The American: A Middle Western Legend (33 page)

He cleaned things up, put things away, washed his hands of them, and went off to tell Emma that they were poor. Yet he was half ashamed as he said it. “We won't starve,” he explained. “I'm still a good lawyer, I think, and I think I have a few friends.”

“I'm glad.”

He realized what she meant. One thing after another had to be sloughed off; now it was the money.

“We're going to be free,” she said. “We're going to do a lot of things that we wanted to do, aren't we, Pete?”

She didn't mean traveling this time; she didn't mean long afternoons in the sunlight; she actually meant, in the essence of it, that they would be free—to speak their own minds, starve, go to jail, or walk as much as they wanted to along the lakefront of Chicago. They would be free to find the direction for which he had been searching.

He put his arm around her; he said to her, “I'm an old man, Emma, and if I were a religious man, I'd say I am dying of my sins. We don't speak about that, do we, but you know I've been looking at the wives of other men. It's reassuring; it's rewarding too. I'm very lucky.”

He said that to Hinrichsen when the Secretary of State offered condolences. “To hell with all that,” he said. “My heart isn't breaking, Buck. Don't act like it is.”

“I only wish you had been born in this damned country.”

“Would that make me an American, Buck?”

“It would make you president.”

“You're lying in your teeth. I told you, to hell with that. I told you I don't want any sympathy. I'm beginning to open my eyes. Do you know what it is to feel free, Buck? Hell—of course you don't. Well, the only real freedom is to recognize what-you have to do, and I'm beginning to get there.”

He was in a better mood as he prepared his farewell message for Tanner's inauguration; he put down the things he wanted to say, the things he wanted noted, marked, and remembered. Among other finalities, death is the aching knowledge that you will leave things half finished, unsaid, open to misinterpretation, lies and slander. Doc Arbady of Chicago, who was his good friend, had said to him, not so long ago, “You ask me a straight question, Pete, and this answer is straight. Locomotor Ataxia means that you are dying. That's broad, but not so broad as it might be. Consider that every man begins to die at a certain point, thirty, thirty-five—from then on, it's downhill, but slowly, and some of us live to be a hundred. With you, the process is quickened. The way you walk is a sign of that. Those pains are another sign, the dizziness, weakness, vomiting—all of those are symptoms. Maybe you'll live for ten years; that's possible, but I don't say it's likely. If I were in your place, I would do everything I have to do soon. Early each day.” He had thanked Doc Arbady and he had acted on his advice. And once he had overcome—at least partially—the heart-paralyzing fear, the urgency of death was not altogether unacceptable. At least, there was a ready satisfaction in each act completed, such as he felt when he had written this farewell message, when he had read it aloud to Emma, slowly and emphatically.

“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?”

“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?”