Part 2 (1/2)
Fessenden echoed my sneer, and went on: ”He's a rotten hypocrite; but then, we can always pull the bung out of these Reform movements that way.”
”You said it isn't as bad for me as it seems,” I interrupted.
”Oh, yes. You're to be on the ticket. The old man's going to send you to the legislature,--lower house, of course.”
I did not cheer up. An a.s.semblyman got only a thousand a year.
”The pay ain't much,” confessed Buck, ”but there ain't nothing to do except vote according to order. Then there's a great deal to be picked up on the side,--the old man understands that others have got to live besides him. Salaries in politics don't cut no figure nowadays, anyhow.
It's the chance the place gives for pick-ups.”
At first I flatly refused, but Buck pointed out that I was foolish to throw away the benefits sure to come through the ”old man's” liking for me. ”He'll take care of you,” he a.s.sured me. ”He's got you booked for a quick rise.” My poverty was so pressing that I had not the courage to refuse,--the year and a half of ferocious struggle and the longing to marry Betty Crosby had combined to break my spirit. I believe it is Johnson who says the worst feature of genteel poverty is its power to make one ridiculous. I don't think so. No; its worst feature is its power to make one afraid.
That night I told my mother of my impending ”honors.” We were in the dark on our little front porch. She was silent, and presently I thought I heard her suppressing a sigh. ”You don't like it, mother?” said I.
”No, Harvey, but--I see no light ahead in any other direction, and I guess one should always steer toward what light there is.” She stood behind my chair, put her hands on my shoulders, and rested her chin lightly on the top of my head. ”Besides, I can trust you. Whatever direction you take, you're sure to win in the end.”
I was glad it was dark. An hour after I went to bed I heard some one stirring in the house,--it seemed to me there was a voice, too. I rose and went into the hall, and so, softly to my mother's room. Her door was ajar. She was near the window, kneeling there in the moonlight, praying--for me.
I had not been long in the legislature before I saw that my position was even more contemptible than I antic.i.p.ated. So contemptible, indeed, was it that, had I not been away from home and among those as basely situated as myself, it would have been intolerable,--a convict infinitely prefers the penitentiary to the chain gang. Then, too, there was consolation in the fact that the people, my fellow citizens, in their stupidity and ignorance about political conditions, did not realize what public office had come to mean. At home they believed what the machine-controlled newspapers said of me--that I was a ”manly, independent young man,” that I was ”making a vigorous stand for what was honest in public affairs,” that I was the ”honorable and distinguished son of an honorable and distinguished father.” How often I read those and similar eulogies of young men just starting in public life! And is it not really amazing that the people believe, that they never say to themselves: ”But, if he were actually what he so loudly professes to be, how could he have got public office from a boss and a machine?”
I soon gave up trying to fool myself into imagining I was the servant of the people by introducing or speaking for petty little popular measures. I saw clearly that graft was the backbone, the whole skeleton of legislative business, and that its fleshly cover of pretended public service could be seen only by the blind. I saw, also, that no one in the machine of either party had any real power. The state boss of our party, United States Senator Dunkirk, was a creature and servant of corporations. Silliman, the state boss of the opposition party, was the same, but got less for his services because his party was hopelessly in the minority and its machine could be useful only as a sort of supplement and scapegoat.
With the men at the top, Dunkirk and Silliman, mere lackeys, I saw my own future plainly enough. I saw myself crawling on year after year,--crawling one of two roads. Either I should become a political scullion, a wretched party hack, despising myself and despised by those who used me, or I should develop into a lackey's lackey or a plain lackey, lieutenant of a boss or a boss, so-called--a derisive name, really, when the only kind of boss-s.h.i.+p open was head political procurer to one or more rich corporations or groups of corporations. I felt I should probably become a scullion, as I thought I had no taste or instinct for business, and as I was developing some talent for ”mixing,”
and for dispensing ”hot air” from the stump.
I turned these things over and over in my mind with an energy that sprang from shame, from the knowledge of what my mother would think if she knew the truth about her son, and from a realization that I was no nearer marrying Betty Crosby than before. At last I wrought myself into a sullen fury beneath a calm surface. The lessons in self-restraint and self-hiding I learned in that first of my two years as a.s.semblyman have been invaluable.
When I entered upon my second and last winter, I was outwardly as serene as--as a volcano on the verge of eruption.
III
SAYLER ”DRAWS THE LINE”
In February the railways traversing our state sent to the capitol a bill that had been drawn by our ablest lawyers and reviewed by the craftiest of the great corporation lawyers of New York City. Its purpose, most shrewdly and slyly concealed, was to exempt the railways from practically all taxation. It was so subtly worded that this would be disclosed only when the companies should be brought to court for refusing to pay their usual share of the taxes. Such measures are usually ”straddled” through a legislature,--that is, neither party takes the responsibility, but the boss of each machine a.s.signs to vote for them all the men whose seats are secure beyond any ordinary a.s.sault of public indignation. In this case, of the ninety-one members of the lower house, thirty-two were a.s.signed by Dunkirk and seventeen by Silliman to make up a majority with three to spare.
My boss, Dominick, got wind that Dunkirk and Silliman were cutting an extra melon of uncommon size. He descended upon the capitol and served notice on Dunkirk that the eleven Dominick men a.s.signed to vote for the bill would vote against it unless he got seven thousand dollars apiece for them,--seventy-seven thousand dollars. Dunkirk needed every one of Dominick's men to make up his portion of the majority; he yielded after trying in vain to reduce the price. All Dominick would say to him on that point, so I heard afterward, was:
”Every day you put me off, I go up a thousand dollars a head.”
We who were to be voted so profitably for Dunkirk, Silliman, Dominick, and the railroads, learned what was going on,--Silliman went on a ”tear”
and talked too much. Nine of us, _not_ including myself, got together and sent Ca.s.sidy, member from the second Jackson County district, to Dominick to plead for a share. I happened to be with him in the Capital City Hotel bar when Ca.s.sidy came up, and, hemming and hawing, explained how he and his fellow insurgents felt.
Dominick's veins seemed cords straining to bind down a demon struggling to escape. ”It's back to the bench you go, Pat Ca.s.sidy,--back to the bench where I found you,” he snarled, with a volley of profanity and sewage. ”I don't know nothing about this here bill except that it's for the good of the party. Go back to that gang of d.a.m.ned wharf rats, and tell 'em, if I hear another squeak, I'll put 'em where I got 'em.”
Ca.s.sidy shrank away with a furtive glance of envy and hate at me, whom Dominick treated with peculiar consideration,--I think it was because I was the only man of education and of any pretensions to ”family” in official position in his machine. He used to like to cla.s.s himself and me together as ”us gentlemen,” in contrast to ”them muckers,” meaning my colleagues.