The Confessions Of A Reformer
Frederic C. Howe
[Part 8 of 11]
CHAPTER 23 / LEISURE
When the work of the Tax Commission was completed and the last
record of assessments signed, sealed, and delivered to the county
officials, I was at last free. I could leave Cleveland, could keep
the promise I had made to myself when I entered the New York Law
School, that I would quit the law at forty. If I had been
successful, well and good. If not, there was no need of further
trying. Success there had been of a kind, but it had given me little
enjoyment. The law had been my Leah; I had served fourteen years,
like Jacob for Rachel -- now I would enter into the reward of
freedom and devote myself to writing. That desire was stronger than
the associations of years in Cleveland.[p.231]
My wife threw herself into the suffrage movement, which was then
beginning to command attention, and in which she had been one of the
pioneers in Cleveland. ...[p.232]
Her achievements when she came to Cleveland were greater than my
own; she was widely known as a speaker, as a leader in the suffrage
movement, and in social activities. She was eager to continue her
work, work which was life to her. But I wanted my old-fashioned
picture of a wife rather than an equal partner. Women did not take
part in things in Cleveland; only a few had gone to college at that
time; there were but few activities open to women. They did not earn
their own living. That was a public admission of failure by the
husband. I found reasons for deciding against each suggested
activity in turn.
It did not occur to me that there was anything illogical in my
position, anything unjust in it or out of keeping with what I
believed in. My mind simply held fast to assumptions of my boyhood,
which social prejudices seemed to Justify. And as I look back over
those years I realize that I never honestly faced what I was doing
or the rightfulness of my wife's claims. It was not until we came to
New York, where the suffrage movement was claiming women of
distinction, where no more notice was taken of a woman in work than
a man, that I recast my prejudices. My mind did not do it, new
standards did. Then I was as eager for her to find her work as I had
been loath to have her do so in Cleveland. And she rapidly found
opportunities to her liking. She arranged meetings at Cooper Union
on various subjects, she developed dramatic activities in connection
with her work as chairman of the Twenty-fifth District, and rose
rapidly in the many activities with which women were connected. But
I had taken many years out of her life, had denied her the
opportunity to pioneer, which she feared rather less than did I, and
many of the enthusiasms that had been denied her in Cleveland could
not be warmed into life again.[pp.233-234]
She had aided me greatly in public speaking and writing and gave
me generous freedom to do as I chose with my life. She had consented
to the abandonment of the law for the uncertainties of literature,
the assured life of Cleveland for the hazards of the metropolis. All
this fitted in quite naturally with my domestic picture at the time.
As I reflect on this evolution in my opinions, I see again the
resistance of the mind to facts that involve sacrifice or personal
discomfort, that involve disapproval by one's class or the society
in which one lives. There was every reason why I should have allowed
my wife any right which I enjoyed, should have given her every
freedom which I took for myself, should have encouraged her to
express her talents, which I recognized were of an unusual sort. I
was proud of these qualities, and my belief in freedom should have
made me the first to insist that she use them as she willed.
Instead, I discouraged them, because I preferred my early picture of
a wife, a picture that fell in with the current assumption of the
period that a woman should quite literally "serve,"
quite literally "obey," her husband. Property
rights die hard. Up to very recently a woman was property. Social
mores die harder. They relate to the herd in which one lives. And
social standing is as much prized as property. As to women, I
followed the changing mores. I spoke for women's suffrage without
much wanting it. And I urged freedom for women without liking it. My
mind gave way, but not my instincts. One can be a hard-boiled
monopolist in personal relations, just as in property; and as
unwilling to permit individuals to change as the Constitution of the
land. I hated privilege in the world of economics; I chose it in my
own home.[pp.234-235]
And I have sometimes doubted whether many of the men who spoke and
worked for the equality of women really desired it. Intellectually
yes, but instinctively no; they clung as did I to the propertied
instinct, to economic supremacy, to the old idea of marriage, in
which all that a woman got she got through petitioning for it. There
is something so jagged about our convictions; they do not run a
hundred per cent true. My own unwillingness to abdicate masculine
power made me better understand men's unwillingness to abdicate
economic power.
And in the woman movement, as in other social movements, equality
had to be seized by the class that had it not. I remember a saying
of Tolstoy's that the "rich would do anything for the poor
but get off their backs." That seemed to be true in the
relation of sexes as it was in the relations of classes.
With our life adjusted to new friends, with leisure and freedom
from economic fears, I could now write as I had not written before.
For years I had been planning in detail the writing of a series of
ten books on the general subject of democracy. It was to occupy the
rest of my life. Though some of my early illusions were gone, my
enthusiasm for democracy remained. Democracy had never been
synthetically studied. It had only been partially tried. Endless
books on the subject of government were concerned with the
Constitution, with city charters, with the machinery of government.
Academic in form and substance, they did not portray the invisible
government that lay back of the shadows with which we were familiar;
they left us still in the dark as to what was the matter with the
city and the state. They did not deal with the economic foundations
of politics, with its social possibilities, or suggest what the city
and the state might become if they used their powers to serve the
people.[pp.235-236] I had dreams of social democracy. What we needed
were facts. I would assemble the achievements of Germany, England,
Switzerland, and Denmark and present them as a demonstration of
constructive democracy, of the kind of a society we might have if we
but saw the state as an agency of service.
My plan was ambitious. It included first a volume on the city,
then a study of the American State then one on the federal
government. These books were to be illumined with comparisons from
Europe, with studies of public ownership, social insurance
co-operation, city-planning. One volume was to be a survey of
contemporary civilization followed, I hoped, by a history of the
world, interpreted in economic rather than political or personal
terms.
America seemed to me a country so much absorbed in elementary
activities, in wholly individual efforts to get on in the world that
it had not had the time to think of anything else. Only yesterday we
were pioneers, homesteaders, home-builders. We had quite naturally
left politics to any one who would relieve us of the responsibility.
We were not only business-minded, we were parish-minded. We did not
know what was going on outside of our own environment. But we were
practical -- facts were important to us; all that was needed was to
show the way and we would fellow it. The right kind of books written
from experience factual in presentation and popular in form would
bring to America the one thing needed. ... When I wrote The
City, the Hope of Democracy, the first book of my series, I felt
that it would be a manual of reform; it would hearten people and
point out the steps to be taken. I put into it all my faith in the
future of American cities, in the certainty of their
redemption.[pp.236-237]
I sent the manuscript to Charles Scribner's Sons, confident of its
value, certain of its success. It was accepted and the proofs came
back to me interlined with helpful suggestions and humorous queries
as to facts or arrangement. They were initialed W.C.B. My sense of
literary form was not commensurate with my zeal for the subject.
There were exaggerations; I was frankly a propagandist disposed to
repetition as a means of emphasis. I fancy that I am one of a large
number of writers who owe an unexpressed debt to Mr. W. C. Brownell,
one of America's distinguished critics, as he is certainly one of
her kindest. He gave me continued encouragement, along with
illuminating suggestions as to style and manner of treatment that
were never dogmatic and were always right.
A second book, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy, had
followed as the fruit of two winters that I spent at the University
of Wisconsin lecturing on European and American politics. I utilized
the opportunity to make a study of an American State that had used
its powers under the liberalizing legislation inspired by Robert M.
LaFollette. I wrote about Wisconsin as an example of what the
American State might be; of the dignity that it might enjoy, not
unlike that of the smaller countries of Europe. The close
identification of the State university with the State government I
found admirable; admirable, too, the aid that the agricultural
college had been in upbuilding farm life. Through social
legislation, education, and the expansion of State activities,
Wisconsin was making itself an invaluable experiment in
democracy.[p.237]
...I had a passionate belief that people could and would build as
great states as ever rulers had built. But everywhere I found the
conflict that balked democracy in its work. I found it especially in
America and analyzed it in a book entitled "Privilege and
Democracy." It was a diagnosis of the America of my generation,
of the ascendancy of business and our indifference to an organized,
well-ordered state. In England and Germany I saw democracy coming
into being in cities rather than in Parliament; I described it in
three books -- The British City: The Beginnings of Democracy,
European Cities at Work, and The Modern City and Its
Problems.
Socialized Germany, published in 1914, contained parts of
an ambitious work that I had long had in mind, to be called The
Peaceful Revolution. During the war I wrote Why War?,
The Only Possible Peace, and The High Cost of Living.
Later Denmark: A Cooperative Commonwealth Ruled by Farmers
marked a return to the original series on political and industrial
democracy.[p.238]
CHAPTER 24 / THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE
One day I was invited to speak at the City Club of New York at a
meeting where the guest of honor was Count von Bernsdorff, the
German ambassador. The subject was municipal administration in
Germany. Some one liked what I had to say, and a short time after I
was asked to become director of the People's Institute, a
kind of popular university, which conducted a public forum at Cooper
Union and carried on various educational activities south of
Fourteenth Street. Its founder, Charles Sprague Smith, had been the
moving spirit in many progressive political ideas. ...Here was
contact with life and with liberal movements in the city. I gladly
accepted the invitation.[p.240]
...Socialism was the vogue, also woman suffrage. Graduates of
Harvard, Columbia, and Vassar, concerned for the well-being of
society but not for its conventions formed an American youth
movement. They protested against industrial conditions, suffered
vicariously with the poor, hated injustice. ...They started radical
periodicals for the expression of their ideas. Muck-rakers, it
seemed, had had their day. Mere uplift was inadequate. Constructive
change was demanded.[pp.240-241]
There were leaders among these leaders. Max Eastman, handsome,
eloquent, winning, was associate professor of philosophy at
Columbia. Poet and dreamer of better conditions, he was drawn from
the university into life. Crystal Eastman, a graduate of Vassar and
later admitted to the bar, held an important position as secretary
of the Workmen's Compensation Commission, to which she had been
appointed by Governor Hughes as the result of a brilliant
investigation of housing and industrial conditions in Pittsburgh.
This brother and sister became the centre of a group of writers,
artists, and poets, who started The Masses in 1912 and carried on
its publication until 1917, when it was discontinued as a result of
the war. ...Jack Reed, recently from Harvard, was beginning that
tempestuous career as poet, magazine writer, war reporter, and
finally revolutionary agitator which led him first to Mexico with
Villa and then to Russia, where he died, honored by a monument
erected by the revolutionists. Boardman Robinson and John Sloan, the
artists, Mary Heaton Vorce and Inez Haynes Irwin the well known
fiction-writers, formed part of the group that contributed to The
Masses as a forum for the expression of their ideas in art and
literature.[pp.241-242]
The great hall of Cooper Union, the centre of the activities of
the People's Institute was a free forum for the discussion
of questions of the day. Socialism and feminism were presented from
its platform. Prominent foreigners coming to this country spoke
there. Protest meetings were organized to defeat obnoxious measures
before the Assembly at Albany, ...[p.242]
Emma Goldman, deported to Russia in 1920, took part in discussions
in those more confident days from the floor of Cooper Union. She
presented her ideas with a brutal frankness and disregard for
conventions that suggested the advocacy of force. Had she been
staged in some more conventional activity she might easily have been
recognized as a remarkable person. ...She was indifferent to
material comfort, generous to the last degree. Tolerant of people,
but intolerant of institutions, she denounced the latter
unsparingly, and dramatized her own radicalism, partly to secure a
hearing, partly because she felt the necessity of becoming a martyr
to her beliefs, as were other revolutionists in Russia. It was her
ideas quite as much as herself that she insisted on exhibiting. And
her ideas were always unusual and unashamed.[p.243]
Several times I went to Detroit to try to persuade Henry Ford to
contribute to radical movements. I was never able to enlist his
interest. He, too, mystified me; perhaps the very simplicity of the
man bewildered me. He did not fit in with my formulas, either. Once
I spent several days at the plant waiting for an opportunity to
discuss my mission. But his mind seemed never to leave his car, or
tractor. He would go away abruptly and be found standing over some
obscure part of the car beside a workman performing some routine
function, or before the motion-picture screen that was exhibiting
the tractor which was then being perfected. I have never seen more
complete absorption: he listened to his attorney listlessly, to his
superintendent with irritation, to guests without interest. He left
his luncheon untouched, abandoned visitors who had come half-way
across the continent to discuss something with him; but when he did
talk on some public question it was with an understanding of cause
and effect that was quite out of keeping with his apparent ignorance
of the essential facts. His mind leaped from starting point to
conclusion. Intermediate factors were as though they did not
exist.[pp.246-247]
He saw the labor problem in personal terms. He had no faith in
labor-unions, apparently little faith in the experts whom he
employed. He had few intimates among men of his class, but loved to
visit with the farmers and men with whom he had grown up in the town
of Dearborn. Life to him seemed bounded by the moralities of a small
town, moralities of kindness, of doing your job as well as it can be
done, of hating waste in any form, especially hating personal vices
like smoking, drinking, or gambling. To him the banker was an
exploiter, the railroads were the last word in inefficiency, and
should be owned by the government and operated for service, while
the landowner was a non-producer who seized in increased rentals all
of the gains which Ford gave to his workers in higher wages. War was
the most immoral thing of all. It was caused by international
bankers, by munition-makers, and by a parasitical, exploiting
class.[p.247]
The years from 1911 to 1914 were a happy interim for me. Working
with college men and women who were convinced that the old order was
breaking up, living in a world that had confidence in literature and
in the power of ideas, it seemed to me that a new dispensation was
about to be ushered in. A half-dozen monthly magazines had built up
their circulation on disclosures of corruption and economic wrong;
Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Charles Edward
Russell had the attention of America; forums were being opened in
the churches, city reformers were springing up all over the country.
A dozen insurgents had been elected to Congress; direct primaries,
the direct election of United States senators, the initiative and
referendum were being adopted, while municipal ownership, labor
legislation, woman suffrage, and the single tax seemed but a short
way off. It was good form to be a liberal. Conservative lawyers,
bankers, and men of affairs stepped out from their offices and lent
their names to radical movements. They presided at meetings and
contributed to causes. Branches of the Intercollegiate Socialist
League were being organized in the colleges, woman suffrage was
enlisting the most prominent women of the country, President
Roosevelt was providing catchwords for radicals to conjure with,
while Woodrow Wilson was taken from the cloisters of Princeton to be
made governor of New Jersey, to be later elected to the
presidency.[pp.249-250]
"The new freedom" was to replace the old serfdom of
bosses, the younger generation was to achieve the things that had
been denied my own -- a generation ignorant of the old Egypt of
small capitalism, aware of the cruel feudalism of the new. The
political renaissance was now surely coming. It would not stop with
economic reform; it would bring in a rebirth of literature, art,
music, and spirit, not unlike that which came to Italy in the
thirteenth century after the popolo grasso had made their pile and
then turned to finer things. The colleges were to lead it; it was to
have the support of the more enlightened business men; it would call
for the impoverished talents of the immigrant and the poor. The
spirit of this young America was generous, hospitable, brilliant; it
was care-free and full of variety. The young people in whom it
leaped to expression hated injustice. They had no questions about
the soundness of American democracy. They had supreme confidence in
the mind. They believed, not less than I had always believed, that
the truth would make us free.[p.251]
CHAPTER 25 / ELLIS ISLAND
During the summer of 1914 I received a letter from President
Wilson tendering me the position of United States Commissioner of
Immigration at the port of New York. I was happy in the work as
director of the People's institute. The subject of
immigration did not interest me greatly, and I knew very little
about it. But Ellis Island is a principality. It lies in lower New
York harbor, opposite to the Aquarium, which in earlier days was
Castle Garden. The Commissioner has a force of six hundred men under
him, and in normal times as many as five thousand immigrants passed
through the island in a single day. There are two big hospitals and
a fleet of boats. The Commissioner is a presidential appointee and
responsible to the President alone.
The appointment made an appeal to something in me which has always
been fundamental, something which stirred me in the university, led
me into the social settlement, urged me into politics, impelled me
to work for parks and playgrounds in Cleveland, and landed me in the
People's Institute in New York. All of my activities have
been part of a lifelong interest in the changing and improving of
conditions that result in suffering or injustice. My passion for the
city, in fact, all my writing, has been but the expression of this
enthusiasm for improved environment. My admiration for Tom Johnson
had sprung from the same hope and the same faith.[p.252]
My interest in political reforms was not personal, it was
economic. It was related somehow to a better ordering of things; to
freeing the individual so that he could achieve all that was in him.
That had been my chief enthusiasm in connection with the People's
Institute. ...[p.253]
Ellis Island was an opportunity to ameliorate the lot of several
thousand human beings. It was also an opportunity to do the work I
liked to do. No doubt I thought I wanted to do this work for the
sake of the immigrants. Probably I wanted to do it to satisfy my own
instincts. Here on a small scale was an environment to be changed
and improved.
I was wholly ignorant of official bureaucracy, of its jealousies
and resistances to change -- an ignorance, as it turned out, that
was an advantage to me, for had I known the psychology of the
permanent employee and his power, I should have hesitated before
initiating the changes I had in mind to humanize the island. For I
had heard Ellis Island referred to at Cooper Union as the Island of
Tears. It was a storehouse of sob stories for the press;
deportations, dismembered families, unnecessary cruelties made it
one of the tragic places of the world.[p.253]
During the next few years I learned how we were governed by petty
clerks, mostly Republicans. The government was their government. A
Cabinet official was to be respected, but he was to be made to know
his place. He must not think that he could change things and
disorganize the department; it had been so for years, it would
remain so. Even Presidents came and went, but the permanent
official, protected by the Civil Service regulations, was there for
life. He hoped for a little more salary, dreamed of a little more
power, eventually a place farther up the line as chief clerk. Then
he would repay some of the slights he had received.[255]
This was the administrative state -- the state that often shapes
political action, that conspires with congressmen. In a generation's
time, largely through the Civil Service reform movement, America has
created an official bureaucracy moved largely by fear, hating
initiative, and organized as a solid block to protect itself and its
petty unimaginative, salary hunting instincts. America has paid a
heavy price for its permanent classified service. In Washington at
least it would be better if we had the spoils system, with all of
its evils, in those offices that have it in their power to shape
policies, to control executive action, and to make the state a
bureaucratic thing. In the State Department, the Treasury in the War
and Navy Departments, this is especially true. Even the Labor
Department is Tory-minded in its personnel; I found, for the most
part, only a petty struggle of groups and individuals to retain and
exalt their own power.[p.256]
On the island there was resistance to change. I had to blaze my
way through division chiefs to know what was going on. Finally, I
posted a notice in a dozen languages that any immigrant and any
official could come to me directly. I posted other notices
explaining to the aliens their rights. After repeated failures to
get action from Washington, I printed a whole code of rules and
displayed them conspicuously about the island. It was as easy to
make a hundred changes at one stroke as a single one. Once the order
had been issued, the burden was on the bureau to change. The orders
stuck; they were never rescinded. And easy access to my office ended
many abuses.
I set myself to changing the reputation of the island. I meant
that it should be a kindly place to the million-odd people who in
normal times passed through its gates each year. Instead of a
prison, it should become a place of temporary detention. Aliens were
allowed a great deal of freedom. For the first time men and women
were permitted to be together in the detention rooms. The war
lengthened the period of detention into months, so I opened a school
for children. ...On Sunday concerts were given by immigrant groups,
which readily co-operated with me in caring for their nationals.
...[p.257]
I took down high iron screens that suggested a prison, refused to
permit cells to be used for solitary confinement. When disputes
arose in the detention rooms which seemed to threaten serious
disorder, I talked things over with the aliens. Always there was
some just cause for complaint, over the food, over harsh treatment.
During these years there were hundreds of persons detained as
immoral cases, scores who had had a criminal record at home. Nearly
one million aliens passed through the island during the five years I
was there. For a time there were two thousand Germans detained as
war prisoners, and for nearly a year there were a hundred-odd Reds
arrested in different parts of the country and portrayed as the most
dangerous of anarchists, organized to overthrow the government by
force. Yet during these years there was never a controversy that was
not allayed by a friendly conference, and all told scarcely half a
dozen instances of disorder, disturbance, or outbreak of any
kind.[p.257]
For over a year things went well on the island. The newspapers
gave space to the new ideas that I had introduced, the attempt to
care for the thousands of aliens who, as a result of war, found
themselves without a country, wards of the United States Government.
I spoke before chambers of commerce, clubs, colleges, and
universities. I took an active part in the movement to Americanize
the alien, especially in trying to interpret his wants, as opposed
to the wants which his self-constituted guardians thought he ought
to have.
I was happy in my work of humanizing Ellis Island.[p.258]
CHAPTER 26 / BUSINESS AS USUAL
Then something happened. It happened so quickly that I did not
understand it. I could not fathom its significance or sense its
power. ...
Some Years prior to my appointment the New York Globe had made a
sensational attack on the condition of food supplied the immigrants
on the island. It asserted that the concessionaire supplied poor
food, that he made a fortune out of his contract, which carried with
it the right to sell supplies to departing aliens as they left the
island for Western points. The Globe had forced an
investigation by the department, which it asserted had never been
efficiently conducted. ...I had the food supervised, and came to the
conclusion that it was wrong for private contractors to enjoy
concessions on government property, especially in the case of the
food contractor, to whose interest it was to push the sale of food
and depreciate its quality.[pp.259-260]
Fortified with my investigations, I went to the department and
members of Congress, and urged that the government should feed the
immigrant itself. There was no great difficulty with the plan, for
the government fed the patients in the hospitals, and the plant was
already installed. The Secretary of Labor approved the suggestion,
and an amendment providing for it was inserted in a pending
appropriation bill. It authorized the department to feed the aliens
directly after it had compensated the existing concessionaire for
his investment.
The morning following the adoption of this amendment the New York
papers carried reports of a savage attack made on me by a New York
congressman. He said that I was a Socialist and a radical; he made a
number of other charges against my administration. Obviously his
information had been obtained from the food contractor.
When reporters showed me the story, I said that possibly the
solicitude of the congressman over conditions at the island was due
to the fact that he had long been the attorney for the food
contractor who had been ousted from a very profitable contract by
the change in the law.
Then the storm broke. It did not let up for four years.
I found that seventy thousand aliens were being landed every year
in Hoboken instead of being brought to Ellis Island. They lost time.
They were fleeced by hotels, by baggage men; they were lured into
houses of prostitution and saloons and in the end many of them were
brought to Ellis Island by circuitous routes on their way to
Western-bound trains. They and their baggage were handled over and
over again; they were left unprotected on the streets. It often cost
them what little money they had. All this would have been obviated
had the aliens been landed directly at Ellis Island, where they were
under government protection and were placed on outgoing trains by
inspectors detailed for that purpose.[pp.260-261]
I urged that these passengers be landed on the island directly
from the steamships, where the abuses could be stopped. Instead of
investigating the subject and issuing an order, the
Commissioner-General called a hearing at Ellis Island on the
proposal. The propriety of the change seemed so obvious that I
assumed it would be ordered as a matter of course. On the day of the
hearing the island was swamped with a hungry crowd protesting
against the proposal. They came not only from Hoboken but from New
Jersey and New York. Powerful interests had been enlisted; there
were railway and steamship agents, hotel-keepers, express men,
representatives of the New York Chamber of Commerce. Hundreds of
people were angrily aroused at the suggestion that they should be
deprived of their prey. Representatives of the Hoboken Chamber of
Commerce said it would cost Hoboken at least five hundred thousand
dollars a year. Hotel and express men claimed almost equal losses.
They looked upon the money which they took from the alien as a
vested interest. It was sacred. They were callous to the suggestion
that the prevailing system meant a needless loss to immigrants of
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. These considerations were
not even noticed in the discussion. Money was at stake. It was to be
taken from Americans. Why in the name of Heaven should anybody be
concerned over the alien?[p.261]
The order for the change was never made.
I found that the transcontinental railroads divided the incoming
aliens among themselves by a pooling arrangement. Many were taken
West over the most circuitous routes. Some were first taken to New
York; there they were kept in cheap lodging-houses. Then they were
put on a boat to Norfolk, where they were transferred to trains
carrying them to Cincinnati, Chicago, or Western points. They lost
days of time, often they reached their destination late in the night
without friends to meet them. They were open to all sorts of graft
on their unprotected arrival.
I found that aliens in this country were losing large sums of
money through irresponsible bankers, with whom they made deposits,
bought exchange, or purchased tickets for themselves or their
friends. I detailed secret-service men to investigate, and unearthed
losses of twelve million dollars in a single year in New York alone.
The worst offender fled the country as a result of the
investigation. I sought to put these fly-by-night bankers out of
business by a State law that would require inspection by the banking
authorities, but I was never able to make any headway with the
suggestion nor could I get any support at Washington.[p.262]
...I was called a Socialist; Socialism meant all kings of things
to the congressional mind. I was accused of admitting immoral women,
who had been ordered deported; of permitting too great freedom on
the island, of tolerating gambling. ...[p.263]