“My boy, you have done the people of Chicago and the people of Illinois a great service—a service you will understand some day—and now, on their behalf, I wish to thank you for it.”
MACOCHEE’S FIRST CAMPAIGN FUND
SQUIRE GODDARD had been renominated as mayor of Macochee for the fifth time, and for three weeks had played his customary checker games with the firemen in the town hall, serene in the conviction that he could not fail of reëlection. Then suddenly he awakened to the fact that he had been the victim of a gum-shoe campaign. Election was but a week off, and something had to be done. So they raised a campaign fund. Now, Macochee, in that day, had never had a campaign fund. The state committee never put any money into Gordon County, even in a presidential year. The Republicans didn’t have to, and the Democrats knew better. The local candidates, of course, had little expenses of their own—for cigars, for carriages when there were township meetings out in the little red school-house, for printing the tickets (in the days before we had the Australian ballot), and for Ganson’s hack to use at the polls on election day, but they were stingy in these things. Macochee and Gordon County always went right, anyhow. Joe Boyle, Captain Bishop, Major Turner, old Bill Williams and John Ernest had been parceling the fat offices in the court-house among themselves ever since the war, and all a county convention ever had to do was to renominate the old ticket, and it went through in November without a scratch. Sometimes, because of curious constitutional prejudices against a county treasurer succeeding himself, they had to run Captain Bishop for county clerk, and let old Bill Williams have the treasury, but it only meant, after all, changing the combination a little, and beyond the trouble of moving some favorite old desk chairs, which had molded themselves to rheumatic backs, from one side of the court-house to the other, the ring remained undisturbed in that ancient, life-giving pile. Of course they had to find a new candidate for prosecuting attorney every six years, but, fortunately, the crop of young lawyers is one that never fails, whatever party is in power down in Washington.
And so, among a virgin electorate, the advent of a campaign fund was an impressive event. The people felt that they had entered upon a new era in their political life, just as they did when the council bought the new fire apparatus and began to agitate the question of bonding the town for water-works—a proposition, by the way, upon which the leading citizens sat down quickly enough, because it meant taxes—while the line of loafers leaning against the court-house fence increased, waiting for the distribution. They had vague notions about a campaign fund in Macochee. The amount was reputed to be five hundred dollars, and, technically, it was in the custody of the court-house ring, but as they had never had a campaign fund to disburse before, and could not decide how to proceed, it was temporarily locked in the county treasurer’s vault, where, not being interest on the public moneys, it was comparatively safe. Meanwhile they were sticking closer than brothers. They would not allow one of their number out of their sight. They went to their meals in relays, and held night sessions in the treasury, losing sleep and rest, so that all their latent diseases, rheumatics, phthisis, lumbago, gravel, and so on, were aggravated. They became cross, jealous and suspicious, full of envy, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, back-biters, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things. They swore as they had not sworn since the battle of Port Republic. They cursed each other, they cursed Horace Goddard, and when these subjects failed, they cursed young Halliday.
Young Halliday was at the bottom of all the deviltry in Macochee. He had not been out of Harvard a month before all the good people in the town were wagging their heads sadly and saying: “Tsck! Tsck! Tsck!” He parted his hair in the middle. He brought home a habit of dropping his r’s, and of pronouncing his a’s with a broad accent, as, for instance, when he said “rawther;” he smoked cigarettes, puffed a heavy brier pipe, wore red neckties and knickerbockers, and he drank beer. And he did something else, something that struck the moral fiber of the town on the raw. He changed his politics and became a Democrat!
Being a Democrat in Macochee is like being a Republican in Alabama. There are hardly enough Democrats in Macochee—outside of the fifth ward, which is Irish—to hold primaries, and they always have mass conventions to hide their political nakedness. Hank Defrees, the only Democratic lawyer in Macochee, insisted that conventions were necessary in order to keep up the party organization. He liked to go over to Columbus every two years as delegate to the state convention. It afforded him an outing and a chance at the whisky in the Neil House. Besides, it is something to go to the state convention with the solid vote of any county, even Gordon, in your vest pocket. The local Democrats humored Hank. He had been their only available timber for Common Pleas judge and prosecuting attorney, and he had been sacrificed on the altar of his party times enough, surely, to entitle him to whatever there was in sight.
But George Halliday had been reared a Republican. His father had been an Abolitionist, the friend of Salmon P. Chase, and his home had been known in its time as one of the stations of the underground railway. He had voted for John C. Fremont, and he had voted a straight Republican ticket ever since. George had responded to these home influences sympathetically, and had given early promise of that vital interest in politics for which Ohio mothers ardently look in their sons. His first experience in politics was in 1876, when he took an active part in the Hayes-Tilden campaign, crying after the little Catholic boys from the parochial school, on his homeward way at evening:
“Fried rats and pickled cats,
Are good enough for Democrats.”
And once he marched with a party of his playmates in a torchlight procession, under a transparency which announced exultantly: