The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories, as M. George Cain
says, and perhaps that is why I have lingered so long over these little
incidents of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them in no sort of
related order; Jones died years before Johnson; but somehow they seem
to me to have appeared simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern
sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together. Different as
their personalities were, different as two such great originals must
have been, they were one in ideal, and even in their last words they
expressed the vast toil and strain of the efforts they put forth to
attain it.
“Was it worth while?” asked Tom Johnson of his friend Newton Baker, a
day or two before he died. And Sam Jones on that last day turned to his
sister Nell, the noble spirit who had conducted the settlement work at
Golden Rule House, and said:
“‘He that endureth to the end----’ What does it say?”
She repeated the Scripture to him.
“Say it in Welsh,” he said, his thought returning in those ultimate
moments to the speech they had used as children. But before she could
direct her mind into the old sequences, the end had come.
At least, there were those in town who thought it was the end. The
stock of the street railway company went up twenty-four points the
next morning, and some brokers issued a letter saying now that
Jones had died the securities of that enterprise offered a golden
investment--about the most authentic extant illustration, I suppose, of
the utter contemptibility of privilege in these states. The politicians
often had been heard to say that when Jones retired the non-partizan
movement in Toledo would come to an end; in their professional analyses
they had pronounced it a personal following not governed by principle,
and that with the passing of the leader it would disappear and the
voters become tractable and docile partizan automata again. And now
that Jones was dead and one of their organization, the president of the
council, was to succeed to the mayor’s office, the hopes they had so
long entertained seemed at last on the point of realisation. Within a
few weeks, therefore, an ordinance granting the street railway company
a renewal of its rights was passed by the council.
Then, instantly, the old spirit flamed anew; there were editorials,
mass meetings, and all sorts of protest against the action, and in
response to this indignant public feeling, the acting mayor, Mr.
Robert H. Finch, very courageously vetoed the ordinance. But the
machine “had the votes,” and on the following Monday night the council
met to pass the ordinance over the veto. The members of the Republican
organization were there, favored with seats in the office of the city
clerk; lobbyists and the legal representatives of the street railway
company were there. The chamber was crowded; the hot air of the small,
low-ceiled room was charged with a nervous tension; there was in it an
eager expectant quality, not unmixed with dread and fear and guilt. The
atmosphere was offensive to the moral sense--a condition remarked in
other halls in this land when councils and legislatures have been about
to take action that was inimical to the public good.
But the machine councilmen bore themselves jauntily enough; the windows
were open to the soft night of the early autumn, and now and then some
one sauntered in nonchalance over to the windows, and looked down
into St. Clair Street, garish in the white and brilliant light of
the electric signs of theaters, restaurants and saloons. The theater
crowds were already going by, but it was to be noted that they loitered
that evening, and were reënforced by other saunterers, as though the
entertainment of the pavement might surpass that of the painted scene
within. And above all the noises of the street, clanged the gongs of
the street cars gliding by, and, for the moment, as a dramatic center
of the scene, a squad of policemen was stationed in the lobby of the
council chamber.
This nervous, sinister mood was somehow abroad in the whole city that
night. Mr. Negley D. Cochran had written another editorial, published
that evening in heavy type, in the _News-Bee_, calling on the citizens
to come out and protect their rights in the streets of their city, so
that there were apprehensions of all sorts of danger and disaster.
The council proceeded with its business; the voice of the reading
clerk droned on in the resolutions and ordinances that represented the
normal municipal activities of that hour, and then, suddenly, a sound
of a new and unaccustomed sort arose from St. Clair Street, the sound
of the tramp of marching men. Those at the windows, looking out, saw
a strange spectacle--not without its menace; the newspaper reporters,
some of them, embellished their reports with old phrases about faces
blanching. Perhaps they did; they might well have done so, for the men
came down St. Clair Street not as a mob; they were silent, marching in
column, by sets of fours, with an orderly precision and a discipline
almost military. And at their head there was a man whose square, broad
shoulders and firm stride were the last expression of determination.
He wore a slouch hat, under which his gray hair showed; his closely
trimmed beard was grizzled; he looked, as many noted, not unlike the
conventional portraits of General Grant. The man was Mr. Johnson
Thurston, and he was as grim as General Grant, as brave, as determined,
and as cool. He was widely known in Toledo as a lawyer, however, not
as a politician; he had never been in politics, indeed, but he was in
politics that night, surely, and destined to remain in politics for
years to come.
He brought his column to a halt under the windows of the council
chamber. There was no room in that small chamber for such a delegation,
or seemingly for any delegation of the people, however small. Johnson
Thurston’s son marched beside him as an aide, bearing a soap box--the
modern tribune of our democracy--and he placed it on the pavement for
his father. A street car, just then halting, clanged its gong for the
throng to make way, and at this perfect symbol of the foe they were
opposing, Johnson Thurston shook his fist, and shouted:
“Stand there! The people are attending to their business to-night!”
The street car stood, and Johnson Thurston mounted his soap box,
produced a paper and read from it in a loud voice that section of
the Constitution in which the people retain to themselves the right
peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. And
this done, he turned to his followers, gave them a signal, and there
went up from their throats in perfect unison a mighty cry: “Let the
franchise alone!”
Three times they voiced their imperative mandate, and then, at a
signal, they wheeled about, and marched away in the excellent order
in which they had come. Such a demonstration, in the streets, at
night, before a legislative body, had it occurred in a capital or in a
metropolis, would have been historic. As it was, the cry that went up
from those men was heard in the council chamber; and it was destined
to ring through the town for the better part of a decade. The council
did not pass the ordinance over the Mayor’s veto; half an hour later
the councilmen were escorted from their chamber by the police they had
summoned; and a sadly shaken body they were, poor fellows.
Meanwhile the men who had marched with Johnson Thurston had retired
to a vacant storeroom in Superior Street, three blocks away, over
the door of which there was a canvas sign bearing the inscription
“INDEPENDENT HEADQUARTERS.” There they had assembled and been drilled
by Johnson Thurston, as college men are drilled by a leader in their
yells, and with a solemn sense of civic duty they had marched to the
council chamber to save their city from a quarter of a century more
of shameful vassalage to a privileged public utility corporation. The
threat of their presence had been sufficient, but had that proved
unavailing, they had provided other resources. There had been all the
while, from the hour of the opening of the doors that night, twelve
men in the council chamber, armed with bombs, not of dynamite or any
such anarchist explosive, but of asafœtida and sulphureted hydrogen
and I know not what other overpowering fumes and odors, confidently
relied upon to prevail against even so foul a stench as that which a
privileged plutocracy can make in any of the halls of government when
it has determined to secure another lease of its tenure.
At Independent Headquarters, then, that autumn, political meetings were
held, in which local affairs--the street-car situation especially
and the relation it bore to the machines of political parties--were
discussed. Because of those changes the legislature was always
making in the government of cities, three councilman at large were
to be elected. This was in the year 1904, in the midst of a national
campaign. Roosevelt was running for president for his second--or his
first term, depending on the point of view--and three of those men who
had voted for that street railway ordinance, and were ready to vote to
pass it over the mayor’s veto, were candidates on the Republican ticket
for councilmen at large. The Independents who had marched with Johnson
Thurston determined to nominate a city ticket, and they honored me by
offering me the place at the head of that ticket as their candidate
for councilman at large. I was writing another novel just then and
battling as usual against interruptions, and so I begged off; it was
not the campaign I feared, but, as I told them, the fear that I should
be elected. We nominated a ticket, and went into the campaign, speaking
every night, and in November, though Roosevelt carried the city by
fifteen thousand, our candidates for councilmen at large were elected.
Clearly, then, the non-partizan movement had not wholly died with
Golden Rule Jones; his soul, like the soul of John Brown, was marching
on, and still somehow led by him, and inspired by his spirit, there had
sprung forth, like Greek soldiers from the dragon’s teeth, in Toledo
a democratic municipal movement. First of all the cities in America,
she had taken the initial step in freeing herself, the step all
cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their
masters--that of non-partizan municipal elections.