It is, however, a curious characteristic of our people, or of the vocal
minority of them, that while they insist on every possible interference
with every private and personal right, in the field of moral conduct,
they nevertheless will tolerate no interference whatever with property
rights. Thus it was precisely as Cossacks that many employers of labor
insisted on my using the police to cow their workmen whenever there was
a strike.
During my first term it befell that our city was torn by strikes,
all the union machinists in town walked out, then the moulders, and
at last a great factory wherein automobiles were made was “struck,”
as the workingmen say. It is impossible to give an idea of the worry
such a condition causes officials. It is more than that sensation
of weariness, of irritation, even of disgust, which it causes the
general public. This is due partly to the resentment created by the
interference with physical comfort, and even peace of mind, since there
is in us all something more than a fear of disorder and tumult, in that
innate love of harmony which exists potentially in humanity. But to the
official there is a greater difficulty because of the responsibility to
which he is held. People intuitively regard strikers as public enemies,
and while the blame for the irritation caused by strikes is visited
on the direct and apparent cause, that is, the strikers themselves; it
is visited, too, on the official head of the local government, who is
supposed to be able somehow to put a stop to such things. The general
or mass intelligence will not as yet go much deeper than the superfices
of the problem, or seek to understand the causes of economic unrest and
disorder; it still thinks in old sequences and puts its trust in the
weapons of the flesh.
I think I shall never forget the first call I had from a delegation
of manufacturers during the early days of those strikes. They came in
not too friendly spirit, but rather in their capacity of “citizens
and tax-payers,” standing on their rights, as they understood them,
though they in common with most of us and with the law as well, had
only the most hazy notions as to what those rights were, and perhaps
still hazier notions as to their duties. “We come,” said the spokesman,
“representing two millions of dollars’ worth of property.”
They could not have put their case more frankly. But I, as I was able
to recall in that moment, represented two hundred thousand people,
themselves among them of course. And here at the very outset was the
old conflict in its simplest terms, of man against property. Now,
in that old struggle, while I had made no sacrifices in the cause
and have been of no especial service in it, I had nevertheless given
intellectual assent to the general propositions advanced in favor of
the human side, the side of man. By prejudice, or perversity, or
constitutionally, I considered men of more value than factories. I had
perhaps never heard of a strike, for instance, in which my sympathies
were not impulsively with the strikers. I could always see that poor
foreigner, whose body had lain there on the cold damp rocks at Lemont
so many years before, and somehow I could not get out of my mind’s eye
the figures of the workmen on strike, many of them hungry and desperate
as their wives and children were; they seemed to me to be in straits
more dire than their harried and harassed and worried employers, though
I could feel sorry for them, too, since even if they were not hungry,
they, too, were the victims of the anarchy of our industrial system.
They had of course no social conscience whatever, but perhaps they
could not help that. But there they were, bringing their troubles to
the mayor, whom perhaps they did not wholly regard as their mayor,
since they had some prescience of the fact that in that mayor’s mind
was always the memory of those throngs of workingmen who had looked up
to him with some of the emotions of confidence and hope. There was alas
little enough that he could do for those workingmen, but, especially in
such an hour, he must at least not forget them. Of the relative rights
of their present quarrel he had little knowledge; but he had envisaged
enough of life to know, without too much sentimentalizing them, that,
while they were often wrong, they were somehow right when they were
wrong. That is, their eternal cause was right.
What the manufacturers wanted, as they put it, was “protection,” a
term with vague and varying connotations. As was the case in all the
strikes of all the years of my experience in the mayoralty, they felt
that the police were not sufficiently aggressive, or that the Chief of
Police had not detailed sufficient men to afford them protection. I
did not raise the question, though it occurred to me, as to what the
police were doing to protect the strikers, who were citizens, too, and
tax-payers, or at least rent-payers and so indirect tax-payers, but
when I asked the Chief, the big-hearted Perry Knapp reported that the
strikers were complaining, too, and out of his collection of works
on Lincoln, he brought me one which contained a letter the great
president wrote to General John M. Schofield, when he assigned that
officer to the command of the Department of the Missouri, in May, 1863,
to succeed General Curtis. Curtis had been the head of one party as
Governor Gamble had been the head of the other, in what Lincoln called
the pestilent factional quarrel into which the Union men had entered.
“Now that you are in the position,” wrote Lincoln, “I wish you to undo
nothing merely because General Curtis or Governor Gamble did it, but to
exercise your own judgment, and do right for the public interest. Let
your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep
the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harass and persecute
the people. It is a difficult rôle, and so much the greater will be the
honor if you perform it well. If both factions, or neither, shall abuse
you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one
and praised by the other.”
How Lincoln knew human nature! It seemed as good a model as one
might find, since we, too, were in the midst of a little civil war,
and we always tried to pursue that course. What the manufacturing
employers wished, of course, was for us to use the police to break
the strike; that we did not deem it our duty to do. What we tried to
do was to preserve the public peace and--since our industry in its
present status is war--to let them fight it out. We tried to see to
it that they fought it out along the lines laid down, in fixing the
relative rights of the industrial belligerents, by the Courts of Great
Britain, and this policy had the virtual approval of our own courts
when in an ancillary way it came under discussion there. But we had
difficulty in maintaining the peace, not only because the strikers,
or more likely their sympathizers, broke it now and then, but because
when the strikers were not breaking it, the employers seemed bent
on doing something to make them. They did not intend it for that
purpose of course; they simply thought in old feudal sequences. They
hired mercenaries, bullies provided as “guards” by private detective
agencies. It kept the police pretty busy disarming these guards, and
greatly added to their labors because the guards were always on the
point of hurting some one.