His statesmanship was discontinuous, being an interesting avocation rather than a career. Of it little has been permanent. His General Staff soon lapsed into incompetence; if it had not, it might have been the danger to American national life that the German General Staff was to German national life. Recently it was merged with the high command. As Secretary of State he was not creative, Mr. Harding turning back to the solid ground of American international policy, rested upon John Hay's open door and Knox's dollar diplomacy. Root in foreign relations merely succeeded with the Senate where Hay had failed. Always the advocate, he takes other men's ideas, Hay's or Wilson's and justifies them or makes them practical. His New York constitution failed, being unjustly suspected. His world court has little better hope of acceptance, for Mr. Hughes is not a voluntary sharer of glory.
In spite of it all, some greatness remains, the impression of a powerful though limited intelligence. His career was to give us a moral. It is: if you have an adroit and energetic mind you will find public affairs uninteresting; except in their occasional phases. If you have such a mind and must enter politics, hide it; otherwise democracy will distrust you. Whatever you do, be dull.
HIRAM JOHNSON
Hiram Johnson would have enjoyed the French Revolution, if accident had made him radical at that time. He would have been stirred by the rising of the people; he would have given tongue to their grievances in a voice keyed to lash them to greater fury. He would have been excited by it as he never has been by the little risings of the masses which he has made vocal. In all the noisy early phases of it, he would have made the loudest noise. And he would have gone to the block when the real business of the revolution began with the fanatics at its helm.
In the Russian Revolution, he would have been a Kerensky; and he would have fled when the true believers in change arrived. He is the orator of emeutes, who is fascinated by a multitude in a passion.
Johnson is not a revolutionary. Not in the least, not any more than Henry Cabot Lodge is. But revolution has a fierce attraction for him. He once said to me, speaking bitterly during the campaign, of Mr. Harding's prospective election, "The war has set back the people for a generation. They have bowed to a hundred repressed acts. They have become slaves to the government. They are frightened at the excesses in Russia. They are docile; and they will not recover from being so for many years. The interests which control the Republican party will make the most of their docility. In the end, of course, there will be a revolution, but it will not come in my time."
That "it will not come in my time" was said in a tone of regret. It was not so much that the Senator wanted revolution. I do not believe he did. But he wanted his chance, that outburst of popular resentment which would bring him to the front, with the excitement, the sense of power that would come from the response of the nation when his angry voice translated into words its elemental passion.
Turbulent popular feeling is breath in Johnson's nostrils. Twice he has thoroughly enjoyed its intoxication.
His political life was blank paper when the tumult of popular indignation swept California at the time Francis J. Heney, who was prosecuting the San Francisco grafters, was shot in the court room. He had thought nothing politically, he had felt nothing politically. He had neither convictions, nor passions, nor morals, politically speaking. He grew up in soil which does not produce lofty standards. Something of the mining-camp spirit still hung over California, which had been settled by adventurers, forty-niners, gold seekers, men who had left the East to "make a new start" where there was pay dirt. The State had a wild zest for life which was untrammeled by Puritanism. San Francisco had its Barbary Coast and in every restaurant its private dining rooms for women. Johnson himself was sprung from a father who was a "railroad lawyer," the agent of privileges in procuring special favors, by methods once well known, from the state legislature. The atmosphere of his youth was not one to develop a sensitive conscience or a high conception of public morals.