It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration,
or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of
machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service
corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call
themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to
exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies
and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration
from themselves and their larger and more complex immoralities to the
small and uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the hope
of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued, just as friends of the
fox might turn aside the hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the
trail. Many a progressive administration in this land has been led
into that _cul de sac_, and as Mr. Carl Hovey observed recently of the
neat saying to the effect that the way to get rid of a bad law is to
enforce it, the process usually proves to be merely the way to get rid
of a good administration. The effort had been made by the opponents
of Golden Rule Jones and it had failed. It had been attempted in the
case of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously enough the
effort was never made in Toledo or in Cleveland or in Cincinnati,
or elsewhere for that matter, in the days of machine domination. The
Puritan never lets his religion interfere with business.
I used often to recall, in those days, a witty saying of Mr. William
Travers Jerome, when he was District Attorney in New York. He said he
often wished that there were two volumes of the Revised Statutes, one
to contain the laws enacted for human beings, and the other to embalm
the moral yearnings of rural communities.
It was disturbing and discouraging, of course, to feel that out there
in the community there was this shadowy mass of well intentioned
people, the most of whom no doubt, in common with all the rest of
us, did wish to see moral improvement, and yet so misconstrued and
misinterpreted our efforts. It was saddening, too, because in the
work we were trying to do we should have liked their sympathy, their
interest and their support. Because of their wider opportunity of
enlightenment much better and nobler things might have been demanded
of them, but as Johnson Thurston one night pointed out, they did not
show as much civic spirit, as much concern for the common weal as
those of smaller opportunities, those bad people as they called them
of whom much less would naturally have been expected. I made a rule,
as I have already said somewhere in these pages, not to talk back,
or to argue with them. They viewed life from the Puritan standpoint,
and I suppose that I viewed it from the pagan standpoint. The sins of
others and their mistakes and failures never did excite in me that
moral indignation which exists in the breasts of some; perhaps the old
distinction between bad people and good people had been blurred in my
consciousness. I could see that the bad people did many good things
in their lives, and that the good people thought many dark and evil
thoughts. I had seen indeed so much more kindness and consideration,
so much more pity and mercy shown by the bad that I felt strengthened
in my philosophy and in my belief that if their environment could be
improved, if they could have a better chance in life, they would be as
good as anybody. It seemed to me that most of the crime in the world
was the result of involuntary poverty, and the tremendous, perhaps
insuperable task, was to make involuntary poverty impossible. But in
the meantime there was other work to be done. Aside from the problem of
transportation which was but one phase of the great struggle between
privilege and the people, of plutocracy with democracy, there were
civic centers, city halls, markets, swimming pools, bridges to be
built, parks to be improved, boulevards and parkways to be laid out,
a filtration plant to be installed, improvements in all of the other
departments, a great mass of wonderful work for the promotion of the
public amenities, the public health, and the adornment of the city,
in a word, there was a city to be built, and strangely enough this
group of objectors of whom I have been speaking, were so intensely
preoccupied with moral considerations that they never had even the
slightest interest in these improvements. I think it is this spirit of
Puritanism that has made the cities of America so ugly, or permitted
them to be ugly; such conceptions as beauty and ugliness are perhaps
impossible to minds that know no distinction but good and bad, and for
this reason it has been difficult to make an æsthetic appeal with any
effectiveness.
During three of my four terms in that office the nasty quarrel about
morals raged. As I look back and think now with what virulence it did
rage, it appeals to me as a remarkable psychological phenomenon. Of
course it was bad for those who engaged in it, and bad for the town
as well, for such an exaggerated idea of conditions was given that
the police in neighboring cities, clever rogues that they were, could
always excuse and exculpate themselves for any of their delinquencies
by saying that the thieves that had come to town hailed from Toledo, or
that those they could not catch had gone and taken refuge there. But I
did not engage in the discussion nor permit the police officials to do
so. There was no time, since there was so much other work to do, and
we went on as well as we could with what Tom Johnson used to call the
policy of administrative repression, improving moral conditions with
such means as we had. We did succeed in eliminating the wine rooms,
in closing the saloons at midnight, and finally, after a tremendous
effort, in extirpating professional gambling. It was of no consequence
that it did not have any effect upon criticism, for we did not do it
to stop criticism, and the discussion went on until I had been elected
for the third time, and immediately after that election when a large
majority of the people had again spoken their minds on the subject, it
was considered the proper time to reopen the discussion and to hold a
so-called civic revival. The young, uncultured man they brought to town
to conduct that revival, could have known nothing whatever of life, and
was wholly unconscious of the great economic forces which, with so much
complexity and friction, were building the modern city. He came to call
on me before he opened his revival that he might have, as he said, a
personal, private and confidential talk. When I asked him how the city
could be regenerated, he said he did not know, but this fact did not
prevent him from telling the audiences he addressed that week just what
should be done, and that he, for instance, could nobly do it, and in
the end they sent a committee to me to tell me what to do, if not how
to do it. I asked the committee to reduce their complaints to writing,
to point out those evils which they considered most objectionable,
and to propose means of combating them. The committee went away and
I confess I did not expect to see them again because I had no notion
that they could ever agree as to the particular evils, but after some
weeks they had come to terms on a few heads, and filed their complaint
pointing out several specific vices in town, and as a remedy proposed
that they be “prevented.” I replied to them in a letter in which I
said all I could think of at that time or all I could think of now on
this whole vexed problem. It was printed in pamphlet form and rather
widely circulated, and finally published as a little book.[B] I do not
know that it convinced anybody who was not convinced already. I think
we got along a little better afterward than we had before, and by the
time my fourth term was done the phenomenon of the discussion, if not
the vice, had disappeared. After my letter was sent to the committee,
it was said that they would reply to it, but they never did, and
instead invited the Reverend William A. Sunday to come to the city to
conduct a revival. It was announced by some that he came to assault our
position, but when he arrived Captain Anson, the old Chicago baseball
player, under whom Mr. Sunday had played baseball in his younger days,
happened to be giving his monologue at a variety theater that week,
and he and Mr. Sunday together called on me. I do not know when I have
had a pleasanter hour than that we spent talking about the old days in
Chicago when Anson had been playing first base and I had been reporting
the baseball games for the old _Herald_. That, to be sure, was after
the days of Billy Sunday’s services in right field, but it was not too
late for me to have known and celebrated the prowess of that famous
infield, Anson, Pfeffer, Williamson and Burns, and we could celebrate
them again and speculate as to whether there were really giants in
those days whose like was known on earth no more.
Mr. Sunday conducted his revival with the success that usually attends
his efforts in that direction, but he did not mention me or the
administration until the very close of his visit, when he said that
we were doing as well as anybody could be expected to do under all the
circumstances.