BRAND WHITLOCK
Brand Whitlock, lawyer, politician, author and ambassador, was born in Urbana, Ohio, March 4, 1869. His father, Rev. Elias D. Whitlock, was a minister of power and a man of strong convictions. Brand was educated partly in the public schools, partly by private teaching. He never went to college, but this did not mean that his education stopped; he kept on studying, and to such good purpose that in 1916 Brown University gave him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Like many other writers, he received his early training in newspaper work. At eighteen he became a reporter on a Toledo paper, and three years later was reporter and political correspondent for the Chicago Herald. While in Chicago he was a member of the old Whitechapel Club, a group of newspaper men which included F. P. Dunne, the creator of Mr. Dooley; Alfred Henry Lewis, author of Wolfville; and George Ade, whose Fables in Slang were widely popular a few years ago.
He was strongly drawn to the law, and in 1893 went to Springfield, Illinois, and entered a law office as a student. He was admitted to the bar, and shortly after went to Toledo, Ohio, to practice. In eight years he had established himself as a successful lawyer, and something more. He was recognized as a man of high executive ability, and as being absolutely "square." Such men are none too common, and Toledo decided that it needed him in the mayor's chair. Without a political machine, without a platform, and without a party, he was elected mayor in 1905, reelected in 1907, again in 1909, again in 1911—and could probably have had the office for life if he had been willing to accept it. In the meantime he had written several successful novels; he wanted more time for writing, and when in 1913 he was offered the post of United States Minister to Belgium, he accepted, thinking that he would find in this position an opportunity to observe life from a new angle, and leisure for literary work. In August 1914 he was on his vacation, and had begun work on a new novel. In his own words:
I had the manuscript of my novel before me.... It was somehow just beginning to take form, beginning to show some signs of life; at times some characters in it gave evidence of being human and alive; they were beginning to act now and then spontaneously, beginning to say and to do things after the manner of human beings; the long vista before me, the months of laborious drudging toil and pain, the long agony of effort necessary to write any book, even a poor one, was beginning to appear less weary, less futile; there was the first faint glow of the joy of creative effort.
and then suddenly the telephone bell rang, and announced that the Archduke of Austria had been assassinated at Sarajevo.
The rest of the story belongs to history. How he went back to Brussels; how when the city seemed doomed, and all the government officials left, he stayed on; how when the city was preparing to resist by force, he went to Burgomaster Max and convinced him that it was useless, and so saved the city from the fate of Louvain; how he took charge of the relief work, how the King of Belgium thanked him for his services to the country; how the city of Brussels in gratitude gave him a picture by Van Dyck, a priceless thing, which he accepted—not for himself but for his home city of Toledo; how after the war, he went back, not as Minister but as Ambassador,—all these are among the proud memories of America's part in the World War.
Brand Whitlock is so much more than an author that it is with an effort that we turn to consider his literary work. His first book, The Thirteenth District, published in 1902, was a novel of American politics; it contains a capital description of a convention, and shows the strategy of political leaders as seen by a keen observer. In Her Infinite Variety he dealt with the suffrage movement as it was in 1904, with determined women seeking the ballot, and equally determined women working just as hard to keep it away from them. The Happy Average was a story of an every-day American couple: they were not rich, nor famous, nor divorced,—yet the author thinks their story is typical of most American lives. The Turn of the Balance is a novel that grew out of his legal experiences: it deals with the underworld of crime, and often in a depressing way. It reflects the author's belief that the present organization of society, and our methods of administering justice, are the cause of much of the misery in the world. Following these novels came two volumes of short stories, The Gold Brick and The Fall Guy: both deal with various aspects of American life of to-day. In 1914 he published an autobiography under the title Forty Years of It. This is interesting as a picture of political life of the period in Ohio. His latest book, Memories of Belgium under the German Occupation, tells the story of four eventful years. In all that trying time, each night, no matter how weary he was, he forced himself to set down the events of the day. From these records he wrote a book that by virtue of its first-hand information and its literary art ranks among the most important of the books called forth by the Great War.