I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a
Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected
to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the
Chicago _Herald_, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was
a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state,
many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning--I
think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton
county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks Street
in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science
of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the
counsels of the Cincinnati politicians--I was walking along Superior
Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic
strains of “Home Again, Home Again.” There were other bands playing
that morning, but the prevailing tune was “The Campbells are Coming”;
for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in
Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our
state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so
brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a
frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention,
McKinley defeated him for governor.
But as I was saying, it was not “The Campbells are Coming” which
the band was playing that morning, but “Home Again,” and along the
wide street, with an intimate sense of proprietorship that excluded
strangers from this particular demonstration, people were saying:
“It’s Tom Johnson, home from Europe!”
It was his own employees who had gone forth to meet him, the men who
worked for him in the street railway system he owned in Cleveland in
those days, and I thought it rather a pretty compliment that a man’s
employees should like him so well that they would turn out to welcome
him with a band when he came home from his holiday abroad. I could
understand their feeling when an hour later I saw Tom Johnson in the
Hollenden Hotel, the center of a group of political friends; he seemed
as glad as any of them to be back among so many Democrats. He still
had his youth, and there was in his manner a peculiar, subtle charm, a
gift with which the gods are rather stingy among the sons of men. I can
see him now, his curly hair moist with the heat of the summer day, his
profile, clear enough for a Greek coin, and the smile that never failed
him, or failed a situation, to the end. He was, I think, in Congress in
those days of which I am writing, or if he was not, he went to Congress
soon after from one of the Cleveland districts. And while he was there
he wrote a remarkable letter in response to a communication he had
received from some girls who worked in a cloak factory in Cleveland,
asking him to vote against the Wilson tariff bill when it was amended
by adding a specific duty to the _ad valorem_ duty on women’s cloaks.
The girls, of course, poor things, had not written the communication;
it was written by the editor of a protectionist newspaper in Cleveland,
and the response which Johnson sent was one of the simplest and
clearest expositions of the evils of protection I ever read. I had read
it when it was published, and had been delighted, but it was not for a
dozen years that I was able to tell Johnson of my delight, and then one
day as he and Dr. Frederic C. Howe and I were at luncheon I spoke of
the letter. He laughed.
“It was a great letter, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Indeed it was,” I replied.
“A wonderful letter,” he went on. “You know, it completely shut them up
around here. The editor of that paper tried for weeks to reply to it,
and then he gave it up, and he told me privately some time afterward
that he was sure the theory of protection was right, but that it
wouldn’t work on women’s cloaks. Yes, it was a great letter.” And then
with a sigh, he added: “I wish I could have written such a letter.
Henry George worked on that letter for days and nights before we got
it to suit us; I’d think and think, and he’d write and write, and then
tear up what he had written, but finally we got it down.”
Henry George was the great influence in his life, as he has been the
influence in the lives of so many in this world. Johnson had been a
plutocrat; he had made, or to use a distinction Golden Rule Jones
used to insist upon, he had “gathered,” by the time he was thirty,
an immense fortune, through legal privileges. Johnson’s privileges
had been tariffs on steel, and street railway franchises in several
cities, and thus early in life he was almost ready for that most
squalid of all poverty, mere possession. And then suddenly he had a
marvelous experience, one that comes to few men; he caught a vision of
a new social order.
He was on a railway train going from Indianapolis to New York, and the
news agent on the train importuned him to buy a novel. Johnson waved
him aside--I can imagine with what imperious impatience. But this agent
was not to be waved aside; he persisted after the manner of his kind;
he had that weird occult power by which the book agent weaves his spell
and paralyses the will, even such a superior will as Tom Johnson’s,
and the agent sold to him, not a novel, but Henry George’s “Social
Problems.” He was not given to reading; he read only for information,
and even then he usually had someone else read to him. Once during his
last illness he asked me what I was reading, and I told him Ferrero’s
“Rome,” and tried to give him some notion of Ferrero’s description of
the political machine which Cæsar and Pompey had organized, and of
the private fire department of Crassus, and he said: “Well, I’ll have
Newton read it to me.” He used to wonder sometimes half wistfully,
as though he were missing some good in life, how it was that I loved
poetry so, and it was somehow consoling when Mr. Richard McGhee, that
fine Irish member of Parliament, told me one night in the House of
Commons that when Johnson made that last journey to England he had read
Burns to him, and that Johnson had loved and even recited certain
passages from them. Well then, Johnson bought his book, and idly
turning the pages began to read, became interested, finally enthralled,
and read on and on. Later he bought “Progress and Poverty,” and as he
read that wonderful book, as there dawned upon his consciousness the
awful realization that notwithstanding all the amazing progress mankind
has made in the world, poverty has kept even pace with it, stalking
ever at its side, that with all of man’s inventions, labor-saving
devices, and all that, there has been no such amelioration of the
human lot, no such improvement in society as should have come from so
much effort and achievement, he had a spiritual awakening, experienced
within him something that was veritably, as the Methodists would say, a
“conversion.” There was an instant revolution in his nature, or in his
purpose; he turned to confront life in an entirely new attitude, and he
began to have that which so many, rich and poor, utterly lack, so many
to whom existence is but a meaningless confusion of the senses, a life
concept. And with this new concept there came a new ideal.
He at once sought out Henry George, the two became fast friends, and
the friendship lasted until George’s dramatic death in the midst of his
campaign for the mayoralty of New York. George used to do much of his
work at the Johnson home in Cleveland--and used to forget to fasten his
collar when he was called from that spell of concentration over his
desk to the dinner table. The Johnsons were aristocrats from Kentucky,
descended from a long line of southern ancestors. And yet Tom Johnson
was a Democrat, from conviction and principle. In fact it seems almost
as though the cause of democracy would never have got on at all if
now and then it had not had aristocrats to lead it, as ever it has
had, from the times of the Gracchi to those of the Mirabeaus and the
Lafayettes and the Jeffersons.
Tom Johnson made an instant impression when he went into politics, and
he went in on the explicit advice of Henry George. When he arose in the
House of Representatives at Washington to make his first speech, no one
paid the least attention. It is, I suppose, the most difficult place in
the world to speak, not so much because of the audience, but because of
the arrangement; that scattered expanse of desks is not conducive to
dramatic effect, or to any focusing of interest. The British Parliament
is the only one in the world that is seated properly; there the old
form of the lists is maintained, opponents meet literally face to face
across that narrow chamber. But when Johnson arose at Washington, there
were those scattered desks, and the members--lolling at their desks,
writing letters, reading newspapers, clapping their hands for pages,
gossiping, sauntering about, arising and going out, giving no heed
whatever. But Tom Johnson had not spoken many words before Tom Reed,
then the leader on the Republican side, suddenly looked up, listened,
put his hand behind his ear, and leaning forward intently said: “Sh!”
and thus brought his followers to attention before the new and strong
personality whose power he had so instantly recognized.
It was a power that was felt in that House. They tried to shelve
him; they put him on the committee for the District of Columbia, and
no shelf could have pleased him more, or been better suited to his
peculiar genius, for it gave him a city to deal with. The very first
thing he did was to investigate the revenues of the District, and he
made a report on the subject, based on the theories underlying the
proposition of the single tax. He tried to have the single tax adopted
for the District, and while he failed in that design his report is a
classic on the whole subject of municipal taxation, even if, like most
classics, it is little read. He made some splendid speeches, too, on
the tariff, and by a clever device, under the rule giving members leave
to print what no one is willing to hear, he contrived, with the help
of several colleagues, to distribute over the land more than a million
copies of Henry George’s “Protection and Free Trade,” giving that work
a larger circulation than all the six best sellers among the romantic
novels.
It is one of the peculiar weaknesses of our political system that
our strongest men cannot be kept very long in Congress, and it was
Johnson’s fate to be defeated after his second term, but he then
entered a field of political activity which was not only thoroughly
congenial to him, but one in which for the present the struggle for
democracy must be carried on. That field is the field of municipal
politics which he entered just at the time of the awakening which
marked the first decade of the new century.