They could not have put their case more frankly. But I, as I was able to recall in that moment, represented two hundred thousand people, themselves among them of course. And here at the very outset was the old conflict in its simplest terms, of man against property. Now, in that old struggle, while I had made no sacrifices in the cause and have been of no especial service in it, I had nevertheless given intellectual assent to the general propositions advanced in favor of the human side, the side of man. By prejudice, or perversity, or constitutionally, I considered men of more value than factories. I had perhaps never heard of a strike, for instance, in which my sympathies were not impulsively with the strikers. I could always see that poor foreigner, whose body had lain there on the cold damp rocks at Lemont so many years before, and somehow I could not get out of my mind’s eye the figures of the workmen on strike, many of them hungry and desperate as their wives and children were; they seemed to me to be in straits more dire than their harried and harassed and worried employers, though I could feel sorry for them, too, since even if they were not hungry, they, too, were the victims of the anarchy of our industrial system. They had of course no social conscience whatever, but perhaps they could not help that. But there they were, bringing their troubles to the mayor, whom perhaps they did not wholly regard as their mayor, since they had some prescience of the fact that in that mayor’s mind was always the memory of those throngs of workingmen who had looked up to him with some of the emotions of confidence and hope. There was alas little enough that he could do for those workingmen, but, especially in such an hour, he must at least not forget them. Of the relative rights of their present quarrel he had little knowledge; but he had envisaged enough of life to know, without too much sentimentalizing them, that, while they were often wrong, they were somehow right when they were wrong. That is, their eternal cause was right.
What the manufacturers wanted, as they put it, was “protection,” a term with vague and varying connotations. As was the case in all the strikes of all the years of my experience in the mayoralty, they felt that the police were not sufficiently aggressive, or that the Chief of Police had not detailed sufficient men to afford them protection. I did not raise the question, though it occurred to me, as to what the police were doing to protect the strikers, who were citizens, too, and tax-payers, or at least rent-payers and so indirect tax-payers, but when I asked the Chief, the big-hearted Perry Knapp reported that the strikers were complaining, too, and out of his collection of works on Lincoln, he brought me one which contained a letter the great president wrote to General John M. Schofield, when he assigned that officer to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in May, 1863, to succeed General Curtis. Curtis had been the head of one party as Governor Gamble had been the head of the other, in what Lincoln called the pestilent factional quarrel into which the Union men had entered. “Now that you are in the position,” wrote Lincoln, “I wish you to undo nothing merely because General Curtis or Governor Gamble did it, but to exercise your own judgment, and do right for the public interest. Let your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harass and persecute the people. It is a difficult rôle, and so much the greater will be the honor if you perform it well. If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one and praised by the other.”
How Lincoln knew human nature! It seemed as good a model as one might find, since we, too, were in the midst of a little civil war, and we always tried to pursue that course. What the manufacturing employers wished, of course, was for us to use the police to break the strike; that we did not deem it our duty to do. What we tried to do was to preserve the public peace and—since our industry in its present status is war—to let them fight it out. We tried to see to it that they fought it out along the lines laid down, in fixing the relative rights of the industrial belligerents, by the Courts of Great Britain, and this policy had the virtual approval of our own courts when in an ancillary way it came under discussion there. But we had difficulty in maintaining the peace, not only because the strikers, or more likely their sympathizers, broke it now and then, but because when the strikers were not breaking it, the employers seemed bent on doing something to make them. They did not intend it for that purpose of course; they simply thought in old feudal sequences. They hired mercenaries, bullies provided as “guards” by private detective agencies. It kept the police pretty busy disarming these guards, and greatly added to their labors because the guards were always on the point of hurting some one.
LIII
There was one of the employers, indeed, who grew so alarmed that he came one morning to the office predicting a riot at his plant, that very afternoon at five o’clock, when the works were to shut down for the day. This man was just then operating his factory with strike breakers and he was concerned for their safety. Indeed his concern was expressed in the form of a personal sympathy and love for them which was far more sentimental than any I had ever been accused of showing toward workingmen. He was concerned about their inalienable right to work, and about their wives and little children, and about their comfort and peace of mind; indeed it was such a concern, such a love, that, had he but shown the moiety of it to his former employees, they never could have gone out on strike at all.
At five o’clock that day then, with the Chief of Police, I visited the plant to observe, and if possible to prevent the impending riot. The works had not yet closed for the day, but in the street before the black and haggard and ugly buildings where they had toiled, the strikers were gathered, and with them their wives, with bare and brawny forearms rolled in their aprons, and their children clinging timorously about their skirts. It was a gray and somber afternoon in spring, but there was in the crowd a kind of nervous excitement that might have passed for gayety, a mood that strangely travestied the holiday spirit; perhaps they regarded the strike as an opportunity for the sensation lacking in their monotonous lives. There were several hulking fellows loafing about whom the Chief of Police recognized as private detectives, and as a first step in preventing disorder, he ordered these away. Presently the whistle blew its long, lugubrious blast, the crowd gathered in closer groups, and a silence fell. Sitting there with the Chief in his official buggy, I waited; the great gates of the high stockade swung slowly open, and then there issued forth a vehicle, the like of which I had never seen before, a sort of huge van, made of rough boards, that might have moved the impedimenta of an embassy. In the rear there was a door, fastened with a padlock; the sides were pierced with loop holes, and on the high seat beside the driver sat an enormous guard, with a rifle across his knees. This van, this moving arsenal containing within its mysterious interior the strike breakers, and I was told other guards ready to thrust rifles through those loop holes, moved slowly out of those high gates, lurched across the gutter into the street, and rumbled away, and as it went it was followed by a shout of such ridicule that even the guard on the front seat lost his menacing gravity and smiled himself, perhaps with some dawning recognition of the absurdity of the whole affair.
There was no riot, though when the employer came to see me the next day I could assure him of my surprise that there had been none, since there was an invitation to disorder almost irresistible in that solemn and absurd vehicle, with its rifles and loop holes and guards and cowering mystery within. And I could urge upon him too a belated recognition of the immutable and unwritten law by which such an invitation to trouble is sure to be accepted. I almost felt, I told him, like heaving a stone after it myself to see what would happen. He finally agreed with me, dismissed his guards, and dismantled his rolling arsenal, and not long afterward was using its gear to haul the commodities they were soon manufacturing in those shops again.
And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works, until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together. It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect in the present status of productive industry in this world.
The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them, and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was not picketed by the strikers, they did not even visit it, so far as I know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said, as though he must exculpate himself: “Oh well, you know—Mayor Jones. We haven’t forgotten him and what he was.”