“I realized that I should have to stand behind a sort of ‘movement’ for women in the police departments of other cities, just because I was the first in the field.”
Effective presentation of the life and the character of a man who has “done things” is illustrated by the following “personality sketch” by Mr. Brand Whitlock, published in the American Magazine, but equally well adapted for newspaper publication:
Those citizens of Ohio who a dozen years ago used to throng the big circus-tent in which Tom L. Johnson was then[Pg 246] making his first campaigns in the country districts will recall the figure of the slender youth with the Grecian profile and the fair hair who used to stand there under the flaring light and speak of fundamental democracy. They, or those of them who were accessible to such impressions, caught something of the spirit of youthful idealism that was in the young man; if they did not, his presence and personality gave them reassurance, for attendance on one of Tom Johnson’s meetings in those days was, in Ohio, an enterprise to impart the thrill of a spicy and dangerous adventure. Time flies, and time has flown fast in this last decade, and the political ideas that Herbert S. Bigelow was helping Tom Johnson to disseminate, though they were flouted and scorned then as heretical, insane, and wicked, have since become, by the inevitable and monotonous operation of the universal law of progress, conventional, respectable, orthodox, and popular.
Herbert Bigelow was then not many years out of Lane Theological Seminary—strange spectacle in Ohio, that of a minister addressing Democratic meetings!—and he was pastor of the Vine Street Congregational Church, in Cincinnati. Vine Street Congregational Church was in itself an instance of the operation of the old law. Before the Civil War it was a hotbed of abolition when abolition was unpopular and unorthodox even in Ohio, though everybody in Ohio is an abolitionist to-day, and, if he is old enough, claims to have been so then. But after the war the Vine Street Church became respectable, with a cold and formal atmosphere of black walnut and musty cushions of a magenta shade, and when Herbert Bigelow began to preach a somewhat too literal application of the social ethics of Jesus, not to Hankow or Kordofan, but to Cincinnati, there was a disconcerting rustle in the pews, the tendency of that doctrine being to decrease the revenues of the church in an inverse ratio to the increase in the number of human beings in the congregation.
It is an interesting story, not to be told here in detail, of how Herbert Bigelow struggled, of how they tried to get him out of his pulpit, and of how he worked for a long time without salary, until Daniel Kiefer devised means of financing the institution, so that it lost its ecclesiastical atmosphere, became a People’s Church or forum for free speech, and moved into a theater where radicals preach their various and conflicting heresies on Sunday afternoons, after moving pictures have illustrated the progress of the species.
[Pg 247]
Meanwhile Herbert Bigelow was increasingly prominent in political reform movement; he lectured everywhere, wrote articles for radical publications, organized the Ohio Direct Legislation League, and poured all his energy into the propaganda of the initiative and referendum. The privileged interests opposed him, of course, and still oppose him. One way they did it was to call him Reverend; whenever it was necessary to frighten “good” people, by holding up his image, they printed the Reverend with the subtle and sinister implication of quotation-marks; whenever it was necessary to influence “bad” people, printing the Reverend without the quotation-marks.
But Herbert Bigelow was an idealist growing day by day more practical. He had had hard knocks in boyhood; he knew what it was to be poor; he had a love of his fellow man; he was saddened and appalled by the shadow of poverty everywhere, the shadow which so many are too blind to see, or too selfish and cowardly to admit. But this spirit of sympathy and of pity in him had been somehow ordered, organized, and made coherent by the philosophy of Henry George, and when that vision came to him, as does nearly every other who has a vision, he went to work for social justice.
His great opportunity came when, last year, a convention was called to draft a new constitution for Ohio, and he set out to impress the people with the fact that it was their opportunity. He organized the Ohio Progressive Constitution League, with subsidiary leagues in every county; he worked all summer; and through that league, aided and inspired by what the lecturers call the Spirit of the Times, a majority of delegates elected to the convention were pledged to the principles of direct legislation.
And for the first half of the year Mr. Bigelow was at Columbus, presiding over the constitutional convention as its president. At forty his figure is no longer slender; it has taken on the rotundity of the middle years; but as he sat there in gray tweeds, with the yellow hair hanging over his forehead, smiling, it must have been gratifying to him now and then to reflect that his old heresies had become so orthodox in his own time. The convention adopted articles providing for home rule for cities, for a license system to control the liquor traffic, for equal suffrage, for verdicts in civil cases by a three-fourths vote of the jury, for the welfare of labor, and, under Mr. Bigelow’s leadership, a clause adopting the initiative[Pg 248] and referendum in the State. When the vote was taken, and Herbert Bigelow had the satisfaction of announcing the triumph of the principle he had so long advocated, it was a moment that all his friends were glad to have him experience. The irony in which the fates usually award their laurels was not wanting in that instance, for in the clause there is a proviso that the initiative and referendum shall not be used by the people to adopt the single tax, supposed, in Ohio, to be a method of despoiling farmers by taxing land according to its superficial area. But Herbert Bigelow, whom fate taught long ago, like Josh Whitcomb, to accommodate himself to circumstances and to take what he can get, smiles and is happy; and his friends are happy with him.