The American: A Middle Western Legend (27 page)

“Buck,” he said, and Hinrichsen came to him. Bryan stopped. The silence was empty. Overtones of Bryan's voice rocked back and forth. “Out here,” Altgeld said. They stepped into the passageway, but the flat tone of the Governor's voice penetrated the room.

“What is he doing here?” Altgeld demanded.

“He came.”

“Who invited him?”

“No one. He came. There's no need to be hard on him.”

“Suppose you let me decide that. This is an Illinois caucus. Get him out.”

Judge McConnell joined them. “Take it easy, Pete. I know how you feel, but take it easy.” His voice was a whisper.

“Buck, get him out. This is an Illinois caucus. Get that damned fool out of here. Tell him he has no more chance of being president than I have, and I wasn't even born in this country.”

An hour later, Altgeld put it to the Illinois delegation. “Either,” he said, “you follow me, or I climb down and let anyone else who wants to step in. One way or another. I'm not playing for pennies. This is life and death. I told you before there wouldn't be any second chances. You want to dance around a maypole with Bryan—all right. You want to win an election, all right. But from my point of view the two don't mix.”

They told him they were with him. They shook his hand and assured him that they were with him. But after they went and only Sam McConnell was left, he dropped into a chair, white and trembling.

“I'm sick,” he told the judge. “I want to crawl away. I want to crawl into bed and forget there ever was such a thing as a Democrat.”

“You're not that sick, Pete.”

“You mean I'm not dying?”

“Who'll hold them in line? Hinrichsen is biting at the traces. My word, you don't need brains, you don't need ability; a golden voice is enough.”

“Yes—”

“You're not that sick, Pete.”

“Don't worry. I'll be around. You'd see me in hell, wouldn't you, before you'd let me out of this? Well, I'll be around.”

XVI

The convention was in full swing, and Chicago reacted properly to this very essential business of American democracy. A preacher roared that there were more prostitutes in the middle-western metropolis than in all the rest of the country put together, and perhaps that was so. The beer wagons clattered day and night, and freightloads of Old Granddad and Golden Wedding poured in. The police had instructions not to arrest delegates unless they actually tore up a piece of the town, and there was hardly a night without a torchlight parade or a street meeting with free beer. The feeling penetrated, for it was more than an ordinary convention, and a sense of revolt and pending drama reached even as far as packing-house town and Pullman city. The thousands and thousands of workingmen picked up their heads and listened. Things were stirring in the land, a noise, a ripple; the worst part of the depression was gone, and labor had the strength to do a little more than exist. A man called Debs spoke about socialism and a man called Altgeld spoke about democracy. Coming out of the plants, shoulder to shoulder in the packed thousands, labor had a new feeling of solidarity. At meetings, they listened to their leaders asking them to trust the little Governor. Among themselves, they still shook their heads; but there was the easing of tension that comes with an armed truce, or perhaps with the calm before the storm. Old union men could not remember when it had been so quiet and good as it was now, and they were bending their ears to the hope that Altgeld had found the way—a way within the framework of their land and yet without violence and Gatling guns and death and Pinkertons. The peculiar American persuasiveness was taking hold again, for here all things were possible. And even in the mansions of the rich by the lake, a part of this was shared; for though they hated the very guts of the Governor, whom they referred to as “that damned man,” they felt that another crisis had passed, that a great new era of prosperity was in the offing, that the mores of their lives, their over-plushed homes, their many-faceted ethics, their double and triple standards, their gilt and glitter and sense of kingliness were insured and strengthened; and they could afford to talk about the people now and ask, was not their party more surely and certainly the people's party? Had they not brought such prosperity here as the world had never known? They could unbend. The Democrats had shown their true colors, and one could display responsive virtue by writing a check for ten or twenty or fifty thousands dollars, or twice as much for Mark Hanna, who controlled Republican destinies in the east.

There is no one spirit for a great city, but sometimes there is a commanding overtone, and it was like that in Chicago when the convention opened. The saloons were as full as the shops, and at the huge beer halls, twelve-piece bands ground out the new hit tune, “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, And the band played on; He'd glide 'cross the floor with the girl he adored, And the band played on.” The new theatre was packed every night, and the curious motor cars which had so recently made their appearance acted as a prod to the imagination and let it roam wildly in the brave new world that was coming. If Lucy Parsons still roamed the streets, still set up her little stand to sell her husband's book—well, that was a sort of civil fixture by now, and even the police were beginning to leave her alone, instead of hauling her off into jail again and again. And if at nightfall, the vagabonds, the homeless, the unemployed—who, somehow, were still numbered in the hundreds of thousands—crept here and there, seeking a bowl of soup or a place to sleep, well, that too was a part of life that one accepted and became conditioned to.

XVII

Richard Bland of Missouri was not a colorful man. At this time he was just past his sixtieth year, and those who knew him only casually, in deference to his long term of service in congress, conceded that he was a reliable man, but were not ready to say very much more about him. Part of him was the standard congressional cliché, the string tie, the frock coat, and the resonant voice; but there was more to him than that, a hatred of the great industrial combines that had taken over the government, a sympathy for the farmer, the forgotten man of the frontier, which expressed itself in a tireless battle for free silver coinage, and a readiness to believe that this was a new age for America and for all the world, an age of monopoly capitalism, an age which required a new party, new men, new ideas, and new consideration of the millions who worked with their hands but owned no tools. Early in the battle to oust Cleveland and turn the Democratic Party into a people's party, he had joined Altgeld; he had gone down the line with Altgeld, with the courage not of an old man but a young man, and quietly he had made Missouri one of the pivot-forces in the struggle. When they approached him about the presidency, he said, “You've been talking a lot about the people. Suppose you let them decide whether they want me.” Would he come to Chicago? “No!” The
no
was very definite. He didn't believe a candidate belonged at the convention. Altgeld pleaded, “Richard, look at the practical side of the matter. If you want to speak about democracy, then talk of the forces. You're one of the forces. You have to come to the convention.” He said, emphatically, “No. That's all, my mind is made up.” “But you'll run,” they asked him. He said, “I'll run, all right. If you want me.”

To Altgeld, it was incredible that after all the work had been done the situation should now be so underestimated. The convention whooped it up, flung their hats in the air, and talked about patronage as if they were already in the White House. It turned Altgeld's stomach. They were casual about the fight he had led for sixteen months. Grover was out; they were in. They performed snake dances. They cheered, Rah, rah, rah, sixteen to one, silver, silver, rah, rah, rah. He remarked to McConnell, “And they want to run the country.” “Have you ever seen the Republicans?” McConnell asked him. He shook his head. “Well, just the same.” But it didn't help that the other party was as infantile, as shallow as his own. The other party had twenty million dollars; his own party had been maneuvered into a revolt they did not even comprehend. Taking over a government, or holding a Fourth of July celebration—it was all one and the same thing. He wished fervently that Bland had come up to the city, the more so when Bryan cornered him and pleaded: _

“Let me talk, Governor.”

He wanted to remark that he had rarely seen Bryan do anything else, but he held onto his temper and answered, pleasantly enough, “We got a pretty full agenda, Bill.”

“A short speech.”

“I don't know.”

“My god, Governor, what have you got against me?”

He answered truthfully, “You want to be president too hard, Bill. I want to win this election.”

“But let me talk, please. I would ask you on my knees.”

“You don't have to.”

“Will you deny Nebraska the right to raise her voice? Is it for nothing that we hacked a nation out of the prairies, fought the Indians, and pledged our lives to the cause of democracy?”

He looked at Bryan as if he had never seen him before. “Oh, my aunt,” he whispered.

“You'll let me talk, please, Governor?”

“If there's time, I'll let you talk,” Altgeld sighed.

“I've been working on an address.”

“If there's time.” He remembered that Hinrichsen had remarked upon going up to Bryan's room and finding him there, in front of the bureau mirror, one hand thrust into his waistcoat, declaiming. “He can speak,” Hinrichsen said. Now Altgeld repeated, “If there's time, Bill, you can speak.” And he told McConnell afterward that the thought of all Nebraska standing impotent on her prairies had been too much for him. “Let him speak. I don't want it said, Sam, that I shut anyone up.”

“I suppose you're right.”

“Do you know that Buck is impressed with him. People listen to him talk and a sort of glaze comes over their eyes. Something happens to them.”

“I know—”

Nominations began. Speakers went on for hours, and some of the delegates listened and others didn't. Some smoked cigars and others caucused in the anterooms. Every so often there would be a calculated roar of cheers and then a screaming frenzy that ended up in a snake-dance, as a group of natives attempted to stampede the house and start a boom for their favorite son. But other groups of native sons would regard this with bored disinterest. Few listened; some of the speakers spoke to some of the audience; some spoke to the thin air.

Altgeld sat in the Illinois corner, watching this the way a man from Mars might; he appeared bloodless and shriveled. He kept trying to swallow the astonishing fact that this same crowd might make up a government and operate this great union of states.

XVIII

Finally, William Jennings Bryan spoke. Altgeld watched him rise to his feet, walk to the platform, and mount it. He faced the crowd, thrust his fingers into his waistcoat, and moved his head, ever so slightly. The ebony hair rippled. The light caught his ruddy skin, and it glowed. After the procession of the middle-aged and the old, the whiskered and the bearded and the mustached, the pot-bellied politician and the doddering congressional veteran, this appeared to be the apostle of youth itself. For a long minute, he stood silent on the platform, allowing his personality to impress itself, giving those who still did not know him a chance to whisper to their neighbors and to be answered, “Bryan—Nebraska.” His dark brows knit and then relaxed. His mouth was stern and then gentle. He began to speak with deference and humility, his magnificent voice, even on a muted note, penetrating every corner of the hall. As he started with the usual, “Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the convention,” the noise and chatter among the delegates went on uninterrupted, and hardly more than a third of them actually listened. But his next sentence caught them, and face after face turned to him. The voice throbbed an impinged and penetrated:

“I would be presumptuous, indeed, to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened, if this were a mere measuring of abilities; but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity!”

The chatter had stopped: They were watching him now, and Altgeld had the impression that at least several hundred delegates had known the content of the speech in advance, planned for it, and were ready to act on it. Yet, in spite of himself, that magic voice had caught him up: inside, his heart sank, as he laid against this mounting effect his quiet hope that by speaking sanely and directly about Bland and for him, with the aid of a few dozen who understood what was at stake, he might turn this shaky rebellion into a victory. He was pulled from the rising crescendo of Bryan's voice by Sam McConnell who whispered hoarsely, “Well, you asked for it.”

“He can speak.”

“Nobody denies that. And nobody listens to what he says.”

“They're listening,” Altgeld said. “That's the amazing thing, they're listening. Do you hear?” He doubted his own ears. A roar of applause went up. Bryan was saying:

“The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer.… The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—who begins in the spring and toils all summer—is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain.… The miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from the hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade, are as much businessmen as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world.”

Altgeld growled, “He's an idiot, do you hear him? And they're swallowing it—they're swallowing that incredible nonsense. Everyone is a businessman, and therefore we're for business and for everyone.”