The experience in the East was not altogether distasteful to Bierce. He was the center of a great deal of attention and he had enjoyed the experience of matching his satire against the wiles of Collis P. Huntington. Bierce had been sent east, as shown by the wire of Mr. Hearst, but his second trip to Washington was at his own request, and was no doubt the result of the pleasant time he had in 1896. One day he was standing in the Senate gallery and chanced to hear Mr. Sherman shout, during the course of an address: “If that is not war, then where in the name of hell does war exist?” A woman standing at Bierce’s side asked him if he had heard anything unusual. He replied: “I really do not know whether or not the expression that he used is common in your tongue. I am from Kansas.” Another incident is rather amusing. One day he chanced to be in a hotel lobby conversing with two very well-known New York society women who were visiting in Washington. An old, shabbily dressed man walked up and spoke to one of the ladies, and she acknowledged his greeting in a courteous manner. After the man had turned away, the other lady said: “Mrs.
A — , how could you speak to such a creature!” Mrs. A — started to explain that the old man had been a former servant, but Bierce interrupted her to say: “It is unnecessary for Mrs. A — to offer an explanation. She can afford to be seen speaking to any one.” The “mauve decade” was never more amazing than during these months. At the home of a Western family which had recently acquired a vast fortune, Mr. Bierce was admonished by the hostess to notice her beautiful “spinal” staircase. It was an age of fuss and showiness and Bierce was amused. It certainly offered a bigger scene than San Francisco. He would come back to Washington again.
During the summer, Bierce’s old associate E. H. (“Ned”) Hamilton was covering the Democratic Convention at Chicago and the railroad issue was an important question during the first days of the convention. But suddenly it was forgotten in the shouting about “silver.” Mr. Bierce did not, however, show the same enthusiasm for the young, handsome and rhetorical William Jennings Bryan that the other Hearst journalists did under the instructions of their chief. Mr. Hearst’s papers acclaimed Bryan as the great savior; the man of the hour; and destiny’s choice. But Bierce with ears that were deaf to the rumble and roar of the press and the people, paused in his castigation of Huntington long enough to remark, with characteristic sweetness, “Mr. Bryan’s creation was the unstudied act of his own larnyx; it said ‘Let there be Bryan’ and there was Bryan.’” Bierce marched with Mr. Hearst when it was against some one he disliked, but now he refused to join a band wagon that he knew was headed by the most nonsensical buffoon and demagogue of the century. Moreover, it was from this date that he began to have frequent quarrels with the Hearst editors. From 1896 on, Mr. Hearst was looking with lustful eyes on the possession of the White House, and Bierce knew it and despised him for the ambition. Bierce had some hopes of checking the tide of empty bombast that he saw captivating the country, but by 1913 he had long since despaired of the task. But he did recognize a demagogue when he saw one and later wrote these very sharp lines about Mr. Hearst:
“With many amiable and alluring qualities, among which is, or used to be, a personal modesty amounting to bashfulness, the man has not a friend in the world. Nor does he merit one, for, either congenitally or by induced perversity, he is inaccessible to the conception of an unselfish attachment or a disinterested motive. Silent and smiling, he moves among men, the loneliest man. Nobody but God loves him and he knows it; and God’s love he values only in so far as he fancies that it may promote his amusing ambition to darken the door of the White House. As to that, I think that he would be about the kind of President that the country — daft with democracy and sick with sin — is beginning to deserve.”
The excerpt is quoted from a manuscript of about fourteen pages which Bierce wrote to fill out the last volume of his “Collected Works.” He informed his immediate friends that it formed merely an introduction to a longer work which he intended to write about Mr. Hearst, but which he would never publish during the life of Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, for whom he entertained a very high regard. The rest of the manuscript was never found, and it is extremely doubtful if it was ever written, although there was one trunk which was lost at Laredo in 1913 that might have contained the copy. What a pity that it was never written! Bierce would have been a writer fitted by temperament and experience to analyze properly Mr. Hearst and to point out the significance of the appearance of such a demagogue in the democracy of which Thomas Jefferson had dreamed so nobly.
The strain of the long fight in Washington began to tell on Bierce by the summer of 1896. In the early part of June, he was stricken quite seriously ill and had to go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He suffered acutely from his asthma and was confined in the old Eagle Hotel for some time. Wires poured in from all imaginable sources, messages of condolence, sympathy, congratulation, and affection. Sam Chamberlain, Mr. Hearst, Bierce’s children, Amy Cecil, were all worried and alarmed by the reports they received of his condition. The old blight was upon him again. Never for a cognizable interval had the shadow of its dreaded hand been lifted from his life. It came at nights while he slept; and in the sunny moments of the day, it was a spectre that stalked by his side. During these long nocturnal trysts with death when he wheezed and coughed and struggled for breath, bent over the backs of chairs in squalid hotels, alone and unattended, all the memories of horror and suffering which he otherwise kept, as Mr. Mumford intimates, under a “mechanism of concealment,” were unleased. Death, and death’s music, were with him always. By experience he had come to view death quizzically and with a sneer; contemplation of its significance had made even death negligible. But it served, this ever-present consciousness of death, to beat life into place, to reduce it to such a lowly level that it was wholly contemptible and unworthy. Out in that easy, slothful, lackadaisical world morons and zanies applauded clowns who shouted and roared for their entertainment and the process was known as the selection of a president. Other lovely mannered “genderless gents” wrote novels of “local color” or spent their time in idle, ridiculous, “muck-raking” and were pronounced artists. “Nothing mattered,” he said and who, pray tell, would argue with him?
When he was able to be about, he returned to New York, and his copy was dispatched from that city during August and September of 1896. He was not writing very much for The Examiner during these months and occasionally his copy would not appear for weeks at a time. In January of 1897 the Funding Bill was defeated and Bierce left for California. The long fight was at an end, and he was glad to be traveling west again. Another circuit of the continent: to England and back; to Dakota and return; to New York and then to San Francisco again; tracks that passed and repassed in an endless repetition of trivial experiences. But always, it seemed, he returned to the coast.
The work that Bierce did towards defeating the Funding Bill, apart from the sensational drama of the Huntington interview, was of the first importance. Furthermore, it was generally recognized and conceded at the time that his influence had determined the battle. Swinnerton pictured him in several cartoons chastising Mr. Huntington with great vigor and skill. The supplement of The Examiner for February 22, 1896, during the thick of the fight, was entirely devoted to an account of Bierce’s activities. T. T. Williams wired him, “My congratulations on defeat of Funding Bill due to the able and earnest and honest manner in which you fought against it. If you had done no other good than this, your creation as a beneficent influence would be more than justified.” Long before his colleagues, David Graham Phillips and Alfred Henry Lewis, started their muckraking journalism, Mr. Bierce had fought and won a most decisive victory over one of the worst monopolies that ever disgraced this country. But he had drawn no hasty inferences, and, once the fight was over, it was for him a closed chapter. Would that there had been other journalists as sensible! When Bierce actually arrived in San Francisco, he was given quite a reception and the newspapers were full of cartoons showing “Ambrose Bierce” returni
ng to a city strewn with flowers, etc., to do him honor.
That this account of Bierce’s activities in connection with the defeat of the Funding Bill is not colored by personal admiration is borne out by the fact that in 1910, when Charles Edward Russell began to publish his well-known series of articles on the “Railroads,” and after nearly two decades had passed and public opinion had become somewhat clarified, Mr. Russell made this comment in reference to Bierce’s journalism:
“These articles were extraordinary examples of invective and bitter sarcasm. They were addressed to the dishonest nature of the bill and to the real reasons why the machine had slated it for passage. When Mr. Bierce began his campaign, few persons imagined that the bill could be stopped. After a time the skill and steady persistence of the attack began to draw wide attention. With six months of incessant firing, Mr. Bierce had the railroad forces frightened and wavering; and before the end of the year, he had them whipped. The bill was withdrawn and killed, and in 1898 Congress adopted an amendment to the general deficiency bill, providing for the collection of the Pacific Railroad subsidy debt, principal and interest.”
And, not only was the defeat of the railroad a great achievement in itself, but the consequences of the victory can scarcely be overestimated. It marked the doom of Southern Pacific dominance in California, for in the mayoralty campaign of 1896, Fremont Older managed to get his candidate, James D. Phelan, a liberal, elected mayor of San Francisco. The tide had turned and it did not cease rolling on to victory until Hiram Johnson had been elected Governor. Then, after he had framed the famous act creating the Railway Commission and amending the State Constitution so as to give the newly created commission sweeping powers of regulation and control, the Southern Pacific episode was closed once and for all.
On the way to San Francisco, Bierce stopped at Los Angeles, registering at the Van Nuys Hotel on March 30, 1897. He was the guest of General O. H. LaGrange for several weeks at Soldiers’ Home, where the General was Commandant. There were several long visits with the daughter and with other friends, including Charles Fletcher Lummis, editor of “Out West,” but there was no word for Mollie Day Bierce, who, in 1896, had left St. Helena to come to Los Angeles to live with her mother. Mrs. Bierce stayed in the North until Bierce had left for Washington, and then, thinking that he was going to live permanently in the East, had moved to Los Angeles. General LaGrange, on this occasion, made the fatal mistake of trying to intercede with Mr. Bierce, on behalf of Mrs. Bierce, to effect a reconciliation. Not knowing the facts, the General had assumed that it was actually a case of “desertion,” and had spoken rather sharply to Bierce about the duties of a husband. There was a stormy scene at the Commandant’s home and Bierce left in anger for the North. He wrote the General a scorching letter, in which he branded his old friend with disloyalty, not in befriending Mrs. Bierce, but in accusing Bierce without waiting for or requesting an explanation. Under the circumstances, the General was the last person in the world who should have accused Bierce of mistreating a woman, and the old fellow must have smarted under the lashing lines of that parting curse for many days. But, in an explanation to his daughter, Bierce said: “My child, there is only one woman in my life that I have loved and that woman happens to be your mother.”
CHAPTER XV. “THE SHADOW MAKER”
ALTHOUGH Bierce was received with exceptional enthusiasm on the part of his associates and the friends of The Examiner, still there were intimations of displeasure from the other journals. A writer on The Call observed that “the rascal of the sorrel hair” had returned to San Francisco. Doubtless the old offenders prepared for a renewal of the rough treatment to which they had by that time become adjusted. They were not to be disappointed, for Bierce was soon applying his whip with unmitigated zest, writing that “compared with Senator White, Senator Perkins is a clouted suckling. Senator Perkins is a leader only when followed by a line of cows curious to ascertain what else he is, and if he is good to eat.” But it is apparent that Bierce was beginning to suffer from mental fatigue. Satire is endless work and ultimately the satirist wearies of his task, as it gradually becomes apparent to him that his sharp comments are lost in a whirlwind of nonsense. The edge of Bierce’s wit was blunted with hard usage, and he could stoop to such clumsy abuse as this:
“Here lies Greer Harrison, a well cracked louse —
So small a tenant of so big a house.”
But it was about this time that the Spanish-American fiasco gave him the material for the last burst of his fine satirical powers.
Prior to his sojourn in Washington he had noticed that “War — Horrid War! — between the United States and Spain has already broken out like a red rash in the newspapers, whose managing commodores are shivering their timbers and blasting their toplights with a truly pelagic volubility and no little vraisemblance.” But when Mr. Hearst, with all his gaudy propaganda about Evangelina Cisneros, had forced McKinley’s hand and we were at war with Spain, not even the colored flags and patriotic headlines of The Examiner deceived Bierce for one moment. In the thick of the excitement he wrote such trenchant statements as these: “We are at war with Spain to-day merely in obedience to a suasion that has been gathering force from the beginning of our national existence. The passion for territory once roused rages like a lion; successive conquests only strengthen it. That is the fever that is now burning in the American blood.” (The Examiner, July 31, 1898.) “We are not being pushed into the forefront of this bloody struggle for place and power and more of earth by any necessity more imperious than our desire.” (The Examiner, July 24, 1898.) And what better comment could have been made at the moment than this: “We can conquer these people without half trying, for we belong to the race of gluttons and drunkards to whom dominion is given over the abstemious. We can thrash them consummately and every day of the week, but we cannot understand them; and is it not a great golden truth, shining like a star, that what one does not understand one knows to be bad?” (August 7, 1898, The Examiner.)
He was not deceived by the national psychology that had made war with Spain inevitable. Nor was he particularly deceived by all the talk anent the “perfidious Aguinaldo” and the “mighty power of Spain.” Mr. Bryan and Mr. Roosevelt did not gain his admiration by their obvious play for the grandstand in “raising volunteer” regiments. He suggested that the regiment which Mr. Bryan threatened to organize should be called the “Nebraska Immunes,” and that life insurance companies extend to it special policies at low rates. He announced that he did not share “this paper’s confidence in the formidable character of the dynamite cruiser Vesuvius,” and he did not hesitate to write very pointed criticisms of Sampson’s tactics. “Instead of corking Cervera in, Sampson corked himself out. It did not matter: he was held out, anyhow, by the iron hand of his timidity.” The miserable triviality of that tawdry drama was an open book for him: the horrible blunders, the opéra bouffe charges, the sophomoric tactics, the race for honors, the petty bickering and quarrels, the hysteria of the people and the sentiments of the press, were all recorded with amused contempt in his column. The spectacle rather fatigued him, but he did correspond with some of the officers and later read with care the manuscript of his friend H. H. Sargeant on “The History of the Santiago Campaign,” and in Washington he was a factor in securing relief for Wolf son, the Confederate rebel who had fought so bravely in the war with Spain.
During these first months after his return from Washington, he lived at the old El Monte Hotel in Los Gatos. Los Gatos, situated at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains, overlooking the entire Santa Clara Valley, possessed a warm, dry climate that seemed to give him relief for his asthma. When the spells were too severe, he could take the train at Los Gatos and ride a few miles to Wright’s station, almost at the crest of the mountains, where he stayed at the old Jeffreys Hotel or camp. To Los Gatos and Wrights came the endless hordes of his “pupils,” admirers, and the few faithful but devoted friends. He was never to have such a list of pupils as he had at this time
. Carroll Carrington wrote him letters of adoration and called him “Dear Mentor” and reviewed his books with dutiful reverence in The Examiner. Then, too, Mr. Markham’s secretary, Jean Hazen, sent some sketches to Bierce which he managed to have published. These pupils were sending him constant verses and poems, some of which were addressed to the Master, as this valentine:
“O Sly Reformer in a cynic’s guise!
Fools led by love see deeper than the wise;
I see in Prattle sermons for the town;
That spare the sin, but gaily cut the sinner down.
Thy word has been my lamp for several years:
Now take my little song of praise — and fears,
For well I know thy joy is in the feeble line,
And thou wilt even flay poor me, thy valentine.”
He would often visit Mr and Mrs. Hirshberg at Ione, where Mr. Hirshberg was in charge of the school for incorrigible boys. He suggested to Mr. Hirshberg once that these boys should all be sent away to war and shot: that they could never be cured of the disorders that made them criminals. It was to the Hirshbergs, too, that he would come on his bicycle for periodic visits from Los Gatos. Upon his arrival, he would line the young ladies of the family up in stair-step fashion and kiss them all from the tallest to the smallest. It was once suggested to Mr. Bierce that he was inconsistent in liking female, but disliking male, Semitics. To this he responded, and the observation is borne out by his practice, that he “hated Hebrews but adored She-brews.” So greatly was he admired by the female side of the Hirshberg family that some irate male had written under his picture the single word: “God.” Mrs. Hirshberg, “the best of my best friends,” as he once said, would send him food when he was ill in Oakland and could not be about. As soon as he recovered, he would call at their home. It was like, as Mrs. Hirshberg says, “The sun coming out from behind a cloud: he was eager, joyous, splendid.” After one particularly severe attack of asthma, he said to her, “Israel has touched me with his wing again.” Naturally he was lionized by the women.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 364