David Graham Phillips

“ Bill laughed. “Why don’t you drop politics, George? Why fool with the silly game? The people’ll never learn anything. They can always be buncoed—the asses! What did God make ’em for? To work like hell all day and then hand over most of what they’ve made to some clever chap—and thank him for taking it.”
“That used to be so,” replied Helm. “But they’re waking up, Bill. All they need is the right kind of leaders.” ”

“ Much is said about the heavy cares of office, and certainly most men in high office do age rapidly. But Helm’s notion of the duties of office was not that usually held by officials. If a man spends his time at secretly doing things which would ruin him, were they found out—if he hides service of thieves and plunderers behind a pretense of public service, naturally he grows old rapidly. Such secrets and such terrors loosen the hair and the teeth, stoop the shoulders, yellow the fat and sag and wrinkle the cheeks. ”

“ Clearwater had the shrewd man’s knowledge of human nature, was not without insight into his daughter. It is a mistake to think that men are fooled because they let themselves be cajoled; they are fooled, usually, because they wish to be, because their vanity or their hope or their affection gives their cajoler the aid without which he—or she—would fail. Clearwater was [234] well aware that Eleanor was artfully dodging the real issue. But how does knowledge that his beloved daughter is lovingly artful aid a loving father to corner her and bring her to ways of sense and reason? ”

“ The daughter adores the father as the superior type of the superior sex; the father adores the daughter as the embodiment of the female sex’s two awe-inspiring charms, beauty and purity. Clearwater thought his daughter the most beautiful woman in the world, and an angel for purity—certainly, such purity could have no place in the mud-geyser of the world as he knew it. And he was now in terror lest she, idealist, ignorant of the realities, should not understand his attitude toward Helm. ”

“ He bowed with dignity and grace—for, whenever he was unconscious of himself—on the platform or when absorbed in earnest conversation—his awkwardness dropped from him, revealing his homeliness as attractive. He went on uptown, dazed, wondering at himself, doubting whether he was awake. Had he indeed seen Eleanor Clearwater? Had they said to each other the things he was amazedly recalling? Awe of male externals of ornamentation and pretense he had never felt. But his awe for fashion and manner in women had been deep and painful—and [91] reverent. ”

“ Helm flushed, but his voice was gentle as he replied:
“I think you’re unjust to Senator Sayler, sir. He knew that your daughter and I loved each other. He likes both of us, and he knew you’d put your daughter’s happiness above what he probably regards as simply a difference of political opinion.”
“Anarchy and socialism aren’t political opinions,” retorted Clearwater. “They’re criminal, sir, criminal. And I regard any [221] one who holds the ideas you profess—I regard him as a criminal. He is a criminal—an inciter of riot and murder and theft.” ”

“ But for such as the Hollisters and the Clearwaters he remained a bumpkin, a demagogue, an impossible lower-class person.
Yet he had wrought the wondrous, proposal-fraught change in Miss Clearwater. And he had done it by impudently pausing at her phaeton in Harrison’s main street and telling her, with exasperating indifference to her icy manner, that he could marry her if he wished but that he had no place in his life for such a person as she.
Why had this transformed her? For two reasons, both important to those men who would fain have influence over one—or more—of the female sex. ”

“ Hazelrigg soon quelled that mutiny. Of all the understrappers at the beck and call of a machine boss, the orators—they upon whose lips the people hang spellbound—are the lowest, the most despised by their fellow slaves and the most brutally worked and the most meagerly paid.
As Sayler had taken the muzzle from the press of the State to make his “object lesson” thoroughly effective, in a few weeks George Helm became famous—newspaper famous—the beanstalk variety of fame, showy but perishable. Bill Desbrough came up to see him. ”

“ Eleanor Clearwater had gone to Harrison, a reserved, cool, not to say cold young woman, with an air that made her seem years older than she was, and with an interest in men so faint that it discouraged all but two dauntless fortune hunters—who were promptly sent to look further. ”

“ In a hilarious mood the Democratic machine, casting about for its sacrifice candidate, nominated George Helm—or, rather, George Helm’s whiskers.
It was a side-splitting joke. Everybody liked George. Everybody knew about his whiskers—knew him by his whiskers. It bade fair to inject that humor, so dearly beloved of the American people, into what was usually a dull campaign. The only trouble was that for the first time Helm failed to see a joke.
The night of his nomination the light in Mrs. Beaver’s tiny, stuffy attic room went out early. ”

“ Sayler shrugged his shoulders. “An impulse you’ve repented,” said he.
“I think I must have been crazy,” said she.
“I think he must have been crazy,” retorted Sayler. “But he has come to his senses. He’s here to release you.”
Eleanor’s eyes flashed.
“He was caught for the moment by your looks,” Sayler went on, with quick raillery. “But he is too intelligent to be ruled by such an impulse. Shallow men are, but not such men as George Helm. They assign women their proper place in the life of a man with something to do in the world and the ability to do it.” ”

“ The girl’s beautiful face, frankly expressing her emotions, gave Sayler the pleasure of delighting in his skill as a player upon that interesting instrument, human nature. A woman—especially a young woman—brought up in the false education custom imposes upon our comfortable classes, rarely has the intelligence clearly to distinguish a formable man in his early formative period. Or, if her woman’s instinct for the real thing in manhood does by chance lead her aright, the courage to act is lacking. ”

“ The people!—how little we understand them—how much and how often we misunderstand them. The people, so ignorant, yet so quaintly wise—as they toil in the obscurity, building patiently, working and hoping—and waiting always for leaders. Deceived a thousand times, they wait on and hope on—since leaders they must have, and since leaders will surely come.
Helm did not exaggerate the public interest in himself. ”

“ As the masses in their slow, dim way were beginning to realize that parties and politics were not matters of principle but of pocket filling—and pocket-emptying, Sayler was being denounced, was being built up into a figure of greater menace, and therefore of greater public admiration and respect, than the actualities warranted, powerful and dangerous though he was. ”

“ And Sayler, knowing that he could gain nothing by deceiving Helm in their personal talks, gave himself the pleasure of being almost frank.
“Well, Governor,” said he, “how goes the game of honest politics?”
[277] “I needn’t tell you,” replied Helm, good-humoredly.
“You’ll some day see I was right when I warned you there was no such thing as honest politics.”
“Did I ever deny it?” said Helm. “How could there be honest politics? Human society is, necessarily, modeled as yet upon the only example man had to guide them—nature, with her cruel law of the survival of the fittest. ”

“ For most men cannot reason and judge; they must choose a party and a leader by instinct and must trust themselves to that party and that leader implicitly. The story of history is the story of loyalty—and of loyalty betrayed. The mass has trusted and worshiped a class; the class has become infatuated with itself, has trampled on and betrayed the mass.
George Helm had won, the previous fall, because the mass of the people in that district had at last become more than suspicious of the honesty and fidelity of their [93] chosen leaders. ”

“ Sayler, deeply interested in the subject and in the man, led him on to describe his own method, this so sympathetically—rather than adroitly—that Helm took from his pocket an old letter on the blank side of whose single sheet he had outlined the “backbone” of a speech he was to make against a perpetual grant of a big trolley franchise. The franchise meant, of course, the creation of a huge mass of stocks and bonds which would enable many generations of a certain group of the upper class to live luxuriously by taking impudent toll from the masses in exchange for no service rendered. ”

“ This man, planted upon this rock-founded confidence, could not but show in his exterior the external change. But where the small fellow reveals his fleeting or trivial success in an access of swagger, the large, simple nature reveals it in the deeper absorption in the career, the lessened consciousness of self. And as George Helm’s self-consciousness had been the sole cause of his awkwardness and the chief cause of his extreme plainness, the change was most striking. ”

“ If some catastrophe—which God forbid!—should wipe out at a stroke all our leaders—all the geniuses who give us employment, run our affairs, write our books and newspapers, make our laws, blow the whistles for us to begin and to stop work, tell us when to go forth and when to come in out of the rain—if some cataclysm should orphan us entirely of these our wondrous wise guardians, don’t you suspect that circumstance would almost overnight create a new set for us, quite as good, perhaps better? ”

“ For, before noon of that first day of the campaign, it had been discovered that the Democratic [17] machine had not nominated whiskers, but a man.
We are in the habit of regarding a human being as a mere conglomerate of sundry familiar conventionalities—of dress, of manner, of thought. We have formed the habit because with an occasional rare exception a human being is simply that and nothing more. So an individuality is always a startling apparition—fascinating, perhaps, certainly terrifying. ”

“ Nobody’ll listen to politics except round election time. That’s why robbing the people’s the easiest and the favorite way to make money.”
“Everything’s politics,” said Helm. “Religion’s politics, and education’s politics, and farming and mining and factories and doctors and storekeeping—everything! What’s politics but settling how the proceeds of everybody’s labor are to be distributed—whether [126] the man who works is to get what he works for or somebody else is to get it? And that question means everything that affects any human being, morally, mentally, physically. ”

“ But I can guess your career.”
“We had only got you as far as short dresses,” said he. “When you left that boarding school——”
“Nothing since,” interrupted she. “I’ve simply been sitting round waiting for a husband. What else is there for a woman? Still, I never wish I’d been a man.”
“Why not?” asked George. He was twisted into one of his strange poses—legs wound round each other, body bent forward, supported by his elbows. He had never been so blissfully, airily happy as watching this beautiful girl, with the most wonderful light he had ever beheld reflecting from her fair shoulders. ”

“ The reason the hands were turning backward for Helm and his wife was, of course, happiness. A man often loves a woman—a girl—for the possibilities he sees [260] in her which he fancies he can realize. Indeed one of woman’s best beguilements for “leading on” the man she wants is the subtle creating or encouragement of this same fancy. But when a woman really does love a man, she loves him for himself, wishes him to stay exactly as he is. Eleanor had taken the lank, tall, rural-looking impersonation of strength, gentleness and self-unconscious simplicity because that was what she wanted. ”

“ Men live by taking advantage of one another—of one another’s ignorance, stupidity, necessity, cowardice. And politics—it’s simply the struggle between warring appetites, between competing selfishnesses.”
“Then what’s the use of exhorting men to stop robbing each other?” inquired Sayler. “Isn’t my plan the wiser—and the better?—to try to show the strong that they shouldn’t strip the weak—that they should content [278] themselves with all the harvest, and not uproot and so prevent another harvest.”
“I admit you have your usefulness,” replied Helm. ”

“ When a father seriously makes the threat to cut off a son or a daughter, however great the reflection upon the father, it is greater upon the son or daughter. Eleanor Clearwater had lived under her father’s eye all the years of her life. ”

“ George Helm had cherished deep in his heart a peculiar feeling for Eleanor Clearwater since that first long talk he had with her, the only woman he had met who possessed worldly knowledge and beauty, refined and glorified by the highest civilized arts of manner and dress. ”

“ Helm,” said Branagan, with the respect a shrewd man cannot but feel in presence of an intelligence that has shown itself the superior of his. “I understand perfectly, George.”
“You probably don’t understand,” said [75] George. “But no matter. You can be boss of the machine, but you can’t be my boss. If you give me the nomination and I’m elected, I’ll not attack the—the shortcomings of my friends until I’ve settled with the crimes of my enemies. I’ll not forget that I owe you, and not the people, for the nomination. ”

“ Certainly there [3] was in young George Helm’s appearance no grace or beauty to detain the professional glance of a husband-seeker with a fancy for romantic ornamentation of the business of matrimony. Certainly also there was in that appearance no suggestion of latent possibilities of luxury-providing. A plain, serious-looking young man with darkish hair and a red beard, with a big loosely jointed body whose legs and arms seemed unduly long. A strong, rather homely face, stern to sadness in repose, flashing unexpectedly into keen appreciation of wit and fun when the chance offered. ”

“ He now went down to the Capitol to hunt Helm up.
An extraordinary amount of trouble for so distinguished a man to take about an almost obscure youth of rugged appearance, one he knew hardly at all. But Sayler was a profound man. It had been said of him that he had ruined more young men than any man of his time. It was his habit to seek out any youth who showed, to his acute insight into human nature, indications of unusual abilities. ”

“ That winter luck favored George Helm. He did not have to break with the machine.
Senator Sayler, the representative of the plutocracy, quarreled with some of his largest clients—his bosses, they fancied themselves, until he, as astute as he was bold and cynical, showed them that he had made himself indispensable to them. He, the rich man as well as the expert and most intelligent politician; they, merely rich men, crudely buying of politicians the coveted robbers’ licenses. The quarrel grew out of the idiotic greediness of his clients. ”

“ Sayler discovered that he wished to look at the west wing of the capitol, walked with [144] his wife, thus forcing Helm to walk with Eleanor—and to walk ahead where he could observe. There was plenty to see.
A serious young woman is never in any circumstances so interesting to a man as a light and gay, pretty woman, whatever men may pretend. It is inborn in the male to regard the female as the representative of the lighter side of life; and so long as he is not married to her, light she should be if she would please him—light and full of coquetry of the kind he happens to regard as “womanly.” ”

“ Helm suddenly asked.
“About twelve hundred,” replied Branagan.
“I thought so,” said Helm. “If I’d had five thousand dollars I’d have sent you and [66] Reichman to the pen for the frauds. But you knew I’d be helpless.”
The Democratic boss gave him an amiable and sympathetic look. Said he: “A man without money is always helpless, George. And the further he goes the surer he is to fall—and fall hard.”
“I know. I’ve got to have enough to make me independent.” ”

“ But wealth can be created only by laboring; wealth is nothing but the proceeds of labor.
Therefore,
To have comfort, in the lady and gentleman sense, in the sense in which our new luxury-mad upper class is determined to have it, means that one must “appropriate”—that is, steal—the proceeds of the labor of others.
First corollary: That the more “comfortable” the upper class becomes, the more of the proceeds of the labor of others it must be stealing. ”