Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

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.”

During one of many pleasant afternoons in the old Grand Pacific Hotel he began to tell us something about the chronic office holders to be found in the capital of his state, as in most states, and said: “If God in a moment of enthusiasm should see fit to snatch them to His bosom I should regard it as a dispensation of divine providence in which I could acquiesce with a fervor that would be turbulent and even riotous.” It was in this stream of exaggeration and hyperbole that he talked all the time, but with the coming of the winter of that year my opportunities of listening to him were cut off. I was sent to Springfield to report the sessions of the legislature. In the spring a bill was under discussion for the appropriation of a large sum in aid of the World’s Fair, and when the usual opposition developed among those country members who have so long governed our cities in dislike and distrust of the people in them, a delegation came down from Chicago to lobby for the measure. It was not long until it was evident that they were not making much headway; the difference, the distinction in their dress and manner, their somewhat too lofty style were only making matters worse. I took it upon myself to telegraph to James W. Scott, the publisher of The Herald, apprising him of the situation, and suggesting that Colonel McKenzie be sent down to reënforce them. I felt that he would perhaps understand the country members better because he understood humanity better, and besides, I wished to see him again and hear his stories and funny sayings. He came, and after he had associated with the members a day or so, and they had seen him draw Kentucky “twist” from the deep pocket of the long tails of his coat, and on one or two occasions had watched him gently pinch into a julep the tender sprigs of mint the spring had brought to Springfield, the appropriation for some reason was made. While he was there he said he wished to visit the tomb of Lincoln, and it was with pride that I got an open carriage and drove him, on an incomparable morning in June, out to Oak Ridge cemetery. He was in a solemn mood that morning; the visit had a meaning for him; he had fought on the other side in the great war, but he had a better conception of the character of the noble martyr than many a northerner, especially of the day when that tomb was built, certainly a nobler conception of that lofty character than is expressed in Mead’s cruel war groups—as though Lincoln had been merely some shoulder-strapped murderer of his fellow men! The Colonel had never been there before, and it was an occasion for him, and for me, too, though every time I went there it was for me an occasion, as my sojourn in Springfield was an opportunity, to induce those who had known Lincoln to talk about him.

The tomb has a chamber in its base where there were stored a number of things; the place, indeed, was a sort of cheap museum, and you paid to enter there and listen to an aged custodian lecture on the “relics,” and thrill the gaping onlooker with the details of the attempt to steal the body, and buy a book about it, if you were morbid and silly enough. The custodian began his lecture in that chamber, and then led you out into the sunlight again, and up on the base of the monument, and showed you the bronze fighters, and at last, took you down into the crypt, on the brow of the little down that overlooks the cemetery.