The American: A Middle Western Legend (32 page)

“Some men, Pete, get pleasure from different things, cards, women, and I've known some of our American aristocrats whose hobby was putting diamond fillings in their teeth, but I think, with you, it's hitting your head against a stone wall—” The tone of his voice robbed it of all offense; they stood in the shadow, and Emma couldn't see his face, but the intonation was more bitter than regretful.

“You thought there was no chance, right from the beginning?”

“None,” Martin said.

“And you don't know why I did it?”

“I know,” Martin said tiredly. “I know, Pete. All right, so I know. It always was this way; it's always going to be this way. The strong are going to take from the weak, and men are going to go hungry, and they're going to die, and I wouldn't give you twenty cents for the power of an ideal or a Christian sentiment. Because if there are worse liars than the swine who operate our free press, it's the sacred pastors who stand in their pulpits and methodically cut your throat. Your trade unions don't cut any ice with me, Pete; it's the men who own the guns and the schools and the churches and the factories who pay off, and you've let them crucify you.…”

A short while after that, he took up his hat and coat and left. Emma ordered dinner sent up. She was amazed at how well her husband ate. A great load seemed to have been lifted from him. From the time Martin left, he didn't mention the election again, and when Emma suggested that they might have the phone switched off and messages held, he agreed eagerly. They ate a good dinner, and then Altgeld stretched out on a chair, his feet up on a stool.

“I wish you would read something—I don't know what,” he said.

She had a copy of
Huckleberry Finn
, in the bedroom; she brought it in, opened it, and read at random from here and. there. They both knew the book well. He asked for the part about the duke and the king and then the part about the vendetta. He was half awake and half asleep after an hour of this. She helped him into the bedroom, and as soon as he was in bed, he was sleeping.

Emma couldn't sleep; she sat at the window, in the dark, watching the lights of the city, thinking about this and that, and about many things and about nothing at all. The election seemed a long time ago, and it seemed more than a lifetime ago that she had. read each day in the papers of a labor leader called Albert Parsons, who was going to be hanged by the neck until dead. And when had she read of a party a New York millionaire gave where a racehorse was the guest of honor, eating a champagne mash of oats out of a golden trough, and where each of the guests was given a diamond horseshoe worth several thousand dollars as a souvenir? Her thoughts were not of condemnation, not relative; she thought of one thing and another, watching the sprawling, windy, incredible city that had come out of the prairie and the woods, as her husband had, confused as he was, uncertain as he was, and as incredibly strong and inevitable.…

The next morning, they learned that William McKinley was president-elect of the United States and that John Tanner was governor-elect of the sovereign State of Illinois. Even though in the state, Altgeld had run more than ten thousand votes ahead of Bryan, the two had gone down together. But, to this, Altgeld reacted with almost no emotion at all. He ate a good breakfast of wheatcakes, bacon, eggs, and hot rolls. “I must have slept like a log last night,” he told Emma. “I feel good.”

When Schilling called on the phone, Altgeld was able to laugh at his hollow voice. “Get some sleep,” he said. “My god, George, you've been up all night. How do you expect things to look?” “But we've lost—don't you understand?” “We've lost. That's right. Go to sleep, and then think about it.”

And he asked Emma, “You have the tickets?”

She nodded. He suggested a walk along the lakefront before they left. “You know, we'll be coming back here soon to live. You're not disappointed?” She said, “Pete, I would have given five years of my life for you to have won that election.” He took her in his arms as he hadn't for a long time.

IX

In many ways, many men reacted, for something was taking shape, and in one fashion or another, some more clearly, some less clearly, they saw it. To Schilling, who came to see him still sleepless, Gene Debs said, “So it came out as I said.” “That's right. Do you want to gloat?” “No, Schilling, I don't want to gloat. You made your bed with them because it was soft to lay in, and Parsons' been dead a long time.” “What the devil does that have to do with it?” “Because you walked out on us, but whenever you came back, we were here. All right, we said, this is an honest man, we'll support him. Now we're going to hoe our own row. They showed us their strength; now we'll show them the good right arm of the workers. We're strong, too, Schilling, and we're learning how to fight.” “So you'd crucify him with the rest?” “I don't crucify him. God damn it, Schilling, what kind of a fool are you?” Schilling was tired and without words to hit back; he stared at the tall, lean organizer, and he nodded, and he walked out. And home, in bed at last, he was able to let his tears flow, weeping for the first time in as long as he could remember. But Debs didn't weep, sitting behind the kitchen table of the little shack that was his home, hard chin in hands, the
Chicago Tribune
spread out in front of him, Altgeld spread-eagled, flayed and defined: “… his criminal sympathies, his anarchistic tendencies, his fostering of evil, his patronage and protection of Debsism, free riot …” and on and on: Debs didn't weep, but read with cold eyes.

Someone had said to Debs, not long ago, that whatever was done to Pete Altgeld in their own time, history would right it; history would wring the truth from it: but now and today, Debs reflected that history was a forlorn hope. Life was on his side, but let the abstract truth be for the scholars; he had a bitter impatience. Through the thin walls, he could hear from next door how a baby whimpered for food; the Monday before, he had gone to the burial of Johnny Ames, a stockyards organizer who had died from tuberculosis, contracted on top of too many beatings, too much exposure, too much starvation. Let others wait for history; he had seen a ditch on the edge of packing-town filled with the cold-blue dead of a Polish family, starved out. Let them tell him that this was a land where no one starved! His thoughts roamed to people too numerous to count, and there was one emotion, one drive, one plea—and that was hunger.

His long-fingered, work-hardened hands turned the pages of the
Tribune.
He read with serious and intent interest

In the Union League Club, at the same time, the celebration was winding up or running down—as you would have it—as the earth turned and the sun rose and the new day came in. There had been a unique celebration, for the small gods of Chicago had forgotten their careful manners. They say that a reaction from fear will express itself in multiple ways, even to the extent of fat bankers lining up from a wall to play that old and venerated game of Johnny Ride the Pony. That was in the early part of the evening, when restraint still operated, and it was small and harmless pleasure that was gotten from pork-butchers, steelmen, bankers, rolling-stock operators, and many others joining hands and dancing ring-around-the-rosey and roaring out, “Well, I guess I'll have to telegraph my baby, I need the money bad, indeed I do.” That was when a victory was only expected, not yet conceded; when actual confirmation of the fact that William McKinley was president was received, champagne was flowing like Niagara Falls, and a late supper was served, beefsteak, venison steak, pheasant, grouse, rib roasts, stuffed turkeys, and with it appropriate trimmings, sweets, nuts. It was after that the real entertainment began, something to remember. However, this was reaction to a danger that was gone, and no one can be condemned for relaxing.

The people of the city and of the country relaxed too. The brief excitement had worn off; an election, had come and gone, but the republic was maintained, and what was all this talk of an end to freedom, not to mention the substantial good things of life? The citizens woke up, and it was the same, the shadows in the same places, the smell of coffee the same, the voices the same.

X

For Altgeld, there was the need of making an estimate. They looked to him now, as they had when Bryan won the nomination, and Bryan himself had called and asked, hopelessly:

“Governor, what are we going to do?”

“Wait for the next time. Make some use of what we've learned.” But he himself was unsure of what they had learned. When he wrote down his statement, the words came hard and they sounded flat, for all their bumptiousness: “Consider that only six months ago our great party lay prostrate. It had been betrayed into the hands of the thieves and monopolists by President Cleveland—” He read it to Emma. She asked him, “Thieves?” He felt he was overemphasizing it and changed the word to “jobbers.” He was writing without certainty, “… It arose with new energy, it cut loose from the domination of trusts and syndicates …” “It's good,” Emma reassured him. “Don't be afraid.” That was a reversal, and he stared at her for a long while. When had she ever told him not to be afraid?

“You mean because I've lost everything, there's no more to lose?”

“I didn't mean that, Pete.”

“Do you think I'm afraid?”

“I don't think you're
afraid
of anything on earth, Pete. That isn't what I meant.”

“Then what?”

“I want you not to think that you're beaten, Pete.”

But with each word he wrote, the vastness of the defeat sank in. When he put on paper, of his party, “It drove out the political vermin and with a new inspiration it again proclaimed democratic principles and espoused the cause of toiling humanity,” he could only whisper, “My God, I sound like Bryan.”

He felt more like himelf when he wrote, “It was confronted by all the boodle that could be scraped together on two continents; it was confronted by all the banks, all the trusts, all the syndicates, all the corporations, all the great papers.” That, at least, was the sober truth; and whatever his own future was, or the party's, let it be set down that this single time at least, the Democrats had fought bravely against great odds. He wrote bitterly, “It was confronted by everything that money could buy, that boodle could debauch or that fear of starvation could coerce.…”

But reading it to Emma, the condition became more plain. Everything had been with the opposition; they had won, very simply, because the force and the wealth of the nation were with them. He said to his wife, dully:

“All day now, I've been nursing myself on the belief that four years from now we could make the people understand. But four years from now they'll close down the factories again.”

He finished writing what would afterward be called the manifesto of democracy. For him, it was a confession of defeat.

XI

Two months were left now. They had lived in the executive mansion for four years, and Emma, when she began to pack, shook her head hopelessly. Her husband was a type who practiced an almost automatic accumulation. Books piled up in high stacks, and it broke his heart to part with any of them. He saved newspapers and magazines, explaining that he would never know when he might want something. Brand Whitlock helped Emma sort out the stuff; the Governor himself was not too interested. He told them they might keep what they thought was worth keeping, throw the rest away. There was a certain absentmindedness in all of his actions now. Without saying anything to Emma, he would wrap himself up in coat and muffler, go out, and begin a slow shuffle across the lawn; it broke her heart to watch that, and now and again she would ask young Whitlock to join him. Apologetic, she would tell the boy, “He's very sick, you know,” realizing how furious her husband would have been had he overheard. Brand Whitlock would take long strides to join Altgeld, thinking all the while, desperately, how he would open the conversation. But the Governor liked him, and his greeting would invariably be, “Hello, son, and what is it today?”

“I was reading in the papers that there's almost no doubt that there'll be war with Spain. What do you think, sir?”

“And you came galloping across the lawn to tell me the papers are promoting a war with Spain?”

“Well, sir, no—that is, not exactly—”

“All right, Brand. Yes, sure, there's going to be a war with Spain—that's the beginning. That's going to be a lot of war, a different kind of violence. Just beginning. My god, there's going to be the kind of bloodletting that will make our thing between the states look like a skirmish.”

“But why—why?”

“Why do we want Cuba? You tell me. Why do we want the Philippines? Why do we want Puerto Rico? You tell me why. And when are we going to be satisfied—oh, the devil with that! Tell me about yourself. If you come out to walk with me, don't sweat over some proper conversational subject.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you understand—come to see me in Chicago. I'll be a new man when I get out of here.”

But that was bravado. Chicago was just another stop now, for it did not seem to him that he was going anywhere at all. Much like an automaton, he cleared up his work. His accountants came down from Chicago, and though he had known much of it, he was nevertheless astounded to discover how deeply in debt he was, how much of a poor man he was. Being Governor of Illinois, being nominal leader of the national party—none of that had swelled his wealth, but rather drained from him almost every penny he had. As the figures shaped up, he began to wonder how a poor man could function in an office, even considering that he should be elected to one, except by joining the systematic robbery of the people that was taken for granted by so many. That, he had never indulged in; not because his character morally prohibited it, but because he had such a deep-seated contempt for graft, because out of the years it had emerged, in his eyes, as a cheap and despicable practice.