My Story (3 page)
Authors: Elizabeth J. Hauser
Most of these things Mr. Johnson has ignored in his story. They were so much a part of the day's work with him that it would no more have occurred to him to tell them than to relate that he put on his shoes when he got up in the morning.
The things he does tell are told simply, and even the most unpleasant of them without any bitterness. As a year only had elapsed between the time of his defeat as mayor of Cleveland and the day he set himself seriously to the task of telling his story this absence of bitterness cannot be attributed to the softening influences of time; nor can it be ascribed to the mellowing hand of age for Mr. Johnson was not old. Up to his last hour of consciousness he was living ahead of the generation just born, and there are those who believe that this would have been so had he lived to be eighty-six years of age instead of dying as he did at fifty-six.
It must be, then, that even in the heat of the battle when feeling ran highest he was not affected by it, for not only had all bitterness vanished when he began to write, but he had actually forgotten many of his most trying and cruel experiences.
Contrast his statement that he was hissed but once in his life and that at a meeting in Brooklyn with this from the pen of a man who participated in nearly all of Mr. Johnson's campaigns:
“During his dozen campaigns while mayor it was his habit to insist upon questions from the audience; he asked for hard ones,
âmean' ones, he called them; he liked that kind best. No man was apparently more vulnerable. He had been in the street railway business all his life and he opened up his whole life to scrutiny and gayly acknowledged where acknowledgment was coming, and answered where an answer was required. Frequently his meetings were on the verge of riot; in the east end where feeling was most vindictive and but a handful of his friends would be present he would stand on the edge of a jeering, sometimes a hissing crowd that packed the tent far out to the street lines, smilingly leaning on the edge of the table until the uproar quieted. Then he would frequently win the meeting by a simple story or sweet appeal. Night after night he met this kind of thing, speaking possibly half a dozen times in from one to three tents and in as many more halls, and apparently never wearying of it. He seemed to court this kind of exposure to attack.”
Again, in discussing the Depositors Savings and Trust Company, he dismisses the relation of other banks to the Depositors in a single sentence, “A great many of the local banks were unfriendly, but a few of them acted very nicely indeed.” That is all, though it is a matter of common knowledge that the organization of the Depositors was necessary in order to provide the low-fare movement with a friendly bank and to prevent its transactions from being made public and thereby circumvented, that it had constantly to combat rumors against it set in motion by hostile interests, and that from the very beginning it was compelled to fight against a combination of the banking interests of Cleveland to which it finally had to succumb.
He says nothing to indicate that he had any personal feeling in connection with the strike inaugurated by the old and still hostile street railway managers directly after the Municipal Traction Company took possession of the street railways. He had had a strike on one of his own
street railroads but once. That lasted just ten minutes. He went in person to the men and told them that he thought what they were asking for was reasonable and he was prepared to give it to them. He had always paid good wages and had encouraged labor unions among his employes. While that Cleveland strike was on he spent hours of each day in a machine shop working with his hands on the pay enter fare-box which he had invented and with which he was preparing to equip the cars. Did he resort to manual labor and abandon his mind to the mental absorption of mechanical problems that the iron might not enter his soul? He never told.
So little reference is made to the persecutions and cruelties of the street railway company and the business interests allied with it that the reader whose only source of information is Mr. Johnson's own story might perhaps conclude that Cleveland was quite different from Detroit and Toledo and Chicago and San Francisco and other cities where the franchises of public service corporations have been threatened. But in Cleveland, as in these other cities, there was organized as if by instinct a sympathetic, political-financial-social group whose power and influence made itself known the moment it was touched. It included the banks and trust companies with their directors. Banks that did not sympathize with this conspiracy were coerced by fear into compliance with the will of the stronger institutions. Through the banks, manufacturers, wholesale and retail merchants were reached. Business men who openly sympathized with the low-fare movement were called to the directors' rooms in the banks and advised, sometimes in guarded language, that their loans might be called or their credit contracted. Only one bank
of any size dared identify itself with the low-fare railroad and it was made to suffer some of the stings of ostracism. Many men who bought low-fare stock had to do it secretly. Contractors, professional and business men were cowed at meetings of the Chamber of Commerce by the suggestion that they would lose business; retailers who voted for Mayor Johnson and let their position be known were boycotted or threatened with boycott. The professional classes were allied with the business interests. The lawyers were almost a unit. At one time fourteen of the leading law firms of the city were employed against the movement. Many physicians and in a large measure the clergy were affiliated with this class. There were a few notable exceptions in both the Catholic and Protestant churches. Dean Charles D. Williams of Trinity Cathedral, now Bishop of Michigan, never flagged in his devotion to Mr. Johnson or to the cause for which he stood. The clerks followed in the wake of the business interests and all who were seeking favor socially, professionally or commercially, lined up with Privilege.
And there was always a portion of the press to be reckoned with I Two newspapers owned respectively by the family of one of Mr. Johnson's most powerful political enemies and by attorneys and stockholders of the street railway company, persistently misrepresented the people's movement, and, through paid advertisements, editorially and otherwise, they made charges of criminality and dishonesty against Mr. Johnson, implying that the movement was part of his plan to make money, to steal the street railways of the city for private profit. Brutal cartoons accompanied their news stories or illustrated their editorial point of view.
Yet when Mr. Johnson died, a little more than a year after he went out of office, these newspapers joined with thousands of others in proclaiming their belief in his sincerity and honesty. He had made mistakes, they said, but not a shadow of a suggestion of bad faith did they charge up to him.
The newspaper persecution of Mr. Johnson was not confined to Cleveland. A publicity bureau supplied the country papers of the State with material well designed to convince the unthinking and the uninformed that in the Cleveland mayor were reincarnated for the temptation and fall of Ohio all the qualities ascribed to the Satan of the early orthodox church.
To all of this was added the coercive power of social ostracism. It was carried into the clubs and employed against all who distantly believed in or liked Mr. Johnson.
“For the greater part of nine years,” writes Frederic C. Howe, “Cleveland was an armed camp. There was but one line of division. It was between those who would crucify Mr. Johnson and all of his friends, and those who believed in him. I doubt if any of the border cities like Washington and Covington during the Civil War were more completely rent asunder than was Cleveland during those years. It is doubtful if the wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines in the Italian cities were more bitter, more remorseless, more cruel than this contention in Cleveland. If any kind of cruelty, any kind of coercion, any kind of social, political or financial power was left untried in those years to break the heart of Mr. Johnson, I do not know what or when it was.”
How he contrived to keep his spirit strong and glad is something one may not hope to comprehend. At one
period in the street railway fight when the entire city of Cleveland seemed to have united in a clamor for settlement and when even his most trusted friends and loyal followers were urging concessions which Mr. Johnson's far-seeing vision would not permit him to make, when, for a time, he stood utterly alone, not a word of discouragement, not a sign of irritation escaped him. But when his “boys” finally rallied to his support and a united plan of action was agreed upon once more, the mayor was so happy that a friend, knowing nothing of the occurrence just past, commented upon his gaiety. In explanation he related what had happened. An expression from his listener of admiration at the patience and sweetness of his attitude brought from him this answer: without speaking he took from his inside breast pocket a little worn brown card and handed it to her.
She read:
“The man who is worthy of being a leader of men will never complain of the stupidity of his helpers, of the ingratitude of mankind, nor of the inappreciation of the public.
“These things are all a part of the great game of life, and to meet them and not go down under them in discouragement and defeat is the final proof of power.”
“I should like to keep this card long enough to copy the quotation,” the friend said, after a moment.
“You may have it,” replied Mr. Johnson, “I don't need it any more.”
Much of Mr. Johnson's success in public affairs as in his mastery of himself must be attributed to the fact that he did not go into the fight against Privilege with the confusion of ideas and multiplicity of aims which have de
stroyed the usefulness of so many good, well-intentioned men in similar service. If it be that there are men in whom the sense of justice is more highly developed than it was in Mr. Johnson, in the history of our country, at least, there has been none who has given fuller expression in action to that sense of justice. He was a rich man, made rich by special privilege. He did not blink the fact. When Mr. George's writings opened his eyes to the truth about the established order, he went out to destroy the conditions which make his own class possible.
Inequality of opportunity with its concomitant result, involuntary poverty, was
the social wrong
. To restore equality of opportunity by securing to each worker the product of his own labor, thereby depriving a privileged few from monopolizing rewards which belong to the many, was
the social remedy
. His programme was definite and complete. His philosophy must have been tremendously satisfying, for by means of it he worked out a simple, effective solution to every political problem that might arise, and the answers to his personal problems as well.
That there was a marked development in the noblest qualities in Mr. Johnson's character during the last five or six years of his life none of his friends will gainsay; yet from the very beginning of his interest in social questions there was something different, something extraordinary about him. One of the ablest of American editors, a man who had been closely associated with Mr. Johnson in the earlier days and one who knew him intimately for twenty-five years, said of him a few days after his death, “I don't know how it was, but somehow Johnson never had to reason things out. No matter what the question that came
up, no matter how laboriously I might have to study it in order to work my way out, he knew as if by instinct the proper and just solution of it.”
Another of the men who was closest to Mr. Johnson from 1901 to 1911 says,
“I can only understand Tom L. Johnson by saying that his qualities were of a different kind than those of other men; his courage, his intellect, his insight, his sympathy, his love were on a something more than human plane. He saw his mental pictures, reached his decisions, carried his Herculean load for more than forty years because he was endowed with a gift of a different caliber, of another kind than those of any of his contemporaries. There was nothing ordinary about him except his kinship with ordinary people. He might easily have been a Morgan of finance had he chosen to pursue this field of exploit; he might easily have been one of our greatest inventors, one of our greatest electrical experts. He was a wonderful mathematician, a great manager of men and things, a political philosopher of the rarest kind with something of the intuitive point of view of Jefferson. He knew the street railway business from the standpoint of the motorman, the conductor, the manager, the electrician, the financier. He had been all of these things. He had mastered the iron and steel business in the same exhaustive way. For years he arose at five o'clock and began the day with a study of French or some other subject with an instructor, and closed it with the study of some work on political science in which he was interested. He was an orator of the most effective kind and in quick exchange of repartee or in answering questions, a master. As a parliamentary leader of the English sort he would probably have been the greatest of his generation, for he not only knew more about more things than any man I have ever met, but he also had a philosophy of life which clarified every question into its logical crystals. That was one of the rarest qualities of the man. He did not reason things out; they simply straightened out when they came in contact with
his mind. Did a proposition make for liberty? it was approved. Did it make for special privilege in any of its forms? it was wrong. Did legislation open up opportunity, promote personal or political freedom, make it easier for all men to achieve their best? it required no other argument. I have frequently heard him say that if he had the choice of leaving his children with millions or with equal opportunity he would not hesitate which to choose.”
No picture of this man would be complete without a view of him at play, for Mr. Johnson played on as gigantic a scale as he worked. Had he chosen to make his play his serious work he would probably have been one of the greatest inventors of his time. He had intended to tell as part of this story, in narrative form and so simply that every layman might understand it, something of his invention which, for want of a better name, was known to his friends as “greased lightning.” Even after he was stricken by his final illness and confined to his bed he talked about this and still hoped to be able to dictate it. This was not to be, but we are able to give the story to the readers of Mr. Johnson's book, for Frederic C. Howe, remembering it as Mr. Johnson told it to him, has written it for us. Mr. Howe's assistance not only in the matter of the following story of the invention but in the preparation of this entire introduction has been invaluable.