Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“Well, you’re all right, then.”

It thereupon occurred to the governor’s secretary to introduce us, and so I made the acquaintance of Clarence Darrow. He had taken it upon himself to neglect his duties as the attorney of some of the railroads and other large corporations in Chicago long enough to come down to Springfield on his own initiative and responsibility to plead with the Governor for this lad’s life (he was always going on some such Quixotic errand of mercy for the poor and the friendless), and we retired to the governor’s ante-chamber to await the coming of Gill. We talked for a while about the Prendergast case, which might have had more sympathetic consideration had it not persisted as the Carter Harrison case in the mind of that public, which when its latent spirit of vengeance is aroused can so easily become the mob, but it was not long until I discovered that Darrow had read books other than those of the law, and for an hour we talked of Tolstoy and the other great Russians, and of Thomas Hardy and of Mr. Howells, to enumerate no more of the long catalogue of those realists whom we liked in common, and when I discovered that he actually knew Mr. Howells, knew him personally, as the saying is, I could feel that poor Prendergast, though I had never seen him in my life, or scarcely ever thought of him until the night before, had done me one service at least, and it made me all the more anxious to save him.

When Joe Gill’s tall Egyptian form came swinging into the room our talk of books was interrupted long enough to arrange for a hearing that afternoon, and then we resumed our talk, and it endured through luncheon and after, and I left him only long enough to have a conversation with Gill and to ask him as a sort of personal favor to an old friend to spare the boy’s life.

At two o’clock the hearing was called. The reporters and the governor’s secretary and George Brennan and I made the audience, and Gill sat up erectly in the governor’s chair to hear the appeal. Darrow asked me the proper address for a governor, and I said since this was the lieutenant-governor I thought “Your Excellency” would be propitiative, and Darrow made one of those eloquent appeals for mercy of which he is the complete master. It moved us all, but the Lieutenant-Governor gathered himself together and refused it, and Darrow went back to Chicago to unfold those legal technicalities which make our law so superior to other forms in that they can stay the hand of its vengeance. He did not succeed in the end, and the boy was hanged, and murder has gone on in Chicago since, I understand, the same as before. But Darrow could not leave Springfield until midnight of that day, and we talked about books all the evening, and when he boarded his train he had in his valise the MS. of my story about another governor and another pardon, concerning which he was charged to answer a certain question to which all my doubts and perplexities could be reduced, namely: “Is it worth while, and if not, is there any use in going on and trying to write one that is?”

I had to wait almost as long for his decision as though he had been an editor himself, but when I called at his office in Chicago one morning in the autumn to get the MS., and he told me that his answer to my question was “yes,” and that he would, if I agreed, send the story to Mr. Howells, I was as happy as though he had been an editor and had accepted it for publication. I could not agree to its being sent on to weary Mr. Howells, but took it back with me to Springfield, in hope, if not in confidence.

XVI

However, it has seemed to be my fate, or my weakness, which we too often confuse with fate, to vacillate between an interest in letters and an interest in politics, and after that year, whose days and nights were almost wholly given to studying law, I was admitted to the bar, and thereupon felt qualified to go out on the stump in the campaign that autumn and speak in behalf of the Democratic ticket. It was fun to drive out over Sangamon County in those soft autumn evenings, over the soft roads,—though if it rained they became too soft,—and to speak in schoolhouses to the little audiences of farmers, or of miners, on the iniquities of the tariff. If we had been a little more devoted to principle, perhaps, than we were to party, we might better have spoken of the iniquities of that Democratic minority in the Senate which had just completed its betrayal of us all and helped to perpetrate those iniquities, but when you belong to a party you are presumed to adjust yourself to what your representatives do, and to make the best of what generally is a pretty bad bargain. The bargain of those senators had been particularly bad, and so, instead of speaking in the tones of righteous indignation, we had to adopt the milder accents of apology and explanation, and it was difficult to explain to some of those audiences. There was more or less heckling, and now and then impromptu little debates, and sometimes when the meeting was done, and we started on the long ride back to town, we would find that the nuts had been removed from the axles of our carriage-wheels. Perhaps that argument was as good as any we had made, and it could not matter much anyway, since partizan speeches never convince anybody, and if they could, if they could do anything but deepen and intensify prejudice, whole batteries of the world’s best orators in that year could not have overcome the vicious effects of that high betrayal, even though they had been led to the charge by Phocion and Demosthenes.

I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name, had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the workingmen had learned at last that the system did not “protect” them, and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men so far as I know—M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough to disgust anyone with politics altogether, and to forswear them and parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I can think of.

To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well. The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong, and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them, or at least to take some measures against the lie.

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.