, then and always, the labor question, and we were beginning to discover that that is fundamental, perhaps the one great fundamental,--aside from the complication of evil and good that is inherent and implicit in humanity itself,--since the burning question is and always will be how the work of the world is to be got done, and, what is a much more embarrassing problem, who is to do it. Many of the men who had been doing that work, or the heaviest of it, were striking in Illinois in those years.

The shots the Pinkertons had fired at Homestead echoed in the state; Senator Palmer had made a great speech about it in the Senate; and perhaps the tariff had something to do with that, since tariffs on steel have not been unknown. But there were shots fired nearer home, first in the strike among the men who were digging the drainage canal, then among the miners in the soft coal fields of the state, then the strike in the model town of Pullman, and the great railroad strike that grew out of it.

They called it the Debs Rebellion, and for a while it assumed some of the proportions of a rebellion, or at least it frightened many people in Illinois as much as a rebellion might have done. We were in the midst of all its alarms during that whole spring and summer, and down in the adjutant-general’s office at the State House there was the stir almost of war itself, with troops being ordered here and there about the state, and the Governor harried and worried by a situation that presented to him the abhorrent necessity of using armed force. I was reading over the other day the report made to the War Department by my friend Major Jewett Baker, then a lieutenant in the Twelfth U. S. Infantry, detailed with the National Guard of Illinois; and in his clear and excellent account of all those confused events the scenes of those times came back: the long lines of idle freight cars, charred by incendiary flames; the little groups of men standing about wearing the white ribbons of the strike sympathizers, and the colonel of the regular army, in his cups at his club, who wished he might order a whole regiment to shoot them, “each man to take aim at a dirty white ribbon”; the regulars encamped on the lake front, their sentinels pacing their posts at the quickstep in the rain; and then that morning conference in the mayor’s office in Chicago, at which I was permitted to look on--what an interesting life it is to look on at!--when there appeared Eugene V. Debs, tall, lithe, nervous, leader of the strikers, his hair, what there was of it, sandy, but his head mostly bald, his eyes flashing, his mouth ready to smile, soon to go to Woodstock Jail, to emerge a Socialist, and become the leader of that party.

Major Baker’s report shows, indirectly and by inference, that much of the criticism which the Governor endured was not justified, since he turned out all his troops as fast as local authorities asked for them. At any rate, he acted according to his democratic principles and to his conception of his duty. His principles were in a sense different from those of President Cleveland, with whom he disagreed in that notable instance when the President in his vigorous, practical way sent federal troops into Chicago; the Governor protested, as one of his predecessors in the governor’s office, Senator Palmer, had protested when President Grant sent federal troops under Phil Sheridan into Chicago at the time of the great fire. Almost everybody who had any way of making his voice heard sided with President Cleveland, and the end of the strike was accredited to him. Doubtless the grim presence of those regular troops did overawe the hoodlums who had taken advantage of the strike to create disorder, but if the credit must go to armed force, the report by Major, or, as he was in those days, Lieutenant, Baker shows that that little company of the Illinois National Guard which ruthlessly fired into the mob at Loomis Street one night virtually ended the disorder.

Perhaps Governor Altgeld was willing to forego any “credit” for an act, which, however necessary to the preservation of order, demanded so many lives. I do not know as to that, but I do recall the expression which clouded his face that afternoon we arrived at Lemont, during the strike at the drainage canal. It occurred a year before the railway strike, and the Governor had gone to Lemont himself to make an investigation. He had asked Lieutenant Baker and me to go with him, and when we got off the train at Lemont, on the afternoon of a cheerless day, the crowds were standing aimlessly about, watching with a sullen curiosity the arrival of the militia. The soldiers were just then going into camp on the level rocks by a bridge across the canal and the Desplaines River--the bridge, according to the military scientists, was, I believe, considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a strategic point.

The picture was one for the brush of Remington--those young blue-clad soldiers (it was before the days of our imperialism, and of the khaki our soldiers now imitate the British in wearing)--and Baker and I stood and gazed at it a moment, affected by the fascination there always is in the superficial military spectacle; and then, suddenly, we were aware that there was another and more dramatic point of interest, where a group stood about the body of a workman who had been shot in the riots of that morning. He was a foreigner, the clothes he wore doubtless those he had had on when he passed under the Statue of Liberty, coming to this land with what hopes of freedom in his breast no one can ever know. The wife who had come with him was on her knees beside him, rocking back and forth in her grief, dumb as to any words in a strange land whose tongue she could not speak or understand.

The reporters from the Chicago newspapers were there, and among them Eddie Bernard, an old Whitechapeler, who told us that the man had reached Lemont only a few days before, and had been happy in the job he had so promptly found in the new land of promise. And now, there he lay, shot dead. Bernard looked a moment, and then in the irony of a single phrase he expressed the whole drama as he said:

“The land of the free and the home of the brave!”

That was fundamental, anyhow, and politics were not going deeply into the question, except as such men as Altgeld did so, and even they were criticized sharply for attempting it. And one might well be disgusted with politics, then and always, and think of something that has the consolation of literature. The traffic of politicians, as Mr. George Moore somewhere says, is with the things of this world, while art is concerned with the dreams, the visions and the aspirations of a world beyond this. Though literature must some day in this land concern itself with that very question of labor, since it is with fundamental life that art must deal, and be true in its dealing.

XVII

Politics in those days--and not alone in those days either--were mean, and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in the land dreamers of a sort, who had caught a new vision. The feeling of it, the emotion, was to find expression in Mr. Bryan’s great campaign in 1896; but there was then in Chicago a little group, men who had read Henry George, or, without reading him, had looked out on life intelligently and gained a concept of it, or perhaps had merely felt in themselves the stirrings of a new social instinct, and these saw, or thought they saw, the way to a better social order. They could not in those days gain so patient a hearing for their views as they have since, if any hearing they have had may after all be called patient; they were not so very patient themselves, perhaps, as men are quite apt not to be when they think they see as clearly as though a perpetual lightning blazed in the sky exactly what is the matter with the world, and have a simple formula, which, were it but tried, would instantly and infallibly make everything all right.

But these men were not in politics; some of them were too impractical ever to be, and the only man in politics who understood them at all was Altgeld. Generally, the moral atmosphere of politics was foul and heavy with the feculence of all the debauchery that is inseparable from privilege. The personnel of politics was generally low; and in city councils and state legislatures there was a cynical contempt of all the finer sentiments. It was not alone that provincialism and philistinism which stand so obdurately and with such bovine stupidity in the way of progress; there was a positive scorn of the virtues, and the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of which was that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men, who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association, that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the other day, reading Walt Whitman’s terrific arraignment of the powers that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan’s time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the directorate of affairs,--it may be read in his prose works by those who wish,--I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time with that which immediately preceded the newer and better time of the moral awakening in America. Altgeld was one of the forerunners of this time; and, in accordance with the universal law of human nature, it was his fate to be misunderstood and ridiculed and hated, even by many in his own party. He was far in the van in most ways, so far that it was impossible for his own party to follow him. It did not follow him in his opposition to a bill which was passed in the General Assembly to permit of the consolidation of gas companies in Chicago; the machines of the two parties were working well together in the legislature--in one of those bipartizan alliances which were not to be understood until many years later, and even then not to be understood so very clearly, since most of our cities have been governed since by such alliances, in the interest of similar gas companies and other public utility corporations--and when the Governor vetoed their evil measure, this same bipartizan machine sought to pass it over his veto, and none was more active in the effort than were the leaders of his own party in the House.

The supreme effort was made on the last night of the session, amidst one of those riots which mark the dissolution of our deliberative legislative bodies. The lobbyists for the measure were quite shameless that night, as they were on most nights, no doubt; almost as shameless as the legislators themselves. The House was in its shirt-sleeves; and there was the rude horse-play of country bumpkins; paper wads were flying, now and then some member sent hurtling through the hot air his file of printed legislative bills, and all the while there was that confusion of sound, laughter, and oaths and snatches of song, a sort of bedlam, in which laws were being enacted--laws that must be respected and even revered, because of their sacred origin. The leaders were serious, but worried; the expressions of their drawn, tense, nervous faces were unhappy in suspicion and fear, and, perhaps, because of uneasy consciences. The speaker sat above them, pale and haggard, rapping his splintered sounding-board with a broken gavel, rapping persistently and futilely. And as the time drew near when the gas bill was to come on for consideration, the nervous tension was intensified, and evil hung almost palpably in the hot, close air of that chamber. Those who have had experience of legislative bodies, and have by practice learned something of political aëroscopy, can always tell when “something is coming off”; political correspondents have cultivated the sense, and that night they could have divined nothing good or pure or beautiful in that chamber (where the portraits of Lincoln and of Douglas hung), unless it were the mellow music, now and then, of the glass prisms of the chandeliers hanging high from the garish ceiling, as they tinkled and chimed whenever some little breeze wandered in from the June night.

And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. & M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent, taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there, silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long, wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable.

The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there on the verge of the House, and began to talk with him. I had the story a good while afterwards from one of the whips, who, it seemed, knew all that had gone on that night. The lobbyist of course knew about the man, knew especially about his necessities, as lobbyists do; and he began to talk to the old fellow about them--about his poverty and his children, and he used the old argument which has been employed so long and so successfully with the rural members of all our legislatures, and has been the source of so much evil in our city governments, that is, the argument that the bill concerned only Chicago, and that the folks down home would neither know nor care how he voted on it, and then--how much two thousand dollars would mean to him. As the lobbyist talked, there were various eyes that looked at him, waiting for a sign; they needed only a few votes then, and the roll-call was being delayed by one pretense and another, and the clock on the wall, inexorably ticking toward the hour of that legislature’s dissolution, was turned back. The old fellow listened and stroked his chin, and then presently, when the lobbyist had done, he turned his old blue eyes on him and said:

“I reckon you’re right: I’m poor, and I’ve got a big family. And you’re right, too, when you say my people won’t know nor care: they won’t; they don’t know nor care a damn; they won’t send me back here, of course. And God knows what’s to come of my wife and my children; I am going home to them to-morrow and on Monday I’m going to hunt me a job in the harvest-field; I reckon I’ll die in the poorhouse. Yes, I’m going home--but”--he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye--“I’m going home an honest man.”

My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,--“most of them damned cheap,” he said,--and he thought it might make a plot for a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the bill over the Governor’s veto, and it was not long until another story was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he had to do was to go take the bonds--and permit the bill to become a law. His answer, of course, was the veto--an offense as unpardonable as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been--though this was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates mercy, too.

The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more, and it was not long until the Governor was driven from his office amid the hoots and jeers and the hissing of a venomous hatred such as nothing but political rancor knows, unless it be religious rancor. Yes, politics had got pretty low in those days, and its utter meanness, gradually revealed, was enough to cause one to despair of his country and his kind. Perhaps the old Egyptian in the legislature and the idealist in the governor’s chair should have been enough to keep one from despairing altogether, though one honest old peasant cannot save a legislature any more than one swallow can make a summer. I do not mean to say that he was the only honest man in the legislature: there were many others, of course, but partizan politics prevented their honesty from being of much avail; or, at any rate, they did not control events. With the measurable advance in thought since that time, and the general progress of the species, we know now that men do not control events half so much as events control men; we do not know exactly what it is that does control men--that is, those of us who are not Socialists do not know.

Altgeld, at any rate, was disgusted with politics, as well he might have been, since they wrecked his fortune and broke his heart. And it was with relief, I know, that he said that morning,--almost the last he passed in the governor’s chair,--as he and I were going up the long walk to the State House steps:

“Well, we’re rid of this, anyway.”

XVIII

That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R----, which ran like a serial during those trying years.

I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings; sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life that then began to pervade the town; they were not so very high, but they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe, as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds, there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall--a strong man, of course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day--and of Hamilton and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he is not himself aware. There were a few law-books, too, and on the desk a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk over a manuscript of “The 13th District,” a novel of politics I was then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright and reassuring legend, “Money to Loan at 6 per cent.”