The American: A Middle Western Legend (28 page)

Darrow had joined them now, spreading his hands and shaking his head mutely. Bryan's voice thundered through the hall. He had garnered his speech from everywhere, books on oration, Patrick Henry, Cicero, Daniel Webster, and now he spilled it forth in pounding waves of sound:

“We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no longer; we petition no more. We defy them.”

Darrow was listening open-mouthed. When he turned to Altgeld, the Governor smiled slightly, and shrugged. “It doesn't matter what he says. This is a lesson, Clarence.”

The audience was won; they rode on the waves of sound. They shouted applause at the proper intervals; they hissed when they were supposed to hiss. They swayed to his rhythm. It was like nothing Altgeld had ever seen, and yet it was—it was a camp meeting, a revival, the subconsciously awaited and hoped-for climax to the hotel room, the bawdy houses, the packed saloons and beer halls, the drunken rolling in the gutters, the whole astonishing apparatus with which democratic America nominated her democratically elected presidents. The emotion of the hall could have been graphed like the steep side of a mountain; it rose with the speaker. It burst when he flung wide his arms and screamed:

“Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

The hall went wild. Men sprang on their chairs, yelling, whistling, clapping. Men danced on the floor, jigged, let go with Indian warwhoops. Hats sailed everywhere. Arms waved. One or two of the women present fainted, and others wept. Men embraced each other and pounded each other. The place had become a madhouse, and in it all and over it, Bryan stood, calm and smiling.

Clarence Darrow turned to look at Altgeld. The Governor sat as he had been before, his pale face without any particular expression.

XIX

Emma noticed that after Bryan's speech, her husband seemed less worried, less perturbed; he found time even to go for a walk with her along the lakefront. He said, “You know, dear, you get to think that something depends on you wholly—it doesn't.”

“No.”

This was a holiday. They sat on an old pier; they tossed stones into the water. The sun and the wind brought some color into his face. Emma, in a simple black skirt and a white blouse, dangling a big straw hat, looked like a girl. She had the poise and walk of a girl. She took his arm, and they were not too different from the hundreds of other couples strolling along the lake. They watched the boats on the horizon and speculated on what they were and where they were bound.

“If a few hours are like this,” Emma said, “what would a month be, or two months—or a year?”

He told her that when this was over, they would go to Europe.

“And if you win, you'll not only be Governor again, but with one arm in the White House. Pete, we'll never go anywhere. That's all right. I would have been the wife of the town grocer, more likely than not. Now I'm Pete Altgeld's wife. I'm not complaining.”

“You should complain.”

“No. But I've done all right, haven't I, Pete? I've learned.”

“We both learned.”

“I'm really a happy woman, Pete, a very happy woman. Happier than you are. Because I have what I want.”

“What do you think I want, Emma?”

“I don't know. Do you remember Parsons, Pete?”

“I remember.”

“I think—I think you want to believe in something as directly and as fully as he did. But you don't, do you, Pete?”

“No, I don't,” he said.

It was a fine, rich few hours. He had brought a book of Elizabeth Browning with him, and they sat down on a bench, and he read her the sonnets, a little embarrassed but not too much embarrassed to lose the pleasure of still being able to read love poems.

XX

When the balloting began, Altgeld was uncertain but not too uncertain, perturbed but not too perturbed; and sitting in his corner of the hall, checking off in his notebook the support he had reason to expect, the votes he had been promised, he thought it not wholly unreasonable that Richard Bland should come in on the first ballot. He wanted to think that; he was very tired by now, and he felt the approaching symptoms of another malarial attack. He was tired of the convention; he was sick to his stomach of it. The enthusiasm, which had carried him through a year and a half of struggle for mastery of the party, had waned very considerably. Drawn together like this, the political supporters of his party were far from impressive and not inspiring—the paunched southern Senators who could not talk for five minutes without launching a tirade against the
damn niggers
, the congressmen who, drunk or sober, unwound with the same patriotic tirades, the pinched-faced office-seekers, the few money men who, realizing their exclusiveness in this people's convention, tried to edge in and boss the show, the cynical politicians who played it in votes, dollars and cents and patronage, and gave Altgeld credit for no more than being one of them, but somehow sharper, and the smirking newspapermen, who managed to unmask the entire thing with just a smile and a whisper—not inspiring was any of this; he wanted it to be through and done.

The first ballot went off fairly smoothly. As Altgeld had suspected, Bland ran first with 223 votes, not enough to nominate, but certainly an impressive showing. What surprised him was that Bryan had shown second. He had expected something for Bryan, fourth or fifth, one or two states at the most to follow Nebraska. No sooner had the vote appeared, than Buck Hinrichsen ran up to him and said:

“Governor—we're going to split”

“What in hell do you mean, Buck?”

“I tell you, the delegation won't hold for Bland. They want Bryan.”

“That's nonsense.”

“Is it? We're calling for a caucus.”

“We?”

“That's right. I feel Bryan's the man.”

“Buck, have you lost your head? You know what I've put into this, if the others don't”

“I'm sorry, Governor. I feel Bryan's the man.”

“Sure you do. What in hell has he promised you? Has he promised to make you Secretary of State, of War, of the Treasury? Well, why don't you count how many cabinet posts there are and how many promises he's handed out before you sell him your liver?”

“I didn't think you'd look at it that way.”

“How did you think I'd look at it? All right—if they want a caucus, they can have it.”

But at the caucus, his lethargy departed and he became the old Altgeld, slashing, cutting, parrying. He was brilliant quick, mocking. Did they want to be tight-rope walkers—well, he'd stretch a rope across Lake Michigan, and they could walk it to their heart's content. Did they think Bryan could be elected; well, what had he said? He defied them to repeat one sentence from the Cross of Gold speech. “Bryan—” very slowly, “My God, we're Democrats, do you understand! We have a party, a tradition, we've produced some of the greatest men this land has known, Jefferson, Jackson—and you tell me Bryan, Bryan. Well, we're here to vote for Bland! We're pledged to Bland! We don't break our pledges! We sold the people a bill of goods—we don't change our merchandise. We don't toss the election to William McKinley because we were spellbound by a silver voice.”

He won them. With the second ballot, he could stand up and say, evenly and decisively, “Illinois casts forty-eight votes for Richard Parks Bland of Missouri.”

Some of the hall cheered, but more were silent, staring at the small, bearded man who had mysteriously wrested leadership of the party from Cleveland. But then his own delegation was at him again; Bryan was gaining. They demanded a caucus once more.

He granted it. And once more he drove them back, cowed them, and retained the right to say, “Illinois casts forty-eight votes for Bland of Missouri.”

Now they were at him. It reached a hysterical, feverish pitch. From all over the hall, Bryan's supporters crowded toward Altgeld, screaming, “No cross of gold! No cross of gold!” The place took on all the elements of riot; the pounding of the speakers' gavel could no longer be heard. Bryan supporters surged over the Governor, tearing at his clothes, and were literally thrown back by Altgeld men. Big Buck Hinrichsen found himself forcibly defending the little Governor.

But Altgeld sat calmly; he never moved, neither smiled nor frowned, but watched the incredible chaos with the interested eyes of a scientist who has observed, for the first time, a totally new and unexpected phenomenon. When they called for caucus again, he shrugged and nodded, and the action of filing from the hall acted as a check. At least part of the tumult died, enough for them to take the next ballot. Silence came as Altgeld led his delegation back to its place. He walked slowly; his shuffle was accentuated; yet a faint smile showed as he said, “Illinois casts forty-eight votes for Bland of Missouri.”

But now, for the first time, the Bryan thing took on appearances of a landslide. His vote topped Bland's. His supporters, screaming with joy, tumbled out of their chairs and fell into a snake dance. Round and round the hall it twisted, shattering chairs, signs, stands, men roaring with laughter as they embraced those in front, men sliding on their behinds and giggling hysterically. All control was going. Whisky bottles arched through the air and smashed against the ceiling, raining fragments of broken glass. Like a weird chant, “Cross of gold, cross of gold, cross of gold …”

The Bryan supporters had momentarily forgotten Altgeld, but his own men, men from half a dozen states who had worked with him these past eighteen months, crowded up to him, pleading, “For god's sake, stand firm! Stand by us!” “If Illinois holds, we can break this!” “For the love of God, hold!” Schilling had appeared from somewhere, almost magically, pleading, “Hold them, Pete, please.” And Sam McConnell, voiceless, but his eyes pleading. Yet already they were screaming for the caucus.

This time, as he faced them in the caucus room, Altgeld knew that he was beaten. He knew that far ahead he was beaten, and far behind too. It was not merely the fact of Bryan; it was more than Bryan and beyond Bryan, the whole structure in which he played the roll of his life, the structure that made a mad circus of a national nominating convention. He did not need Buck Hinrichsen's whisper:

“For God's sake, Governor, you're still running the party. But hold off now and you're not running anything, not anything.” He did not need the set faces to tell him that he was beaten, he knew. He knew better than any of them how well he was beaten, how completely.

He nodded. “All right,” he said.

They filed back. For the first time since it began, there was a degree of quiet in the convention hall. State after state was called and reported. Illinois was called. The Governor of Illinois rose and said, “Illinois casts forty-eight votes for William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska.”

He sat down, felt a hand grip his shoulder, saw Sam McConnell, and beside him Schilling and Martin. He was able to smile at them, and then he turned away to see the convention go finally and completely mad as William Jennings Bryan was nominated for President of the United States by the Democratic Party.

PART FIVE

The Third Variation

The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November is a curious day. Some things are American, others imported, others a blend. It is a country of that sort. Seek for a thing deep in the twisted roots of some old first-growth oak, and you will find that a part of Spain crept in long, long ago, or a part of Bohemia, or a part of Poland, or Germany, or Sweden, for sometimes that kind of thing rooted as deeply and securely in the soil here as the ancient oak itself. But some things are American; not just an election day, or any election day, but a traditional and sacrosanct raising of the ego, an incredible bow to the individual in a world that has stamped on the individual and ground him down into the earth, and proved to him that, aside from the fact that he might be president or a millionaire, he should not think for himself, act for himself, defy either custom or prejudice or stupidity, or assert himself in any fashion as a singular product of God's handiwork. But on election day all this sloughs away, and nakedly and unashamedly he comes forth as a man. He holds destiny in the subtle joints of his fingers, and though year after year he is faced, on his ballot, with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, back of his mind, back in that unused space that only hopes and yearns, there is the thought that this time it will be different. Perhaps the hope is backed by a little more than faith, for the citizens sees his land, sometimes, through the patriotic mud that is so constantly flung in his eyes; he knows, somehow, what is the flesh and the blood of the land, even though the words to express it have been stolen from him and perverted; and on election day, to at least some of him, comes the thought that he—by himself—has the power in his worn fingers to change everything, to throw out the barons, the thieves, bandits, the cheap politicians, the mealy-mouthed double-talkers. That he doesn't is a weary disappointment. He isn't sure, but few men are sure when they are alone, and in the voting booth he stands alone. He weighs truth and falsehood, and it is like trying to untangle a ball of yarn after a cat has had a day with it; he tries to find his way through the millions that have been poured down the drain of campaign—and in the end he votes without conviction. Conviction is only in the day itself, the first Tuesday after the, first Monday, that it might be, sometime.