One remembers one’s friends in various attitudes, and I see Tom
Johnson now standing on the platform in the old tent, under the
flaring lights, with the eager crowd before him--there were never
such intelligent audiences to speak to as those in Cleveland, unless
it were those in Toledo--and he was at his best when the crowd was
heckling him. He was like Severus Cassius, who, as Montaigne says,
“spoke best extempore, and stood more obliged to fortune than his own
diligence; it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking,
and his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger redouble
his eloquence.” He voluntarily introduced the custom of heckling so
prevalent in England and Scotland, because at first he was not a
proficient speaker; he was so simple, so direct, so positive, that
he could state his position in a very few words. Thus, as he told me
once, his speeches were too short for the customary political meeting
in a state where political oratory flowed on and on indefinitely, and
he asked the crowd to put questions to him. This stirred him up, put
him on his mettle, stimulated his thought, and he was best at this
short range. And no one ever got the better of him. Once an opponent
triumphantly demanded, in a campaign in which Johnson’s administration
was charged with extravagance:
“Mr. Johnson, is it not a fact that under your administration the
Cleveland workhouse has lost money?”
“Yes, sir,” the Mayor replied promptly.
“How do you explain that?”
“We are not trying to make money in the Cleveland workhouse,” the Mayor
replied instantly, “we are trying to make MEN!”
Or again I see him, superintending the tearing up of street railway
tracks, on streets where the franchises of the private company had
expired, to make room for the rails of the city company, calmly smoking
a cigar, and with a gesture of his expressive delicate white hand
waving aside the latest of the many injunctions that were sued out
against him. The battle was never lost to him, though his followers
were often discouraged. He might have said of court injunctions as
Napoleon said of bullets at the battle of Krasnoi:
“Bah! They have been whistling about our legs these forty years!”
But I see him best I think in the great hall of his home in Euclid
Avenue, one short, fat leg tucked comfortably under him, his cigar
in his aristocratic hand, his friends and admirers about him. It was
a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men. One of them had been
originally an opponent, one of those who heckled him in the tent, a
fiery young radical not long since a blacklisted mechanic who had
gone hungry when on strike, Peter Witt, one of the most picturesque
personalities in Ohio politics; he became one of Johnson’s intimate
friends and strongest supporters, and a splendid speaker on the stump.
He was city clerk of Cleveland under all the Johnson administrations
and is now the street railway commissioner of that city under Mayor
Newton D. Baker, who, as city solicitor, was another of the group of
those happy days. Mr. Baker was like a boy in appearance, with his
sensitive face and the ideals of a poet, and a brilliant lawyer. He
carried all the legal burden of the long street railway controversy in
Cleveland,--it was almost a civil war--and did it all with such skill
and ability, and withal with such grace and courtesy and good nature
that he never offended his opponents, who were the leading corporation
lawyers of the city. Frederic C. Howe had been elected to the council
in Cleveland as a Republican from one of the most aristocratic wards,
but he was won over by Johnson’s personality, was renominated by
Johnson on the Democratic ticket, afterwards sent to the state senate
and became one of the foremost men in the liberal movement in America;
his books on municipal government are authorities. And Dr. Cooley; he
was a Disciple preacher, and Johnson placed him at the head of the
department of charities and corrections, so that, as Johnson used
to say, instead of a preacher Dr. Cooley became a minister. It was
delightful to be with them in those gatherings. The genuine reform of
conditions in that city possessed them all like a passion; they were
stimulated by a common ambition, which was, as Johnson used to say,
to make Cleveland a city set on a hill, and though he was not a poet
nor a maker of phrases everyone instinctively knew what he meant when
he spoke of his city set on a hill. I do not know how much of history
he had read, but he knew intuitively that the city in all ages has
been the outpost of civilization, and that if the problem of democracy
is to be solved at all it is to be solved first in the city. That
was why he struggled for the free city, struggled to make the city
democratic; he knew that the cure for the ills of democracy is not
less democracy, as so many were always preaching, but more democracy.
And how delighted he was when Fred Howe brought out his book “The City
the Hope of Democracy.” He had the joy of seeing marshaled there in the
thesis of a scholar all the arguments he had apprehended but had never
reduced to terms; there they were, all in their logical order--and
Johnson straightway sent a copy of the book to every member of the Ohio
legislature, to their amazement no doubt, if not to their amusement.
I used to like to go over to Cleveland and meet that charming group
Johnson had gathered about him. There was in them a spirit I never saw
in such fullness elsewhere; they were all working for the city, they
thought only of the success of the whole. They had the city sense, a
love of their town like that love which undergraduates have for their
university, the _esprit de corps_ of the crack regiment.
But Johnson used to set me to work with the rest of them. I went over
there once to spend the week’s end, for rest and relaxation, and he had
me working far into three nights on amendments to the municipal code.
He had terrible energy, but it was a joy to work with him. I wish I had
gone oftener.
I have said enough I hope to make it clear that Tom Johnson was one
of those mortals who have somehow been lifted above their fellows far
enough to catch a vision of the social order which people generally
as yet do not see. It was inevitable, of course, that such a man,
especially since he was a rich man, should have his motives impugned,
and I recall now with what a confidential chuckle he said to me one
time when he had been accused of I know not what vaulting and wicked
ambition:
“I am politically ambitious; I have just one ambition; I want to be the
mayor of a free city, and if I were, the very first thing I should do
would be to appoint a corps of assessors who couldn’t see a building,
or an improvement; they would assess for taxation nothing but the value
of the land, and we would try out the single tax.”
He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his
ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make
possible the coming of the free city in this land.
His struggle for three-cent railway fares in Cleveland, which was but a
roundabout method of securing municipal ownership in a state where the
legislature in those days would not permit cities to own their public
utilities was his great work. He lived to see that successful in a way,
though not exactly in the way he had expected; that is another irony
which the fates visit on the head of ambitious men.
And yet that irony of the fates is not always, after all, unkind.
Somehow, after a while, in the lengthened perspective, the broadened
vision that reveals a larger segment of the arc, the event is seen in
better proportion. It requires faith in one’s cause to see this always,
and Johnson always had that faith. I shall not forget how when the
people at last voted against him, he still could smile, and say to me:
“The people are probably right.” It was the last time I saw him. He
was sick then, and dying, and sadly changed; the hair that had been
so black and curly that summer morning long before, had grown thin and
white; the face, sadly lined with weariness, was sublimated by a new
expression. There was the same courage in the classic profile, and the
old smile was there. He was writing his memoirs with a courage as grim
as that of General Grant--and he had the equanimity of Antoninus Pius.
And on his countenance there was the expression of a purified ideal. So
he had won; his was the victory after all.