by Howard Fast
“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.”
“Have you ever heard Bryan talk?”
“You know I’ve heard him. I heard him at the silver convention. I’ve heard auctioneers and street hawkers and Indian medicine men, too.”
“Pete, see him. Please. Do it for me. You can whittle him down. I don’t know who else can. I’ve insulted him, laughed in his face, and done everything but pull his long, lovely hair—and he still wants to be president. And, so help me God, Pete, I’m afraid of him, the way you’re afraid of a little boy who’s a lot stronger than most men.”
“I’ll see him.”
“Pete—thanks. You know, I’m getting no younger; neither of us is. You get old and you get afraid. You have bad dreams. Well, this is our last chance, Pete. God help me, I don’t know my country any more.”
So he saw Bryan. In his thirties, tall, handsome, the long dark hair like something out of another century, Bryan first strutted, then orated, then wheedled. Altgeld watched him, chin in palms, and answered shortly and dryly.
“You don’t trust me,” Bryan finally said.
“Look, son, it’s not whether I trust you or not. But it’s funny about this job of running the country, and what it means to our people. Not that you can’t fool them—”
“Then I’m a fraud!”
“Not that you can’t fool them—they’ve been fooled so many times that it makes you ache to think about it. They’ve been fooled into thinking that their two parties are different, when right now they’re as alike as peas in a pod. They’ve been fooled into voting for the wrong man; they’ve been fooled into voting themselves into serfdom and chains. They’ve been fooled into voting themselves into starvation and misery and heartache. And still when it comes to a president, they think it’s a job for the best man the country can produce.”
“But I’m not the best man,” Bryan said. “Why? Why can’t I convince you?”
“Maybe you wouldn’t be able to convince the voters for the same reason. You’re a young feller.”
“I’ve been in government. I’ve been tried—”
“Sure. Sure you have. And maybe someday you’ll be five times the man Dick Bland is. Maybe now. But it isn’t just a job of making one man president—you know that as well as I do. It’s a job of throwing a pack of scoundrels out of Washington and giving the country back to the people who made it. It’s bigger than any one man. It’s too big to jeopardize. I’d like to be president too, son. I’d like it a hell of a lot. Well, I can’t. Neither can Sam McConnell. Neither can Daniel. Neither can Hinrichsen. You see, we can’t fool the people. We don’t have the forces, the money, the ballyhoo, the machine.”
“But the people would follow me. I tell you—”
“Bill, you’re a good speaker. You got a good tongue there. You got a head on your shoulders, too. But I think you’re a little young to be president. Don’t break down this thing. We’ve worked too hard on it. We’ve built too long and-too carefully.”
“All right. If that’s the way you feel about it, there’s nothing else I can do. Unless they want me—”
Altgeld rose and put his arm around Bryan’s shoulder. He walked with him to the door, talking, repeating words and more words. And afterward he felt sick and angry and disgusted. To have to plead like that with a fool, with a strutting peacock who wanted to be president! Afterward, he wanted to wash his hands of the whole thing, be rid of it and done with it, with politics, with this whole business, never to argue or plead or bully or cozen again as long as he lived.
XI
Before the national convention began, Emma took a suite of rooms at the Sherman House. She was glad to be back in Chicago; in some ways, after so long a time at the executive mansion, it was like a homecoming, like a return to an upset normalcy that was not comfortable but certainly natural. It was good to shop again, to stand on the lake-front, to walk on the dirty streets, to watch the crowds that were like crowds in no other city in the world, to see
the haze of smoke hanging over the factories, to feel the strong smell and to hear the violent sound of Chicago.
She thought it might be good for Pete’s health, but it wasn’t; it couldn’t have been. He took over the parlor of the suite, and no matter how she aired it, the smell of cigar smoke and stale alcohol never departed. Instead of getting better, the gray pallor of his face increased, and the shuffle in his walk became more pronounced than ever.
All day long a steady stream of men went in and out of that room; all day long the rising, falling sound of voices came from there. A core was being made there, a unit of forces from every state in the union. From the very beginning, Emma had followed the steps of insurgence, the first wildcat state committee meeting, the silver convention, the vicious, all-out attack on Grover Cleveland and the other big business forces who controlled the party, and finally the state convention—yet with all that in mind, she still found it difficult to comprehend how in the short space of one year, her husband had become the undisputed leader of the National Democratic Party. Yet it was a fact. From Texas, from Missouri, Arkansas, Virginia and Pennsylvania and Colorado, from state after state came the delegations, and in almost every case their first point of contact was the suite of rooms in the Sherman House.
She became conscious of two Americas: the surface, vocal America, the America of the Newspapers, the pulpits, the courts, the banquets, and the after-dinner speakers—that America hated and castigated Altgeld; to that America, he was the enemy of his land, the first villain, a horned devil who had espoused socialism, communism, and every other ism that had ever existed—except, of course, capitalism and patriotism—and whose sole purpose was to bring down the republic in ruins. But there was another America, almost voiceless, the America of the farmer, the workingman, the small businessman; and to them, for all the screaming of the newspapers, Altgeld was something rare and new, the kind of a leader they had been waiting for. By an accident of birth, he had been denied the presidency, but no accident denied him leadership of the party.
