Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“Who are saying?” I asked.

“The people,” he replied.

He had come, of course, from his luncheon at the club. His motor car was at the door of the city hall, and I asked him to take me for a drive, and I suggested certain parts of town through which, for a change, we might go. We ignored the avenues and the boulevards, and for two hours drove about through quiet streets far from the life of the town as we knew it and as all men down in the business section knew it—the old third ward, where the Poles lived, and around to the upper end of the old seventh where the shops and factories were, and then on over through the eighth and the ninth, and so up to the Hill, and after we had passed by all those blocks and blocks of humble little homes, cottages of one story, and all that, I asked him if he knew what the folk who lived in them were saying about the administration.

“Why, no,” he answered. “I never talk with any of them.”

“Well,” I ventured to say, “they are the people, they who live in those little houses with the low roofs. It is important to know how they feel, too.”

I always felt that he had a new vision after that; he saw that if government was to mean anything to these persons, it must be made human, and the reforms in the police and fire departments he wrought out in that spirit were such that when he died, in not quite four years, when he was just turned thirty, the cartoonist had long since ceased to caricature him as an idle fop, and the newspaper editorials mourned him, in common with most of the community, as one of the best public servants our city, or any city, ever had.

XXXVII

I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land, where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience, when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique. And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and they were many and respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and that was, that I did not know.

Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West, I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole, after four terms in a mayor’s office testing them, I still believe to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs; representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say—non-partizan city elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the task, this was the program.

We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory possible by his great pioneer work in destroying the superstition of party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their party confreres and conspirators from the city—machine politicians to whom they turned for advice—but gain a cheap réclame at home by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the “good” people were always insisting on the “moral” issue; urging us to turn aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official attention on the “bad” people—and wreck our movement. Our immediate purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of transmuting twenty-five millions in green paper into twenty-five millions in gold, and thereby absorb the commercial values of half a century. To do this it was necessary to win elections for years, and to win elections, one must have votes, and “bad” people have votes, equally with “good” people, and if one is to judge from the comment of the “good” people on the election returns, the “bad” people in most cities are in the majority. On that point, I believe, the reformers and the politicians at least are agreed. More than this, we had to obtain from reluctant legislatures the powers that would put the city at least on equal terms with the corporations which had always proved so much more potent than the city. Such was the struggle our movement faced, such was the victory to be won before our city could be free from the triumvirate that so long had exploited it, the political boss, the franchise promoter, and the country politician. The Free City! That was the noble dream.