The American: A Middle Western Legend (24 page)

Then he felt the pressure of young Whitlock's hand and realized that out there they were chanting his name and calling for him. He couldn't go; he was rooted where he stood, and he felt that no force on earth could impel him out there onto the veranda. He looked at Emma with real terror in his eyes. Whitlock was urging him:

“Please, sir, you must go out.”

He shook his head. All the hundreds of times he had spoken from platforms were nothing now; stark, craven fear took hold of all of him, head and foot and body and soul and brain; and then Bathhouse John, red-faced and triumphant, burst in crying, “What an ovation! What an ovation! Greet them, Governor?”

The mood snapped. He went outside, and bowed, and the cheers rose up over the old cottonwoods. Afterwards, he hardly recalled what he said, something about no compromises, a straight path—

“Sixteen to one!” the crowd roared, and Bathhouse John sent his plug hat sailing, up and over the treetops.

And the next day, John Peter Altgeld stood for five full minutes in front of a cheering, half-hysterical convention. When he said, “The time has come for us, the democrats, the Democratic Party to stand once more for democracy and no longer for plutocracy,” a roar went up such as he had never heard before. It was no longer a question of opposition. It was a question of how far, and in what direction he, Pete Altgeld, wanted to go. He was the leader, acknowledged, and the party, in Illinois would follow. When he declared for silver, they screamed approval. “Free money and free people!” They stood up as one man, shouting, “Altgeld! Altgeld! Altgeld!”

“We point the way,” Altgeld said. “We have declared for democracy. It only remains for America to follow.”

VIII

His reaction was one of lethargy and despair. He would work himself into a state of hypertension, and there would be a long, dreadful, sleepless night, during which pain crept through the stillness into every bone and muscle of his body—and he would lie in the dark with the awful realization that he was dying, that his miserable, short, ugly body was beyond repair or rejuvenation. Seeing what was happening, Emma was drawn to him more than ever before. The shadow of a great man was rising over the land, such a man as Jackson was, or Abe Lincoln, a people's hero, the sort of man they spoke about in the shops, on the farms, and in the work gangs; and it seemed a peculiarly bitter piece of mockery that living with such a man, sleeping with him and eating with him, she should find an infinite pity overshadowing every other emotion. In some ways, he was almost childlike; he gave vent to fits of temper before her; he did petty things; he retreated into self-pity—yet even for her and through all of this, his stature increased, and for the first time she found in the substance of her own life that incredible dignity of mankind that is like nothing else. The mixed, blurred, faulty wonder of her husband extended itself to all people, and she found herself, after so many years of married life, beginning to be in love again.

For the first time, his triumphs became personal and intimate to her. When the Illinois silver convention rang a bell through the land and the other states fell in line, Missouri, Texas, Mississippi, she was more pleased than he.

When Grover Cleveland went south to rally, if possible, a whole area of the land against Altgeld, she drove her husband to head a delegation to the Exposition of the Cotton States, which was being held at Atlanta, and his triumphal tour of the south excited her as nothing ever had before. Now they would sit for hours and talk, in a way that they hadn't before and about things that they had never spoken of, breaking down the strange shame and reluctance that can exist for a lifetime between a man and his wife. His dreams and ideas somehow became more real, more solid for both, when he made word-pictures of them for her. He placed things before her almost naïvely; he let his thoughts run and leap, and then bound them in with doubt. They were sharing something they had never shared before.

Buck Hinrichsen, meeting her on the lawn one summer day, said, “My word, Emma, you look as if you inherited a million dollars.”

“I feel that way.”

But best was that through this man, her husband, her own native land was coming into a focus it had never had before. She understood why so many people had remarked that he was the most American product they had ever known. His love for the land was no ordinary thing, no simple thing; not patriotism as she had understood patriotism, but an amazing identity with motley millions of people drawn from every land on the globe, a fullness that could not be content with this nation or that nation, but only with a nation of nations; that saw in the boiling, many-layered society of states the only complete hope of men.

There was one evening when she had Brand Whitlock and Bill Dose in for dinner—he liked small dinners and young people—and the talk turned to Tolstoy. Altgeld read everything of Tolstoy's that came to the country, finding in him something he found in no American or English writer of this time. Yet tonight he was drawing an analogy between Tolstoy and Clemens, to the protests of both Whitlock and Emma. Whitlock went further than Emma, who would see Clemens only as a clown; but even Whitlock demanded, “How can you draw any comparison between
Tom Sawyer
, or even
Huckleberry Finn
and a work like
War and Peace
, sir? I don't see it, for the life of me.”

Emma said, “Dickens, yes. I could see a comparison with Dickens. But Clemens—”

“Never Dickens,” Altgeld snorted. “Never, never Dickens! Not in the same breath, not in the same sentence. What is asked of a writer? You want to write, Brand—you sit at night, scribbling away. What do you demand?”

“Of myself, sir?”

“Of anyone. Of anything you read.”

“I don't know—I never thought of it that way. I suppose, to be entertained.”

“And only that?”

Emma said, “Wouldn't it depend on whether you were reading for entertainment or for learning?”

“We've made such a curse of learning, Emma, that you'd put a world away from entertainment.”

“I mean, would I read your lawbooks for entertainment?”

“Even there, Emma, you're ridden with a concept. There's drama in my lawbooks none of your garden novelists could dream of, the whole stuff of life and death, the best and the basest in men, crime and grand villainy and petty purse-snatching, the whole astonishing record of what man will do to his fellow man. But that's off the path. I asked Brand what he wants in a writer, and he says entertainment, which, in a way, is true—”

“And more than that, sir. I don't know quite how to put it.”

“Would it be in this? When I put Clemens and Tolstoy together, it's because the one has found the soul of America and the other knows the soul of Russia, but Dickens never went deeper than the soul of a shopkeeper. I've never been to England, but, my god, I find no smell of it in Dickens, no taste of it, no love of it, no real hope for it either, and I want a writer to give me that, and to give me people who love and hate and suffer and dream sometimes, like the poor devils in my lawbooks, or like the men and women in Tolstoy and in Mark Twain, not paper cutouts pasted over with so much fancy trimming that never an inch of the flesh shows through, if there is any flesh. So when you write, Brand, turn your stories into something more real than life itself. You only know what's outside a man in life, but sometimes a writer can show the inside and the outside at the same time.”

“You ask a good deal,” Whitlock smiled.

“Do I? Do you know what is most important, Brand, the be-all and end-all—simply good and bad, truth and untruth, and there's no one to lay down a yardstick. Ask Dose. He's watched me long enough. Do you think I believe in democracy, Brand?”

“I think so.”

“You're kind. I wish I had a dollar for everyone who thinks otherwise. But I'm not asking too much when I ask for the real thing, for some of the flesh of life. You believe in democracy, but it doesn't happen by itself. If you don't get out the vote, someone else will. Maybe there isn't any democracy here, maybe there never was. You believe in democracy, but if you leave it to happen you go down under and there's nothing. So you become a cheap ward politician, blown up, only you do it better. You beat them at their own game. But you can't look in the mirror and face yourself. That's the reality—”

Whitlock listened, embarrassed, and was grateful when Emma turned the talk back to books; she did so deftly and easily, but she shared too much of her husband's moods not to be affected. She thought to herself, “It will be better when the thing is under way. He can't stop now. If he stops, it will be the end of him.”

IX

He didn't stop. He drove onto the state Democratic convention with a fury and intensity the country had not seen before. For the next several months, it seemed that there was hardly a day's press where the name of Altgeld didn't break into the headlines. Instead of withering under the abuse that was showered upon him, he gained stature and appeared to draw sustenance from it. The more the silver theory was attacked, the more he leaped to its defense, and by now he believed that it was the only issue upon which the American masses could be united. He used the language of his enemies; he attacked them; he gave them no peace. He had Bill Dose line up a staff of researchers, and they dug into the lives of his enemies, of the Democrats who supported Cleveland, of the gold people. They wanted it hard and dirty and low—well, he would give it back to them in the same coin. When Carlisle, Secretary of the Treasury, attacked him, he flung back proof that some years ago Carlisle himself had spoken for silver. He did the same with Bishop Woodry; when the bishop accused him of godlessness, he gave the number of those who had died of starvation in Woodry's parish, and his researchers gave him the facts of the bishop's forty-thousand-dollar-a-year income and what was done with it.

His mood changed. He drove himself, but he was happy, more lighthearted than he had been in years. He engaged in a war to the death with the
Chicago Tribune
; he sent his blows in twenty different directions. For years he had studied law, practiced it, judged it from the bench; now he forged his knowledge into a two-edged sword and let his enemies know that he was ready to use it. He dug up every technical violation of a state law, of statutes that went back to the time when the state was created, and he served out a steady stream of subpoenas, dragged his enemies into court, had their books examined.

And he pardoned. Pardoning John, they called him, and he grinned back and continued to pardon. Wherever there was reasonable doubt, wherever a man had been framed, a poor damned woman railroaded, a worker condemned with only a mockery of a trial, a homeless, unemployed wretch dragged into court and tried and convicted to clear an embarrassing blotter, a labor organizer beaten up and jailed for assault, he used the power of executive pardon. He did it because it made those who hated him scream with rage and anger and demand his impeachment but he also did it because he could not live without groping for the essence of right and wrong, and because a long time ago certain men, whom he never mentioned now, had died upon a gallows.

When the reporters asked him, “Governor, what do you make of the threats in the eastern papers?” he smiled and told them, “This is the sovereign State of Illinois. When the people of Illinois tire of me—the people, mind you, not the newspapers—they can throw me out. Until then, I'm Governor.”

So when, the following June, the state Democratic convention assembled at Peoria, the eyes of a whole nation were turned there, and a hundred newspapers screamed, in one variation or another: “Is this the beginning of Altgeld's reign of terror?”

He had worked hard; he had planned well. Forty-eight delegates to the Democratic national convention, the whole number for the state, declared for silver, voted John Peter Altgeld state chairman, and pledged to support him.

Once more he listened to the bands, the shouting, the torchlight parades. He sat in a hotel room with his old friends, smiling just a little, and when someone asked him, “What do you make of it, Pete?” he said, “It could be a beginning for something. It could, you know.”

X

Back at Springfield, Sam McConnell called him, and said, “Pete, you'll have to see Bryan.”

“Who?”

“Bryan. You heard me. William Jennings B-r-y-a-n, the nightingale, the boy orator of the plains.”

“Sam, Sam, look—I don't have to cover up for you. I'm sick, I'm sick as hell. And I've got a big job to do. I want to get it done. I want to do one decent act before I make up my bed, and that's to put a president in the White House who isn't an errand boy for Rockefeller or a bookkeeper for Morgan. We decided that Richard Bland might carry it off. All right, there's enough to do, isn't there?”

“Take it slowly. I said see him. Shut him up.”

“My God, Sam, do you know what he wants? Do you know what that fool with the pap still wet on his lips wants? He wants to be president. That's all he wants.”

“I know. That's why I say, see him. Shut him up.”

“Suppose you shut him up. Do I have to talk to every hare-brained idiot who decides he wants to be president? Bland's no knight in armor—I know that. But he's been in congress, he's been in the Senate. He's as honest as any of us, and he's with us. He's made a hell of a name for himself in Missouri, and he's stood steady on this silver thing for a long, long time, and the people will look at him and say, this isn't a revolution, this is an honest man and it's time we had one like that in Washington. Do I have to make political speeches to you?”

“You don't have to, Pete. For God's sake, talk sense.”

“I'm talking sense. But when every minute counts from now to the convention, you want me to waste hours with idiots.”