The Confessions Of A Reformer
Frederic C. Howe
[Part 2 of 11]
CHAPTER 2 / MEADVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA
...It was with difficulty that realism got lodgment in my mind;
early assumptrons as to virtue and vice, goodness and evil remained
in my mind long after I had tried to discard them. This is, I think,
the most characteristic inffuence of my generation. It explains the
nature of our reforms, the regulatory legislation in morals and
economics, our belief in men rather than in institutions and our
messages to other peoples.[p.17]
The important thing was to live as other men lived, do as other
men did, avoid any departure from what other men thought. Not to
conform was dangerous to one's reputation. Men who had strange
ideas, who protested, who thought for themselves, were quietly
ostracised. ...[p.18]
At Chautauqua I heard some lectures on political economy by
Richard T. Ely, of Johns Hopkins. They made me want to know more
about the big world outside of my little home town. I met John H.
Finley, later president of the College of the City of New York ...
who was then a student at Johns Hopkins... I would become an
editorial writer on a city newspaper. In order to be that I felt
that I should know something about economics, history, politics.
Apparently Johns Hopkins was the place where one should study these
things. ...[p.20]
CHAPTER 3 / JOHN HOPKINS
Daniel C. Gilman, the president of Johns Hopkins, was a great
educator. He had been selected by the board of trustees and given a
free hand in working out the plans for the university before its
doors were opened for students. He determined that the endowment
should be spent on men rather than on buildings, and that the
university should be devoted primarily to graduate work. Up to that
time America sent her advanced students abroad, especiaily to
Germany, for study. The men whom he gathered about him as
instructors brought with them an atmosphere of the German
university, of its freedom, its unconventionality, its enthusiasm
for research work. American universities had followed the models of
Oxford and Cambridge. They were church institutions; they emphasized
the classics; they were designed primarily for the education of the
sons of gentlemen. Doctor Gilman selected as instructors men of
enthusiasm, of independence, of courage.[pp.26--27]
...There was no campus. There were no college publications;
athletics were negligible. Students learned how to use books and how
to enjoy their minds. Teachers and students alike felt a dignity and
enthusiasm in their work.
My subjects were political economy, history, and jurisprudence.
Professor Ely, whose lectures had attracted me to the university,
was head of the department of political economy. He was an economic
radical, critical of old traditions and of accepted authorities.
Adam Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill wrote, he said, about the
world as it had been in the days of our grandfathers, when there
were no railroads, when large-scale industry was not known, huge
aggregations of capital had not appeared, and the industrial
revolution had just begun. Traditional political economy was a
science a hundred years out of date. It was without reality.
Text-books talked about the universality of competition; Professor
Ely told us that competition was coming to an end. They outlined
laws of rent, of profits, of demand and supply that were
inoperative. They pictured a society of struggle, while Professor
Ely showed us a world of monopoly, an economic feudalism that was
fast taking the place of the theoretical world of freedom and equal
opportunity.
Under his teaching I found myself wrenched loose from the economic
theories current in Meadville. Men who came under his influence
learned to look at the world with inquiring minds and to challenge
the finality of established things.
The year I took my degree Doctor Ely left Johns Hopkins to go to
the University of Wisconsin. There a few years later he was tried by
the Board of Regents for alleged socialistic teaching. It was, I
believe, one of the first heresy trials in the universities. Doctor
Ely was vindicated and a tablet was put up on the campus as a
monument to academic freedom, but the trial sent a chill through
political economists everywhere and aided effectively in
transferring discussion of social questions from the universities to
the street-corners and the radical press.[pp.28-29]
From many of the evils of American education Johns Hopkins was
conspicuously free. Censorship of thought, mental docility, waste of
enthusiasms, of adventure, of individuality -- all were foreign to
it. It was free from fear. It was as unlike the timid small college
from which I came as it is unlike the universities of to-day, which
seek their presidents from among business men, lawyers, good
money-getters, and in which freedom of teaching is being
subordinated to the desire for a big endowment. The teachers, not
the trustees, determined what was to be taught and how they should
teach it. There was no placating of possible donors, no mirroring of
the views of an economic class. In the nineties at Johns Hopkins I
had the good fortune to be born into the world of thought, to be
associated with men to whom honesty was a matter of course, and to
whom courage was the first essential of a gentleman and a scholar.
Johns Hopkins freed me from many small-town limitations. It gave
me new authorities, but they were still authorities outside of
myself. I continued to think as others thought, only now I was
thinking as did wise men, men who paid little attention to the
church, but who had a worshipful veneration for some scientist or
teacher under whose influence they had fallen. I accepted these new
authorities as quite natural. Acceptance fell in with my earlier
assumption that authority was proper, necessary, probably the first
of the moralities. Not till years after did I come consciously to
believe that I had a right to be my own authority. And not until I
had made serious mistakes did I awaken to the belief that I had some
rights of my own in the world, the right to pursue my own
enthusiasms, to choose what was agreeable rather than what was not.
Duty was always first; happiness was to be scrutinized.[pp.33-34]
CHAPTER 4 / WOODROW WILSON -- VIRGINIAN
Our greatest lecturer, as he was the most distinguished graduate
of the department, was Woodrow Wilson. Austere, never inviting
intimacies, he kept quite by himself at the university. ...
I permitted no conflicts to interfere with his courses. I read
religiously the books he suggested as prescribed reading. What he
had achieved I might also achieve if I were diligent enough. I
absorbed his conceptions of disinterested statesmanship, of
government by noblesse oblige. That early discipleship gave me,
years later, clews to the understanding of the powerful, baffled,
lonely personality who took us into the Great War.
The Wilson whose words I accepted then as I did a quarter of a
century later was a child of Caivinistic forebears, of Virginia
backgrounds, of university enthusiasms. He never escaped from the
church, the reveries of student days, from love for his native
State, They explain his written words, they made him what he
was.[p.35]
He studied at the University of Virginia as a Virginian should. No
university left a stronger stamp on its students than did the
foundation of Thomas Jefferson. At Johns Hopkins he continued the
study of history and politics. There he lived in the lives of the
Fathers of the Republic. He read their State Papers, studied the
debates of the Constitutional Convention, and idealized them as
philosopher-statesmen who had left imperishable monuments to liberty
in the written word. These Virginia gentlemen had not only won
liberty by the sword, they had made it permanent by great documents
-- the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Federal
Constitution. They had laid the foundations of democracy, industrial
as well as political. Only those students who lived in the
atmosphere of Johns Hopkins during these early years know the
veneration in which the men who gave these written monuments to the
world were held.[p.36]
At Johns Hopkins, Woodrow Wilson fell under the spell of Waiter
Bagehot, one of the greatest of British essayists. He urged his
students to read and reread Bagehot as he himself had done. His
Congressionral Government was said to have been inspired by
Bagehot's British Constitution, as were many of his essays on public
men. Bagehot gave the student Wilson that which his mind wanted; a
Picture of what a great constitutional statesman should be. Through
Bagehot's eyes he saw British statesmen as he saw himself. They were
drawn from the best families, trained from youth for the service Of
the state. They grew up in the atmosphere of Oxford and Cambridge,
and were exalted by traditions of disinterested public service. They
had no private ends to serve; because of their independent wealth
they were influenced only by the welfare of the empire. They were
the natural rulers of the constitutional state. England was a
gentlemen's country. And Mr. Wilson believed in gentlemen, in
selected men, in the platonic sense of the term. To Woodrow Wilson
the scholar it was easy to idealize a country that put its scholars
in politics and kept them there as it kept Arthur Balfour, James
Bryce, and other men of his own type.
A love of English Institutions was strong in Mr. Wilson even
during his student days. He organized then a debating society known
as the University Commons, modelled after the Oxford Union. Its
proceedings were carried on as are the proceedings In the House of
Commons. There was a ministry and an opposition. Weekly debates were
staged on current political issues, and ministries rose or fell on
votes of confidence. As a dissertation for his doctor's degree Mr.
Wilson had written Congressional Government, which was considered
the best book written by an American on our form of government. It
treated the British constitution with its responsible ministries
sitting in Parliament as better fitted than our own for popular
government.
Woodrow Wilson loved England as the mother of civil liberty and of
parliamentary government. She had given us the Magna Charta, the
Bill of Rights, and Petition of Rights. She had exiled the Stuarts
for their betrayal of English liberties and had called in Cromwell
and William of Orange to re-establish them. In his mind England was
the literal mother of America. From her we had taken our political
institutions. Also our system ofjurisprudence. His chief criticisms
of the American Constitution related to those features which failed
to follow the British parliamentary model. It was this love for
British forms that led him to read his messages to Congress in
person and to treat himself as a Premier rather than as a President.
As a matter of fact he was better fitted by temperament to serve as
a parliamentary leader than as a. President, and he would have felt
much more at home at Westminster than in Washington.[pp.37-38]
Mr. Wilson gave us no glimpse of the economic background of the
English ruling class. There was always the assumption that these
public men were not moved by private gain. It was never hinted in
his lecture-room that the British landed gentry, bankers, and
business men enacted laws to Protect their own class and group;
looked out, in short for their own interests. Nor that the House of
Lords was in the nature of a private corporation representative of
special interests even more than the United States Senate. He was
not interested in economics.
Woodrow Wilson prized the blood of his forebears. It was the blood
of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, Lees which flowed back in
its purity to old England. During the Peace Conference Mr. Wilson
went to Buckingham Palace, to the old Guildhall, to Carlisle with a
pride of birth, which the British never failed to keep alive before
his eyes. He was the kin, the equal, of the men he sat among from
the British Parliament. He loved England as did they. His blood was
the same as theirs. He knew her history better than did most of his
English associates, and he was proud of the service which he had
been able to render to the mother country.[p.38]
Another university influence permanently affected Woodrow Wilson.
At Johns Hopkins history was studied from original sources, from
American State Papers, from The Federalist, from the writings of the
Fathers; the text-book was secondary. We were directed to read and
reread the writings of the Presidents, especially of Washington,
jefferson, and Madison. We read the debates of the Constitutional
Convention, the letters of these early men. This reverence for State
Papers lived on in President Wilson as it did in all of his
contemporaries It exalted the written word; it made him careful of
his official addresses and communications to Congress. Just as he
gathered his pictures of men out of their public utterances, so
subsequent historians would Judge him from the same source. His
other addresses may pass away; his History of the United States may
be forgotten; the things he did may be condemned; but generations
hence students in the universities and statesmen at the Capital will
find the Woodrow Wilson of his own reveries, the Woodrow Wilson that
he wanted preserved in the State Papers written by him to his
contemporaries.
Woodrow Wilson the President is to be found in these early
influences. He never outgrew them. He lived in a world of dreams
rather than with men. His reveries were of English and American
statesmen, himself among the number; they were the reveries of the
student, of the admiring biographer, of the historian of the
Victorian age, when men were measured by ideological standards
rather than by the more realistic standards of to-day. He was always
religious, Calvinistic. He loved Virginia, the Mother of Presidents,
and esteemed great documents as the most enduring of deeds. His
heroes had phrased liberty, had inspired movements, had given the
world charters of freedom. They had won great victories by the
pen.[p.39]
CHAPTER 6 / THE POOR MAN'S CLUB
...A fascinating little book by Frederic Bastiat that I read that
winter confirmed my estimate of the correctness of [a saloon
owner's] analysis of regulation. It was entitled Economic Fallacies
and showed up the seen and unseen effects of sumptuary
legislation. The way out of the saloon problem I came to feel was by
taking off all the taxes. Taxation not only failed to reform the
businesses such as saloon, it produced by- products that were worse
than the evils it sought to cure. By taxation we had destroyed the
comfortable, friendly saloon, such as I had known in Baltimore
around the university, where any one who drank too much or made
himself a nuisance was put out. By taxation and regulation we made
the saloon an evil, involved it in politics, associated it with
graft. We tried with it, as with almost every problem of its kind,
every solution except letting it alone.[p.54]
Still my early judgments as to the stupidity of regulatory
legislaton have been strengthened with time, as has by contempt for
the hypocrisy that is identified with it.[p.55]
CHAPTER 7 / MY FRIENDS THE IRISH
...Politics I had believed was the business of a gentleman. It
should be in the hands of good men -- men who had succeeded in
business, who observed the conventions of life, who had graduated
from universities. Goodness would cure political ills. The scholar
in politics was the ultimate ideal, the ideal of Plato, of James
Bryce, of Woodrow Wilson. By disinterested service, by not wanting
anything for ourselves, the state could be redeemed.[p.57]
Equipped with this philosophy, I sat about saloons with officers
of the law, and came across a view of life that I had not known
before. Here was a world of political reality. Here politics was
part of everyday life, part of the family, of religion, of race.
Politics was daily work. My state was an abstraction. On the Bowery
it was a real thing -- a city block, a voting precinct, or a ward.
To me politics meant disinterested service. To the people of the
East Side it meant getting something for themselves and their
friends. To me duty to the state was the important thing; to them
the duty was to themselves. Government meant the district leader,
the policeman, the local boss. ...[p.57]
...To be loyal to one's friends, to stand by the gang, to do as
you were told, until you were in turn selected to tell others what
to do, was all that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the
government of the United States meant to the average man in lower
New York twenty-five years ago.[p.58]
It was the Irish cIan transplanted to New York. As I watched its
workings and remembered the praise lavished in the university on the
English conception of government, I saw an age-long conflict between
the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt. The Irish have wanted a state that did
things for them; the Anglo-Saxons have wanted a state that did
nothing. The English had no need of such a state. They were
interested in making money, in getting on in the world. Business
should do as it pleased; the state should own nothing and be nothing
beyond a big policeman. Politics in England was a negative thing,
aristocratic, distrustful of the people. My conception of politics
as the business of gentlemen seemed now to have a shadow cast
alongside it. It occurred to me that the British state, ruled by men
of wealth and leisure, was ruled for them, not for the people; they
unwillingly allowed others a share in it. I found myself leaning
unaccountably to the Irish view of things. They warmed the state
into a human thing, made frank demands on it for things they could
not get for themselves. They provided an amalgam to extreme
Anglo-Saxon individualism, which had an aversion to the state and a
resentment of any extension of its activities beyond routine things.
I began to think that perhaps politics had a human side, perhaps.the
state should do things for the happiness of its people instead of
being merely a policeman. And perhaps things had to be gotten by the
people who needed them most, not for them by some scholar or
leader.[p.59]
CHAPTER 8 / THE LAW
I ... secured the position I had applied for as secretary of the
Pennsylvania Tax Conference, and in the fall went to Pittsburgh to
take the bar examinations.[p.69]
...There was nowhere an outcry over the evil thing of government
by business, as represented by [Senator Matthew Quary, who ruled
Pennsylvania with a rod of iron]. Apparently the people did not want
to rule themselves. They preferred to have their officers selected
by some one else. The State was pretty rotten, every one admitted,
but a change -- well, nobody knew what a change might do to
business.[p.72]
As secretary of the Tax Commission I saw things that confused what
I had learned at the university. Members of the commission were
educated, intelfigent, well-to-do men; they went to church; they
were respected in the community. Yet they saw no impropriety in
taking passes from the railroads; they grew indignant at my
statement that they were relieving the railroads of millions of
taxes, or that the facts they used were not accurate. Everywhere
there was indifference to political conditions and approval of Boss
Quay. To speak critically of him was to invite disaster,
professional ostracism. ...[p.72]
Pittsburgh seemed less and less inviting to me as I lingered on in
it. I hated the dirt; one rarely saw the sun. The city was so
corruptly governed that the streets were not well paved, there were
no decent public buildings, and there was no concern voer unsightly
conditions. ...[p.73]
I decided that I was not willing to spend my life in Pittsburgh
and that I would first find a place to live and then adjust my
professional life to it. I visited Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, and
Cleveland, and liked Cleveland best. It had possibilities of beauty.
It stretched for miles along the lake front and still kept some of
the quality of a small town. ...[p.73]
