On
the Bench
The
most picturesque portion of the official life of Mayor Jones was that which he
passed as a police magistrate. If it is hard for an employer to express love for
a neighbor in his life, how much more so is it for a magistrate and chief of
police! As mayor, he had to fulfil the functions of both, and the result was
sometimes amusing and instructive. The charter of Toledo provided that in the
absence of the police justice the mayor could occupy his place, and on several
occasions he did so. He had formed the opinion that our police courts are
"largely conducted as institutions that take away the liberties of the
people who are poor," and he resolved that they should never be so used in
his hands. On the first day that he sat there was only one prisoner, a beggar
who pleaded guilty, but besought the Mayor to let him leave town. "This man
has a divine right to beg," said the Mayor. The policeman informed him that
the prisoner had been arrested for drunkenness the preceding Friday. "Only
the poor are arrested for drunkenness," replied Jones. "You would not
arrest a rich man for drunkenness. You would send him home in a hack." The
beggar asked again to be allowed to leave Toledo. "I do not see what good
that would do," said the Mayor. "You would only go somewhere else and
would not be any better off. We cannot drive a man off the earth, and the worst
thing that can happen to any man is to be out of work. Under the circumstances I
think we shall have to let you go; but you must keep out of the way of the
officers. You are dismissed."
On
the next court day three men were brought before him on charges of burglary and
petty larceny, and two of them pleaded guilty. The newspapers report that the
Mayor watched the men during their arraignment with a "peculiar expression
of face." Then he began to philosophize: "I do not know how it would
benefit you," he said, "to send you to the workhouse. If I thought it
would do any good to send you to the penitentiary, I would send you there for
five or ten years, but I never heard of any person being benefited by serving
time in that institution. I would not send a son of mine to the penitentiary,
although it is not a matter of sentiment with me. If I thought it would do him
any good, I might send him there.... Now take the case of this young man,"
and he pointed to one of the prisoners, "he is suffering from a loathsome
disease -- crime is a disease, you know -- and imprisonment would not to my mind
effect a cure for him. I will continue the case for decision."
On
the following morning before going to the court room the Mayor went to the
turnkey's office, and calling the three men before him he gave them a good talk.
"He reminded the Wilsons," says the newspaper reporter, "it was a
crime to steal from the poor, at least that was the way his argument
sounded" (but perhaps the reporter missed its full effect). "He spoke
to the men at length, and then, shaking hands all round, told them to go home
and be good citizens." No announcement of any decision was made in court,
but on the docket the Mayor entered the words, "dismissed, sentence
reserved," the meaning of which is perhaps a little hazy.
On
this day another case came before him involving the misdemeanor of using a
gambling device in the form of a "penny-in-the-slot" machine. The
Mayor was very impatient of the time consumed by the lawyers, and apparently was
not much shocked by the transgression. "The best way to dispose of this
case in my opinion," he said in conclusion, "is to turn the machine
over to the owner and let him stand it face to the wall.... The defendant is
dismissed."
Two
months later the Mayor again held court in place of the regular magistrate. Five
men were brought before him on the charge of begging. The Mayor addressed them
paternally. "It was like a parent threatening to chastise wayward children,
but withholding the rod in view of their promises to be good," said the
Toledo Bee. They were discharged. Then came the case of a tramp, found drunk
with a loaded pistol on his person. The Mayor held the pistol up so that
everyone could see it and declared that it was a devilish weapon, intended
solely to kill human beings. It was worse than useless; it was hellish, and
worse than whiskey a thousand times. The prisoner was sentenced to smash the
revolver to pieces with a sledge hammer, and the court adjourned to another room
to see the sentence carried out. As they left the court room "the Mayor
laid his arm affectionately over the shoulder of the prisoner, who grasped his
hand with a sudden pressure that indicated how little he had expected the
unusual sentence." So runs the newspaper report. A policeman put the pistol
in a vise, the prisoner was given a sledge hammer, and in an instant he had
smashed the weapon to fragments and was a free man again. The last case which
came before Mayor Jones was that of three young men who had indulged in a free
fight over a game of ball and whose appearance testified to the fact.
"You
stand up where I can see you!" cried the Mayor. "There you have it
without saying a word -- brute force," and after a stern lecture he let
them go.
The
Legislature of Ohio soon got wind of the fact that a man with a heart was
holding court in Toledo and they promptly repealed the law allowing the mayor to
take the magistrate's place. At his last appearance on the bench Jones made a
little farewell address which explains his course. He said: "The
Legislature is greater than the people and it has seen fit to take the power of
appointing temporary police judges from the hands of the mayor. I have no fault
to find with the arrangement. I have no unkind feeling toward anyone connected
with this police court, and I have made friends down here who will last as long
as life. It is a comfort to reflect that in all my experience as acting police
judge I have done nothing either as judge or as a mayor that I would not do as a
man. I have done by the unfortunate men and women who have come before me in
this court everything in my power to help them to live better lives and nothing
to hinder them. I have sent no one to prison, nor imposed fines upon people for
their being poor. In short, I have done by them just as I would have another
judge do by my son if he were a drunkard or a thief, or by my sister or
daughter, if she were a prostitute. I am aware of the fact that many people
believe in the virtue of brute force, but I do not. For my part, I would be glad
to see every revolver and every club in the world go over Niagara Falls, or
better still, over the brink of hell." In a letter to the Toledo press he
further explains that his actions in court were based upon the Golden Rule.
"There are two methods," he says, "of dealing with people whose
liberty makes them a menace to society -- on the one hand, prisons, penalties,
punishment, hatred and hopeless despair; and on the other, asylums, sympathy,
love, help and hope."
In
case Mayor Jones had been obliged by the law to do violence to his own
sentiments in sentencing a prisoner, he would promptly have refused to apply the
law and have handed in his resignation. He told me this in a letter dated
February 26, 1902. "I have been somewhat perplexed," he says, "to
know just what to do if I should meet a 'bad case,' and the prosecutor should
inform me that the law says so and so, prescribing something that I did not want
to do. For that reason I have been somewhat shy about going on the bench; but
this last trip I went four days in succession during the absence of the judge,
thoroughly prepared to meet any case. I knew just what I would do if the
prosecutor should instruct me that the law prescribed something that I felt
would be an insult to my soul -- something that I could do as a judge, that I
could not do as a man. I thought it would be a splendid occasion for declaring
myself and saying that I would not do either as mayor or judge that which I
could not do as a man, and therefore the necessity was upon me to resign both
offices, for I could not hold the office of mayor and appoint some other man as
judge and ask him to do that which I myself refused to do; but no such
opportunity presented itself. There was nothing more desperate than a 'common
thief,' 'drunk,' 'disturbance,' and on one occasion a 'common prostitute,' and
of course I found no difficulty in disposing of these cases by the application
of the law of love, even in the poor way that it could be dispensed from the
police bench." And it was Mayor Jones who told me of one manly precedent
for resigning a public office when the occupant is called upon to offend his
conscience. It was Mr. Darby, warden of the Ohio penitentiary, who, during Mayor
Jones's term of office, resigned his post rather than take part in the
"electrocution" of a convict. "Not for the whole State of
Ohio," said he, "would I turn on the electric current to kill a human
being!" That is the right kind of talk. Let us never forget the individual
in the official; and let us produce more men who, not for the State of Ohio, nor
for the whole world, would blow up battleships full of their fellows, or run
bayonets into their eyes or slice their faces with sabers. This does not seem to
be an utterly unattainable degree of gentility as I write it down. A friend of
mine not long ago told me a story which bears upon this matter of doing wrong in
office. He was many years ago the correspondent of a New York journal in one of
our Indian wars. General Crook was engaged in his final campaign against
Geronimo, the Apache chief, I think. One night our troops encamped near a town
and my friend entered the tent of the General to obtain news. He found Crook, a
gray and grizzled veteran, lying on his back in the sand with an expression of
worry upon his face. "Why don't you get a place to sleep in town,
General?" said my friend. "There is no reason why you should be
uncomfortable here." "Oh, no," answered General Crook. "I
must not fare better than my men. And a little roughing-it does not trouble me.
What troubles me is that I have got to wipe out this band of Indians and kill
and capture them, and I know perfectly well that they are entirely in the right
and that we are altogether in the wrong." It never occurred to General
Crook that he might have avoided the commission of this crime, which he so
clearly understood, by resigning his commission. But Mayor Jones and Warden
Darby had fortunately made the discovery.
The
last time I saw Golden Rule Jones (for by this name he was known), only a month
or two before his death, he showed me a letter from a condemned murderer in the
Toledo jail, a man who has probably since then been executed. It was dated,
"Lucas County Jail, April 14, 1904," and contained the following
paragraphs: "During my confinement at the Central Station and the County
jail, and of all the large number of men who have come and gone, I have never
heard one word of anything except praise and admiration for you. And this is not
caused by a false conception of your theories -- far from it! They all
understand how thoroughly and unreservedly you condemn crime. But the theories
of punishment advanced by you are what call forth their admiration. And the
majority of these men do not fear corporal punishment, for they constitute a
class who can never safely be driven, but they can be easily led, providing the
leader strikes the proper note." That there is truth in what this man says
is shown by the reduced number of arrests in Toledo during Mayor Jones's
incumbency, and the improved order of the city, while the number of drinking
places under his liberal policy was actually diminished.
Opinions
will doubtless differ as to the value of Mayor Jones's contribution to the
science of penology, but I am sorry for the man who does not appreciate his
spirit. His attitude on the bench and his comments are the natural outgrowth of
the heart of a man who takes his place as judge with a deep love of mankind
within him. His position was necessarily tentative. The precedents of hatred,
fear and retribution are piled up in our law libraries, but the precedents of
love and sympathy have yet to be established, and Mayor Jones was a pioneer in
this department. The day may yet come when his example on the bench will be
cited with greater respect than many a learned decision which is now regarded as
impregnable.
The
Legislature not only removed Mayor Jones from the police court, but from time to
time curtailed his power in various ways, taking away the right of appointment
to office, and building up hostile forces in the city government. The common
council was always opposed to him, and outside of the Mayor's office the
franchise-grabbers had it all their own way.(1)
Still he succeeded in accomplishing a few practical things, which his friend
Brand Whitlock has summarized in an article in the "World's Work." He
humanized the police, introduced kindergartens, public playgrounds and free
concerts, established the eight-hour day for city employees and a minimum day's
wages of $1.50 for common labor. He used the carriages of the Park Department to
give the children sleigh rides in winter; devised a system of lodging-houses for
tramps; laid out public golf links in the parks, and organized a policemen's
band. He gave away all his Mayor's salary to the poor, and his office looked
like a charity bureau, so many were the applicants for relief who besieged it.
Nor did he turn away from anyone. A thorough democrat in feeling, he never was
conscious of any inequality when he met the great and rich, or when he dropped
in at the jail to talk with the prisoners. In an invitation to me to come and
spend a week at his house he enumerates the attractions as follows: "I
believe that you would thoroughly enjoy it, and perhaps it would be a help to
come in contact with some of my friends of the lower classes -- the 'bum'
element around market space" (and he names one or two). "Then Blank's
saloon is a real curiosity shop. Besides, the workhouse, prison and the jail are
fine places."
1.
Mayor Finch, who succeeded Mayor Jones in office, in his first message refers to
him as "our late and much beloved Mayor, a man who enjoyed the esteem,
respect, love and confidence of all classes of our citizenship more than any
chief executive perhaps that Toledo ever had;" and he said that he was
"instrumental in bringing about many reforms in the conduct of public
affairs," and he goes on to enumerate them much as Mr. Whitlock does. Mr.
Whitlock was elected Mayor of Toledo in 1905, and is carrying out the policy of
Mayor Jones with success.
