The Confessions Of A Reformer
Frederic C. Howe
[Chapter 1 / Beginning (Part 1 of 11)]
I am not nearly as old as the records of births in Meadville,
Pennsylvania, make me seem. My life really began in the early
[eighteen] nineties instead of the late sixties. It began at John
Hopkins University. Under the influence of Richard T. Ely, Woodrow
Wilson, Albert Shaw, James Bryce, I came alive. I felt a sense of
responsibility to the world. I wanted to change things. It was not
very clear what I wanted to change or how I should go about it. It
had to do with politics. Also with economics. My mind found new
authorities. They were intellectual rather than moral, social rather
than personal.
From Professor Richard T. Ely I learned that the industrial system
was not what I had assumed it to be in Meadville, where my father
was a manufacturer on a small scale; not a kindly family affair,
like my father's furniture store, in which he employed his brother,
his nephews, and other goodlooking and engaging young men who came
and went in our house as guests. Employers, I now learned, were
capitalists. They exploited their workers. They were not considerate
men who got rather less than their employees out of the enterprise.
Those friendly young men who sang and joked and took me on picnics,
occasionally went to a saloon and had a glass of beer. That
distressed me. Ought I to tell my father about it? Surely he would
remonstrate with them if he knew. One man was always in domestic
difficulties. He overdrew his account by several thousand dollars.
Such problems of personal conduct I heard discussed at home. They
were the only serious ones that business, to my boyhood knowledge,
presented.
In the new world that took shape for me at the university,
industry was a grim affair of mines and mills, of trusts and
monopolies, in which men were numbers rather than human beings.
There was conflict in it, division of people into those who owned
things and those who worked for the people who owned. There were
strikes bloody sometimes like civil war, in which men hated one
another. Little children were slaves in cotton-mills and
sweat-shops; men in mines worked twelve and fourteen hours a day.
There was menace in the industrial system; there was need of change.
Politics, too, had been simple matters in Meadville. The Andrews
Brothers, lieutenants of Matthew Stanley Quay, looked after all the
offices. They personally selected the candidates and advised men
whether or not they should run for office. They gave me railway
passes on which I travelled to and from the university. Few persons
questioned the right of two amiable gentlemen -- one of them editor
of the Meadville Republican, the other a man with no apparent
vocation -- to advise men whether they should be a candidate or get
an appointment. It did not seem improper that every one in the
county should go to them to have things done at Harrisburg or in
Washington by Mr. Quay. In the opinion of my relatives -- and that
opinion had been mine -- Mr. Quay was maligned by disgruntled men
who had not gotten the county printing or some job they wanted. He
was a good organizer. He kept his word, rewarded his friends, and
punished his enemies. He was a member of the church. That was
political morality enough for Meadville. He was known as the "political
leader," and people leaned on him much as they leaned on the
church. Authority was a necessary and desirable thing. It existed
unquestioned. There was something unthinkable to me about being a
Democrat -- Democrats, Copperheads, and atheists were persons whom
one did not know socially. As a boy I did not play with their
children. The Republican Party and the Methodist church divided our
allegiance. Their authority was unquestioned. They were the
guardians of morality, respectability, and standing.
At Johns Hopkins new authorities took the place of the old. Mr.
James Bryce lectured on the failures of democracy and the need of
the scholar in politics. I had brought from home a mild distaste for
the word democracy; it savored of objectors to Senator Quay. But I
did not know that it had failed. I was not aware that everything was
not as it should be. My friends and relatives were not only content
with things as they were; they were stanch believers in the system
which freed them from responsibility and left them free to go about
their business, leaving the primaries, conventions, and elections to
excellent men who were pillars in the church and respected because
of their conventional virtues. Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth was
at that time a work of Biblical authority. When he visited our
seminar on politics, professors and students accepted his opinions
as beyond and above question. He talked about the spoils system,
about the corruption of cities, and the decay of a sense of
responsibility among the kind of people whom I knew. That was what
impressed me most: the kind of people I knew had neglected their
duties.
I had not been interested in politics; I had accepted conditions
as I found them, as I accepted business. They were approved by the
people I knew; the political system included the local judge, a
member of the Methodist church. It had his approval, and it had the
approval of my relatives. I might become a part of it some day.
I was interested in getting a job -- perhaps in my father's store.
I dreamed about homesteading out West, in Kansas or Nebraska. That
suggested adventure. I admired the big brick residences of citizens
who had found oil in Bradford, Oil City, or Ohio; I envied their
social life outside our own. I fancied myself pioneering, going out
as these men had done, and returning to know them and their
families. Life meant business, getting on in the world; the business
one was in determined one's social position. My ambition was to make
money and to enjoy the pleasures that possessors of wealth enjoyed.
I should have liked to be the county judge -- but that was out of
the question. I did not envy my college professors, though they
seemed tremendously wise. They were disagreeable, prone to be
critical of me in the classroom. I never thought of being a scholar.
The law seemed to me a distinguished, a difficult, profession. I was
desperately afraid of being pushed into the ministry, which maiden
aunts and Sunday-school teachers urged on me. One of the terrors of
my boyhood was that I might get drawn into it. Every one agreed in
admonishing me against the saloon; it was the symbol of everything
bad, the cause of the downfall of some of our relatives. If one went
into saloons. one became a printer or a tramp; one associated with
disreputable women.
In these years I wanted what the people around me wanted; wanted
to get on in the world; to make money -- though I had little hope of
every making much. My mind was empty of enthusiasms. I thought as
those about me thought. My world was bounded by the block in which I
lived, by my relatives, by the Methodist church, although I always
sought escape from it; by the college on the hill. I submitted to
college as a tedious experience that had to be gotten through with,
and looked forward to graduation as the day when a decision would
have to be made for which my previous life and associations gave me
no help.
At Johns Hopkins individual authorities took the place of my
small-town herd. Professor Ely showed me a cruel industrial system,
Woodrow Wilson and James Bryce the evils of party politics. Mr.
Bryce said that America, with no leisure class devoted to
statecraft, as in Great Britain, was to be saved by the scholar.
Unthrilled by eloquence -- for Mr. Bryce was a dull lecturer -- I
accepted his creed of responsibility and service. Democracy must be
salvaged from the hands of spoilsmen and politicians; it must be
salvaged even from Senator Quay and the Andrews Brothers.
This change did not come immediately. It did not come vividly; as
old moralities left me, new ones Imperceptibly took their place. I
accepted them from men whom I respected, just as I had accepted my
previous opinions from men who were esteemed in Meadville. I was
accustomed to moralistic authority. These new authorities, too, had
a moralistic flavor.
Doctor Albert Shaw, editor of The Review of Reviews, stirred my
imagination as did none of the other lecturers. He lectured on
municipal administration and painted pictures of cities that I could
visualize -- cities that I wanted to take part in in America; cities
managed as business enterprises; cities that were big business
enterprises, that owned things and did things for people. There was
order and beauty in the cities he described. They owned their own
tramways and gas and electric lighting plants, and they made great
successes of them. Good men ran them, business men, who gave up
their business interests to do so. This kind of objective politics I
could understand; I could think of material things more easily than
economic abstractions. There was something in my mind that seized
upon order, on plans, on doing things the way business men did them
in their own shops and factories. I was familiar with this sort of
thing; it was about the only academic subject that fitted in with my
background, to which something inside of me responded. I read with
zest Doctor Shaw's two illuminating books on municipal government in
Great Britain and on the Continent of Europe. These pictures of
cities gave me my first Political enthusiasm. I desired to be an
editor and writer, as was he, so that I could further the ideas I
had gotten from him. I wanted to go to Europe and see for myself the
cities he had described, to study their machinery, their municipal
enterprises, their splendid streets, parks, and public buildings.
I do not know why out of all the things I heard at Johns Hopkins
this was the thing that gripped me most. Perhaps it was partly my
herd instinct that found expression in this dream. I cared about
beauty and order in cities -- cities that chose for their rulers
university men, trained as I was being trained. Possibly because I
was disorderly myself, I wanted order. And I hated waste. That I had
had been taught to esteem a cardinal sin, and American cities I was
told, were wasteful because they were ruled by politicians, whose
only interest was in jobs.
Woodrow Wilson, though our greatest lecturer, gave me no such
pictures. He dealt in abstractions about the Constitution. He was
interested in political forms, in the fathers of the Republic,
especially in the Virginia statesmen, who were writers of great
documents. He inspired an admiration for the British constitution,
which he counted even more perfect than our own. Mr. Wilson was a
brilliant speaker, and it was his brilliance as a speaker rather
than what I got from him that made me take every course he offered.
In his lecture-room it was not always clear to me what I believed;
but I felt that we had departed from the ideals of the fathers and
were indifferent to our responsibilities to the state. Listening to
him, I got hints of impressions received at home, when preachers
lamented our lukewarmness to Christian Ideals, our neglect of
responsibility to the church. A note of moral passion in his speech
was familiar to me. Great men had departed from Capitol Hill; the
Senate no longer reverberated to the high morality of earlier days.
Democracy was not concerned over issues of great constitutional
import. Politics had become a struggle of vulgar interests, of
ignoble motive, of untrained men. We were abandoned to money-making
in politics, as we were in our personal relations. We had permitted
the government to be seized by spoilsmen and politicians. It was
from them that democracy must be reclaimed.
I learned about Socialism. But it did not interest me. It was not
believed in by the men I knew. I read Henry George, but the Single
Tax seemed altogether too easy a reform to be taken as a social
philosophy. Nor was it believed in by my professors. I had a hazy
sense of the brotherhood of man, but was not greatly moved by it. I
liked my own new kind of people -- of that I was clear; educated,
university people, who read books and talked about them. I had a
strong belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.
English-speaking people were the chosen people; they must be looked
to to carry on civilization.
The new world into which I was emerging was still moralistic. I
got its new moralities, the moralities of educated men, of scholars,
of intellectual reformers. There were evils within the State to be
corrected and abuses without. America required new leaders; without
them democracy must fail. The people were misled because business
men and educated men had not taken the trouble to instruct them. The
people were hungry for guidance; of that we were clear -- guidance
which we, the scholars, alone could provide. To this brotherhood of
service I belonged. I was one of the chosen; one of the remnant and
that Matthew Arnold wrote about. The purple robe of doctor of
philosophy dedicated me to this service, as it gave me a distinction
which seemed rare in my world. The Johns Hopkins motto was Veritas
Vos Liberabit. Through the truth we would redeem the world.
Atlas had nothing on the Johns Hopkins men of the nineties. We
felt that the world had been wished onto our shoulders. And I rather
enjoyed the burden that I was to carry. I accepted it with conscious
satisfaction, though without any clear idea of just how to go about
it. I had lost one set of moralities, which had never been very
clear to me. The new ones were only less uncertain.
It was a distinction to be on intimate terms with men who had
studied abroad, with recognized scholars, to whom the mind was very
important. From them I had unlearned many things; I took pride in
that, more pride than in my limited acquisitions of something new. I
was initiated into a new order; the order of scholars whose
teachings had changed me, would change the world.
