Politics in those days--and not alone in those days either--were mean,
and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with
despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business
utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was
then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was
coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few
saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in
the land dreamers of a sort, who had caught a new vision. The feeling
of it, the emotion, was to find expression in Mr. Bryan’s great
campaign in 1896; but there was then in Chicago a little group, men who
had read Henry George, or, without reading him, had looked out on life
intelligently and gained a concept of it, or perhaps had merely felt
in themselves the stirrings of a new social instinct, and these saw,
or thought they saw, the way to a better social order. They could not
in those days gain so patient a hearing for their views as they have
since, if any hearing they have had may after all be called patient;
they were not so very patient themselves, perhaps, as men are quite apt
not to be when they think they see as clearly as though a perpetual
lightning blazed in the sky exactly what is the matter with the world,
and have a simple formula, which, were it but tried, would instantly
and infallibly make everything all right.
But these men were not in politics; some of them were too impractical
ever to be, and the only man in politics who understood them at all
was Altgeld. Generally, the moral atmosphere of politics was foul and
heavy with the feculence of all the debauchery that is inseparable
from privilege. The personnel of politics was generally low; and in
city councils and state legislatures there was a cynical contempt of
all the finer sentiments. It was not alone that provincialism and
philistinism which stand so obdurately and with such bovine stupidity
in the way of progress; there was a positive scorn of the virtues,
and the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great
corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the
great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of
which was that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did
not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men,
who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power
and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association,
that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the
other day, reading Walt Whitman’s terrific arraignment of the powers
that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan’s
time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the
directorate of affairs,--it may be read in his prose works by those
who wish,--I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time
with that which immediately preceded the newer and better time of the
moral awakening in America. Altgeld was one of the forerunners of this
time; and, in accordance with the universal law of human nature, it was
his fate to be misunderstood and ridiculed and hated, even by many in
his own party. He was far in the van in most ways, so far that it was
impossible for his own party to follow him. It did not follow him in
his opposition to a bill which was passed in the General Assembly to
permit of the consolidation of gas companies in Chicago; the machines
of the two parties were working well together in the legislature--in
one of those bipartizan alliances which were not to be understood until
many years later, and even then not to be understood so very clearly,
since most of our cities have been governed since by such alliances,
in the interest of similar gas companies and other public utility
corporations--and when the Governor vetoed their evil measure, this
same bipartizan machine sought to pass it over his veto, and none was
more active in the effort than were the leaders of his own party in the
House.
The supreme effort was made on the last night of the session, amidst
one of those riots which mark the dissolution of our deliberative
legislative bodies. The lobbyists for the measure were quite shameless
that night, as they were on most nights, no doubt; almost as shameless
as the legislators themselves. The House was in its shirt-sleeves; and
there was the rude horse-play of country bumpkins; paper wads were
flying, now and then some member sent hurtling through the hot air
his file of printed legislative bills, and all the while there was
that confusion of sound, laughter, and oaths and snatches of song,
a sort of bedlam, in which laws were being enacted--laws that must
be respected and even revered, because of their sacred origin. The
leaders were serious, but worried; the expressions of their drawn,
tense, nervous faces were unhappy in suspicion and fear, and, perhaps,
because of uneasy consciences. The speaker sat above them, pale and
haggard, rapping his splintered sounding-board with a broken gavel,
rapping persistently and futilely. And as the time drew near when the
gas bill was to come on for consideration, the nervous tension was
intensified, and evil hung almost palpably in the hot, close air of
that chamber. Those who have had experience of legislative bodies, and
have by practice learned something of political aëroscopy, can always
tell when “something is coming off”; political correspondents have
cultivated the sense, and that night they could have divined nothing
good or pure or beautiful in that chamber (where the portraits of
Lincoln and of Douglas hung), unless it were the mellow music, now and
then, of the glass prisms of the chandeliers hanging high from the
garish ceiling, as they tinkled and chimed whenever some little breeze
wandered in from the June night.
And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is
somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the
gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank
man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we
called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. &
M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting
clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a
member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern
end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent,
taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with
his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night
would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience
in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there,
silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long,
wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable.
The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and
the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And
suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there on the verge
of the House, and began to talk with him. I had the story a good while
afterwards from one of the whips, who, it seemed, knew all that had
gone on that night. The lobbyist of course knew about the man, knew
especially about his necessities, as lobbyists do; and he began to
talk to the old fellow about them--about his poverty and his children,
and he used the old argument which has been employed so long and so
successfully with the rural members of all our legislatures, and has
been the source of so much evil in our city governments, that is, the
argument that the bill concerned only Chicago, and that the folks down
home would neither know nor care how he voted on it, and then--how
much two thousand dollars would mean to him. As the lobbyist talked,
there were various eyes that looked at him, waiting for a sign; they
needed only a few votes then, and the roll-call was being delayed by
one pretense and another, and the clock on the wall, inexorably ticking
toward the hour of that legislature’s dissolution, was turned back. The
old fellow listened and stroked his chin, and then presently, when the
lobbyist had done, he turned his old blue eyes on him and said:
“I reckon you’re right: I’m poor, and I’ve got a big family. And you’re
right, too, when you say my people won’t know nor care: they won’t;
they don’t know nor care a damn; they won’t send me back here, of
course. And God knows what’s to come of my wife and my children; I am
going home to them to-morrow and on Monday I’m going to hunt me a job
in the harvest-field; I reckon I’ll die in the poorhouse. Yes, I’m
going home--but”--he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye--“I’m
going home an honest man.”
My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat
confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,--“most of
them damned cheap,” he said,--and he thought it might make a plot for
a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and
was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the
bill over the Governor’s veto, and it was not long until another story
was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night
was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of
the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds
of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault
in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he
had to do was to go take the bonds--and permit the bill to become a
law. His answer, of course, was the veto--an offense as unpardonable
as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses
against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing
down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been--though this
was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates
mercy, too.
The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found
a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he
did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more,
and it was not long until the Governor was driven from his office
amid the hoots and jeers and the hissing of a venomous hatred such as
nothing but political rancor knows, unless it be religious rancor. Yes,
politics had got pretty low in those days, and its utter meanness,
gradually revealed, was enough to cause one to despair of his country
and his kind. Perhaps the old Egyptian in the legislature and the
idealist in the governor’s chair should have been enough to keep one
from despairing altogether, though one honest old peasant cannot save a
legislature any more than one swallow can make a summer. I do not mean
to say that he was the only honest man in the legislature: there were
many others, of course, but partizan politics prevented their honesty
from being of much avail; or, at any rate, they did not control events.
With the measurable advance in thought since that time, and the general
progress of the species, we know now that men do not control events
half so much as events control men; we do not know exactly what it is
that does control men--that is, those of us who are not Socialists do
not know.
Altgeld, at any rate, was disgusted with politics, as well he might
have been, since they wrecked his fortune and broke his heart. And it
was with relief, I know, that he said that morning,--almost the last
he passed in the governor’s chair,--as he and I were going up the long
walk to the State House steps:
“Well, we’re rid of this, anyway.”