The American: A Middle Western Legend (8 page)

As he sat back now, wiping his lips after the coffee and a crisp little kaiser roll, warm and full of melted butter, he took refuge in the thought that, for better or worse, he was Chicago, this fine house he lived in, jurisprudence, the legal bench, a handsome wife, and many other solid and substantial things. Yet for all of that, he wanted to put his justification into words, talk to someone who would understand all of his position and agree with it. So he said to his wife, “Emma, you'll call on Joe Martin and ask him to drop around.” And as an afterthought and defense, added, “About that North Side property.”

“But Schilling is coming,” she said.

“Schilling? This morning?”

“He called and said he would be here a little before nine. I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

“Why did you forget to tell me? Of all people I don't want to see today, Schilling is first. Schilling! Do you know what he's coming here to do?—to put needles into me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, nothing,” the Judge said. “I can't see him.”

“You can't see Schilling? Pete, what are you talking about? He's coming here. I invited him.” In one way, she knew more about politics than he did, more about whom he could or could not afford to offend.

“All right,” the Judge whispered, “all right.” He stood up, and the security of substance was gone from him. “I'll be in my study. Send him up there when he comes.”

VII

Emma watched the Judge as he climbed up the stairs. She had known that he would be disturbed today; certainly, anyone who lived in or about Chicago and who was at all civilized could not regard with equanimity the prospect of four men hanging by their necks until they were dead; even if these men were cutthroats, ordinary murderers, it was still not a comfortable process to contemplate their last few hours on the earth. But she had not suspected that he would be so violently moved. As with everyone else in Chicago, they had both followed the Haymarket tragedy, from the time the bomb was thrown, a year and a half ago, to the arrests, the trial, the appeals, the petitions, and finally the great, nationwide, desperate effort to save the lives of the condemned men. Yet through it all—so much of it confusing, contradictory—Emma had leaned on the Judge's judicial aloofness. And, when you listened to him and his friends discussing the evidence in highly legal terms, the face of the matter changed from a life-and-death struggle to an intricate and fascinating puzzle.

Her sympathies, and most of the Judge's too, for that matter, were in the limbo of undecided public opinion. Perhaps because she knew less about it, and perhaps because she was less worldly, Emma was more repelled than the Judge by such words as
communism, socialism
, and
anarchy.
Actually, these words reacted upon her with physical force, painting independent images, derived originally from a thousand sources, casual conversation, newspaper stories, cartoons, little leaflets shown about as curiosities, and others too numerous to name. She was a woman who feared violence, who was horrified by pain, who in a curious way admired weakness more than strength, yet was attracted beyond her ability to resist by both strength and violence. Though she knew how much the Judge wanted children, childbirth was a horrible miasma to her, partaking of all those matters of violence she tried so carefully to avoid. Still, in the person of her own husband, violence drew her; do what he might, she would never forget him as he had been when young, and perversely that drew her toward him. The Haymarket affair had all the implications of the unknown, the terrible, and the violent. An anarchist was a wild, bearded devil, a bomb in each dirty hand; a communist was someone unalterably opposed to her, though for reasons she could not define, an unbeliever, an enemy of God and man, and in that a socialist stood beside him. Once, on a tour of the slaughterhouses, a tour she shouldn't have taken and which remained impressed on her consciousness like a bad dream, she saw the men pouring out of the yard gates at noon, and someone remarked, “Those are the workers.” Of course, it was nonsense; she had known workingmen before, in her home town, in her childhood, in Chicago too; but this was different, big, bearded, shuffling men, bloody from fingertip to elbow, wearing leather aprons, black-streaked with blood, walking in shoes that were blood from sole to ankle, stone-visaged, tired, sullen. Always afterward, when someone spoke of the workers or labor, this picture came to mind, and seen in conjunction with all her concepts of anarchists and socialists, it was more than terrible.

Her first meeting with Schilling had modified that impression; but it was not difficult for her to tell herself that Schilling was different, the exception which proved the rule. She truly liked Schilling, he seemed to be so simple, gentle, and, at times, wise.

Emma suspected that, at first, Schilling's attraction toward her husband, and her husband's toward him, was purely political. Each suspected that he could use the other. But later, when she saw how they would sit and talk until late into the evening, in German, which her husband spoke so little now, drinking beer, smiling with pleasure, she realized that the men really complemented each other. Schilling was the closest thing to a real friend her husband had, and that pleased her too; for his loneliness was a formidable thing, so formidable that sometimes she thought it would drive him away from her and from the world. So she seized on Schilling, and then she too came to like him.

It was hard not to like Schilling. He was a small, dry man, a carpenter who built boxes and barrels for the packing house of Libby, McNeill and Libby. For years he had been in the labor movement, a violent radical socialist once, though a lot cooler now, but still a left-wing leader in the great struggle for the eight-hour day. Listening to Schilling talk, Emma got a colorful impression of what this turbulent, nationwide struggle for the eight-hour day was, of the position of the Knights of Labor, of the terrible life-and-death battles of the Molly Maguires, of the private armies of the Pinkertons. It was hardly possible for her to relate this to the quiet and orderly life she lived, and her first-hand relations with household workers, plumbers, carpenters, and delivery men hardly gave substance to Schilling's words. Yet she lent a willing ear when he said:

“And what is labor, my dear Mrs. Altgeld? I will tell you. Labor is a sleeping giant, a giant who has been a long time asleep and is only now beginning to stretch himself and awaken. He isn't one, he is millions, and when he wakes up, then, believe me, you will see some things happen.”

The phrase “he is millions” stuck in her mind; votes, too, were counted in millions, and she had dreams for her husband he himself never expected. The whole eight-hour movement had become political, to a degree, and when Schilling hinted once that her husband would do well to make his political alliances where the votes were, she nodded agreement. But actually, those votes were, for her, imprisoned vaguely in little Schilling; she could never conceive of any sort of alliance with the awful specter which came forth from the slaughterhouse gates that day. And when she thought of the Haymarket defendants, she thought of them not in the light of Schilling, but in the light of those blood-stained, semi-human things who killed the flesh men ate.

Therefore, she took refuge in her husband's legal aloofness, and she readily became convinced, along with thousands of others, of the guilt of the four men who were to be hanged. As her husband and his friends said, the trial was a test of democracy, and democracy had not failed. Such talk relieved her. Why did people have to do terrible things? Why did they have to take it upon themselves to stir up trouble? Why could they not be pleasant and nice and decent? Naturally, they could not all have everything; there was just not enough of everything to go around, and thereby more went to those who worked hardest. Wasn't her husband living proof of that? Hadn't he started with nothing and worked himself up to where he was now? Hadn't she heard it said, a thousand times if once, that any man who wasn't lazy could find work and advance his position? Wasn't that an obvious truth, here in the United States? And wasn't most of the trouble started by foreigners? She didn't dislike foreigners; some of the most prominent men in the country had come as immigrants, and even her own husband was not born in America, though he had come here as a tiny infant; but wasn't there an obligation upon foreigners not to start trouble simply because for the first time they were in a free land?

So out of this came first a hope and then a belief that when the Haymarket case was finally decided and finished, things would be quiet and peaceful, and though she never put it in just those terms she really believed that the death of these men would lay the ogre in his grave, once and for all. To hear, on top of this, an opinion from her husband that the trial was not a fair one, that the men who were going to die were possibly not guilty, was more than disturbing. As she had said, the-case was becoming a sickness in Chicago, and was not the surliness of her husband's actions this morning proof of that?

VIII

But as he went into his study, the Judge's frame of mind was not too different from his wife's, and he too took a brief refuge in the fact that death was the final judgment, the unchangeable and the immutable, the end, the finish and the seal on all decisions. This was not to say that he took any pleasure in the fact that four men were to die; quite to the contrary, their impending deaths enraged him; yet he was more enraged by an awareness of his own position. Why had he lost his temper with Emma, and why had he allowed himself to hand down a decision on justice or injustice in that fashion? It opened up too broad a field of examination of all he stood for and all his bench stood for, his achievement, his success and prominence. Actually, he did not feel any great sorrow for the four men; death was an accompaniment to life, and anyone who did not realize that the two were instantly interchangeable was a dolt or an idiot, and aside from that, he had never known these men, nor was he in sympathy with the things they stood for. He knew somewhat better than his wife what socialism was, having discussed it at great length with Schilling, but he took it for the visionary aims of zealots; and though he had not the hatred and fear of socialists that Field and Armour indulged in, he nevertheless ranged himself against the socialists. As for anarchists, he had no sympathy for them whatsoever; they were a menace to society, and society was correct in removing them. If they wanted to improve things, they could work with their two hands, as he had done, and everything within him revolted from the violence of their talk, the violence that could be wrought with a bomb. Therefore, he joined with his wife in the feeling that, once they were dead, the trouble would be over—or at least he sought for that assurance.

Yet his statement remained, and the more he examined it, the more convinced he became that long and deepseated reflection had driven him to the conclusion that no one of the four defendants was guilty of throwing the bomb which had exploded a year and a half before in Haymarket Square. But if that was the case, when had he come to the decision, now or a week ago or a month ago—and if he had come to the decision, why had he taken no action? And what would he tell Schilling? Could he say to Schilling, “I don't know whether they were innocent or guilty and, furthermore, I don't give a damn whether they were or not; the fact is that they had a rotten, cheap, biased trial, and even what we call justice was turned into a mockery.” Could he tell Schilling that?

On the other hand, why see Schilling at all? Literally, it would soon be the eleventh hour, and at that time they were going to die. Then it would be over, and tomorrow, he, John Peter Altgeld, could sit on his bench once more, arrayed in the long and grand and legal robes of justice.

The Judge sank into a large and comfortable chair, and at this point he was able to smile at himself. Let Schilling come and go; in the last analysis, he, Pete Altgeld, was one individual, and the responsibilities of the world were not his.

He looked around the room, a nice room, the kind of a room he had wanted all his life; not precisely, of course, for a man's life is divided into many stages, and along with a change in taste there is a change in outlook and personality. Still it was the development of the room he had wanted. The walls were lined with books, books he had read, books he wanted to read, legal books, and books he simply wanted to own, although he knew well enough he would never get around to reading them. There was a fireplace, with a fine hickory log burning inside it, and on the mantel there was a bust of Minerva and another bust of Augustus. A definition of the way a man regarded life, and a direction too. He had a carved desk, which he looked at now admiringly.

Possessions were not a drug with him, as with some, but certain things were nice to have, and the pleasure of owning them did not pall easily. They made small monuments, as the desk did, with its book-ends, books between them, its neatly piled papers, its fine and shining brass lamp, topped with two green-glass globes, and its pens and pencils and ornate paperweights. It was surprising what pleasure he could get and what an equable frame of mind he could manage simply by looking at the desk, examining it anew, and placing it properly in the room and the house, as, for example, he himself was placed in Chicago society.

So a man adjusts to the world, whether in large or small things, and sitting in his room, his kingdom, the morning paper spread on his knees, the Judge waited for George Schilling to arrive.

IX

And when Schilling came in, the Judge smiled and said, “Good morning, George.”

“Good morning.”

“Take off your coat. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Do you want a cigar?”

Schilling shook his head as he struggled out of his coat.

“On a chair. Anywhere. Cold outside?”

“Not too cold.”