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SCI LIBRARY

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]

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