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.
