XVII
Politics in those days—and not alone in those days either—were mean, and while I do not intend to say that this meanness bowed me with despair, it did fill me with disgust, and made the whole business utterly distasteful. Politics were almost wholly personal, there was then no conception of them as related to social life. An awakening was coming, to be sure, and the signs were then apparent, even if but few saw them. They were to most quite dim; but there were here and there in the land dreamers of a sort, who had caught a new vision. The feeling of it, the emotion, was to find expression in Mr. Bryan’s greatcampaign in 1896; but there was then in Chicago a little group, men who had read Henry George, or, without reading him, had looked out on life intelligently and gained a concept of it, or perhaps had merely felt in themselves the stirrings of a new social instinct, and these saw, or thought they saw, the way to a better social order. They could not in those days gain so patient a hearing for their views as they have since, if any hearing they have had may after all be called patient; they were not so very patient themselves, perhaps, as men are quite apt not to be when they think they see as clearly as though a perpetual lightning blazed in the sky exactly what is the matter with the world, and have a simple formula, which, were it but tried, would instantly and infallibly make everything all right.
But these men were not in politics; some of them were too impractical ever to be, and the only man in politics who understood them at all was Altgeld. Generally, the moral atmosphere of politics was foul and heavy with the feculence of all the debauchery that is inseparable from privilege. The personnel of politics was generally low; and in city councils and state legislatures there was a cynical contempt of all the finer sentiments. It was not alone that provincialism and philistinism which stand so obdurately and with such bovine stupidity in the way of progress; there was a positive scorn of the virtues, and the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the great political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of whichwas that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men, who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association, that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the other day, reading Walt Whitman’s terrific arraignment of the powers that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan’s time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the directorate of affairs,—it may be read in his prose works by those who wish,—I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time with that which immediately preceded the newer and better time of the moral awakening in America. Altgeld was one of the forerunners of this time; and, in accordance with the universal law of human nature, it was his fate to be misunderstood and ridiculed and hated, even by many in his own party. He was far in the van in most ways, so far that it was impossible for his own party to follow him. It did not follow him in his opposition to a bill which was passed in the General Assembly to permit of the consolidation of gas companies in Chicago; the machines of the two parties were working well together in the legislature—in one of those bipartizan alliances which were not to be understood until many years later, and even then not to be understood so very clearly, since most of our cities have been governed since by such alliances, in the interest of similar gas companies and other public utility corporations—and when the Governor vetoed their evilmeasure, this same bipartizan machine sought to pass it over his veto, and none was more active in the effort than were the leaders of his own party in the House.
The supreme effort was made on the last night of the session, amidst one of those riots which mark the dissolution of our deliberative legislative bodies. The lobbyists for the measure were quite shameless that night, as they were on most nights, no doubt; almost as shameless as the legislators themselves. The House was in its shirt-sleeves; and there was the rude horse-play of country bumpkins; paper wads were flying, now and then some member sent hurtling through the hot air his file of printed legislative bills, and all the while there was that confusion of sound, laughter, and oaths and snatches of song, a sort of bedlam, in which laws were being enacted—laws that must be respected and even revered, because of their sacred origin. The leaders were serious, but worried; the expressions of their drawn, tense, nervous faces were unhappy in suspicion and fear, and, perhaps, because of uneasy consciences. The speaker sat above them, pale and haggard, rapping his splintered sounding-board with a broken gavel, rapping persistently and futilely. And as the time drew near when the gas bill was to come on for consideration, the nervous tension was intensified, and evil hung almost palpably in the hot, close air of that chamber. Those who have had experience of legislative bodies, and have by practice learned something of political aëroscopy, can always tell when “something is coming off”;political correspondents have cultivated the sense, and that night they could have divined nothing good or pure or beautiful in that chamber (where the portraits of Lincoln and of Douglas hung), unless it were the mellow music, now and then, of the glass prisms of the chandeliers hanging high from the garish ceiling, as they tinkled and chimed whenever some little breeze wandered in from the June night.
And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. & M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent, taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there, silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long, wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable.
The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there onthe verge of the House, and began to talk with him. I had the story a good while afterwards from one of the whips, who, it seemed, knew all that had gone on that night. The lobbyist of course knew about the man, knew especially about his necessities, as lobbyists do; and he began to talk to the old fellow about them—about his poverty and his children, and he used the old argument which has been employed so long and so successfully with the rural members of all our legislatures, and has been the source of so much evil in our city governments, that is, the argument that the bill concerned only Chicago, and that the folks down home would neither know nor care how he voted on it, and then—how much two thousand dollars would mean to him. As the lobbyist talked, there were various eyes that looked at him, waiting for a sign; they needed only a few votes then, and the roll-call was being delayed by one pretense and another, and the clock on the wall, inexorably ticking toward the hour of that legislature’s dissolution, was turned back. The old fellow listened and stroked his chin, and then presently, when the lobbyist had done, he turned his old blue eyes on him and said:
“I reckon you’re right: I’m poor, and I’ve got a big family. And you’re right, too, when you say my people won’t know nor care: they won’t; they don’t know nor care a damn; they won’t send me back here, of course. And God knows what’s to come of my wife and my children; I am going home to them to-morrow and on Monday I’m going to hunt me a job in the harvest-field; I reckon I’ll diein the poorhouse. Yes, I’m going home—but”—he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye—“I’m going home an honest man.”
My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,—“most of them damned cheap,” he said,—and he thought it might make a plot for a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the bill over the Governor’s veto, and it was not long until another story was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he had to do was to go take the bonds—and permit the bill to become a law. His answer, of course, was the veto—an offense as unpardonable as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been—though this was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates mercy, too.
The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more, and it was not long until the Governorwas driven from his office amid the hoots and jeers and the hissing of a venomous hatred such as nothing but political rancor knows, unless it be religious rancor. Yes, politics had got pretty low in those days, and its utter meanness, gradually revealed, was enough to cause one to despair of his country and his kind. Perhaps the old Egyptian in the legislature and the idealist in the governor’s chair should have been enough to keep one from despairing altogether, though one honest old peasant cannot save a legislature any more than one swallow can make a summer. I do not mean to say that he was the only honest man in the legislature: there were many others, of course, but partizan politics prevented their honesty from being of much avail; or, at any rate, they did not control events. With the measurable advance in thought since that time, and the general progress of the species, we know now that men do not control events half so much as events control men; we do not know exactly what it is that does control men—that is, those of us who are not Socialists do not know.
Altgeld, at any rate, was disgusted with politics, as well he might have been, since they wrecked his fortune and broke his heart. And it was with relief, I know, that he said that morning,—almost the last he passed in the governor’s chair,—as he and I were going up the long walk to the State House steps:
“Well, we’re rid of this, anyway.”