Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Great Fight for Clean Government

"As to the government of this city," said Mr. Newberry, leaning back in a leather armchair at the Mausoleum Club and lighting a second cigar, "it's rotten, that's all."

"Absolutely rotten," assented Mr. Dick Overend, ringing the bell for a second whiskey and soda.

"Corrupt," said Mr. Newberry, between two puffs of his cigar.

"Full of graft," said Mr. Overend, flicking his ashes into the grate.

"Crooked aldermen," said Mr. Newberry.

"A bum city solicitor," said Mr. Overend, "and an infernal grafter for treasurer."

"Yes," assented Mr. Newberry, and then, leaning forwards in his chair and looking carefully about the corridors of the club, he spoke behind his hand and said, "And the mayor's the biggest grafter of the lot. And what's more," he added, sinking his voice to a whisper, "the time has come to speak out about it fearlessly."

Mr. Overend nodded. "It's a tyranny," he said.

"Worse than Russia," rejoined Mr. Newberry.

They had been sitting in a quiet corner of the club—it was on a Sunday evening—and had fallen into talking, first of all, of the present rottenness of the federal politics of the United States—not argumentatively or with any heat, but with the reflective sadness that steals over an elderly man when he sits in the leather armchair of a comfortable club smoking a good cigar and musing on the decadence of the present day. The rottenness of the federal government didn't anger them. It merely grieved them.

They could remember—both of them—how different everything was when they were young men just entering on life. When Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were young, men went into congress from pure patriotism; there was no such thing as graft or crookedness, as they both admitted, in those days; and as for the United States Senate—here their voices were almost hushed in awe—why, when they were young, the United States Senate—

But no, neither of them could find a phrase big enough for their meaning.

They merely repeated "as for the United States Senate—" and then shook their heads and took long drinks of whiskey and soda.

Then, naturally, speaking of the rottenness of the federal government had led them to talk of the rottenness of the state legislature. How different from the state legislatures that they remembered as young men! Not merely different in the matter of graft, but different, so Mr. Newberry said, in the calibre of the men. He recalled how he had been taken as a boy of twelve by his father to hear a debate. He would never forget it. Giants! he said, that was what they were. In fact, the thing was more like a Witenagemot than a legislature. He said he distinctly recalled a man, whose name he didn't recollect, speaking on a question he didn't just remember what, either for or against he just couldn't recall which; it thrilled him. He would never forget it. It stayed in his memory as if it were yesterday.

But as for the present legislature—here Mr. Dick Overend sadly nodded assent in advance to what he knew was coming—as for the present legislature—well—Mr. Newberry had had, he said, occasion to visit the state capital a week before in connection with a railway bill that he was trying to—that is, that he was anxious to—in short in connection with a railway bill, and when he looked about him at the men in the legislature—positively he felt ashamed; he could put it no other way than that—ashamed.

After which, from speaking of the crookedness of the state government Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were led to talk of the crookedness of the city government! And they both agreed, as above, that things were worse than in Russia. What secretly irritated them both most was that they had lived and done business under this infernal corruption for thirty or forty years and hadn't noticed it. They had been too busy.

The fact was that their conversation reflected not so much their own original ideas as a general wave of feeling that was passing over the whole community.

There had come a moment—quite suddenly it seemed—when it occurred to everybody at the same time that the whole government of the city was rotten. The word is a strong one. But it is the one that was used. Look at the aldermen, they said—rotten! Look at the city solicitor, rotten! And as for the mayor himself—phew!

The thing came like a wave. Everybody felt it at once. People wondered how any sane, intelligent community could tolerate the presence of a set of corrupt scoundrels like the twenty aldermen of the city. Their names, it was said, were simply a byword throughout the United States for rank criminal corruption. This was said so widely that everybody started hunting through the daily papers to try to find out who in blazes were aldermen, anyhow. Twenty names are hard to remember, and as a matter of fact, at the moment when this wave of feeling struck the city, nobody knew or cared who were aldermen, anyway.

To tell the truth, the aldermen had been much the same persons for about fifteen or twenty years. Some were in the produce business, others were butchers, two were grocers, and all of them wore blue checkered waistcoats and red ties and got up at seven in the morning to attend the vegetable and other markets. Nobody had ever really thought about them—that is to say, nobody on Plutoria Avenue. Sometimes one saw a picture in the paper and wondered for a moment who the person was; but on looking more closely and noticing what was written under it, one said, "Oh, I see, an alderman," and turned to something else.

"Whose funeral is that?" a man would sometimes ask on Plutoria Avenue. "Oh just one of the city aldermen," a passerby would answer hurriedly. "Oh I see, I beg your pardon, I thought it might be somebody important."

At which both laughed.

It was not just clear how and where this movement of indignation had started. People said that it was part of a new wave of public morality that was sweeping over the entire United States. Certainly it was being remarked in almost every section of the country. Chicago newspapers were attributing its origin to the new vigour and the fresh ideals of the middle west. In Boston it was said to be due to a revival of the grand old New England spirit. In Philadelphia they called it the spirit of William Penn. In the south it was said to be the reassertion of southern chivalry making itself felt against the greed and selfishness of the north, while in the north they recognized it at once as a protest against the sluggishness and ignorance of the south. In the west they spoke of it as a revolt against the spirit of the east and in the east they called it a reaction against the lawlessness of the west. But everywhere they hailed it as a new sign of the glorious unity of the country.

If therefore Mr. Newberry and Mr. Overend were found to be discussing the corrupt state of their city they only shared in the national sentiments of the moment. In fact in the same city hundreds of other citizens, as disinterested as themselves, were waking up to the realization of what was going on. As soon as people began to look into the condition of things in the city they were horrified at what they found. It was discovered, for example, that Alderman Schwefeldampf was an undertaker! Think of it! In a city with a hundred and fifty deaths a week, and sometimes even better, an undertaker sat on the council! A city that was about to expropriate land and to spend four hundred thousand dollars for a new cemetery, had an undertaker on the expropriation committee itself! And worse than that! Alderman Undercutt was a butcher! In a city that consumed a thousand tons of meat every week! And Alderman O'Hooligan—it leaked out—was an Irishman! Imagine it! An Irishman sitting on the police committee of the council in a city where thirty-eight and a half out of every hundred policemen were Irish, either by birth or parentage! The thing was monstrous.

So when Mr. Newberry said "It's worse than Russia!" he meant it, every word.

Now just as Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were finishing their discussion, the huge bulky form of Mayor McGrath came ponderously past them as they sat. He looked at them sideways out of his eyes—he had eyes like plums in a mottled face—and, being a born politician, he knew by the very look of them that they were talking of something that they had no business to be talking about. But,—being a politician—he merely said, "Good evening, gentlemen," without a sign of disturbance.

"Good evening, Mr. Mayor," said Mr. Newberry, rubbing his hands feebly together and speaking in an ingratiating tone. There is no more pitiable spectacle than an honest man caught in the act of speaking boldly and fearlessly of the evil-doer.

"Good evening, Mr. Mayor," echoed Mr. Dick Overend, also rubbing his hands; "warm evening, is it not?"

The mayor gave no other answer than that deep guttural grunt which is technically known in municipal interviews as refusing to commit oneself.

"Did he hear?" whispered Mr. Newberry as the mayor passed out of the club.

"I don't care if he did," whispered Mr. Dick Overend.

Half an hour later Mayor McGrath entered the premises of the Thomas Jefferson Club, which was situated in the rear end of a saloon and pool room far down in the town.

"Boys," he said to Alderman O'Hooligan and Alderman Gorfinkel, who were playing freeze-out poker in a corner behind the pool tables, "you want to let the boys know to keep pretty dark and go easy. There's a lot of talk I don't like about the elections going round the town. Let the boys know that just for a while the darker they keep the better."

Whereupon the word was passed from the Thomas Jefferson Club to the George Washington Club and thence to the Eureka Club (coloured), and to the Kossuth Club (Hungarian), and to various other centres of civic patriotism in the lower parts of the city. And forthwith such a darkness began to spread over them that not even honest Diogenes with his lantern could have penetrated their doings.

"If them stiffs wants to make trouble," said the president of the George Washington Club to Mayor McGrath a day or two later, "they won't never know what they've bumped up against."

"Well," said the heavy mayor, speaking slowly and cautiously and eyeing his henchman with quiet scrutiny, "you want to go pretty easy now, I tell you."

The look which the mayor directed at his satellite was much the same glance that Morgan the buccaneer might have given to one of his lieutenants before throwing him overboard.

Meantime the wave of civic enthusiasm as reflected in the conversations of Plutoria Avenue grew stronger with every day.

"The thing is a scandal," said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. "Why, these fellows down at the city hall are simply a pack of rogues. I had occasion to do some business there the other day (it was connected with the assessment of our soda factories) and do you know, I actually found that these fellows take money!"

"I say!" said Mr. Peter Spillikins, to whom he spoke, "I say! You don't say!"

"It's a fact," repeated Mr. Fyshe. "They take money. I took the assistant treasurer aside and I said, 'I want such and such done,' and I slipped a fifty dollar bill into his hand. And the fellow took it, took it like a shot."

"He took it!" gasped Mr. Spillikins.

"He did," said Mr. Fyshe. "There ought to be a criminal law for that sort of thing."

"I say!" exclaimed Mr. Spillikins, "they ought to go to jail for a thing like that."

"And the infernal insolence of them," Mr. Fyshe continued. "I went down the next day to see the deputy assistant (about a thing connected with the same matter), told him what I wanted and passed a fifty dollar bill across the counter and the fellow fairly threw it back at me, in a perfect rage. He refused it!"

"Refused it," gasped Mr. Spillikins, "I say!"

Conversations such as this filled up the leisure and divided the business time of all the best people in the city.

In the general gloomy outlook, however, one bright spot was observable. The "wave" had evidently come just at the opportune moment. For not only were civic elections pending but just at this juncture four or five questions of supreme importance would be settled by the incoming council. There was, for instance, the question of the expropriation of the Traction Company (a matter involving many millions); there was the decision as to the renewal of the franchise of the Citizens' Light Company—a vital question; there was also the four hundred thousand dollar purchase of land for the new addition to the cemetery, a matter that must be settled. And it was felt, especially on Plutoria Avenue, to be a splendid thing that the city was waking up, in the moral sense, at the very time when these things were under discussion. All the shareholders of the Traction Company and the Citizens' Light—and they included the very best, the most high-minded, people in the city—felt that what was needed now was a great moral effort, to enable them to lift the city up and carry it with them, or, if not all of it, at any rate as much of it as they could.

"It's a splendid movement!" said Mr. Fyshe (he was a leading shareholder and director of the Citizens' Light), "what a splendid thing to think that we shan't have to deal for our new franchise with a set of corrupt rapscallions like these present aldermen. Do you know, Furlong, that when we approached them first with a proposition for a renewal for a hundred and fifty years they held us up! Said it was too long! Imagine that! A hundred and fifty years (only a century and a half) too long for the franchise! They expect us to install all our poles, string our wires, set up our transformers in their streets and then perhaps at the end of a hundred years find ourselves compelled to sell out at a beggarly valuation. Of course we knew what they wanted. They meant us to hand them over fifty dollars each to stuff into their rascally pockets."

"Outrageous!" said Mr. Furlong.

"And the same thing with the cemetery land deal," went on Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. "Do you realize that, if the movement hadn't come along and checked them, those scoundrels would have given that rogue Schwefeldampf four hundred thousand dollars for his fifty acres! Just think of it!"

"I don't know," said Mr. Furlong with a thoughtful look upon his face, "that four hundred thousand dollars is an excessive price, in and of itself, for that amount of land."

"Certainly not," said Mr. Fyshe, very quietly and decidedly, looking at Mr. Furlong in a searching way as he spoke. "It is not a high price. It seems to me, speaking purely as an outsider, a very fair, reasonable price for fifty acres of suburban land, if it were the right land. If, for example, it were a case of making an offer for that very fine stretch of land, about twenty acres, is it not, which I believe your Corporation owns on the other side of the cemetery, I should say four hundred thousand is a most modest price."

Mr. Furlong nodded his head reflectively.

"You had thought, had you not, of offering it to the city?" said Mr. Fyshe.

"We did," said Mr. Furlong, "at a more or less nominal sum—four hundred thousand or whatever it might be. We felt that for such a purpose, almost sacred as it were, one would want as little bargaining as possible."

"Oh, none at all," assented Mr. Fyshe.

"Our feeling was," went on Mr. Furlong, "that if the city wanted our land for the cemetery extension, it might have it at its own figure—four hundred thousand, half a million, in fact at absolutely any price, from four hundred thousand up, that they cared to put on it. We didn't regard it as a commercial transaction at all. Our reward lay merely in the fact of selling it to them."

"Exactly," said Mr. Fyshe, "and of course your land was more desirable from every point of view. Schwefeldampf's ground is encumbered with a growth of cypress and evergreens and weeping willows which make it quite unsuitable for an up-to-date cemetery; whereas yours, as I remember it, is bright and open—a loose sandy soil with no trees and very little grass to overcome."

"Yes," said Mr. Furlong. "We thought, too, that our ground, having the tanneries and the chemical factory along the farther side of it, was an ideal place for—" he paused, seeking a mode of expressing his thought.

"For the dead," said Mr. Fyshe, with becoming reverence. And after this conversation Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong senior understood one another absolutely in regard to the new movement.

It was astonishing in fact how rapidly the light spread.

"Is Rasselyer-Brown with us?" asked someone of Mr. Fyshe a few days later.

"Heart and soul," answered Mr. Fyshe. "He's very bitter over the way these rascals have been plundering the city on its coal supply. He says that the city has been buying coal wholesale at the pit mouth at three fifty—utterly worthless stuff, he tells me. He has heard it said that everyone of these scoundrels has been paid from twenty-five to fifty dollars a winter to connive at it."

"Dear me," said the listener.

"Abominable, is it not?" said Mr. Fyshe. "But as I said to Rasselyer-Brown, what can one do if the citizens themselves take no interest in these things. 'Take your own case,' I said to him, 'how is it that you, a coal man, are not helping the city in this matter? Why don't you supply the city?' He shook his head, 'I wouldn't do it at three-fifty,' he said. 'No,' I answered, 'but will you at five?' He looked at me for a moment and then he said, 'Fyshe, I'll do it; at five, or at anything over that they like to name. If we get a new council in they may name their own figure.' 'Good,' I said. 'I hope all the other businessmen will be animated with the same spirit.'"

Thus it was that the light broke and spread and illuminated in all directions. People began to realize the needs of the city as they never had before. Mr. Boulder, who owned, among other things, a stone quarry and an asphalt company, felt that the paving of the streets was a disgrace. Mr. Skinyer, of Skinyer and Beatem, shook his head and said that the whole legal department of the city needed reorganization; it needed, he said, new blood. But he added always in a despairing tone, how could one expect to run a department with the head of it drawing only six thousand dollars; the thing was impossible. If, he argued, they could superannuate the present chief solicitor and get a man, a good man (Mr. Skinyer laid emphasis on this) at, say, fifteen thousand there might be some hope.

"Of course," said Mr. Skinyer to Mr. Newberry in discussing the topic, "one would need to give him a proper staff of assistants so as to take off his hands all the routine work—the mere appearance in court, the preparation of briefs, the office consultation, the tax revision and the purely legal work. In that case he would have his hands free to devote himself entirely to those things, which—in fact to turn his attention in whatever direction he might feel it was advisable to turn it."

Within a week or two the public movement had found definite expression and embodied itself in the Clean Government Association. This was organized by a group of leading and disinterested citizens who held their first meeting in the largest upstairs room of the Mausoleum Club. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, Mr. Boulder, and others keenly interested in obtaining simply justice for the stockholders of the Traction and the Citizens' Light were prominent from the start. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, Mr. Furlong senior and others were there, not from special interest in the light or traction questions, but, as they said themselves, from pure civic spirit. Dr. Boomer was there to represent the university with three of his most presentable professors, cultivated men who were able to sit in a first-class club and drink whiskey and soda and talk as well as any businessman present. Mr. Skinyer, Mr. Beatem and others represented the bar. Dr. McTeague, blinking in the blue tobacco smoke, was there to stand for the church. There were all-round enthusiasts as well, such as Mr. Newberry and the Overend brothers and Mr. Peter Spillikins.

"Isn't it fine," whispered Mr. Spillikins to Mr. Newberry, "to see a set of men like these all going into a thing like this, not thinking of their own interests a bit?"

Mr. Fyshe, as chairman, addressed the meeting. He told them they were there to initiate a great free voluntary movement of the people. It had been thought wise, he said, to hold it with closed doors and to keep it out of the newspapers. This would guarantee the league against the old underhand control by a clique that had hitherto disgraced every part of the administration of the city. He wanted, he said, to see everything done henceforth in broad daylight: and for this purpose he had summoned them there at night to discuss ways and means of action. After they were once fully assured of exactly what they wanted to do and how they meant to do it, the league he said, would invite the fullest and freest advice from all classes in the city. There were none he said, amid great applause, that were so lowly that they would not be invited—once the platform of the league was settled—to advise and co-operate. All might help, even the poorest. Subscription lists would be prepared which would allow any sum at all, from one to five dollars, to be given to the treasurer. The league was to be democratic or nothing. The poorest might contribute as little as one dollar: even the richest would not be allowed to give more than five. Moreover he gave notice that he intended to propose that no actual official of the league should be allowed under its by-laws to give anything. He himself—if they did him the honour to make him president as he had heard it hinted was their intention—would be the first to bow to this rule. He would efface himself. He would obliterate himself, content in the interests of all, to give nothing. He was able to announce similar pledges from his friends, Mr. Boulder, Mr. Furlong, Dr. Boomer, and a number of others.

Quite a storm of applause greeted these remarks by Mr. Fyshe, who flushed with pride as he heard it.

"Now, gentlemen," he went on, "this meeting is open for discussion. Remember it is quite informal, anyone may speak. I as chairman make no claim to control or monopolize the discussion. Let everyone understand—"

"Well then, Mr. Chairman," began Mr. Dick Overend.

"One minute, Mr. Overend," said Mr. Fyshe. "I want everyone to understand that he may speak as—"

"May I say then—" began Mr. Newberry.

"Pardon me, Mr. Newberry," said Mr. Fyshe, "I was wishing first to explain that not only may all participate but that we invite—"

"In that case—" began Mr. Newberry.