.


SCI LIBRARY

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]

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