The American: A Middle Western Legend (23 page)

“You mean socialism?”

“A strike is won or lost, that's not a decision. We'll lose more strikes, we'll win, too. But even when we win them, we get the crumbs that fall off the plate.”

“I was a socialist,” Schilling said. “This isn't a country for socialism. Even the workers don't want socialism.”

“They don't know. They live in a pit. Do you want sunshine, if you've never felt it on your skin!”

“Socialism is a theory, an idea. Sometimes I think it's a crazy idea, put forward by people out of their minds. It never worked anywhere.”

“It was never tried.”

“They tried in Paris.”

“Paris! My God, Schilling—you're going to sit there and tell me that in the French commune, socialism failed! It was never tried. The French and the Prussian monopolists made sure it was never tried. They murdered thirty thousand French workers in Paris alone. Do you forget so quickly?”

“But here in America, the people won't have it. What's the use of dreams—the people won't have it!”

“Some day—”

“But today! What about today? Today, at least, there's a leader. There's this man Altgeld.”

“Altgeld.” Debs said it very quietly.

“You don't believe in him?”

“He's one of their men. The state he serves is their state. He's a politician, no better, no worse.”

“And the anarchists?”

“I admit that he has a sense of justice. But the bullets in the guns of his militia are no softer than the bullets in the Pinkertons' rifles.”

“You have to believe in him. I know him. I know him for years and years. I tell you he's for the people, for the workingman. He believes in the people.”

“Maybe he believes in them—”

“You could say that Lincoln was one of them too. But Lincoln was different. Lincoln fought for us, for the people.”

“There were four million black slaves then. There are twenty million wage slaves today.”

“If the workingman supports Altgeld, I tell you, things will change. There will be no more shooting and clubbing of workers. The courts will be ours as well as the millionaires'.”

“I wish I believed that. Schilling, I wish I believed it.”

And now, trying to sleep, Schilling sought for his own belief, and found it in no sustained line, no horizon, but only in bits, in fragments that were not enough to make a whole, but only enough to bedevil a man and keep him from sleep.

VI

Altgeld took the first step the next month. For three weeks he worked frantically, setting every block in place, calling people, writing to them, lining them up, laying the foundation, so that when at last the Democratic State Committee met, he could sit back and let the motion for a special party convention on currency come from the floor, from the rank and file. The date set was June 5, 1895. It was done quickly, quietly, expertly, and when it had been done, the section of the party headed by Cleveland woke up to the fact that they had been duped; at first, that was their only reaction; they had been duped, and Pete Altgeld was making a bid for state party leadership on the incredible issue of free coinage of silver, the old homily that was the tool of every rabble-rouser in the west. It was John R. Walsh, a Chicago banker, an old enemy of Altgeld's via certain loans on the Unity Building, who first realized the full significance of what was happening.

For years now, a gap had been widening in the ranks of the Democratic Party. Populism, the movement among the western and middle-western farmers for a people's party, the natural outgrowth of the people's party of Thomas Jefferson, had grown to great strength in the seventies and eighties; actually, the rise of industry had given it a death blow, and now part of it was going into the new socialist movement, part—the great part and impulse—into the free-silver wing of the Democratic Party. The grange associations, the other farm associations, the small businessman, and the worker who saw his wages decreasing steadily, all sought desperately for some solution to the ruin that faced them. Money was scarce, and when the Federal government, under Grover Cleveland, stopped buying silver, money became scarcer. Debts piled up; farm after farm was put on the auction block; wages continued to drop. There was a wonderful and beautiful simplicity in the very simple answer that there was not enough money. Free silver coinage would solve all problems. Sixteen silver dollars to one gold dollar meant that the blood of the nation would begin to circulate again. The farmers could pay their debts. Prices would go up, but wages would go up even more quickly. It was hard to pick holes in this theory. You could talk your head off to a farmer or worker about cyclical depression, about capitalism and monopoly, but when you said that there wasn't enough money, that was something he understood, and when you offered silver money, to which there was practically no limit, as the cure-all, why he understood that too, and likely enough from there on was your man. Certain labor leaders tried to point out that money was no more or less than a relationship between the social factors of production and consumption, but their only tool of proof was the strike, and from San Francisco to Portland, the strike had been drowned in a sea of blood. In a country so desperate, Free Silver became an almost religious frenzy; even Altgeld saw in free coinage prosperity, an end to depression, and perhaps the breakdown of the monopolies.

And in Altgeld's call for a silver convention in Illinois, John Walsh, the banker, saw something almost as frightening as the labor movement. He got on the phone to the president, and for a half hour hammered home his point. He liked the word
revolution.
He said, over and over, “I tell you it's revolution, Grover. I tell you if it isn't stopped, it's revolution.” “They won't listen to him—they won't listen to that damned anarchist!” “They're listening.” “As for the state, maybe. As for the country, it's out of the question.” “My god, are you blind, blind?” “Then what do you suggest?” “Write something, act, issue a call to the party.” “That blows it up.” “Well, you can't blow it up any bigger than it is.”

Walsh held a private meeting in his office. Marshall Field came, and half a dozen other Chicago bankers and politicians. They talked heatedly and at great length, Walsh hammering home the point:

“You're fools if you think it's going to split the party. I know Altgeld a little better than the rest of you. He's not trying to destroy the party—I wish to God I thought he was—he's trying to take it away from us, take it whole, and take the country along with it.”

“Nonsense!” someone said.

“Nonsense—when you meet something head-on that's bigger than anything you could dream up yourself, then it's nonsense. I assure you, Pete Altgeld is the most dangerous man in America—not that anarchist tripe—he's dangerous at. our own game, politics, votes. And unless he's stopped—”

“He'll be stopped,” Marshall Field said.

“How?”

“There'll be a communication from the president to the Honest Money League. This dirty little upstart will be washed back to where he came from, the sewers. And meanwhile, Walsh, you hold a loan of his, don't you?”

“I do,” Walsh, said thoughtfully.…

The letter from the president came to Chicago, and Altgeld met it better than halfway. He called the press into his office; he had a way with them that was something of his own; he talked to them quietly and intimately, and there was sandwiched between his words a host of implications which reporters understood, for all that they were unable to reproduce them in their papers. He framed his interviews in an attitude. This time his attitude was one of suppressed mirth.

“What do you think of the president's letter, sir?”

“Bad.”

“How do you mean—bad? Bad for the silver cause?”

“My word, gentlemen. I say bad, I mean bad. Badly written. Trash. If anyone else's name was signed to that amazing flow of meaningless words, it would have been the laughing stock of the country.”

“Mr. Governor, isn't that putting it a little strongly?”

“Strongly, oh my sacred aunt! Suppose I had signed it?”

The reporters looked at him, at each other. They grinned. He grinned back.

“You gentlemen are writers. I talk within the limits of the craft.”

They grinned more broadly.

“What is your opinion of the president, Mr. Governor?”

“Aside from the fact that he has sold America to the monopolies and his soul to Wall Street?”

They were still grinning.

“That's off the record. Aside from that, well—unprintable.”

They roared; they came closer to his desk. Casually, he eased forward a humidor of cigars. “Help yourselves—” Some of those in front did; it was fine Havana. “Tell you something, gentlemen, speaking of the president. Who elected him? The people. Who pays him? The people. So maybe the people are beginning to be uneasy about this habit of his of sending Federal troops into sovereign states to shoot down strikers. You know, sometimes farmers don't like to lose their farms just because they can't meet their debts. Hard-headed people, farmers; it ain't easy to reason with them. I know. My own father was one of them. You tell them—just be patient and soon you'll die of starvation and go off to heaven and get your just reward, well, it just doesn't seem to sink in, they're so damned thick-skinned. So maybe they're beginning to wonder why their Democratic president is married the way he is to Wall Street and so dead-set against silver money, which might let them pay off a debt or two, and they might be wondering where all the U.S. marshals come from, the way you see them flooding our west, like cockroaches over old cheese. Tell you something else, gentlemen, I was talking to a workingman I said to him, Joe, how do you like being without a job ten months? He said, Governor, I don't like it one damn bit. I said, Joe, you think you got a right to stand there and tell me you don't like unemployment? He said, I sure as hell have, Governor. So I reminded him, Joe, your president, down there in Washington, thinks it's a Federal crime for you to talk like that. So Joe said, The hell he does! Then maybe it's time, Governor, that we had a new president down there in Washington. These are good cigars, gentlemen. No strings attached to them.”

More of the reporters lit up. An
Inter-Ocean
man, unmoved and hostile, said, “Any comment on the fact that the president is gunning for you, Mr. Governor?”

Altgeld leaned back and sighed. He took a cigar and picked at the end of it. “Gunning for me.… You know, they tell a story about old Davy Crockett. Davy, he's out taking a walk in the woods, and he sees a neighbor taking a sight on something. Davy never did like this neighbor. Too close, too crafty, too mean. So Davy just stands and watches him. Full ten minutes he stands there and watches this neighbor taking a sight with a sixty-inch squirrel gun, and for the life of him, Davy can't see what this gent is aiming at. Finally, his curiosity gets the better of dislike, and Davy saunters over. Out hunting, neighbor Jones? he asks. Neighbor says, shhh—shhh. Davy stretches his neck, but can't see a thing. What in hell's name are you shooting at, neighbor Jones? he asks. Neighbor Jones says, Crockett, sure as hell you're going to scare away the best dinner I seen in a fortnight. I got a sight on that big black bear up there in that tree crotch, and I'm taking a long sight because I don't intend to miss. So Davy looks up at the crotch, and to save his life he can't see a blessed thing. Then he looks at neighbor Jones. Then he busts out laughing. Damn you, Crockett, neighbor Jones yells, you sure as the devil scared away my game. But Davy's just standing there, holding his sides and laughing, until at last he gets up enough wind to say, Never was no game in that tree, neighbor Jones. You been standing there all this time taking a sight on a louse on your own eyelash.”

VII

On June 5th, the silver convention met at Springfield. Bathhouse John Coughlin, who had staged more torchlight parades and beer picnics than he cared to remember, planned the convention from beginning to end, and it went off without a hitch.

On the evening before it began, there was a torchlight procession through the streets of Springfield to the executive mansion. The delegates walked arm in arm, eight abreast, chanting, “Altgeld! Altgeld! The son of Illinois! Altgeld! Altgeld? The son of Illinois?” Almost every citizen turned out to watch, and hundreds of children scampered in and out of the column, shouting and laughing and hooting. Bathhouse John had planted thirty kegs of beer under ice at the fire-house, and since he let the word get around, it was practically certain that none of the citizens would go to bed before the demonstration had run its course. It was a part of Bathhouse John's unique genius as a politician that he sincerely loved people, and that made him see a demonstration not as a shouting, noisy mob, but as a rounded whole of the people. He handed out passes to the state grounds to every boy who would bring a date, and now as the parade came onto the lawn in front of the mansion, it was surrounded by boys in their best suits and girls in crisp white organdy; and as they all gathered there, the Cook County band began to play a wonderful new song that was taking the country by storm:

Oh beautiful for spacious skies
,

For amber waves of grain
,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain.

America! America!

God shed his Grace on thee
,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea.

All this time, Altgeld was standing behind the doors, Emma next to him, Brand Whitlock on the other side, and through a space in the curtains he watched them come up and onto the lawn. It was the first time he had ever heard the song played and sung by so many young voices, and it moved him curiously. He watched the faces in the flickering torchlight, thinking all the while of the hours he had spent with Bathhouse John, planning this, of how fixed and precise and manipulated every detail of it Was, from the first beginnings to this to wherever it would take them—then meeting Emma's eyes, and knowing almost as well as she what was behind them, what thoughts, what fears, what endless, inescapable confusion.