Hardin was not so easily disposed of. Denying that there had been any agreement personally on his part to rest content with one term, he declared himself betimes a candidate for another nomination. Lincoln’s rejoinder was the maxim,—“Turn about is fair play.” He called this his “only argument,” and proceeded in effect to make it the slogan of an energetic campaign. A less inspiring issue on which to ask for political support is not often presented. Yet this was the issue, and Lincoln candidly said so. With a freedom from the customary cant of “public servants” that is really refreshing, he canvassed the party on personal grounds, but without personalities. His supporters were cautioned against saying anything unkind about Hardin; and when he himself made any reference to his adversary, it was in terms of friendly appreciation. Lincoln wanted that office. He wanted it badly. But his ever-present sense of fairness saved him from resentment toward the Bakers and Hardins who wanted it, too. They were entitled to a place in the sun. And even the fact that one who had basked in its warmth for a season was trying now to elbow him back when his turn came, did not ruffle the man’s good humor. Yet he stood his ground firmly, while insisting, with winsome naïveté, on “a fair shake.” So when General Hardin made a crafty suggestion that the candidates should agree respectively to “remain in their own counties,” Lincoln promptly declined, with the obvious explanation: “It seems to me that on reflection you will see, the fact of your having been in Congress has, in various ways, so spread your name in the district, as to give you a decided advantage in such a stipulation.”
His reasons, given in the same letter, for refusing to walk into the general’s other cunningly contrived pitfalls, were equally cogent; while the temper of the missive, as a whole, may be inferred from the pretty little apology: “I have always been in the habit of acceding to almost any proposal that a friend would make, and I am truly sorry that I cannot in this.”[v-65]
Hardin, on his part, was apparently not so amiable. The general’s supporters were allowed to assail Lincoln in somewhat the same manner that Baker’s friends had done three years before. Indeed, they may have been even less scrupulous. For one of Lincoln’s youthful lieutenants, G. W. Harris, tells us how, disheartened by their methods, he went to his chief in the heat of the canvass, and declared that it was useless to proceed any further unless the object of these assaults was willing to adopt similar tactics. Without any show of feeling, Lincoln replied: “Gibson, I want to be nominated; I should like very much to go to Congress; but unless I can get there by fair means, I shall not go. If it depends on some other course, I will stay at home.”[v-66]
“That settled it,” Harris adds. But things hardly went as he had predicted. Not long thereafter his leader’s scruples were vindicated, on even the politician’s narrow ground, by Hardin’s withdrawal from the contest, in a generous letter, which left the field to our Springfield friend unopposed. So it came to pass that when the Whig District Convention met early in May, 1846, the name of this sole remaining candidate was duly presented by Judge Logan and Lincoln received a unanimous nomination.
The Democrats put forward as their candidate the well-known Methodist circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright. He gave promise of making a formidable antagonist. Few men had more friends throughout the district, and indeed, throughout the State. His robust ministry, as he traveled on horseback undaunted by frontier hardships from place to place, brought him into intimate, at times even sacred, relations with the people. They cherished, in their rough way, a fondness for the man whose piety and never-failing human sympathy had made him through all the shifting years, whether at weddings, christenings, sick-beds, or funerals, the dependable partner of their joys and their sorrows. A preacher, moreover, of the church-militant, he compelled respect among these sturdy pioneers by his physical, no less than by his spiritual, qualities. As became one who patrolled in autocratic fashion “the country of superior men,” he was wont, when occasion served, to pound out a sermon or knock out a service-disturbing brawler, with equal force, and—if the truth must be told—with equal relish. But the aggressive elements in Cartwright’s make-up found still freer vent on the several occasions when he sought to transmute all this popularity into votes. For somewhat after the manner of the high priests in Israel, the “Apostle of the West,” as he was sometimes called, aspired to combine religion with statecraft. A Jacksonian Democrat of the uncompromising type, his politics like his theology belonged to the hard-shell variety; and few campaigners could give a better account of themselves on the stump. If rugged eloquence failed to produce the desired effect, a certain nimble-witted humor might be depended on to carry the day for him. He had, in fact, been elected or, more precisely speaking, reëlected, to the State Legislature when Lincoln suffered his first, his only, rebuff at the polls, fourteen years before; and with the two men now pitted against each other again—this time on a larger field—the Democrats naturally expected to bring about a repetition of that defeat.
But the Lincoln who faced Cartwright in 1846 was a different adversary from the comparatively unknown novice who had gone down before the famous preacher in 1832. Since then the younger man must have learned many practical lessons in the school of politics, and learned them well, for his congressional canvass is described as a model of skillful electioneering. It left unturned, in all the district, no stone beneath which might lurk a favorable vote; while it met, with similar alertness, every issue raised by the enemy, or more accurately speaking, every issue but one—that of religion.
The charge of impiety, covertly made in former primary contests, as we have seen, by Lincoln’s own Whig associates, was now publicly urged against him with far greater earnestness by his Democratic opponents. What ground they had for their accusations cannot conveniently be considered at this point. The assailed candidate himself shrewdly refrained from taking any public notice of the matter, and he impressed upon his lieutenants the wisdom of exercising similar forbearance. Here was one of those rare junctures in which your true leader may be recognized, not so much by what he does as by what he omits to do. Lincoln confidently left this issue in the hands of the people. They have on repeated occasions been known to meet it with appropriate vigor, yet nearly every generation of politicians must be taught the lesson anew. The man who lays Religion by the heels, and drags her through the mire of a political campaign for the votes that may adhere to the soiled vestments, usually bends so low over his narrow course that he does not see, until too late, the shocked devotees, on the one hand, deserting him because he has profaned a sacred thing, nor the indignant citizens on the other, turning from him because he would obtrude sectarian influences where they have no business—in purely secular affairs. Even the popularity of a Cartwright sags under such a strain. Moreover, his sterling character gave him no countervailing advantage in that particular contest. For when it came to the weighing of these opposing candidates—cleric against skeptic, saint against sinner—by almost any voter’s own work-a-day standards, the rectitude of Lincoln’s life at the bar, no less than the notable honesty of his politics, dressed the balance between the two champions, so far as practical ethics went, to a nicety. This left the revulsion from bigotry that touched broad-minded men in both parties, together with the normal preponderance of the Whigs and the superior campaigning tactics of their leader, to tip the scales finally in his favor. As the canvass drew near its close, not a few of the Democrats are said to have looked upon him with kindly eyes. But party feelings ran so strong in those days that to support a candidate on the opposing side involved a wrench to cherished traditions from which these alien well-wishers, these friends the enemy, naturally, for the most part, recoiled. One of them, doubtless a typical instance, coming to Lincoln in such a dilemma, declared himself willing to cast a Whig ballot if it were needed to defeat Cartwright. The sacrifice, he thought, should be required only in the event of a very close struggle; and the Whig captain, accepting this view, agreed to let him know how the contest stood. Accordingly, right before election-day, Lincoln having made one of those clever forecasts for which he was noted, released his provisional recruit with the announcement: “I have got the preacher, and don’t want your vote.”[v-67]
He certainly did have the preacher. When returns came in, it was found that a considerable number of Democrats, setting public spirit above partisan prejudice, after all, had given their adherence to the Whig nominee. Lincoln led Cartwright at the polls by 1511 votes. How splendid a victory this was, and how much of it may be credited to Democratic defections, will be understood when it is recalled that the same district had, in the preceding presidential campaign, given electors for Henry Clay, the popular Whig standard-bearer, a plurality of but 914. “Lincoln’s election by the large majority he received,” said Governor Reynolds, commenting on the congressional contest some years later, “was the finest compliment personally and the highest political endorsement any man could expect, and such as I have never seen surpassed.”[v-68] These superlatives hardly overstated the case. No previous Whig campaigner of the district had in fact achieved such results; and so fully did they justify Lincoln’s persistent demands upon his party for the nomination that his election must have brought him a double measure of gratification.
Then, however, came the all but inevitable reaction. That triumph, so long deferred and so patiently wrought out, fell short of what his ambitious fancy had pictured. The sub-acid tang, which detracts too often from our complete enjoyment of life’s sweetest morsels, entered into the victor’s spirit at the moment of achievement, and left him disappointed. Addressing his sympathetic friend Speed—the other self of those days—in much the same vein as the great Roman politician Cicero was wont to employ toward his intimate Atticus, when eclipsing shadows of depression marred the joy of some brilliant exploit, Lincoln wrote: “Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”[v-69]
THE END
THE morning that my father finished that concluding paragraph—the last that he ever wrote—he called mother into the study. With an air of mysterious solemnity, belied by the twinkle in his eye, he beckoned her to the desk.
“Meta, if you promise not to tell a soul, I’ll tell you a state secret,” he said. “I’ve got Lincoln to Congress at last.” Then more earnestly he continued: “It wasn’t an easy job either. I’ve fought all his battles side by side with him, and the world will probably never know how hard we toiled and moiled together.”
These words exactly expressed his relationship to his work. During the twenty-three years that he devoted to the study and interpretation of Abraham Lincoln, he lived with him in spirit as the great novelists have lived with the children of their fancies. Lincoln’s sorrows and triumphs and defeats were as real to him as those of his own life. It is small wonder, therefore, that when men who had known Lincoln read Lincoln, Master of Men, they frequently mistook its author for an intimate contemporary of the great President.
Though not of the same generation as Lincoln, my father’s life was, in a trivial way, associated with it at the start. He was born in New York City on the evening of a Lincoln rally at Cooper Union, October 30, 1862. The family physician was at the meeting when the time became ripe for his services, so my grandfather followed him there, somehow found him in the vast crowd, and worked upon his sense of duty so that he consented to forego the speeches, and returned with my grandfather to the Rothschild home.
One is tempted to speculate whether or not, as the doctor looked down at the boy whose birth had prevented him from hearing eminent men discuss the President,—whether or not some confiding Fate whispered to him a half-articulate prophecy that that same boy was one day to be among the most deep-seeing interpreters of Abraham Lincoln.
Interesting as this coincidence is, in the light of succeeding developments, it is, of course, quite devoid of significance. Not until some years later did Abraham Lincoln actually become an influence in my father’s life.
Probably it was his father who first planted the seed of admiration for Lincoln in his mind, for John Rothschild came to America with an influx of German revolutionists—men of the Carl Schurz stamp—and to him, as to so many of those who came in that wave of immigration, “Lincoln became an ideal,—a prophet.”
Just as some knowledge of my father’s parentage helps to an understanding of his interest in Abraham Lincoln, it enables one better to comprehend several of his personal characteristics. The thoroughness that fortified all his undertakings may be attributed to his unmixed German blood. For his mother as well as his father was German. She was known as “Beautiful Kate,” but a remarkable amiability that poverty and the raising of a large family never impaired was her outstanding characteristic. The evenness of disposition that my father inherited from her combined strangely with a certain fiery impetuosity and violence of temper that was of paternal origin, so that his ordinary mildness and long-suffering sometimes blazed out into a Jovian wrath. From both parents equally, he derived a sturdy honesty, common sense, and humor, while to his father in particular he owed a ready wit and skill in repartee.
Beyond the excellence of his parentage, there was nothing particularly auspicious about the conditions of my father’s early life. John Rothschild was an invalid, and his various attempts to get on in the world were unsuccessful. Furthermore, there were six complications in the bread-and-butter problem of which my father was the fourth. But nature had equipped him splendidly for the upward battle that those must wage who would rise from the ranks. While there cannot have been much suggestive of the fighter in the frail little chap who was “Lonny” Rothschild, yet a cool sureness of purpose and virile resourcefulness often won him the palm in unequal encounters with bullies as well as in the subtler battles of school and daily life.
There is a story that testifies to his resourcefulness and at the same time indicates his literary instinct. “Lonny’s” family lived on Fifty-fourth Street and his school was at Thirteenth Street, two miles away. He could afford the horse cars only on his way to school, and used to return afoot. His chum, however, whose parents were in better circumstances, received two car fares daily and was expected to ride both ways. One day, by the promise of a story, “Lonny” inveigled the youngster into walking home with him. The story proved to be an exciting serial that never ended, so that henceforth the author always had company on these journeys. And what is more, not only were his spirits fortified by company, but his inner being was regaled with the refreshments that he persuaded young Crœsus to buy along the way with the misappropriated car fares.
Generally speaking, “Lon” did not care much for the company of his schoolmates or for their games. He preferred a book to a game of ball. In fact he used habitually to get his one pair of shoes wet so that he might be allowed to curl up in an armchair before the kitchen stove with a biography or some standard novel.
There was a periodical shop in the neighborhood, where he spent part of his spare time, helping the proprietor and, in lieu of pay, gorging himself indiscriminately on the literature that lined the walls. Heterodox as it may be to say so, “Jack Harkaway” and the other yellowbacks which he read there, had a beneficial effect on his style. They developed the virility and feeling for dramatic sequences that later constituted his main literary charm.
But perhaps the most germinal of all these early literary habits was his daily custom of reading the newspaper to his invalid father. Those were the Reconstruction days, when the blunders of certain of Lincoln’s successors called forth constant editorial comment on “How Lincoln would have done it.” The spirit of reverence and admiration for the great President that the press exhaled must have stimulated tremendously the hero-worship that had already taken root in the enthusiastic mind of the lad.
Somewhat of an idealist, as this would suggest, almost from the first, Alonzo Rothschild was never a mere dreamer. The same balance that contributed so to his success throughout later life was already ingrained in his make-up. He was earnest, but fun-loving; frail, yet red-blooded; youthful, and still mature; idealistic, but none the less practical.
His practical powers had an opportunity to expand as soon as he was old enough to run errands. From that time on until he left college, his summer vacations were spent in the employ of some firm, earning a little money and learning something of business methods. The first of these summer positions was with a leather importer, who, largely in jest, set him the task of making a cable code. What the merchant meant in fun, my father took in earnest, and some time thereafter he handed his employer a code so well worked out, and so beautifully written, that for weeks the man proudly exhibited it to every member of the trade who entered the office.
Such precocity often engenders superficiality, but his was the rare brilliance that does not catch at sunbeams, but is content to labor. This appeared in school as well as in his summer work, for the abstract desire to do effectively whatever might come to hand was reinforced, in school, by ambition and directed by a passion for knowledge.
At the age of fourteen he entered the College of the City of New York, where he took his first independent step into journalism. One of his summer positions had been with an art magazine which employed him as “office boy, devil, and General Utility,—his only military distinction.” The force was small and the office boy’s functions corresponded with the range of his abilities. He ran errands, received visitors, read proof or compiled articles for publication, as occasion demanded.
With this varied experience, as a background, the lad started a college publication called The Free Press. The paper was intrinsically modest, but when one considers that the bulk of the work was borne by one boy and that the publication was successful enough to pay that boy’s expenses, the matter appears in a wholly different light.
He did almost everything connected with The Free Press save the printing. He wrote the jokes, editorials, stories, and news items. But so effectively did he attack certain obnoxious faculty measures that he was compelled to work behind a mask of anonymity, thus forfeiting the prestige that his achievement would normally have given him in the eyes of his fellow students.
Although his connection with the paper remained a secret during his college years, it caused his downfall. So much of his time did the undertaking absorb that in his junior year, he failed to pass his examinations. This slump from honors to failure, however, did not destroy the confidence that his teachers had in his inherent worth, for when he decided to finish at Cornell, the president of the College gave him a warm letter of introduction to the president of the other institution.
The plan to transfer to Cornell was never consummated. His brother Meyer, who favored it strongly and who was furnishing him the means, went to Europe that summer on business, and in his absence my father decided that the hour had come for him to assume a share in his brother’s burdens. Acting upon this decision, he turned to newspaper work, and his brother upon his return found him reporting for the Commercial Advertiser. Yet, even with the college doors closing behind him and the bitter, dubious, financial battle ahead, my father determined to return to college in ten years. His first news assignment cannot have cast much of the sunshine of hope upon his ambitions. It was a dog-show. But he soon demonstrated his ability so conclusively that it became the rule to billet him for important assignments. And a few months later he was selected to interview Thomas A. Edison.
He had notable success as an interviewer, a success that he owed to his scrupulous accuracy. He recognized two obligations,—an obligation to the newspaper and an obligation to the person who had entrusted him with the publication of his opinions. But it did not take him long to discover that in the newspaper world faithful service such as his waits long for even meager rewards, so after a few months with the Commercial Advertiser, he turned his back on journalism and entered the employ of a wholesale gem company. There his promotion was steady and he even learned the business well enough to travel for the firm. After several years, however, he decided that early financial independence and consequent freedom for literary pursuits could not come to him if he remained a “hireling.” He therefore cast about until he found what seemed an opportunity, and having matured his plans with the precision of a military strategist, he started out at the age of twenty-two to be his own employer.
His new venture carried him back again into the field of journalism. The jewelry trade publications of the day were monthlies or semi-monthlies and though better than the common run of their contemporaries in trade journalism, they were contemptible when judged by twentieth-century journalistic standards. Their only aim was to sell advertising space and they subordinated everything to that one purpose. Their pages were given over to “puffs” and inadequate news items, and to dull technical articles. They published the news or suppressed it at the will of powerful advertisers.
Mr. Rothschild planned a weekly which was to publish the jewelry news with the impersonal completeness of a daily newspaper; whose editorial comment was to be “brief, conservative and absolutely independent of advertisers”; and in which “puffs” were to be confined to a single column where brevity and moderation were to obtain. As a partner in the enterprise, he chose a man whose previous experience in the field led him to value his services.
A class publication conducted on such principles was an innovation and the graybeards shook their heads. Their belief that the whole thing was the disordered dream of a Don Quixote and his Sancho was strengthened into certainty when it became known that Mr. Rothschild allowed none of his agents to treat customers. In the light of their experience it was as necessary to clinch a contract with a drink as it was to ingratiate one’s self by a judicious suppression of news, and a lavish use of “puffs.”
Had the founder of The Jewelers’ Weekly been merely an idealist, their prophecies would have been justified. But so completely did his new paper cover the activities of the jewelry world that no jeweler could keep abreast of the trade without reading it. Such an indispensable organ was logically a valuable advertising medium, and before long disgruntled advertisers came trooping back with contracts, quite willing to let the young editor determine his own policies. What those policies were may be inferred from a law which owes its presence on the statute books of New York to the activities of The Jewelers’ Weekly. The law is that which forbids a pawnbroker to receive a pledge from any one under sixteen years of age. The need for it was first revealed by an exposé in The Jewelers’ Weekly and its passage was due largely to Mr. Rothschild’s efforts.
Not only was the Weekly a power for good, but its editor, though not much more than twenty, became the recognized “guide, philosopher, and friend” of the trade. He took a friendly interest in the affairs of all his customers, particularly the small men whom it was his delight to nurse along with advice and assistance, helping them often to achieve great success.
In this respect and in several others, Mr. Rothschild showed himself to be no mere seeker after wealth. It is true that he was in business with the avowed purpose of making a competency rapidly, but while in the game he played it as much for its own sake as for the prize. Writing in his diary concerning the famous “Birthday Number,” the finest thing of its day in trade journalism, he said: “My ambition is to make this the handsomest and most readable volume ever issued by a trade publication.” That and similar utterances indicate that his interest in the Weekly was not focused entirely on its money-getting powers.
Because of ill health, his partner withdrew from the firm after a few years, leaving him a free hand in all departments, editorial and financial, and he was able to test his theories to the limit. In the six months following he made the Weekly a landmark in trade journalism besides increasing its value five times. The principle which built his success at this time will surprise most business men. It was: “Give the other fellow a chance to make something too.” In testing this thesis, he worked out what was probably one of the first profit-sharing plans, which, like his other attempts to humanize business, justified itself in dollars and cents.
It was partly this policy of liberality and partly his desire to pave the way for his farewell to business that induced him, at the zenith of his success, to take his one-time partner back into the firm, and with him two other men.
The Jewelers’ Weekly Publishing Company, as it was called, with Mr. Rothschild as president, then took over The Jewelers’ Weekly and the allied publications that he had either started or projected. As long as he remained an active member of the firm, success continued to crown its undertakings, but after he ceased to have a hand in its conduct the splendid publication of which he was so proud, languished.
The failure of his colleagues to continue the work he had so successfully carried on almost single-handed, throws into strong relief his achievements. He had attained financial independence in six years—an independence won at cost to no one else and with incidental benefit to many; he had shown that profits and ethical principles are not at opposite poles of human endeavor; he had proved the feasibility of the profit-sharing plan; he had elevated the tone of the jewelry trade; and he had set new standards in trade journalism.
One would ordinarily feel safe in concluding that a young man who in six years accomplished so many things had not been able to do much else. Yet Alonzo Rothschild found opportunity, also, to keep alive his intellectual interests, to do literary work, and to take an active part in city politics.
While still in newspaper work he had begun making an elaborate card index of his reading in the belief that it would be useful in later literary undertakings. This he continued to enrich during the years that he was building up the Weekly, finding time somehow to do a vast amount of general reading. His active literary work comprised a very excellent monograph on Nathan Hale which appeared subsequently in America, a patriotic journal of the day. The research requisite for the work was considerable and it was only by dogged persistence that Mr. Rothschild could make any headway. All through his chronicle of those busy days one comes across references to the Hale manuscript, triumph at having found time to progress or chagrin at being delayed. One of these passages throws so much light upon his character that it is worth quoting. He writes: “The Hale notes hardly seem to move. I get so little time for them. I am tempted to discontinue them for the present, but I have never yet failed in anything I started to accomplish and I will not begin now. We’ll crawl ahead as best we can.”
Despite the conflicting interests that he complains of, he still found time to do his part in politics. He was one of the founders of the Good Government Movement—“Goo-Goos,” as they were called—and the youngest member of its Executive Council. When the organization was forming, a body of naturalized Germans asked to be affiliated, proposing to designate their branch as German-American. Without any heed to the possible political consequences of such a course, Mr. Rothschild argued against affiliation with any society that maintained a hyphenated character. He said: “There is no such thing as a German-American. These men are either American or they are not. If their patriotism is equivocal and they persist in tying strings to it, we must have nothing to do with them.” Such an attitude in one whose tenderest associations were all in some sense German is strikingly indicative of an unbiased, logical mind.
Mr. Rothschild’s activities were not even confined to politics, study, and literary work. He was also prominent among the younger members of the Society for Ethical Culture. He had a way of giving an original turn to a discussion or of putting a question in a clearer, more spiritual light that attracted Dr. Adler and the latter asked him to write a book on the Morals of Trade and to become a member of the society’s lecture staff.
Few young men would have been dissatisfied with a lot so varied and rich as his, yet this many-sided man longed for something different. Neither was this a vague dissatisfaction. Ever since he left college he had hoped, one day, to make good the deficiencies of his education. Somewhere in these days came also the ambition to write about Abraham Lincoln.
One of the marvels of his career is that he should have realized his ideals. Other men have tried to do what he did and have failed because money, instead of remaining a means to them, became the object. Yet at no time did he let the brilliant present loom large enough in his mind to shut out the future. At the flood-tide of his success, one finds this passage in his diary: “How I long for the day when, free from business cares, I can give my whole time and attention to literary work!” Another, further on, shows that with increased prosperity he grew even more restive. It reads: “Five more months of my last money-grubbing year have passed. They were more agreeable than I expected them to be. I long for the day when some other sound than the chink of the golden guinea will charm my ear. It is siren music.... Let me steer my bark through the high seas of moral and intellectual progress toward—well, we shall see! How I long for the day of my freedom!”
Finally the day of freedom did come and then my father made good his old vow to return to college, entering Harvard University as a special student at the age of twenty-eight. His year there was one of almost cloister-like tranquillity and yet it was marked by achievement. In addition to his studies he found opportunity to write a series of newspaper articles on the Elective System, then being introduced by President Eliot. The latter evinced great interest in his work and went far out of his way to furnish him with data.
Shortly after his return to New York from Harvard, Mr. Rothschild met Miss Meta Robitscheck, who subsequently became his wife. She was heartily in sympathy with his aspirations and agreed with him that the work he planned could be done better away from the distractions of the metropolis. Accordingly, they went, immediately after their wedding, to Cambridge, wrenching themselves away from lifelong associations. This action seemed to others even more unjustifiable than my father’s premature withdrawal from business, but neither he nor his partner in the enterprise ever regretted their course.
The two years at Cambridge were an auspicious beginning for the intellectual life. There my mother took special courses at Radcliffe until my birth increased her responsibilities, and there my father began his study of Abraham Lincoln. It was his plan at first to write a set of monographs on Lincoln and his Cabinet, but an investigation of the material revealed possibilities for more ambitious work, and gradually the great scheme matured of which Lincoln, Master of Men, and this book are merely parts, the whole to have been a cycle of books treating Lincoln’s character from all angles. Having set himself this monumental task of reconstructing a personality, my father decided to find a quiet spot where he might settle down to work and where his family could grow up. He finally discovered in the village of East Foxboro, twenty-two miles south of Boston, a hundred-year-old house surrounded by more than one hundred acres of land that suited him and my mother, and there they moved in the fall of 1897. It was in this place that Ruth and Miriam were born and that my father passed the last eighteen years of his life in the happy realization of the dreams of his youth.
Though absorbed in his chosen work, he somehow found time to foster other interests, just as in the New York days. From the very first, he was a guiding voice in the town councils. He gained the confidence of the people by his absolute straightforwardness and their support by his sound judgment. Only once did he consent to hold office, but he never withheld his assistance, serving on many committees and doing all manner of valuable work. He might as well have been a town official, for usually, when there was constructive work to be done, the selectmen came to him for guidance. People seemed instinctively to turn to him for assistance. Shortly after he moved to East Foxboro, the inhabitants asked him if he would be their leader in a legislative fight for independence from Foxboro. For years they had nursed their grievances and waited for a Moses to lead them out of bondage. They complained, very justly, that they had been paying taxes and asking in vain for their share of the appropriations. The streets were in bad condition, the schoolhouse falling to decay, and on every hand were evidences of a very palpable wrong. Somewhere, somehow Mr. Rothschild had got a remarkably sound knowledge of law. He drew up a petition of separation and led the fight against the parent town, in the legislature. The facts of the case were plainly in favor of the petition, and it would have been granted, had not the member from Foxboro log-rolled long before the bill came up. Although defeated in his effort to make East Foxboro a separate town, Mr. Rothschild virtually won a victory, for ever since that time the village has enjoyed fair treatment from the parent town.
A number of years later East Foxboro called upon Mr. Rothschild to go before the state authorities to procure a water district charter. He drew up the charter and saw to its enactment, thus saving the district several thousand dollars in attorneys’ fees. And, what is more, his charter embodied such improvements that it has since been the model for new water districts in Massachusetts.
Nor were Mr. Rothschild’s public services confined to his own community. He was instrumental in procuring the passage of a law that compels every town in Massachusetts to employ the services of a superintendent of schools. He was also one of those who tried, with partial success, to get the State to compel the railroads to burn crude oil in their locomotives and thus put an end to the forest fires caused by flying coal sparks.
Save for such public services to his community and to the State, my father devoted most of his time to his study of Abraham Lincoln. It is true that he was vice-president of the Lincoln Fellowship, a director of the Free Religious Association, a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, of the Massachusetts Peace Society, and of the Massachusetts Reform Club, but none of these organizations claimed much of his time.
In 1901 he was a delegate to the Anti-Imperialist Convention at Indianapolis, but barring this and occasional short business or pleasure trips, he spent his time quietly at “Brook Farm” educating his family; entertaining his friends; farming a little; helping those who turned to him for advice from all sides; and carrying on his work. In 1906 this study bore its first fruit in the volume Lincoln, Master of Men.
His premature death at the age of fifty-three prevented him from quite completing Honest Abe. Had he finished this book, however, he would merely have taken Lincoln a little further in his political career and added to proof that already amply sustains his thesis.
It is given to few to meet death so exquisitely as he did,—alone, without suffering, in the presence only of Nature. On the morning of September 29, 1915, after a game of tennis with my mother, he went down to the lake alone for a plunge. He was missed some hours later, and a search discovered him dead in the water—a victim of heart failure caused by the icy shock.
His life was a candle that, burning with an unusually generous and beautiful flame, consumed itself before the appointed hour.
One of my father’s friends used to say, “The real thing never looks the part.” Like most epigrams his is too inclusive. My father, for example, did most thoroughly look the part. Literary admirers who met him in the flesh were not disillusioned and those other persons who came in casual contact with him rarely hesitated to class him as a student,—though beyond that point opinions diverged. Some set him down for a physician, others for a lawyer, still others as a college professor, and a few of the keenest for what he really was,—a man of letters. His physical traits, clothes, and manner were—contrary to his friend’s epigram—true indices to his personality and occupation.
A trifle below the medium stature, my father had a distinction of air that many a taller man might have envied. That dignity—courtly at times—was due to a subtle blending of distinct characteristics. To say that he owed it to his well-built, muscular figure, or to his erect carriage, would be palpably inaccurate. Such a description might fit many a substantial bourgeois, whereas Alonzo Rothschild, despite his plain tastes, was far more the patrician. One would have had to imagine him with another head and other hands to consider him bourgeois. Such long, white, blue-veined hands belong to the proverbial gentleman; such delicate skin is an attribute of gentle birth; such a head is seen only on those who do the world’s thinking. Admirably moulded, it put one in mind of a well-built house,—good in its lines and roomy inside. The broad, dome-like forehead—exaggerated by partial baldness—and the full, gray-brown beard were almost unmistakable indications of the scholar. Yet quite as distinctly were the silkiness of his black hair, the well-set, finely cut features, the sparse eyebrows, and the curling nostrils, marks of the aristocrat. But it was the kindliness and swift intelligence of his hazel eyes that gave his face its mobility of expression. Passions and moods played across it as freely as the lights and shadows of the sky are reflected on the surface of a summer meadow.
As his appearance bespoke, my father was physically and nervously of delicate fiber. His sense of touch, for example, was hypersensitive, and it was amusing, at table, to see how gingerly he handled hot plates. He was, however, in no sense unmanly and too often suffered acutely in silence. In fact he could much better bear suffering himself than witness it in others. Not infrequently when some member of the family was in pain, he became similarly afflicted through sheer sympathy.
Sometimes his constitutional intensity manifested itself in quite a different manner. Ordinarily mild-tempered and patient, he was capable of a withering wrath. Relentless, and concentrating in itself all his physical and intellectual forces, it could flare up without warning, or wait years for an opportune moment, and then sweep upon the chosen enemy like a rain of fire. Crushing as the effect of such an outburst was upon its victim, it was hardly less disastrous in its physical reaction upon himself.
Irritability and violence of temper constituted in his case the enemy that every man carries within himself. It is evident that he recognized his cardinal fault, for he kept a little card perched on his inkstand bearing this proverb in his own handwriting: “Mensch ärger dich nicht.”
Usually people so highly organized are difficult to live with, but my father was a striking exception. Save for such occasional outbursts as have already been alluded to, he was of a sunny disposition and most considerate in his personal relationships. Those whose duty it was to minister to his comfort and physical well-being found him easy to please. He was austerely plain in matters of dress and neither knew nor cared what he ate. Indeed, when mentally absorbed, he forgot his meals, and it is said that while he was editing The Jewelers’ Weekly he ate lunch only if one of his friends came and dragged him out. Even had he been more exacting and given freer rein to his moods, his personal charm would have been sufficient counterbalance. His resonant voice, buoyancy, and ready sympathy would alone have made him a pleasant companion. Then, too, he had an almost magical influence over all who came within his range of acquaintance, stimulating the best that they had in them, and bringing it to the surface.
His interest in humanity was not limited by age or sex. He had a great tenderness for children and a power over their affections that was but another phase of his diverse nature. He made a capital playmate, as his own children well remember, and the serious concerns of the grown-up world never so shackled him that he could not shake them off for a romp, or a song, to invent a new game or to play some old favorite. Like many other men who have done big things, he never entirely lost a certain boyishness that cropped out occasionally in whimsical little pranks. One of these is so superior to the general run of practical jokes that it bears narrating.
It was in The Jewelers’ Weekly days. He was returning to New York from a trip to Albany and some friends had accompanied him to the train. While they were waiting, my father accidentally dropped a half-dollar and one of the young ladies, picking it up, vowed that she would keep it as a remembrance. My father pleaded with mock concern that he needed it to complete his fare, but she, disbelieving him, clung to it the more firmly. She was correct in her assumption that he had plenty of money with him, but on the train he decided that the fifty cents should earn him some fun and not be a total loss.
On arriving in New York, he went to his printer and had him strike off a mock newspaper clipping which narrated how a young man, giving his name as Alonzo Rothschild, had been ejected from the Chicago Limited because he lacked part of the fare; how he maintained that it had been stolen from him by a Miss L—— of Albany, and how he was last seen trudging toward New York.
Not only was the young lady contrite over her playful theft, but she was enraged at the newspaper that would print such a story about her, and for a long time she begged my father to divulge the name so that she might bring suit.
This story well illustrates the exuberant, playful humor that brightened his whole life and that made our dinner table more famous for puns, jokes, and repartee than for good cheer of the other sort. But there is another anecdote of this period which throws more light on his character.
One day a gentleman who knew the family was walking through Mount Morris Park, in New York, when he noticed a bareheaded young man seated on a park bench and absorbed in a book. Approaching along the path he was surprised to recognize my father, and on reaching the bench he was still more astonished to see that his forehead swarmed with mosquitoes.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, Lon,” he sang out. My father started at the unexpected sound of the voice as if he had been shot, and looked up. “Why, hello, Sid, I’m just studying,” he said. “It looks more as if you were mosquito farming,” his friend replied. “Why don’t you brush them off?” “Oh, I want them there,” my father answered. “I don’t concentrate the way I ought to and I’m learning how.”
The discipline must have been effectual, for while interruptions annoyed him exceedingly, the mere presence of people in the study while he worked never disturbed him. For years my youngest sister spent her mornings on the rug beside his desk, and while she cut out paper dolls and crooned to herself, he wrote.
My father was capable, not only of great concentration, but also of unity of purpose. Gifted with a variety of talents and innumerable opportunities to exercise them, he remained—save for unavoidable digressions—a one-job man. He consistently refused tempting offers to address audiences, to undertake other literary labors, or to go into politics, and always with the same answer, that he had a task to do and must not stop until he had finished. He could have made himself a prominent figure in the public eye, but he found greater satisfaction in quietly doing work of permanent value.
Singleness of purpose and concentration were only two of the several qualities that made Alonzo Rothschild a man of strength. What had been willful stubbornness in his childhood crystallized, later in life, into dogged persistence. How great a factor it was in his successes may be judged from his own words. Once in speaking of his past life he said, “I have never really wanted a thing without getting it.”
In addition to this driving force he had the gift of silence. Not that he was what is known as a man of few words, nor that he was loath to express definite opinions, but he knew how to keep his own counsels. He rarely discussed a plan until its success was assured, and concerning his literary work, he was almost secretive. This reticence in discussing himself was due somewhat to discreetness, somewhat to good taste, but largely to his doctrine of work and to his constitutional objectivity. He believed that the world’s interest should focus on the work, not on the author. He despised the man whose personality was more discussed than his work and seemed to have little sympathy for him who made his pen a vehicle for expression of self. In this prejudice one can read the influence of Addison, and others of the classical school,—the masters whom he followed in forming his style.
Almost equal to his admiration for literature that definitely “gets somewhere” was his impatience with leisurely, descriptive, digressive writing, however charming its meanderings might be. The full measure of his scorn, however, was reserved for “precious” writers such as Walter Pater, whose involved, mannered style and somewhat luscious thought were peculiarly offensive to one who prized virility, lightness of touch, and lucid directness, as he did.
Between his literary work and his fine business instinct there was a connecting bond. He applied to research the methods of a highly trained business expert. The results can best be described by quoting his own words: “I can,” he said, “go into my study and at a moment’s notice lay my hand on the references covering any point in Lincoln’s life.”
Such a complete mastery of the subject bespeaks a laborious thoroughness that one associates with such names as Stradivari; a striving for perfection suggestive of the days of hand-made things. With the care of a master cabinet-maker choosing his woods, he collected facts, subjecting them to the same searching scrutiny to which the cabinet-maker subjects the woods in a hunt for hidden flaws. Then having tested his materials, he put them together—fitting, readjusting, and polishing, with all the care of the cabinet-maker—until he had done a work that would stand for all time. He wrote with a deliberateness that might seem laughable to those unacquainted with the art of authorship, never permitting a sentence to stand until every word rang true even though it were to take hours in the writing. Like Ben Jonson he realized that, “Who casts to write a living line must sweat.” It may seem a trivial matter, but none the less it is significant of the spirit in which he worked, that the printers who set up Lincoln, Master of Men, found the manuscript one of the most faultless that they had ever handled.
The grasp of detail here exemplified, supplemented by clearness of judgment, originality, and foresight, constituted a rare intellectual fitness. It is not uncommon to find a man of constructive ability or one who is a good administrator, but the two qualities are rarely found together. Where they are associated, one has a man equipped for high service. With such an endowment of all-round effectiveness, Alonzo Rothschild could have attained leadership in any one of many fields of human endeavor.
There were lines, however, along which my father was little developed. His tastes in music and art were plain, not to say plebeian. Nor was he of a deeply poetic or metaphysical cast of mind. The older he grew, the more he centered his attention upon international, ethical, and social questions, and the less upon abstract metaphysical inquiries. A Jew by birth, he early settled down to agnosticism, though never quite contentedly. As a young man he had been strongly attracted by Theosophy, but finding nothing substantial on which to base a belief he sadly gave it up and lapsed back into agnosticism. Still all through his life Theosophy flitted before his eyes as an unattained desire and he often expressed the wish that he could accept its beautiful philosophy. That he had a strong religious instinct is further testified by his own words about sacred music. He writes: “Irreligious as I am, sacred music when well played on the organ has a powerful influence on me. It makes me feel sometimes as if I were inspired—as if I could seize my pen and write something worth reading.”
Though too much a man of the world to be a poet in the strict meaning of the word, he was one in the larger sense of magnificence of conceptions, elevated thoughts, and high purposes.
It is interesting in this connection to consider what influence his almost lifelong study of Abraham Lincoln may have had on his character. It would seem that in his great simplicity, he must have been directly influenced by Lincoln. Like him, he considered himself a plain man, and he contented himself with a plain man’s share of the world’s luxuries. He rarely rode in a parlor-car and could satisfy his hunger as contentedly at a dairy lunch as in a hotel dining-room. He cared nothing for the appearance of things.
The last eighteen years of his life he spent in a plain old farmhouse. There was nothing about its exterior to distinguish it from thousands of other New England farmhouses, but once inside, the visitor found himself in “a city of books.” In other respects he found the house as unpretentious inside as it appeared from without. It lacked no comforts or conveniences, but there was no studied attempt at decoration. It was quite evidently the home of a man who valued only the genuine things of life.
And yet, with all its simplicity, that house was a Mecca toward which turned many feet. All sorts of people came there, knowing that none ever went away without being enriched. For one it was new inspiration; for another the solution of some vexing problem, or perhaps a fresh grasp on his whole life. They knew that the man who dwelt there was never too busy or too weary to help his fellow men, and they came like tired children for comfort or for help. They knew him to be a man of warm sympathies, a brave man, an honest man, and a man strong enough to help shoulder their burdens. How many realized as they sat there, quietly talking with him, smiling with him, laughing with him, that this man who seemed so like themselves was—in the language of one grateful old lady—a “prince of men” in whom were all the elements of true greatness.
John Rothschild.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
April, 1917.
WITH THE CORRESPONDING ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES