The American: A Middle Western Legend (15 page)

My children, my precious ones, I request you to read this parting message on each recurring anniversary of my Death in remembrance of him who dies not alone for you, but for the children yet unborn. Bless you, my Darlings. Farewell.

Your Father, Albert R. Parsons.

Emma, however, was not impressed by this letter, and Altgeld, though he read it to himself a dozen times over, did not press his feelings on his wife. Out of his childlessness, children became a mystery; he stopped to look at them in the streets, and he was very good with his friends' children; but sometimes, when he thought too much about them, they gave him a sensation of woeful emptiness, and he half suspected that emptiness was present in a far more cutting way in Emma.

His second meeting with Lucy Parsons came shortly after the first. In the early spring of that year, 1889, he was asked to address the Economic Conference Forum on the subject of Prison Reform. That was fitting, for who was better informed than the author of
Our Penal Machinery and its Victims
? It was in such a mood that Altgeld came to the meeting, in a mood of liberal determination, his mind made up that he would speak forthrightly and plainly, saying what he thought, the newspapers be damned. He half expected to be the scapegoat of the affair, to emerge through a welter of bitter editorials the following day; and he had learned that such editorials on such a subject generally did more good than harm; but it turned out quite differently, and instead of being the scapegoat he became the hero of the next day's press. A group of labor people were in the audience, and when the discussion began, Lucy Parsons got the floor and demanded:

“Judge Altgeld!”

“Yes?”

“Judge Altgeld, will you deny that your jails are filled with the children of the poor, not the children of the rich? Will you deny that men steal because their bellies are empty? Will you dare to state that any of these lost sisters you speak of enjoy going to bed with ten and twenty miserable men in one night and having their insides burn like they were branded?”

A storm of protest broke out; cries of “Disgraceful!” and “Disgusting!” came from all over the hall. A parson rose, waving his umbrella wildly and calling for the floor. Others hissed. But Judge Altgeld, as the papers pointed out the following day, acted admirably. He spread his arms and quelled the tumult. He demanded order and imposed it. He said, “A lady has the floor. Can we condemn courtesy by showing ourselves so discourteous?” And then, turning to Mrs. Parsons, he said, “Please finish your statement, Mrs. Parsons, and then, if you wish, I will answer you.”

So it was the notorious Lucy Parsons! The hall hushed, and Mrs. Parsons, who had remained on her feet, went on:

“What is the approach of you who talk reform, preach reform, and make a sleigh of reform upon which you will ride into heaven? How do you solve things? Judge Altgeld advocates gray suits for the prisoners instead of striped suits. He advocates constructive work, good books, and large, clean cells. Rightly enough, he says that the hardened criminal should be kept apart from the first offender. Being a judge himself, I am not surprised that he talks so much of justice, for even if a thing is nowhere present, it is good that it should be discussed. No, I am not attacking Judge Altgeld. I am with him when he talks of the horror of clubbing. I know. I was clubbed, not once but many times. I bear the scars. But I will not rise to your reform bait. This is your society, Judge Altgeld; you helped to build and create it, and it is this society that makes the criminal. A woman becomes a prostitute because it's a little better than dying of hunger. A man becomes a thief because your system turns him into an outlaw. He sees your ethics, which are the ethics of wild beasts, and yet you jail him because he uses those ethics. And if the workers unite to fight for food, for a better way of life, you jail them too. And the sop to your conscience is reform, always reform. No, so long as you preserve this system and its ethics, your jails will be full of men and women who choose life to death, and who take life as you force them to take it, through crime.”

She sat down and a quiet audience waited. When Judge Altgeld answered, his voice was admirably controlled; he acted as befitted a judge of the commonwealth. “My dear Mrs. Parsons,” he said, “arguments on a certain level demand an answer on the same level. Since you deprecate the decent workingman who holds down a job and brings home comfort and sustenance to his wife and children, I must rise in his defense. Hard work, industry, and thrift do not promote crime; quite the reverse. The honest workingman shuns crime, as does the honest employer; although I do not deny that specimens of both classes now walking about belong in jail. You say the system promotes criminals—perhaps, but I answer that it is the best system man has been able to devise, and it is only by sincere and intelligent reform that the evils within it will be lessened and finally done away with. I don't deny the evils; but I face them practically, and I recommend the same practical course to those utopians who would prefer that everything be cast in the waste basket.”

As the papers said, a rousing chorus of applause greeted this, and although certain elements at the meeting continued to heckle the Judge, they had little effect on the mass of the audience.

That was the second time he saw Lucy Parsons. The third time, nearly a year later, he was driving with Judge Tree through the packing-house district and he saw her walking on a picket line, only a dozen yards from the road. Altgeld pulled in his horse and said to Tree:

“See that woman there?”

“Which?”

“The one with the dark face and the gray coat. She has a yellow handkerchief around her neck.”

“Yes?”

“That's Lucy Parsons,” Altgeld said.

At that moment she looked at them, but if she recognized Altgeld she gave no sign of it. As they drove away, Tree remarked:

“She's trying to clear her husband's name, isn't she?”

“I imagine so. They seem to have been very devoted.”

Tree said, “She won't help things by being mixed up in strikes.”

Those were the three times, but they ran through a period of half a dozen years, and it could hardly be said that the Governor was troubled greatly, either by those meetings, or by the memory of Parsons as Schilling had described him. Yet now, after the scene with Darrow, his thoughts ranged over the many matters concerning the Haymarket affair, that most curious case which would not rest, either by virtue of a hangman's scaffold or a prison cell.

He smiled wryly at the thought that he, who almost alone of liberal Chicago citizens had held back from signing the clemency petition, should be dogged and needled by this wretched case. The details of it were vague in his memory by now, and sometimes he wondered why it bulked so large with such different men as George Schilling and Clarence Darrow, why there should be in existence now a new petition signed by thousands of names ready to be presented to him. It was true that at the time, although he had not followed the case too closely in the newspapers, it had struck him as a miscarriage of justice, but in the essence justice was a stout, blind lady, and the man who had a dollar for each miscarriage she had suffered would be unnaturally wealthy, even here in Chicago.

He was annoyed by the way the matter followed him; he had a large and complex job ahead of him, and didn't he have the right to work as other men did, with a direct relation to practical problems? Another of those damned, mysterious cyclic depressions had hit the state, and soon he would be facing a rash of strikes, lockouts, pleas from both labor and capital; there would be the question of the unemployed; the state institutions were in miserable conditon; and the state schools were something to weep at. Also, with a certain grim satisfaction, he faced the prospect of cleaning out the rest of his political enemies, as well as the opponents of his party. It was a man-sized job and more, and yet like a small, malignant cancer, this Haymarket affair kept inserting itself—as if he had been elected Governor in relation to that and nothing else.

Wistfully, he recalled the first after-flush of the election victory. The Democrats were back in, and it was like tilting a thousand-gallon bucket of champagne and sending it flowing. Black bowler hats were transformed to shining silk, and night after night the lights shone on a sea of gleaming shirtfronts. Civil War vets, Democratic stalwarts, beginning to age considerably, pledged toasts to the “Solid South,” and millionaire pork and beef kings, millionaire lumbermen, and millionaire railroaders, toasted the people's party. The Judge, soon to be the Governor, loved it, and though night after night it was the same, fatuous speeches describing his town-to-town buckboard campaign, his astuteness, his brilliance, he did not tire. Emma tired first, pleading that his health would not stand it, recognizing the signs of those constantly recurrent malarial attacks; but this was a reward he would taste fully. Not even the legend of the Ugly Duckling did justice to this, and if he drank too much, ate too much, slept too little, danced too much, well, a man lived once and died completely.

In that mood, recalling such recent pleasantness, he was found by his wife as twilight crept into his large, mahogany-fitted office. He looked up to meet her inquiring gaze.

“Do you want the lights on?” she asked him.

Smiling, he shook his head; he still had such pride in Emma, she was such a well-turned, well-dressed woman, whether a lawyer's wife, or a judge's, or the hostess in the executive mansion! Her hair, graying a little, was as it should be, and so was her face and her figure. If he did not gain from marriage what others set such store by, he did have certain values he appreciated completely.

“I'll go with you, my dear,” he said. “Can we have an early dinner?”

“For any special reason?”

“I'm going to Chicago tonight,” the Governor said.

IV

The trip from Springfield to Chicago, covering that same unnatural separation of capital from center of commerce that exists in so many states, was a long and tiresome one; and generally the Governor would conquer boredom through work, or sleep, or companionship—cigars, whisky, and a private room lightening and shortening the two hundred-odd miles. Not that he cared much for liquor, but his friends did, and he enjoyed slouching into one of the big leather chairs the railroad put at his disposal, and listening to the stories told and the comments passed. He never actually broke down his reserve, a wall of protection he had long ago created; and that feeling of apartness gave him almost a spectator's position. Thus he could be together and comfortable with men he despised as well as with men he liked, nor did the talk of the cheap politicians, the ward-heelers, the county men, the old party hacks, and the rising speculators bite deep enough to move him to disgust. He could watch them, listen to them, hear their onerously repetitious dirty stories, listen to discussion of extramatrimonial affairs, and yet remain aloof. And if he tired of the whole thing, he could pick up a book and read, and his friends would look at each other and then lower their voices, so as not to disturb the Governor.

But, tonight, he brought no work with him and he went alone, without even a secretary. The porter had made up his bed, but though it was late, he had no great desire for sleep. He was on one of those journeys which are made as much to get away from one place as to go to another; and the fact that he had laid out a program for Chicago, a program that was in some ways a direct response to Darrow's insolence, gave him no peace of mind. He recognized that he had to take action and put this Haymarket specter in its grave. He would go to his-office in the Unity Block, and he would operate from there for a day; that would be soothing. He would call on his friends and demand their instant appearance. Joe Martin would come; so would Schilling and Tree and Mayor Cregier and King Mike McDonald, who bossed the city, and half a dozen more; and some would give advice, some would plead, some would shout at him. Yet he knew that nothing of what they said would matter particularly; the upshot of it was already decided in his own mind. He would get the records, review the case, stretch out the review while he felt the temper of the public, and then crawl through the only loophole. Instead of writing any decision on the fairness or unfairness of the trial, the impartiality of judge or jury or appeal courts, he would extend to the three men the mercy of the sovereign state, saying, in so many words: “You have been punished enough; go and sin no more.” Thereby, he would be merciful; he would be magnanimous; he would put the beast to rest, nor would he incur the enmity of certain forces. It was a weasel move put into weasel words, but almost no one would so term it. Only he, John Peter Altgeld, taking that course would realize the full implications of it.

He undressed and got into bed, but still he could not sleep, even though the jolting of a Pullman car usually acted like a bromide. Instead, his thoughts raced here and there with restless, pounding annoyance. He sought for an ethic, but there was no ethic; he recalled what Lucy Parsons had said, and in his mind he composed arguments against her. In his mind, he arranged his investments; he totaled his wealth, recalled how he had run ten thousand into a hundred thousand, and a hundred thousand into a million. He was the
Millionaire governor!
What was he fighting? Why should he nail himself onto a cross of three miserable labor agitators? What earthly sense did it make? When he could free them so easily, with the same harmless bit of equivocation that a hundred other governors had used, why should he resist that thought? Why should he lie awake and fight a conclusion he had already come to?

If he took the other path, if he decided that the three men were innocent, had always been innocent—

He put that thought out of his mind. “To hell with it,” he said. “To hell and be damned! Leave it alone! Let them rot in jail!” Life was short. At the age of forty-five, it comes on a man that perhaps only fifteen years are left. He wanted more. He wanted to sit in the Senate, and he could.