Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“How do you explain that?”

“We are not trying to make money in the Cleveland workhouse,” the Mayor replied instantly, “we are trying to make MEN!”

Or again I see him, superintending the tearing up of street railway tracks, on streets where the franchises of the private company had expired, to make room for the rails of the city company, calmly smoking a cigar, and with a gesture of his expressive delicate white hand waving aside the latest of the many injunctions that were sued out against him. The battle was never lost to him, though his followers were often discouraged. He might have said of court injunctions as Napoleon said of bullets at the battle of Krasnoi:

“Bah! They have been whistling about our legs these forty years!”

But I see him best I think in the great hall of his home in Euclid Avenue, one short, fat leg tucked comfortably under him, his cigar in his aristocratic hand, his friends and admirers about him. It was a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men. One of them had been originally an opponent, one of those who heckled him in the tent, a fiery young radical not long since a blacklisted mechanic who had gone hungry when on strike, Peter Witt, one of the most picturesque personalities in Ohio politics; he became one of Johnson’s intimate friends and strongest supporters, and a splendid speaker on the stump. He was city clerk of Cleveland under all the Johnson administrations and is now the street railway commissioner of that city under Mayor Newton D. Baker, who, as city solicitor, was another of the group of those happy days. Mr. Baker was like a boy in appearance, with his sensitive face and the ideals of a poet, and a brilliant lawyer. He carried all the legal burden of the long street railway controversy in Cleveland,—it was almost a civil war—and did it all with such skill and ability, and withal with such grace and courtesy and good nature that he never offended his opponents, who were the leading corporation lawyers of the city. Frederic C. Howe had been elected to the council in Cleveland as a Republican from one of the most aristocratic wards, but he was won over by Johnson’s personality, was renominated by Johnson on the Democratic ticket, afterwards sent to the state senate and became one of the foremost men in the liberal movement in America; his books on municipal government are authorities. And Dr. Cooley; he was a Disciple preacher, and Johnson placed him at the head of the department of charities and corrections, so that, as Johnson used to say, instead of a preacher Dr. Cooley became a minister. It was delightful to be with them in those gatherings. The genuine reform of conditions in that city possessed them all like a passion; they were stimulated by a common ambition, which was, as Johnson used to say, to make Cleveland a city set on a hill, and though he was not a poet nor a maker of phrases everyone instinctively knew what he meant when he spoke of his city set on a hill. I do not know how much of history he had read, but he knew intuitively that the city in all ages has been the outpost of civilization, and that if the problem of democracy is to be solved at all it is to be solved first in the city. That was why he struggled for the free city, struggled to make the city democratic; he knew that the cure for the ills of democracy is not less democracy, as so many were always preaching, but more democracy. And how delighted he was when Fred Howe brought out his book “The City the Hope of Democracy.” He had the joy of seeing marshaled there in the thesis of a scholar all the arguments he had apprehended but had never reduced to terms; there they were, all in their logical order—and Johnson straightway sent a copy of the book to every member of the Ohio legislature, to their amazement no doubt, if not to their amusement.

I used to like to go over to Cleveland and meet that charming group Johnson had gathered about him. There was in them a spirit I never saw in such fullness elsewhere; they were all working for the city, they thought only of the success of the whole. They had the city sense, a love of their town like that love which undergraduates have for their university, the esprit de corps of the crack regiment.

But Johnson used to set me to work with the rest of them. I went over there once to spend the week’s end, for rest and relaxation, and he had me working far into three nights on amendments to the municipal code. He had terrible energy, but it was a joy to work with him. I wish I had gone oftener.

I have said enough I hope to make it clear that Tom Johnson was one of those mortals who have somehow been lifted above their fellows far enough to catch a vision of the social order which people generally as yet do not see. It was inevitable, of course, that such a man, especially since he was a rich man, should have his motives impugned, and I recall now with what a confidential chuckle he said to me one time when he had been accused of I know not what vaulting and wicked ambition:

“I am politically ambitious; I have just one ambition; I want to be the mayor of a free city, and if I were, the very first thing I should do would be to appoint a corps of assessors who couldn’t see a building, or an improvement; they would assess for taxation nothing but the value of the land, and we would try out the single tax.”

He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make possible the coming of the free city in this land.