Take the railroads. With already the cheapest railroad transportation in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air. Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster that must be chained up with restrictive laws. Sometimes they practised both these arts at once. Result: the nation’s transportation arteries were strangling. No extension of the arterial system for an increasing population was possible under these conditions. What would the sequel be? Rome for all her sins might have endured if only she had developed means of communication, namely, roads, in an adequate manner. It was obvious and nobody saw it. Well, now he was trying to save people from a repetition of that blunder. He was trying to make them see in time that unless they allowed the railroads to prosper the great American experiment was doomed.
I could not help thinking: people prophesy against Wall Street and Wall Street prophesies against the people.
I was surprised that he gave me so much time until it occurred to me that he was thinking out loud, still working on his speech.
He wished me to take my reports, which were merely field notes, and pull them into form as an article on Coxeyism. He would procure publication of it, in one of the monthly reviews perhaps, under his name if I didn’t mind, and he could adopt it whole, or under my own. It didn’t matter which.
“An unhappy incident has just occurred in my office,” he said. “My private secretary had to be sent away suddenly. You might work in his room out there if it’s comfortable.”
I sat down to the task at once, in the ante-room, at the vacant desk. Half an hour later, passing out, he dropped me word of where he was going and when he might be expected back, in case anyone should ask. In a little while the boy did ask. Either he had not been at his place when the president passed out, or else the president forgot to tell him, his habit being to leave word at the desk where I sat. Also the telephone rang several times and as there was no one else to do it I answered.
This ambiguous arrangement continued, the president coming and going, leaving me always informed of his movements and asking me to be so good as to say this or that to persons who should call up on the telephone. It took two days to finish the article. He conceived a liking for my style of writing and asked me to edit and touch up a manuscript that had been giving him some trouble. Then it was to go over the proofs of a monograph he had in the printer’s hands.
On the fifth day, about 4 o’clock, I was at work on these proofs and the president was in his office alone with the door closed when someone came in from the waiting room unannounced. I did not look up. Whoever it was stood looking at my back, then moved a little to one side to get an angular view, and a voice I recognized but could not instantly identify addressed me.
“Hello, Coxey!”
“Hello,” I said, looking round. It was the irritating man of the ferryboat incident. He sat down and ogled me offensively.