The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well
known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for
office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps
deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian
goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love
the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so
with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not
all care to hold office, even if most people do smile indulgently
when the modest disinclination is expressed. Perhaps such scepticism
is quite natural in a land so saturated in privilege that even office
holding is regarded in that light--or was until recently, for now a
new conception is expanding in the public consciousness and there is
hope that ere long public office will be regarded as a responsibility.
I was quite sure that I did not care to be a councilman--that weekly
wrangle, by night, in a room choking with the fumes of cheap tobacco,
known as the session of the common council, was far from my tastes. And
when the mayoralty was suggested to me I was quite as certain that I
did not wish that. For it was not long after the death of Jones that
it was suggested; by Tom Johnson for one, who, in his blunt way, told
me that I should run for the place; and by Steffens, who, just then in
Cleveland, was writing the article in which Tom Johnson was celebrated
as “the best mayor of the best governed city in America,” and Steffens
found time now and then to come over to Toledo to see us. “And another
thing,” he wrote to me after one of these visits, “you’ll have to run
for mayor.” He reached this conclusion, I believe, by a process of
inversion. He had been talking with some of the machine politicians,
and it was their objection to me as a candidate that caused him to
see my duty in that light. I was at one with them on that point, at
any rate; they could have been no more reluctant to have me run than
I myself was. Tom Johnson, when the Democrats met in their state
convention at Columbus that year, might propose me for governor, and
the delegation of his county, Cuyahoga, and the delegation from my own
county of Lucas vote for my nomination, but that stroke of political
lightning was easily arrested by rods that had been more accurately and
carefully adjusted, so that I could take the manuscript of “The Turn of
the Balance” and go to Wequetonsing on the shores of Little Traverse
Bay, where the days are blue and gold, and there is sparkling sunshine,
and a golf links where one may find happiness, if he is on his game,
or if he is not, consolation in that noble view from the hill--the tee
at the old fourth and the new twelfth hole--when he may, if he wish,
imagine himself in Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples--which is no
more beautiful. Meredith Nicholson, a hale old Hoosier friend, as James
Whitcomb Riley used to phrase it, was there, too, near the spot where
he wrote that excellent novel, “The Main Chance,” and in that country
place with him and other charming friends near by I spent the summer.
But when I came home in the autumn the campaign was already on, and the
Independents had all but nominated me as their candidate for mayor.
They were forced to make their nominations by petition, and on the
petitions proposing me for the office there were many thousands of
names, pages that were stained with the grime and dust and grease of
factories and shops--a diploma in its way, which might have made one
proud, had not the prospect been one to make one so very unhappy. For
I knew what the mayoralty had done to Jones. I had come to realize in
my association with him that there is no position more difficult than
that of the mayor of a large city in the America of our times, for
the city is a kind of microcosm where are posited in miniature all
the problems of a democracy, and the fact that they are in miniature
only increases the difficulty. My ambitions lay in another field,
and besides I had a feeling against it, dim and vague, though since
adequately expressed in one of those fine generalizations which Señor
Guglielmo Ferrero makes on his brilliant page; “there is no sphere of
activity,” he says, writing of the perils of political life, “which is
so much at the mercy of unforeseen accidents or where the effort put
out is so incommensurable with the result obtained.” It is, of course,
one of the privileges of the citizen in a democracy to be “mentioned”
for public office; if no one else mentions him he can mention himself,
and whenever someone else does mention him there are many who ascribe
to his originality the credit for the suggestion.
It seems difficult for our people to understand any man who really does
not desire public office in a land where it has so long been regarded
purely as a privilege to be bestowed or a prize to be contested. I
suppose that even the blunt and grim old warrior Sherman caused the
people to smile when he said that if nominated for the presidency he
would not accept and if elected he would not serve. They wondered what
he meant, and for a time it never occurred to them that he meant just
what he said.
But the day came at last when I must decide, and to a committee of the
Independents I said that I should give them an answer in the morning.
I thought it all over again in the watches of the night,--and the
unfinished manuscript on my library table--and at last, since somebody
had to do it, since somebody had to point out at least the danger of
risking the community rights in the hands of a political machine, I
said I would accept. I suppose that it is but an expression of that
ironic mood in which the Fates delight to deal with mortals that it
should be so easy to get that which one does not want; the Independents
insisted on my standing for the office, but the only humor in that
fact was just then too grim for pleasure, though there is always a
compensation somewhere after all, and gloomy as I was that morning at
the prospect of the bitter campaign and the difficulties that would
follow if I were elected, I could laugh when “Dad” McCullough, the
old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to
our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a
mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of
his committee not to hear him, said:
“Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear
down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?”
His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be
drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it!
And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall,
before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried
to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All
the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to
which we had been used in Jones’s campaigns were revived and repeated
with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was
ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb
the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by “Dad”
McCullough as “bearing down on the infirmities of the law,” was now
represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce
none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the
Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos.
To this “moral” issue that had served for so many years, the “good”
people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certain
of the clergy to lead them rallied instantly about the machine, and
for six weeks reveled in an inspection of all the city’s vices, and
mouseled in the slums and stews of the tenderloin for examples of the
depravity which they declared it was the purpose and design of the
Independents to intensify and perpetuate. Their own candidate had
been in power for a year and a half and these conditions had existed
unmolested, but when some of our speakers indicated this inconsistency
in their attitude they only raged the more.
But notwithstanding all this, the issue was clear; the machine had
helped to make it clear, not only by its long opposition to Jones, but
more recently by its efforts for the street railway company. It was the
old issue between privilege and democracy, that has marked the cleavage
in society in all ages. The people were trying to take back their own
government, for the purpose, first, of preventing the street railway
company from securing another lease of the city’s streets for a quarter
of a century, by which, incidentally, the company would realize profits
on about twenty-five million dollars of watered stock. But the people
were not to be deceived; they were not to be turned off the trail so
easily; and the entire ticket was elected, so that at the beginning of
that new year the Independents were in control of every branch of the
government, not only in the city, but in the county as well.