Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

I shall never forget Johnson Thurston as he sat in my office during that last campaign, recalling these men who had been to him as comrades in arms, and, what affected him more sorely, the fact that in our overabundant political success the ideals that had beckoned them on had become blurred in the vision of those who came after them. I detected him in the act of drawing his handkerchief furtively from his pocket, and hastily pressing it to his eyes, as he stammered something in apology for his emotion....

Thus there came the irresistible conviction that the work of the politician was not for me. There was other work I wished to do. I doubt whether the politician’s work is ever permanent, though it is too much to say that it lacks real value; I have never been able to think it out. The work of few men, of course, is permanent, sometimes the work of the artist least of any. But, however ephemeral, if the artist’s work is done in sincerity, it is of far greater worth than the work of the politician, if for no other reason, than because, to recall again those words of George Moore which can never lose their charm or their consolation, the traffic of the politician is with the affairs of this world, while the artist is concerned with the dreams, the visions, and the aspirations of a world that is beyond this. I have quoted them before in these pages, I know; they cannot be quoted too often, or too often read by us Americans, if, by pondering them, we may plumb their profound depths. For we all read human history too superficially. Kings and emperors, princes and dukes, prime ministers and generals may fascinate the imagination for a while, but if life is ever to unfold its possibilities to the later consciousness, these become but the phantoms of vanished realms, and there emerge more gracious figures, Phidias and Theocritus; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Correggio; Donatello and Michelangelo; Sidney, Spenser, Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These and the other artists and humanists of their times are veritable personalities in our world, far more than Elizabeth, or the dukes of the Medici, or even Pericles. For from periods such as these their names made illustrious, from the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, the Reformation, man emerged as Man, clothed with the beauty and power of an emancipated spirit. In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy free cities of Flanders and Germany—and it discovered America, not the America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind.

And, surely, this America is not always to bear the reproach of having no music, and so little painting and literature of her own. Surely the aspirations of this new land, with the irresistible impulse of the democratic spirit and humanistic culture are to find emotional expression in the terms and forms of enduring beauty. It was this sublime adventure that interested me far more than the trivial and repulsive wrangles of the politicians....

Our opponents had never known how wholly right they were in their reiterated charge that I was but a dreamer; incorrigible dreamer indeed, and nothing more!

But in these years I had given my city the best there was in me, little as that was, and when the legislature made provision for the constitutional convention, which met at Columbus, and, after months of deliberation, submitted a long list of amendments to the fundamental law of the state, among them that one which granted home rule to cities, I felt, for it was an emotion deeper than thought, that if the people could only be induced to approve that amendment the long anticipated and happy release was at hand. We had been engaged on an impossible task; we had been trying to regenerate the city by means of electing to office persons who in themselves would reflect the communal aspiration, but this could not be continued indefinitely; the cities could achieve no genuine reform until they were autonomous. With home rule democracy would have the means of development, and the people the opportunity of self-expression; they would have to depend on themselves; they could no longer, with an Oriental fatalism, neglect their own destiny and then lay the blame for the inevitable catastrophe on the mayor, or the political boss, or the country members of the legislature.

There were, if I remember well, about fifty of these amendments, among them provisions for the initiative and referendum, woman suffrage, and many other progressive and radical doctrines, in addition to our beloved home rule for cities, and, when the campaign opened in behalf of their adoption, Newton Baker, who a year before had been elected mayor of Cleveland, proposed that he and I make a tour of the state in a motor car and speak for the home rule amendment, since all the others had their devoted proponents.

Nothing more delightful than a campaign tour in company with Newton Baker could be imagined, and I had visions of our little caravan, out on the country roads of Ohio, going from town to town, and of our standing up in the car and speaking to the crowds of farmers who had come into the town to hear us, or having come for their Saturday marketing, would pause while we told them of the needs of cities. I had always believed that if the farmers could only be brought to understand the cities they would not be so obdurate with us, but would enlarge our opportunities of self-expression and self-government. I could fancy myself standing up and leaning over the side of the car and talking to them, while they stood there in their drab garments, their faces drawn in mental concentration, looking at us out of eyes around which were little wrinkles of suspicion, wondering what designs we had upon them; at first they would stand afar off, perhaps on the other side of the street, as they used to do when we went out to speak to them in the judicial campaigns; but then presently they would draw a little closer, until at last they crowded about the car, staying on to the end, and then perhaps even vouchsafing us the conservative approval of scattered applause. Or I would dramatize Baker as speaking, while I sat there utterly charmed with his manner, his clear and polished expression, and envied him his ability to speak with such surprising fluency, such ease and grace, as if the fact of putting words together so that they would form clear, logical and related sentences were nothing at all, and wondering why it was that everyone that heard was not instantly converted to his plan, whatever it was.... And then, between times, Baker would not be talking politics at all; he would not be indulging in politician’s low gossip, slandering every one he knew—the ineradicable and, I suppose, inevitable habit of politicians, because in public they are obliged to be so suave in utterance and so smiling and ingratiating in manner. Baker was not like them at all; he knew a vast deal of literature and could talk about books with comprehension; if you mentioned a passage from John Eglinton, or a scene from Tourgenieff, or a poem of Yeats or Masefield, he would know what you were talking about; he is not one of those who, by the little deceit of a thin, factitious smile of appreciation, pretend an acquaintance they have never enjoyed. Baker has been able to keep the habit of reading, even in politics, a singular achievement. Only he would not read novels that were in the somber or tragic manner; I used to tell him that this was a sign he was growing old, since only the buoyancy of youth can risk its spirit in such darkened paths. For instance, he would never read my novel about prisons, “The Turn of the Balance”; he said he knew it was too terrible. But I did not reproach or blame him. I no longer like to read terrible books myself, since life is....

But that pretty scheme fell through, our tour was abandoned, and we went separate ways, though we did have the joy of speaking together on several occasions, once here in Toledo, where we opened the campaign in old Memorial Hall, and again in a town down the state, and at last in two great meetings in Cleveland, where they got out the old tent Johnson had used in his campaigns, and the audiences its canvas walls sheltered, there under the flaring torches, were inspired by his spirit as once they had been by his presence, and with the enthusiasm of them fresh in my heart I set out from Cleveland that last week of the campaign for the long drive to Columbus, where the campaign was to close.

It was a hot day in early September; the clouds were piled high in the west as we started, and the air was suffocating in its dense humidity; plainly it was to be a day of thunder and lightning and tropical showers. My friend, Henry W. Ashley, who understands democracy to the fundamentals (his father was the friend of Lincoln and wrote the Fifteenth Amendment), was with us, for he was ever an interested spectator of our politics. We went by the way of Oberlin because Ashley wished to see the college campus and indulge some sentimental reflections in a scene that had been so vitally associated with the old struggle of the abolitionists. The storm which had been so ominously threatening all the morning broke upon us as we slowly made our way through the country south of Oberlin, as desolate a tract as one could find, and we were charged as heavily with depression as were the clouds with rain as we thought of the futility of attempting to convince the inhabitants of such a land that they had any responsibility for the problems that were vexing the people in the cities of the state. I remember a village through which we passed; it was about noon, according to our watches, though, since in the country the people reject Standard time and regulate their leisurely affairs by “God’s time,” noon was half an hour gone, and, after their dinners, they were seeking the relaxation they did not seem to need. The rain had ceased, and on the village green under the clearing sky the old men had come out to pitch horseshoes. Among them was a patriarch whose long white beard, stained with the juice of the tobacco he resolutely chewed, swept the belt of his slack trousers; he was in bare feet. The human foot after it has trod this earth for three score years and ten is not a thing of beauty, and Ashley joked me, as we labored in the mud of those deplorable roads, for my temerity in hoping that we could convert that antediluvian to our way of thinking.

Had the task been wholly mine I should not have undertaken it, and, of course, in that instance I did not attempt it; the old barefoot quoit player stood to us a symbol of the implicit and stubborn conservatism of the rural districts. But there were others in the field, an army of them, indeed; Herbert Bigelow, the radical preacher of Cincinnati, who had been president of the constitutional convention; Henry T. Hunt, Cincinnati’s young mayor; and, most influential of all of them perhaps, James M. Cox, destined that autumn to be elected governor of Ohio. And, besides all these, there was the spirit of the times, penetrating at last with its inspiring ideas even the conservatism of the country people. I was confident that the old man could be counted upon to vote for the initiative and referendum at any rate, since one so free and democratic in costume and manner must be of the democratic spirit as well, though I had my doubts of him in that moment when he should put on his spectacles and examine the amendments abolishing capital punishment, and granting home rule to cities.