The American: A Middle Western Legend (16 page)

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. What 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?”

Quietly, honestly, Altgeld answered, “I don't know.”

“When you know where you stand, then go to the party.”

VI

Schilling, however, knew precisely why he had been summoned, and after an exchange of greetings, he sat waiting for Altgeld to break the ice; but Altgeld, watching the former carpenter, the friend of Parsons, considered how almost every man has his price, has an end to his ideal, a time when he tires. Schilling had served him well in the gubernatorial race; under the Judge's guidance, he had formed the Altgeld Labor Legion, and the Democratic Party had come forth as the party of the workingman, Jefferson's party. One hundred thousand dollars of Altgeld's own money had furnished the backing for this movement, and the workingman was told that here was Pete Altgeld, a worker himself, who would fight for him right down the line. He spoke in union halls; he paraded his recollections of railroad construction; he wrapped the denims tight around him. When he spoke to workers and said, “Old Abe Lincoln would be the first one to take up the banner of new democracy, the banner of the working class,” they roared with satisfaction, the deep-toned roar which came from this kind of an audience. And when he spoke to a group of German workers, telling them, “
Ich arbeite mit meinen Händen! Und du arbeitest mit deinen Händen, und wo gibt es Hände, stark genug, um uns zu nehmen, was wir erarbeitet haben
?” the same, deep-toned road greeted him.

Afterwards, the reward for Schilling was the post of secretary in the State Board of Labor Statistics, so that he no longer had to go hungry most of the time, as he did when he was business manager for the socialist paper in Chicago; and therefore it was hard for Schilling to demand from the Governor. His old comrades knew the tune had had played at the election, and now, looking at him, Altgeld wondered just how thin and rotten and incredible the whole political fabric of the great republic was, how much more it could be stretched, and whether it was not essentially the same all the way through, top to bottom, House, Senate, and White House, only the price changing, only the method of corruption becoming a great deal larger and more complex.

Yet he liked Schilling, liked him tremendously; at the bottom, Schilling was his own kind; he was declassed wholly, Schilling was not. Emma could make a great thing of both the stone house on Frederick Street and the State Mansion, but there was a point beyond which he couldn't travel. Those he could live with were not the masters, but the political servants, wisecracking, loud-mouthed, foul of speech, corrupt, graft-ridden, but still with a memory that they lived in the gold palaces only by sufferance; and a million-dollar tag didn't change it any.

So when he spoke, the Governor asked Schilling, straightforwardly, “Do they all expect me to pardon the anarchists?”

“All?”

“Not all. You know what I mean.”

“Sometimes, my friend,” Schilling said, “I think that you don't understand your own game. Whatever you think, the people elected you. More of them voted for you than for your opponent. There must have been a reason.”

“I never put in a platform that I would pardon the anarchists.”

“No, of course not. A thousand vote for this reason, a thousand for that. But there are many, many thousands who hope you will pardon Fielden and Schwab and Neebe—no, they believe you will. Pete, what I have heard! They look at you and their hearts go out, so they trust you.”

“And they're fools.”

“No,” Schilling said tiredly. “They are not entirely fools.”

“If I pardon them, then I'm through.”

“Unless you believe in the people.”

“What could the people do for me? What could I do for them?”

“I think that if you were born in this country, they could make you president. And this way, they would follow you to hell.”

Altgeld shook his head.

“And the pardon?”

With a sudden rush of irritation, Altgeld snapped, “If they're guilty, they can rot there! If they're innocent, they'll get out! God damn it, talk about something else! And if you want to talk about the anarchists, bring me facts, not tears, not this stupid talk about the people!”

VII

But Judge Lambert Tree said, pointing to methodology, pure and simple, “There are two ways to go about this. If you extend mercy to these men, no one will dare to protest. Haymarket was a witchburning, a bloodfest, and the heat has passed. Do you think that at this point Marshall Field or Cyrus McCormick give two damns as to whether those three men rot inside a jail or outside one?”

“I've thought of that,” Altgeld agreed.

“On the other hand, if you imply that Parsons and Spies were innocent, as you must if you are to pardon Fielden on legalistic grounds, or even if you imply that the original trial was unfair, then I, personally, would not give twenty-cents for your political future.”

“I see.”

“So the three courses are open. Ignore the whole thing—and you'll never get the labor vote again in this state. Extend mercy, and both labor and businss will stand behind you—I would say, if you want another term as Governor, yes, and the Senate too. But if you take a third course—”

“I'm through?”

“I think so.”

“You would not take the third course?”

“I don't think any man in his right mind would, Peter.”

“Do you think that if I had sat on that bench instead of Gary and tried the case, the result would have been different?”

“I don't know what you would have done. I don't even know what I would have done. But I think there is a limit to what any one man can do.”

“And where is the limit?” Altgeld asked.

“The point where he destroys himself.”

“Then you would have to consider that Parsons destroyed himself,” Altgeld murmured.