The Confessions Of A Reformer
Frederic C. Howe
[Part 6 of 11]
CHAPTER 19 / PRE-WAR RADICALS
One day in 1903 Lincoln Steffens came into our offices. I had been
reading his articles on "The Shame of the Cities"
in McClure's Magazine, and was eager to meet him. ...acquaintance
furnished me the astonishing discovery that Lincoln Steffens was an
artist rather than a reformer.
He was getting good copy, was seeing extraordinary men, bankers,
bosses, grafters; he set down the things he saw and got more
enjoyment than hatred out of the dishonor he uncovered. He paid
little attention to the machinery of government, to the things other
men thought important. ...[p.182]
...He found out that the "dirty" bosses took
orders. They were scavengers, stokers, shovellers, who kept the
machines going for the captains on the bridge. They organized the
saloon; they took graft from prostitutes, bartered in contracts. But
they did it not alone for themselves; there were others involved,
men whom they only knew casually -- bankers, clubmen, gentlemen,
whose influence was so powerful that it protected them from exposure
through the press. Steffens disclosed what came to be known as the "invisible
government." He coined phrases which stuck. He awakened us
to shame -- made it possible for us to understand what was the
matter. He showed a more penetrating knowledge of politics than any
writer in the country.
He came to Cleveland as a reporter. Tom Johnson, he thought, was
different from other bosses only in that he was cleverer. He was
playing the same game, cheating the people for some ulterior end,
probably his private enrichment by setting possession of the
street-railways. But Tom Johnson was elected by the people, and
Steffens wanted to understand a city that brought its boss out into
the open. He spent months in Ohio talking with all sorts of men. He
went away convinced that there was something wrong, but that he
could not find it. It would come out in time. Later he returned and
continued the inquiry. My estimate of muck-raking rose greatly from
seeing him at work. He was exact, painstaking, unflinchingly
accurate. At last, almost reluctantly, he accepted Tom Johnson as a
great leader. He described him as "the best mayor of the
best-governed city in America."
Steffens changed after that. When he came to Cleveland he
professed to be merely a reporter, who wrote political stories as
brilliant as fiction and delighted in his work. Under the influence
of Tom Johnson he came to believe in the single tax. Then he studied
Socialism and became a Socialist without interest in Karl Marx, as
he had been a single-taxer without adherence to Henry George. He
hated sects and organization; organization, he said, would destroy
the beauty of any movement. He was always the psychologist, as he
had been in his student days at a German university. He outgrew
Socialism. Revolutions attracted him. He went to Mexico, where he
liked the thoroughness of the job. Then to Russia, Germany, and
Italy. Wherever a revolution was threatening, there Steffens might
be found, trying to understand it. ...[pp.183-184]
Brand Whitlock ... was primarily an artist, like Steffens. His
political life was an accident. I had the impression ... that the
office of mayor, to which he had been elected on the death of Sam
Jones, distressed him. Brutality hurt him. The brutality of society
to the criminal hurt him most. Society must protect itself, but the
state, he believed, should help people, not hurt them. Personal
liberty was a precious thing. ...[p.188]
I felt close to Brand Whitlock. I too was writing -- books
idealizing a city that would be free from class war. I too wanted a
free state, in which the individual would be important.[pp.188-189]
I saw Brand Whitlock again in Brussels after the war. Will Irwin
and I were doing the devastated area with a French mission and we
called at the embassy. It was filled with grateful memorials from
towns and cities, from the King of Belgium and from foreign
governments. There Whitlock seemed to me to be in his proper
environment. We walked through the parks and talked about old days
of struggle In Cleveland and Toledo. I saw that his thoughts still
turned to literature. "I have gone through every political
philosophy," he said. "I can see nothing in Socialism. The
philosophy of Henry George of a free state in which the resources of
the earth will be opened up to use is the only political philosophy
that has ever commanded my adherence. But the world is not
interested in such a simple reform. It wants too much government,
too much regulation, too much policing. And it may never change."[p.189]
Heartening ... liberals and reporting their doings was a weekly
publication in Chicago, The Public, edited by Louis F. Post.
Fearlessly honest in opinion, keenly understanding in its reporting,
it gave form and direction to the liberal movement and charted the
lines of its progress. It was the best mirror of pre-war liberalism
that we had; a reading of its pages discloses the fineness, the
intellectuality, the hopefulness of that movement which was the last
protest of the democracy of the pioneer period still under the
influence of the free land of the West.[p.195]
What has become of this movement that promised so much twenty
years ago? What has become of the pre-war radicals? They had a large
following; their voices inspired America during the years that
preceded the war. They gave themselves without stint, they fought
for the most part alone, and they felt that a change was impending
that would end the abuses that had come with the rise of great
wealth, based for the most part on the unparalleled resources of
America.[pp.195-196]
Lincoln Steffens spends most of his time in Europe. To my question
when I last saw him as to what he was doing, he answered smilingly:
"I am learning to be an intelligent father." Brand
Whitlock has gone back to literature, Newton Baker to the law.
Fremont Older edits the San Francisco Call. Joseph W. Folk is dead.
Most of the radicals of pre-war days have laid down their arms. Was
the fight too hard? Did youth burn itself out? Has the movement
become a class struggle, finding its leaders among the farmers and
workers? May it be -- as some of them feel -- that there is little
for liberals to do? Though the old order decays, the new order
cannot be rushed. It must come in its own way. There must be the
frosts of winter before there can be an awakening of spring.[p.196]
Robert M. LaFollette persisted almost alone in the fight. For a
quarter of a century he did at least two men's work fighting special
interests, assailing the trusts and the protective tariff in the
Senate, and attempting to hold the railroads in leash. Between
sessions he toured the country reading the roll-call on his
associates until they were one by one defeated, and a statement made
in his maiden speech in the Senate came true. He predicted then,
when the Senate emptied itself to show disapproval of him, that "he
would live to see the day when the seats now vacated temporarily
would be permanently vacated of their present possessors."
He fought in Wisconsin to preserve the gains that were made there;
was recognized in the Senate as a scrupulous and tireless worker,
never content with a statement until it had been verified, loading
his speeches with statistics and supporting material which make them
authoritative; his voice has carried the progressive cause from one
end of the country to the other. During the war he was ridiculed,
misrepresented, cruelly handled by the press. A phrase in one of his
speeches, "We have grounds of complaint against Germany, was
distorted by the press agencies to read: "We have no
grounds of complaint against Germany." He was assailed by
the President as a "wilful" man, was all but
abandoned by his friends, and for years lived under the shadow of
proceedings to oust him from the Senate. Threatened by disease and
harassed financially, he bore his isolation without complaint;
accepted no friendship which impaired his freedom, never compromised
with a conviction, and displayed unflinching courage of the kind
that enables men to go to the stake.[pp.196-197]
I traveled with him through the West on his last campaign, saw the
devotion of throngs of farmers and workers that gathered to hear him
and came to believe that he was probably the best-loved man in
America.[p.197]