I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment
was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s
participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden
Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much
perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land,
where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience,
when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The
condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of
its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order
these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of
municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the
German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil
service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly
because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and
for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored
relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule
Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected
to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable
imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement
in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique.
And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and
they were many and respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none
whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and
that was, that I did not know.
Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be
called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though
even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be
realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West,
I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made
them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in
America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole,
after four terms in a mayor’s office testing them, I still believe
to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local
government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we
had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines
ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and
the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished
was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the
same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs;
representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these
remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say--non-partizan city
elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the
task, this was the program.
We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory
possible by his great pioneer work in destroying the superstition of
party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should
say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans
who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private
hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because
its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through
the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six
times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the
legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew
nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country
lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic
opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their
party confreres and conspirators from the city--machine politicians
to whom they turned for advice--but gain a cheap _réclame_ at home
by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the
bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and
their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office
holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on
every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the “good”
people were always insisting on the “moral” issue; urging us to turn
aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official
attention on the “bad” people--and wreck our movement. Our immediate
purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to
obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of
transmuting twenty-five millions in green paper into twenty-five
millions in gold, and thereby absorb the commercial values of half a
century. To do this it was necessary to win elections for years, and
to win elections, one must have votes, and “bad” people have votes,
equally with “good” people, and if one is to judge from the comment of
the “good” people on the election returns, the “bad” people in most
cities are in the majority. On that point, I believe, the reformers and
the politicians at least are agreed. More than this, we had to obtain
from reluctant legislatures the powers that would put the city at least
on equal terms with the corporations which had always proved so much
more potent than the city. Such was the struggle our movement faced,
such was the victory to be won before our city could be free from the
triumvirate that so long had exploited it, the political boss, the
franchise promoter, and the country politician. The Free City! That was
the noble dream.
Well might the wise and sophisticated laugh at their mayor and call him
dreamer! It was, and, alas, it is a dream. But youth is so sublimely
confident, and counts so little on opposition. Not the opposition of
those who array themselves against it--that was to be expected, of
course, that was part of the glorious conflict--but the opposition from
within the ranks, the opposition on the hither side of the barricade.
For youth thinks, sometimes, that even opponents may be won, if only
they can be brought to that vantage ground whence one inevitably
beholds the fair and radiant vision. It had not expected the falling
away of followers, of supporters, even of friends--the strangely
averted eye on the street, the suddenly abandoned weekly call, the
cessation of little notes of encouragement, the amazing revelations of
malignity and bitterness at election times, and the flood increasing in
volume at each succeeding election. One man, thought to be devoted to
a cause, fails in his desire to secure an office; another you refuse a
contract; he whom you neglected to favor in January punctually appears
in the opposition ranks in November, one by one they drop away, and
multiply into an army. Even in the official group in the City Hall and
in the council, there are jealousies, and childish spites, and pitiable
little ambitions and with them misunderstanding, gossip, slander,
anonymous attacks, lies, abuse, hatred, until youth makes the awful
discovery that there is, after all, in human nature, pure malice, and
youth must fight hard to retain its ideals, so continually are all the
old lovely illusions stripped away in this bewildering complication of
little tragedies and comedies we call life.
To be sure, youth might have known, having read the like in books from
infancy, and having made some reflections of its own on the irony of
things, and indulged from time to time in philosophizings. But that was
about the experience of others, from which none of us is wise enough
to learn. Most of us indeed are not wise enough to learn from our own.
It is all a part of life. What a thing human life is, to be sure, and
human nature! _Ay di mi!_ as Carlyle used to say. Patience, and shuffle
the cards!...
... I had no intention of recalling such things. Did not Jones say that
when the Golden Rule would not work, it was not the fault of the Rule,
but because one did not quite know how to work it? I have no intention
of setting down the failures or the little successes of four terms as
mayor. Nor shall I write a little history of those terms in office;
I could not, and it would not be worth while if I could. I shall not
attempt in these pages a treatise on municipal government, for if the
task were rightly executed, it would be a history of civilization.
Non-partizanship in municipal elections, municipal ownership, home
rule for cities,--who is interested in these? I have discussed them
in interviews--(“Is there to be a statement for us this morning, Mr.
Mayor?”)--and speeches numerous as autumn leaves, and like them, lost
now in the winds to which they were given.
After all, it is life in which we are all interested. And one sees a
deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage
it as--just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one
cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine
to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition,
or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One
indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold
its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and
its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. He may discern
there the operations of universal and inexorable laws, and realize the
tremendous conflict that everywhere and in all times goes on between
privilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may
make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib
and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it
make him the slave of its own _clichés_, as Socialists for instance,
when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse,
emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula “Economic determinism.”
But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple
only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there
appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most
exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and
comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must
always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human
minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity
of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens
to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no
doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore
been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no
rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of
privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones
said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty
ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and
glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know
not where nor how, and all pretty much alike. And government, be its
form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The
city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with
those strange embracing gestures, “I believe in _all_ the people.”