Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

Our satisfaction and our pride in our legal achievement was somewhat modified by the fact that the application of the same rule to conditions in our sister city of Cleveland had the effect, in certain cases then pending, of pulling down the work which another great mayor, Tom L. Johnson, was then doing in that city. It was even said that the Supreme Court had been influenced by the desire of Mark Hanna, Tom Johnson’s ancient enemy in Cleveland, to see his old rival defeated. Some were unkind enough to say that Mark Hanna’s influence was more powerful with the court, as at that time constituted, than was the logic of the attorneys who were representing Golden Rule Jones.

But however that may have been, the decision in that case had ultimate far-reaching effects in improving the conditions in Ohio cities, and was the beginning of a conflict that did not end until they were free and autonomous. In my own case it was the beginning of a study of municipal government that has grown more fascinating as the years have fled, a study that has led me to see, or to think that I see, the large hope of our democracy in the cities of America.

I regard it as Jones’s supreme contribution to the thought of his time that, by the mere force of his own original character and personality, he compelled a discussion of fundamental principles of government. Toledo to-day is a community which has a wider acquaintance with all the abstract principles of social relations than any other city in the land, or in the world, since, when one ventures into generalities, one might as well make them as sweeping as one can.

Jones’s other great contribution to the science of municipal government was that of non-partizanship in local affairs. That is the way he used to express it; what he meant was that the issues of national politics must not be permitted to obtrude themselves into municipal campaigns, and that what divisions there are should be confined to local issues. There is, of course, in our cities, as in our land or any land, only one issue, that which is presented by the conflict of the aristocratic, or plutocratic, spirit and the spirit of democracy.

Jones used to herald himself as “a Man Without a Party,” but he was a great democrat, the most fundamental I ever knew or imagined; he summed up in himself, as no other figure of our time since Lincoln, all that the democratic spirit is and hopes to be. Perhaps in this characterization I seem to behold his figure larger than it was in relation to the whole mass, but while his work may appear at first glance local, it was really general and universal. No one can estimate the peculiar and lively force of such a personality; certainly no one can presume to limit his influence, for such a spirit is illimitable and irresistible.

He was elected in that last campaign for the fourth time, but he did not live very long. He had never, it seemed to me, been quite the same after the day when he had that experience of insult which he did not resent. “Draw the sting,” he used to counsel us when, in our campaign harangues, we became bitter, or sarcastic, or merely smart. He had supreme reliance on the simple truth, on the power of reasonableness. He never reviled again; he never sought to even scores. When he died the only wounds he left in human hearts were because he was no more. They understood him at last, those who had scoffed and sneered and abused and vilified, and I, who had had the immense privilege of his friendship, and thought I knew him,—when I stood that July afternoon, on the veranda of his home, beside his bier to speak at his funeral, and looked out over the thousands who were gathered on the wide lawn before his home,—I realized that I, too, had not wholly understood him.

I know not how many thousands were there; they were standing on the lawns in a mass that extended across the street and into the yards on the farther side. Down to the corner, and into the side streets, they were packed, and they stood in long lines all the way out to the cemetery. In that crowd there were all sorts of that one sort he knew as humanity without distinction,—judges, and women of prominence and women whom he alone would have included in humanity, there were thieves, and prize-fighters,—and they all stood there with the tears streaming down their faces.

There is no monument to Golden Rule Jones in Toledo; and since St. Gaudens is gone I know of no one who could conceive him in marble or in bronze. There is not a public building which he erected, no reminder of him which the eye can see or the hands touch. But his name is spoken here a thousand times a day, and always with the reverence that marks the passage of a great man upon the earth. And I am sure that his influence did not end here. Did not a letter come from Yasnaya Polyana in the handwriting of the great Tolstoy, who somehow had heard of this noble and simple soul who was, in his own way, trying the same experiment of life which the great Russian was making?

XXV

In the beginning, of course, it was inevitable that Jones should have been called a Socialist. I suppose he did not care much himself, but the Socialists cared, and promptly disowned him, and were at one with the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him. He shared, no doubt, the Socialists’ great dream of an ordered society, though he would not have ordered it by any kind of force or compulsion, but in that spirit which they sneer at as mere sentimentalism. He was patient with them; he saw their point of view; he had, indeed, the immense advantage of being in advance of them in his development. He saw Socialism not, as most see it, from the hither side, but from the farther side, as one who has passed through it; he was like a man who having left the dusty highway and entered a wood which he thinks his journey’s end, suddenly emerges and from a hill beholds the illimitable prospect that lies beyond. Of course he could never endure anything so doctrinaire as Socialism, in the form in which he was accustomed to see it exemplified in the Socialists about him. He could not endure their orthodoxy, any more than he could endure the orthodoxy they were contending against. Their sectarianism was to him quite as impossible as that sectarianism he had known in other fields. Their bigotry was as bad as any. He saw no good to come from a substitution of their tyranny for any other of the many old tyrannies in the world. And naturally to one of his spirit the class hatred they were always inciting under the name of class consciousness was as abhorrent to him as all hatred was.