The American: A Middle Western Legend (19 page)

Then he went on to give his opinion of the judge. He felt no mercy, no charity toward Gary; he had sat on a bench himself—he knew well enough the extent of any judge's power. Recently, in a magazine article, Judge Gary had reviewed the Haymarket case, and now Altgeld quoted from Gary's article:

“‘
The conviction,' Gary wrote, ‘has not gone on the ground that they did have actually any personal participation in the particular act which caused the death of Degan, but the conviction proceeds upon the ground that they had generally, by speech and print, advised large classes of the people, not particular individuals, but large classes, to commit murder, and had left the commission, the time and place and when, to the individual will and whim, or caprice, or whatever it may be, of each individual man who listened to their advice, and that in consequence of that advice, and influenced by that advice, somebody not known did throw the bomb that caused Degan's death. Now, if this is not a correct principle of the law, then the defendants of course are entitled to a new trial. The case is without precedent; there is no example in the law books of a case of this sort.
'”

To which Altgeld wrote, in answer:

“The judge certainly told the truth when he stated that the case was without precedent, and that no example could be found in the law books to sustain the law as above laid down. For, in all the centuries during which government has been maintained among men, and crime has been punished, no judge in a civilized country has ever laid down such a rule before.…”

Then Altgeld went on to block out a broad picture. Something strange and ominous and significant was happening in the land. Just in the time of his own life, the people had been disinherited, divided, confused. Between those who labored and those who profited, a wide gap was making, and over that gap a bloody, murderous war had been raging for a dozen years. From underground had come organizations like the Knights of Labor and the Molly Maguires, painfully trying to weld labor together, to make a united force out of it—and counter to them, from the jails, the sewers, the gambling towns of the west, the city slums, from the pestholes and horror spots of America, had come crawling the dregs of the land, bums and gangsters, thieves, gunmen, professional murderers, the rejected of society and the enemies of society, and they had been given a badge of pardon and immunity and welded together into the strangest army of mercenaries the world had yet known, the Pinkertons. They were a private army, privately armed and equipped, privately trained in the technique of violence—with only one purpose in mind, to battle and crush the rising organization of labor.

Reminding the people how quickly, how efficiently the so-called Haymarket murderers had been railroaded to the scaffold, Altgeld in contrast pointed to case after case of Pinkerton murder that had gone unpublicized, unavenged by society. Coldly and deliberately he wrote:

“Now it is shown … that in 1885 there was a strike at the McCormick Reaper factory on account of a reduction in wages and some Pinkerton men, while on their way there, were hooted at by some people on the street, when they fired into the crowd and fatally wounded several people who had taken no part in any disturbance; that four of the Pinkerton men were indicted for murder by the grand jury, but that the prosecuting officers apparently took no interest in the case and allowed it to be continued a number of times, until the witnesses were sworn out, and in the end the murderers went free; that after this there was a strike on the West Division Street Railway and that some of the police under the leadership of Capt. John Bonfield, indulged in a brutality never equaled before; that even small merchants standing on their own doorsteps and having no interest in the strike were clubbed, then hustled into patrol wagons and thrown into prison on no charge and not even booked.…”

So it went in the pardon he wrote, affidavits, case after case, facts and details coming alive under the slow and methodical manipulation of his pen, and when it would occur to him that he was the first Governor of an American state to write of such matters, he would pause and again try to grasp what might come of this. But that was impossible, for there were no precedents; as there had been no precedents for the conduct of Judge Gary in deliberate judicial murder, so were there no precedents for what he did.

Yet it was not a matter of courage that was concerned; the motivation was chiefly neither courage nor an obligation to others. If he had an obligation, it was to himself, and it was only for himself, for his need to make reason and justice out of the world he inhabited, that he wrote the bitter finish to his act:

“It is further charged with much bitterness by those who speak for the prisoners that the record of the case shows that the judge conducted the trial with malicious ferocity and forced eight men to be tried together; that in cross-examining the state's witnesses he confined councel for the defense to the specific points touched on by the state, while in the cross-examination of the defendants' witnesses he permitted the state's attorney to go into all manner of subjects entirely foreign to the matters on which the witnesses were examined in chief; also that every ruling throughout the long trial on any contested point was in favor of the state, and further, that page after page of the record contains insinuating remarks of the judge, made in the hearing of the jury, and with the evident intent of bringing the jury to his way of thinking; that these speeches, coming from the court, were much more damaging than any speeches from the state's attorney could possibly have been; that the state's attorney often took his cue from the judge's remarks; that the judge's magazine article recently published, although written nearly six years after the trial, is yet full of venom; that, pretending to simply review the case, he had to drag into his article a letter written by an excited woman to a newspaper after the trial was over, and which therefore had nothing whatever to do with the case and was put into the article simply to create a prejudice against the woman, as well as against the dead and the living, and that, not content with this, he in the same article makes an insinuating attack on one of the lawyers for the defense, not for anything done at the trial, but because more than a year after the trial when some of the defendants had been hung, he ventured to express a few kind, if erroneous, sentiments over the graves of his dead clients, whom he at least believed to be innocent. It is urged that such ferocity or subserviency is without a parallel in all history; that even Jeffries in England contented himself with hanging his victims, and did not stop to berate them after they were dead.

“These charges are of a personal character, and while they seem to be sustained by the record of the trial and the papers before me and tend to show that the trial was not fair, I do not care to discuss this feature of the case any further, because it is not necessary. I am convinced that it is clearly my duty to act in this case for the reasons already given, and I, therefore, grant an abolute pardon to Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab this 26th day of June, 1893.”

And then, underneath, he signed his name, John P. Altgeld, Governor of Illinois, and then it was finished, and he went to bed that night and slept quietly and easily.

XIV

Emma had two ladies from the United Charities in to tea when the subject of the anarchists came up, and one of them, a Mrs. Byce, said, “We hear the Governor is going to pardon them?”

“Perhaps,” Emma smiled. “The Governor does a great many things without consulting me.”

“How strange,” the other, Mrs. Benson, remarked. “I mean you would think—”

“Then he is going to pardon them?” Mrs. Byce said.

“I couldn't say.”

“But won't that encourage them?” Mrs. Byce said. “I mean, they could just come out of the penitentiary and go on throwing bombs.”

“Dynamite,” Mrs. Benson nodded.

Mrs. Byce said, “Do you know, I read just enough of it to go into a teacup could blow us all sky-high.”

“But surely, Mrs. Altgeld,” said Mrs. Benson, “you don't approve of this sort of thing?”

“Of dynamite?”

“Of anarchists and communists.”

“No, no, indeed.”

“But you said, the Governor—”

“I said nothing about the Governor,” Emma smiled.

“I would encourage them.”

“There's no denying that it would encourage them,” Mrs. Byce said. “I mean, to let them out of jail the way you would let a wild beast out of a cage.”

“I'm sure the Governor has taken that into consideration,” Emma said. She excused herself for a moment, and as she stepped out of the room, Mrs. Byce, lowering her voice, said, “Poor thing, I'm sure she knows as little as she says.”

“You are?”

“She's a lady. They say he's no better than an anarchist. Has a spittoon in his room. Eats with his fingers. She doesn't invite people to dinner. He doesn't talk very well.”

“You don't say.”

“He is a foreigner, you know. Of course, he's Governor. But you can't forget that he's not an American.”

“No, I don't suppose you can.”

“They don't—I mean they haven't—well—”

“I've heard.”

“Separate rooms. That's why they have no children.”

“You don't say.”

“They say he has a harelip. They say if you look at him very closely, under his mustache, you can see it.”

“Really.”

“You know Mrs. Henly Smith?”

“I've met her.”

“They had a son with a harelip. They put him in an institution.”

“No!”

“Yes. If we meet him, look carefully, under his mustache.”

XV

When Emma had read the pardon message, she said to her husband, “Why do you hate Gary so?”

“I hate what Gary stands for.”

“But a lot of other people stand for the same thing. You don't hate them all.”

“I hate pimps. I don't like murderers, even on the bench. As bad as the master is, I like his tool less.”

“I see.”

He asked her bluntly, “What do you think will, happen, Emma?”

“I think some people will be with you and other won't, that's all. If they don't want you to be Governor again, we can go away, we can take a trip somewhere, can't we?”

“We could take a trip I suppose—”

Yet the next day, when Mike McDonald called from Chicago, she knew what a dream it was to think of a trip, of pleasant sunny afternoons when there would be nothing for them to do but rest, but be together; she knew because she stood by Altgeld when he answered the telephone and heard him say:

“Yes … yes, that's right.… You don't? … I say I've made up my mind, that's all … that's all.… You can talk as much as you please, I'm listening.… No! … I told you before that my mind was made up; in case you've forgotten, I'm the Governor.… He can go to hell and be damned.… The party?—the party wasn't here when the world was created, the party's changed, and it's going to change a hell of a lot more!”

He put down the phone and sat at his desk. He said to his wife, “Emma, it's going to be hard, it's going to be different. You were right, I hate Gary, I hate a lot of men. I love men too. They're going to line up. We're not all on the same side. I hate Gary. In that article Gary wrote for the
Century
he poured out his venom on Captain Black and his wife. I've got venom too. You remember, Black defended them. I was a lawyer, Emma, it doesn't matter that I differ from them, and I don't believe in what they fight for; I'm supposed to believe in justice, and I could have defended them and I didn't. I sat back, I sat it out, and they hanged Parsons by the neck until he was dead. Black defended them and went to their grave, and there he said something for which Gary never forgave him. Do you know what he said, what blasphemy, this—‘I loved these men,' Black said. ‘I knew them not until I came to know them in the time of their sore travail and anguish. As months went by and I found in the lives of those with whom I talked the witness of their love for the people, of their patience, gentleness and courage, my heart was taken captive in their cause.' That was Black's blasphemy, for which Gary never forgave him, and do you know what his wife did, Emma? She wrote, in a letter to the
Daily News
, these devilish words—‘Often, as I took up one or the other of the daily papers, I would recall reverently those words of my Divine Master:
For which of my good works do you stone me?'
That way, Emma, she too earned Gary's hatred. Now it's my turn. Let him know that I despise him, and all that he stands for.”

XVI

Mr. E. S. Dreyer was a banker, a citizen of Chicago, and in many other ways a pillar of the community, and if he had been able to go to bed at night and sleep, history would have forgotten him and his round cheeks and his mustache, and the deals he made, the profits he garnered and laid away, the club he belonged to, the cigars he smoked; but he could not sleep much of the time, and when he did sleep he dreamed of four men standing on a scaffold, and they all said to him, calmly and logically, “You, Mr. E. S. Dreyer, murdered us.”

His doctor gave him bromides and said, “Nonsense! And as for Parsons and the rest of them, I say good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“I acted as I saw my duty, and why should I have anything on my conscience?”

“No reason at all,” the doctor said.

“But I don't sleep and I don't rest.”

“Worry.”

“If I sleep, I don't rest. I dream.”

“Keep your bowels flushed,” the doctor said. “That's important. Keep your bowels flushed.”

But the keeping of Mr. E. S. Dreyer's bowels flushed proved singularly ineffective. Actually, no one in his own circle would have condemned Mr. Dreyer. For years he had never spent an evening at his club, at the dinner table, or indeed anywhere else where there was conversation without the conversation shifting, sooner or later, to labor; and when—it did, how could Mr. Dreyer be blamed for joining in the chorus of vituperation and hatred? Hatred for labor, fear of labor, antagonism toward labor were as much Mr. Dreyer's second nature as any of the habitual functions he performed daily, dressing, undressing, eating with his right hand, and putting on a hat when he went outside. So it is not surprising that when Mr. Dreyer was made foreman of the grand jury in the Haymarket case, he should have raised a whisky and soda at his club and cheerfully pledged the death of the whole lot. Nor is it surprising that he confided to many of his good friends that the anarchists would hang, or he'd see himself damned. Nor is it surprising that he fought for the murder indictments and drove them through, so that finally all over town people who knew him said: