by Howard Fast
“I’m glad you can say those things, Pete,” she nodded.
But he didn’t say them. He sat on the platform with Governor Tanner, and afterwards he reflected that this was merely cheap and childish. For the first time, a retiring governor of the state was kept voiceless, and the carefully prepared speech remained in his pocket. The new governor said, afterwards, “Sorry, Altgeld, but there was no time on the program. It’s a shame that you couldn’t talk, but I presume you understand.”
“I understand,” Altgeld smiled.
Then they went north to Chicago and home, hands washed clean. At the station, Joe Martin alone waited, and he put his arms around both Altgeld and Emma.
The wind came in from the lake, cold and fresh. It was a bright clear evening as they rode through the streets of the city.
XII
He was not yet fifty years old, but he was old not young, an old man who puttered around at this and that. His friends came to Emma and wondered what they could do, and she shook her head hopelessly. The newspapers were after him again, but for once he didn’t seem to have the energy or the desire to fight back. They had a new tag for him, said to have been coined by the bright young Teddy Roosevelt, “The Illinois Communist.” A new and lurid quality had come into their stories; as the Governor of Illinois, he had been a dangerous man; he had shown a devastating tendency to strike back; as Altgeld, the private citizen, the red, he was fair game, and as fair game they went after him. When he told a reporter that private enterprise might be wrong—a lot of things had to be looked at differently, that particular paper flared forth with the headline: “ALTGELD CALLS FOR REVOLUTION!” When he argued his first case in court, the judge stared at him hostilely; he won the decision in spite of the bench, and his antagonism was hardly concealed. What assets he had left disappeared like snow under a hot sun; the brokers, bankers, and businessmen of Chicago were smilingly hard. “Pay your debts,” they told him. That a fortune of his had gone down the drain of the party, and that many of them were Democrats as well as Republicans did not seem to matter. When Joe Martin came to his rescue with thirty-five thousand dollars and forced him to take it, he said, “You know, Joe, I won’t live long enough to repay this. I’ve lost the knack of making money.” “You repaid it a long time ago,” Martin said. He took it, and he saw it go after the rest, good money after bad, as they said. His business partner and cousin, John Lanehart, had died, leaving more debts, and somehow he found the money to pay them. It was no longer a case of becoming a rich man; it was how to become a poor man gracefully.
He read a good deal in those days. Emma was making a home again—the house in Chicago was practically all that they had left—and in his study there he found himself learning. He wanted to know all there was to know of what had happened in the past two generations. The repetitious phrases of the reformers, the lurid accounts of John D. Rockefeller, Jim Fisk, Commodore Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Phil Armour, J. P. Morgan, and all the rest were not enough. He knew how it had happened; he had seen it happen here in Chicago, and some of the spoil had even been flung to him. He wanted to know why it had happened, why a great nation had been delivered over to them, hand and foot and mouth, and why now, under their pressure, this same nation was setting forth on an imperialist march to master the world. He was drawn into a mayoralty campaign; the Democrats had put up young Carter Harrison, whose father had been mayor of Chicago when the Haymarket people were hanged, and they wanted Altgeld to lend his weight. He did so, but in place of his old enthusiasm was a scientific curiosity. Here in. Chicago the two parties had become like one, and though the Democrats were victorious, all the fine-sounding ideals for which he had battled nationally were thrown overboard and their loss was hardly noticed except by a very few. His attitude toward politics was not becoming one of cynicism, but rather one of anger. The whole hysterical pageant was relating itself to those cold-eyes, cool-headed men who ruled their dozen industrial empires like no kings the world had ever known. In order that they might have peace, in order that they might have numberless and willing servants, they observed an ancient ritual on the first Tuesday after the first Monday each November. And in order that the ritual might be well observed, they employed his kind, the politicians, the modern gladiators who coldbloodedly performed on specified occasions, but ate from the same bowl and lived in the same enclosure. It was overt and cheap and almost ridiculous when Mark Hanna dangled William McKinley on the several golden strings provided by the Morgans and the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, but was it less so, he wondered, when they allowed an opposition candidate to win, as they did sometimes, and then bought in on the new administration, bought out the cabinet, the congress, the large fry and the small fry.…
He wasn’t shocked when the Maine went down and the war cries echoed from coast to coast. He was beginning to understand, not fully, but better than he had ever understood before, and he began to come out of his lethargy. He woke to life suddenly, and Emma found herself dragged out to meetings, to the theatre, to certain dinners. Once again the parade of people, strange people, all kinds of people to the home of Pete Altgeld began. He felt a renewed strength. And when Darrow and Schilling came with their proposal of a third party for the next local election, he was ready to listen.
“But don’t go off half-cocked,” he told Darrow coldly. “This is going to be hard and murderous, and I don’t think we’re going to win. You have to begin somewhere, and we begin here.”
“But you’ll be the candidate?”
“I’ll run for mayor, that’s right. But just remember that we’re operating on a shoestring. I’m broke.” And to Schilling, he said, “I want to meet Debs, George. Will you arrange it?”
“Here?”
“Here or anywhere. I don’t care.”
XIII
They sat in the kitchen of Debs’ house, a pitcher of beer on the table, two glasses, Altgeld’s hat and coat on a chair at one side, a small black dog poking at Debs’ hand, the smell of recently cooked cabbage, an open ten-cent copybook in which Debs had been writing, a bottle of ink and a pen, and a plate with two slices of dry bread on it They had shaken hands and spoken a few words of greeting and now they sat and looked at each other.
“We should have met a long time ago,” Altgeld said.
Debs was not impressed. He poured two glasses of beer, carefully, not spilling a drop. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“I want to talk about some things, Debs, but I want you to trust me. You don’t trust me, do you?”
“No.”
“I suppose you have reasons.”
“A lot of reasons.”
“Would you mind—”
“I don’t mind. Generally, I don’t trust your kind. I don’t trust lawyers; I don’t trust rich men, I don’t like them. I don’t like the miserable little lackeys of the trusts, of Standard Oil and New York Central and Carnegie Steel and the rest. That’s generally. Specifically, you were governor—well, what happened? Is it any better now then when you became governor?”
“No—it’s worse.”
“Beer?” Debs asked. Altgeld nodded. They both sipped at their glasses.
“Would it have been any better if you were governor?” Altgeld asked.
“Maybe.”
“Why did you support me in the election?”
“You were the lesser of two evils. That’s all. That’s the whole reason.”
“And you don’t believe that if Bryan had won, if I had won, it would be any better?”
“That’s right,” Debs said quietly. “No better. We would be at war with Spain sooner or later. Maybe it would have been a little harder, a little more expensive for them to buy out the Democrats, but it wouldn’t cost more than the ten million they spent on McKinley.”
“You’re a socialist, aren’t you?”
“That’s no secret,” Debs said.
“And that’s the only thing that represents any hope to you? You don’t see any good coming out of capitalism?”
&nb
sp; “You don’t answer that question by saying yes.” Debs smiled for the first time. “There’s some progress under capitalism. You know that, Altgeld—I don’t have to draw pictures for you. You remember when there were no railroads, and today the railroads are here. It’s true that maybe a hundred thousand men died of disease building them; it’s true that the capital came by giving the promoters a billion acres of public land; it’s true that they were built by idiots more than by engineers, and almost all the lines had to be relaid; it’s true that the iron rails wore like cheese, and that not so long ago there were seventy-six different track gauges, and that for a period of twenty years there was never a train that ran on schedule, and that God knows how many of the public were killed riding the rotten rolling stock, and that more than five thousand workers were murdered in rail labor battles—but we have the railroad, and that’s progress, isn’t it?”
“I don’t mean that,” Altgeld said, differently on the defensive than he had ever been, not knowing whether Debs was laughing at him, liking him or quietly contemptuous.
“Do I think we can ever legislate the evils away? Maybe we can. That’s why I’m a socialist, not to make a revolution and a commune, as the Tribune’s so glad to say. But maybe. If we had ten million votes for socialism, I still don’t know if they’d hand over the government to us. It’s their government. It was their government when you were Governor. That’s why your militia shot us down when we struck, Altgeld. You want me to forget that?”
“I don’t ask you to forget it. I know what I did when I was Governor. I took an oath. I enforced the law.”
“Their law.”
“The law of the state. I’m not proud. I’m not ashamed. I did what I had to do. I’d do it again. If the law is no good, then it has to be changed. The Governor enforces what law there is.”
“That’s an evasion.”
“The hell it is!” Altgeld snapped. “I’m no socialist, Debs. You ought to know that, if no one else in America does.”
“I know it.” He hesitated a moment, drank down the rest of his beer, and said quietly, “Who’s with you, Altgeld? You try to walk in the middle, and who’s your friend? You try to make your peace with this rotten system—why? You’re the first man since Lincoln who can speak to the people, who doesn’t despise the people, and whom they love. That’s right, they love you, they trust you. You could have been a Fisk or a Gould or an Armour, but you didn’t. But it’s not the way it was when Abe Lincoln became president. When they marched off to the war and the paper uniforms melted in the rain and the rotten guns blew up in their faces, then it became different My god, Altgeld, you can’t be a Lincoln today; there’ll be no more Lincolns in America—that’s gone. We’re not a democracy, we’re an oligarchy. If you didn’t realize that when they closed down the factories before election day, you never will. You were there—you saw McDonald sell out the street-car franchises for ninety-nine years; you saw what happened at Pullman. What in hell am I talking for—you pardoned the anarchists, didn’t you?”
Altgeld nodded, his face like a mask, his blue eyes staring fixedly at Debs.
“Come with us,” Debs pleaded. The barriers were down. He leaned across the table, his long, powerful hands gripping the edge. His face was an earnest of silent pleading. His tongue wet his lips, and in the live muscles of his cheeks, his chin, was all that he wanted to say and could not find the words for. “Come with us, Altgeld,” he repeated. “The world found democracy through America—it’s going to find, socialism through America. It’s going to find the life God made man to live. It’s going to find the workers building the kind of palaces that will make your lakefront mansions look like shacks. There’s going to be a republic of farmers and workers, where men are equal and free. A land without unemployment, a land where children grow up strong and clean and decent. It’s going to be a beautiful, great land! God almighty, Altgeld, what’s your stake with them?”
No expression on Altgeld’s face, no reaction. “I’m not a socialist, Debs,” he said quietly. “That’s honest. I’m a dying man, Debs. I’ve got nothing to hide, nothing to fear. I just don’t go along with you—I can’t” He made no explanations; in his dry, rasping voice, there was a quality almost of anguish. Debs realized why men loved him; he was the end of something. Beyond him were the mighty forests cut down, the lashing wave of the frontier, the democracy of democracies, where all was possible and nothing impossible. Yet in that moment Debs pitied him and hated him, and the intimacy was gone, and they were just two men sitting at a kitchen table, and finally Altgeld said, “You know why I’m here.”
“Schilling told me.”
“What do you think of a third party, Debs?”
“I told you before. The third party for America is the party of socialism. It can’t be different.”
“Then that means you won’t support me as an independent candidate for mayor?”
“Well support you,” Debs said wearily. “We supported you for Governor—we’ll support you as long as you run, Altgeld. What I’m fighting for won’t come tomorrow, and until then I want to live.”
They shook hands, and Altgeld left him. Debs watched him walk away, a small, feeble man whose feet dragged as he walked.
XIV
Altgeld was like a child; his excitement was like a running fever. As he told Emma, “If I was standing for president, it wouldn’t be this way.” For the first time, he was on his own; for the first time in his political life, he was a candidate with no strings attached. It was like breathing fresh air after living for a generation in a stuffy room. It was like coming out of a cell into freedom. When Bathhouse John, now against him, told him, “It cannot be done, Governor—it cannot be done,” he answered, “Damn it, I’ll show you that it can be done!” He forgot his illness; he forgot Doc Arbady’s black predictions. When the Tribune said, “The devil must be given his due, and there is no doubt but that John P. Altgeld is one of the most astute political minds in America,” he responded with the first press conference in a long while. He was sick with nervousness as He waited for the reporters. He had seen to the cigars himself, fine black perfectos. He had invited men from the labor weeklies as well as the big dailies. Joe Martin served as doorkeeper and welcoming committee. Emma saw to the setups, cold lemonade as well as soda and water for the Scotch and rye whisky. While waiting, to hide his own nervousness, he lectured his wife and best friend on the importance of the press. “If the boss is against me and the reporter likes me, Joe, well that’s a damn sight better than for the boss to be on my side and the reporter to hate my guts. Sure they’re out to get me and they rake me over the coals. But look what they do to Teddy Roosevelt, the bosses’ own little boy—I don’t think there’s a newspaperman in the country who doesn’t know him for what he is, a puffed-up little ass, and, my word, but it comes through in their stories.”
The press was taken up to his study, and there he was, behind his desk, the way they remembered him, chin on hands, the blue eyes sparkling.
“Going back in harness, Governor?”
“I’ve never been out of harness,” he said, fetching a laugh with the first sally. “I’ve just been taking a few deep breaths.”
“How does it feel to be out there alone, Governor?”
“Alone? Have a cigar, son,” he said, holding them out and passing them around. “Tell you something, they used to say about old Dan Boone that he was never lost—not just because he was at home in the woods, but because he was pretty well content with where he happened to be. Changes a man’s viewpoint. That’s the way I feel.”
“What about streetcar and gas franchises, Governor?”
“They’ve been used as political spoil. Our public services are a rock around the public’s neck, and the men who promoted them are latter-day bandits. You may quote me, gentlemen. This business of fifty-five and ninety-nine-year franchises is a disgrace. I would grant no franchise for more than ten years or some such limited period, and then the public service reverts to the public
.”
A labor reporter asked, “What about the right to strike and the right to assemble?”
“Inviolate, in so far as the power of the mayor would be concerned. There would be no limitation except that of conditions, by which I mean traffic, transportation, and so forth. The streets belong to the people of this city, and if they want to picket on them or hold meetings on them, they damn well may!”
“Does that go for communists and anarchists?”
“It goes for all citizens of Chicago, regardless of their race, color, or political persuasion.”
“Does this mean that you’ve lost faith in the Democratic Party, Governor?”
“It does not. The bigger the independent vote, the more strength to the party.”
“What about the war, Governor?”
“I’m for Cuban independence, and I’m in favor of using American arms to help Cuba gain that independence. But I think the annexation of the Philippines, the Hawaiian and Sandwich Islands is shameful, and one more step on the road toward American imperialism.…”
It went that way. For the first time, there were no strings attached, and he could speak his piece, talk out straightforwardly and forthrightly. He could say where he stood, what he was for and what he was against.