The question what is the matter with Congress has received more answers than any other question asked about American institutions. For almost ageneration the national legislature has been regarded as the one great failure in self government. For years it has been the home of small men concerned with petty things which it approached in a petty spirit, incompetent, wasteful, and hypocritical, a trial to the Executive, almost a plague to the country. It has shared with state legislatures and municipal boards of aldermen the impatience of the people. In spite of searchings of the public conscience it has gone from bad to worse till it is at its lowest point today, in personnel, in organization, in capacity to transact business.
What has brought Congress to this state has been the unimportance of its work, "doing such little things," as Mr. Root said after his six years in the Senate. Natural economy prevents the sending of a man on a boy's errand even if the man would go.
The great power which legislatures have, that over the public purse, has not been of enough importance to make Congress a great legislature. Taxes were light and before the war fell so indirectly that the public gave them little attention. The control of the budget virtually passed out of the hands of Congress, for executive departments habitually exceeded their appropriations and Congress always made up the deficiencies. There was no tax upon incomes. Taxpayers were indifferent. A few hundred millions more or less was of no account.
Dispensations to business in the shape of protective duties upon imports, a form of taxation which once made Congress a dominant factor in national life, had become steadily less important as American industry grew strong enough to hold its own market against competition and to compete itself in other markets. With the subsidence of the tariff as an issue Congress lost its last power to impose taxes in which the country was deeply interested. Where the control of the public purse and taxes are unimportant, legislatures are weak, unless executive authority is vested in a Cabinet formed from among their members.
With the enfeeblement of Congress through the growing unimportance of the taxing power, its great function, came the tendency to magnify the Executive. Power has to go somewhere, and it went down Pennsylvania Avenue. And this movement coincided with the development of centralization. Congress, which was full of the spirit of localism, was not a perfect instrument of centralization. The Executive was.
To elevate the President it was necessary to depress Congress. It became the fashion to speak sneeringly of the Legislative branch, to sympathize with presidents who "had Congress on their hands," to write of "the shame of the Senate," and when any issue existed between the two parts of the government to throw the force of public opinion on the side of the executive. The press printedendless criticism of the Senate and the House. Theories of government were invented to reduce Congress to a subordinate place.
Meanwhile Congress, having regard for the character of its membership, was agreed that incompetence should suffer no disabilities. All that was required for political preferment within it was political longevity.
The seniority rule, by which committee chairmanships went not to ability but to long service, favored mediocrity and second childhood. Even more, incompetence banded together jealously to protect itself against competence and shunted it into minor assignments. While the public was regarding Congress with contempt Congress was well satisfied to make itself contemptible.
Suppose we had developed a capacity for breeding statesmen in this country, which we have not, would any man of first-class talents seek a public career in such an institution as I have described? In the first place, the people were visiting Congress with indifference, or worse than indifference, and ambition will not serve under indifference. In the next place that great power which makes legislatures dominant, the power to tax and to distribute the fruits of taxation, had become temporarily unimportant; and again, Congress itself was organized for self-protection against brains and character.
Senator Root quit the Senate in disgust. SenatorKenyon has just followed his example in even deeper disgust. A Tammany Congressman after one term said, "They tie horses to Congressmen in Washington."
Congress is upon the whole a faithful reflection of the American political consciousness. Democracy is a relatively new thing. It has not taken hold of the minds and hearts of men. Shadowy and half-unconscious faiths dispute its place. De Gourmont writing of the persistence of Paganism in Catholicism, says that no religion ever dies but lives on in its successor. So no government ever dies but lives on in its successor. Why take the trouble to govern yourselves when your vital interests are so well directed by the higher governments, of Progress, of economic Forces, of heroes and captains of industry who ruled by a sort of divine right? The less you try to muddle through by means of poor human instruments in this well-ordered world the better.
For the limited tasks of self-government, why should special talents be required? We are still near enough the pioneer age to adhere to pioneer conceptions. Roosevelt, unfortunately, is the national ideal.
We look hopefully for great amateurs like him among insurance agents, building contractors, lawyers, country editors, bankers, retiring, with modest fortunes made, into public life. We put the jack of all trades everywhere. Into thePresidency—and I don't know why we should not in that office, for it is a waste of material and a misdirection of effort in self-government to throw away a first-class public man on a four-year job. Into the Senate and the House, into the Cabinet, where a lawyer without previous experience of international affairs conducts our foreign relations in the most difficult period of the world's history, matching the power of his country against the wits of other countries' practiced representatives, and thus obtaining a certain forbearance of their extreme skill.
Into the diplomatic posts, where an editor, Colonel Harvey, noted only for his audacity, holds the most important ambassadorship. Those who have seen the Colonel at meetings of the Supreme Council tell the amazing story that he was a silent and uneasy figure in the conferences of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Briand, perhaps because he is only an observer, perhaps also because he was in the company of practiced statesmen and diplomats.
However, our system has its compensations. The picture of the robustious Colonel uneasy in Zion is one of them.
In another great diplomatic post is Mr. Richard Washburn Child, a quantity producer of fiction, or sort of literary Henry Ford. In another, Paris, the second most important in the world, Mr. Myron Herrick, a retired business man. Senator Foraker said of him, at a critical moment of hispublic career, "De mortuis nil." "Don't you wish to finish that quotation, 'nisi bonum,'" asked the reporter who was seeking a statement. "No," said the Senator sharply; "De mortuis nil." Of the ambassador to France nil, except that he comes from Ohio.
But when we, given all these causes for the weakness of Congress, the frail hold which the idea of self-government has upon the popular mind, the unimportance of the taxing power, the tendency to concentrate on the executive at the expense of the legislative, the obstacles to ability which mediocrity has erected in Congress, we have not explained the present extraordinary confusion and demoralization in the legislative branch. Most of these causes have been operating for some time, yet Congress has been able to function. Only since Mr. Harding became President has the breakdown of Congress been marked.
If you ask observers in Washington why the last Congress failed more completely than any of its predecessors, with one voice they reply: "Lack of leadership." Everybody cackles of leadership as if lack of leadership were a cause and not a symptom. What is it that makes a leader and followers unless it is a common purpose?
The weakness of Mr. Harding, Mr. Lodge, Speaker Gillett, Mr. Mondell lies partly in themselves, but it is made more apparent by the difficulties that confront them. It traces back to theuncertainties in the national mind. Who could lead representatives of taxpayers staggering under the costs of the war and representatives of soldiers striving to lay an added burden on the taxpayers? Who could lead representatives of farmers who demand that a large share of the credit available in this country be mobilized by the government for the subvention of agriculture and representatives of commerce and manufacture who wish to keep the government from competing with them for the stock of credit? Or labor which insists that the way to improve business is by stimulating demand at home through liberal wages, increasing consumption; and the other classes which insist that the way to restore business is by making increased consumption possible to them through lower prices only to be accomplished through lower wages? The conflict runs across party lines. The old rallying cries fall on deaf ears.
The Republican party was based on the common belief that government favors delivered at the top percolated down, by a kind of gravity that operated with rough justice, to all levels of society, like water from a reservoir on a hill reaching all the homes of a city. When you called for loyalty to that you called for loyalty to everybody's stomach, expressed in the half-forgotten phrase: "The full dinner pail."
Now, the various elements of society are doubtful of what may reach them by the force of gravityfrom the top. Each insists that government favor shall enter at its level and be diffused from that center. Would you make the nation happy and rich, give the soldiers a five-billion-dollar bonus and start them buying? Give the farmers a several-billion-dollar guarantee of their staples and start prosperity on the farm. Give labor high wages and start prosperity there by stimulating consumption. Give the consumer lower prices by cutting wages and start prosperity there. Shift the burden of taxation somewhat from wealth and start prosperity once more in the good old way by favors at the top.
One might compare the breakup that has occurred in this country to the breakup that took place in Russia after the first revolution, the peaceful and ineffective revolution of 1905. All parties in Russia united against absolutism. A measure of representative government being established and the main object of the revolution being achieved, all parties fell to quarrelling among themselves as to which should profit most by the new institutions.
Under Mr. Roosevelt and his successors a mild revolution was accomplished. People turned against economic absolutism. They had begun to question the unregulated descent of favors from the top. They doubted the force of gravity that used to fill dinner pails. They demanded some representation in the process of filling dinner pails. They set up a government at Washington to control credit and transportation.
And now they have fallen apart over who shall pay the taxes, who shall have use of the credit, who shall profit by lowered freight rates, rebates in principle, special favors in transportation, under a new name.
When men today deplore the lack of leadership they are comparing Mr. Harding with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Lodge and Mr. Mondell with Senator Hanna and Senator Aldrich. Today's chiefs of state are of smaller stature. Mr. Harding has been a drifter all his life; he has not the native force of Mr. Roosevelt, the sheer vitality which gloried in overcoming obstacles. He has not the will of Mr. Wilson. The petulant Lodge is not the same order of being as the brutal, thick-necked Hanna, or the more finished but still robust Aldrich.
But beyond this personal superiority which the leaders of the past had, they enjoyed the advantage of standing upon sure ground. Mr. Hanna belonged to that fortunate generation which never doubted, whether it was in religion or morals or politics. He may not have put it so to himself, but behind everything that he did lay the tacit assumption that the business system was divinely ordained. The hand of Providence was conspicuous everywhere in America's rise, but nowhere more than in the rapid turning, unprecedented in the world's history, of minerals and forests into a civilization.
In times of daily miracles it is easy to believe. Mr. Hanna believed, the public believed, Congress believed. Mr. Hanna spoke for this divinely ordained system which was developing an undeveloped continent as one had never been in the memory of man, making us all richer, with a certain rough justice, according to our deserts.
He himself was a pioneer. He himself had created wealth. He knew the creators of wealth. He delivered the commandments handed down to him on the mountain. With God so much on his side a much lesser man than Hanna would have been a great leader. God isn't on the side of Mr. Lodge. That is the difference.
Mr. Aldrich represented a less pure faith. What had been a primitive religion had become an established church. He had behind him a power of organization in business and Congress that Hanna had not. The public may have been less faithful; still the religion he represented was the official religion.
Like Hanna, he was rich and a creator of wealth; in addition he was connected by marriage with the richest family in the United States. He was the spokesman of business, and even if faith was decaying no one seriously questioned the sacred character of business as the instrument of Providence for making America great, rich, and free.
The chief aim was the creation of wealth. No one could doubt that the business organizationwas accomplishing it with unparalleled success. Perhaps the heads of the business organization kept a little too much of the newly created wealth to themselves, but at least everyone shared in it and it was wise to let well enough alone. Where there is such substantial unity as existed at that time, no great personal qualities are required for leadership.
And Mr. Aldrich was not endowed with great personal qualities. He has been gone from Washington only a dozen years, and yet no tradition of him survives except that he managed the Senate machine efficiently. In type he was the business executive. He represented more fully than anyone else in the Senate the one great interest of the country. He stood for a reality, and it gave him tremendous power.
His mind was one of ordinary range. He traded in tariff schedules and erected majorities upon the dispensing of favors. He bestowed public buildings and river improvements in return for votes. Leaders have not now these things to give or have them in insufficient quantities and on too unimportant a scale.
No great piece of constructive legislation serves to recall him. Primarily a man of business, he nevertheless attached his name to the grotesque Aldrich-Vreeland currency act. The work of the monetary commission of which he was the head, and which led to the present Federal Reserve Law, was the work of college professors and economists.
Naturally a better leader than Mr. Lodge because he met men more easily upon a common ground and had more vitality than the Massachusetts Senator has, he was no better leader than any one of half a dozen present Senators would be if the aim of business were accepted today by the country as the great social aim, as it was in his day, and if any one of the six now spoke for business in the Senate as in his time he did.
Give Mr. Brandegee or Mr. Lenroot or Mr. Wadsworth a people accepting that distribution which worked out from extending to the heads of the business organization every possible favor and immunity, as the distribution best serving the interests of all, and add unto him plenty of public buildings and river improvements, and he could lead as well as Mr. Aldrich.
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 RelationsCommittee. 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 wasin 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 "succés de scandale." He was what the hypocrites in Washington secretly desired to be but lacked the courage to be. Helived 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 shirtsleeves 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 minutiæ.
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 thisconcern 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 hisvoice the arid places in the Republican party where loyalty should grow.
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. Someenter 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 ofClay 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 everywhereheard. 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 themost 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 Molière'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 knowingeveryone 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.
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 theloss 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 ispolitically 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.
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 seeingeyes. 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.