My Story (33 page)
Authors: Elizabeth J. Hauser
The books on advanced mathematics, the games of chess, which he had employed at an earlier period of his illness to divert his mind were superseded now by poetry and fiction. He became very fond of several of Kipling's poems and these were read and re-read to him. He frequently quoted snatches of poems he had committed to memory years before. His enjoyment of Kipling's jungle stories was like the enjoyment of a child with a well-developed imagination. He delighted in the romances of Sir Walter Scott and every character in the story he was reading became to him a living person for the time being. He looked over the newspaper clippings which were sent him regularly from Cleveland and read a New York paper daily, but rather as a duty than otherwise.
He enjoyed the wonderful sunsets over the Nantucket moors, and on the “longest day in the year” arose at three o'clock in the morning to go out, accompanied by his attendant, James Tyler, to see the sun rise over the ocean. The flowers and the birds of the island interested him
He was on a little spot of earth at last where there were more jobs than men to do them, where health was the rule and where there was no poverty, where the jail had not been occupied within the memory of several generations, where there was one church at the service of all denominations, where by means of the yearly town meeting the people ruled. It was a good place for recreation for a man of Mr. Johnson's convictions.
His health improved somewhat under the stimulus of outdoor life, though he continued to suffer pain and was being gradually forced to a more and more restricted diet. Upon the advice of his physician he had given up smoking months before and he never resumed it. Though he had been an inveterate smoker for years no word of complaint on this account, nor, as one by one he was obliged to give up the things he liked to eat, escaped him then or afterwards. For long weeks before his death his diet of milk was varied only by an occasional egg or a few raw oysters. One of his attendants, seeing his suffering in spite of all this precaution, was moved to remark, “I wish I could bear it for you.” He summoned a smile and answered with a bit of ever ready philosophy, “No Tomlinson in this.” There was indeed no Tomlinson in him.
Mr. Johnson returned to Cleveland August 28, and on that day decided to give a favorable reply to the publishers of
Hampton's Magazine
, who were urging him to write for them a story of his Cleveland fight.
He went to New York the following week, arriving on Monday, September 5, Labor Day. “I don't like Labor Day,” he said, “except as a holiday. These parades of working men seem to proclaim a difference between
them and the rest of us which ought not to exist. It hurts me.”
Mr. Johnson devoted a week or more to dictating a magazine article on the Cleveland movement and from this developed the plan to have him tell his whole story. He had this in mind when he returned again to Cleveland, October 8.
The evening of the eleventh he paid a brief visit to the Democratic headquarters. Commenting on this, the
Plain Dealer
said, “When Tom L. Johnson walked into Weber's Hall last night the ceiling did not go up because the floor above held it down.” He spoke but a few sentences, concluding with this characteristic one: “While we are building this city on a hill let us never forget the one necessity â that we must deserve success.”
The next few weeks were the most painful of Mr. Johnson's illness. He was not able to proceed with his writing for some time, though he had his secretary at his house daily and attended to his mail as usual and to various matters of business.
Regardless of the effort it cost he insisted upon going to a tent meeting at which Governor Harmon and others were speaking the evening of November 1. He was not expected. This is the way a local newspaper described that event: “For a second only there was a hush. Men who had followed Mr. Johnson for years with exceeding devotion leaned forward to make certain their eyes did not deceive them. Then as the former mayor mounted the platform there was a demonstration such as is seldom seen at any time. As the governor and Mr. Johnson clasped hands the tent fairly rocked with applause. Almost the entire crowd rose to its feet to cheer. Among
portions of the crowd the cheering nearly approached a frenzy. In the moment or two that the former mayor spoke he showed his old time vigor. The tent, the crowd and the flood of recollections seemingly inspired him.”
Governor Harmon said that night what he afterwards repeated in substance to Mr. Johnson in a letter: “The demonstration we have just witnessed has stirred me to the depths of my soul. I can only say that if at any time after my service as governor has expired and I appear before a body of citizens of my State and there, without the powers of office, without the possibility of bestowing favors, I shall receive such a testimonial as you to-night have given your old fighting leader, I will consider that life certainly has been well worth living.”
On November 7, Mr. Johnson voted early and busied himself for the remainder of the day much as he had been wont to do in the days of his strength, receiving election returns at his apartment in the Knickerbocker in the evening. The next day he commenced to write his story. He did his last work on it March 14, 1911, the day before he was attacked by the acute illness which was to terminate in death.
Mr. Johnson left Cleveland but once after he returned in October and that was to attend a meeting of the Fels Fund Commission in New York in November. Louis F. Post's account of Mr. Johnson's participation in that meeting, written especially for this story, follows:
“To friends who had not seen Mr. Johnson since tne days of his health and strength his wasted appearance was discouraging. But to me the contrast was not with his days of health. It was with periods in the course of his illness, and I thought the signs were hopeful. In no respect were they more manifestly so than
in the clearness of perception, and the responsibility and directness of utterance, with which he participated in the deliberations of the Commission. Here he was altogether, except in vim, at his wisest and best.
“We met him in Cleveland, November 17, 1910. Those who gathered there were Daniel Kiefer (chairman of the Fels Fund), Fenton Lawson of Cincinnati, Doctor Wm. P. Hill of St. Louis, W. S. U'Ren and W. G. Eggleston of Oregon, George A. Briggs (one of the commission) of Indiana, myself of Chicago, and James W. Bucklin of Colorado. A loyal friend of Tom L. Johnson's for twenty years, Bucklin was formerly a state senator of Colorado and a distinguished one; he has long been a leader in the Henry George movement; he was an attendant at the first single tax conference, in New York, and at the second, in Chicago; and he was the father of the “Bucklin Bill” in Colorado (a single tax amendment) and of the Grand Junction plan of commission government. Mr. Johnson personally conducted the party â which A. B. du Pont and Peter Witt had then joined for the purpose,â through the du Pont subway. He did it with almost all the enthusiasm of his days of intensest interest in mechanical inventions.
“On the railroad train that night he gathered us into his stateroom, as many of us at a time as it would hold (as James Tyler can testify), for he wanted the companionship and the conversation. He said very little, but he listened with manifest interest; and what he did say showed his unabated hunger for news and thought about the cause that had won his lifelong devotion nearly thirty years before.
“Oregon had just voted upon the county-option-tax amendment, now in force in that State and which, thanks in part to the Fels Fund, is to be utilized next year for a single tax campaign in every county. This measure had been proposed by Thomas G. Shearman as early as 1888, and had been then embraced and always afterward advocated by George and Johnson as the best means for promoting the single tax cause in this country. The
result of the Oregon vote was not yet known, but Mr. U'Ren's account of the campaign, which had been financed largely by the Fels Fund, was particularly interesting to Mr. Johnson. All the more, perhaps, because the introduction through friendly channels into the Oregon campaign of two nominally friendly but (under the local circumstances at that time) really inimical amendments, must have reminded him of a kind of Big Business method of opposition which he had encountered in his Ohio contests with Privilege. It was probably in part an identification in his mind of these subtle tactics in the two States as the same in origin that caused him to make the only speech I heard him make at the public meeting of the Fels Fund two or three days afterwards. His sustained interest in the result of the Oregon election on the county option tax amendment may be inferred from his message to Bucklin and me on our way home through Cleveland. Having heard in New York, as we all had, that the amendment had been defeated, but learning from Edward W. Doty on returning to Cleveland that there were vague newspaper reports to the contrary, he sent Arthur Fuller down to our train as it passed through Cleveland later than his own, to tell us what he had learned from Mr. Doty and to ask what we knew about it. We knew nothing then, but his news was soon confirmed. The county option tax amendment had carried. It was the other two that had been defeated.
“In committee consultations at his rooms in the Prince George Hotel after our arrival in New York, Mr. Johnson had little to say; but his mind was alert, and whenever he did say anything he went directly to the point and without irritation or personal feeling. In all our twenty-five years of cooperation in the same cause I never knew him to be irritable in conference or public speech, nor to be moved by personal animus, and in the Fels Fund conference he was in those respects his old-time self.
“When he spoke at the public meeting of the Fels Fund, in the rooms of the Liberal Club, he did so because matters had
taken a shape which in his judgment precluded his remaining silent. He recognized obstructive influences of the same character and apparent origin as some he had encountered in his nine years' fight against Privilege in Ohio. It was not a pleasant task for him to speak of this, but as he saw the matter it was his task if anyone's, and he did not shirk. There was no unkindness toward individuals, either in what he said or in his way of saying it. He made no accusation of bad faith against anyone immediately concerned. His suggestions, on the contrary, were of good faith played upon from outside. Nor, on the other hand, was there any weak holding back of facts he thought his associates ought to know. He spoke deliberately, frankly, and without any spirit of personal unfriendliness toward anybody, just as in public speaking he had been accustomed to do; yet with the characteristic force and clearness of statement which never left anyone in doubt of what he meant. The parallels he drew, and which were of the substance of his speech, were to the effect that whenever he had encountered the outlying influence he mentioned, it came in the form of a proposal of what he described as âsomething different, just a little different,' from the movement it seemed to him designed to obstruct or divert.
“Those who saw Tom L. Johnson as he made that speech, having known him before his illness and seeing him then for the first time since his health had broken, thought of him reasonably enough as of one whose physical strength had hopelessly gone; but no one who had ever known him well, could have heard him then without realizing that the man himself was there in all his mental and moral vigor. Had I closed my eyes so as to shut out the emaciated body, and but listened to the voice and followed the thought, I think he would have seemed unchanged to me. In that speech I recognized as of old the vigor of voice and thought and phrase and sense of responsibility, of the same Tom L. Johnson who, coming over to Henry George in the early eighties, followed him until death, and then good-humoredly but
relentlessly, regardless of friends, fearless of foes, irrespective of fortune and of victory or defeat, took the lead in fighting Privilege in its varied moods, from subtle to ferocious, for nine memorable years in Ohio.”
On January 6, 1911, Mr. Fels and Mr. Kiefer visited Cleveland as one of the points on their Western tour in the interests of the single tax propaganda. A public meeting was held in the Chamber of Commerce auditorium in the evening. Dr. Cooley presided and Mr. Fels, Dr. Eggleston of Oregon, Newton D. Baker and Mr. Johnson were the speakers. And so it happened that Mr. Johnson's last participation in a public meeting was in behalf of the cause so near his heart. The hall was crowded and here in the very citadel of his old time enemy he received such an ovation as could not but gladden the heart of anyone. As he looked at the cheering crowd before him he said, “This does not look like the old tent, but it sounds like it.” He spoke simply and directly as usual, and eloquently as he always did when the single tax was his theme. His voice was clear and distinct with a fullness of tone that had been absent for a long time. His closest friends might well have been deceived by his apparent strength, and those who knew that this was probably the last time he would make a speech rejoiced exceedingly in the nobility of the sentiments he enunciated that night and in the power manifested in their utterance.
On February 6, owing to contagious illness in his own family, Mr. Johnson was ordered by his physician to leave the family apartment in the Knickerbocker until all danger of infection was past. He therefore moved to Whitehall, an apartment hotel on the edge of one of Cleveland's most beautiful parks. He was suffering less at this time,
the peritonitis which was said to be the cause of his pain having evidently subsided. Now, for the first time, he was under the constant care of a physician and the daily visits of his doctor, to whom he became greatly attached, added greatly to his comfort.
