The American: A Middle Western Legend

by Howard Fast

  “Did you know Albert Parsons?”

  “I never knew him,” Altgeld said flatly.

  “Oh—”

  The Governor folded the stiff sheets and offered them to Dreyer. At first Dreyer didn’t move; then he shuffled over to the desk and took them, his face working all the time, like a man about to be ill. Then he started to say, “Well, Governor, well, Governor—I hardly know—” Suddenly, he began to cry. His face worked convulsively, and the tears rolled down his fat cheeks. He walked over to the window to hide his face from them, from Whitlock who was staring at the floor in great embarrassment.

  “Go along, Brand,” the Governor said.

  “Thank you, sir. For everything.”

  The boy went out. Altgeld looked at his watch, said, somewhat harshly, “You’ll miss your train, Mr. Dreyer.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “All right.”

  “I want to explain. The grand jury—”

  “I know. You don’t have to apologize. You don’t have to explain.”

  “Foolish of me to act this way. It’s a little bit of atonement.”

  “You’ll miss your train if you don’t go along, Mr. Dreyer.”

  He was glad when finally Dreyer had gone. It was most unpleasant to see a man cry, and the more unpleasant when he himself felt no sympathy for the banker, none at all. He called in his secretary and told him:

  “Dose, I’ll have to give out a statement, I suppose.”

  “It’s gotten out, sir, and the veranda’s full of reporters.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say it’s the biggest story since Lee surrendered.”

  “Is it? What in hell are you so nervous about? They’re not going to hang us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell them I’ll see them in half an hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What the devil is wrong with you? Are you frightened?”

  “I guess I’ve got too much imagination.”

  “Well, sit on it. Go and tell them what I told you to!”

  He found Emma in her dressing room, sewing a lace collar on a blouse. She turned to him with a smile, her fine head tilted and alert. He kissed her, and then he sat down on a stool, looking up at her, watching her.

  “Then you’ve done it?” she said, continuing to sew.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Are you sorry?” he asked her.

  “I guess I’m a little sorry, Pete. I’m ambitious, Pete. I always was that way, I guess you know. I wanted you to be the greatest man in the country. You are, you know?”

  He laughed at her.

  “Well, I know. A woman knows a lot about her husband. But I’m not much of a wife, Pete. I’m frightened, I always have been. You used to frighten me.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure, Pete. Well, I’m still frightened. But I’m not sorry you did it. I would want to do something like signing those pardons. I never will—”

  “I think we’re making a mountain out of a molehill, and that nothing much of anything will happen.”

  “Pete, if the worst kind of thing happens, could you go away with me and be happy with me?”

  “Run away?”

  “If they force you, Pete?”

  He grinned and kissed her. Then he went back to his office. The reporters came in and crowded around expectantly.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Will you be quoted?”

  “No quotes.”

  “Then you’ve pardoned the anarchists?”

  “Right.”

  “Clemency, sir?”

  “An absolute pardon,” Altgeld said slowly. “The men were never guilty. You can have my pardon reasons later. They can be quoted.”

  Whistles from several parts of the room. Men scribbling furiously.

  “Will you imply in your reasons that Parsons and Spies and the others were innocent too?”

  “I do.”

  The reporters edged toward the desk. Altgeld put his elbows on the desk, his face in his palms, his blue eyes bright and expectant

  XVIII

  That night, while he slept, the news went through the land that the Governor of Illinois had pardoned the anarchists. All night long, as the stories were filed, telegraph keys clicked, and the details coming in, extracts from the pardon message, comments of the Governor, built up to an effect that scrapped the prepared editions in places so far apart as San Francisco, California, and Savannah, Georgia. Editorial conferences were hurriedly summoned, and newspaper owners were roused out of bed to render a decision. The news came to President Grover Cleveland as he was preparing for bed, and in his bathrobe he stamped back and forth across his chamber, swearing softly and then ordering a cabinet meeting for the next day. For King Mike McDonald of Chicago, there was no sleep at all that night, for a steady stream of raging bosses, heelers, and other large and small fry flooded upon him, and finally Marshall Field came to talk in no uncertain terms. Business at the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had slowed somewhat, became suddenly most brisk, and three very important industrialists had a private meeting with Pinkerton himself. Congressmen were turned out of bed by telegraph messengers, and four United States Senators sat over their cigars all that night. Brand Whitlock lay awake making drama out of the slow movement of incident, for it seemed to him that nothing he had ever known was just like this, a man high in the governing circles of the nation making a choice between justice and all else that life might offer; and Emma Altgeld lay awake, thinking of the crude, uncouth farm boy who wanted to know all there was between the covers of books and who spoke the weird half-German, half-English of the backlands. But the Governor himself slept, quietly and easily.

  XIX

  And the next day it broke!

  He rose in the morning and he trimmed his mustache and beard and he looked at himself in the mirror, and then ate breakfast and took a horse around the grounds before the papers came. He was feeling fit and eager and a load was gone from his chest, and Parsons and Spies could lie more easily in their graves. Then he came into his office, and his secretary had the papers for him.

  That was the beginning.

  In a sense, the Chicago Tribune was restrained, for. though it reported the story bitterly and one-sidedly, the worst it said editorially was: “The Anarchists believed that he [Altgeld] was not merely an alien by birth, but an alien by temperament and sympathies, and they were right. He has apparently not a drop of true American blood in his veins. He does not reason like an American, not feel like one, and consequently does not behave like one. But it set a keynote, and every Chicago paper of importance followed suit, the News, the Inter-Ocean, and the rest.

  The theme was plain, outlined and underlined, not only anger, but a growling rage such as bad never appeared in American newspapers before. As John Peter Altgeld read the stories, smiling thinly as more and more newspapers came in, from downstate, from Cleveland, from west and east and south, one matter after another shaped itself into focus. Nervous, his secretary asked, “Do you want all the papers, Governor?” “All of them.” “I think this is hasty anger,” the secretary reasoned, trying to make it better. “Not hasty at all, not at all.” It amazed him that the Governor seemed to be in such fine spirits. But at lunch that day, Altgeld told his wife:

  “The hardest thing in the world is to see what’s in front of a man’s nose. I could have pardoned the most depraved murderer, the worst sexual pervert, the most successful forger, the most skillful bank-robber, and they would have slobbered with approval. There’s only one thing that hits them in the belly, and that’s any threat to their rule. I shook the oligarchy, Emma, and I’m going to shake them more. I’m going to ride this. It’s just beginning, but I’m going to ride it all the way through. I told them their justice was no justice, but a fraud, and so are their courts, and so is the whole dirty rotten fabric of their state. And they’re going to take it, because the peopl
e will be with me.”

  A new pile of papers were put down alongside him, the first one from the east coat with the headline: “ANARCHIST GOVERNOR SLAYS JUSTICE.” And another: “RUIN AND REVOLUTION DECREED BY GOVERNOR ALTGELD.”

  “This isn’t the people,” he said. “Emma, let me see you smile.”

  “I can’t smile. I can’t smile at that.”

  “Why? Because fat-bellied owners issue directives and tell them what to write?”

  “Because the whole world is reading that. My God, Pete, every one of them, every paper, every writer, every single one—”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. You were right. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “My God, Emma, right and wrong—you keep harping on that. There is no right and there is no wrong. We live by pig ethics and a pig code. I live by it! You do! That’s this precious damned world of ours!”

  “But I thought—”

  “That some would be with me? Well, some will. The socialist papers will be with me, the labor papers—what is left of the old Abolitionist sheets, they’ll be with me, and maybe here and there will be a man with guts, maybe one in a hundred. But I told them that their justice was not justice. I told them that they are capitalists, building a country for capitalists, and that means war to the death.”

  “And for you—”

  “Let them shout! Let them wake up the country! I am sick to my stomach of the cheap little rats, the McDonalds, the Mark Hannas, the Armours—all the dirty little buyers and sellers of votes. They are seventy-five million people in this country, and they’re strong—My God, Emma, they’re strong! I’m talking to them, and they’ll hear me. They haven’t any voice now—this trash, these rags—it’s not their voice. But they can be given a voice. They can be given a party. They can be made to understand that their votes are like a sledgehammer, ready to drive these rats back.”

  So he sat in his office and did his work as Governor and read the papers and the mail and the telegrams. As he said, there was a voice here and there raised to support him, but the rest, by and large, all of it, not slackening, day by day, was hate, filth, condemnation, threats in the mail. It became a phenomenon, a thing that had never been seen before, not even when Booth slew Lincoln, not even when the guns fired on Fort Sumter; and no part of the nation was laggard. They called him an alien; they questioned his citizenship; they denied that he had ever fought in the war; they denied his legitimate parentage; they demanded his impeachment; they demanded that Federal troops march against the Capitol of Illinois; they called him a socialist, an anarchist, a communist; they inferred that he had personally directed the throwing of the bomb; they wrote ugly, dirty stories of his relationship with his wife; they accused him of being a Jew and part of an international Jewish plot; they called him a dictator, a Nero, a Pontius Pilate; they said that he had both murder and lesser crime in his dark past; in almost every church in America, sermon after sermon was preached against him; and the newspapers that came onto his desk, raging with filth and venom, were like a geographical index: The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal, Harper’s Weekly, The Nation, The New York Sun, The Chicago Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Herald, The New York World, The Philadelphia Press, The New York Herald, The New York Tribune, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Pittsburgh Commerical-Advertiser—those and a thousand more, all racing for a goal in venom. He was cartooned wild-haired, with pistols in each hand, with daggers in his teeth, with bombs, with sticks of dynamite; he was pictured strangling liberty, crushing liberty under his feet, snarling at the full-blown female figure of liberty, knifing her, shooting her, even raping her.

  And sometimes, there were statements of support. Almost without exception, the socialist and labor papers supported his stand. And here and there, small papers, small-town papers, little western sheets, hand-set, run by one or two men—these came out to back him, to praise him, to say that there were men who admired and loved him.

  Yet the other could not but have its effect. Emma saw the change in him, the widening streaks in his hair, a redness about his eyes; his carriage was not so erect. She came on him once as he sat at his desk, reading and re-reading a foul little verse from The New York Sun:

  O, Wild Chicago, When the Time

  Is Ripe for Ruin’s deeds,

  When constitutions, courts and laws

  Go down midst crashing creeds,

  Lift up your weak and guilty hands

  From out of the wreck of states,

  And as the crumbling towers fall down

  Write ALTGELD on your gates!

  He turned to her and said, “It’s not nice, is it, my dear Emma?”

  “How can you stand all this?”

  “All of it and a lot more.”

  “Won’t it ever stop?”

  “This is only the beginning, Emma. We go on from here. It’s only the beginning for them—and for me too.”

  PART FOUR

  The Second Variation

  On a March evening of 1895, he finished a quiet, intimate, yet triumphant dinner, just himself, Altgeld, Governor of Illinois, Emma, his wife, and Hinrichsen, the Secretary of State, the three of them under the big crystal chandelier, intimate, confidence resolved, Emma watching her husband with affection and admiration, Hinrichsen noticing how she looked at the Governor and thinking that a woman had never looked at him that way, and Altgeld smiling, pouring out a glass of clear yellow wine for each of them, and proposing the toast to his wife.

  She said the toast should be otherwise, “After two years, Pete—”

  Hinrichsen proposed that they drink to the Governor. “Not to myself, Buck.” “This is your night, this is what you worked for.” “Only a beginning, a plan—the work still comes.” “Then we drink to that,” Hinrichsen said. “Then to success, to the plan.” The Governor said, all right, he would drink to that. He stood up with his second glass of wine and had to grasp the edge of the table to keep himself from reeling, and smiled again to quiet the look of alarm that came into his wife’s eyes.

  “A people’s party,” he said simply.

  His wife rose and walked around the table to offer him her arm, but there was something of annoyance in the manner of his refusal, as he said, “Go into the parlor with Buck, my dear. They’ll be coming soon.” And as she still looked at him, “I have a little work to get out of the way.”

  “Yes. But you won’t keep them waiting?”

  “Suppose you call me when they’re all here.”

  “All right.”

  He turned away, and when Hinrichsen looked at her questioningly, she shook her head. Hinrichsen offered her his arm, but she didn’t move until the Governor had left the room, and then she sighed and her whole body seemed to loosen, wilt.

  “He’ll be all right, Emma,” Hinrichsen said.

  “Yes—”

  “The man’s tired. My god, when you think of what he’s done—when you think of any man coming out from under the past two years, and coming out with half the country afraid of him, hating him, and half the country worshiping the ground he walks on—well, that’s something to consider.”

  They were walking into the parlor, and she stopped suddenly, pulling her arm loose, facing the big man. “Is it for me, Buck? Is that what I should consider? Do you know that he’s dying?”

  “No.” And then added, very slowly, “I knew he was sick—”

  “The way he walks—you’ve seen that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s forty-eight years old, and he’s dying, and all he’s ever known is struggle, no rest, no peace. I’m tired of it. It had to be this kind of a finish for him, out of his childhood, out of all the rotten terror of it. Well, I don’t want him to have this. I want him to go away, to have a little peace.”

  Hinrichsen nodded.

  She smiled, relaxed, became the hostess again. “He doesn’t know what peace is or what a man is supposed to do with it. There are cigars in the
cabinet, Buck. Please help yourself. Do you want some brandy?”

  “I’ll wait, thank you, Emma.”

  She sat down on a small, plush-covered lady’s chair, the wooden rosebuds of the back making a frame for her, hands crossed demurely, a gentle lady with graying hair, but still good to look at, still alive and attractive. She asked the big, red-faced politician:

  “Will he carry it off?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he could do almost anything. I remember how he was a boy with a German accent, and he read a book with a dirty finger marking out the words. That was when he fell in love with me, do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “And he doesn’t want to die. My God, Buck, none of us want to die. They tried to destroy him because he pardoned three men who were innocent, but he came out like a giant, and the people want him—”

  “Emma, stop it!”

  “Yes. You like him, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “At first you hated him. People hate him at first.”

  “I like him.”

  “All right. I won’t be hysterical, Buck. Schilling will be here, and Joe Martin and Darrow and Sam McConnell, and it will be like old times, won’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then he’ll want me to go, Pete will—it’s no woman’s world yet, is it, though it will be some day—but afterwards he sits down and tells me, word for word; it comes clearer and better, I suppose.”

  Hinrichsen said, “You’re a remarkable woman, Emma.” He took a cigar from a gold case, snipped the end neatly with a cutter that hung on a gold chain on his vest, and, as he lit it, said, “Would it be violating any confidence to tell me why he hates Grover Cleveland the way he does?”

  “You know.”

  “I know what anyone does, Emma. I know that during the big Pullman strike, the president pushed Federal troops in. I know that Pete stood up to him. I know what the Federal marshals were. But there’s more than that. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you. Do you know how someone is bought, bought body and soul and hand and foot? Do you know you can buy a president? You want to know why Pete hates him—well, because he’s a frightened man, a stupid man, a man who sold himself. When he came into this state with his troops, his guns, those thugs whom he swore in as Federal employees, Pete was ready to fight him. Yes. And what would that have meant? State militia ranged against Federal troops. Pete knew what it would have meant, and it was too big, so the men out at Pullman lost. Little men whose wives and children had nothing to eat, and they put themselves together to ask for something more. The Army came in, and they lost. Do you still want to know why Pete hates Grover Cleveland? It’s not a confidence.”