The American: A Middle Western Legend

by Howard Fast

  At that moment, she brought it up. She was not going to bring it up, not going to mention it. It was ammunition that lay in her lap, ready to fire both ways; he knew it, yet she brought it up. An appeal for clemency for these men who were going to die had been signed by sixty thousand citizens of Chicago, some of them very prominent men. Yet John Peter Altgeld’s name was missing. She said, casually, “Then why didn’t you sign the petition? Goudy signed it. Brown signed it. But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t,” he admitted.

  “Would you sign it now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Then where is the principle in your belief in their innocence?”

  “I don’t know. Am I supposed to have principles? You knew me the way I used to be, Emma, a long time ago. Should that produce principles?”

  What he wanted to say after that eluded him, and he felt ashamed of bringing up the past in so childish a manner. He stabbed at his food and found that he no longer desired it, and he was almost grateful to Emma when she poured him a cup of coffee. “Thank you,” he said, contritely, and then became angry again when he realized that she was feeling sorry for him, sorry she had ever brought up the matter of the petition: He didn’t want sympathy; he did what was right: suddenly, he told himself that and then in the saying it collapsed like a pricked balloon. His friend, Joe Martin the gambler, always said that you played the game to win and didn’t count the stakes; but that was as childish as anything else, and even his friend Martin worshipped sincerely at the foot of a sort of perverted honesty, not holding his life much higher than a so-called debt of honor, whatever his honor was. Was there a pattern in his life concerning men who were good—in the accepted sense of the word—and did he despise such men? Of course he hadn’t put his name to the petition; what good would it have done, in his own terms? He was a judge. He sat on the bench, enforcing the law, whether it was good law or bad law, just law or unjust law—and how well he knew that law and justice were things apart—and yet when he rendered a decision, did he stand on principle or the letter of the law? It was not a good world he inhabited; he had only to look around Chicago to see that, he had only to look back in his own memory to see what the world did to the weak, the small, and even to the strong who were not strong enough; yet hadn’t he long ago decided that it was the best of all possible worlds? Hadn’t he fought on that belief, up and up, step by step, proving the legend of America and making himself almost a caricature of that legend, a judge in a graystone house? Not, it is true, one of those like Field, or Armour, or McCormick—he had a different memory from theirs and he couldn’t elude it entirely, and to prove that he had written a book, Our Penal Machinery and its Victims. Even if his desire to understand what makes criminal men was no more virtuous than Armour’s desire to understand what makes sick cattle, as some of his enemies said, he was nevertheless interested in men and believed that crime could be cured as well as punished. But was that principle, or was the only principle that of the advancement of Judge Altgeld within the only frame he knew?

  His wife said that she was sorry. “Now I’m sorry,” she said. “Why did I mention that? Why don’t we forget about the anarchists? Finish your breakfast, please.”

  He pushed his plate away. He knew the gesture displeased her; it was not right, it was an old, bad habit of his. And his wife said, more hotly:

  “It’s become like a sickness here in Chicago, this whole business of the anarchists. It’s in our blood now, it seems.”

  “Maybe it is a sickness.”

  “Sometimes I would want to live anywhere, anywhere but here.”

  The Judge said, “Here? This is what I am. I came here with nothing. I think a man who had nothing once, he tries to forget it, but he can’t. Maybe Chicago is like a mother for me, so I could excuse this or that, and say, it’s Chicago.”

  VI

  They said of Chicago then, in one of those pat phrases which have as little truth as substance, that it killed pigs and made men; but not long after Pete Altgeld came, he saw the men killed along with the pigs, and if there was a repugnance toward eating the flesh of one, that about limited the ethic. Pete Altgeld could have been king-pin in Savannah; Joe Martin had sketched that out once, saying: “I would have stayed. County attorney, state legislature, congress, senate. The place for a big frog, if he’s smart, is a small puddle.” “And you?” Pete Altgeld asked. “Well,” his friend answered, “some big frogs want to be bigger.” But that was not entirely the case with Pete Altgeld when he threw over a good job, a job he had sweated for, fought for, suffered for too, to come to Chicago with one hundred dollars or so in his pockets and not a friend in the world, just a small-town, small-time lawyer, such as were a dime a dozen in the queen of western cities. It was more than that, for Chicago was sending out a call that could be heard a long way, a sound in which the clink of silver dollars mingled with the meshing gears of machines, the squealing of stuck pigs, the cry of many thousand voices, and somewhere, lost in it almost yet not entirely, an echo of the old western warwhoop. Chicago asked for men like Pete Altgeld. When he called it his mother, he was not far from wrong, for it was as much a mother as anything he had known, and sometimes it was not unkind to men who could hold on and suck at those swelling teats. How many days had he spent in his first small office standing at the window and watching the wonder that America had made and which only America could have made. The few cases he got in those days were not enough to keep him busy; he lived in his office, worked there when there was work, and uncertainly at first, but soon more confidently, reached out his fingers to take the pulse of the city.

  It was not a very clean game he was playing; honesty and perseverance had a place, but they were strictly limited; of more importance were the people you knew, the way you used them, and the way you allowed them to use you. Nor were most of the cases that came his way fine struggles of jurisprudence; more often they were miserable pieces of the whole wretched melodrama the city presented. Divorce, or petty thievery, or for example the case which brought him the friendship of Joe Martin. Martin ran a high-class gambling parlor. A client came to Altgeld complaining of a good-sized loss at Martin’s house, and asking Altgeld to recover for him, as was then possible within the law. Altgeld sent his demands to Martin, and when Martin came to see him, he called Altgeld’s client a liar, labeled Altgeld’s action as part of a big blackmail racket, and stated that, the client had never lost a dime at his place. Altgeld liked Martin’s looks, a small, ruddy-faced, loudly dressed, and well-groomed man. So while he took the money, he questioned the client until he had determined that this time Martin was in the right; he threw out his client, returned the money to Martin, and made one of the best friends he had, better than the friends he made when he learned the method of political deals, when he learned that no lawyer has to starve if he climbs onto one or another of the political bandwagons. And he had climbed on. He had grown with Chicago.

  As he sat back now, wiping his lips after the coffee and a crisp little kaiser roll, warm and full of melted butter, he took refuge in the thought that, for better or worse, he was Chicago, this fine house he lived in, jurisprudence, the legal bench, a handsome wife, and many other solid and substantial things. Yet for all of that, he wanted to put his justification into words, talk to someone who would understand all of his position and agree with it. So he said to his wife, “Emma, you’ll call on Joe Martin and ask him to drop around.” And as an afterthought and defense, added, “About that North Side property.”

  “But Schilling is coming,” she said.

  “Schilling? This morning?”

  “He called and said he would be here a little before nine. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

  “Why did you forget to tell me? Of all people I don’t want to see today, Schilling is first. Schilling! Do you know what he’s coming here to do?—to put needles into me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” the Judge said. “I can’t see
him.”

  “You can’t see Schilling? Pete, what are you talking about? He’s coming here. I invited him.” In one way, she knew more about politics than he did, more about whom he could or could not afford to offend.

  “All right,” the Judge whispered, “all right.” He stood up, and the security of substance was gone from him. “I’ll be in my study. Send him up there when he comes.”

  VII

  Emma watched the Judge as he climbed up the stairs. She had known that he would be disturbed today; certainly, anyone who lived in or about Chicago and who was at all civilized could not regard with equanimity the prospect of four men hanging by their necks until they were dead; even if these men were cutthroats, ordinary murderers, it was still not a comfortable process to contemplate their last few hours on the earth. But she had not suspected that he would be so violently moved. As with everyone else in Chicago, they had both followed the Haymarket tragedy, from the time the bomb was thrown, a year and a half ago, to the arrests, the trial, the appeals, the petitions, and finally the great, nationwide, desperate effort to save the lives of the condemned men. Yet through it all—so much of it confusing, contradictory—Emma had leaned on the Judge’s judicial aloofness. And, when you listened to him and his friends discussing the evidence in highly legal terms, the face of the matter changed from a life-and-death struggle to an intricate and fascinating puzzle.

  Her sympathies, and most of the Judge’s too, for that matter, were in the limbo of undecided public opinion. Perhaps because she knew less about it, and perhaps because she was less worldly, Emma was more repelled than the Judge by such words as communism, socialism, and anarchy. Actually, these words reacted upon her with physical force, painting independent images, derived originally from a thousand sources, casual conversation, newspaper stories, cartoons, little leaflets shown about as curiosities, and others too numerous to name. She was a woman who feared violence, who was horrified by pain, who in a curious way admired weakness more than strength, yet was attracted beyond her ability to resist by both strength and violence. Though she knew how much the Judge wanted children, childbirth was a horrible miasma to her, partaking of all those matters of violence she tried so carefully to avoid. Still, in the person of her own husband, violence drew her; do what he might, she would never forget him as he had been when young, and perversely that drew her toward him. The Haymarket affair had all the implications of the unknown, the terrible, and the violent. An anarchist was a wild, bearded devil, a bomb in each dirty hand; a communist was someone unalterably opposed to her, though for reasons she could not define, an unbeliever, an enemy of God and man, and in that a socialist stood beside him. Once, on a tour of the slaughterhouses, a tour she shouldn’t have taken and which remained impressed on her consciousness like a bad dream, she saw the men pouring out of the yard gates at noon, and someone remarked, “Those are the workers.” Of course, it was nonsense; she had known workingmen before, in her home town, in her childhood, in Chicago too; but this was different, big, bearded, shuffling men, bloody from fingertip to elbow, wearing leather aprons, black-streaked with blood, walking in shoes that were blood from sole to ankle, stone-visaged, tired, sullen. Always afterward, when someone spoke of the workers or labor, this picture came to mind, and seen in conjunction with all her concepts of anarchists and socialists, it was more than terrible.

  Her first meeting with Schilling had modified that impression; but it was not difficult for her to tell herself that Schilling was different, the exception which proved the rule. She truly liked Schilling, he seemed to be so simple, gentle, and, at times, wise.

  Emma suspected that, at first, Schilling’s attraction toward her husband, and her husband’s toward him, was purely political. Each suspected that he could use the other. But later, when she saw how they would sit and talk until late into the evening, in German, which her husband spoke so little now, drinking beer, smiling with pleasure, she realized that the men really complemented each other. Schilling was the closest thing to a real friend her husband had, and that pleased her too; for his loneliness was a formidable thing, so formidable that sometimes she thought it would drive him away from her and from the world. So she seized on Schilling, and then she too came to like him.

  It was hard not to like Schilling. He was a small, dry man, a carpenter who built boxes and barrels for the packing house of Libby, McNeill and Libby. For years he had been in the labor movement, a violent radical socialist once, though a lot cooler now, but still a left-wing leader in the great struggle for the eight-hour day. Listening to Schilling talk, Emma got a colorful impression of what this turbulent, nationwide struggle for the eight-hour day was, of the position of the Knights of Labor, of the terrible life-and-death battles of the Molly Maguires, of the private armies of the Pinkertons. It was hardly possible for her to relate this to the quiet and orderly life she lived, and her first-hand relations with household workers, plumbers, carpenters, and delivery men hardly gave substance to Schilling’s words. Yet she lent a willing ear when he said:

  “And what is labor, my dear Mrs. Altgeld? I will tell you. Labor is a sleeping giant, a giant who has been a long time asleep and is only now beginning to stretch himself and awaken. He isn’t one, he is millions, and when he wakes up, then, believe me, you will see some things happen.”

  The phrase “he is millions” stuck in her mind; votes, too, were counted in millions, and she had dreams for her husband he himself never expected. The whole eight-hour movement had become political, to a degree, and when Schilling hinted once that her husband would do well to make his political alliances where the votes were, she nodded agreement. But actually, those votes were, for her, imprisoned vaguely in little Schilling; she could never conceive of any sort of alliance with the awful specter which came forth from the slaughterhouse gates that day. And when she thought of the Haymarket defendants, she thought of them not in the light of Schilling, but in the light of those blood-stained, semi-human things who killed the flesh men ate.

  Therefore, she took refuge in her husband’s legal aloofness, and she readily became convinced, along with thousands of others, of the guilt of the four men who were to be hanged. As her husband and his friends said, the trial was a test of democracy, and democracy had not failed. Such talk relieved her. Why did people have to do terrible things? Why did they have to take it upon themselves to stir up trouble? Why could they not be pleasant and nice and decent? Naturally, they could not all have everything; there was just not enough of everything to go around, and thereby more went to those who worked hardest. Wasn’t her husband living proof of that? Hadn’t he started with nothing and worked himself up to where he was now? Hadn’t she heard it said, a thousand times if once, that any man who wasn’t lazy could find work and advance his position? Wasn’t that an obvious truth, here in the United States? And wasn’t most of the trouble started by foreigners? She didn’t dislike foreigners; some of the most prominent men in the country had come as immigrants, and even her own husband was not born in America, though he had come here as a tiny infant; but wasn’t there an obligation upon foreigners not to start trouble simply because for the first time they were in a free land?

  So out of this came first a hope and then a belief that when the Haymarket case was finally decided and finished, things would be quiet and peaceful, and though she never put it in just those terms she really believed that the death of these men would lay the ogre in his grave, once and for all. To hear, on top of this, an opinion from her husband that the trial was not a fair one, that the men who were going to die were possibly not guilty, was more than disturbing. As she had said, the-case was becoming a sickness in Chicago, and was not the surliness of her husband’s actions this morning proof of that?

  VIII

  But as he went into his study, the Judge’s frame of mind was not too different from his wife’s, and he too took a brief refuge in the fact that death was the final judgment, the unchangeable and the immutable, the end, the finish and the seal on all dec
isions. This was not to say that he took any pleasure in the fact that four men were to die; quite to the contrary, their impending deaths enraged him; yet he was more enraged by an awareness of his own position. Why had he lost his temper with Emma, and why had he allowed himself to hand down a decision on justice or injustice in that fashion? It opened up too broad a field of examination of all he stood for and all his bench stood for, his achievement, his success and prominence. Actually, he did not feel any great sorrow for the four men; death was an accompaniment to life, and anyone who did not realize that the two were instantly interchangeable was a dolt or an idiot, and aside from that, he had never known these men, nor was he in sympathy with the things they stood for. He knew somewhat better than his wife what socialism was, having discussed it at great length with Schilling, but he took it for the visionary aims of zealots; and though he had not the hatred and fear of socialists that Field and Armour indulged in, he nevertheless ranged himself against the socialists. As for anarchists, he had no sympathy for them whatsoever; they were a menace to society, and society was correct in removing them. If they wanted to improve things, they could work with their two hands, as he had done, and everything within him revolted from the violence of their talk, the violence that could be wrought with a bomb. Therefore, he joined with his wife in the feeling that, once they were dead, the trouble would be over—or at least he sought for that assurance.

  Yet his statement remained, and the more he examined it, the more convinced he became that long and deepseated reflection had driven him to the conclusion that no one of the four defendants was guilty of throwing the bomb which had exploded a year and a half before in Haymarket Square. But if that was the case, when had he come to the decision, now or a week ago or a month ago—and if he had come to the decision, why had he taken no action? And what would he tell Schilling? Could he say to Schilling, “I don’t know whether they were innocent or guilty and, furthermore, I don’t give a damn whether they were or not; the fact is that they had a rotten, cheap, biased trial, and even what we call justice was turned into a mockery.” Could he tell Schilling that?