Lincoln Steffens

“ But Colby didn’t want to run for boss of Essex; he wanted to make his appeal more to the people. This was an instinct, a democratic instinct which this rich railroad magnate’s son has well developed in him. He proposed running an older man for senator, but the older man wouldn’t run and the Newark, Bloomfield, and Orange men wanted Colby to lead their common fight. He was in doubt. He wanted to make the fight impersonal, and they adopted his principle to fight the boss, not Lentz; not the man, but the boss as an institution, as an agent of a corrupt oligarchy. ”

“ When the goal of such a man is the creation of a monopoly of all the
food or all the oil or all the steel in our world, we take him seriously — too late. I think that Rudolph Spreckels, capitalist, bank president, captain of industry, who, at thirty-five, has devoted his knowledge of men and business methods good and bad; his patient impatience; his talent for organization and his executive ability, to reform in the united cities of America — such a man is worth our study. ”

“ I find myself, at the opening of the campaign, confronted by a threefold opposition. First, that of the Democratic machine and its absolute boss; second, the scarcely concealed and treacherous opposition of a Republican party leader, whose demands in behalf of his corporate clients I have refused to grant; third, the secret but powerful opposition of a combination of public service and railroad corporations, whose unjust corporate privileges are threatened by my reelection. ”

“ States, the Judge says, are done by boys under twenty-three!
“And why not?” he asks. “The children of parents who die or fail in their duty are taken by the State and sent for their schooling into the streets or jails where they pick up false ideals and criminal arts. With few exceptions, all these boy criminals named above, whom society has sent to the slaughter-house to be killed, had been sent to jail in their teens by society for other crimes. And most of them were first imprisoned as little children.”
In other words, our criminal court system does not prevent, it fosters crime. ”

“ Every father and mother ought to know more about their own children than anyone else. Perhaps, in most cases, they do, but it is amazing how often they don’t. And the reason they don’t is that they haven’t enough love for children to understand them, and not enough character to hold their respect. Their children lie to them, and it is the parents’ fault. I recall hardly a single case in the thousands I have dealt with when we did not get the truth from the child; yet in hundreds of these cases the children had lied to the parents. ”

“ It is time to fight the boss system itself, by which unscrupulous men get between the people and the public officials by control of the party machinery, betray the people, acquire riches for themselves, and attempt to drive out of public life all who will not take orders from the boss, and his real masters, the corporations.
“Mark M. Fagan.”
So the fight that fall, in Jersey City, as in Essex County and in New York, as in Toledo and Cincinnati, and Cleveland and Philadelphia, and in Ohio and in Pennsylvania, was a fight against the bosses. ”

“ If the corporations do to Colby in Jersey what they have done to La Follette in Wisconsin, they will stir up envy and hatred against him; they will befool his followers with false arguments or buy them with money or office or “business”; and they will embitter his life, public and private, too, with misrepresentation and slander. If the fight is fought to a finish, every trick known to expert manipulators of legislatures and public opinion will be tried, but the rings didn’t believe it would be fought to a finish. ”

“ At any rate, he is the political ideal of the business world. All over the country I have heard business men say that what we want is some good business man who will apply good business methods to politics and government and give - us a good, businesslike administration. The efficacy of this solution is dubious, but never mind. Here we have the business men’s dream come true; here we have the business man “sacrificing his money and his still more valuable time” to the public service. How do business men receive the devotion of Rudolph Spreckels? ”

“ As time went on and the excitement grew, men who never had taken part in politics joined in what they agreed was the “greatest game they ever sat in at,” the great game of politics. Everybody was welcome, and everybody was happy. It was a popular election, every man’s election, and they won. Won ? The completeness of their victory at the primaries astonished them. They carried everything. The next morning Major Lentz told Colby the convention was his, Colby’s, and Colby might “run it” to suit himself. Very gracious, indeed, was this defeated boss, but he hoped (and he hopes) to be boss again. ”

“ Colby’s class suffers from class consciousness, as much, if not more, than labour does. If he had gone forth as a rich man to the poor, or as a capitalist to labour, or as a business man offering a good business administration to a people incompetent for self-government, he would have had to buy votes or be beaten. ”

“ Paul Thieman in the Denver Post once called Ben Lindsey “the first citizen of Colorado,” and declared that, not the mines and the mills, not the railroads, the farms, and the banks, but Ben Lindsey’s work was “the greatest thing the state has produced.” And from the point of view of the history of man, this is true. It looks absurd from a shop window, but Paul Thieman was seeing things through
the eyes of a little boy he mentions, who, sitting silent one day watching the Judge deal out justice, suddenly rushed up and kissed him on the cheek. ”

“ As for the penal code, nourished by the centuries to prevent crime, it is operated as escapes for the strong criminal or as instruments of society’s revenge upon the weak.
Ben Lindsey’s great, new, ancient discovery is that men are what we are after, men and women; and that everything else, business and laws, politics, the Church, the schools — these are not institutions, but means to those higher ends, character and right living. ”

“ The outside world couldn’t understand why the people of his state wanted the Judge of the Juvenile Court to run for Governor; nor why he was willing to take the nomination. The reason, as we shall see, was that Ben Lindsey is no mere philanthropist, but (in the true sense of the word) a politician; no mere saver of little victims of wrong, but a man leading men to destroy the opportunities for evil-doing, and to give all the children of men a “show” to “do good.” ”

“ And just as some boys want to be Napoleon, so young U'Ren dreamed that when he grew up he would be like Moses, the giver of laws that should lead the people out of Darkness into the land of Promise. But, of course, the Biblical hero-worship, taught him first by that pious woman, his good mother, made it a religious influence, as it still is, for when U'Ren, the blacksmith, is fashioning his legislative tools he works not alone with the affection of the true mechanic, but with the devotion of a faith that his laws will indeed deliver the people from bondage. ”

“ We of the East despised the "Pops"; but their movement was to the reform movement of to-day what the "extreme" Abolitionists of New England were to the great movement that produced Lincoln and the Republican party. U'Ren became a Populist. But that party was to him—what the Republican party is to him now; what any party must be to any man who has in mind the good, not of an organization, but of a people—a means to an end, an instrument, a political tool. ”

“ The legislature had met, and again all the rulers of the state were present, the rulers and their dummies, the office-holders and legislators. This time Tom McCarter went to Colby; that is to say, the business boss beckoned the assemblyman to him.
“Colby,” he said, “what’s this I hear about you introducing a limited franchise bill?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Raising his voice, as before, so that all could hear, he laid down the law of the land for legislators. “You introduce that bill,” he bawled in his mad rage, “and you’ll lose every friend you have in Essex County.” ”

“ The boys had committed a crime; what was the Judge to do with them ? He didn’t know; he would have to “think it over.” And he thought it over. He went back to first principles. What did the complainant really want ? Only to have his property protected. And what was the law against burglary for? To protect property by preventing burglary. Wasn’t there any other way to achieve these common ends except by punishing these boys as burglars ? And if he put them
in prison might not other boys go on robbing the pigeon-loft? The Judge says it is “out of the mouths of babes” that he has learned wisdom. ”

“ I asked. “The poor people? The working people? When you address a crowd, do you appeal to labour as labour, to the unions, for example?”
“Oh, no. I never do that. I mean everybody.
The poor need the most, and most people over here work, but by people I mean men and women and children, everybody.”
“Railroad presidents? Do you hate the railroads ?”
“No,” he said, reflecting. “They do a good deal that is wrong. They corrupt young men, and they don’t care anything about Jersey City. They should stop corrupting politics, but you can’t expect them to look out for us. ”

“ One of his queer ideas is what may be called a sense of public property. All men know that private property is sacred; for centuries that sense has been borne in upon us till even thieves know it is wrong to steal private property. But highly civilized men lack all sense of the sacredness of public property; from timber lands to city streets that is a private graft. And when one day the Mayor received an anonymous note advising him to have the underlying franchise of the trolley company looked up, he was interested. ”

“ He is as open-minded to the truth about himself as he is to the truth about corruption, and because he is open-minded, and because he can confess his mistakes when he sees them; because he takes fences as he comes to them, and because he says he “will go any length to put a stop to the corruption of men and government,” it is likely that the Gentleman from Essex will fight to a finish. What the end will be in Jersey, Jerseymen must decide; they will have to watch the struggle and choose between those representatives who represent them
and those who do not. ”

“ Spreckels has that great fault of the self-made man; he has learned not from the experience of others, but only from his own, and what he doesn’t know isn’t known. He is unacquainted with the literature and the history of politics and government; he has no economic enlightenment at all. He is truly a practical man, and his practical experience is exceptional. He knows that he, as a gas magnate, did not bribe anybody and that he didn’t “have to.” ”

“ The Spreckels family is an institution in California and, generally regarded as a unit, is not popular. The Spreckelses fight. They fight hard. But they don’t fight together. They are not a unit. The family fights inside as well as out, and not all the members speak to one another. They differ among themselves in character, tastes, methods, purposes and, apparently, in morals. All they seem to have in common is a certain aggressive independence. They are in business what Labour would call “scabs.” They work by themselves and each by himself. ”

“ A capitalist, he can see the beam in the eye of capital as clearly as he can the mote in the eye of labour; and the only sense of class that he shows is in his real scorn for the workingman’s brick and the politician’s petty - blackmail. He would let them go to get the big, real deviltry of his own class, which is the source of our corruption, political, business, and labour, too. And he did.
Mr. Spreckels was fair. He gave his own class a chance. He passed the word in business circles that he was going after grafters; that he
knew business men were held up ”

“ In other words, Judge Lindsey has sought not merely to cure but to prevent the evils of child-life.
“Don’t tear down all the time,” men shout at reformers. “What we want is reconstructive work.” It was Lindsey’s “reconstructive work” that threatened to “hurt business.”
There we have one all-sufficient reason why he has to fight; but there’s a second: Ben Lindsey does not limit his labours to the cause of the children. He is celebrated for his juvenile sys- tem, and in Denver you hear that he is “a philan- thropist, and if he would stick to his philanthropic work, he might go on forever.” ”

“ The only trouble with gangs is that they absorb all the loyalty of the members, turning them from and often against the home, the Law, and the State. But that happens in grown-ups’ gangs, too. Railroad and other corporations are gangs which, in the interest of their “business,” corrupt the State. ”