Steffens came to Toledo occasionally, and I recall an evening when we
sat in my library and he told me of a certain editor with whom he had
been talking; the editor had been praising his work with a fervor that
filled Steffens with despair.
“Must I write up every city in the United States before they will see?”
he said. “If I were to do Toledo, how that chap would berate me!”
He came to Toledo early in his investigations, and I took him to see
Jones, and as we left the City Hall in the late afternoon of that
spring day, Steffens was somehow depressed; we had walked a block in
St. Clair Street in silence when he said:
“Why, that man’s program will take a thousand years!”
It did seem long to wait. There was a time when I thought it might be
done in a shorter period, but I have found myself under the necessity
of extending the term from time to time. I fear now that Steffens’s
estimate of the length of Jones’s program was rather short, but I know
of no other way that the program can be carried out. Steffens himself
is not so impatient now; he learned much more about our cities than he
ever wrote or dared to write, much no doubt that he could not write.
Great as was the data he collected, before all the conclusions could
be drawn, all the general rules deduced, it would be necessary to have
the data of all life, of which the cities are microcosms. The subject,
after all, is rather large.
But to some it seemed simple enough; were there not policemen patroling
their beats ready to arrest the bad people? Thus in the early days of
the awakening in America impatience took on the form it always takes
with us, and men flew to the old idols of our race, the constable and
the policeman; someone must be hounded down, someone must be put in
prison. This was the form which the awakening took in many places, and
many reputations were built up in that wretched work, and perhaps the
inadequacy of the work is best demonstrated by the instability of the
reputations. I suppose that such efforts do accomplish something, even
though it be at such fearful cost; they may educate some, but mostly
they seem to me to gratify a taste for cheap sensation and reward that
prurient curiosity which has always made the contemplation of sin so
very fascinating to our race. The reformer was abroad, seeking to make
mankind over, but since he has no model more attractive than himself to
offer, his work never goes very far, and he returns to his warfare on
the cigarette, or in moments of greater courage, on the poor girl whose
figure flits by in the darkness, followed by the reformer’s devouring
eye.
But Steffens did not write us up, as the reporters phrase it. I think
Jones perplexed him in those first days, though he knows now that
Jones was wholly and I had almost said solely right. Jones indeed
perplexed most of us. A man with a program of a thousand years could
not be expected to interest so vitally our impatient democracy, as
would one with a program so speedy and simple that it involved nothing
more complex than putting all the bad people in jail; and there was
always someone ready to point out the bad people, so that it seemed
simple, as well it might to those who had forgotten that even that
program is six thousand years old, at least, according to Archbishop
Ussher’s chronology. Steffens, however, was seeking types and in the
two leading cities of Ohio he found them so perfect that he need
never have gone further--had it not been for people like that fellow
citizen of ours who filled Steffens with such despair. But while he
was gathering his data on Cincinnati and on Cleveland he came to see
us often, to our delight, and continued to come, so that he knew our
city and our politics almost better than we knew them ourselves. He
went to Cleveland, I remember, with some distinct prejudice against
Tom Johnson; the prejudice so easily imbibed in gentlemen’s clubs. But
I was delighted when, after his investigation, he wrote that story
in _McClure’s_ which characterized Tom Johnson as the best mayor of
the best governed city in the United States. I was delighted because
I was flattered in my own opinion, because I was fond of Tom Johnson,
and because it appeared just in the nick of time to turn the tide in
Johnson’s third campaign.
Jones was delighted, too; he had said almost immediately after Johnson
became mayor of Cleveland that he “loved him” because, in appointing
the Reverend Harris R. Cooley as Director of Charities and Corrections,
Johnson selected a man who began at once to parole prisoners from the
workhouse, and Jones and Johnson became friends as Johnson and Pingree
had been friends. It was a peculiar instance of the whimsical and
profligate generosity of the fates that the three cities grouped at the
western end of Lake Erie like those cities Walt Whitman saw, or thought
he saw, “as sisters with their arms around each others’ necks” should
have had about the same time three such mayors as Pingree in Detroit,
Johnson in Cleveland and Jones in Toledo, though the three men were
different in everything except their democracy.
Johnson’s success in Cleveland, obtained nominally as a Democrat,
though in his campaign he was as non-partizan as Jones himself, made
him the “logical” candidate of the Democrats in the state for governor,
and when he was nominated for that office he burst upon the old
Republican state like a new planet flaming in the heavens. Many of the
Democrats found that he was entirely too logical in his democracy,
since he was as like as not to denounce a Democratic office holder as
any other. He went forth to his campaign that year in his big French
touring car, a way entirely new to us, and in the car he went from
town to town, holding his immense meetings in a circus tent which was
taken down and sent on ahead each night. In this way he was entirely
independent of local committees, and they did not like that very well;
it had been his wealth more than his democracy that had made him seem
so logical as a candidate to some of the Democrats. Such a spectacle
had not been seen on our country roads as that great touring car
made; it was a red car, and the newspapers called it “the red devil”;
sometimes they were willing to apply the epithet to its occupant. It
was inevitable, of course, that provincialism should criticize him for
having bought his car in France instead of the home market, and I shall
never forget, so irresistible in retort was he, the instant reply he
made:
“That complaint comes in very bad grace from you protectionists. I
bought my car in France it is true and paid $5,000 for it, but I paid
you $3,000 more in tariff duties to let me bring it home. You made me
pay for it twice and I think I own it now.”
Few have ever been vilified or abused as Johnson was abused in our
state that year; his red car might have been a chariot of flame driven
by an anarchist, from the way some of the people talked. Strange,
inexplicable hatred in humanity for those who love it most! Tom Johnson
campaigned that year on a platform which demanded a two-cent-a-mile
railway fare and the taxation of railroad property at something like
its value, or at least, he said the railroads should pay in taxes as
much, relatively, as a man paid on his home; the poor man was paying on
more than a sixty per cent. valuation while the railways were valued
at eighteen or twenty per cent. This was dangerous, even revolutionary
doctrine, of course, and Johnson was a single-taxer, supposed in
Ohio to be a method of taxation whereby everybody would be relieved
of taxation except the farmers who were to be taxed according to the
superficial area of their farms. And of course Johnson was defeated,
and yet within two years the legislature enacted the first of these
proposals into law with but one dissenting vote. Thus heresy becomes
orthodoxy. The proposal for taxation reform still waits, and will wait,
I fancy, for years, since it is so fundamental, and mankind never
attacks fundamental problems until it has exhausted all the superficial
ones. And yet, while many other changes he contended for in his day
have been made, while many of his heresies have become orthodoxies,
the fear of him possessed the rural mind in the legislature until his
death, and almost any measure could be defeated by merely uttering the
formula “Tom Johnson.”