But the machine councilmen bore themselves jauntily enough; the windows were open to the soft night of the early autumn, and now and then some one sauntered in nonchalance over to the windows, and looked down into St. Clair Street, garish in the white and brilliant light of the electric signs of theaters, restaurants and saloons. The theater crowds were already going by, but it was to be noted that they loitered that evening, and were reënforced by other saunterers, as though the entertainment of the pavement might surpass that of the painted scene within. And above all the noises of the street, clanged the gongs of the street cars gliding by, and, for the moment, as a dramatic center of the scene, a squad of policemen was stationed in the lobby of the council chamber.
This nervous, sinister mood was somehow abroad in the whole city that night. Mr. Negley D. Cochran had written another editorial, published that evening in heavy type, in the News-Bee, calling on the citizens to come out and protect their rights in the streets of their city, so that there were apprehensions of all sorts of danger and disaster.
The council proceeded with its business; the voice of the reading clerk droned on in the resolutions and ordinances that represented the normal municipal activities of that hour, and then, suddenly, a sound of a new and unaccustomed sort arose from St. Clair Street, the sound of the tramp of marching men. Those at the windows, looking out, saw a strange spectacle—not without its menace; the newspaper reporters, some of them, embellished their reports with old phrases about faces blanching. Perhaps they did; they might well have done so, for the men came down St. Clair Street not as a mob; they were silent, marching in column, by sets of fours, with an orderly precision and a discipline almost military. And at their head there was a man whose square, broad shoulders and firm stride were the last expression of determination. He wore a slouch hat, under which his gray hair showed; his closely trimmed beard was grizzled; he looked, as many noted, not unlike the conventional portraits of General Grant. The man was Mr. Johnson Thurston, and he was as grim as General Grant, as brave, as determined, and as cool. He was widely known in Toledo as a lawyer, however, not as a politician; he had never been in politics, indeed, but he was in politics that night, surely, and destined to remain in politics for years to come.
He brought his column to a halt under the windows of the council chamber. There was no room in that small chamber for such a delegation, or seemingly for any delegation of the people, however small. Johnson Thurston’s son marched beside him as an aide, bearing a soap box—the modern tribune of our democracy—and he placed it on the pavement for his father. A street car, just then halting, clanged its gong for the throng to make way, and at this perfect symbol of the foe they were opposing, Johnson Thurston shook his fist, and shouted:
“Stand there! The people are attending to their business to-night!”
The street car stood, and Johnson Thurston mounted his soap box, produced a paper and read from it in a loud voice that section of the Constitution in which the people retain to themselves the right peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. And this done, he turned to his followers, gave them a signal, and there went up from their throats in perfect unison a mighty cry: “Let the franchise alone!”
Three times they voiced their imperative mandate, and then, at a signal, they wheeled about, and marched away in the excellent order in which they had come. Such a demonstration, in the streets, at night, before a legislative body, had it occurred in a capital or in a metropolis, would have been historic. As it was, the cry that went up from those men was heard in the council chamber; and it was destined to ring through the town for the better part of a decade. The council did not pass the ordinance over the Mayor’s veto; half an hour later the councilmen were escorted from their chamber by the police they had summoned; and a sadly shaken body they were, poor fellows.
Meanwhile the men who had marched with Johnson Thurston had retired to a vacant storeroom in Superior Street, three blocks away, over the door of which there was a canvas sign bearing the inscription “Independent Headquarters.” There they had assembled and been drilled by Johnson Thurston, as college men are drilled by a leader in their yells, and with a solemn sense of civic duty they had marched to the council chamber to save their city from a quarter of a century more of shameful vassalage to a privileged public utility corporation. The threat of their presence had been sufficient, but had that proved unavailing, they had provided other resources. There had been all the while, from the hour of the opening of the doors that night, twelve men in the council chamber, armed with bombs, not of dynamite or any such anarchist explosive, but of asafœtida and sulphureted hydrogen and I know not what other overpowering fumes and odors, confidently relied upon to prevail against even so foul a stench as that which a privileged plutocracy can make in any of the halls of government when it has determined to secure another lease of its tenure.
At Independent Headquarters, then, that autumn, political meetings were held, in which local affairs—the street-car situation especially and the relation it bore to the machines of political parties—were discussed. Because of those changes the legislature was always making in the government of cities, three councilman at large were to be elected. This was in the year 1904, in the midst of a national campaign. Roosevelt was running for president for his second—or his first term, depending on the point of view—and three of those men who had voted for that street railway ordinance, and were ready to vote to pass it over the mayor’s veto, were candidates on the Republican ticket for councilmen at large. The Independents who had marched with Johnson Thurston determined to nominate a city ticket, and they honored me by offering me the place at the head of that ticket as their candidate for councilman at large. I was writing another novel just then and battling as usual against interruptions, and so I begged off; it was not the campaign I feared, but, as I told them, the fear that I should be elected. We nominated a ticket, and went into the campaign, speaking every night, and in November, though Roosevelt carried the city by fifteen thousand, our candidates for councilmen at large were elected. Clearly, then, the non-partizan movement had not wholly died with Golden Rule Jones; his soul, like the soul of John Brown, was marching on, and still somehow led by him, and inspired by his spirit, there had sprung forth, like Greek soldiers from the dragon’s teeth, in Toledo a democratic municipal movement. First of all the cities in America, she had taken the initial step in freeing herself, the step all cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their masters—that of non-partizan municipal elections.