The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty
made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices
as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the
man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been
in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio.
He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an
eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a
member of the Board of Public Safety--we still had the board plan of
government then--and the appointment to office of a young aristocrat
afforded the newspapers and cartoonists an opportunity for ridicule
which they did not overlook. But I knew the boy. I had seen him play
football, for one thing, and I knew how he managed his own business.
The vigor and the nerve he had displayed on the football field at once
showed in his duties, and the ability and devotion he displayed in his
own affairs he applied in the public service. The criticism to which
the administration was constantly subjected distressed him; he heard
so much of it at the fashionable club where he had his luncheons. One
afternoon he came into City Hall with an expression more somber than
usual, and as he sat down in my office he began:
“They are saying----”
“Who are saying?” I asked.
“The people,” he replied.
He had come, of course, from his luncheon at the club. His motor car
was at the door of the city hall, and I asked him to take me for a
drive, and I suggested certain parts of town through which, for a
change, we might go. We ignored the avenues and the boulevards, and for
two hours drove about through quiet streets far from the life of the
town as we knew it and as all men down in the business section knew
it--the old third ward, where the Poles lived, and around to the upper
end of the old seventh where the shops and factories were, and then on
over through the eighth and the ninth, and so up to the Hill, and after
we had passed by all those blocks and blocks of humble little homes,
cottages of one story, and all that, I asked him if he knew what the
folk who lived in them were saying about the administration.
“Why, no,” he answered. “I never talk with any of them.”
“Well,” I ventured to say, “they are the people, they who live in those
little houses with the low roofs. It is important to know how they
feel, too.”
I always felt that he had a new vision after that; he saw that if
government was to mean anything to these persons, it must be made
human, and the reforms in the police and fire departments he wrought
out in that spirit were such that when he died, in not quite four
years, when he was just turned thirty, the cartoonist had long since
ceased to caricature him as an idle fop, and the newspaper editorials
mourned him, in common with most of the community, as one of the best
public servants our city, or any city, ever had.