LII
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 blamefor 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 aboutright. 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.