Brand
Whitlock was born in Urbana, Ohio, in 1869. He became a journalist
and worked for the Chicago Herald.
He was later employed by John P. Altgeld,
the reforming governor of Illinois. Whitlock also worked closely with
Samuel Jones, the radical mayor of Toledo.
Whitlock became increasingly involved in politics and eventually served
four terms as mayor of Toledo (1906-14). Like Samuel
Jones, Whitlock developed a reputation as an honest and efficient
mayor.
Whitlock was United States ambassador to Belgium during the First
World War. Whitlock wrote 18 books, including several novels and
a biography, Forty Years of It
(1914). Brand Whitlock died in 1934.
(1)
Brand Whitlock first met John P. Altgeld
while working for the Chicago Herald in 1892.
There was a particular pallor in his countenance, and the face
was such a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been
for the high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed
many as altogether lacking in expression. He had been a judge of the
Circuit Court, and was known by his occasional addresses, his interviews
and articles, as a publicist of radical and humanitarian tendencies.
He was known especially to the laboring classes and to the poor, who,
by that acute sympathy they possess, divined in him a friend, and
in the circles of sociological workers and students, then so small
and obscure as to make their views esoteric, he was recognized as
one who understood and sympathized with their tendencies and ideas.
(2)
Brand Whitlock was working for John P.
Altgeld when he decided to pardon the men convicted for the
Haymarket Bombers in June, 1893.
He knew the cost to him; he had just come to the governorship of his
state, and to the leadership of his party, after its thirty years
of defeat, and he realized what powerful interests would be frightened
and offended if he were to turn three forgotten men out of prison;
he understood how partisanship would turn the action to its advantage.
It mattered not that most of the thoughtful men in Illinois would
tell you that the "anarchists" had been improperly convicted,
that they were not only entirely innocent of the murder of which they
had been accused, but were not even anarchists.
And so, one morning in June, very early, I was called to the governor's
office, and told to make out pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab.
I took them over to the governor's office. I was admitted to his private
room, and there he sat, at his great flat desk. The only other person
in the room was Dreier, a Chicago banker, who had never wearied, it
seems, in his efforts to have these men pardoned.
The Governor took the big sheets of imitation parchment, glanced over
them, signed his name to each, laid down the pen, and handed the papers
across the table to Dreier. The banker took them, and began to say
something. But he only got as far as "Governor, I hardly"
when he broke down and wept.
I saw the Governor as I was walking to the Capitol the next morning.
The Governor was riding his horse - he was a gallant horseman - and
he bowed and smiled that faint, wan smile of his, and drew up to the
curb a moment. I said: "Well, the storm will break now."
"Oh, yes," he replied, with a not wholly convincing air
of throwing off a care, "I was prepared for that. It was merely
doing right." I said something to him then to express my satisfaction
in the great deed that was to be so willfully, recklessly, and cruelly
misunderstood. I did not say all I might have said, for I felt that
my opinions could mean so little to him. I have wished since that
I had said more, said something that could perhaps have made a great
burden a little easier for that brave and tortured soul. But he rode
away with that wan, persistent smile. And the storm did break, and
the abuse it rained upon him broke his heart.
(3)
Brand Whitlock wrote about Samuel Jones,
the mayor of Toledo, in his book Forty Years Of It (1914)
Samuel Jones was a man who tried to practice the fundamental
philosophy of Christianity. All the newspapers were against him, and
all the preachers. When the people came to vote for his re-election
his majorities were overwhelming, so that he used to say that everybody
was against him but the people.
In those days I had not met him. One day, suddenly, as I was working
on a story in my office, in he stepped with a startling, abrupt manner,
wheeled a chair up to my desk, and sat down. He was a big Welshman
with a sandy complexion and great hands that had worked hard in their
time, and he had an eye that looked right into the centre of your
skull. He wore, and all the time he was in the room continued to wear,
a large cream-coloured slouch hat, and he had on the flowing cravat
which for some inexplicable reason artists and social reformers wear;
their affinity being due, no doubt, to the fact that the reformer
must be an artist of a sort, else he could not dream his dreams.
He had a practical air of the very practical business man he had been
before he became mayor. He had been such a practical business man
that he was worth half a million, a fairly good fortune for our town;
but he had not been in office very long before all the business men
were down on him, and saying that what the town needed was a business
man for mayor. They disliked him of course because he would not do
just what they told him to that being the meaning and purpose of a
business man for mayor. The politicians and preachers objected to
him on the same grounds: the unpardonable sin being to express in
any but a purely ideal and sentimental form sympathy for the workers
or the poor.
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