Behind the Mirrors Part 14

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 a.s.sociate 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 munic.i.p.al legislature; they see that every const.i.tuent gets his street sign and sidewalk enc.u.mbrance 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 b.u.t.tonholing 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 const.i.tutional questions, like a child with mola.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SENATOR JAMES W. WADSWORTH OF NEW YORK]

Industry makes Reed Smoot one of the most useful of the Senators. He has a pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.tle 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 sanct.i.ty 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sions 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-j.a.panese 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 doc.u.ment 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.