XL

These observations come with the recollection of those days of my first

term in the mayor’s office when I had so much to do with reformers

that I earnestly desired that no one would ever include me in their

category. They came to see me so often and in such numbers that my

whole view of life was quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that

half the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind, and their

first need was to get the mayor to use the police force to help them.

When they did not call at the office, they were writing letters. The

favorite day for these expressions of the reforming spirit was Monday.

I had been many months in the office however, before I was able to make

this generalization, though from the first I could observe that Monday

took on something of that dismal and somber tone which has given it

its name of blue Monday. In the early days of a simpler life in our

country, when the customs of the pioneer had not been superseded by the

complexities of modern existence, its color used to be ascribed to the

fact that it was wash day, and perhaps it has remained a sort of moral

wash day ever since. At any rate we soon discovered that everyone who

had a grievance or a complaint or a suggestion about his neighbor or

some larger scheme of reforming whole groups of the population was most

likely to be heavily charged with it on Monday, and since the almost

universal conception among us is that all reforms can be wrought by the

mayor, by the simple process of issuing an order to the police, these

complaints were of course lodged at the mayor’s office.

They were of a curious variety, expressing, I suppose, not only all

the moral yearnings of mankind, but all the meaner moods of human

nature, and each new Monday morning seemed to have in reserve, for a

nature that was trying to keep its faith in humanity, some fresh and

theretofore unimagined instance of the depths of little meannesses to

which human nature is capable of sinking. Many of them came in person

with their criticism, others sent anonymous letters. Then there were

those who came to repeat ugly things they had heard about me; “I

wouldn’t tell you this if I were not your friend. I think you ought

to know it.” Later in the afternoon the evenings’ newspapers, with

the criticisms marked, were laid on my desk. All this made Monday

the hardest day of the week, especially as the day closed with the

hebdominal session of the council, where one might find now and then

some pretty discouraging examples of human meanness. Tuesday was not

quite so bad, though it was trying; human nature seemed to run pretty

high, or pretty low, on that day, too. By Wednesday, the atmosphere

began to clear, and by Thursday and Friday, everyone seemed to be

attending to his own business and letting the faults of his neighbors

go unnoted or at least unreported, and Saturday was a day of such calm

that one’s whole faith in humanity was miraculously restored; if the

weather was fine one might almost discover human nature as to be good

as that nature which would reveal herself on the golf links.

As a result of it all we finally made the deduction--my secretary

Bernard Dailey, the stenographers in the office and the reporters who

formed so pleasant an element of the life there--that it was all due

to the effects of the Sunday that had intervened. In the first place,

people had leisure on that day and in that leisure they could whet up

their consciences and set them to the congenial task of dissecting the

characters of other people, or they could contemplate the evils in the

world and resolve highly to make the mayor do away with them, and then

after the custom of our land they could gorge on the huge Sunday noon

dinner of roast beef, and then lie about all afternoon like pythons in

a torpor which produced an indigestion so acute and lasting that for

three days it passed very well for pious fervor and zeal for reform.

Such at least was our theory, offered here solely in the scientific

spirit, and not by any means as final. It was acquiesced in by all of

us at the time, and has been supported by an unvarying series of data

on the Monday mornings since then.

We submitted it to Henry Frisch, the police sergeant who had been

detailed for duty in the mayor’s office for many years, a dear and

comfortable soul, who had served under several mayors, and had

developed a philosophy of life that was a very Nirvana of comfort

and repose. Long ago, so it seemed when he smiled indulgently on the

discomfiture of blue Monday, he had given up humanity as a bad job; to

him the race was utterly and irredeemably hopeless, and without the

need of saying a word he could shake his honest head at the suggestion

of a new reform with a motion that was eloquent of all negation. He was

very tolerant, however, and made no argument in rebuttal, he simply

refused to accept humanity on any general plane; regarding the race as

a biological species merely, he would confide to you that his years of

experience at that post and as a policeman who had paced his beat and

afterward commanded a sergeant’s squad, had convinced him that it was

altogether depraved, dishonest and disgusting, but with any individual

specimen of the species he was not that way at all. He was really

kindness itself. The next minute, with tears in his eyes, he would go

to any extremes to help some poor devil out of trouble. Unless it were

reformers; for these he had no use, he said, and if his advice had been

accepted he would have been permitted to expel them from the City Hall

by their own beloved weapons of violence and force of arms. On Sundays

he went fishing.

Perhaps at the time of which I am thinking, if not very specifically

writing, there was more of this Monday spirit of reform than is

usual. In the first place, much is expected of a new official and

because he does not promptly work those miracles which are confidently

expected whether he was foolish enough to promise them or not, he is

so generally complained of that it may be set down as an axiom of

practical politics that any elected official, in the executive branch

of the government, could be recalled at any time during the first year

of his incumbency of his office. Just then, too, there had been elected

to the governorship a gentleman who had been very deeply devoted to

the interests of the Methodist Church, the strongest denomination

numerically in Ohio--the first governor of Ohio, indeed, was a

Methodist preacher--and because of that fact and because of the use in

his inaugural message of the magic phrase “law and order,” it was at

once announced in the most sensational manner of the sensational press

that, unless all the sumptuary laws in Ohio were drastically enforced,

all the mayors of the cities would be removed. Governor Pattison had

been elected as a Democrat, and during his campaign Tom Johnson and

I had supported him, and it was while we were in Columbus at his

inauguration that this sensation was exploited in the newspapers. I

remember how Tom Johnson received it when one of his coterie brought

the extra editions into the hotel and pointed out to him the dreadful

predictions of the headlines; the white, aristocratic hand waved the

suggestion imperiously aside, and he said:

“Four days, and it’ll all be over. That’s the life of a newspaper

sensation.”

I believe that newspaper editors themselves place the limit of the

effectiveness of a sensation at about that time, though some of them

are so shrewd that they drop the sensation the day before the people

begin to lose interest in it, instead of waiting for the day on which

they actually tire of it. Which may be an explanation of the fact that

the beginnings of things are always treated so much more fully in the

press than their endings; one always reads of the opening of the trial,

and the awful charge, but is never told how it all came out in the end,

unless the end was catastrophic. The theory of the press is, I believe,

that good news is no news.

I do not know that poor Governor Pattison ever had any intention of

raising the issue of local self-government, and of raising it in such

a direct and positive way as by attempting to remove all the mayors

of Ohio towns and cities in which it could be shown that some little

enactment of the legislature had failed of absolute enforcement; I

suppose he had no such intention, since the law gave him no such power,

though that made no difference to the professional reverencers and

enforcers of law. The poor man never saw the governor’s office after

that night of his brilliant inauguration, when he stood, very dark and

weary, with features drawn, but resolutely smiling, at his levee in the

senate chamber, a tragic figure in a way, the first Democratic governor

in a long while, and the fates treating him with their customary irony

and indignity by setting their seal upon him in the very hour of his

triumph. He died in a few months, but there remained many of course who

could prophesy in his name and cast out devils with each extra edition

of the newspapers, and the discussion of law enforcement has gone on

pretty steadily from that time to this.