Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

IV

Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture, influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished, because so many of its students came from the southern states. It declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed foundation.

One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several times a day passed by my grandfather’s home on his way to and from his classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the distinguished family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself distinguishes a town.

I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.

“They have been there ever since eighteen sixty-six,” said my father, who had gone there in the year he had mentioned on his coming out of college.

His home was in Piqua, a town not far away, where his father had retired to rest after his lifelong labors on a farm he had himself “cleared” in Montgomery County many years before. This paternal grandfather was a large, gaunt, silent man, who spoke little, and then mostly in a sardonic humor, as when, during that awful pioneer work of felling a forest to make a little plantation, he said to his grown sons who were helping to clear away the underbrush of a walnut wood:

“Boys, what little you cut, pile here.”

Few other of his sayings have been preserved, and it may be that he has left behind an impression that he never talked at all because he never talked politics, and not to do that in Ohio dooms one to a silence almost perpetual. He had once been a Democrat, and had participated with such enthusiasm in the campaign of 1856 that he had kept his horses’ tails and manes braided for a month that they might roll forth in noble curls when they were loosened, and the horses harnessed to a carriage containing four veterans of the Revolution, who were to be thus splendidly drawn to the raising of a tall hickory pole in honor of James Buchanan, that year a candidate for president. But the old diplomatist made such a miserable weakling failure of his administration that his Piqua partizan became disgusted and renounced forever his interest in political affairs, and, like Henry I., never smiled again.

But my Grandfather Brand, when he was not talking about poetry or the war, was talking about politics; sometimes world politics, for he was interested in that; sometimes European politics, which he had followed ever since in Paris he had witnessed the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, or national politics, or state politics, or, in default of a larger interest, local politics, which in Ohio, as no doubt elsewhere, sometimes looms largest and most important of all, because, perhaps, as De Tocqueville says, local assemblies constitute the strength of free institutions.

My grandfather was then, at the time of which I am thinking even if I am not very specifically writing about it, mayor—and continued to be mayor for four terms. It was an office that was suited, no doubt, to the leisure of his retirement, and while it gave him the feeling of being occupied in public affairs, it nevertheless left him opportunities enough for his German poets, and for his horses and his farm out at Cable, and the strawberries he was beginning to cultivate with the enthusiasm of an amateur.