However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor
exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so
many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and
habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes,
separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo
something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every
day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel,
a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result
is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the
streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which
strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the
activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer,
who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make
the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles
and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are
obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of
free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding
office; whether the East Side is receiving its due consideration in
comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball
in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of
morals is to prevail--these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever
before him.
And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost
supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees--of
aged men--demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the
public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed
at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses
in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable
ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them
more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their
neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout
that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall
him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist
him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were
ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from
prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction.
I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one
evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well;
“I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.”
Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their
difficulties. I remember one poor soul whose husband was in the
penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and
showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor
had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged
his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him
before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that
the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being
good to prisoners.”
Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly
powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each
new attempt at explanation she said:
“You are the father of all.”
It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population
employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula.
This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to
those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the
native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of
the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in
refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively
advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously
radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much
of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.
It may have been because, in some way, it had got abroad that I was
a reformer myself. It was at a time when there was new and searching
inquiry, and a new sense of public decency, the result of a profound
impulse in the public consciousness, and I had been of those who in
my town had opposed the political machines. Constructive thinking and
constructive work being the hardest task in the world, one of which
our democracy in its present development is not yet fully capable, the
impulse spent itself largely in destructive work. That was natural;
it is a quality inherent in humanity. My friend Kermode F. Gill, the
artist-builder and contractor of Cleveland, once told me that while
it is difficult to get men to carry on any large construction, and
carry it on well, and necessary to set task masters over them to have
the work done at all, there is a wholly different spirit in evidence
when the work is one of demolition. If a great building is to be torn
down, the men need no task masters, no speeding up, they fly at it in a
perfect frenzy, with a veritable passion, and tear it down so swiftly
that the one difficulty is to get the salvage. And in the course of
building public works I have observed the same phenomenon. While the
forces are tearing down, while they are excavating, that black fringe
of spectators, the “crow line” the builders call it, is always there.
But when once the work is above ground, and construction begins, when
the structure lifts itself, when it aspires,--the crow line dissolves
and melts quite away. This, in a sense, is true of man in any of his
operations. When the great awakening came, after the first shock of
surprise, after the first resolve to do better, the public went at the
work of demolition, all about the arena the thumbs of the multitude
were turned down, and we witnessed the tragedy of men who but a short
while before had been praised and lauded for their possessions, and
used as models for little boys in Sunday-school, suddenly stripped of
all their coveted garments, and held up to the hatred and ridicule
of a world that can yet think of nothing better than the stocks, the
pillory, the jail, and the scaffold.
In Edinburgh I was shown a little church of which Sir Walter Scott was
once a vestryman, or deacon or elder or some such official, and in the
door still hung the irons in which offenders were fastened on Sunday
mornings so that the righteous, as they went to pray, might comfort
themselves with a consoling sense of their own goodness by spitting in
the face of the sinner. Many of our reforms are still carried on in
this spirit, and are no more sensible or productive of good.
The word “reformer,” like the word “politician” has degenerated,
and, in the mind of the common man, come to connote something very
disagreeable. In four terms as mayor I came to know both species
pretty well, and, in the later connotations of the term, I prefer the
politician. He, at least, is human. The reformers, as Emerson said,
affect one as the insane do; their motives may be pious, but their
methods are profane. They are a buzz in the ear.
I had read this in Emerson in my youth, when for a long time I had
a veritable passion for him, just as in a former stage, and another
mood, I had had a veritable passion for books about Napoleon, and, at
another, for the works of Carlyle, and the controversy excited by the
reckless Froude; but the truth--as it appears to me, or at any rate,
the part of a truth--was not borne in upon me until I came to know and
to regard, with dread, the possibility that I might be included in
their number, which I should not like, unless it were as a mere brother
in humanity, somewhat estranged in spirit though we should be.