FIVE GREAT AMERICANS
Douglas, Paul H.
Five Great Americans By PAUL H. DOUGLAS IN these days of denunciations and counterdenunciations I thought it might be well to write about five Americans who are in danger of being forgotten but...
...Freed from the profits of this institution, they furnished in the next three-quarters of a century the spiritual shock troops of the antislavery movement...
...When he first rose to speak in the Senate, all his Republican colleagues left the Chamber but the time came when not only the whole Senate but the whole country listened when he spoke...
...Woolman was then given one of the most disagreeable jobs a man could have...
...One by one, the Quaker yearly meetings passed resolutions asking all their members to free their slaves...
...George W. Norris was a Nebraska lawyer who came to Congress in 1902 and found it dominated by big business...
...Nor did she stop there...
...Foreign Policy Republicans joined the Democrats to replace the absolute monarchy of the Speaker with what has turned out to be the tempered autocracy of the Rules Committee...
...When LaFollette became governor, his enemies manned the state jobs, and he must have been sorely tempted...
...He always does what he thinks is right...
...His name was John Peter Altgeld...
...But Woolman's inner voice would not let him rest...
...One of these reforms was to establish a genuine system of civil service for state employes...
...But perhaps his noblest act came PAUL H. DOUGLAS, though only a "freshman" in the U. S. Senate, Is one of that body's most universally respected and Iistened-to members...
...Should they be turned out or retained...
...Almost no one questioned it and most men of means owned slaves...
...For when the opposition takes power, they cannot be expected to abide by the results...
...Democracy and Social Ethics, New Ideals of Peace, The Spirit of Youth, and City Streets and the Devil-Baby at Hull House are part of the permanent classics of our literature...
...Slowly it dawned on Woolman as a young man that slavery was a great moral wrong...
...He did this not because he sympathized with their aims, which he did not, but because he believed with reason that they had not received a fair trial and that there was no adequate evidence to indicate their guilt...
...III The third person was Jane Addams, the miller's daughter, who started Hull House in the slums of Chicago in 1889 and who for nearly 50 years fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and cared for the sick in body and soul...
...But he refused to fire his opponents and instead gave them civil-service tenure...
...A devoted worker for peace and international understanding, Jane Addams went further than most of us would go but she sowed on a wide scale the seeds of active goodwill...
...Yerkes went to Altgeld, offered him $500,000 in currency which was in a safety deposit box in Chicago, if he would allow the bill to become law without his signature...
...After several defeats, he was finally elected Governor of Wisconsin in 1900...
...Eagle forgotten...
...He did this for years with such gentleness and humility that few harsh words were ever spoken to him and by 1775 the Quakers had freed their slaves without a cent of compensation and were out from underneath the great curse of slavery...
...How long, O Lord, how long...
...As Bernard Shaw wrote in Saint ]oan: "O God, that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints...
...Believing that the poor should have beauty as well as bread, she sponsored dance classes and a little theater, organized a music and an art school and developed an industrial museum which preceded the great museums of Munich and Chicago...
...Miss Addams and her associates opened the first playground, established day nurseries, started the Juvenile Protective Association and the Juvenile court, took care of immigrants, got the garbage out of the streets and alleys and helped with protective legislation for women and children...
...Her books, such as Twenty Years at Hull House...
...Under the stone, Time has its way with you And death has its own...
...A problem which always comes up when civil service is first put into effect is what to do with the existing employes who were originally appointed on political grounds...
...My fourth and fifth selections were both United States Senators: Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., of Wisconsin, and his friend and fellow fighter, George W. Norris of Nebraska...
...He decided to do so and was immediately attacked on the ground that he had betrayed a confidence...
...His son, Robert M. LaFollette Jr., who succeeded him, served for 20 years more and by his skill and fairness won the title of the "Senators' Senator...
...But at times one hopes that mankind can recognize such men and women while they are living and not merely after they have died...
...He got a law passed to protect seamen and worked constantly for a proper physical valuation of the railroads to squeeze the "water" out of their capitalization...
...The tenderness and the integrity of John Peter Altgeld live on in the people of my state of Illinois and elsewhere...
...hence Wisconsin ranks with Massachusetts and New York as one of the pioneers in this movement...
...No one could legitimately doubt his sincerity after that and as a result the merit system has probably been developed more fully in Wisconsin than in any other state...
...At the eleventh hour, he returned the key to Yerkes and vetoed the traction bill with a stinging message which concluded, "I cannot sell out the people of Chicago...
...This was 50 years ago...
...Out of her insight into the hungers of the human heart Jane Addams became one of our most penetrating and poignant writers...
...The House of Representatives was then ruled by Speaker Cannon who in effect appointed all committees and decided which Congressman should be permitted to speak and which bills could be called up for action...
...It told him slavery was wrong and that he should bear testimony against it, so he quietly traveled over the country speaking at Quaker meetings and to individual Quakers, urging them to stand out against slavery...
...LaFollette was then elected to the Senate and immediately started out on a vigorous program to preserve competition and prevent monopoly...
...Under these conditions, a true merit system becomes impossible and civil service a more or less hypocritical farce...
...The system brutalized both the slave and the master...
...The only man who met him was Joe Martin, the former gambler who loved Altgeld with all his heart and who had a keener insight into true virtue than most of the self-righteous people...
...Norris' stood this as long as he could and then with a few other Progressive No Korea for Europe Quaker experience in many European countries indicates that this tendency to think only in terms of gaining an advantage is not winning friends for either the United States or Russia, because most Europeans seem more interested in seeking a resolution of the conflict...
...He took the key to the box, counted the money, found it was not marked, and then took counsel with his conscience...
...The first is John Woolman, the Quaker tailor who was born early in the 18th Century, lived a life of apparent obscurity but who was the spiritual fountainhead of the anti-slavery movement in America...
...A hard-boiled and cynical politician once told me of Norris, "You can't buy him, nor flatter him nor frighten him...
...He had been beaten for reelection and had lost his fortune...
...II The second man I want to speak about was a black-bearded German immigrant who fought in the Civil War, came to Chicago, practiced law, and in 1892 became Governor of Illinois...
...Steps to Peace...
...air bombardment...
...In those days of strain and turmoil, we can take strength in the examples of John Woolman, John Peter Altgeld, Jane Addams, Bob LaFoIIette and George Norris, who served the people of this nation...
...They know that in the event of war their lands would be the principal battlefields, and they themselves among the first casualties, in a holocaust that would be as much civil as international in character...
...Five Great Americans By PAUL H. DOUGLAS IN these days of denunciations and counterdenunciations I thought it might be well to write about five Americans who are in danger of being forgotten but who by their work and lives have helped to make us all better men and women...
...And then wistfully, with tears running down his face, he said, "I wish I could be like George Norris...
...A Quaker View of U.S...
...But it was widespread and it was profitable...
...For that full credit should be given to Robert M. LaFollette...
...They were bitterly attacked and criticized in their day, but their rives have stood the test of time...
...Here he pushed through numerous reforms such as the establishment of a state income tax, the regulation of private utilities based upon a physical valuation of their property, a reform of the general property tax, the building up of the state University into one of the great free institutions of the land, a workmen's compensation act for industrial accidents, and a host of other reforms...
...He was appointed to a visiting committee to call on Quaker slaveholders and get them to free their bondsmen...
...It was of Altgeld that our prairie poet, Vachel Lindsay, wrote: "Sleep on...
...With the example of Korea before them, Europeans are not likely to be enthusiastic about a strategy that would liberate a continent after it had borne the brunt of attack by Soviet land forces, the slaughter of guerrilla warfare, and the devastation of U.S...
...If the employes belong to the opposition, however, it is a common practice for a governor to oust them, replace them with his own men, and then put the latter under the protection of civil service...
...And I would add that many of us believe he was the finest and purest Senator of the last century...
...But Lindsay continued: "To live in mankind is far, far more than to live in a name...
...Had this been done, we need never have had the Civil War with all its terrible loss of life, and the relations between the races and the sections would today be infinitely more friendly...
...An Illinois Democrat, Douglas is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago in the periods he Is not in politics...
...Coming to the Senate in 1912, Norris served in that body for 30 years...
...at the completion of his term...
...At a time when women worked 12 hours a day or more in factories, he helped pass an eight-hour law— the first of its kind in this country...
...A citizen of the world, she was also firmly rooted in Halsted Street and the bloody 20th Ward of Chicago...
...In the words of George Eliot, they have joined "the choir invisible of those immortal dead, who live in minds made better by their presence...
...How much better it would have been had others followed the example of Woolman and his associates...
...She combined both character and culture to a rare degree, and after knowing her for many years, I would say she was one of the two authentic saints I have ever met...
...But because the people would not follow John Wool-man and the way of love, they had to take John Brown and the way of force, with Grant to boot...
...The new regime will therefore get rid of those who have the jobs on one pretext or another and give the positions to their own followers...
...Resentful of injustice, he pardoned a group of anarchists who had been convicted of murder in connection with the Haymarket riots...
...But this tends to poison the system from the very start...
...If they are of his own party or group, a governor generally tends to blanket them in as permanent civil servants and thus try to give them permanent jobs...
...At this very juncture, Charles T. Yerkes, the corrupt streetcar magnate, was getting from the Illinois Legislature a 50-year franchise for the use of Chicago's streets without compensation...
...Altgeld was sorely tempted...
...Then, his term over, beaten and disgraced, and with only $7 in his pocket, he took the day coach to Chicago...
...LaFollette...
...Human beings were treated as property and frequently overworked and cruelly handled...
...He was active in every good . cause, but his two greatest works were, first in getting the so-called anti-lame duck amendment passed which made Congress more responsive to the popular will and secondly, in creating, with Franklin Roosevelt's help, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has done so much to build up that area...
...early - in his career, had to decide whether or not he should make public an attempt to influence improperly the Supreme Court of his state...
Vol. 15 • November 1951 • No. 11
