Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/185

 delighted when, after his investigation, he wrote that story in McClure's which characterized Tom Johnson as the best mayor of the best governed city in the United States. I was delighted because I was flattered in my own opinion, because I was fond of Tom Johnson, and because it appeared just in the nick of time to turn the tide in Johnson's third campaign.

Jones was delighted, too; he had said almost immediately after Johnson became mayor of Cleveland that he "loved him" because, in appointing the Reverend Harris R. Cooley as Director of Charities and Corrections, Johnson selected a man who began at once to parole prisoners from the workhouse, and Jones and Johnson became friends as Johnson and Pingree had been friends. It was a peculiar instance of the whimsical and profligate generosity of the fates that the three cities grouped at the western end of Lake Erie like those cities Walt Whitman saw, or thought he saw, "as sisters with their arms around each others' necks" should have had about the same time three such mayors as Pingree in Detroit, Johnson in Cleveland and Jones in Toledo, though the three men were different in everything except their democracy.

Johnson's success in Cleveland, obtained nominally as a Democrat, though in his campaign he was as non-partizan as Jones himself, made him the "logical" candidate of the Democrats in the state for governor, and when he was nominated for that office he burst upon the old Republican state like a new planet flaming in the heavens. Many of the Demo