XVI

However, it has seemed to be my fate, or my weakness, which we too

often confuse with fate, to vacillate between an interest in letters

and an interest in politics, and after that year, whose days and nights

were almost wholly given to studying law, I was admitted to the bar,

and thereupon felt qualified to go out on the stump in the campaign

that autumn and speak in behalf of the Democratic ticket. It was fun to

drive out over Sangamon County in those soft autumn evenings, over the

soft roads,--though if it rained they became too soft,--and to speak

in schoolhouses to the little audiences of farmers, or of miners, on

the iniquities of the tariff. If we had been a little more devoted to

principle, perhaps, than we were to party, we might better have spoken

of the iniquities of that Democratic minority in the Senate which had

just completed its betrayal of us all and helped to perpetrate those

iniquities, but when you belong to a party you are presumed to adjust

yourself to what your representatives do, and to make the best of what

generally is a pretty bad bargain. The bargain of those senators had

been particularly bad, and so, instead of speaking in the tones of

righteous indignation, we had to adopt the milder accents of apology

and explanation, and it was difficult to explain to some of those

audiences. There was more or less heckling, and now and then impromptu

little debates, and sometimes when the meeting was done, and we started

on the long ride back to town, we would find that the nuts had been

removed from the axles of our carriage-wheels. Perhaps that argument

was as good as any we had made, and it could not matter much anyway,

since partizan speeches never convince anybody, and if they could,

if they could do anything but deepen and intensify prejudice, whole

batteries of the world’s best orators in that year could not have

overcome the vicious effects of that high betrayal, even though they

had been led to the charge by Phocion and Demosthenes.

I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It

had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which

appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name,

had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new

continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and

then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and

children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these

sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with

the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the

workingmen had learned at last that the system did not “protect” them,

and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism

of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with

a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and

trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in

power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them

with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was

committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong

a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill

anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been

developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men

so far as I know--M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough

to disgust anyone with politics altogether, and to forswear them and

parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the

attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He

made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind

down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I

can think of.

To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely

fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service

reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well.

The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of

course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though

everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion

of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong,

and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them,

or at least to take some measures against the lie.

The Democratic party, to be sure, redeemed itself later under the

splendid leadership of President Wilson, but at that time, while we

recognized the evil of the theory, we seemed to have sunk into a

sordid acquiescence in the fact; everybody thought the tariff wrong,

but nobody wished to have it done away with so long as there was a

chance, to speak in modern American, for him to get in on the graft.

The word “graft” was unknown in those days, by all save those thieves

in whose argot it was found and devoted to its present general use in

the vocabulary. I suppose it is in the dictionary by this time. In any

event, it is not strange that the word should have become so current,

since for a while we made a national institution of the very thing it

connotes.

There was, however, then and always, the labor question, and we were

beginning to discover that that is fundamental, perhaps the one great

fundamental,--aside from the complication of evil and good that is

inherent and implicit in humanity itself,--since the burning question

is and always will be how the work of the world is to be got done, and,

what is a much more embarrassing problem, who is to do it. Many of the

men who had been doing that work, or the heaviest of it, were striking

in Illinois in those years.

The shots the Pinkertons had fired at Homestead echoed in the state;

Senator Palmer had made a great speech about it in the Senate; and

perhaps the tariff had something to do with that, since tariffs on

steel have not been unknown. But there were shots fired nearer home,

first in the strike among the men who were digging the drainage canal,

then among the miners in the soft coal fields of the state, then the

strike in the model town of Pullman, and the great railroad strike that

grew out of it.

They called it the Debs Rebellion, and for a while it assumed some of

the proportions of a rebellion, or at least it frightened many people

in Illinois as much as a rebellion might have done. We were in the

midst of all its alarms during that whole spring and summer, and down

in the adjutant-general’s office at the State House there was the stir

almost of war itself, with troops being ordered here and there about

the state, and the Governor harried and worried by a situation that

presented to him the abhorrent necessity of using armed force. I was

reading over the other day the report made to the War Department by

my friend Major Jewett Baker, then a lieutenant in the Twelfth U. S.

Infantry, detailed with the National Guard of Illinois; and in his

clear and excellent account of all those confused events the scenes of

those times came back: the long lines of idle freight cars, charred

by incendiary flames; the little groups of men standing about wearing

the white ribbons of the strike sympathizers, and the colonel of the

regular army, in his cups at his club, who wished he might order a

whole regiment to shoot them, “each man to take aim at a dirty white

ribbon”; the regulars encamped on the lake front, their sentinels

pacing their posts at the quickstep in the rain; and then that morning

conference in the mayor’s office in Chicago, at which I was permitted

to look on--what an interesting life it is to look on at!--when there

appeared Eugene V. Debs, tall, lithe, nervous, leader of the strikers,

his hair, what there was of it, sandy, but his head mostly bald, his

eyes flashing, his mouth ready to smile, soon to go to Woodstock Jail,

to emerge a Socialist, and become the leader of that party.

Major Baker’s report shows, indirectly and by inference, that much of

the criticism which the Governor endured was not justified, since he

turned out all his troops as fast as local authorities asked for them.

At any rate, he acted according to his democratic principles and to his

conception of his duty. His principles were in a sense different from

those of President Cleveland, with whom he disagreed in that notable

instance when the President in his vigorous, practical way sent federal

troops into Chicago; the Governor protested, as one of his predecessors

in the governor’s office, Senator Palmer, had protested when President

Grant sent federal troops under Phil Sheridan into Chicago at the time

of the great fire. Almost everybody who had any way of making his voice

heard sided with President Cleveland, and the end of the strike was

accredited to him. Doubtless the grim presence of those regular troops

did overawe the hoodlums who had taken advantage of the strike to

create disorder, but if the credit must go to armed force, the report

by Major, or, as he was in those days, Lieutenant, Baker shows that

that little company of the Illinois National Guard which ruthlessly

fired into the mob at Loomis Street one night virtually ended the

disorder.

Perhaps Governor Altgeld was willing to forego any “credit” for an act,

which, however necessary to the preservation of order, demanded so many

lives. I do not know as to that, but I do recall the expression which

clouded his face that afternoon we arrived at Lemont, during the strike

at the drainage canal. It occurred a year before the railway strike,

and the Governor had gone to Lemont himself to make an investigation.

He had asked Lieutenant Baker and me to go with him, and when we got

off the train at Lemont, on the afternoon of a cheerless day, the

crowds were standing aimlessly about, watching with a sullen curiosity

the arrival of the militia. The soldiers were just then going into

camp on the level rocks by a bridge across the canal and the Desplaines

River--the bridge, according to the military scientists, was, I

believe, considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a strategic

point.

The picture was one for the brush of Remington--those young blue-clad

soldiers (it was before the days of our imperialism, and of the khaki

our soldiers now imitate the British in wearing)--and Baker and I stood

and gazed at it a moment, affected by the fascination there always is

in the superficial military spectacle; and then, suddenly, we were

aware that there was another and more dramatic point of interest,

where a group stood about the body of a workman who had been shot in

the riots of that morning. He was a foreigner, the clothes he wore

doubtless those he had had on when he passed under the Statue of

Liberty, coming to this land with what hopes of freedom in his breast

no one can ever know. The wife who had come with him was on her knees

beside him, rocking back and forth in her grief, dumb as to any words

in a strange land whose tongue she could not speak or understand.

The reporters from the Chicago newspapers were there, and among them

Eddie Bernard, an old Whitechapeler, who told us that the man had

reached Lemont only a few days before, and had been happy in the job

he had so promptly found in the new land of promise. And now, there he

lay, shot dead. Bernard looked a moment, and then in the irony of a

single phrase he expressed the whole drama as he said:

“The land of the free and the home of the brave!”

That was fundamental, anyhow, and politics were not going deeply into

the question, except as such men as Altgeld did so, and even they were

criticized sharply for attempting it. And one might well be disgusted

with politics, then and always, and think of something that has the

consolation of literature. The traffic of politicians, as Mr. George

Moore somewhere says, is with the things of this world, while art is

concerned with the dreams, the visions and the aspirations of a world

beyond this. Though literature must some day in this land concern

itself with that very question of labor, since it is with fundamental

life that art must deal, and be true in its dealing.