Poetry
It
is quite likely that Mayor Jones's idea of America's leadership was learned from
Walt Whitman, whose works, during the last years of his life, had great
influence over him. He had many favorite authors, and his books are full of
quotations from the Bible, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Tolstoy, Lamennais,
Mazzini, Victor Hugo, Bellamy, Mrs. Gilman, Herron, Longfellow, Browning and
Lowell. But his special fondness was for poetry, and of all the poets Whitman
was for him the chief. A volume of "Leaves of Grass" lay beside a
Bible on his desk, and both books were well worn and penciled. On the walls of
his office were the portraits of most of these authors, but of Whitman there
were two. I take a little credit to myself for Jones's acquaintance with
Whitman, although I acted as a mere instrument. In the summer of 1897 Mr. B. Fay
Mills invited a few kindred spirits to a beautiful spot on Lake George known as
Crosbyside, and Mayor Jones was one of the party. Mills told me that he wished
to persuade Jones to like Whitman, and we both agreed that the Mayor was about
as nearly Whitman's ideal comrade-man as could be found, and that it was a shame
that he was not fond of "Leaves of Grass." So Mills contrived a plot
according to which a dozen of us went up the funicular railway to the top of the
mountain at the south end of the lake, and there in the midst of the most
beautiful scenery and looking out on a glorious view, he made me read selections
from Whitman for a half-hour, ostensibly for the general benefit, but really
with a solitary eye to Jones. When I finished the Mayor remarked dryly that he
didn't call that poetry, and that the kind of poetry that he liked was of the
order of the lines:
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Full many a flower is born to
blush unseen
And waste its fragrance on the
desert air.
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And
of such poetry he could recite pages from memory. The experiment seemed to be a
total failure, but you never can tell, and soon I was delighted to learn that
Mayor Jones was quoting Whitman on all occasions, and referring to him as the
best-beloved of his teachers. I understand that Mills had followed up the first
attack, undaunted by its lack of results; but I claim an humble place beside him
as the introducer of Mayor Jones to Walt Whitman. He had a sentiment adapted
from Whitman stamped on all the envelopes which he used in his correspondence,
namely this: "I claim no privilege for myself or for my children that I am
not doing my utmost to secure for all others on equal terms." I find him
again quoting Whitman, for example, at the funeral of a tramp in February, 1902,
in the back room of an undertaker's. The man was an old sailor who finished his
course in the lodging house of the Toledo Humane Society. "When Mayor Jones
arrived," says the Toledo Bee, "the dozen comrades, most of them
feeble, shuffled into the room. It was a peculiar assemblage." Mayor Jones
made the funeral address. He spoke of the recent death of his own brother, and
said that he regarded this man as his brother, too. "I am quite sure,"
said he, "that he did the best he could, considering the limitations that
surrounded him.... Death comes daily, hourly, everywhere. Yet it is nothing to
be alarmed at. Sixty years is not the limit of life, nor sixty millions of
years, but it goes on, and on, and on, through all the ceaseless ages -- our
life to be a part of all life.... I want to read you a few lines on what a grand
old man, but lately passed beyond, Walt Whitman, has to say on death:
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"Come lovely and soothing
death,
Undulate round the world
serenely,
Arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to
all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate death!
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"He
looks very restful there in his coffin, doesn't he? It was Tolstoy who said that
the dead are always beautiful -- that there's not an expression of pain or fear
upon the face, but rather that of astonishment. I can't say, I will not say he
is dead -- he is only away. Good-bye, my brother, good-bye." A few days
later the Mayor was invited by a delegation from the Sailors' Union to "do
the funeral" for another old salt.
Devoted
to poetry, like a true Kelt, Jones had something of the bard about him. He wrote
many songs for his men to sing, and there is a simple power in some of his
verses which gives them value. Here is a stanza from one of his songs
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We speak the word patriotic,
We sing the song of the free,
And tell the tale of a new time,
Of a world that surely will be,
When men will live comrades and
lovers,
All rancor and hate under ban,
And the highest and holiest
title,
Will be that you're known as a
man.
Chorus.
No title is higher than man,
No title is higher than man,
And the highest and holiest
title
Will be that you're known as a
man.
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Another
song is entitled "Freedom Day"
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Haste, oh, haste, delightful
morning
Of that glorious freedom day,
When from earth's remotest
border
Tyranny has passed away.
Refrain.
Ever growing,
Swiftly flowing,
Like a mighty river,
Sweeping on from shore to shore,
Love will rule the wide world
o'er.
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The
prose style of Mayor Jones, however, was far superior to his poetry, and he
often uttered epigrams which summed up his thought tersely, vigorously and with
humor. I cite a few of these aphorisms, collected here and there:
If
there were to be improvements in sucker-rods, why may we not reasonably expect
that there is room for improvement in social relations?
It
would pay us a thousand times better to provide work for our own people than to
purchase insurrections from Spain.
I
was at a workhouse recently, and while there saw one-third of the men confined
in the prison working at the brick-machines for the revolting and blood-curdling
crime of jumping on freight trains.
The
ideal robber -- the lowest bidder.
Charity
is twice cursed, -- it curses him that gives and him that takes.
It
is better to lift your whole city up an inch than to pull yourself up to the
skies.
After
the fight is over we have to settle the difficulty. Let us learn to settle it
first.
What
heresy can be more fallacious than the prevailing one that superior ability
entitles one to the right to live at the expense of his fellows?
We
tie a balloon to one man and a saw-log to another, and then declare that they
have an equal chance to rise in the world.
If
millionaires were three miles high, if they were a class of higher beings upon
whom we depended for our cleverest inventions.... then the tremendous
disparities in matters of wealth might be overlooked.
The
best way to secure your own rights is to be diligent in securing the rights of
others.
The
rich man has no neighbors -- only rivals and parasites.
It
is only a lower-natured man who can be dazzled by the bauble, gold. Men who have
discovered the true wealth of mind and character care little for the wampum of
commerce.
I
was born on foreign soil, but born an American. There are a lot of people born
on American soil that are not yet half-way over from Europe.
It
was a strange destiny which brought this man of Keltic, dreamy temperament into
the business world and made him successful there. He was a machinist and an
inventor, and yet he saw clearly the drawbacks of machinery and longed for a
world of artistic craftsmanship. "Machinery," he says, "has added
speed and intensity and discomfort to production, so that many a factory
worker's life is almost equivalent to imprisonment at hard labor. Consider what
a machinist's work is like during the hot summer months. In spite of the intense
heat, the murky, impure air, the deafening roar of machinery, the grime and
sweat and dust, when every second seems a minute and every minute seems an hour,
he is expected, for ten long, weary hours every day, to be as accurate as a
jeweler and as energetic as a blacksmith.... A mechanic's work is not physical
only. It is brain work quite as much as the labor of many a professional man....
Machinery is almost driving some branches of art out of existence. It is leading
us to lay stress on quantity, not quality. No nation could ever manufacture so
many poor articles in so short a time as we can. The combination of machinery
and long hours has worked against all that is artistic and original."
