Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

Now, the various elements of society are doubtful of what may reach them by the force of gravity from 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 organization was 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.

CHAPTER X

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 "succés 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 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 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.

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.