There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos,
perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun
to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not
wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom,
there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several
thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when
he wrote a statement setting forth his position--it was a document with
the strong flavor of his personality in it--the newspapers refused to
publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and
he opened his campaign on the post-office corner, standing bare-headed
in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd.
Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that
he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him
on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after
having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for
the first time independently, a “Man Without a Party,” as he called
himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own
party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his
standard.
But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the
beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him,
though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. There was a
prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him
and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than
all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his
sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones
went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked
him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow’s answer was to snatch
the paper from Jones’s hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to
imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing
insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the “shotgun and the
club.” Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the
oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always
in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts
against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his
back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox
in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to
resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away
from the fellow, without a word.
He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was
trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as
he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his
face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had
ever seen it, and he said:
“Well, I’ve won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last
a victory over myself, over my own nature. I have done what it has
always been hardest for me to do.”
“What?” I asked.
He sat in silence for a moment, and then he said:
“You know, it has always seemed to me that the most remarkable thing
that was ever said of Jesus was that when he was reviled, he reviled
not again. It is the hardest thing in the world to do.”
The struggle over the renewal of the franchise grants to the street
railway company had already begun, and the council had attempted to
grant it the franchise it wished, renewing its privileges for another
twenty-five years. When Mayor Jones vetoed the bill, the council
prepared to pass it over his veto, and would have done so that Monday
night had it not been for two men--Mayor Jones and Mr. Negley D.
Cochran, the editor of the _News-Bee_, a newspaper which has always
taken the democratic viewpoint of public questions. Mr. Cochran, with
his brilliant gift in the writing of editorials, had called out the
whole populace, almost, to attend the meeting of the council and to
protest. The demonstration was so far effective that the council was
too frightened to pass the street railway ordinance. The attorney for
the street railway company was there, and when there was a lull in the
noise, he sneered:
“I suppose, Mr. Mayor, that this is an example of government under the
Golden Rule.”
“No,” replied Jones in a flash, “it is an example of government under
the rule of gold.”
Unless it were because of his interference with the nefarious
privileges of a few, one can see no reason why the press and pulpit
should have opposed him. What had he done? He had only preached that
the fundamental doctrine of Christianity was sound, and, as much as a
man may in so complex a civilization, he had tried to practice it. He
had taught kindness and tolerance, and pity and mercy; he had visited
the sick, and gone to those that were in prison; he had said that all
men are free and equal, that they have been endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights. He had said that it is wrong to kill
people, even in the electric chair, that it is wrong to take from the
poor, without giving them in return. He had not said these things in
anger, or in bitterness; he had never been personal, he had always been
explicit in saying that he, as a part of society, was equally to blame
with all the rest for social wrongs. The only textbooks he ever used in
his campaigns were the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence,
and, of course, his beloved Walt Whitman. And yet the pulpits rang
every Sunday with denunciations of him, and the newspapers opposed
him. Why was it, because a man endorsed these old doctrines upon which
society claims to rest, that society should denounce him?
I think it was because he was so utterly and entirely sincere, and
because he believed these things, and tried to put them into practice
in his life, and wished them to be more fully incorporated in the life
of society. Society will forgive anything in a man, except sincerity.
If he be sincere in charity, in pity, in mercy, in sympathy for the
outcast, the despised, the imprisoned, all that vast horde of the
denied and proscribed, still less will it forgive him, for it knows
instinctively that the privileges men have or seek could not exist in a
system where these principles were admitted as vital, inspiring force.
There was nothing, of course, for one who believed in the American
doctrines to do but to support such a man, and when he appeared to be
so utterly without supporters it seemed to be one’s duty more than
ever, though I own to having shrunk from such unconventional methods as
Jones employed. That meeting at the post-office corner, for instance;
someone might laugh, and in the great American self-consciousness and
fear of the ridiculous, what was one to do? The opposition, that is,
the two old parties, the Republican and Democratic, had nominated
excellent men against Jones; the Republican nominee, indeed, Mr. John
W. Dowd, was a man to whom I had gone to school, an old and very dear
friend of our family, a charming gentleman of cultivated tastes. It
was not easy to be in the attitude of opposing him, but my duty seemed
clear, and I went into the campaign with Jones, and we spoke together
every night.
It was a campaign in which were discussed most of the fundamental
problems of social life. A stranger, coming to Toledo at that time,
might have thought us a most unsophisticated people, for there were
speculations about the right of society to inflict punishment, the
basis of property, and a rather searching inquiry into the subject of
representative government. This was involved in the dispute as to the
propriety of political machines, for the Republicans by that time had a
party organization so strong that it was easily denominated a machine;
it was so strong that it controlled every branch of the city government
except the executive; it never could defeat Jones. There was a good
deal said, too, about the enforcement of law, a subject which has its
fascination for the people of my town.