Brand Whitlock

“ There is nowhere in the world, so far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature, entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging barbs of ice on its breath—and then, suddenly, it is summer without any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.
Jones was not very well that spring ”

“ But after the whole economic system has been re-adjusted and perfected and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of life so prodigious! ”

“ For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths! ”

“ There are no shades or shadows, no gradations, no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white, good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime. It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad. If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is time to call in the police. ”

“ And all too soon for the orators warming to their work—they must speak rapidly, they must speak simply and come to the point, for the demands of the street meeting are obdurate and out under the open sky there is short shrift for insincerity or any of the old pretense and buncombe—the whistle blows, the men turn and scatter, the crowd melts away, a few linger to the last minute to catch the last word, and then they turn and run, and as they go they lift high the perpendicular hand—Walt Whitman’s sign of democracy.... ”

“ Love will rule this wide world o’er.
It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his seat on the government bench. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I used to wish, when it was presented to me as mayor, that some of these cock-sure persons who would solve the problem off-hand by issuing a general order to the police, could get themselves elected to the opportunity. Of course I issued no general order on the subject; perhaps I was too skeptical, too much lacking in faith in the miraculous powers of the constabulary. Our city was like all cities; there were prostitutes in brothels, prostitutes in saloons, prostitutes in flats, prostitutes on the streets at night. ”

“ It was a city wherein human life was precious, and therefore gracious, a city which the citizen loved as a graduate loves his alma mater, a city with a communal spirit. There the old ideas of privilege had given way to the ideals of service, public property was held as sacred as private property, power was lightly wielded, the people’s voice was intelligent and omnipotent, for [367] they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work, performing its noble functions. ”

“ In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy free cities of Flanders and Germany—and it discovered America, not the America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind. ”

“ And then politics have the dreadful effect of beating all the freshness out of a man; if they do not make him timid, they make him hesitant and cautious, provident of his opinion; he goes about with his finger on his lips, fearful of utterance, and, when he does speak, it is in guarded syllables which conceal his true thought; he cultivates solemnity and the meretricious art of posing; humor is to be avoided, since the crowd is perplexed by humor and so resents it, and will have only the stale rudimentary wit of those stories which men, straining to be funny, match at the banquet board. ”

“ In not every city has the advance been so marked, for not every city has had such personalities as Johnson and Jones, and without personalities, democracies seem unable to function. The old corruptions, once so flagrant, are growing less and less, and there is left only the residuum of meanness and pettiness and spite, the crimes that require no courage and entail no fear of the law, committed by beings who never could attain the robust stature of the old and brazen and robust offenders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To one, indeed, who, in eight years’ participation in municipal politics might in that respect have been compared to that character in one of Anatole France’s novels who never opened a door without coming upon some hitherto unsuspected depth of infamy in mankind, it was difficult to avoid that strain. And yet, bad as municipal government has been in this land, it is everywhere better to-day. The level of moral sentiment, like the level of intelligence, mounts slowly, in wide spirals, but it mounts steadily all the time. ”

“ He did not realize that ambition of course; no one ever realizes his ambition. But he did perhaps more than any other man in America to make possible the coming of the free city in this land.
His struggle for three-cent railway fares in Cleveland, which was but a roundabout method of securing municipal ownership in a state where the legislature in those days would not permit cities to own their public utilities was his great work. He lived to see that successful in a way, though not exactly in the way he had expected; that is another irony which the fates visit on the head of ambitious men. ”

“ It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then to congress, then—governor, senator, president. They could not, of course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party, and to see to it that its members held office under the government. ”

“ The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him of both. ”

“ Of course, in any effort to help them,—and our efforts were not always perhaps wholly wise,—we encountered that most formidable and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital punishment alive in the world ”

“ And when a trust is formed, or a strike interrupts [238] business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long, or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train, or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.” ”

“ My grandfather had given four years to the Civil War, and I had found the mayor’s office as trying, as difficult, and as alien as he had found his martial experience. The truth is, that long before the eight years were over the irritation of constant, persistent, nagging criticism had got on my nerves, and, besides the pain of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, I grew to have a perfect detestation for those manipulations which are the technic of politics. And, then, one cannot be a mayor always, [351] and it were better to retire than to be dismissed. ”

“ 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 freeing [182] herself, the step all cities in America must take if they would free themselves from their masters—that of non-partizan municipal elections. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Down in their hearts these are not what the people want. What they want is a life that is fuller, more beautiful, more splendid and, above all, more human. And nobody can prepare it and hand it over to them. They must get it themselves; it must come up through them and out of them, through long and toilsome processes of development; for such is democracy.
“That man’s program will take a thousand years!” Lincoln Steffens had said in despair that day I introduced him to Jones. ”