IX

It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity

about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and

it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that

year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with

James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s

cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most

men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil

fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest

perhaps when they are won. When I reached the station that morning,

Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in

arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes,

with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him

an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost

a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved,

there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness,

maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and

his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps,

then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way

down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the

other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder.

Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered

and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with

them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has

departed the spirit of the republic.

“It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing,” said Mr. Phelps to us

reporters, “a sight you could witness in no other country in the world.

There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man

may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were

nobody.”

Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from

that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European

sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for

any of us to have conversation with our premier. Mr. Blaine had just

come from Ohio where he had been speaking in McKinley’s district, and

he understood the political situation so perfectly that he said, in the

frankness of a conversation that was not to be reported, that McKinley

was certain to be defeated; indeed he foresaw, though it required no

very great vision to do that, the reverse that was to overtake his

party in the congressional elections.

With my interest in the tariff question, which then seemed to me so

fundamental, I did not lose the opportunity to ask Mr. Blaine about

his reciprocity project: but after a while the conversation turned

to more personal subjects. When he learned that I was from Ohio, he

asked me suddenly if I could name the counties that formed the several

congressional districts of the state. I could not, of course, do that,

and I supposed no one in the world could do it or ever wish to do it;

but he could, and with a naïve pride in the accomplishment he did, and

then astounded me by saying that he could almost match the feat with

any state in the Union.

It was the only enthusiasm the poor man showed all that day, and

when we reached South Bend, there was a _contretemps_ that might

have afforded Mr. Phelps further food for reflection on the lack of

ceremony in America. When the premier stepped off the train into the

wet mass of snow that covered the dirty platform of the ugly little

station, there was nowhere to be seen any evidence of a reception

for the distinguished guest. There was an old hack, or ’bus, one of

those rattling, shambling, moth-eaten vehicles that await the incoming

train at every small town in our land, with a team of forlorn horses

depressed by the weather or by life, but there was no committee of

eminent citizens, no band, nothing. The scene was bare and bleak and

cold, and the premier was plainly disgusted.

He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr.

Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve,

but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were

loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment

which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly

pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing

and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the

world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to

be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee

rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus

of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to

another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some

rich man’s house.

The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have

a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the

meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if

they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It

assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the

sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience

was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped

in,” to use our midwestern phrase, they displayed that bucolic

indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no

way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty,

and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for

him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort

which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker

drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr.

Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly

closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley

Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity,

all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective

tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had

been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The

speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the

opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be

overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and

since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but

the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour

and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I

did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as

a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties

the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair,

nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics

and political etiquette--if there are such things--require, and Mr.

Blaine himself most have had some consciousness of his partial failure,

some dissatisfaction with his effort, for I was just about to put my

story on the wire at six o’clock when he appeared, with his rich host,

and asked for me. I talked to him through the little wicket of the

telegraph office, and the conversation began inauspiciously by the rich

man’s peremptorily commanding me to let him see my stuff; he wished,

he said, to “look it over”! I was not as patient with his presumption

then as I think I could be now, for I had not learned that it was the

factory system that produces such types, men who bully the women at

home and the women and clerks and operatives in their shops, and I

denied him the right, of course. He became very angry, and blustered

through the little window, while the operator, an old telegrapher I

had known in Toledo, sat behind me waiting to send the story clicking

into Chicago on _The Herald’s_ wire. After the rich man had exhausted

himself, Mr. Blaine took his place at the window and in a mild and calm

manner, asked me for my copy, saying that he was not well, and that

he had made some slips in his speech which he did not care to have go

to the country. It was those unfortunate or fortunate babies of the

protective tariff system, and he said that the correspondent of a press

association had agreed to make the excisions if I would do so, and he

would consider it a favor if I would oblige him.

The charm of his manner had been on me all that day, and I had been

feeling sorry for him all day, too, and I was sorrier for him then

than ever, and half ashamed of some of the things I had written, but

I explained to him that I had been sent by my paper in the hope that

he might say something to the disadvantage of his own cause, and that

my duty was to report, at least, what he had said. It was one of the

hardest “noes” I ever had to say, and at last as he turned away, I

regretted, perhaps more than he, and certainly more than he ever knew,

that I could not let him revise his speech--since that is what most of

us desire to do with most of our speeches.

When that campaign ended in the overthrow of the Republican majority in

Congress, and I was sent to interview Ben Butterworth on the result,

he said, in his humorous way: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken

away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was not altogether cast

down by the result; in his place in Congress as a representative from

a Cincinnati district he had risen to denounce the tariff, and so had

his consolation. To me it seemed as if the people had at last entered

the promised land, that that was the day the Lord had made for his

people, but Mr. Butterworth could point out that our government was not

so democratic as the British government, for instance, since it was

not so responsive to the people’s will. Over there, of course, after

such a reverse the government would have retired, and a new one would

have been formed, but here the existing administration would remain in

power two years longer, and then, even if it lost in the presidential

election over a year must elapse before a new Congress would convene,

so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.

X

However, there were other interests and other delights with which to

occupy one’s self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth

himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor

General of the World’s Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was

preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and

assigned to the World’s Fair, and there were so many distinguished men

from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was

very much like politics in its superficial aspects. There was, for

instance, the World’s Columbian Commission, a body created under the

authority of Congress, composed of two commissioners from each state,

appointed by its governor, and that body exactly the size of the senate

was like it in personnel and character. The witty Thomas E. Palmer of

Michigan was its president, and there were among its membership such

men as Judge Lindsay, later senator from Kentucky, Judge Harris of

Virginia, who looked like George Washington, and many other delightful

and pungent characters. But no personality among them all was more

interesting than Colonel James A. McKenzie, Judge Lindsay’s colleague

from Kentucky. He was tall and spare of frame, and his long moustache

and goatee, and the great black slouch hat he wore made him in

appearance the typical southerner of the popular imagination. He was

indeed the typical southerner by every right and tradition, by birth,

by his services in the Confederate army, by his stately courtesy, by

his love of sentiment and the picturesque, by his wit and humor and

eloquence, and his fondness for phrases. His humor sparkled in his kind

blue eyes, and it overflowed in that brilliant conversation with which

he delighted everyone about him; he could entertain you by the hour

with his comments on all phases of that life in which he found such

zest. He had been known as “Quinine Jim,” because as congressman he

had secured the reduction or the abolition of the duty on that drug,

so indispensable in malarial lands. He was fond of striking phrases;

he it was who had referred to Blaine as a Florentine mosaic; and his

reference to Mrs. Cleveland as “the uncrowned queen of America” had

delighted the Democratic convention at St. Louis which renominated her

husband for the presidency. And again at Chicago, on that memorable

night of oratory in 1892 in seconding the nomination of Cleveland on

behalf of Kentucky he stood on a chair and referred to his state as the

commonwealth “in which, thank God, the damned lie is the first lick,

where the women are so beautiful that the aurora borealis blushes with

shame, where the whiskey is so good as to make intoxication a virtue,

and the horses so fleet that lightning in comparison is but a puling

paralytic.”

During one of many pleasant afternoons in the old Grand Pacific Hotel

he began to tell us something about the chronic office holders to

be found in the capital of his state, as in most states, and said:

“If God in a moment of enthusiasm should see fit to snatch them to

His bosom I should regard it as a dispensation of divine providence

in which I could acquiesce with a fervor that would be turbulent and

even riotous.” It was in this stream of exaggeration and hyperbole

that he talked all the time, but with the coming of the winter of that

year my opportunities of listening to him were cut off. I was sent to

Springfield to report the sessions of the legislature. In the spring

a bill was under discussion for the appropriation of a large sum in

aid of the World’s Fair, and when the usual opposition developed among

those country members who have so long governed our cities in dislike

and distrust of the people in them, a delegation came down from Chicago

to lobby for the measure. It was not long until it was evident that

they were not making much headway; the difference, the distinction

in their dress and manner, their somewhat too lofty style were only

making matters worse. I took it upon myself to telegraph to James W.

Scott, the publisher of _The Herald_, apprising him of the situation,

and suggesting that Colonel McKenzie be sent down to reënforce them.

I felt that he would perhaps understand the country members better

because he understood humanity better, and besides, I wished to see

him again and hear his stories and funny sayings. He came, and after

he had associated with the members a day or so, and they had seen him

draw Kentucky “twist” from the deep pocket of the long tails of his

coat, and on one or two occasions had watched him gently pinch into a

julep the tender sprigs of mint the spring had brought to Springfield,

the appropriation for some reason was made. While he was there he said

he wished to visit the tomb of Lincoln, and it was with pride that I

got an open carriage and drove him, on an incomparable morning in June,

out to Oak Ridge cemetery. He was in a solemn mood that morning; the

visit had a meaning for him; he had fought on the other side in the

great war, but he had a better conception of the character of the noble

martyr than many a northerner, especially of the day when that tomb

was built, certainly a nobler conception of that lofty character than

is expressed in Mead’s cruel war groups--as though Lincoln had been

merely some shoulder-strapped murderer of his fellow men! The Colonel

had never been there before, and it was an occasion for him, and for

me, too, though every time I went there it was for me an occasion, as

my sojourn in Springfield was an opportunity, to induce those who had

known Lincoln to talk about him.

The tomb has a chamber in its base where there were stored a number of

things; the place, indeed, was a sort of cheap museum, and you paid to

enter there and listen to an aged custodian lecture on the “relics,”

and thrill the gaping onlooker with the details of the attempt to

steal the body, and buy a book about it, if you were morbid and silly

enough. The custodian began his lecture in that chamber, and then led

you out into the sunlight again, and up on the base of the monument,

and showed you the bronze fighters, and at last, took you down into the

crypt, on the brow of the little down that overlooks the cemetery.

There at last Colonel McKenzie stood beside the sarcophagus and after

a while the custodian came to the end of his rigmarole, and, by some

mercy, was still. And I stood aside and looked at the old Confederate

officer, standing there in that cool entrance, beside the very tomb of

Lincoln. He stood with his arms folded on his breast, his tall form

slightly bent, his big hat in his hand, and his white head bowed; he

stood there a long time, in the perfect silence of that June morning,

with thoughts, I suppose, that might have made an epic.

When at last he turned away and went around to the front of the

monument, and we were about to enter our carriage, he turned, and still

uncovered, over the little gate in the low fence that enclosed the

spot, he paused and gave his hand to the old custodian, and said:

“Colonel, I wish to express to you my appreciation of the privilege

I have had this morning of paying my respects at the shrine of the

greatest American that ever lived.”

He said it solemnly and sincerely, and then, still holding the

delighted old fellow’s hand, he went on in profound gravity:

“And I cannot go away without expressing my sense of satisfaction

in the eloquent oration you have delivered on this occasion. I was

particularly impressed, sir, by its evident lack of previous thought

and preparation.”