XXXII
The predilection of the Ohio man for politics, I believe, is well known in this land, where it is generally identified with a love for office. There is a reproach implied in the reputation which we perhaps deserve. An Ohio man goes into politics as naturally as a Nova Scotian goes to sea, and yet not all Nova Scotians go to sea. They all love the sea perhaps, but they do not all care to become sailors. And so with us Ohioans. We all love politics, though fortunately we do not all care to hold office, even if most people do smile indulgently when the modest disinclination is expressed. Perhaps such scepticism is quite natural in a land so saturated in privilege that even office holding is regarded in that light—or was until recently, for now a new conception is expanding in the public consciousness and there is hope that ere long public office will be regarded as a responsibility. I was quite sure that I did not care to be a councilman—that weekly wrangle, by night, in a room choking with the fumes of cheap tobacco, known as the session of the common council, was far from my tastes. And when the mayoralty was suggested to me I was quite as certain that I did not wish that. For it was not long after the death of Jones that it was suggested; by Tom Johnson for one, who, in his blunt way, toldme that I should run for the place; and by Steffens, who, just then in Cleveland, was writing the article in which Tom Johnson was celebrated as “the best mayor of the best governed city in America,” and Steffens found time now and then to come over to Toledo to see us. “And another thing,” he wrote to me after one of these visits, “you’ll have to run for mayor.” He reached this conclusion, I believe, by a process of inversion. He had been talking with some of the machine politicians, and it was their objection to me as a candidate that caused him to see my duty in that light. I was at one with them on that point, at any rate; they could have been no more reluctant to have me run than I myself was. Tom Johnson, when the Democrats met in their state convention at Columbus that year, might propose me for governor, and the delegation of his county, Cuyahoga, and the delegation from my own county of Lucas vote for my nomination, but that stroke of political lightning was easily arrested by rods that had been more accurately and carefully adjusted, so that I could take the manuscript of “The Turn of the Balance” and go to Wequetonsing on the shores of Little Traverse Bay, where the days are blue and gold, and there is sparkling sunshine, and a golf links where one may find happiness, if he is on his game, or if he is not, consolation in that noble view from the hill—the tee at the old fourth and the new twelfth hole—when he may, if he wish, imagine himself in Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples—which is no more beautiful. Meredith Nicholson, a hale old Hoosier friend, as James Whitcomb Riley used tophrase it, was there, too, near the spot where he wrote that excellent novel, “The Main Chance,” and in that country place with him and other charming friends near by I spent the summer. But when I came home in the autumn the campaign was already on, and the Independents had all but nominated me as their candidate for mayor.
They were forced to make their nominations by petition, and on the petitions proposing me for the office there were many thousands of names, pages that were stained with the grime and dust and grease of factories and shops—a diploma in its way, which might have made one proud, had not the prospect been one to make one so very unhappy. For I knew what the mayoralty had done to Jones. I had come to realize in my association with him that there is no position more difficult than that of the mayor of a large city in the America of our times, for the city is a kind of microcosm where are posited in miniature all the problems of a democracy, and the fact that they are in miniature only increases the difficulty. My ambitions lay in another field, and besides I had a feeling against it, dim and vague, though since adequately expressed in one of those fine generalizations which Señor Guglielmo Ferrero makes on his brilliant page; “there is no sphere of activity,” he says, writing of the perils of political life, “which is so much at the mercy of unforeseen accidents or where the effort put out is so incommensurable with the result obtained.” It is, of course, one of the privileges of the citizen in a democracy to be “mentioned” for public office; if no one elsementions him he can mention himself, and whenever someone else does mention him there are many who ascribe to his originality the credit for the suggestion.
It seems difficult for our people to understand any man who really does not desire public office in a land where it has so long been regarded purely as a privilege to be bestowed or a prize to be contested. I suppose that even the blunt and grim old warrior Sherman caused the people to smile when he said that if nominated for the presidency he would not accept and if elected he would not serve. They wondered what he meant, and for a time it never occurred to them that he meant just what he said.
But the day came at last when I must decide, and to a committee of the Independents I said that I should give them an answer in the morning. I thought it all over again in the watches of the night,—and the unfinished manuscript on my library table—and at last, since somebody had to do it, since somebody had to point out at least the danger of risking the community rights in the hands of a political machine, I said I would accept. I suppose that it is but an expression of that ironic mood in which the Fates delight to deal with mortals that it should be so easy to get that which one does not want; the Independents insisted on my standing for the office, but the only humor in that fact was just then too grim for pleasure, though there is always a compensation somewhere after all, and gloomy as I was that morning at the prospect of the bitter campaign and the difficulties that would follow if I wereelected, I could laugh when “Dad” McCullough, the old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of his committee not to hear him, said:
“Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?”
His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it!
And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall, before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to which we had been used in Jones’s campaigns were revived and repeated with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by “Dad” McCullough as “bearing down on the infirmities of the law,” was now represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos.
To this “moral” issue that had served for so many years, the “good” people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certainof the clergy to lead them rallied instantly about the machine, and for six weeks reveled in an inspection of all the city’s vices, and mouseled in the slums and stews of the tenderloin for examples of the depravity which they declared it was the purpose and design of the Independents to intensify and perpetuate. Their own candidate had been in power for a year and a half and these conditions had existed unmolested, but when some of our speakers indicated this inconsistency in their attitude they only raged the more.
But notwithstanding all this, the issue was clear; the machine had helped to make it clear, not only by its long opposition to Jones, but more recently by its efforts for the street railway company. It was the old issue between privilege and democracy, that has marked the cleavage in society in all ages. The people were trying to take back their own government, for the purpose, first, of preventing the street railway company from securing another lease of the city’s streets for a quarter of a century, by which, incidentally, the company would realize profits on about twenty-five million dollars of watered stock. But the people were not to be deceived; they were not to be turned off the trail so easily; and the entire ticket was elected, so that at the beginning of that new year the Independents were in control of every branch of the government, not only in the city, but in the county as well.