Enclosed please find what I have termed a "Retrospect," being a review of the political conditions leading to and making possible the present expose.
Such clippings as I have will be forwarded with matter. I enclose letter from Mr. Blakeley.
Very respectfully,
J. JEROME NORDMAN.
After that we waited, rather impatiently, it must be confessed, for Whitlock's manuscript. After the passage of other admonitory letters and telegrams, we received the following letter. We print it "instead of an article." In our opinion, it is an extraordinarily valuable summary of the whole subject of municipal misrule. It goes far and beyond Pittsburg, and deep into economic, social, and national conditions of which that city is but an instance and an illustration. And, moreover, it sets forth just how such an article, could we find the right man to do it, should be written. Here it is:
Executive Offices
THE CITY OF TOLEDO 3 June, 1910.
JOHN O'HARA COSGRAVE, Esquire,Editor
EVERYBODY'S MAGAZINE.
DEAR MR. COSGRAVE:
The Pittsburg story is big, too big and too important and too significant to do at second hand. I have had a valuable correspondence with Mr. Nordman, and he has most kindly put his information, and in clear form, at my disposal. He has sent me his scrapbook of newspaper clippings, and he has written me at length and in detail of the various exposures and prosecutions. I have made inquiries, too, from friends, and I have been thinking over the story that you propose. But it won't go, and I have concluded that it ought not to go in that form; and that is the only form in which it is possible for me now to tell it.
I find just what I expected to find, or I find the familiar symptoms of what I expected to find. The intelligent answers to the several questions I put to Mr. Nordman after our first few letters are exactly what I expected them to be. One city is all cities; and all exhibit the same effects, proceeding from the same causes. Look about you, anywhere, and if you see graft, and bribery, and corruption, you'll find a bi-partisan machine controlling nominations and elections to municipal offices, and representing the few who consider themselves privileged to exploit the people by means of franchises in public utilities, etc. It's as easy as it is for a physician to tell what ails a sallow and emaciated Southern "cracker" who shivers with chills one day, and burns up with fever the next.
And so, in Pittsburg, I found the usual Republican machine with its big boss, the usual Democratic machine and its little boss, and the two, as usual, working together, the Democratic boss and his tools rewarded by a few small offices on "bi-partisan" boards, and the like; then the street railway system and other public utility corporations which these bosses represent, and for which they procure franchises. And after this, the "better element," the "eminently respectable" citizens, supporting this combination, enjoying the fruits of its labor, and influencing the business interests of the city in the way that gives such perfect exemplification of the evils of class government in our cities—the same, old, sordid story.
The revelations, as they are called—though by this time they should have ceased to be revelations, and have become "recognitions" in this country—made by the newspaper clippings before me are the expected indications of the deeper, underlying causes. The superficial observer sees in them merely a corrupt council; and, from the fact that councilmen have taken bribes, he makes the daring deduction that some one gave them the bribes; he sees that councilmen have been grafting, and then is naively astonished by the revelation that some business men higher up, although not very much higher up, have been caught and publicly disgraced. He sees, too, a brave and fearless prosecutor who is sending these men to prison; and there are the usual predictions that out of all this there is to come to Pittsburg "good" government—that is, government by honest men, to be aided, perhaps, by the adoption of the commission plan. That is to say, we have here the subject only in its personal aspect, and not in its institutional, sociological, economic aspect.