Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“Why, since you are opposed to signing our pledge, we will waive that in your case, and you and I can have a little private understanding—no one need ever know, and you can say——” he was gently tapping the ends of his fingers together, and the last terms of his proposal seemed to be absorbed by an expression of vulpine significance so eloquent and plain in its meaning that mere words were superfluous.

I sat there and looked at him; I had known of him, he spoke nearly every Sunday in some church, and took up collections for the reform to which, quite sincerely, I believe, he was devoting his life. Then I said:

“But that isn’t my idea even of politics, to say nothing of ethics.”

I believe now that he had no conception of the moral significance of his suggestion that we have an implied understanding which I was to be at liberty to deny if the exigencies of politics suggested it. He was a reformer, belonging to the order of the indurated mind. He was possessed by a theory, which held his mind in the relentless mould of its absolutism, and there his mind had hardened, and, alas, his heart, too, no doubt—so that its original impressions were all fixed and immutable, and not subject to change; they could not be erased nor could any new impressions be superimposed. He was convinced that his particular theory was correct, and that if only it could be imposed on mankind, the world would be infinitely better off; and that hence any means, no matter what, were permissible in effecting this imposition, because of the good that would follow. It is an old mental attitude in this world, well treated of in books, and understood and recognized by everyone except those who adopt it, and in its spirit every new reform is promulgated by its avatar. But the reformer never thinks of himself in any such light, of course, he does not understand it any more than he understands mankind’s distrust of him. It is the instinctive fear of the theorist that has been felt for every one of them from Robespierre, the archtype, and impossibilist par excellence, down to the latest man haranguing his little idle crowd on the street corner.

XL

These observations come with the recollection of those days of my first term in the mayor’s office when I had so much to do with reformers that I earnestly desired that no one would ever include me in their category. They came to see me so often and in such numbers that my whole view of life was quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that half the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind, and their first need was to get the mayor to use the police force to help them. When they did not call at the office, they were writing letters. The favorite day for these expressions of the reforming spirit was Monday. I had been many months in the office however, before I was able to make this generalization, though from the first I could observe that Monday took on something of that dismal and somber tone which has given it its name of blue Monday. In the early days of a simpler life in our country, when the customs of the pioneer had not been superseded by the complexities of modern existence, its color used to be ascribed to the fact that it was wash day, and perhaps it has remained a sort of moral wash day ever since. At any rate we soon discovered that everyone who had a grievance or a complaint or a suggestion about his neighbor or some larger scheme of reforming whole groups of the population was most likely to be heavily charged with it on Monday, and since the almost universal conception among us is that all reforms can be wrought by the mayor, by the simple process of issuing an order to the police, these complaints were of course lodged at the mayor’s office.

They were of a curious variety, expressing, I suppose, not only all the moral yearnings of mankind, but all the meaner moods of human nature, and each new Monday morning seemed to have in reserve, for a nature that was trying to keep its faith in humanity, some fresh and theretofore unimagined instance of the depths of little meannesses to which human nature is capable of sinking. Many of them came in person with their criticism, others sent anonymous letters. Then there were those who came to repeat ugly things they had heard about me; “I wouldn’t tell you this if I were not your friend. I think you ought to know it.” Later in the afternoon the evenings’ newspapers, with the criticisms marked, were laid on my desk. All this made Monday the hardest day of the week, especially as the day closed with the hebdominal session of the council, where one might find now and then some pretty discouraging examples of human meanness. Tuesday was not quite so bad, though it was trying; human nature seemed to run pretty high, or pretty low, on that day, too. By Wednesday, the atmosphere began to clear, and by Thursday and Friday, everyone seemed to be attending to his own business and letting the faults of his neighbors go unnoted or at least unreported, and Saturday was a day of such calm that one’s whole faith in humanity was miraculously restored; if the weather was fine one might almost discover human nature as to be good as that nature which would reveal herself on the golf links.

As a result of it all we finally made the deduction—my secretary Bernard Dailey, the stenographers in the office and the reporters who formed so pleasant an element of the life there—that it was all due to the effects of the Sunday that had intervened. In the first place, people had leisure on that day and in that leisure they could whet up their consciences and set them to the congenial task of dissecting the characters of other people, or they could contemplate the evils in the world and resolve highly to make the mayor do away with them, and then after the custom of our land they could gorge on the huge Sunday noon dinner of roast beef, and then lie about all afternoon like pythons in a torpor which produced an indigestion so acute and lasting that for three days it passed very well for pious fervor and zeal for reform. Such at least was our theory, offered here solely in the scientific spirit, and not by any means as final. It was acquiesced in by all of us at the time, and has been supported by an unvarying series of data on the Monday mornings since then.

We submitted it to Henry Frisch, the police sergeant who had been detailed for duty in the mayor’s office for many years, a dear and comfortable soul, who had served under several mayors, and had developed a philosophy of life that was a very Nirvana of comfort and repose. Long ago, so it seemed when he smiled indulgently on the discomfiture of blue Monday, he had given up humanity as a bad job; to him the race was utterly and irredeemably hopeless, and without the need of saying a word he could shake his honest head at the suggestion of a new reform with a motion that was eloquent of all negation. He was very tolerant, however, and made no argument in rebuttal, he simply refused to accept humanity on any general plane; regarding the race as a biological species merely, he would confide to you that his years of experience at that post and as a policeman who had paced his beat and afterward commanded a sergeant’s squad, had convinced him that it was altogether depraved, dishonest and disgusting, but with any individual specimen of the species he was not that way at all. He was really kindness itself. The next minute, with tears in his eyes, he would go to any extremes to help some poor devil out of trouble. Unless it were reformers; for these he had no use, he said, and if his advice had been accepted he would have been permitted to expel them from the City Hall by their own beloved weapons of violence and force of arms. On Sundays he went fishing.

Perhaps at the time of which I am thinking, if not very specifically writing, there was more of this Monday spirit of reform than is usual. In the first place, much is expected of a new official and because he does not promptly work those miracles which are confidently expected whether he was foolish enough to promise them or not, he is so generally complained of that it may be set down as an axiom of practical politics that any elected official, in the executive branch of the government, could be recalled at any time during the first year of his incumbency of his office. Just then, too, there had been elected to the governorship a gentleman who had been very deeply devoted to the interests of the Methodist Church, the strongest denomination numerically in Ohio—the first governor of Ohio, indeed, was a Methodist preacher—and because of that fact and because of the use in his inaugural message of the magic phrase “law and order,” it was at once announced in the most sensational manner of the sensational press that, unless all the sumptuary laws in Ohio were drastically enforced, all the mayors of the cities would be removed. Governor Pattison had been elected as a Democrat, and during his campaign Tom Johnson and I had supported him, and it was while we were in Columbus at his inauguration that this sensation was exploited in the newspapers. I remember how Tom Johnson received it when one of his coterie brought the extra editions into the hotel and pointed out to him the dreadful predictions of the headlines; the white, aristocratic hand waved the suggestion imperiously aside, and he said: