The American: A Middle Western Legend (20 page)

“If anyone gets the credit, Dreyer should.”

What was surprising was that after the hanging of four of the defendants, Mr. Dreyer's peace of mind departed. Insidiously, the most natural reaction in the world, his own, became distorted until he began to think of himself as a murderer. And no matter how he hated socialism, no matter how much he piled up for himself proof of the abiding evil of communists, he could not tell himself, successfully, that he had not participated in the murder of Parsons and the others.

He worked out his own atonement; he gave money to the cause of amnesty for the three who still lived. He signed petitions, he got others to sign petitions. He had bitter fights with his wife and his cronies, but he knew that his own peace and sanity depended upon the release of the three men. And he kept calling the Governor until Altgeld, annoyed by his insistence, asked Schilling about him. Schilling told him, and indicated that Dreyer wished to deliver the pardons to the jail. Altgeld's first reaction was of disgust. “He can go to the devil,” he said.

“You'll need support in this. Let him do it,” Schilling insisted, and finally Altgeld agreed, and when Dreyer called again, Dose, the Governor's secretary, made an appointment for him.

“I want the pardons made out now,” Altgeld said. “But I want it done quietly. Get Whitlock to write them out, and tell him to keep his mouth shut.” Then, after a moment, Altgeld said, “Send Hinrichsen over here.”

Big Buck Hinrichsen was head of the Democratic State Committee, and his own political plum was the job of Secretary of State. When he swaggered into the office of Altgeld, whom he did not care for particularly, he was rather curtly told to sit down, while the Governor went on writing. Then Altgeld said:

“Buck, I'm pardoning the anarchists.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I've already ordered the pardons written, and my pardon message is at the printer's. I've put my reasons down there, and when you get a copy you'll be able to read the why and wherefore.”

“And you think that's a smart move?”

“It's not a question of whether it's smart or not. I'm doing it.” Watching Hinrichsen, he added, “Do you want to sign the pardons in person, or do you want to leave it for the clerk?”

“I don't know. This whole business strikes me as one hell of a move. I don't like it.”

“I didn't call you in to ask you if you liked it,” Altgeld said quietly.

“Did you speak to Mike?”

“I'm Governor,” Altgeld smiled. “Do you understand that, Buck, for the time being I'm Governor.”

XVII

It did Altgeld good to see Brand Whitlock's face as he came in with the pardons. The boy was looking at him in a way no one had ever looked at Altgeld before. Altgeld was sitting behind his desk, and at one side of the room, in front of a bookcase and under a portrait of Abe Lincoln, the Chicago banker stood, nervous and eager at the same time, his plump face expectant.

“Here are the pardons, sir,” Whitlock said.

“How do you feel about it?” Altgeld asked him.

“I feel good. I feel terribly good, sir.”

“It's what you would have done if you were in my place, is that right?”

“I think it's what I would do, sir. I hope it's what I would do.”

“This is Mr. Dreyer,” Altgeld said. “This is Brand Whitlock, Mr. Dreyer, one of our men in the State Department. Brand, Mr. Dreyer is going to take the pardons to Joliet and see the men out of jail.”

Whitlock stood there, wondering what he was expected to say to this, and able to say only, “I'm glad.”

“Well, it's time.”

“I wonder if I could ask you a question, sir?”

Altgeld was signing the pardons, one by one, carefully, and blotting each just as carefully. “Go on,” he nodded, without looking up.

“Did you know Albert Parsons?”

“I never knew him,” Altgeld said flatly.

“Oh—”

The Governor folded the stiff sheets and offered them to Dreyer. At first Dreyer didn't move; then he shuffled over to the desk and took them, his face working all the time, like a man about to be ill. Then he started to say, “Well, Governor, well, Governor—I hardly know—” Suddenly, he began to cry. His face worked convulsively, and the tears rolled down his fat cheeks. He walked over to the window to hide his face from them, from Whitlock who was staring at the floor in great embarrassment.

“Go along, Brand,” the Governor said.

“Thank you, sir. For everything.”

The boy went out. Altgeld looked at his watch, said, somewhat harshly, “You'll miss your train, Mr. Dreyer.”

“I'm sorry. I'm terribly sorry.”

“All right.”

“I want to explain. The grand jury—”

“I know. You don't have to apologize. You don't have to explain.”

“Foolish of me to act this way. It's a little bit of atonement.”

“You'll miss your train if you don't go along, Mr. Dreyer.”

He was glad when finally Dreyer had gone. It was most unpleasant to see a man cry, and the more unpleasant when he himself felt no sympathy for the banker, none at all. He called in his secretary and told him:

“Dose, I'll have to give out a statement, I suppose.”

“It's gotten out, sir, and the veranda's full of reporters.”

“What do they say?”

“They say it's the biggest story since Lee surrendered.”

“Is it? What in hell are you so nervous about? They're not going to hang us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell them I'll see them in half an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the devil is wrong with you? Are you frightened?”

“I guess I've got too much imagination.”

“Well, sit on it. Go and tell them what I told you to!”

He found Emma in her dressing room, sewing a lace collar on a blouse. She turned to him with a smile, her fine head tilted and alert. He kissed her, and then he sat down on a stool, looking up at her, watching her.

“Then you've done it?” she said, continuing to sew.

“That's right.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Are you sorry?” he asked her.

“I guess I'm a little sorry, Pete. I'm ambitious, Pete. I always was that way, I guess you know. I wanted you to be the greatest man in the country. You are, you know?”

He laughed at her.

“Well, I know. A woman knows a lot about her husband. But I'm not much of a wife, Pete. I'm frightened, I always have been. You used to frighten me.”

“Me?”

“Sure, Pete. Well, I'm still frightened. But I'm not sorry you did it. I would want to do something like signing those pardons. I never will—”

“I think we're making a mountain out of a molehill, and that nothing much of anything will happen.”

“Pete, if the worst kind of thing happens, could you go away with me and be happy with me?”

“Run away?”

“If they force you, Pete?”

He grinned and kissed her. Then he went back to his office. The reporters came in and crowded around expectantly.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Will you be quoted?”

“No quotes.”

“Then you've pardoned the anarchists?”

“Right.”

“Clemency, sir?”

“An absolute pardon,” Altgeld said slowly. “The men were never guilty. You can have my pardon reasons later. They can be quoted.”

Whistles from several parts of the room. Men scribbling furiously.

“Will you imply in your reasons that Parsons and Spies and the others were innocent too?”

“I do.”

The reporters edged toward the desk. Altgeld put his elbows on the desk, his face in his palms, his blue eyes bright and expectant

XVIII

That night, while he slept, the news went through the land that the Governor of Illinois had pardoned the anarchists. All night long, as the stories were filed, telegraph keys clicked, and the details coming in, extracts from the pardon message, comments of the Governor, built up to an effect that scrapped the prepared editions in places so far apart as San Francisco, California, and Savannah, Georgia. Editorial conferences were hurriedly summoned, and newspaper owners were roused out of bed to render a decision. The news came to President Grover Cleveland as he was preparing for bed, and in his bathrobe he stamped back and forth across his chamber, swearing softly and then ordering a cabinet meeting for the next day. For King Mike McDonald of Chicago, there was no sleep at all that night, for a steady stream of raging bosses, heelers, and other large and small fry flooded upon him, and finally Marshall Field came to talk in no uncertain terms. Business at the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had slowed somewhat, became suddenly most brisk, and three very important industrialists had a private meeting with Pinkerton himself. Congressmen were turned out of bed by telegraph messengers, and four United States Senators sat over their cigars all that night. Brand Whitlock lay awake making drama out of the slow movement of incident, for it seemed to him that nothing he had ever known was just like this, a man high in the governing circles of the nation making a choice between justice and all else that life might offer; and Emma Altgeld lay awake, thinking of the crude, uncouth farm boy who wanted to know all there was between the covers of books and who spoke the weird half-German, half-English of the backlands. But the Governor himself slept, quietly and easily.

XIX

And the next day it broke!

He rose in the morning and he trimmed his mustache and beard and he looked at himself in the mirror, and then ate breakfast and took a horse around the grounds before the papers came. He was feeling fit and eager and a load was gone from his chest, and Parsons and Spies could lie more easily in their graves. Then he came into his office, and his secretary had the papers for him.

That was the beginning.

In a sense, the
Chicago Tribune
was restrained, for. though it reported the story bitterly and one-sidedly, the worst it said editorially was: “
The Anarchists believed that he
[Altgeld]
was not merely an alien by birth, but an alien by temperament and sympathies, and they were right. He has apparently not a drop of true American blood in his veins. He does not reason like an American, not feel like one, and consequently does not behave like one.
But it set a keynote, and every Chicago paper of importance followed suit, the
News
, the
Inter-Ocean
, and the rest.

The theme was plain, outlined and underlined, not only anger, but a growling rage such as bad never appeared in American newspapers before. As John Peter Altgeld read the stories, smiling thinly as more and more newspapers came in, from downstate, from Cleveland, from west and east and south, one matter after another shaped itself into focus. Nervous, his secretary asked, “Do you want all the papers, Governor?” “All of them.” “I think this is hasty anger,” the secretary reasoned, trying to make it better. “Not hasty at all, not at all.” It amazed him that the Governor seemed to be in such fine spirits. But at lunch that day, Altgeld told his wife:

“The hardest thing in the world is to see what's in front of a man's nose. I could have pardoned the most depraved murderer, the worst sexual pervert, the most successful forger, the most skillful bank-robber, and they would have slobbered with approval. There's only one thing that hits them in the belly, and that's any threat to their rule. I shook the oligarchy, Emma, and I'm going to shake them more. I'm going to ride this. It's just beginning, but I'm going to ride it all the way through. I told them their justice was no justice, but a fraud, and so are their courts, and so is the whole dirty rotten fabric of their state. And they're going to take it, because the people will be with me.”

A new pile of papers were put down alongside him, the first one from the east coat with the headline:
“ANARCHIST GOVERNOR SLAYS JUSTICE.”
And another:
“RUIN AND REVOLUTION DECREED BY GOVERNOR ALTGELD.”

“This isn't the people,” he said. “Emma, let me see you smile.”

“I can't smile. I can't smile at that.”

“Why? Because fat-bellied owners issue directives and tell them what to write?”

“Because the whole world is reading that. My God, Pete, every one of them, every paper, every writer, every single one—”

“What did you expect?”

“I don't know. You were right. You didn't do anything wrong.”

“My God, Emma, right and wrong—you keep harping on that. There is no right and there is no wrong. We live by pig ethics and a pig code. I live by it! You do! That's this precious damned world of ours!”

“But I thought—”

“That some would be with me? Well, some will. The socialist papers will be with me, the labor papers—what is left of the old Abolitionist sheets, they'll be with me, and maybe here and there will be a man with guts, maybe one in a hundred. But I told them that their justice was not justice. I told them that they are capitalists, building a country for capitalists, and that means war to the death.”

“And for you—”

“Let them shout! Let them wake up the country! I am sick to my stomach of the cheap little rats, the McDonalds, the Mark Hannas, the Armours—all the dirty little buyers and sellers of votes. They are seventy-five million people in this country, and they're strong—My God, Emma, they're strong! I'm talking to them, and they'll hear me. They haven't any voice now—this trash, these rags—it's not their voice. But they can be given a voice. They can be given a party. They can be made to understand that their votes are like a sledgehammer, ready to drive these rats back.”

So he sat in his office and did his work as Governor and read the papers and the mail and the telegrams. As he said, there was a voice here and there raised to support him, but the rest, by and large, all of it, not slackening, day by day, was hate, filth, condemnation, threats in the mail. It became a phenomenon, a thing that had never been seen before, not even when Booth slew Lincoln, not even when the guns fired on Fort Sumter; and no part of the nation was laggard. They called him an alien; they questioned his citizenship; they denied that he had ever fought in the war; they denied his legitimate parentage; they demanded his impeachment; they demanded that Federal troops march against the Capitol of Illinois; they called him a socialist, an anarchist, a communist; they inferred that he had personally directed the throwing of the bomb; they wrote ugly, dirty stories of his relationship with his wife; they accused him of being a Jew and part of an international Jewish plot; they called him a dictator, a Nero, a Pontius Pilate; they said that he had both murder and lesser crime in his dark past; in almost every church in America, sermon after sermon was preached against him; and the newspapers that came onto his desk, raging with filth and venom, were like a geographical index:
The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal, Harper's Weekly, The Nation, The New York Sun, The Chicago Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Herald, The New York World, The Philadelphia Press, The New York Herald, The New York Tribune, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Pittsburgh Commerical-Advertiser
—those and a thousand more, all racing for a goal in venom. He was cartooned wild-haired, with pistols in each hand, with daggers in his teeth, with bombs, with sticks of dynamite; he was pictured strangling liberty, crushing liberty under his feet, snarling at the full-blown female figure of liberty, knifing her, shooting her, even raping her.