Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/226



The first thing was to get men who could do the work, a difficulty made greater because we have been accustomed to bestow public offices as rewards for political service; the office is for the man, not the man for the office. I had a friend, a young man, who had never been in politics in his life, though he had been born and reared in Ohio. He was of an old, wealthy and aristocratic family, a graduate of an eastern university. His name was Franklin Macomber. I appointed him a member of the Board of Public Safety—we still had the board plan of government then—and the appointment to office of a young aristocrat afforded the newspapers and cartoonists an opportunity for ridicule which they did not overlook. But I knew the boy. I had seen him play football, for one thing, and I knew how he managed his own business. The vigor and the nerve he had displayed on the football field at once showed in his duties, and the ability and devotion he displayed in his own affairs he applied in the public service. The criticism to which the administration was constantly subjected distressed him; he heard so much of it at the fashionable club where he had his luncheons. One afternoon he came into City Hall with an expression more somber than usual, and as he sat down in my office he began:

"They are saying"

"Who are saying?" I asked.

"The people," he replied.