The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

Barton is a lawyer and something of a cynic. I have never known a man whose command of irony equalled his. He usually employed it, however, with perfect good nature, and it was impossible to ruffle him. In the court-room I have seen him the target for attacks by a formidable array of opposing counsel, and have heard him answer an hour’s argument in an incisive reply compressed into ten minutes. His suggestions touching municipal reforms were dismissed as impractical, which was absurd, for Barton is essentially a practical man, as his professional successes clearly proved before he was thirty. He maintained that one capable man, working alone, could revolutionize a city’s government if he set about it in the right spirit; and he manifested the greatest scorn for “movements,” committees of one hundred, and that sort of thing. He had no great confidence in the mass of mankind or in the soundness of the majority. His ideas were, we thought, often fantastic, but it could never be said that he lacked the courage of his convictions. He once assembled round a mahogany table the presidents of the six principal banks and trust companies in our town and laid before them a plan by which, through the smothering of the city’s credit, a particularly vicious administration might be brought to terms. The city finances were in a bad way, and, as the result of a policy of wastefulness and short-sightedness, the administration was constantly seeking temporary loans, which the local banks were expected to carry. Barton dissected the municipal budget before the financiers, and proposed that, as another temporary accommodation was about to be asked, they put the screws on the mayor and demand that he immediately force the resignations of all his important appointees and replace them with men to be designated by three citizens to be named by the bankers. Barton had carefully formulated the whole matter, and he presented it with his usual clarity and effectiveness; but rivalry between the banks for the city’s business, and fear of incurring the displeasure of some of their individual depositors who were closely allied with the bosses of the bipartisan machine, caused the scheme to be rejected. Our lunch-table strategy board was highly amused by Barton’s failure, which was just what we had predicted.

Barton accepted his defeat with equanimity and spoke kindly of the bankers as good men but deficient in courage. But in the primaries the following spring he got himself nominated for city councilman. No one knew just how he had accomplished this. Of course, as things go in our American cities, no one qualified for membership in a university club is eligible for any municipal office, and no man of our acquaintance had ever before offered himself for a position so utterly without honor or dignity. Even more amazing than Barton’s nomination was Barton’s election. Our councilmen are elected at large, and we had assumed that any strength he might develop in the more prosperous residential districts would be overbalanced by losses in industrial neighborhoods.

The results proved to be quite otherwise. Barton ran his own campaign. He made no speeches, but spent the better part of two months personally appealing to mechanics and laborers, usually in their homes or on their door-steps. He was at pains to keep out of the newspapers, and his own party organization (he is a Republican) gave him only the most grudging support.

We joked him a good deal about his election to an office that promised nothing to a man of his type but annoyance and humiliation. His associates in the council were machine men, who had no knowledge whatever of enlightened methods of conducting cities. The very terminology in which municipal government is discussed by the informed was as strange to them as Sanskrit. His Republican colleagues cheerfully ignored him, and shut him out of their caucuses; the Democrats resented his appearance in the council chamber as an unwarranted intrusion—“almost an indelicacy,” to use Barton’s own phrase.

The biggest joke of all was Barton’s appointment to the chairmanship of the Committee on Municipal Art. That this was the only recognition his associates accorded to the keenest lawyer in the State—a man possessing a broad knowledge of municipal methods, gathered in every part of the world—was ludicrous, it must be confessed; but Barton was not in the least disturbed, and continued to suffer our chaff with his usual good humor.

Barton is a secretive person, but we learned later that he had meekly asked the president of the council to give him this appointment. And it was conferred upon him chiefly because no one else wanted it, there being, obviously, “nothing in” municipal art discernible to the bleared eye of the average councilman.

About that time old Sam Follonsby died, bequeathing half a million dollars—twice as much as anybody knew he had—to be spent on fountains and statues in the city parks and along the boulevards.

The many attempts of the administration to divert the money to other uses; the efforts of the mayor to throw the estate into the hands of a trust company in which he had friends—these matters need not be recited here.

Suffice it to say that Barton was equal to all the demands made upon his legal genius. When the estate was settled at the end of a year, Barton had won every point. Follonsby’s money was definitely set aside by the court as a special fund for the objects specified by the testator, and Barton, as the chairman of the Committee on Municipal Art, had so tied it up in a legal mesh of his own ingenious contriving that it was, to all intents and purposes, subject only to his personal check.

It was now that Barton, long irritated by the indifference of our people to the imperative need of municipal reform, devised a plan for arousing the apathetic electorate. A philosopher, as well as a connoisseur in the fine arts, he had concluded that our whole idea of erecting statues to the good and noble serves no purpose in stirring patriotic impulses in the bosoms of beholders. There were plenty of statues and not a few tablets in our town commemorating great-souled men, but they suffered sadly from public neglect. And it must be confessed that the average statue, no matter how splendid the achievements of its subject, is little regarded and serves only passively as a reminder of public duty. With what has seemed to me a sublime cynicism, Barton proceeded to spend Follonsby’s money in a manner at once novel and arresting. He commissioned one of the most distinguished sculptors in the country to design a statue; and at the end of his second year in the council (he had been elected for four years), it was set up on the new boulevard that parallels the river.