Besides these interesting topics there was the subject of municipal
home rule. This had already become vital in Toledo because, a year or
so before, the Republican party organization through its influence
in the state, without having to strain its powers of persuasion, had
induced the legislature to pass a special law which deprived the Mayor
of Toledo of his control of the police force and vested the government
of that body in a commission appointed by the governor of the state.
It had been, of course, a direct offense to Jones, and it was intended
to take from him the last of his powers. He had been greatly roused
by it; the morning after the law had been enacted he had appeared
at my house before breakfast to discuss this latest assault upon
liberty. The law was an exact replica of a law that had been passed for
Cincinnati many years before, and that law had been sustained by the
Supreme Court in a decision which had made it the leading case on that
subject of constitutional law for a whole generation. Time and again
it had been attacked and always it had been sustained; to contest the
constitutionality of this new act seemed the veriest folly.
But Jones was determined to resist; like some stout burgomaster of an
old free city of Germany he determined to stand out against the city’s
overlords from the rural districts, and he insisted on my representing
him in the litigation which his resistance would certainly provoke.
I had no hope of winning, and told him so; I explained the precedent
in the Cincinnati case, and that only made him more determined; if
there was one thing more than another for which he had a supreme and
sovereign contempt it was a legal precedent. My brethren at the bar all
laughed at me, as I knew they would; but I went to work, and after a
few days’ investigation became convinced that the doctrine laid down in
that leading case was not at all sound.
When I came to this conviction, I induced Jones to retain additional
counsel, one of the most brilliant lawyers at our bar, Mr. Clarence
Brown, a man who, in addition to his knowledge of the law, could bring
to the forum a charming personality, a wit and an eloquence that were
irresistible. He, too, set to work, and in a few days he was convinced,
as I, that the precedent should be overthrown. Jones refused to turn
over the command of the police to the new commissioners whom the
governor appointed; they applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of
mandamus, we tried the case, and we won, overthrowing not only the
doctrine at the Cincinnati case, but the whole fabric of municipal
legislation in the state, so that a special session of the legislature
was necessary to enact new codes for the government of the cities.
Our satisfaction and our pride in our legal achievement was somewhat
modified by the fact that the application of the same rule to
conditions in our sister city of Cleveland had the effect, in certain
cases then pending, of pulling down the work which another great mayor,
Tom L. Johnson, was then doing in that city. It was even said that the
Supreme Court had been influenced by the desire of Mark Hanna, Tom
Johnson’s ancient enemy in Cleveland, to see his old rival defeated.
Some were unkind enough to say that Mark Hanna’s influence was more
powerful with the court, as at that time constituted, than was the
logic of the attorneys who were representing Golden Rule Jones.
But however that may have been, the decision in that case had ultimate
far-reaching effects in improving the conditions in Ohio cities, and
was the beginning of a conflict that did not end until they were free
and autonomous. In my own case it was the beginning of a study of
municipal government that has grown more fascinating as the years have
fled, a study that has led me to see, or to think that I see, the large
hope of our democracy in the cities of America.
I regard it as Jones’s supreme contribution to the thought of his time
that, by the mere force of his own original character and personality,
he compelled a discussion of fundamental principles of government.
Toledo to-day is a community which has a wider acquaintance with all
the abstract principles of social relations than any other city in the
land, or in the world, since, when one ventures into generalities, one
might as well make them as sweeping as one can.
Jones’s other great contribution to the science of municipal government
was that of non-partizanship in local affairs. That is the way he used
to express it; what he meant was that the issues of national politics
must not be permitted to obtrude themselves into municipal campaigns,
and that what divisions there are should be confined to local issues.
There is, of course, in our cities, as in our land or any land, only
one issue, that which is presented by the conflict of the aristocratic,
or plutocratic, spirit and the spirit of democracy.
Jones used to herald himself as “a Man Without a Party,” but he was
a great democrat, the most fundamental I ever knew or imagined; he
summed up in himself, as no other figure of our time since Lincoln,
all that the democratic spirit is and hopes to be. Perhaps in this
characterization I seem to behold his figure larger than it was in
relation to the whole mass, but while his work may appear at first
glance local, it was really general and universal. No one can estimate
the peculiar and lively force of such a personality; certainly no one
can presume to limit his influence, for such a spirit is illimitable
and irresistible.
He was elected in that last campaign for the fourth time, but he did
not live very long. He had never, it seemed to me, been quite the same
after the day when he had that experience of insult which he did not
resent. “Draw the sting,” he used to counsel us when, in our campaign
harangues, we became bitter, or sarcastic, or merely smart. He had
supreme reliance on the simple truth, on the power of reasonableness.
He never reviled again; he never sought to even scores. When he died
the only wounds he left in human hearts were because he was no more.
They understood him at last, those who had scoffed and sneered and
abused and vilified, and I, who had had the immense privilege of his
friendship, and thought I knew him,--when I stood that July afternoon,
on the veranda of his home, beside his bier to speak at his funeral,
and looked out over the thousands who were gathered on the wide lawn
before his home,--I realized that I, too, had not wholly understood him.
I know not how many thousands were there; they were standing on the
lawns in a mass that extended across the street and into the yards
on the farther side. Down to the corner, and into the side streets,
they were packed, and they stood in long lines all the way out to the
cemetery. In that crowd there were all sorts of that one sort he knew
as humanity without distinction,--judges, and women of prominence
and women whom he alone would have included in humanity, there were
thieves, and prize-fighters,--and they all stood there with the tears
streaming down their faces.
There is no monument to Golden Rule Jones in Toledo; and since St.
Gaudens is gone I know of no one who could conceive him in marble
or in bronze. There is not a public building which he erected, no
reminder of him which the eye can see or the hands touch. But his name
is spoken here a thousand times a day, and always with the reverence
that marks the passage of a great man upon the earth. And I am sure
that his influence did not end here. Did not a letter come from Yasnaya
Polyana in the handwriting of the great Tolstoy, who somehow had heard
of this noble and simple soul who was, in his own way, trying the same
experiment of life which the great Russian was making?