Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

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.’”