Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

But we did not do it at first, and we did not do it at last. At first it was impossible to get it into the councilmanic head that it was at all necessary, especially since it cost money to retain the “experts,” as they are called, to do the work. They were prone to that old vice of the human mind which leads it to imagine that when it has stated the end to be achieved it has at the same time stated the means of achieving it,—like the advice to the bashful man “to assume an easy and graceful attitude, especially in the presence of ladies”—and when council was finally convinced and had provided the funds for the experts, we could not agree as to who should be employed. That is, the human equation was apparent. There was unhappily nobody but men to make evaluations, and all the engineers who were competent were employed by street railway companies, and expected or hoped to continue to be employed by street railway companies, and they had evolved so many fantastic notions of “intangible” value that they could account for almost any excess in artificial capitalization, and make the grossest exhibition of corporate greed in watering stocks appear like veritable self denial in frugality and economy. We selected Professor Bemis to represent the city, because he was one of the few of the “experts” committed to the people’s cause; he had advised Tom Johnson throughout his long war. But the company never could be brought to select anybody, or to agree upon the third arbiter—even to accept the Judge of the United States Circuit Court when, against the advice of the whole administrative circle, I proposed him.

Again and again in our prolonged negotiations we returned, as in a vicious circle, to this point; again and again we reached this impasse.

LXI

Meanwhile, the franchises were expiring, and the time drew on when the company would have no rights left in the streets. And here was the opportunity for the mind that had the power, or the defect, of isolating propositions, of regarding them as absolute, of ignoring the intricate relativity of life. “Put the company off the streets,” was the cry; “make it stop running its cars; bring it to its knees.” However, we could not bring the company to its knees without bringing the riders to their feet; we could not put the company off the streets, without at the same time and by the same process, putting the people on the streets; when the cars stopped running the people began walking. The public convenience was paramount.

Then Mr. Cornell Schreiber, the City Solicitor, hit upon a plan. He drew an ordinance providing that the company could use the streets wherein its rights had expired, only on the condition that it carry passengers at a three-cent fare, and the ordinance was at once passed by the council. It was of doubtful legality, but it had its effect in a world of human beings. Before it was effective even, people were tendering three cents as fare; and in the face of the difficulty of dealing with a whole populace in this mood, the company agreed to put in force a temporary rate of three cents during the rush hours of the morning and evening, and it lowered fares in the other hours and made further concessions. And there we let the matter rest.

And, since the education of the general mind never stops, the people were learning. Their patience was time and again exhausted by the unavoidable length of the franchise dispute, for the problem was to them, as to most Americans, new, the legal questions in which the whole subject was prolific had not been settled, there was the interruption of business and convenience and pleasure attending long continued negotiations, and perhaps more than all that irritation of the public temper which proceeds from all communal disputes. The company’s representatives counted on all this to tire the people out; and since the controversy assumed a political complexion, and there was as always the difficulty of sustaining the mass will, they had hopes that by delay the people in weariness would surrender. The time came when the sentiment in favor of municipal ownership was so strong that the Independents adopted the view I had expressed and declared it to be their purpose to grant no renewals of franchises at all, but to let the company operate on sufferance until the city itself could take over the lines.

During the course of the long struggle a change had come over the spirit of the people, and this change had been reflected in the laws. The greatest difficulty had been found in the city’s want of autonomy; the cities of Ohio not only lacked the power to own and operate public utilities, but they even had few rights in contracting with the private companies. The street-car companies had always been more ably and assiduously represented in the state legislature than had the people themselves; the people had not had the strength to wrest these powers from the legislature, and indeed, in their patience and toryism, they had not made many efforts to do so. Thus our campaign led us out into the state, and the end, toward which we had to struggle, was the free city; the last of our demands was home rule. In the relations between public utility corporations and the municipality, our cities were a whole generation behind the cities of Great Britain, Germany, France and Belgium. Indeed, in relation to all social functions we were not much further advanced than was Rome in the second century.

As to the medieval cities of Italy, the free cities of Germany and the cities of Great Britain, struggling all of them against some overlord, some king, noble or bishop, so at last there came to our cities a realization of the vassalage they were under. Their destinies were in the hands of the country politicians in the state legislature who had no sympathy with city problems, because they had no understanding of them. Oftenest indeed they had a contempt for them, they all held to the Puritan ideal. But a demand for freedom went up from Cleveland, from Cincinnati, from Columbus, from Toledo. The legislature began to make its reluctant concessions; it gave cities, for instance, the right to have street railway franchises referred to the people for approval or rejection. And at last in the great awakening, the state constitution was ultimately amended and cities were given home rule. It was the irony of life that Golden Rule Jones and Tom Johnson could not have lived to see that day!

LXII

A few weeks after my election to a fourth term I wrote out and gave to the reporters a statement in which I said that I would not be again a candidate for the office of mayor. I had been thinking of my old ambition in letters, and of those novels I had planned to write. Already I had been six years in office and I had not written a novel in all that time. And here I was, just entering upon another term. If ever I were to write those novels I would better be about it, before I grew too old and too tired. The politicians, regarding all such statements as but the professional insincerities of their trade, could not consider my decision seriously of course, or credit its intention. They were somewhat like my friends in the literary world, or like some of them at least, who were unable to understand why I should not continue indefinitely to run for mayor, though the politicians were not so innocent and credulous, since they did not believe that I could as inevitably continue to be elected. I suppose it was the life of action that appealed to my literary friends or to their literary imaginations; they had the human habit of disparaging their own calling, and, if they did not hold my performance in that field as lightly as the politicians held it, they wondered why I did not prefer politics. The politicians in their harangues spoke of my writings bitterly, as though they were a personal affront to their intelligences, and urged the electorate to rebuke me for spending my time upon such nonsense. If I had not known that they had never read my books, or any books, all this might have been chilling to the literary aspiration, but I knew them to their heart’s core, where there was nothing but contempt for books, and, as I sometimes thought, yielding too much to cynicism and despair, nothing but contempt for any sort of beauty or goodly impulse. Of course, they were not so bad as that; out of politics they were as good as anyone or as anything; we instinctively recognize the vitiating quality of the political atmosphere in our constant use of the phrase “if it could only be taken out of politics,” as with the tariff, the currency, municipal government, etc. But my friends in the political line could join my friends in the literary line in the surprise they felt at my decision to retire at the end of that last term. The politicians did not think I meant what I said, of course; it is quite impossible for a politician to imagine a man’s meaning what he says, since politicians so seldom mean what they say themselves; they considered it merely as bad politics to have said such a thing at all. “It’ll embarrass you when you run again,” they would warn me in their bland naïveté. It did not embarrass me, however, because I would not and did not run again, though I had to decline a nomination or two before they were convinced, but their own lack of faith, those who were still Independents, at least, proved an ultimate embarrassment to them, for they neglected to agree upon a candidate to succeed me, and by the next election they had grouped themselves in factions, each with its own candidate. Perhaps this untoward result came to pass as much because the independent movement by that time had become the Independent party, as for any other reason discernible to the mind of man; at least, it was disparaged by the use of that term, which implied its own reproach in Toledo, and its sponsors conducted themselves so much after the historic precedents of faction in political parties, by separating into the inevitable right and left wing, that they managed to get themselves soundly beaten.