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Page 49
At one end of the ward there is a street of good houses, familiarly
called "Con Row." The term is perhaps quite unjustly used, but it is
nevertheless universally applied, because many of these houses are
occupied by professional office holders. This row is supposed to form a
happy hunting-ground of the successful politician, where he can live in
prosperity, and still maintain his vote and influence in the ward. It
would be difficult to justly estimate the influence which this group of
successful, prominent men, including the alderman who lives there, have
had upon the ideals of the youth in the vicinity. The path which leads
to riches and success, to civic prominence and honor, is the path of
political corruption. We might compare this to the path laid out by
Benjamin Franklin, who also secured all of these things, but told young
men that they could be obtained only by strenuous effort and frugal
living, by the cultivation of the mind, and the holding fast to
righteousness; or, again, we might compare it to the ideals which were
held up to the American youth fifty years ago, lower, to be sure, than
the revolutionary ideal, but still fine and aspiring toward honorable
dealing and careful living. They were told that the career of the
self-made man was open to every American boy, if he worked hard and
saved his money, improved his mind, and followed a steady ambition. The
writer remembers that when she was ten years old, the village
schoolmaster told his little flock, without any mitigating clauses,
that Jay Gould had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by always
saving bits of string, and that, as a result, every child in the village
assiduously collected party-colored balls of twine. A bright Chicago boy
might well draw the inference that the path of the corrupt politician
not only leads to civic honors, but to the glories of benevolence and
philanthropy. This lowering of standards, this setting of an ideal, is
perhaps the worst of the situation, for, as we said in the first
chapter, we determine ideals by our daily actions and decisions not only
for ourselves, but largely for each other.
We are all involved in this political corruption, and as members of the
community stand indicted. This is the penalty of a democracy,--that we
are bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can stand
aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the
same air.
That the alderman has much to do with setting the standard of life and
desirable prosperity may be illustrated by the following incident:
During one of the campaigns a clever cartoonist drew a poster
representing the successful alderman in portraiture drinking champagne
at a table loaded with pretentious dishes and surrounded by other
revellers. In contradistinction was his opponent, a bricklayer, who sat
upon a half-finished wall, eating a meagre dinner from a workingman's
dinner-pail, and the passer-by was asked which type of representative he
preferred, the presumption being that at least in a workingman's
district the bricklayer would come out ahead. To the chagrin of the
reformers, however, it was gradually discovered that, in the popular
mind, a man who laid bricks and wore overalls was not nearly so
desirable for an alderman as the man who drank champagne and wore a
diamond in his shirt front. The district wished its representative "to
stand up with the best of them," and certainly some of the constituents
would have been ashamed to have been represented by a bricklayer. It is
part of that general desire to appear well, the optimistic and
thoroughly American belief, that even if a man is working with his hands
to-day, he and his children will quite likely be in a better position in
the swift coming to-morrow, and there is no need of being too closely
associated with common working people. There is an honest absence of
class consciousness, and a na�ve belief that the kind of occupation
quite largely determines social position. This is doubtless exaggerated
in a neighborhood of foreign people by the fact that as each nationality
becomes more adapted to American conditions, the scale of its occupation
rises. Fifty years ago in America "a Dutchman" was used as a term of
reproach, meaning a man whose language was not understood, and who
performed menial tasks, digging sewers and building railroad
embankments. Later the Irish did the same work in the community, but as
quickly as possible handed it on to the Italians, to whom the name
"dago" is said to cling as a result of the digging which the Irishman
resigned to him. The Italian himself is at last waking up to this fact.
In a political speech recently made by an Italian padrone, he bitterly
reproached the alderman for giving the-four-dollars-a-day "jobs" of
sitting in an office to Irishmen and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day "jobs"
of sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise
in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as
to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must
remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and
that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps
most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct,
the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, is but
feebly developed. A form of constraint, gentle, but powerful, is
afforded by the simple desire to do what others do, in order to share
with them the approval of the community. Of course, the larger the
number of people among whom an habitual mode of conduct obtains, the
greater the constraint it puts upon the individual will. Thus it is that
the political corruption of the city presses most heavily where it can
be least resisted, and is most likely to be imitated.
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