The American: A Middle Western Legend

by Howard Fast

  She sat down and a quiet audience waited. When Judge Altgeld answered, his voice was admirably controlled; he acted as befitted a judge of the commonwealth. “My dear Mrs. Parsons,” he said, “arguments on a certain level demand an answer on the same level. Since you deprecate the decent workingman who holds down a job and brings home comfort and sustenance to his wife and children, I must rise in his defense. Hard work, industry, and thrift do not promote crime; quite the reverse. The honest workingman shuns crime, as does the honest employer; although I do not deny that specimens of both classes now walking about belong in jail. You say the system promotes criminals—perhaps, but I answer that it is the best system man has been able to devise, and it is only by sincere and intelligent reform that the evils within it will be lessened and finally done away with. I don’t deny the evils; but I face them practically, and I recommend the same practical course to those utopians who would prefer that everything be cast in the waste basket.”

  As the papers said, a rousing chorus of applause greeted this, and although certain elements at the meeting continued to heckle the Judge, they had little effect on the mass of the audience.

  That was the second time he saw Lucy Parsons. The third time, nearly a year later, he was driving with Judge Tree through the packing-house district and he saw her walking on a picket line, only a dozen yards from the road. Altgeld pulled in his horse and said to Tree:

  “See that woman there?”

  “Which?”

  “The one with the dark face and the gray coat. She has a yellow handkerchief around her neck.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s Lucy Parsons,” Altgeld said.

  At that moment she looked at them, but if she recognized Altgeld she gave no sign of it. As they drove away, Tree remarked:

  “She’s trying to clear her husband’s name, isn’t she?”

  “I imagine so. They seem to have been very devoted.”

  Tree said, “She won’t help things by being mixed up in strikes.”

  Those were the three times, but they ran through a period of half a dozen years, and it could hardly be said that the Governor was troubled greatly, either by those meetings, or by the memory of Parsons as Schilling had described him. Yet now, after the scene with Darrow, his thoughts ranged over the many matters concerning the Haymarket affair, that most curious case which would not rest, either by virtue of a hangman’s scaffold or a prison cell.

  He smiled wryly at the thought that he, who almost alone of liberal Chicago citizens had held back from signing the clemency petition, should be dogged and needled by this wretched case. The details of it were vague in his memory by now, and sometimes he wondered why it bulked so large with such different men as George Schilling and Clarence Darrow, why there should be in existence now a new petition signed by thousands of names ready to be presented to him. It was true that at the time, although he had not followed the case too closely in the newspapers, it had struck him as a miscarriage of justice, but in the essence justice was a stout, blind lady, and the man who had a dollar for each miscarriage she had suffered would be unnaturally wealthy, even here in Chicago.

  He was annoyed by the way the matter followed him; he had a large and complex job ahead of him, and didn’t he have the right to work as other men did, with a direct relation to practical problems? Another of those damned, mysterious cyclic depressions had hit the state, and soon he would be facing a rash of strikes, lockouts, pleas from both labor and capital; there would be the question of the unemployed; the state institutions were in miserable conditon; and the state schools were something to weep at. Also, with a certain grim satisfaction, he faced the prospect of cleaning out the rest of his political enemies, as well as the opponents of his party. It was a man-sized job and more, and yet like a small, malignant cancer, this Haymarket affair kept inserting itself—as if he had been elected Governor in relation to that and nothing else.

  Wistfully, he recalled the first after-flush of the election victory. The Democrats were back in, and it was like tilting a thousand-gallon bucket of champagne and sending it flowing. Black bowler hats were transformed to shining silk, and night after night the lights shone on a sea of gleaming shirtfronts. Civil War vets, Democratic stalwarts, beginning to age considerably, pledged toasts to the “Solid South,” and millionaire pork and beef kings, millionaire lumbermen, and millionaire railroaders, toasted the people’s party. The Judge, soon to be the Governor, loved it, and though night after night it was the same, fatuous speeches describing his town-to-town buckboard campaign, his astuteness, his brilliance, he did not tire. Emma tired first, pleading that his health would not stand it, recognizing the signs of those constantly recurrent malarial attacks; but this was a reward he would taste fully. Not even the legend of the Ugly Duckling did justice to this, and if he drank too much, ate too much, slept too little, danced too much, well, a man lived once and died completely.

  In that mood, recalling such recent pleasantness, he was found by his wife as twilight crept into his large, mahogany-fitted office. He looked up to meet her inquiring gaze.

  “Do you want the lights on?” she asked him.

  Smiling, he shook his head; he still had such pride in Emma, she was such a well-turned, well-dressed woman, whether a lawyer’s wife, or a judge’s, or the hostess in the executive mansion! Her hair, graying a little, was as it should be, and so was her face and her figure. If he did not gain from marriage what others set such store by, he did have certain values he appreciated completely.

  “I’ll go with you, my dear,” he said. “Can we have an early dinner?”

  “For any special reason?”

  “I’m going to Chicago tonight,” the Governor said.

  IV

  The trip from Springfield to Chicago, covering that same unnatural separation of capital from center of commerce that exists in so many states, was a long and tiresome one; and generally the Governor would conquer boredom through work, or sleep, or companionship—cigars, whisky, and a private room lightening and shortening the two hundred-odd miles. Not that he cared much for liquor, but his friends did, and he enjoyed slouching into one of the big leather chairs the railroad put at his disposal, and listening to the stories told and the comments passed. He never actually broke down his reserve, a wall of protection he had long ago created; and that feeling of apartness gave him almost a spectator’s position. Thus he could be together and comfortable with men he despised as well as with men he liked, nor did the talk of the cheap politicians, the ward-heelers, the county men, the old party hacks, and the rising speculators bite deep enough to move him to disgust. He could watch them, listen to them, hear their onerously repetitious dirty stories, listen to discussion of extramatrimonial affairs, and yet remain aloof. And if he tired of the whole thing, he could pick up a book and read, and his friends would look at each other and then lower their voices, so as not to disturb the Governor.

  But, tonight, he brought no work with him and he went alone, without even a secretary. The porter had made up his bed, but though it was late, he had no great desire for sleep. He was on one of those journeys which are made as much to get away from one place as to go to another; and the fact that he had laid out a program for Chicago, a program that was in some ways a direct response to Darrow’s insolence, gave him no peace of mind. He recognized that he had to take action and put this Haymarket specter in its grave. He would go to his-office in the Unity Block, and he would operate from there for a day; that would be soothing. He would call on his friends and demand their instant appearance. Joe Martin would come; so would Schilling and Tree and Mayor Cregier and King Mike McDonald, who bossed the city, and half a dozen more; and some would give advice, some would plead, some would shout at him. Yet he knew that nothing of what they said would matter particularly; the upshot of it was already decided in his own mind. He would get the records, review the case, stretch out the review while he felt the temper of the public, and then crawl through the only loophole. Instead of writi
ng any decision on the fairness or unfairness of the trial, the impartiality of judge or jury or appeal courts, he would extend to the three men the mercy of the sovereign state, saying, in so many words: “You have been punished enough; go and sin no more.” Thereby, he would be merciful; he would be magnanimous; he would put the beast to rest, nor would he incur the enmity of certain forces. It was a weasel move put into weasel words, but almost no one would so term it. Only he, John Peter Altgeld, taking that course would realize the full implications of it.

  He undressed and got into bed, but still he could not sleep, even though the jolting of a Pullman car usually acted like a bromide. Instead, his thoughts raced here and there with restless, pounding annoyance. He sought for an ethic, but there was no ethic; he recalled what Lucy Parsons had said, and in his mind he composed arguments against her. In his mind, he arranged his investments; he totaled his wealth, recalled how he had run ten thousand into a hundred thousand, and a hundred thousand into a million. He was the Millionaire governor! What was he fighting? Why should he nail himself onto a cross of three miserable labor agitators? What earthly sense did it make? When he could free them so easily, with the same harmless bit of equivocation that a hundred other governors had used, why should he resist that thought? Why should he lie awake and fight a conclusion he had already come to?

  If he took the other path, if he decided that the three men were innocent, had always been innocent—

  He put that thought out of his mind. “To hell with it,” he said. “To hell and be damned! Leave it alone! Let them rot in jail!” Life was short. At the age of forty-five, it comes on a man that perhaps only fifteen years are left. He wanted more. He wanted to sit in the Senate, and he could.

  He remembered Phil Armour, and he remembered Schilling saying bitterly, in reference to a sellout on the part of a certain labor leader, “Some men die for freedom, but a German writes a book about it.”

  He drove the thought from his mind. He was no more German than Abe Lincoln was English. He was an American. What if he had, by a freak of chance, been born on the other side? A few months later, and he would have been born here. He was an American; didn’t his friends say that he was more American than any native son they knew?

  He sought for an ethic, and there was no ethic to be found. Not even the ethic of power, for as a businessman he was nothing alongside Field or McCormick or Armour or Pullman, and he knew, if no one else did, precisely how a man came to be Governor of Illinois.

  V

  In his office in the great Unity Building, which was his, which he had built and created, he felt much better. Daylight eases a problem, and by now he had become so thoroughly a part of Chicago that the city was, in a sense, an answer to problems. For wasn’t Chicago like him, more American than any city on the continent, yet with a larger proportion of foreign-born than any city on the continent; ugly in its youth, but becoming less so, crude and vigorous and violent? In the downtown section, massive skyscrapers were rising, buildings unlike any other in the land, huge, blocked-out, frightening, giving a feeling of being flung and landing here and there or anywhere, like the toys of a capricious giant. Also, after the great inter-city labor wars of the late seventies and eighties, the wealthy citizens of the town led a movement against narrow streets. Narrow streets, turning and twisting, could be too easily barricaded and held. In narrow streets a few rifles were as good as artillery, and from the upper floor a handful might defend such streets against a thousand. So the city-planners laid out the new avenues broad and wide, with streets intersecting them at exact right angles; thereby, a Gatling gun could sweep unobstructed for a thousand yards, a howitzer could be precisely trained, and a field piece could drive point-blank for a mile or more. Cavalry could charge on an avenue as well as across an open field, and troops could advance ten abreast.

  And while sober, thoughtful citizens, such as Altgeld, considered that there was something disgraceful as well as hysterical in this sort of thing, they admitted that the city benefited; from the pork- and beef-butchery beginnings, they could make a dream of a continental metropolis, noble and beautiful, central to half the world, and giving wheat and beef and abundance to many millions.

  His Unity Block was part of this dream. A long time ago—how long ago, he hardly knew, but perhaps back in those half-forgotten days when he ran like a small wild beast through the virgin forest of the middle border—he had conceived the dream of rearing towers. Since then it had changed; the fancies of a child became the sketches of a lonely man. When Emma discovered him at his desk, shading in rectangular blocks, he would be half apologetic, half ashamed; and then she would explain to someone else that Pete wanted to build the biggest house in the world. But that was hardly the truth; he wanted to build towers; when he sought for verity in his world, the world charging out of the middle west like a steam locomotive, he found it only in material things. Other men died and they left a child, a family, a commercial empire; if he died, for a few weeks his friends would talk about Pete Altgeld, and then it would be done. In the dark hours of the night, when the fear of death was strongest, he understood full well why the ancient Egyptian kings reared such mighty piles of stone.

  Partly out of that, he built the Unity Block; partly because he despised his own trade of politics. He wrote books; he built houses; he sought to imprint himself on life. Each time it was a larger piece of property, a taller building. It did not occur to him to ask why, with so much space available, Americans should frenetically urge their buildings toward the sky. If he translated it to himself at all, it was in terms of a monument rearing out of the soot and dirt of this wild and windy town, so that people could point and say, “Altgeld built that.” He put four hundred thousand dollars of his money into the Unity Building, and he borrowed as much more, and then from day to day, he could not wait to see it in completion, planning in sleepless nights how he could hurry the construction. When the steel framework reared up, the building’s nakedness became his own until he could cover it over with bricks. He made mistakes; stone caught between his framework and the McCormick building, which it hugged, threw the skeleton out of line, and it was not the hundred-thousand-dollar repair bill that made him sick, desperate, terror-stricken, but rather the thought that his building, his baby and darling might be lost forever. He saw it through the repair as a mother might see a child through sickness; and of nights, stealthily, he would slip out of his house, go and stand in the darkness across the street from the giant he was nursing, stand for hours on end staring up at the monstrous bulk, darker against the dark Chicago sky. And when the masonry enfolded the frame, finally, he felt like weeping with gratitude; and out of this came certain childish things, like what he said to Pastor Schloss of the Lutheran Church he now and then gave money to:

  “You see, pastor, this is the kind of immortality that counts. It will stand forever.”

  To which the pastor answered, quite obviously, “Nothing stands forever.”

  This was the place to which he went now, home in Chicago, and sitting in his office there, he felt comforted, rested and assured, so much so that Joe Martin, coming in, smiled with surprise and said:

  “Pete, you look good.”

  “I feel good.”

  “Well, I heard you were sick. But you don’t look sick. You look like old times. But maybe I go too much by old times. I should call you Governor now.”

  “All right—if you want to.”

  “What can I do for the Governor?” Martin asked. There was a half-hostile note in his voice, mixed with the real pleasure he felt at seeing Altgeld.

  “Send Emma some flowers, for one thing. You did that in Chicago. It wouldn’t cost a hell of a lot more now.”

  “How is Emma?”

  “Worried about me. Otherwise, fine.”

  “Has she something to worry about?”

  “Only that I’m wearing out, running down. I say I’ve got twenty good years left, maybe thirty. But the smart boys don’t count on me to live out my term. Wh
at do you think?”

  “I don’t play long shots.”

  “Why don’t you ask me what I really want?”

  “Why should I? You’re the Governor. You call and I come. You call and big Mike comes too. I’m just a two-bit gambler.”

  “All right,” Altgeld said. “Get it out of your system.”

  “No.”

  “Where did you want me to count you in? Superintendent of Hospitals, Secretary of State, Factory Inspector—?”

  “Maybe it’s your kind of honesty I don’t figure,” Joe Martin said. “I don’t claim to be an honest man, but I never welshed on a bet; I never ratted on a friend. I bought votes and sold them, because that’s my business, the same as running a roulette wheel.”

  “And you think I’m pulling reform on my friends?”

  “I don’t know what to think. A man become governor—”

  “And what?”

  “He plays both ends against the middle. I guess the next step is the White House.”

  “I wasn’t born in this country,” Altgeld reminded him.

  “Jesus God, and the way you figure, that’s the only thing that stands in your way.”

  “Maybe. Why don’t you stop tearing at me, Joe? Maybe I don’t know what to do. I’m sick of politics.”

  “You’re not sick of it, Governor. You love it.”

  “And I hate it. Suppose I busted loose?”

  “How?”

  “Not something that concerned the party directly. Would the party stick by me?”

  “Ask the party, Governor.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “All right. I don’t know; you’re for labor, you’re against it. You’re against big business, but you’re big business yourself. You hate Big Mike and you hate Phil Armour too. Where do you stand?”