XXXVIII
However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes, separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel, a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer, who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding office; whether theEast Side is receiving its due consideration in comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of morals is to prevail—these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever before him.
And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees—of aged men—demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction. I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well; “I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.”
Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their difficulties. I remember onepoor soul whose husband was in the penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being good to prisoners.”
Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each new attempt at explanation she said:
“You are the father of all.”
It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula. This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.
It may have been because, in some way, it had got abroad that I was a reformer myself. It was at a time when there was new and searching inquiry, anda new sense of public decency, the result of a profound impulse in the public consciousness, and I had been of those who in my town had opposed the political machines. Constructive thinking and constructive work being the hardest task in the world, one of which our democracy in its present development is not yet fully capable, the impulse spent itself largely in destructive work. That was natural; it is a quality inherent in humanity. My friend Kermode F. Gill, the artist-builder and contractor of Cleveland, once told me that while it is difficult to get men to carry on any large construction, and carry it on well, and necessary to set task masters over them to have the work done at all, there is a wholly different spirit in evidence when the work is one of demolition. If a great building is to be torn down, the men need no task masters, no speeding up, they fly at it in a perfect frenzy, with a veritable passion, and tear it down so swiftly that the one difficulty is to get the salvage. And in the course of building public works I have observed the same phenomenon. While the forces are tearing down, while they are excavating, that black fringe of spectators, the “crow line” the builders call it, is always there. But when once the work is above ground, and construction begins, when the structure lifts itself, when it aspires,—the crow line dissolves and melts quite away. This, in a sense, is true of man in any of his operations. When the great awakening came, after the first shock of surprise, after the first resolve to do better, the public went at the work of demolition, all about the arenathe thumbs of the multitude were turned down, and we witnessed the tragedy of men who but a short while before had been praised and lauded for their possessions, and used as models for little boys in Sunday-school, suddenly stripped of all their coveted garments, and held up to the hatred and ridicule of a world that can yet think of nothing better than the stocks, the pillory, the jail, and the scaffold.
In Edinburgh I was shown a little church of which Sir Walter Scott was once a vestryman, or deacon or elder or some such official, and in the door still hung the irons in which offenders were fastened on Sunday mornings so that the righteous, as they went to pray, might comfort themselves with a consoling sense of their own goodness by spitting in the face of the sinner. Many of our reforms are still carried on in this spirit, and are no more sensible or productive of good.
The word “reformer,” like the word “politician” has degenerated, and, in the mind of the common man, come to connote something very disagreeable. In four terms as mayor I came to know both species pretty well, and, in the later connotations of the term, I prefer the politician. He, at least, is human. The reformers, as Emerson said, affect one as the insane do; their motives may be pious, but their methods are profane. They are a buzz in the ear.
I had read this in Emerson in my youth, when for a long time I had a veritable passion for him, just as in a former stage, and another mood, I had had a veritable passion for books about Napoleon, and,at another, for the works of Carlyle, and the controversy excited by the reckless Froude; but the truth—as it appears to me, or at any rate, the part of a truth—was not borne in upon me until I came to know and to regard, with dread, the possibility that I might be included in their number, which I should not like, unless it were as a mere brother in humanity, somewhat estranged in spirit though we should be.