The Conflict Part 42

Not so the others--and that in itself was proof enough of sinister intentions.

Under Victor Dorn's shrewd direction, the League candidates published, each man in a sworn statement, a complete description of all the property owned by himself and by his wife. "The character of a man's property," said the New Day, "is an indication of how that man will act in public affairs. Therefore, every candidate for public trust owes it to the people to tell them just what his property interests are. The League candidates do this--and an effective answer the schedules make to the charge that the League's candidates are men who have 'no stake in the community.' Now, let Mr. Sawyer, Mr. Hull, Mr. Galland and the rest of the League's opponents do likewise. Let us read how many shares of water and ice stock Mr. Sawyer owns. Let us hear from Mr.

Hull about his traction holdings--those of the Hull estate from which he draws his entire income. As for Mr. Galland, it would be easier for him to give the list of public and semi-public corporations in which he is not largely interested. But let him be specific, since he asks the people to trust him as judge between them and those corporations of which he is almost as large an owner as is his father-in-law."

This line of attack--and the publication of the largest contributors to the Republican and Democratic-Reform campaign fund--caused a great deal of public and private discussion. Large crowds cheered Hull when he, without doing the charges the honor of repeating them, denounced the "undignified and demagogic methods of our desperate opponents." The smaller Sawyer crowds applauded Sawyer when he waxed indignant over the attempts of those "socialists and anarchists, haters of this free country and spitters upon its glorious flag, to set poor against rich, to destroy our splendid American tradition of a free field and no favors, and let the best man win!"

Sawyer, and Davy, all the candidates of the machines and the reformers for that matter, made excellent public appearances. They discoursed eloquently about popular rights and wrongs. They denounced corruption; they stood strongly for the right and renounced and denounced the devil and all his works. They promised to do far more for the people than did the Leaguers; for Victor Dorn had trained his men to tell the exact truth--the difficulty of doing anything for the people at any near time or in any brief period because at a single election but a small part of the effective offices could be changed, and sweeping changes must be made before there could be sweeping benefits. "We'll do all we can,"

was their promise. "Their county government and their state government and their courts won't let us do much. But a beginning has to be made.

Let's make it!"

David Hull's public appearance was especially good. Not so effective as it has now become, because he was only a novice at campaigning in that year. But he looked, well--handsome, yet not too handsome, upper cla.s.s, but not arrogant, serious, frank and kindly. And he talked in a plain, honest way--you felt that no interest, however greedy, desperate and powerful, would dare approach that man with an improper proposal--and you quite forgot in real affairs the crude improper proposal is never the method of approach. When Davy, with grave emotion, referred to the "pitiful efforts to smirch the personal character of candidates," you could not but burn with scorn of the Victor Dorn tactics. What if Hull did own gas and water and ice and traction and railway stocks? Mustn't a rich man invest his money somehow? And how could he more creditably invest it than in local enterprises and in enterprises that opened up the country and gave employment to labor? What if the dividends were improperly, even criminally, earned? Must he therefore throw the dividends paid him into the street? As for a man of such a.s.sociations and financial interests being unfit fairly to administer public affairs, what balderdash! Who could be more fit than this educated, high minded man, of large private means, willing to devote himself to the public service instead of drinking himself to death or doing nothing at all. You would have felt, as you looked at Davy and listened to him, that it was little short of marvelous that a man could be so self-sacrificing as to consent to run the gauntlet of low mudslingers for no reward but an office with a salary of three thousand a year. And you would have been afraid that, if something was not done to stop these mudslingers, such men as David Hull would abandon their patriotic efforts to save their country--and then WHAT would become of the country?

But Victor and his a.s.sociates--on the platform, in the paper, in posters and dodgers and leaflets--continued to press home the ugly questions--and continued to call attention to the fact that, while there had been ample opportunity, none of the candidates had answered any of the questions. And presently--keeping up this line of attack--Victor opened out in another. He had Falconer, the League candidate for judge, draw up a careful statement of exactly what each public officer could do under existing law to end or to check the most flagrant of the abuses from which the people of Remsen City were suffering. With this statement as a basis, he formulated a series of questions--"Yes or no? If you are elected, will you or will you not?"

The League candidates promptly gave the specific pledges. Sawyer dodged. David Hull was more adroit. He held up a copy of the list of questions at a big meeting in Odd Fellows' Hall.

"Our opponents have resorted to a familiar trick--the question and the pledge." (Applause. Sensation. Fear lest "our candidate" was about to "put his foot in it.") "We need resort to no tricks. I promptly and frankly, for our whole ticket, answer their questions. I say, 'We will lay hold of ANY and EVERY abuse, as soon as it presents itself, and WILL SMASH IT."

Applause, cheers, whistlings--a demonstration lasting nearly five minutes by a watch held by Gamaliel Tooker, who had a mania for gathering records of all kinds and who had voted for every Republican candidate for President since the party was founded. Davy did not again refer to Victor Dorn's questions. But Victor continued to press them and to ask whether a public officer ought not to go and present himself to abuses, instead of waiting for them to hunt him out and present themselves to him.

Such was the campaign as the public saw it. And such was in reality the campaign of the Leaguers. But the real campaign--the one conducted by Kelly and House--was entirely different. They were not talking; they were working.

They were working on a plan based somewhat after this fashion:

In former and happier days, when people left politics to politicians and minded their own business, about ninety-five per cent. of the voters voted their straight party tickets like good soldiers. Then politics was a high-cla.s.s business, and politicians devoted themselves to getting out the full party vote and to buying or cajoling to one side or the other the doubtful ten per cent that held the balance of power. That golden age, however, had pa.s.sed. People had gotten into the habit of fancying that, because certain men had grown very, very rich through their own genius for money-making, supplemented perhaps by accidental favors from law and public officials, therefore politics in some way might possibly concern the private citizen, might account for the curious discrepancy between his labor and its reward. The impression was growing that, while the energy of the citizen determined the PRODUCTION of wealth, it was politics that determined the distribution of wealth. And under the influence of this impression, the percentage of sober, steady, reliable voters who "stood by the grand old party" had shrunk to about seventy, while the percentage of voters who had to be worried about had grown to about thirty.

The Kelly-House problem was, what shall we do as to that annoying thirty per cent?

Kelly--for he was THE brain of the bi-partisan machine, proposed to throw the election to the House-Reform "combine." His henchmen and House's made a careful poll, and he sat up all night growing haggard and puffy-eyed over the result. According to this poll, not only was the League's entire ticket to be elected, but also Galland, despite his having the Republican, the Democratic and the Reform nominations, was to be beaten by the League's Falconer. He couldn't understand it. The Sawyer meetings were quite up to his expectations and indicated that the Republican rank and file was preparing to swallow the Sawyer dose without blinking. The Alliance and the Democratic meetings were equally satisfactory. Hull was "making a hit." Everywhere he had big crowds and enthusiasm. The League meetings were only slightly better attended than during the last campaign; no indication there of the League "landslide."

Yet Kelly could not, dared not, doubt that poll. It was his only safe guide. And it a.s.sured him that the long-dreaded disaster was at hand.

In vain was the clever trick of nominating a popular, "clean" young reformer and opposing him with an unpopular regular of the most offensive type--more offensive even than a professional politician of unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been rasping the nerves of Boss Kelly.

What should he do?

It was clear to him that the doom of the old system was settled. The plutocrats, the upper-cla.s.s crowd--the "silk stockings," as they had been called from the days when men wore knee-breeches--they fancied that this nation-wide movement was sporadic, would work out in a few years, and that the people would return to their allegiance. Kelly had no such delusions. Issuing from the depths of the people, he understood. They were learning a little something at last. They were discovering that the ever higher prices for everything and stationary or falling wages and salaries had some intimate relation with politics; that at the national capitol, at the state capitol, in the county courthouse, in the city hall their share of the nation's vast annual production of wealth was being determined--and that the persons doing the dividing, though elected by them, were in the employ of the plutocracy. Kelly, seeing and comprehending, felt that it behooved him to get for his masters--and for himself--all that could be got in the brief remaining time. Not that he was thinking of giving up the game; nothing so foolish as that. It would be many a year before the plutocracy could be routed out, before the people would have the intelligence and the persistence to claim and to hold their own. In the meantime, they could be fooled and robbed by a hundred tricks. He was not a const.i.tutional lawyer, but he had practical good sense, and could enjoy the joke upon the people in their entanglement in the toils of their own making. Through fear of governmental tyranny they had divided authority among legislators, executives and judges, national, state, local. And, behold, outside of the government, out where they had never dreamed of looking, had grown up a tyranny that was perpetuating itself by dodging from one of these divided authorities to another, eluding capture, wearing out the not too strong perseverance of popular pursuit.

But, thanks to Victor Dorn, the local graft was about to be taken away from the politicians and the plutocracy. How put off that unpleasant event? Obviously, in the only way left unclosed. The election must be stolen.

It is a very human state of mind to feel that what one wants somehow has already become in a sense one's property. It is even more profoundly human to feel that what one has had, however wrongfully, cannot justly be taken away. So Mr. Kelly did not regard himself as a thief, taking what did not belong to him; no, he was holding on to and defending his own.

Victor Dorn had not been in politics since early boyhood without learning how the political game is conducted in all its branches.

Because there had never been the remotest chance of victory, Victor had never made preelection polls of his party. So the first hint that he got of there being a real foundation for the belief of some of his a.s.sociates in an impending victory was when he found out that Kelly and House were "colonizing" voters, and were selecting election officers with an eye to "dirty work." These preparations, he knew, could not be making for the same reason as in the years before the "gentlemen's agreement" between the Republican and the Democratic machines. Kelly, he knew, wanted House and the Alliance to win. Therefore, the colonizations in the slums and the appointing of notorious buckos to positions where they would control the ballot boxes could be directed only against the Workingmen's League. Kelly must have accurate information that the League was likely, or at least not unlikely, to win.

Victor had thought he had so schooled himself that victory and defeat were mere words to him. He soon realized how he had overestimated the power of philosophy over human nature. During that campaign he had been imagining that he was putting all his ability, all his energy, all his resourcefulness into the fight. He now discovered his mistake.

Hope--definite hope--of victory had hardly entered his mind before he was organizing and leading on such a campaign as Remsen City had never known in all its history--and Remsen City was in a state where politics is the chief distraction of the people. Sleep left him; he had no need of sleep. Day and night his brain worked, pouring out a steady stream of ideas. He became like a gigantic electric storage battery to which a hundred, a thousand small batteries come for renewal. He charged his a.s.sociates afresh each day. And they in turn became amazingly more powerful forces for acting upon the minds of the people.

In the last week of the campaign it became common talk throughout the city that the "Dorn crowd" would probably carry the election. Kelly was the only one of the opposition leaders who could maintain a calm front. Kelly was too seasoned a gambler even to show his feelings in his countenance, but, had he been showing them, his following would not have been depressed, for he had made preparations to meet and overcome any majority short of unanimity which the people might roll up against him. The discouragement in the House-Alliance camps became so apparent that Kelly sent his chief lieutenant, Wellman, successor to the fugitive Rivers, to House and to David Hull with a message. It was delivered to Hull in this form:

"The old man says he wants you to stop going round with your chin knocking against your knees. He says everybody is saying you have given up the fight."

"Our meetings these last few days are very discouraging," said Davy gloomily.

"What's meetin's?" retorted Wellman. "You fellows that shoot off your mouths think you're doing the campaigning. But the real stuff is being doped up by us fellows who ain't seen or heard. The old man says you are going to win. That's straight. He knows. It's only a question of the size of your majority. So pull yourself together, Mr. Hull, and put the ginger back into your speeches, and stir up that there gang of dudes. What a gang of Johnnies and quitters they are!"

Hull was looking directly and keenly at the secret messenger. Upon his lips was a question he dared not ask. Seeing the impudent, disdainful smile in Wellman's eyes, he hastily shifted his glance. It was most uncomfortable, this suspicion of the hidden meaning of the Kelly message--a suspicion ALMOST confirmed by that mocking smile of the messenger. Hull said with embarra.s.sment:

"Tell Mr. Kelly I'm much obliged."

"And you'll begin to make a fight again?"

"Certainly," said Davy impatiently.

When he was alone he became once more involved in one of those internal struggles to prevent himself from seeing--and smelling--a hideous and malodorous truth. These struggles were painfully frequent. The only consolation the young reformer found was that they were increasingly less difficult to end in the way such struggles must be ended if a high-minded young man is to make a career in "practical" life.

On election day after he had voted he went for a long walk in the woods to the south of the town, leaving word at his headquarters what direction he had taken. After walking two hours he sat down on a log in the shade near where the highroad crossed Foaming Creek. He became so absorbed in his thoughts that he sprang to his feet with a wild look when Selma's voice said, close by:

"May I interrupt a moment, Mr. Hull?"

He recovered slowly. His cheeks were pale and his voice uncertain as he replied:

"You? I beg your pardon. This campaign has played smash with my nerves."

He now noted that she was regarding him with a glance so intense that it seemed to concentrate all the pa.s.sion and energy in that slim, nervous body of hers. He said uncomfortably:

"You wished to see me?"

"I wonder what you were thinking about," she said in her impetuous, direct way. "It makes me almost afraid to ask what I came to ask."

"Won't you sit?" said he.

"No, thanks," replied she.

"Then you'll compel me to stand. And I'm horribly tired."

She seated herself upon the log. He made himself comfortable at its other end.

"I've just come from Victor Dorn's house," said she. "There was a consultation among the leaders of our party. We have learned that your people--Kelly and House--are going to steal the election on the count this evening. They are committing wholesale frauds now--sending round gangs of repeaters, intimidating our voters, openly buying votes at the polling places--paying men as much not to vote as they usually pay for votes."

Davy, though latterly he had grown so much older and graver that no one now thought of him as Davy, contrived to muster a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You oughtn't to let them deceive you with that silly talk, Miss Gordon. The losers always indulge in it. Your good sense must tell you how foolish it is. The police are on guard, and the courts of justice are open."

"Yes--the police are on guard--to protect fraud and to drive us away from the polls. And the courts are open--but not for us."

David was gentle with her. "I know how sincere you are, Selma," said he. "No doubt you believe those things. Perhaps Dorn believes them, also--from repeating them so often. But all the same I'm sorry to hear you say them."

He tried to look at her. He found that his eyes were more comfortable when his glance was elsewhere.

"This has been a sad campaign to me," he went on. "I did not appreciate before what demagogery meant--how dangerous it is--how wicked, how criminally wicked it is for men to stir up the lower cla.s.ses against the educated leadership of the community."