by Howard Fast
“Governor—”
“Hullo, Bill,” Altgeld had said. “Congratulations.”
“Well—well, it came out that way. I guess that’s all, it just came out that way.”
“It just happened,” Altgeld grinned, telling Emma how Bryan had stood there, more like a boy than ever, more like an overgrown, handsome farm boy, realizing only by slow degrees what had happened, that he was the party candidate for president of the United States, and wanting desperately to ask Altgeld a question he couldn’t frame, “Are you going to be with me? For me or against me? Because I did this; I never believed I could do it, but I did it.”
“What do you think, Governor?” he managed to say.
“I think it’s going to be hard. Bill, I think it’s going to be hard as hell.”
And Bryan nodded, smiling a little foolishly. That was the way her husband had told it to her. He had a way of leaving things out. He came back from the convention with the blood drained from him, but he could nevertheless laugh and say, “Do you know, I’m learning, Emma. And in the process, the edges are rubbed off. There are a lot of edges to be rubbed off, Emma, and I suppose that eventually, I’ll smooth out.”
She was with him the second time he saw Bryan. The simple disobedience of his body, which refused any longer to obey him, allowed for a few weeks’ rest before the final phase of the campaign set in. Emma suggested Colorado Springs, and he agreed with the proposal, albeit some what reluctantly. But once on the train and in their compartment, he collapsed; it was as if the springs and the hinges and the wires had melted away, and there was no strength left to do anything but lie in a chair. Emma read to him, tended him, and sat and talked with him. They talked for hours. All of his groping for a perspective was being channeled now, and after the nomination of Bryan and his own physical letdown, the pieces, peculiarly, fitted better. He was able to arrange himself in the scheme of things. Quite confidently, he said to his wife:
“When this campaign is over, I think I’ll know what to do. I think it will be very clear.”
He didn’t talk about victory or defeat. The campaign was a stage; it would be over, and then there would be another stage. It was there that he told her, for the first time, of going to the funeral so long ago, back in ’87, and how he had stood there in the cold winter morning, watching the endless column of workingmen go by. He said:
“If I had spoken to any one of them, Emma, it would have dissolved; but to see them like that, all together, one expression on ten thousand faces, well, it meant something. I mean, in their relation to me, in mine to them. But when I want to put my hand on what it meant—well, I stop short. I always stop short. But after this campaign—”
At Lincoln, Nebraska, the train laid over for two hours. Bryan was waiting there, and hardly had the train stopped when he was knocking at the door of the compartment.
“Governor, how are you feeling?” he demanded, speaking words that were rehearsed, swallowing over them, and striding in with both his hands extended to Altgeld. The Governor sat in a chair, his legs wrapped in a robe, and Bryan was not unfamiliar with the thin smile that greeted him.
“I’m fine, Bill. How are you?”
“Like an ox,” Bryan answered, grinning at Emma. “The last thing in the world to trouble me is my health. But I heard you were sick; I worried.”
“Bill, sit down and stop panting. You knew damn well a year ago that I was sick. Emma, get him something to drink—get him a lemonade, we’re in Nebraska.” Emma called the porter; Bryan eased his big bulk into a chair, rose again with Emma. “Sit down, sit down,” Altgeld said. Bryan smiled sheepishly. The rehearsed lines were finished, and he sat there with his hands on his knees, staring at the Governor. Altgeld said, “Well, how does it feel to be the candidate?”
Bryan shook his head. “I don’t know—it’s a feeling I can’t get used to.” The bars were down; he started to speak, swallowed, and then said, “Governor, I swear—I never thought—”
“You didn’t. You sure as hell never thought so! But you couldn’t stop. You rode it like a kid riding a washtub down a snow slide. Wait a minute—I’m not angry. Just forget that. You’re the candidate and only one thing matters, that next year you should move into the White House. That’s all that matters, Bill. Understand that.”
Bryan moved between anger and withdrawal; he hung there for one long moment, and then Altgeld thrust out his hand and said, “This is for what’s gone, Bill.”
They shook hands, and Bryan was smiling again. The lemonade came, and he sat there sipping it. Altgeld watched him, studying him at this close range, as he told Emma afterwards, wondering how he could relax him and turn out what was inside, considering that there was something inside. Emma began to talk to him, asking about his family, about the life here in Nebraska. Young as he was, he showed Washington conditioning; it was difficult for him to state a thing as a matter of fact rather than as a proclamation. And he wanted Altgeld to speak. Able to contain himself no longer, he asked bluntly:
“Governor, what are our chances?”
“When? Now, tomorrow, or on election day?”
“On election day, of course.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Altgeld said. “It’s a long time to election day, isn’t it?”
“But you could guess, estimate.”
“I don’t guess,” Altgeld smiled. “I don’t guess, Bill. When you know certain things, you can add them up. Sometimes you know some things and there are other things that you don’t know. Is that what you mean by guessing? You never know all the things, not even after the votes are counted. Right now, how much do we know?”
“We know that McKinley’s a bag of clothes, and that Mark Hanna’s got him dancing on strings. We know that the people are pretty well fed up with the way Wall Street runs the country.”
“Do we?”
“We know that the people want free silver coinage.”
Altgeld’s voice dropped; his voice had a tendency to grind and rasp and hammer; when he spoke softly, he could eliminate this. He wanted to eliminate it now; he wanted nothing to stand between him and William Jennings Bryan. In the normal course of things, it was difficult enough to talk to Bryan, but now Bryan was in the saddle; he came to Altgeld because Altgeld still led the party, but he couldn’t forget that he was in the saddle in spite of the Governor of Illinois and not because of him. Now Altgeld said:
“Bill, we talk a lot about the people—I do, you do, and if I had a dollar for every time they mention the people in that esteemed congress of ours, I’d be a very rich man. But what are the people? Do they have leaders? Can they talk in one voice? Can they even go into the polls and vote? Some can, but enough of them can’t to let us worry about it. This isn’t the first presidential election, and every president, even such incredible buffoons as Rutherford B. Hayes, have been elected by a part of the people. We’re going to tell the people something, but Mark Hanna and the Republican Party are going to tell them something else. How are the people going to know what’s right?”
“Because we stand for what’s right.”
“My word, Bill, that’s not enough. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. But how do we get across to the people what we stand for? For every newspaper that’s for us, there are twenty against us. We’ve got four hundred thousand in the campaign chest—maybe we stand to get a few hundred thousand more. The Republicans have six million already—some say ten million—and stand to get millions more. That never happened before. That much money was never collected before in the history of this country to be spent on a presidential campaign. Ten million dollars—why, there was a time when that would run our government for a year, and now it’s being poured down the drain to elect William McKinley president. Well, there’s a reason for that; things go together; they’re connected, Bill, and we have to understand just how they’re connected, so we can know how to fight them.”
“What things?” Bryan asked. “The Republicans have always had money. We knew that—we’re a peopl
e’s party, not a Wall Street party.”
“That’s right, we are—sure. But still, there are some things. Take this agitation for war with Spain—”
“I’m for Cuban independence!”
“And I am too. But there’s more to it than that. On the one hand, we throttle the independence movement in Cuba; we cut off supplies, arms. We let them starve. On the other hand, we move toward war with Spain. That’s an indication of something else. Monopoly capitalism in America has become a giant, a bloody, ruthless giant. That’s where the ten million dollars comes from. And they’re going to start spreading, that’s what this Cuban thing amounts to. America isn’t big enough any more—the world is the next step. You have to see that coming, Bill, and then you’ll see what we’re up against in this campaign. It’s not only free silver, government by injunction, the rights of farmers and workers and small businessmen; it’s that, but it’s something else. It’s the first real bid by our side to stem this thing that has grown up in our own lifetimes, this thing that’s like nothing else the world ever knew. And they know that—and because they know it, they’re going to fight us with no holds barred; Inside of that frame, you’ve got to talk to the people, Bill, and there’s only one way we can talk to them.”
“I don’t wholly agree,” Bryan said. He was not a constant listener, and Altgeld wondered whether he had heard all he said. “It’s going to be a hard fight, but the people are with us. No one likes monopoly, no one likes the trusts. We’ll take our case to the people.”
“Sure, we’ll take it to them. But with integrity. That’s an old-fashioned word, but it works. We can’t equivocate, we can’t compromise—”
They were words Bryan liked. He nodded savagely. Altgeld sighed and said, “We must stand on our platform, Bill. My god, we must stand there firm as all hell, just firm as all hell.” But afterward, he told Emma, “How much of it meant anything, and how much of it went in and out? He’s all right, but this is too big for him. Maybe it’s too big for anyone.”
IV
Emma was alone when Buck Hinrichsen came up, some what sheepishly, but Emma said, “Anyway, you felt that you had to see him today, and that’s good, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“Shall I order some breakfast for you, coffee anyway?”
“Nothing, nothing, thanks. How is he feeling, Emma?” Hinrichsen was dapperly dressed, fawn gloves, fawn spats, a large single-pearl tiepin, tight-fitting black coat, and a black bowler hat which he mechanically dusted with the edge of his gloves. He looked and acted the part of a routine middle-western politician, unimaginative, shrewd, calculating, a little better than average scavenger in the offal-heap of spoil; but with him, as with so many others, a relationship with Altgeld had induced a qualitative change. He became something more than he was; he had found a direction and he groped along it. His switch from Bland to Bryan had not altered his belief that there was nothing in America like Altgeld.
Emma replied, “I don’t know.”
That could be; he understood that.
“You think you know Pete, but then you don’t know him. I’m married to him, and I don’t know him. But I learned about strength and I learned about struggle, Buck. You know, they crucified him; they nailed him up, and they put nails into every part of him. But it wasn’t enough.”
“I know.”
“Why did they have to do it? Every paper in the country—until there isn’t a little child anywhere who won’t dream of that evil face, the popping eyes, the leer; that’s the way they’ve painted him. No man ever was treated that way before. Buck, what’s happening to this land of ours?”
“That’s politics, Emma.”
“It’s more than politics, and you know it. What did he do that they hate him so? Because he pardoned three men who were innocent? Because he spoke up for labor?”
Hinrichsen nodded.
“Did you see the cartoon in Harper’s Weekly?”
Hinrichsen nodded again. He had seen the cartoon, Altgeld cloaked like a devil, the face contorted diabolically, the flames of hell rising from a smoking capital, and in his hands a shredded Constitution. Over his shoulder leered the insane face of Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin, drawn to parody Altgeld, and a skeleton hand reached forward, holding a revolver. The caption beneath had read, “Guiteau was a power in Washington for one day. Shall Altgeld be a power there for four years?” No one who had seen it would ever forget it.
“Is that politics?” Emma asked. “Is it politics when you see those pictures every time you open a paper? I won’t ask you if you think we can win, Buck; I won’t insult your intelligence that way. They own this free country of ours. They own the press; they own the pulpit; they even own the food that comes from the earth. Do you see how much I’ve learned? Only, sometimes I wish I never knew any of it. Sometimes I wish I had been Emma Ford, quiet, stupidly, but maybe more happily. You ask how Pete is—when we went across the state and he spoke from the train, well, each time after he spoke he had only enough strength to crawl back into bed, and each time I thought he was dying. Do you know how pleasant that can be, Buck?”
Again, Hinrichsen nodded, and now Emma was overcome with remorse. “But you don’t have to listen to all this. I’m insufferable. Can’t I tell you something nice? I think that this time, when this is over, we’ll tour the Continent. That’s something I’ve always wanted—to get away from this and see all those wonderful civilizations, Italy and Paris and England. Do you know, we’d be presented to Queen Victoria—Pete says so and calls her an evil old bitch in the same breath. You see, my language has improved too; it would in such circumstances.…”
They talked on, and Emma relaxed. Hinrichsen told a story very well. His own anger could be biting and contemptuous, as when he told about hearing what he described as “… a dirty, miserable character called Theodore Roosevelt …” speak at the Coliseum just a few weeks before. Then, speaking to the Republican College League, Roosevelt had screamed: “Mr. Altgeld is a much more dangerous man than Bryan. He is much slyer, much more intelligent, much less silly, much more free from all the restraints of public morality. The one is unscrupulous from vanity, the other from calculation, and would connive at wholesale murder and would justify it by elaborate and cunning sophistry for reasons known only to his own tortuous soul. For America to put men like this in control of her destiny would be such a dishonor as it is scarcely bearable to think of. Mr. Altgeld condones and encourages the most infamous of murders and denounces the Federal government and the Supreme Court for interfering to put a stop to the bloody lawlessness which results in worse than murder. Both of them would substitute for the government of Washington and Lincoln, for the system of orderly liberty which we inherit from our fore fathers and which we desire to bequeath to our sons, a red welter of lawlessness as vicious as the Paris commune itself.…” And so forth and so on. “Well,” Hinrichsen said, “I got to Mr. Roosevelt afterward and I asked him, Have you ever met Altgeld? Oh, no, he said, oh, no, never. Of course, that was after he had satisfied himself about my credentials. They were Teddying him to death, our Chicago big boys, Teddy this and Teddy that, and there was something about young Theodore very much like a fat little teddy bear, believe me, Emma. A very estimable young gentleman, a damn highbrow snob—forgive the language, Emma—snotnose, I don’t know of any other way to describe him, but estimable, distinctly estimable, and didn’t want to talk to me or answer any questions until he had really ascertained that I was Secretary of State and not just some poor old bum who had pushed my way into his august presence. Then—oh, no, he had never met Mr. Altgeld, and wouldn’t, of course. By god, he said, I should have to fight him if I did. How can I meet a man socially whom I may have to face with bared sword on the barricades?—So help me god, Emma, those were his very words! Can you imagine? But this young fellow is a card, Emma, someone we’re going to hear from. It’s not just that he’s an idiot or a political climber; he’s some weird combination of a moron and a Jeff Davis, and I’ll be d
amned if I can figure it out.”
Hinrichsen paused, then spread his hands wide. “But I learned something. It made me see where I was wrong with Bryan, so dead-wrong. Bryan is like setting up pins in an alley, setting them up for no other reason than that they should be knocked down. That’s why I’m here. I want to apologize to the Governor. I want to shake his hand.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Buck.”
“Let me be the judge of that, Emma. When I make a mistake, I make them. That’s an old story. You hear him, and then you go away and you say, what a wonderful speaker he is, and then you vote for McKinley. And Mark Hanna just lets Bryan talk. But tell me, were you in New York with Pete?”
“Yes. It was one of the good things. He walked into their own stronghold, and he was better than they were, better than any of them. Even their newspapers had to admit that Cooper Union was packed, and there were ten thousand more in the streets who couldn’t get in, and workingmen—wherever Pete spoke, it was the workingmen who came to hear him. I never saw that before at political meetings. And they listen to what he has to say—”
Hinrichsen watched her and listened to her. He had been part of the same process; he had reacted to Altgeld; he had become something else, and so had she. He was listening to her when the Governor returned. Hinrichsen held out his hand and the Governor took it. There didn’t have to be any explanations. But it seemed to Hinrichsen that he had never known what a small man Altgeld was, how frail; of the solid, earthlike strength of four years past, there was left now only the bright, searching eyes and a slow smile that let you into him, that invited you.
“Hello, Buck,” he said. “Have you come to bring me felicitations or condolences?”
Hinrichsen answered, seriously, “I came to see you.”
“Thanks.” Then, after a moment, “A good line at the polls.”
“How does it look?”
“Why, I don’t know, Buck. What do you think? You’ve got a politician’s nose. What kind of a smell is in the air today?”