XXIII
There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos, perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom, there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when he wrote a statement setting forth his position—it was a document with the strong flavor of his personality in it—the newspapers refused to publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and he opened his campaign on the post-office corner, standing bare-headed in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd. Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for the first time independently, a “Man Without a Party,” as he called himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his standard.
But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him, though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. Therewas a prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow’s answer was to snatch the paper from Jones’s hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the “shotgun and the club.” Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away from the fellow, without a word.
He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had ever seen it, and he said:
“Well, I’ve won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last a victory over myself, over myown nature. I have done what it has always been hardest for me to do.”
“What?” I asked.
He sat in silence for a moment, and then he said:
“You know, it has always seemed to me that the most remarkable thing that was ever said of Jesus was that when he was reviled, he reviled not again. It is the hardest thing in the world to do.”
The struggle over the renewal of the franchise grants to the street railway company had already begun, and the council had attempted to grant it the franchise it wished, renewing its privileges for another twenty-five years. When Mayor Jones vetoed the bill, the council prepared to pass it over his veto, and would have done so that Monday night had it not been for two men—Mayor Jones and Mr. Negley D. Cochran, the editor of theNews-Bee, a newspaper which has always taken the democratic viewpoint of public questions. Mr. Cochran, with his brilliant gift in the writing of editorials, had called out the whole populace, almost, to attend the meeting of the council and to protest. The demonstration was so far effective that the council was too frightened to pass the street railway ordinance. The attorney for the street railway company was there, and when there was a lull in the noise, he sneered:
“I suppose, Mr. Mayor, that this is an example of government under the Golden Rule.”
“No,” replied Jones in a flash, “it is an example of government under the rule of gold.”
Unless it were because of his interference with thenefarious privileges of a few, one can see no reason why the press and pulpit should have opposed him. What had he done? He had only preached that the fundamental doctrine of Christianity was sound, and, as much as a man may in so complex a civilization, he had tried to practice it. He had taught kindness and tolerance, and pity and mercy; he had visited the sick, and gone to those that were in prison; he had said that all men are free and equal, that they have been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. He had said that it is wrong to kill people, even in the electric chair, that it is wrong to take from the poor, without giving them in return. He had not said these things in anger, or in bitterness; he had never been personal, he had always been explicit in saying that he, as a part of society, was equally to blame with all the rest for social wrongs. The only textbooks he ever used in his campaigns were the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence, and, of course, his beloved Walt Whitman. And yet the pulpits rang every Sunday with denunciations of him, and the newspapers opposed him. Why was it, because a man endorsed these old doctrines upon which society claims to rest, that society should denounce him?
I think it was because he was so utterly and entirely sincere, and because he believed these things, and tried to put them into practice in his life, and wished them to be more fully incorporated in the life of society. Society will forgive anything in a man, except sincerity. If he be sincere in charity,in pity, in mercy, in sympathy for the outcast, the despised, the imprisoned, all that vast horde of the denied and proscribed, still less will it forgive him, for it knows instinctively that the privileges men have or seek could not exist in a system where these principles were admitted as vital, inspiring force.
There was nothing, of course, for one who believed in the American doctrines to do but to support such a man, and when he appeared to be so utterly without supporters it seemed to be one’s duty more than ever, though I own to having shrunk from such unconventional methods as Jones employed. That meeting at the post-office corner, for instance; someone might laugh, and in the great American self-consciousness and fear of the ridiculous, what was one to do? The opposition, that is, the two old parties, the Republican and Democratic, had nominated excellent men against Jones; the Republican nominee, indeed, Mr. John W. Dowd, was a man to whom I had gone to school, an old and very dear friend of our family, a charming gentleman of cultivated tastes. It was not easy to be in the attitude of opposing him, but my duty seemed clear, and I went into the campaign with Jones, and we spoke together every night.
It was a campaign in which were discussed most of the fundamental problems of social life. A stranger, coming to Toledo at that time, might have thought us a most unsophisticated people, for there were speculations about the right of society to inflict punishment, the basis of property, and a rathersearching inquiry into the subject of representative government. This was involved in the dispute as to the propriety of political machines, for the Republicans by that time had a party organization so strong that it was easily denominated a machine; it was so strong that it controlled every branch of the city government except the executive; it never could defeat Jones. There was a good deal said, too, about the enforcement of law, a subject which has its fascination for the people of my town.