Every community, city, town, village, State—the United States itself—has a certain number of men who are willing, if it doesn’t cost anything, to vote right. They don’t want to “hurt their business”; they “can’t afford the time to go to the primaries”; they don’t care to think much. But they will vote. This may not be much, but it is enough. All that this independent, non-partisan vote wants is leadership, and that is what the Chicago reformers furnished.
They had no such definite idea when they began. They had no theory at all—nothing but wrath, experience, common Chicago sense, and newspapers ready to back reform, not for the news, but for the common good. Theories they had tried; and exposures, celebrated trials, even some convictions of boodlers. They had gone in for a civil-service reform law, and, by the way, they got a good one, probably the best in any city in the country. But exposés are good only for one election; court trials may punish individuals, but even convictions do not break up a corrupt system; and a “reform law” without reform citizenship is like a ship without a crew. With all their “reforms,” bad government persisted. There was that bear garden—the City Council; something ought to be done to that. Men like William Kent, John H. Hamline, W. R. Manierre, A. W. Maltby, and James R. Mann had gone in there from their “respectable” wards, and their presence proved that they could get there; their speeches were public protests, and their votes, “no,” “no,” “no,” were plain indicators of wrong. But all this was not enough. The Civic Federation, a respectable but inefficient universal reforming association, met without plans in 1895. It called together two hundred representative men, with Lyman J. Gage at their head, to “do something.” The two hundred appointed a committee of fifteen to “find something to do.” One of the fifteen drew forth a fully drawn plan for a new municipal party, the old, old scheme. “That won’t do,” said Edwin Burritt Smith to Mr. Gage, who sat beside him. “No, that won’t do,” said Gage. But they didn’t know what to do. To gain time Mr. Smith moved a sub-committee. The sub-committee reported back to the fifteen, the fifteen to the two hundred. And so, as Mr. Smith said, they “fumbled.”
But notice what they didn’t do. Fumblers as they were, they didn’t talk of more exposures. “Heavens, we know enough,” said one. They didn’t go to the Legislature for a new charter. They needed one, they need one to-day, and badly, too, but the men who didn’t know what, but did know what not to do, wouldn’t let them commit the folly of asking one corrupt legislature to legislate another corrupt legislature out of existence. And they didn’t wait till the next mayoralty election to elect a “business mayor” who should give them good government.
They were bound to accept the situation just as it was—the laws, the conditions, the political circumstances, all exactly as they were—and, just as a politician would, go into the next fight whatever it was and fight. All they needed was a fighter. So it was moved to find a man, one man, and let this man find eight other men, who should organize the “Municipal Voters’ League.” There were no instructions; the very name was chosen because it meant nothing and might mean anything.
But the man! That was the problem. There were men, a few, but the one man is always hard to find. There was William Kent, rich, young, afraid of nothing and always ready, but he was an alderman, and the wise ones declared that the Nine must not only be disinterested, but must appear so. William Kent wouldn’t do. Others were suggested; none that would do.
“How about George E. Cole?”
“Just the man,” said Mr. Gage, and all knew the thought was an inspiration.
George E. Cole described himself to me as a “second-class business man.” Standing about five feet high, he knows he is no taller; but he knows that that is tall enough. Cole is a fighter. Nobody discovered it, perhaps, till he was past his fiftieth year. Then one Martin B. Madden found it out. Madden, a prominent citizen, president of the Western Stone Company, and a man of tremendous political power, was one of the business men who went into the Council to bring order out of the chaos of corruption. He was a Yerkes leader. Madden lived in Cole’s ward. His house was in sight of Cole’s house. “The sight of it made me hot,” said Cole, “for I knew what it represented.” Cole had set out to defeat Madden, and he made a campaign which attracted the attention of the whole town. Madden was re-elected, but Cole had proved himself, and that was what made Lyman J. Gage say that Cole was “just the man.”
“You come to me as a Hobson’s choice,” said Mr. Cole to the committee, “as a sort of forlorn hope. All right,” he added, “as a last chance, I’ll take it.”
Cole went out to make up the Nine. He chose William H. Colvin, a wealthy business man, retired; Edwin Burritt Smith, publicist and lawyer; M. J. Carroll, ex-labor leader, ex-typesetter, an editorial writer on a trade journal; Frank Wells, a well-known real estate man; R. R. Donnelly, the head of one of the greatest printing establishments in the city; and Hoyt King, a young lawyer who turned out to be a natural investigator. These made, with Cole himself, only seven, but he had the help and counsel of Kent, Allen B. Pond, the architect, Judge Murray F. Tuley, Francis Lackner, and Graham Taylor. “We were just a few commonplace, ordinary men,” said one of them to me, “and there is your encouragement for other commonplace, ordinary men.” These men were selected for what they could do, however, not for what they “represented.” The One Hundred, which the Nine were to complete, was to do the representing. But the One Hundred never was completed, and the ward committee, a feature of the first campaign, was abandoned later on. “The boss and the ring” was the model of the Nine, only they did not know it. They were not thinking of principles and methods. Work was their instinct and the fighting has always been thick. The next election was to be held in April, and by the time they were ready February was half over. Since it was to be an election of aldermen, they went right out after the aldermen. There were sixty-eight in all—fifty-seven of them “thieves,” as the League reported promptly and plainly. Of the sixty-eight, the terms of thirty-four were expiring, and these all were likely to come up for re-election.