NOTHING was ever funnier than Barton’s election to the city council.
However, it occurs to me that if I’m going to speak of it at all, I may
as well tell the whole story.
At the University Club, where a dozen of us have met for luncheon every
business day for many years, Barton’s ideas on the subject of municipal
reform were always received in the most contumelious fashion. We shared
his rage that things were as they were, but as practical business
men we knew that there was no remedy. A city, Barton held, should be
conducted like any other corporation. Its affairs are so various, and
touch so intimately the comfort and security of all of us, that it
is imperative that they be administered by servants of indubitable
character and special training. He would point out that a citizen’s
rights and privileges are similar to those of a stockholder, and that
taxes are in effect assessments to which we submit only in the belief
that the sums demanded are necessary to the wise handling of the
public business; that we should be as anxious for dividends in the form
of efficient and economical service as we are for cash dividends in
other corporations.
There is nothing foolish or unreasonable in these notions; but most of
us are not as ingenious as Barton, or as resourceful as he in finding
means of realizing them.
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.
His choice of a subject had never been made known, so that curiosity
was greatly excited on the day of the unveiling. Barton had brought
the governor of an adjoining State, who was just then much in the
public eye as a fighter of grafters, to deliver the oration. It was a
speech with a sting to it, but our people had long been hardened to
such lashings. The mayor spoke in praise of the civic spirit which had
impelled Follonsby to make so large a bequest to the public; and then,
before five thousand persons, a little schoolgirl pulled the cord, and
the statue, a splendid creation in bronze, was exposed to the amazed
populace.
I shall not undertake to depict the horror and chagrin of the assembled
citizens when they beheld, instead of the statue of Follonsby, which
they were prepared to see, or a symbolic representation of the
city itself as a flower-crowned maiden, the familiar pudgy figure,
reproduced with the most cruel fidelity, of Mike O’Grady, known as
“Silent Mike,” a big bipartisan boss who had for years dominated
municipal affairs, and who had but lately gone to his reward. The
inscription in itself was an ironic master-stroke:
To
Michael P. O’Grady
Protector of Saloons, Friend of Crooks
For Ten Years a City Councilman
Dominating the Affairs of the Municipality
This Statue is Erected
By Grateful Fellow-Citizens
In Recognition of his Public Services
The effect of this was tremendously disturbing, as may be imagined.
Every newspaper in America printed a picture of the O’Grady statue;
our rival cities made merry over it at our expense. The Chamber of
Commerce, incensed at the affront to the city’s good name, passed
resolutions condemning Barton in the bitterest terms; the local press
howled; a mass-meeting was held in our biggest hall to voice public
indignation. But amid the clamor Barton remained calm, pointing to
the stipulation in Follonsby’s will that his money should be spent
in memorials of men who had enjoyed most fully the confidence of the
people. And as O’Grady had been permitted for years to run the town
about as he liked, with only feeble protests and occasional futile
efforts to get rid of him, Barton was able to defend himself against
all comers.
Six months later Barton set up on the same boulevard a handsome tablet
commemorating the services of a mayor whose venality had brought the
city to the verge of bankruptcy, and who, when his term of office
expired, had betaken himself to parts unknown. This was greeted with
another outburst of rage, much to Barton’s delight. After a brief
interval another tablet was placed on one of the river bridges. The
building of that particular bridge had been attended with much scandal,
and the names of the councilmanic committee who were responsible for it
were set forth over these figures:
Cost to the People $249,950.00
Cost to the Council 131,272.81
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Graft $118,677.19
The figures were exact and a matter of record. An impudent prosecuting
attorney who had broken with the machine had laid them before the
public some time earlier; but his efforts to convict the culprits
had been frustrated by a judge of the criminal court who took orders
from the bosses. Barton broke his rule against talking through the
newspapers by issuing a caustic statement imploring the infuriated
councilmen to sue him for libel as they threatened to do.
The city was beginning to feel the edge of Barton’s little ironies. At
the club we all realized that he was animated by a definite and high
purpose in thus flaunting in enduring bronze the shame of the city.
“It is to such men as these,” said Barton, referring to the gentlemen
he had favored with his statue and tablets, “that we confide all
our affairs. For years we have stupidly allowed a band of outlaws
to run our town. They spend our money; they manage in their own way
large affairs that concern all of us; they sneer at all the forces
of decency; they have made serfs of us. These scoundrels are our
creatures, and we encourage and foster them; they represent us and our
ideals, and it’s only fitting that we should publish their merits to
the world.”
While Barton was fighting half a dozen injunction suits brought to
thwart the further expenditure of Follonsby’s money for memorials of
men of notorious misfeasance or malfeasance, another city election
rolled round. By this time there had been a revulsion of feeling. The
people began to see that after all there might be a way of escape. Even
the newspapers that had most bitterly assailed Barton declared that
he was just the man for the mayoralty, and he was fairly driven into
office at the head of a non-partisan municipal ticket.
The Boulevard of Rogues we called it for a time. But after Barton had
been in the mayor’s office a year he dumped the O’Grady statue into the
river, destroyed the tablets, and returned to the Follonsby Fund out
of his own pocket the money he had paid for them. Three noble statues
of honest patriots now adorn the boulevard, and half a dozen beautiful
fountains have been distributed among the parks.
The Barton plan is, I submit, worthy of all emulation. If every
boss-ridden, machine-managed American city could once visualize its
shame and folly as Barton compelled us to do, there would be less
complaint about the general failure of local government. There is,
when you come to think of it, nothing so preposterous in the idea
of perpetuating in outward and visible forms the public servants we
humbly permit to misgovern us. Nothing could be better calculated to
quicken the civic impulse in the lethargic citizen than the enforced
contemplation of a line of statues erected to rascals who have
prospered at the expense of the community.
I’m a little sorry, though, that Barton never carried out one of his
plans, which looked to the planting in the centre of a down-town park
of a symbolic figure of the city, felicitously expressed by a barroom
loafer dozing on a whiskey barrel. I should have liked it, and Barton
confessed to me the other day that he was a good deal grieved himself
that he had not pulled it off!