XXXVII
I went into the mayor’s office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer’s participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land, where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience, when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique. And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and they were manyand respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and that was, that I did not know.
Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West, I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole, after four terms in a mayor’s office testing them, I still believe to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs; representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say—non-partizan city elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the task, this was the program.
We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory possible by his great pioneer workin destroying the superstition of party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their party confreres and conspirators from the city—machine politicians to whom they turned for advice—but gain a cheapréclameat home by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the “good” people were always insisting on the “moral” issue; urging us to turn aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official attention on the “bad” people—and wreck our movement. Our immediate purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of transmuting twenty-fivemillions in green paper into twenty-five millions in gold, and thereby absorb the commercial values of half a century. To do this it was necessary to win elections for years, and to win elections, one must have votes, and “bad” people have votes, equally with “good” people, and if one is to judge from the comment of the “good” people on the election returns, the “bad” people in most cities are in the majority. On that point, I believe, the reformers and the politicians at least are agreed. More than this, we had to obtain from reluctant legislatures the powers that would put the city at least on equal terms with the corporations which had always proved so much more potent than the city. Such was the struggle our movement faced, such was the victory to be won before our city could be free from the triumvirate that so long had exploited it, the political boss, the franchise promoter, and the country politician. The Free City! That was the noble dream.
Well might the wise and sophisticated laugh at their mayor and call him dreamer! It was, and, alas, it is a dream. But youth is so sublimely confident, and counts so little on opposition. Not the opposition of those who array themselves against it—that was to be expected, of course, that was part of the glorious conflict—but the opposition from within the ranks, the opposition on the hither side of the barricade. For youth thinks, sometimes, that even opponents may be won, if only they can be brought to that vantage ground whence one inevitably beholds the fair and radiant vision. It had not expected the falling away of followers, of supporters,even of friends—the strangely averted eye on the street, the suddenly abandoned weekly call, the cessation of little notes of encouragement, the amazing revelations of malignity and bitterness at election times, and the flood increasing in volume at each succeeding election. One man, thought to be devoted to a cause, fails in his desire to secure an office; another you refuse a contract; he whom you neglected to favor in January punctually appears in the opposition ranks in November, one by one they drop away, and multiply into an army. Even in the official group in the City Hall and in the council, there are jealousies, and childish spites, and pitiable little ambitions and with them misunderstanding, gossip, slander, anonymous attacks, lies, abuse, hatred, until youth makes the awful discovery that there is, after all, in human nature, pure malice, and youth must fight hard to retain its ideals, so continually are all the old lovely illusions stripped away in this bewildering complication of little tragedies and comedies we call life.
To be sure, youth might have known, having read the like in books from infancy, and having made some reflections of its own on the irony of things, and indulged from time to time in philosophizings. But that was about the experience of others, from which none of us is wise enough to learn. Most of us indeed are not wise enough to learn from our own. It is all a part of life. What a thing human life is, to be sure, and human nature!Ay di mi!as Carlyle used to say. Patience, and shuffle the cards!...
... I had no intention of recalling such things. Did not Jones say that when the Golden Rule would not work, it was not the fault of the Rule, but because one did not quite know how to work it? I have no intention of setting down the failures or the little successes of four terms as mayor. Nor shall I write a little history of those terms in office; I could not, and it would not be worth while if I could. I shall not attempt in these pages a treatise on municipal government, for if the task were rightly executed, it would be a history of civilization. Non-partizanship in municipal elections, municipal ownership, home rule for cities,—who is interested in these? I have discussed them in interviews—(“Is there to be a statement for us this morning, Mr. Mayor?”)—and speeches numerous as autumn leaves, and like them, lost now in the winds to which they were given.
After all, it is life in which we are all interested. And one sees a deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage it as—just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition, or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. He may discern there the operations of universal and inexorable laws, and realize the tremendous conflict that everywhere and in all times goes on betweenprivilege and the people. Such a view may simplify life for him; it may make easy the peroration to the campaign speech; it may provide a glib and facile answer to any question. But he should have a care lest it make him the slave of its ownclichés, as Socialists for instance, when they become purely scientific, explain every human impulse, emotion and deed by simply repeating the formula “Economic determinism.”
But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know not where nor how, and all pretty much alike.And government, be its form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with those strange embracing gestures, “I believe inallthe people.”