SENATOR JOSEPH S FRELINGHUYSEN OF NEW JERSEY
I present these characterizations of Senate leaders, past, present, and future, to indicate through them what the Senate itself is, and to suggest what conditions have given quite ordinary men power and how feeble leadership has become, with the country no longer agreed how best to promote the general good, and with Congress as it has been in recent years a relatively unimportant factor in the national government.
Senator Platt used to say of an habitual candidate for nomination to the governorship of New York, Timothy L. Woodruff, "Well, it may taper down to Tim." We have "tapered down to Tim,"—or rather to "Jim"—in the Senate because as a people we have been indifferent and unsure, and because there has been little use for anything but "Tims" or "Jims" in Washington. Nature seems to abhor a waste in government.
Those who ascribe all the troubles in Congress to lack of leadership, and go no further, blame the poverty of our legislative life upon the popular election of Senators and upon the choice of candidates at direct primaries. But the decay began before the system changed. We resorted to new methods of nomination and election because the old methods were giving us Lorimers and Addickses. Probably we gained nothing, but we lost little.
Big business, so long as the taxing power, through the imposition of the tariff, was important to it, and so long as it was accepted as the one vital interest of the country, saw to it that it was effectively represented in Congress. It was then somebody's job to see that at least some solid men went to Washington. It has of late been nobody's job. There has been no real competition for seats in the national legislature.
The Senate has tempted small business men who can not arise to the level of national attention through their control of industry, and small lawyers similarly restricted in their efforts for publicity. It is an easily attained national stage.
It appeals to that snobbish instinct—of wives sometimes—which seeks social preferment not to be obtained in small home towns, or denied where family histories are too well known.
It allures the politician, bringing opportunity to play the favorite game of dispensing patronage and delivering votes, with the added pomp of a title.
It is the escape of the aristocrat, whose traditions leave him the choice between idleness and what is called "public service."
It is the escape of the successful man who has found his success empty and tries to satisfy the unsatisfied cravings of his nature. Such men "retire" into it, as it was reported to President Harding's indignation that one of the Chicago banker candidates for the Secretaryship of the Treasury wished to retire into the Cabinet. Some enter it for one of these motives, more from a combination of them, but, generally, it is the promised land of the bored, some of whom find it only a mirage.
A typical Senator is Mr. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, one of the smaller business men being drawn into public life. Son of a country minister, he started as an insurance agent. Nature equipped him with unusual energy and aggressiveness and those two qualities brought success in writing insurance. Nothing in his early training inhibited his robust temperament. Ruddy and vigorous, he is not sicklied o'er with any pale cast whatever. Plainly he has a zest for life, that easily accessible American life where good mixers abound.
Not a highbrow, he yet recognizes that literature has its place, on all four walls of a large room, and bought in sets.
Having the American horror of loneliness, whether social or moral, you find him always going along with his party. When his set divides he balances between the two factions as long as possible and elects to go with the more numerous. Simple, likable, honest, safe so long as majorities are safe, and that is the theory we are working on, he is the average man in everything but his aggressiveness and energy.
No, he also rises above the average in possessing such a name as Frelinghuysen. You enter his library and you see a banner of the campaign of Clay and Frelinghuysen. He will recite to you campaign songs of those unsuccessful candidates for President and Vice-President. Another Frelinghuysen was a Cabinet member. Another Frelinghuysen, of the wealthier branch of the family, has an assured social position.
None of these famous Frelinghuysens is an ancestor. Each of them is a challenge. If he could have found an ancestor! If an insurance company were a high place from which to survey the world at one's feet! But, no! Ancestors, power, publicity, social prestige, all lie beyond the reach of small business success.
In the Senate men, important men, come to you for favors; it is so much better than going to them to write policies. From the Senatorship you condescend; there really is a world to which a Senator can condescend. Washington is a social melting pot. No one asks whether you are one of the Blanks. You are Senator Blank and that is enough. And if you are so fortunate, by your very averageness, to attach yourself to the average man whose fortune makes him President, and you become one of the Harding Senators, one of the intimates, you are lifted up: like Bottom, you are translated. You are the familiar of greatness.
As a legislator you deal with policies, international and domestic, in the realm of ideas—as when you sit in your library, four square with all the wisdom of the ages.
If you have enough of the boy about you, like Frelinghuysen, you enjoy all this hugely. You have projected your ego beyond the limits of the insurance business. You look among the branches of the Frelinghuysen family tree without losing countenance. Who knows that there won't be another "and Frelinghuysen" ticket, this time a successful one?
Not every senator has escaped so nearly from the failures which attend success as has Frelinghuysen. Nor is his escape complete. A sense of unreality haunts him. Aggressiveness in his case covers it, as it so often does a feeling of weakness. After he has blustered through some utterance, he will buttonhole you and ask, "Did I make a damn fool of myself? Now, the point I was trying to make was, etc. Did I get it clear? Or did I seem like a damn fool?"
Less agile minded than Senator Edge, he watches the motions of his New Jersey colleague as a fascinated bird watches those of a snake or a cat. Intellectually he is not at ease, even in the Senate.
Another of the Harding set is Harry New of Indiana, one of the "Wa'al naow" school of statesmen, in dress and speech the perfect county chairman of the stage. The broad-brimmed black felt hat, winter and summer, has withstood all the insidious attacks of fashion. The nasal voice has equally resisted all the temptations to conformity with the softer tones which are now everywhere heard. In politics one has to be regular, and New has the impulse to individuality, which with Borah and LaFollette manifests itself in political isolation. With New it manifests itself in hat and speech. New thus remains a person, not merely a clothes-horse which is recorded "aye" when Mr. Lodge votes "aye" and "no" when Mr. Lodge votes "no." But this is hardly fair. Mr. New has been irregular in other ways. He has not made money; he has lost it, a fortune in a stone quarry. He is indifferent to it. This marks him as a person. He would rather whip a stream for trout than go after dollars with a landing net.
Whipping a stream for trout is the clue to Harry New. If you are a fisherman you impute all sorts of wiles to the fish. You match your wits against the sharp wits under the water, and your ego is fortified when, the day being dark and your hand being cunning, you land a mess from the stream. The world is a trout stream to New. The hat and the nasal accent are the good old flies that Isaak Walton recommended.
There is the type of mind which sees craft where others see simplicity. We associate shrewdness with the kind of hat New wears and the kind of voice he has preserved against the seductions of politeness. It is one of our rural traditions. Suppose shrewdness that asks no more than conversation and a small mess of fish. It is delightful. As we listen to it arriving after the most penetrating exposition at the same conclusions which we have reached directly and stupidly, we are flattered. We realize that we, too, are shrewd, unconsciously so, as, wasn't it 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 knowing everyone in their districts, who by doing little favors here and there get themselves elected to the municipal legislature; they see that every constituent gets his street sign and sidewalk encumbrance permits, interview the police in their behalf when necessary, and the bright young men who compose the traditional humor of the daily press refer to them gaily as "statesmen."
The art of being a Senator like Calder is the art of never saying "no." He is worth mentioning because he has the bare essentials of senatorship, the habit of answering all letters that come to him, the practice of introducing by request all bills that anyone asks to have introduced, industry in seeking all jobs and favors that anyone comes to him desiring.
He "goes to the mat" for everybody and everything. He shakes everybody's hand. He is a good news source to representatives of the local press and is paid for his services in publicity. New York is populous and sent many soldiers to the late war. Nevertheless, the mother or father of a soldier from that state who did not receive a personal letter from Calder must have eluded the post office.
He votes enthusiastically for everything that everybody is for. He is unhappy when he has to take sides on sharply debated issues. Morality is a question of majorities. He finds safety in numbers.
