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.