I had gone into the mayor’s office feeling that I was about the most ill-prepared man for such a job in the town. Naturally I had turned to Tom Johnson, who had a tremendous reputation as an executive; even his worst enemy, as the saying is, would not deny his wonderful executive ability. I went to him in a sort of despair, and he laughed and leaned over and whispered——
But perhaps after all I should not tell. It was spoken in confidence. And it is ungenerous and unkind to destroy the cherished illusions of the world, almost as unkind, I was about to say, as it is difficult, since there is nothing the world so cherishes and hugs to its sad old withered bosom as it does its illusions. It may be that they are entirely necessary to it, it may be that it could not get along without them. What would this nation have done, after all, if it had not been for executive ability and the judicial temperament? The judicial temperament consists, of course, in nothing more than the calm assurance which enables one to put off till to-morrow problems that should be decided to-day, for if allowed to go long enough problems will solve themselves, just as letters unanswered long enough despatch their own replies.
I had deduced that generalization for myself long ago, while waiting for judges to hand down opinions, and then in decisions reading the well-known formula: “The court does not find it necessary to pass on this particular point at this time.” Why, I applied one time to the Supreme Court, on a Wednesday morning, for a stay of execution on behalf of a man who was to be burned alive in our electric chair on the following Friday, and the judicial temperament who at that time happened to be chief justice calmly said that the application would be taken under advisement and a decision handed down in due course, which, at the earliest, was the following Tuesday morning. But the governor half an hour afterward said, “Oh, well, don’t worry; if the court doesn’t act, I’ll reprieve him,” an example, perhaps, of what I had in mind when I was writing those vague thoughts about making government human. But executive ability! I had, and still have, great admiration and reverence for that——
But Tom Johnson leaned over that afternoon, as we sat there in the committee room of the House at Columbus, and laughed and whispered:
“It’s the simplest thing in the world; decide every question quickly and be right half the time. And get somebody who can do the work. That’s all there is to executive ability.”
I looked at him in amazement. He had grown quite serious.
“There’s another thing,” he added. “Don’t spend too much time in your office. A quarter of an hour each day is generally too long, unless there are a whole lot of letters. Of course,” he went on reflectively, “you can get clerks who can sign your name better than you can.”
XXXVI
The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio. He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a member of the Board of Public Safety—we still had the board plan of government then—and the appointment to office of a young aristocrat afforded the newspapers and cartoonists an opportunity for ridicule which they did not overlook. But I knew the boy. I had seen him play football, for one thing, and I knew how he managed his own business. The vigor and the nerve he had displayed on the football field at once showed in his duties, and the ability and devotion he displayed in his own affairs he applied in the public service. The criticism to which the administration was constantly subjected distressed him; he heard so much of it at the fashionable club where he had his luncheons. One afternoon he came into City Hall with an expression more somber than usual, and as he sat down in my office he began:
“They are saying——”