XXXI
The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories, as M. George Cain says, and perhaps that is why I have lingered so long over these little incidents of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them in no sort of related order; Jones died years before Johnson; but somehow they seem to me to have appeared simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together. Different as their personalities were, different as two such great originals must have been, they were one in ideal, and even in their last words they expressed the vast toil and strain of the efforts they put forth to attain it.
“Was it worth while?” asked Tom Johnson of his friend Newton Baker, a day or two before he died. And Sam Jones on that last day turned to his sister Nell, the noble spirit who had conducted the settlement work at Golden Rule House, and said:
“‘He that endureth to the end——’ What does it say?”
She repeated the Scripture to him.
“Say it in Welsh,” he said, his thought returning in those ultimate moments to the speech they had used as children. But before she could direct her mind into the old sequences, the end had come.
At least, there were those in town who thought it was the end. The stock of the street railway company went up twenty-four points the next morning, and some brokers issued a letter saying now that Jones had died the securities of that enterprise offered a golden investment—about the most authentic extant illustration, I suppose, of the utter contemptibility of privilege in these states. The politicians often had been heard to say that when Jones retired the non-partizan movement in Toledo would come to an end; in their professional analyses they had pronounced it a personal following not governed by principle, and that with the passing of the leader it would disappear and the voters become tractable and docile partizan automata again. And now that Jones was dead and one of their organization, the president of the council, was to succeed to the mayor’s office, the hopes they had so long entertained seemed at last on the point of realisation. Within a few weeks, therefore, an ordinance granting the street railway company a renewal of its rights was passed by the council.
Then, instantly, the old spirit flamed anew; there were editorials, mass meetings, and all sorts of protest against the action, and in response to this indignantpublic feeling, the acting mayor, Mr. Robert H. Finch, very courageously vetoed the ordinance. But the machine “had the votes,” and on the following Monday night the council met to pass the ordinance over the veto. The members of the Republican organization were there, favored with seats in the office of the city clerk; lobbyists and the legal representatives of the street railway company were there. The chamber was crowded; the hot air of the small, low-ceiled room was charged with a nervous tension; there was in it an eager expectant quality, not unmixed with dread and fear and guilt. The atmosphere was offensive to the moral sense—a condition remarked in other halls in this land when councils and legislatures have been about to take action that was inimical to the public good.
But the machine councilmen bore themselves jauntily enough; the windows were open to the soft night of the early autumn, and now and then some one sauntered in nonchalance over to the windows, and looked down into St. Clair Street, garish in the white and brilliant light of the electric signs of theaters, restaurants and saloons. The theater crowds were already going by, but it was to be noted that they loitered that evening, and were reënforced by other saunterers, as though the entertainment of the pavement might surpass that of the painted scene within. And above all the noises of the street, clanged the gongs of the street cars gliding by, and, for the moment, as a dramatic center of the scene, a squad of policemen was stationed in the lobby of the council chamber.
This nervous, sinister mood was somehow abroad in the whole city that night. Mr. Negley D. Cochran had written another editorial, published that evening in heavy type, in theNews-Bee, calling on the citizens to come out and protect their rights in the streets of their city, so that there were apprehensions of all sorts of danger and disaster.
The council proceeded with its business; the voice of the reading clerk droned on in the resolutions and ordinances that represented the normal municipal activities of that hour, and then, suddenly, a sound of a new and unaccustomed sort arose from St. Clair Street, the sound of the tramp of marching men. Those at the windows, looking out, saw a strange spectacle—not without its menace; the newspaper reporters, some of them, embellished their reports with old phrases about faces blanching. Perhaps they did; they might well have done so, for the men came down St. Clair Street not as a mob; they were silent, marching in column, by sets of fours, with an orderly precision and a discipline almost military. And at their head there was a man whose square, broad shoulders and firm stride were the last expression of determination. He wore a slouch hat, under which his gray hair showed; his closely trimmed beard was grizzled; he looked, as many noted, not unlike the conventional portraits of General Grant. The man was Mr. Johnson Thurston, and he was as grim as General Grant, as brave, as determined, and as cool. He was widely known in Toledo as a lawyer, however, not as a politician; he had never been in politics, indeed, buthe was in politics that night, surely, and destined to remain in politics for years to come.
He brought his column to a halt under the windows of the council chamber. There was no room in that small chamber for such a delegation, or seemingly for any delegation of the people, however small. Johnson Thurston’s son marched beside him as an aide, bearing a soap box—the modern tribune of our democracy—and he placed it on the pavement for his father. A street car, just then halting, clanged its gong for the throng to make way, and at this perfect symbol of the foe they were opposing, Johnson Thurston shook his fist, and shouted:
“Stand there! The people are attending to their business to-night!”
The street car stood, and Johnson Thurston mounted his soap box, produced a paper and read from it in a loud voice that section of the Constitution in which the people retain to themselves the right peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. And this done, he turned to his followers, gave them a signal, and there went up from their throats in perfect unison a mighty cry: “Let the franchise alone!”
Three times they voiced their imperative mandate, and then, at a signal, they wheeled about, and marched away in the excellent order in which they had come. Such a demonstration, in the streets, at night, before a legislative body, had it occurred in a capital or in a metropolis, would have been historic. As it was, the cry that went up from thosemen was heard in the council chamber; and it was destined to ring through the town for the better part of a decade. The council did not pass the ordinance over the Mayor’s veto; half an hour later the councilmen were escorted from their chamber by the police they had summoned; and a sadly shaken body they were, poor fellows.
Meanwhile the men who had marched with Johnson Thurston had retired to a vacant storeroom in Superior Street, three blocks away, over the door of which there was a canvas sign bearing the inscription “Independent Headquarters.” There they had assembled and been drilled by Johnson Thurston, as college men are drilled by a leader in their yells, and with a solemn sense of civic duty they had marched to the council chamber to save their city from a quarter of a century more of shameful vassalage to a privileged public utility corporation. The threat of their presence had been sufficient, but had that proved unavailing, they had provided other resources. There had been all the while, from the hour of the opening of the doors that night, twelve men in the council chamber, armed with bombs, not of dynamite or any such anarchist explosive, but of asafœtida and sulphureted hydrogen and I know not what other overpowering fumes and odors, confidently relied upon to prevail against even so foul a stench as that which a privileged plutocracy can make in any of the halls of government when it has determined to secure another lease of its tenure.
At Independent Headquarters, then, that autumn, political meetings were held, in which local affairs—thestreet-car situation especially and the relation it bore to the machines of political parties—were discussed. Because of those changes the legislature was always making in the government of cities, three councilman at large were to be elected. This was in the year 1904, in the midst of a national campaign. Roosevelt was running for president for his second—or his first term, depending on the point of view—and three of those men who had voted for that street railway ordinance, and were ready to vote to pass it over the mayor’s veto, were candidates on the Republican ticket for councilmen at large. The Independents who had marched with Johnson Thurston determined to nominate a city ticket, and they honored me by offering me the place at the head of that ticket as their candidate for councilman at large. I was writing another novel just then and battling as usual against interruptions, and so I begged off; it was not the campaign I feared, but, as I told them, the fear that I should be elected. We nominated a ticket, and went into the campaign, speaking every night, and in November, though Roosevelt carried the city by fifteen thousand, our candidates for councilmen at large were elected. Clearly, then, the non-partizan movement had not wholly died with Golden Rule Jones; his soul, like the soul of John Brown, was marching on, and still somehow led by him, and inspired by his spirit, there had sprung forth, like Greek soldiers from the dragon’s teeth, in Toledo a democratic municipal movement. First of all the cities in America, she had taken the initial step in freeingherself, the step all cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their masters—that of non-partizan municipal elections.