the leader of the spike team, Mr. Bryan, and still more distinctly
behind his rival, or running mate, or whatever one may choose to call
him, the Hon. Thomas Watson. There is far more regard for the essential
fitness of things in a ticket which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr. Watson
than one which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr. Sewall. Mr. Watson is a
man of Mr. Bryan’s type, only a little more so. But Mr. Sewall is
of a different type, and possesses many attributes which must make
association with him exceedingly painful, not merely to Mr. Watson,
but to Mr. Bryan himself. He is a well-to-do man. Indeed in many
communities he would be called a rich man. He is a banker, a railroad
man, a shipbuilder, and has been successful in business. Now if Mr.
Bryan and Mr. Watson really stand for any principle it is hostility
to this kind of success. Thrift, industry, and business energy are
qualities which are quite incompatible with true Populistic feeling.
Payment of debts, like the suppression of riots, is abhorrent to the
Populistic mind. Such conduct strikes the Populist as immoral. Mr.
Bryan made his appearance in Congress with two colleagues elected on
the same ticket, one of whom stated to the present writer that no
honest man ever earned $5000 a year; that whoever got that amount stole
it. Mr. Sewall has earned many times $5000 a year. He is a prosperous
capitalist. Populism never prospers save where men are unprosperous,
and your true Populist is especially intolerant of business success. If
a man is a successful business man he at once calls him a plutocrat.
He makes only one exception. A miner or speculator in mines may be many
times a millionaire and yet remain in good standing in the Populist
party. The Populist has ineradicably fixed in his mind the belief that
silver is a cheap metal, and that silver money is, while not fiat
money, still a long step toward it. Silver is connected in his mind
with scaling down debts, the partial repudiation of obligations,
and other measures aimed at those odious moneyed tyrants who lend
money to persons who insist upon borrowing, or who have put their
ill-gotten gains in saving banks and kindred wicked institutions for
the encouragement of the vice of thrift. These pleasurable associations
quite outweigh, with the Populist, the fact that the silver man himself
is rich. He is even for the moment blind to the further fact that these
pro-silver men, like Senator Stewart, Governor Altgeld, and their
compeers, strenuously insist that the obligations to themselves shall
be liquidated in gold; indeed this particular idiosyncrasy of the
silver leaders is not much frowned upon by the bulk of the Populists,
because it has at least the merit of savoring strongly of “doing”
one’s creditors. Not even the fact that rich silver mine owners may
have earned their money honestly can outweigh the other fact that they
champion a species of currency which will make most thrifty and honest
men poorer, in the minds of the truly logical Populist.
But Mr. Sewall has no fictitious advantage in the way of owing his
wealth to silver. He has made his money precisely as the most loathed
reprobate of Wall Street--or of New York, which the average Populist
regards as synonymous with Wall Street--has made his. The average
Populist does not draw fine distinctions. There are in New York, as
in other large cities, scoundrels of great wealth who have made their
money by means skilfully calculated to come just outside the line of
criminality. There are other men who have made their money exactly as
the successful miner or farmer makes his,--that is, by the exercise
of shrewdness, business daring, energy and thrift. But the Populist
draws no line of division between these two classes. They have made
money, and that is enough. One may have built railroads and the other
have wrecked them, but they are both railroad men in his eyes, and
that is all. One may have swindled his creditors, and the other built
up a bank which has been of incalculable benefit to all who have had
dealings with it, but to the Populist they are both gold bugs, and as
such noxious. Mr. Sewall is the type of man the contemplation of which
usually throws a Populist orator into spasms. But it happens that he
believes in free silver, just as other very respectable men believe
in spirit rapping, or the faith-cure, or Buddhism, or pilgrimages to
Lourdes, or the foot of a graveyard rabbit. There are very able men and
very lovely women who believe in each or all of these, and there are a
much larger number who believe in free silver. Had they lived in the
days of Sparta they would have believed in free iron, iron coin being
at that time the cheapest circulating medium, the adoption of which
would give the greatest expansion of the currency. But they have been
dragged on by the slow procession of the centuries, and now they only
believe in free silver. It is a belief which is compatible with all the
domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very good capacities as a
public servant. Mr. Sewall doubtless stands as one of these men. He can
hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the Chicago platform. In
the minds of most thrifty, hard-working men, who are given to thinking
at all about public questions, the free-silver plank is very far from
being the most rotten of the many rotten planks put together with such
perverted skill by the Chicago architects. A platform which declares in
favor of free and unlimited rioting and which has the same strenuous
objection to the exercise of the police power by the general government
that is felt in the circles presided over by Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs,
and all the people whose pictures appear in the detective bureaus of
our great cities, cannot appeal to persons who have gone beyond the
unpolished-stone period of civilization.
The men who object to what they style “government by injunction”
are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty
sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves,
fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth and
woolly rhinoceros. They are interesting as representing a geological
survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is the least chance of
their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors
in our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds
and sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish to pay one’s
debts in coins worth fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a much less
nice thing to wish to plunge one’s country into anarchy by providing
that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown scornfully on the
law-abiding. There is a good deal of mushy sentiment in the world, and
there are always a certain number of people whose minds are weak and
whose emotions are strong and who effervesce with sympathy toward any
man who does wrong, and with indignation against any man who chastises
the criminal for having done wrong. These emotionalists, moreover, are
always reinforced by that large body of men who themselves wish to
do wrong, and who are not sentimental at all, but, on the contrary,
very practical. It is rarely that these two classes control a great
political party, but at Chicago this became an accomplished fact.
Furthermore, the Chicago convention attacked the Supreme Court. Again
this represents a species of atavism,--that is, of recurrence to the
ways of thought of remote barbarian ancestors. Savages do not like
an independent and upright judiciary. They want the judge to decide
their way, and if he does not, they want to behead him. The Populists
experience much the same emotions when they realize that the judiciary
stands between them and plunder.
Now on all these points Mr. Sewall can hardly feel complete sympathy
with his temporary allies. He is very anxious that the Populists shall
vote for him for Vice-President, and of course he feels a kindly
emotion toward those who do intend to vote for him. He would doubtless
pardon much heresy of political belief in any member of the electoral
college who feels that Sewall is his friend, not Watson,--Codlin, not
Short. He has, of course, a vein of the erratic in his character,
or otherwise he would not be in such company at all, and would have
no quality that would recommend him to them. But on the whole his
sympathies must lie with the man who saves money rather than with the
man who proposes to take away the money when it has been saved, and
with the policeman who arrests a violent criminal rather than with the
criminal. Such sympathy puts him at a disadvantage in the Populist
camp. He is loud in his professions of belief in the remarkable series
of principles for which he is supposed to stand, but his protestations
ring rather hollow. The average supporter of Bryan doubtless intends
to support Sewall, for he thinks him an unimportant tail to the Bryan
kite. But, though unimportant, he regards him with a slight feeling of
irritation, as being at the best a rather ludicrous contrast to the
rest of the kite. He contributes no element of strength to the Bryan
ticket, for other men who work hard and wish to enjoy the fruits of
their toil simply regard him as a renegade, and the average Populist,
or Populistic Democrat, does not like him, and accepts him simply
because he fears not doing so may jeopardize Bryan’s chances. He is
in the uncomfortable position always held by the respectable theorist
who gets caught in a revolutionary movement and has to wedge nervously
up into the front rank with the gentlemen who are not troubled by any
of his scruples, and who really do think that it is all very fine and
glorious. In fact Mr. Sewall is much the least picturesque and the
least appropriate figure on the platform or platforms upon which Mr.
Bryan is standing.
Mr. Watson, whose enemies now call him a Georgia cracker, is in reality
a far more suitable companion for Mr. Bryan in such a contest. It
must be said, however, that if virtue always received its reward Mr.
Watson and not Mr. Bryan would stand at the head of the ticket. In
the language of mathematicians Mr. Watson merely represents Mr. Bryan
raised several powers. The same is true of the Populist as compared
to the Democratic platform. Mr. Bryan may affect to believe that free
silver does represent the ultimate goal, and that his friends do not
intend to go further in the direction of fiat money. Mr. Watson’s
friends, the middle-of-the-road Populists, are much more fearless and
much more logical. They are willing to accept silver as a temporary
makeshift, but they want a currency based on corn and cotton next, and
ultimately a currency based on the desires of the people who issue
it. The statesmanlike utterance of that great financier, Mr. Bryan’s
chief rival for the nomination and at present his foremost supporter,
Mr. Bland, to the effect that he would “wipe out the national debt as
with a sponge,” meets with their cordial approval as far as it goes,
but they object to the qualification before the word “debt.” In wiping
out debts they do not wish to halt merely at the national debt. The
Populists indorsed Bryan as the best they could get; but they hated
Sewall so that they took the extraordinary step of nominating the
Vice-President before the President so as to make sure of a really
acceptable man in the person of Watson.
With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug and the banker is largely
a mere form of intellectual entertainment; but with Mr. Watson it
represents an almost ferocious conviction. Someone has said that Mr.
Watson like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied retribution on the South
for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white who gives
him his strength. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities of the
North, especially any dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach
the South with having failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is
certainly an awkward man for a community to develop. He is infinitely
more in earnest than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson’s followers belong
to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that the
respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads, dry-goods
stores, factories, and the like, are persons with many of the mental
and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished Heliogabalus,
Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome. Not only do they
believe this, but they say it with appalling frankness. They are very
sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are. They are also
very suspicious. They distrust anything they cannot understand; and as
they understand but little this opens a very wide field for distrust.
They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, they are then at
least atheists of an archaic type. Refinement and comfort they are
apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man
should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any
other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms
of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and
cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the
deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust,
and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves, at least they hope to make
matters uncomfortable for those that are. They possess many strong,
rugged virtues, but they are quite impossible politically, because they
always confound the essentials and the non-essentials, and though they
often make war on vice, they rather prefer making war upon prosperity
and refinement.
Mr. Watson was in a sense born out of place when he was born in
Georgia, for in Georgia the regular Democracy, while it has accepted
the principles of the Populists, has made war on their _personnel_,
and in every way strives to press them down. Far better for Mr. Watson
would it have been could he have been born in the adjacent State of
South Carolina, where the Populists swallowed the Democrats with a
gulp. Senator Tillman, the great Populist or Democratic orator from
South Carolina, possesses an untrammelled tongue any middle-of-the-road
man would envy: and moreover Mr. Tillman’s brother has been frequently
elected to Congress upon the issue that he never wore either an
overcoat or an undershirt, an issue which any Populist statesman finds
readily comprehensible, and which he would recognize at first glance
as being strong before the people. It needs a certain amount of mental
subtlety to appreciate that it is for one’s interest to support a man
because he is honest and has broad views about coast defenses and the
navy, and other similar subjects; but it does not need any mind at all
to have one’s prejudices stirred in favor of a statesman whose claim to
the title rests upon his indifference to the requirements of civilized
dress.
Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his frankness, his extreme
suspiciousness, his distrust of anything he cannot understand, and
the feeling he encourages against all the elegancies and decencies of
civilized life, is an interesting personage. He represents the real
thing, while Bryan after all is more or less a sham and a compromise.
Mr. Watson would, at a blow, destroy all banks and bankers, with a
cheerful, albeit vague, belief that thereby he was in some abstruse way
benefiting the people at large. And he would do this with the simple
sincerity and faith of an African savage who tries to benefit his tribe
by a sufficiency of human sacrifices. But Mr. Bryan would be beset by
ugly doubts when he came to put into effect all the mischievous beliefs
of his followers, and Mr. Sewall would doubtless be frankly miserable
if it ever became necessary for him to take a lead in such matters. Mr.
Watson really ought to be the first man on the ticket, with Mr. Bryan
second; for he is much the superior in boldness, in thorough-going
acceptance of his principles according to their logical conclusions,
and in sincerity of faith. It is impossible not to regret that the
Democrats and Populists should not have put forward in the first place
the man who genuinely represents their ideas.
However, it is even doubtful whether Mr. Watson will receive the
support to which he is entitled as a vice-presidential candidate. In
the South the Populists have been so crushed under the heel of the
Democrats, and have bitten that heel with such eager venom, that they
dislike entering into a coalition with them; but in the south the
Democrats will generally control the election machinery. In the far
West, and generally in those States where the Populist wing of the new
alliance is ascendant, the Populists have no especial hatred of the
Democrats. They know that their principles are substantially identical,
and they think it best to support the man who seems to represent the
majority faction among the various factions that stand behind Bryan.
As a consequence of this curious condition of affairs there are several
interesting possibilities open. The electoral college consists of the
men elected at the polls in the various States to record the decrees
of the majorities in those States, and it has grown to be an axiom
of politics that they must merely register the will of the men who
elected them. But it does seem possible that in the present election
some of the electors may return to the old principles of a century ago
and exercise at least a limited discretion in casting their votes. In
a State like Nebraska, for instance, it looks as though it would be
possible that the electoral ticket on the anti-Republican side would be
composed of four Bryan and Watson men and four Bryan and Sewall men.
Now in the event of Bryan having more votes than McKinley--that is,
in the event of the country showing strong Bedlamite tendencies next
November--it might be that a split between Sewall and Watson would give
a plurality to Hobart, and in such event it is hardly conceivable that
some of the electors would not exercise their discretion by changing
their votes. If they did not, we might then again see a return to the
early and profoundly interesting practice of our fathers and witness a
President chosen by one party and a Vice-President by the other.
I wish it to be distinctly understood, however, that these are merely
interesting speculations as to what might occur in a hopelessly
improbable contingency. I am a good American, with a profound belief
in my countrymen, and I have no idea that they will deliberately
lower themselves to a level beneath that of a South American
Republic, by voting for the farrago of sinister nonsense which the
Populistic-Democratic politicians at Chicago chose to set up as
embodying the principles of their party, and for the amiable and
windy demagogue who stands upon that platform. Many entirely honest
and intelligent men have been misled by the silver talk, and have
for the moment joined the ranks of the ignorant, the vicious and the
wrong-headed. These men of character and capacity are blinded by their
own misfortunes, or their own needs, or else they have never fairly
looked into the matter for themselves, being, like most men, whether in
“gold” or “silver” communities, content to follow the opinion of those
they are accustomed to trust. After full and fair inquiry these men, I
am sure, whether they live in Maine, in Tennessee, or in Oregon, will
come out on the side of honest money. The shiftless and vicious and
the honest but hopelessly ignorant and puzzle-headed voters cannot be
reached; but the average farmer, the average business man, the average
workman--in short, the average American--will always stand up for
honesty and decency when he can once satisfy himself as to the side on
which they are to be found.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[17] _Review of Reviews_, September, 1896.
[Illustration]
X
HOW NOT TO HELP OUR POORER BROTHER[18]
After the publication of my article in the September _Review of
Reviews_ on the vice-presidential candidates, I received the following
very manly, and very courteous, letter from the Honorable Thomas
Watson, then the candidate with Mr. Bryan on the Populist ticket for
Vice-President. I publish it with his permission:
HON. THEODORE ROOSEVELT:
It pains me to be misunderstood by those whose good opinion I respect,
and upon reading your trenchant article in the September number of the
_Review of Reviews_ the impulse was strong to write to you.
When you take your stand for honester government and for juster laws
in New York, as you have so courageously done, your motives must be
the same as mine--for you do not need the money your office gives
you. I can understand, instinctively, what you feel--what your motives
are. You merely obey a law of your nature which puts you into mortal
combat with what you think is wrong. You fight because your own sense
of self-respect and self-loyalty compels you to fight. Is not this so?
If in Georgia and throughout the South we have conditions as
intolerable as those that surround you in New York, can you not
realize why I make war upon them?
Tammany itself has grown great because mistaken leaders of the
southern Democracy catered to its Kellys and Crokers and feared to
defy them.
The first “roast” I ever got from the Democratic press of this State
followed a speech I had made denouncing Tammany, and denouncing the
craven leaders who obeyed Tammany.
It is astonishing how one honest man may honestly misjudge another.
My creed does _not_ lead me to dislike the men who run a bank, a
factory, a railroad or a foundry. I do _not_ hate a man for owning a
bond, and having a bank account, or having cash loaned at interest.
Upon the other hand, I think each should make all the profit in
business he fairly can; but I do believe that the banks should not
exercise the sovereign power of issuing money, and I do believe that
all special privileges granted, and all exemption from taxation,
work infinite harm. I _do_ believe that the wealth of the Republic
is practically free from federal taxation, and that the burdens of
government fall upon the shoulders of those least able to bear them.
If you could spend an evening with me among my books and amid my
family, I feel quite sure you would not again class me with those who
make war upon the “decencies and elegancies of civilized life.” And if
you could attend one of my great political meetings in Georgia, and
see the good men and good women who believe in Populism, you would not
continue to class them with those who vote for candidates upon the “no
undershirt” platform.
In other words, if you understood me and mine your judgment of us
would be different.
The “cracker” of the South is simply the man who did not buy slaves
to do his work. He did it all himself--like a man. Some of our
best generals in war, and magistrates in peace, have come from the
“cracker” class. As a matter of fact, however, my own people, from
my father back to Revolutionary times, were slave owners and land
owners. In the first meeting held in Georgia to express sympathy with
the Boston patriots my great-great-grandfather bore a prominent part,
and in the first State legislature ever convened in Georgia one of my
ancestors was the representative of his county.
My grandfather was wealthy, and so was my father. My boyhood was spent
in the idleness of a rich man’s son. It was not till I was in my teens
that misfortune overtook us, sent us homeless into the world, and
deprived me of the thorough collegiate training my father intended for
me.
At sixteen years of age I thus had to commence life moneyless, and the
weary years I spent among the poor, the kindness I received in their
homes, and the acquaintance I made with the hardship of their lives,
gave me that profound sympathy for them which I yet retain--though I
am no longer poor myself.
Pardon the liberty I take in intruding this letter upon you. I have
followed your work in New York with admiring sympathy, and have
frequently written of it in my paper. While hundreds of miles separate
us, and our tasks and methods have been widely different, I must still
believe that we have much in common, and that the ruling force which
actuates us both is to challenge wrong and to fight the battles of
good government.
Very respectfully yours,
(Signed) THOS. E. WATSON.
THOMPSON, GA., August, 30, 1896.