The President: A Novel

by Alfred Henry Lewis

At this pinch a vile chance befell. No sooner was the Obstinate One given the Governorship of a State doubtful and accounted the enemy's country, than straightway he was looked upon as White House timber by sundry architects of politics, and thereafter his name went more or less linked with a possible Presidency. The situation stirred the spleen of Senator Hanway. It was discouraging to have those identical tariff triumphs, which had been intended as an argument favorable to himself, give birth to a rival; one also who, for his geography and the popularity which those personal obstinacies and thick-skulled integrities invoked, might work a grave disturbance in his plans. To make bad worse, the Obstinate One possessed a sinister luck of his own and with closed eyes backed into a fight on the right side and won it against a pack of lobby wolves who were yelping and snapping about the State Treasury. This, although the Obstinate One of all men least appreciated what he had done, confirmed him as a valuable asset of party; pending further honors the public to reward him gave him the title of Governor Obstinate.

In his white, still, rippleless way, Senator Hanway hated in his soul's soul the name of Governor Obstinate. Night and day he carried that dull, fortunate gentleman on his swell of thought and never ceased to consider how he might deal him a blow or withstand him in any Presidential stepping forward. And yet at no time had Senator Hanway—and himself the master of every art of cord and creese in politics—felt more helpless. If Governor Obstinate had been no more than just a finished politician, a mere Crillon of political fence, Senator Hanway might have flashed his ready point between his ribs. But the other's very crudities defended him. He was primitive to the verge of despair. Even his strength was primitive, inasmuch as it dwelt among the people rather than with the machinists of party. Senator Hanway's monkish brow went often puckered of a most uncanonical frown as he thought upon that sardonic Destiny which had thrust this Governor Obstinate forward to become a stumbling block in his way. In his angry contempt he could compare him to nothing save a grizzly bear.

Whatever the justice of this last shaggy simile, even Senator Hanway could not deny its formidable side. A grizzly, whether in fact or in hyperbole, is no one good to meet. There is a supremacy of the primitive; when the natural and the artificial have collided the latter has more than once come limping off. Our soldiers cannot make the Indians fight their fashion; the Indians make the soldiers fight their fashion. If the soldiers were dense enough to insist upon their formation, the Indians—fighting all over the field and each red warrior for himself—would fill them as full of holes as a colander. When, therefore, Senator Hanway called Governor Obstinate a grizzly, it was a name of respect. The usual methods would not prevail in his stubborn case. Most of all, money could not be employed to overthrow him; for his foundations, like the foundations of any other grizzly, were original and beyond the touch of money.

Now all this served to palsy the strength of Senator Hanway. In one shape or another, and whether by promise or actual present production, money was his one great tool; and where the tool has lost its power the artisan is also powerless. It is not to Senator Hanway's discredit that he would fail where money failed; Richelieu, wanting money, would have been a turtle on its back. Wherefore, let it be rewritten that Senator Hanway in the face of those clumsy, uncouth, half-seeing yet tremendous potentialities of his enemy was seized of a helplessness never before felt. To oppose the other with only those narrow means of money was like trying to put down a Sioux uprising with a resolution of the Board of Trade. Still, he must do his best; he must hold this Governor Obstinate as much as he might in check, trusting to the chapter of accidents, which in politics is a very lair of surprises, to suggest final ways and means to baffle his advance.

For the business of making him President, the complaisant Senate had become the workshop of Senator Hanway. Now, on the brink of a new Congress, one which would be in session when the nominating convention of his party was called to order and therefore might be supposed to own power over its action and the Presidential ticket it would put up, Senator Hanway resolved to add the House of Representatives to his machine. He would elect its Speaker, and make the House an annex to his workshop of a Senate. He would hook up House and Senate as a coachman hooks up his team, and driving them tandem or abreast as the exigencies of the hour suggested, see how far two such powerful agencies might take him on his White House road.

It was on the side of Senator Hanway a brilliant thought and a daring one, this plan to seize a Speakership and apply it to his personal fortunes; for your Speakership is that office second only to a Presidency, and comes often to be the latter's superior in practical force. Those wise ones who designed the government intended the House of Representatives to be a republic. Through its own groveling abjections, however, it long ago sunk to an autocracy with the Speaker in the rôle of autocrat. It sold its birthright for no one knows what mess of pottage to pass its slavish days beneath a tyranny of the gavel. The Speaker settles all things. No measure is proposed, no bill passes, no member speaks except by the Speaker's will. He constructs the committees and selects their chairmen and lays out their work. With a dozen members, every one of whom votes and acts beneath his thumb, the Speaker transacts the story of the House. So far as the other three hundred and forty odd members are concerned, the folk who sent them might as well have written a letter. They live as much without art or part or lot in planning and executing House affairs as do the caged menagerie animals in the planning and execution of the affairs of what show they happen to exist as the attractions. These caged ones of the House are never regarded and but seldom heard. The best that one of them may gain is "Leave to print"; which is a kind of consent to be fraudulent, and permits a member to pretend through the Congressional Record that he made a speech (which he never made) and was overwhelmed by applause (which he did not receive) which swept down in thunderous peals (during moments utterly silent) from crowded galleries (as empty as a church).

Senator Hanway, when he decided to pick out a House Speaker favorable to his hopes, had plenty of time wherein to lay his plans. The personnel of a coming House is known for over a year; the members are elected nearly thirteen months before they take their seats. These thirteen months of grace are granted the new member by the Constitution on a hopeful theory that he will devote them to a study of his country's needs. In this instance, as in many another, theory and practice wander wide apart; the new member gives those thirteen months to a profound study of his own needs, and concerns himself no more over the nation's than over wine-pressing in far-away Bordeaux. It is the glaring fault of every scheme of government, your own being no exception to the rule, that it seems meant for man as he should be rather than for man as he is.

Every member of the coming House, among matters of personal moment to himself, had given no little thought to what committees he would be placed upon; and this, in the nature of House things, likewise compelled him to a consideration of the Speakership and who should fill it. It was by remembering those committee hopes and fears of members, and adroitly fomenting them, that Senator Hanway expected to control the Speakership election.

But he must go warily to work. Coming from the Senate end of the Capitol, Senator Hanway, in his proposed interference in the organization of the House, must maintain himself discreetly in the dark. It was not a task to accomplish blowing a bugle. The House had surrendered its powers to the Speaker; but it had retained its vanity, and like all weak animals it was the more vain for being weak. The members, were it once known and parcel of the common gossip how they inclined to Senator Hanway's manipulation, would be compelled to rebel. They would be driven to oppose him as a method of preserving what they called their self-respect. Aware of this, Senator Hanway never came into the open, never appeared upon the surface. He secretly pitched upon a candidate among the older ones of the House and made his deal with him, working the wires of his diplomacy from below.

There was peculiar demand for effort on Senator Hanway's part. His man, when now he had selected him, would not find himself uninterrupted or unopposed in his march for that Speakership. There was another, and if native popularity were to count a stronger hand stretched forth to seize the gavel prize. Had it lain in the cards, Senator Hanway, who always sought his ends on lines of least resistance, would himself have pitched upon this stronger one. But such was beyond the question. The strong one claimed to be of that party clan which pushed the offensive Governor Obstinate for the Presidency; and this not only offered a perfect reason why Senator Hanway should make no alliance with him, but it multiplied the necessity for his defeat.