INTERLUDE. INTRODUCING A FEW MEMBERS OF THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE AND
SOME OTHERS
There is a saying that in American families there is only three or four
generations from riches to shirt sleeves. Mr. Hanna is the first
generation, Mr. Aldrich is the second generation. In Mr. Penrose and Mr.
Lodge you reach what is a common phase of American family history, the
eccentric generation. And in Senator Jim Watson and Senator Charles
Curtis, who are just coming on the scene as "leaders," you reach once
more political shirt sleeves.
The American family dissipating its patrimony, produces invariably the
son who is half contemptuous of the old house that founded his fortunes,
who is half highbrow, who perhaps writes books as well as keeping them,
or it may be bolts to the other side altogether.
So the Hanna-Aldrich stock produced Henry Cabot Lodge, a sort of
political James Hazen Hyde, who stayed at home and satisfied his longing
for abroad by serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But
perhaps it would be fairer to Mr. Lodge to say of him what a witty
friend of mine did, "Lodge is what Henry James would have been if Henry
James had remained in America and gone into politics." Or he is what
Henry Adams might have been if Henry Adams had been less honest in his
contempt for democracy.
The last leaf of that New England tree whose fruit was an expatriate
literature and expatriate lives, the limit of Mr. Lodge's expatriation
was an interest in foreign affairs when redder-blooded Americans were
happily ignorant of them. If business had been choosing spokesmen at
Washington it would no more have picked out Mr. Lodge than it would have
picked out James Hazen Hyde or Henry James. Mr. Lodge's leadership was a
sign of decay.
But some will say business at this time had Senator Penrose as its
spokesman. I doubt it. Senator Penrose was that other son of the family
in whose blood runs all the ancestral energies without the ancestral
restraint.
By the time he achieved prominence business in politics was no longer
quite respectable. People said, creating the Penrose legend, "Why,
Penrose would stop at nothing. He'd even represent the selfish interests
here in Washington." Therefore it was considered that he must represent
them. And he did to an extent, speaking for Henry C. Frick and some
others of Pennsylvania, but he was in no adequate sense the successor
of Aldrich and Hanna.
Had business chosen a spokesman at Washington, he must have been
respectable. Hanna was that most respectable of Americans, the highly
successful man who has played for and won a great fortune. Aldrich was
that equally respectable American, the conservative manager of the
established corporation.
There is a story that when Penrose became boss of Pennsylvania the
Republican politicians of the State were anxious about the effect his
personal reputation would have upon the voters. Finally they went to
him, as the elders sometimes go to the young parson, and said, "The
organization thinks the people would like it better if you were
married," "All right, boys, if you think so," Penrose replied; "let the
organization pick the gal." The organization recoiled from this
cynicism. But business is harder. Business, if it had really identified
itself with Penrose, would have "picked the gal."
No better evidence of the tenuity of his connection with business is
required than his outbreak in 1920, "I won't have the international
bankers write the platform and nominate the candidate at Chicago."
Mr. Penrose enjoyed a "_succes de scandale_." He was what the hypocrites
in Washington secretly desired to be but lacked the courage to be. He
lived up to the aristocratic tradition, at its worst; which everyone
admires, especially at its worst. He did on a grand scale what anyone
else would have been damned for doing on a lesser scale and was loved
for being so splendidly shocking.
He was the village sport, with the best blood of the village in his
veins, and was the village delight, the man about whom all the best
stories were whispered. He had the clear mind which comes from scorn of
pretense. But all this is not greatness, nor is it leadership. The
Republicans in the Senate before being led by Mr. Penrose would have
insisted on "picking the gal." They like to see framed marriage
certificates in the party household.
The patrimony is gone and we reach shirt sleeves in Senator Charles
Curtis and Senator James Watson, one of whom will succeed Mr. Lodge when
he dies, retires, or is retired, and the other of whom will succeed Mr.
Cummins as president pro tem when he similarly disposes of himself or is
disposed of.
Neither of them has the stature or solidity of Hanna or Aldrich, and
they will not have supporting them unity in party or in national
sentiment. Neither of them has the romantic quality of Mr. Penrose or
Mr. Lodge. Neither of them will ever be a leader in any real sense of
the word. Neither of them will have anything to lead.
As frequently happens when you reach shirt sleeves by the downward
route, you find the accumulative instinct reasserting itself on a petty
scale. Look at the rather shabby clothes that Senator Curtis wears, in
spite of his considerable wealth, and you are sure that you have to do
with a hoarder. And that is what he is; a hoarder of political minutiae.
Current report is that he is the best poker player in either house of
Congress. You can imagine him sitting across the table watching the
faces of his antagonists with a cold eye, which no tremor of a muscle,
no faint coming or going of color, no betraying weakness escapes.
That is his forte in politics, knowing all the little things about men
which reveal their purposes or operate in unexpected ways as hidden
motives.
He has a perfect card catalogue of nearly all the voters of Kansas. It
is kept up to date. It reports not merely names and addresses but
personal details, the voter's point of view, what interests him, what
influences may be brought to bear on him. Curtis is a hoarder, with an
amazing capacity for heaping up that sort of information.
His mind is a card catalogue of the Senate, vastly more detailed than
the card catalogue of Kansas. He watches the Senate as he watches the
faces of his antagonist in a poker game. He knows the little
unconsidered trifles which make men vote this way and that. And he is so
objective about it all that he rarely deceives himself. If into this
concern with the small motives which move men there crept a certain
contempt of humanity he might mislead himself; he might be hateful, too;
but his objectivity saves him; he is as objective as a card catalogue
and no more hateful.
But you see how far short all this falls from leadership, or
statesmanship, or greatness of any description. Usefulness is there
certainly; card catalogues are above all useful, especially when there
is variety and diversity to deal with, as there is coming to be in a
Senate ruled by blocs and frequented by undisciplined individualism.
If Curtis kept a journal he would hand down to posterity a most perfect
picture of men and motives in Washington,--if, again, posterity should
be interested in the fleeting and inconsiderable figures who fill the
national capital "in this wicked and adulterous generation seeking for a
sign"--I am quoting the Bible trained Secretary of State in one of his
petulant moments.
If he had the malice of Saint Simon, the journal would be diverting, but
he is without malice. He has no cynical conception of men's weakness and
smallness as something to play upon. He accepts Senators as they are,
sympathetically. What makes them vote this way and that is the major
consideration of politics. His records of the Kansas electorate are more
important to him than principles, policies, or morals. The efficient
election district Captain of the Senate, that is Curtis.
A more likely successor to Lodge is "Jim" Watson of Indiana. I attended
a theatrical performance in Washington recently. Nearby sat the Indiana
Senator. His neighbor, whom I did not recognize, doubtless some
politician from Indiana, sat with his arm about Watson's neck, before
the curtain rose, pouring confidences into Watson's ear.
Watson is given to public embraces. His arm falls naturally about an
interlocutor's shoulders or, and this is important as showing that Jim
is not merely patronizing, descending affectionately from the great
heights of the Senatorship, Jim himself, as at the theatre, is the
object of the embrace. But perhaps that is finer condescension.
If the characteristic gesture of Lodge is the imperious clapping of his
hands for the Senate pages and the revealing trait of Curtis is
extraordinary intuition about the cards in other hands around the
lamp-lit table, the soul of Watson is in the embrace. His voice is a
caress. He kisses things through. He never errs in personal relations,
if you like to be embraced--and most men do, by greatness.
In one of his less successful moments he represented, at Washington the
National Manufacturers' Association, at that time a rather shady
organization of lesser business men. If he had not been the orator that
he is he would have been with that circumambulatory arm of his, an
inevitable lobbyist.
For Watson is an orator, of the old school, the Harding school. They
employ the same loose style of speech, flabby as unused muscles, words
that come into your head because you have often heard them on the stump
and in the Senate, and read them in country editorials, words that have
long lost their precise meaning but evoke the old pictures in the minds
of an emotional and unthinking electorate. At this art of emitting a
long rumble of speech which is not addressed to the mind Watson has no
equal.
It is an American art and puzzling to foreigners. Vice-Admiral Kato, not
the head of the Japanese delegation but the second Kato, had enough
English to remark it. "Your President," he said, "is a charming man, but
why does he put such funny things in his speeches?"
In the mere mastery of this kind of English Mr. Harding may equal
Watson, but as an orator the Indianian has what the President never had;
the unctuous quality in him which makes him embrace readily lets him
pour out his soul freely. He has thunders in his voice, he tosses his
head with its fuzzy hair magnificently, he has gusto. He has
imagination. He is a big, lovable if not wholly admirable, boy playing
at oratory, playing at statesmanship, playing above all at politics.
Nothing is very real to him, not even money; he put all he had into an
irrigation project and left it there. Just now he irrigates with the
tears in his voice the arid places in the Republican party where
loyalty should grow.
[Illustration: SENATOR JOSEPH S FRELINGHUYSEN OF NEW JERSEY]
I present these characterizations of Senate leaders, past, present, and
future, to indicate through them what the Senate itself is, and to
suggest what conditions have given quite ordinary men power and how
feeble leadership has become, with the country no longer agreed how best
to promote the general good, and with Congress as it has been in recent
years a relatively unimportant factor in the national government.
Senator Platt used to say of an habitual candidate for nomination to the
governorship of New York, Timothy L. Woodruff, "Well, it may taper down
to Tim." We have "tapered down to Tim,"--or rather to "Jim"--in the
Senate because as a people we have been indifferent and unsure, and
because there has been little use for anything but "Tims" or "Jims" in
Washington. Nature seems to abhor a waste in government.
Those who ascribe all the troubles in Congress to lack of leadership,
and go no further, blame the poverty of our legislative life upon the
popular election of Senators and upon the choice of candidates at direct
primaries. But the decay began before the system changed. We resorted to
new methods of nomination and election because the old methods were
giving us Lorimers and Addickses. Probably we gained nothing, but we
lost little.
Big business, so long as the taxing power, through the imposition of
the tariff, was important to it, and so long as it was accepted as the
one vital interest of the country, saw to it that it was effectively
represented in Congress. It was then somebody's job to see that at least
some solid men went to Washington. It has of late been nobody's job.
There has been no real competition for seats in the national
legislature.
The Senate has tempted small business men who can not arise to the level
of national attention through their control of industry, and small
lawyers similarly restricted in their efforts for publicity. It is an
easily attained national stage.
It appeals to that snobbish instinct--of wives sometimes--which seeks
social preferment not to be obtained in small home towns, or denied
where family histories are too well known.
It allures the politician, bringing opportunity to play the favorite
game of dispensing patronage and delivering votes, with the added pomp
of a title.
It is the escape of the aristocrat, whose traditions leave him the
choice between idleness and what is called "public service."
It is the escape of the successful man who has found his success empty
and tries to satisfy the unsatisfied cravings of his nature. Such men
"retire" into it, as it was reported to President Harding's indignation
that one of the Chicago banker candidates for the Secretaryship of the
Treasury wished to retire into the Cabinet. Some enter it for one of
these motives, more from a combination of them, but, generally, it is
the promised land of the bored, some of whom find it only a mirage.
A typical Senator is Mr. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, one of the smaller
business men being drawn into public life. Son of a country minister, he
started as an insurance agent. Nature equipped him with unusual energy
and aggressiveness and those two qualities brought success in writing
insurance. Nothing in his early training inhibited his robust
temperament. Ruddy and vigorous, he is not sicklied o'er with any pale
cast whatever. Plainly he has a zest for life, that easily accessible
American life where good mixers abound.
Not a highbrow, he yet recognizes that literature has its place, on all
four walls of a large room, and bought in sets.
Having the American horror of loneliness, whether social or moral, you
find him always going along with his party. When his set divides he
balances between the two factions as long as possible and elects to go
with the more numerous. Simple, likable, honest, safe so long as
majorities are safe, and that is the theory we are working on, he is the
average man in everything but his aggressiveness and energy.
No, he also rises above the average in possessing such a name as
Frelinghuysen. You enter his library and you see a banner of the
campaign of Clay and Frelinghuysen. He will recite to you campaign
songs of those unsuccessful candidates for President and Vice-President.
Another Frelinghuysen was a Cabinet member. Another Frelinghuysen, of
the wealthier branch of the family, has an assured social position.
None of these famous Frelinghuysens is an ancestor. Each of them is a
challenge. If he could have found an ancestor! If an insurance company
were a high place from which to survey the world at one's feet! But, no!
Ancestors, power, publicity, social prestige, all lie beyond the reach
of small business success.
In the Senate men, important men, come to you for favors; it is so much
better than going to them to write policies. From the Senatorship you
condescend; there really is a world to which a Senator can condescend.
Washington is a social melting pot. No one asks whether you are one of
the Blanks. You are Senator Blank and that is enough. And if you are so
fortunate, by your very averageness, to attach yourself to the average
man whose fortune makes him President, and you become one of the Harding
Senators, one of the intimates, you are lifted up: like Bottom, you are
translated. You are the familiar of greatness.
As a legislator you deal with policies, international and domestic, in
the realm of ideas--as when you sit in your library, four square with
all the wisdom of the ages.
If you have enough of the boy about you, like Frelinghuysen, you enjoy
all this hugely. You have projected your ego beyond the limits of the
insurance business. You look among the branches of the Frelinghuysen
family tree without losing countenance. Who knows that there won't be
another "and Frelinghuysen" ticket, this time a successful one?
Not every senator has escaped so nearly from the failures which attend
success as has Frelinghuysen. Nor is his escape complete. A sense of
unreality haunts him. Aggressiveness in his case covers it, as it so
often does a feeling of weakness. After he has blustered through some
utterance, he will buttonhole you and ask, "Did I make a damn fool of
myself? Now, the point I was trying to make was, etc. Did I get it
clear? Or did I seem like a damn fool?"
Less agile minded than Senator Edge, he watches the motions of his New
Jersey colleague as a fascinated bird watches those of a snake or a cat.
Intellectually he is not at ease, even in the Senate.
Another of the Harding set is Harry New of Indiana, one of the "Wa'al
naow" school of statesmen, in dress and speech the perfect county
chairman of the stage. The broad-brimmed black felt hat, winter and
summer, has withstood all the insidious attacks of fashion. The nasal
voice has equally resisted all the temptations to conformity with the
softer tones which are now everywhere heard. In politics one has to be
regular, and New has the impulse to individuality, which with Borah and
LaFollette manifests itself in political isolation. With New it
manifests itself in hat and speech. New thus remains a person, not
merely a clothes-horse which is recorded "aye" when Mr. Lodge votes
"aye" and "no" when Mr. Lodge votes "no." But this is hardly fair. Mr.
New has been irregular in other ways. He has not made money; he has lost
it, a fortune in a stone quarry. He is indifferent to it. This marks him
as a person. He would rather whip a stream for trout than go after
dollars with a landing net.
Whipping a stream for trout is the clue to Harry New. If you are a
fisherman you impute all sorts of wiles to the fish. You match your wits
against the sharp wits under the water, and your ego is fortified when,
the day being dark and your hand being cunning, you land a mess from the
stream. The world is a trout stream to New. The hat and the nasal accent
are the good old flies that Isaak Walton recommended.
There is the type of mind which sees craft where others see simplicity.
We associate shrewdness with the kind of hat New wears and the kind of
voice he has preserved against the seductions of politeness. It is one
of our rural traditions. Suppose shrewdness that asks no more than
conversation and a small mess of fish. It is delightful. As we listen to
it arriving after the most penetrating exposition at the same
conclusions which we have reached directly and stupidly, we are
flattered. We realize that we, too, are shrewd, unconsciously so, as,
wasn't it Moliere's bourgeois gentleman, who learned that he was
unconsciously a gentleman, since he had been doing all his life some of
the things that gentlemen did?
A playboy of the western plains, New would be happier if his colleague,
Jim Watson, did not also take himself seriously as a politician. "Jim,"
says New, "is an orator, a great orator, but he ought to let politics
alone; as a politician he is, like all orators a child."
New is no orator. A fair division would be for Watson to be the orator
and New the politician. But no one is ready to admit that he is no
politician. For New politics is craft; for Watson it is embraces. At a
dinner in Indiana, New contrived to have his rival for the senatorship,
Beveridge, and the politically outlawed Mayor of Indianapolis, Lew
Shank, not invited. Watson would have led them both in with an arm
around the neck of each. That individualism which makes New preserve the
hat and the accent makes him punish foes, or is it that the sense of
being "close to Harding" robs him of discretion?
In the board of aldermen of any large city you will find a dozen
Calders, local builders or contractors, good fellows who have the gift
of knowing everyone in their districts, who by doing little favors here
and there get themselves elected to the municipal legislature; they see
that every constituent gets his street sign and sidewalk encumbrance
permits, interview the police in their behalf when necessary, and the
bright young men who compose the traditional humor of the daily press
refer to them gaily as "statesmen."
The art of being a Senator like Calder is the art of never saying "no."
He is worth mentioning because he has the bare essentials of
senatorship, the habit of answering all letters that come to him, the
practice of introducing by request all bills that anyone asks to have
introduced, industry in seeking all jobs and favors that anyone comes to
him desiring.
He "goes to the mat" for everybody and everything. He shakes everybody's
hand. He is a good news source to representatives of the local press and
is paid for his services in publicity. New York is populous and sent
many soldiers to the late war. Nevertheless, the mother or father of a
soldier from that state who did not receive a personal letter from
Calder must have eluded the post office.
He votes enthusiastically for everything that everybody is for. He is
unhappy when he has to take sides on sharply debated issues. Morality is
a question of majorities. He finds safety in numbers.
[Illustration: SENATOR HARRY S. NEW OF INDIANA]
Nature was not kind to Calder; it left him with no power to throw a
bluff. He is plainly what he is. He has neither words nor manner. His
colleagues look down on him a little. But most of them are after all
only Calder plus, and plus, generally speaking, not so very much. He is
the Senator reduced to the lowest terms.
Calder is timid, more timid than Frelinghuysen with his eternal
buttonholing you to ask what impression he has made, more timid than
anyone except Kellogg of Minnesota. The latter is in a constant state of
flutter. Little and wisplike physically he seems to blow about with
every breeze of politics. He is so unsure that his nerves are always on
edge, in danger of breaking. When he was balancing political
consequences over nicely during the League of Nations discussion,
Ex-President Taft said to him impatiently: "The trouble with you, Frank,
is that you have no guts." Kellogg straightened up all his
inches--physically he is a white-haired and bent Will H. Hays--and
replied, "I allow no man to say that to me." He fluttered out, and Mr.
Taft being kind-hearted followed him to apologize.
If you could analyze the uneasiness of Mr. Kellogg you would understand
the fear which haunts the minds of all Senators. Mr. Kellogg comes to
Washington after an enormously successful career at the bar. He is rich.
He is respected. His place in society is secure. What would the loss of
the senatorship mean to such a man? He ought to have all the confidence
which is supposed to be in the man who rises in the world, all that
which comes from an established position. Unlike most great lawyers who
retire into the Senate, Mr. Kellogg does not merely interest himself in
constitutional questions, like a child with molasses on its fingers
playing with feathers. He is industrious. He interests himself in the
Senate's business. He develops nice scruples which can not be brushed
aside. He wears himself out over them. He hesitates. He trembles. The
certainty with which his mind must have operated in the field of legal
principles deserts him in the field of political expediency. Or perhaps
it is that he sees both principles and expediency and can not choose
between the two.
Wadsworth of New York is an exception to the general run of Senators. He
belongs by birth to the class which is traditionally free from
hypocrisy. He is not boisterously contemptuous of the slavishness of
Senators as Penrose was. He is quietly contemptuous. His voice has a
note of well-bred impatience in it. He has not Penrose's pleasure in
mere shocking, but he has the aristocratic hatred of moral ostentation.
The kind of thing that is not done is the kind of thing that is not
done. You don't do it and make no parade of your abstinence. Wadsworth
does not open his home to all his New York colleagues in both houses
just because it is politically expedient. His house is his own, and
so is his conscience, which is not surrendered at the demands of woman
suffrage or of the dries. He has courage. He has convictions. He is
lonely. To be otherwise than lonely in the Senate you must be a
Frelinghuysen, an Elkins, a Newberry, a New, a Watson, or a Hale. He
will never be a leader. He has no more place in the Senate as it is than
Lord Robert Cecil, a much larger man, has in the House of Commons as it
is. Both belong to another day and generation. Neither is sure of
anything but himself and each counts the world well lost. Both represent
the aristocratic tradition.
[Illustration: SENATOR JAMES W. WADSWORTH OF NEW YORK]
Industry makes Reed Smoot one of the most useful of the Senators. He has
a passion for details. He reads all the bills. He makes himself a master
of the Government's appropriations and expenditures. He exudes figures
from every pore. By temperament Mr. Smoot is unhappy, and he finds cause
of dark foreboding in the mounting costs of government. His voice has a
scolding note. His manner and appearance is that of a village elder. His
heart is sore as he regards the political world about him, its
wastefulness, its consumption of white paper, on leaves to print and on
reports which no one reads. He is the aggrieved parent. "My children,"
he seems always to say, "you must mend your ways." He specializes in
misplaced commas. Nothing is too trivial for his all seeing eyes. In
committee he talks much, twice as much as anyone else, about points
which escape the attention of all his colleagues. Senators, wishing to
get through no matter how, regard him as a pest. Only an unimaginative
and uncreative mind can occupy itself as Smoot's does. He is a building
inspector rather than a builder. With his fussiness, his minor prophetic
voice, his holier-than-thou attitude toward waste, he can never be a
leader of the Senate to which the idle apprentice, the good fellow, who
dines out much in the Harding Senatorial set, the small business man
seeking a place in society, give its tone and character.
One can not present a complete gallery of the Senate in the space of a
single chapter. I have chosen a few characteristic figures, the leaders
past, present, and to come, the small business man who seeks social
preferment or the destruction of a title in Washington, such as Calder
and Frelinghuysen, the politician who likes to play the game better in
the Capitol than at home, like New, the aristocrat who escapes from the
boredom of doing nothing into the boredom of a democratic chamber, the
gradgrind legislator of whom there are few like Smoot, the half party
man, half bloc man like Capper.
[Illustration: SENATOR WILLIAM M. CALDER OF NEW YORK]
All of these men belong to a party and are limited by that party's
weakness, its lack of principles, the caution which it has to use in
avoiding the alienation of its loosely held supporters. The party
program is something on which all kinds of people can stand. Necessarily
the party men in the Senate are tied down to a cause that is largely
negative. They can not be other than feeble and ineffective figures.
The weakness of parties has led to the emergence of a few outstanding
individual Senators who must be examined to see whether around them the
new Senate which will come with the shift of power and responsibility to
the legislative branch can be built. The most brilliant and interesting
of them is Senator Borah, but it is significant that the farm bloc
looking for a leader did not turn to him, but chose rather much less
significant and effective men.
Yet the Idaho Senator seems the natural rallying point for any movement
which will give new life and force to the Senate. He is established. He
is the most potent single individual in the upper house. So far as there
is any opposition to President Harding and his friends, Mr. Borah is
that opposition. His is the intelligence which inspires the Democratic
party when it consents to be inspired by intelligence. He believes that
the revolution has come, not one of street fighting and bomb throwing
but a peaceful change which has made the old parties meaningless,
destroyed the old authorities and set men free for the new grouping that
is to take place. Others in the Senate see this and are frightened.
Borah sees it and is glad. His bonds are loosed and he is a vastly
braver, sincerer and more effective Senator than ever before.
It is absurd to use the word radical of Borah, Johnson, or LaFollette,
for none of them is truly radical; but if one must do so for the lack of
any better term, then Borah is the conservatives' radical. The angriest
reactionary remains calm when his name is mentioned, perhaps because
Borah never gets into a passion himself and never addresses himself to
popular prejudice. He is not a mob orator. He is impersonal in his
appeals. No one any longer suspects him of an ambition to be President.
He seems, like a hermit, to have divorced himself from the earthly
passions of politics and to have become pure intellect operating in the
range of public affairs. He is almost a sage while still a Senator.
If we had the custom of electing our Ex-Presidents to the Senate, you
can imagine one of them, beyond the average of intelligence, freed from
ambition through having filled the highest office, occupying a place
like that of Borah.
Borah perhaps likes it too well ever to descend into the market place
and become a leader. His is an enviable lot, for he is the most nearly
free man in Washington; why should he exchange the immunity he possesses
for a small group of followers? Besides he believes in the power of
oratory rather than in the power of organization. He said to me at the
Republican Convention of 1916, "I could stampede this crowd for
Roosevelt." The crowd was thoroughly organized against Roosevelt.
Nature made him an orator, one of the greatest in the country. And he
has come to be satisfied with the gift he has. The unimportance of his
state, Idaho, has freed him from any illusions about himself with
respect to the Presidency. The habit of carrying a comb in his vest
pocket marks him as free from the social ambitions which number more
victims in the Senate than the ambition for the presidency. He is almost
a disembodied spirit politically, of the revolution he discerns he will
be a spectator.
Hiram Johnson is a declining figure. I see no reason to modify the
conclusion which was reached about him in the _Mirrors of Washington_,
that he thought more of men than of principles and especially of one
man, Johnson. The test of his sincerity came when the vote was reached
on the unseating of Senator Newberry for spending too much money in the
Michigan primaries.
Johnson's great issue a year before had been sanctity of popular
nominations. Yet when he had an opportunity to speak and act against a
brazen even though foolish attempt to buy a nomination, he was rushing
wildly across the continent, arriving after the vote had been taken.
On reaching Washington, he called his newspaper friends before him to
explain the difficulties and delays that had made him late. When he had
finished a nasal voice from the press remarked, "Senator, there will be
great public sympathy with you as a victim of the railroads. But the
people will only know how great their loss has been if you will tell
them now how you would have voted if you had been here." Johnson
adjourned the meeting hastily without a reply.
The absence from the roll call and the theatrical attempt to make it
appear accidental were typical. Johnson had won the Michigan primaries
in the national campaign of 1920. The delegates were in control of
Newberry's political friends. They remained firm for Johnson throughout
the balloting. Johnson avoided voting against their leader although his
principles required that he should lead the fight for his unseating.
Johnson has always over-emphasized Johnson. At the Progressive
convention in 1912 when Roosevelt was nominated for the Presidency and
Johnson for the Vice-Presidency, it was proposed, since both were in
attendance, to bring both on the stage and introduce them to the
delegates. The natural order was Roosevelt first, since he was the
nominee for President and since he was, moreover, one of the most
distinguished figures in the world, and Johnson, since he had second
place, second. But Johnson would go second to no man. Either he must
show himself on the stage first or not at all. Finally it was
compromised by presenting them together at the same moment, holding
hands upon the platform.
Johnson can never see himself in proper perspective. At the Progressive
convention he was more important than Roosevelt. In the Newberry case
his political fortunes were more important than honest primaries.
Senator Reed of Missouri is possessed of a devil. He is a satirist
turned politician. He has the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. American life
with its stupidity, its facile optimism, its gullibility, its easy
compromises, its hypocrisy, fills him with rage. His face is shot red
with passion. His voice is angry. He is a defeated idealist left in this
barren generation without an ideal. He might have been led away by the
war as so many were, as Wilson was, into the belief that out of its
sufferings would come a purified and elevated humanity. But Reed is hard
to lead away. Where other men see beauty and hope he searches furiously
for sham. Where other men say cheerfully half a loaf is better than no
bread he puts the half loaf on the scales and proves that it is short
weight.
An old prosecuting attorney, he believes that guilt is everywhere. He is
always out for a conviction. If the evidence is insufficient he uses all
the arts, disingenuous presentations, appeals to prejudice, not because
he is indifferent to justice but because the accused ought to be hanged
anyway, and he is not going to let lack of evidence stand in the way of
that salutary consummation.
He conducts a lifelong and passionate fight against the American
practice of "getting away with it." Shall Hoover get away with it as a
great and pure man, the benefactor of the race! Not while Jim Reed has
breath in his body! Here is an American idol, tear it down, exhibit its
clay feet! Shall Wilson "get away with it," with his League of Nations
and his sublimated world set free from all the baser passions of the
past? Not while any acid remains on Jim Reed's tongue!
Reed is sincere. He hates sham. He nevertheless himself uses sham to
fight sham. He is the nearest thing to a great satirist this country has
developed. And the amazing consideration is that in a nation which
dislikes satire a satirist should be elected by the suffrage of his
fellows.
Probably it is only in politics that we tolerate satire. In
self-government we only half believe. We are divided in our own minds.
We make laws furiously and laugh at the laws we make. We pretend that
the little men of politics are great and then privately we indicate our
real perception of the truth by telling how small they are. Politics is
suspect and it stamps you as a person of penetration to show that you
are aware what sham and dishonesty there is in them. It is almost as
good an evidence of a superior mind as to say, "Of course I don't
believe what I read in the newspapers." Now satire is enjoyed by
superior minds, and it is only with regard to politics that we as a
people have superior minds, politics not being like business the pursuit
of honest everyday folk.
Jim Reed is then that part of ourselves which tells us that
self-government is a good deal of a sham, in the hands of amusing
charlatans. We tolerate him in perhaps the only place where we would
tolerate a satirist, in the Senate. And in the Senate they fear him.
He was attacking the Four Power Pact. "People say," he declared, "that
this ends the Anglo-Japanese alliance. I do not find it in the pact. I
do not find it nominated in the bond," he shouted. And the friends of
the pact sat silent afraid of Reed's power as a debater, until Senator
Lenroot having studied the document several minutes in the cloakroom
read the plain language of the agreement to end the alliance. Reed
almost "got away with it" himself. But this is not leadership. One does
not follow a satirist. One makes him a privileged character at most.
Reed and Borah are privileged characters each in his own way. The
privilege of being "queer" is as old as the herd itself. The harmless
insane man was almost sacred in primitive society. The "fool" was the
only man whose disrespect did not amount to _lese majeste_. The wisdom
of the "fool" was regarded with a certain awe and admiration. But the
death rate among those who sought this franchise must have been high.
It must be personality which decides who survives and achieves this
license and who does not, a nice capacity for adjustment, a rare sense
of what the crowd will endure. Borah and Reed have it, LaFollette has
not or has not chosen to exercise it.
George Moore somewhere says that if you can convince a woman that it is
all play, all Pan and nymph, between you and her, you have the perfect
way of a man with a maid, when his aim is something short of matrimony.
But if you are too serious about it--! LaFollette is perhaps too serious
about it. If he could have said what he had to say with a laugh and so
as to raise a laugh he might have been privileged like Reed, or, if he
had to be serious, he should have been serious like Borah, in a detached
and impersonal fashion; then perhaps he might still have been something
less than the public enemy that he is. But LaFollette is serious,
terribly serious, terribly in earnest. He has had convictions, clung to
them, and probably suffered more for them than any man in Washington.
The Wisconsin Senator is one of the least understood men in public life.
In the Senate he speaks violently, with a harsh voice and an excess of
manner. He is small and some of this loudness and emphasis is no doubt
that compensation for lack of stature and presence to which men
unconsciously resort; some of it is an exterior which has been
cultivated to cover up an unusually shy and sensitive heart. The
character in history and fiction which most intrigues him is Hamlet,
that gentle soul unfit for life. He has spent years studying the shy
Dane. He himself is a Hamlet who has taken up arms against a sea of
troubles. The "queer" man who would gain a franchise for his "queerness"
must not be sensitive. The crowd likes better to persecute than to
tolerate.
Then too LaFollette entered the Senate when minorities were less
tolerable than they are today. He got the stamp of impossible when
Roosevelt led a movement in his direction and he refused to be a part of
it. Thus he became isolated, neither Progressive nor Old Guard. You can
not safely be too uncompromising, too serious. It makes no difference if
you were right in rejecting both wings of the party as reactionary which
they speedily proved to be. It makes no difference if you were right in
opposing the war, and no one is so sure today that LaFollette was wrong
in doing so as men were when it was proposed to expel him from the
Senate. Justification after the fact does no good. It is not your
wrongness that they hate; it's your uncompromising quality, and that
remains more unbreakable than ever.
An unusual loyalty explains the unwillingness to compromise. LaFollette
attaches himself deeply. A characteristic act was his leaving the Senate
for months to nurse a sick son back to health. It sets him apart from
most men, who do not let sickness in the family interfere with their
business and perform their full duty when they hire a trained nurse.
People think of LaFollette, the public man, as an egoist but this
nursing of his son showed the utmost absence of egoism. And so it is
with all his intimate relations, which are unusually sweet and tender.
Whatever he is like privately, publicly he is placed, rated, catalogued;
the general mind is made up. The farm bloc no more turned to him than to
Borah for leadership. He will always remain isolated.
Now that party discipline has been broken down, what nonconformist
Senators suffer most from is the tyranny of the teapot. Senator Kenyon
referred to it when he said Newberry on trial for fitness for his seat
"floated back into the Senate on an ocean of tea." An unparliamentary
version of the same reference to the social influence is: "The Senate is
one long procession of dinners and hootch."
If you are regular politically you are regular socially. Given the habit
of voting with the crowd, of putting others at ease by a not too great
display of intellect, a good cook, a pre-war cellar, and a not
impossible wife, and you belong to the Senatorial middle class, the new
rich insurance agents, lawyers, miners, and manufacturers who control
the fate of the socially ambitious. You may not be invited to the
Wadsworths', or may be seldom asked there. But you are accepted by what
Mencken might call the wealthy "booboisie," the circle Mr. Harding
frequented before he was advanced to the White House.
If you don't you are of the Senatorial proletariat. You are invited out
seldom or not at all. You have to organize a little set of
intellectuals, not found in the Senate, for your wife's tea parties.
Senator Kenyon was a moderate nonconformist. Intellectually he was
honest, but not strong, so that an outsider might have thought that his
honesty and independence would be overlooked. But he was never accepted
by the "booboisie." He was virtually cold shouldered out of the Senate,
for it was with immense relief that he escaped from teapot ostracism to
the securer social area of the Federal bench.
I repeat a bit of gossip about the Iowa Senator without vouching for it.
When he was retiring, it is said, a reporter asked, "What can be done
with the Senate?" "Nothing," replied the Iowan, "The only thing to do is
to destroy it." If he said this he really flattered the "booboisie."
Destruction is reserved for wicked things like Sodom and Gomorrah. But
the Senate is not wicked. It is good, honest in the sense of not
stealing, well-meaning, timid, petty, tea-drinking, human, commonplace.
You can't destroy it unless you have something to put in its place, and
there is nothing. Much better turn it over to the blocs and see what
they will do with it.