The Mirrors of Washington

by Clinton W. Gilbert; John Kirby

Penrose does not despise the appurtenances of bossism. If the truth were told he probably likes the idea of being represented as the hard-fisted master of party destinies. He knows that such a reputation inspires awe if not respect, on the part of the rank and file, from the humble precinct worker to the gentleman of large affairs who provides the necessary campaign funds. It has its value, sentimental as well as practical, for the American people likes to set up its own political idols. The politicians who for the moment guide the destinies of the nation are so misdrawn, so illuminated with virtues and endowed with vices quite foreign to them, that they frequently achieve a personality quite fictitious, but which, none the less, passes current in the popular mind as genuine.

Nothing could be more grotesque, for example, than the picture of Senator Smoot, who is merely a sublimated messenger boy, as one of the arbiters of the Republican policies; or of Senator Lodge, by sheer strength of leadership, restraining the discordant Republican elements in the Senate from kicking over the traces. This is journalist "copy" written for a popular imagination which finds the truth too tepid.

Boies Penrose serves the purpose of appeasing national appetite for what the magazine editors call "dynamic stuff."

But the real Boies Penrose is not all as he is pictured. At a cursory glance he might appear to be a physiological, psychological, and political anachronism. At least he is sufficiently different from his colleagues to be, if not actually mysterious, not easily understandable. There is something fundamental about him. He inspires a certain awe which may not be magnetic but has the same effect upon those who surround him; where he sits is the head of the table.

I doubt if Lodge or Knox or Hughes could ever fathom the secret of his power; they are not cast in the same mould. His colleagues smile at his idiosyncracies—behind his back—but they approach him with the respect due to a master. Many of them admire him, not a few hate him, but all of them fear him. It is rather a singular thing that Senator La Follette, himself at the pinnacle of his championship of the Wisconsin progressive idea, was probably on friendlier terms with the senior Senator from Pennsylvania than any of the other leaders of those reactionary forces with whom he was tilting. He knew where Penrose stood and it is not at all improbable that behind the Penrose reticence there was a modicum of admiration for the methods of the redoubtable little colleague, who in his way, was a more inexorable boss than Penrose himself ever dreamed of being. The mutual understanding was there, even if it never became articulate.

Penrose has peculiarities which put him in a niche quite his own. He eschews conversation as an idle affectation. He dislikes to shake hands, preferring the Chinese fashion of holding his on his own expansive paunch. When he finds it necessary to talk at all he speaks the precise truth as he sees it without consideration for the feelings of those he happens to be addressing. The results are frequently so ludicrous, particularly when he enters a colloquy on the Senate floor, that he is given credit for a much more pronounced sense of humor than he actually possesses. I doubt that he is always conscious of the element of humor and I suspect that if he realized that his observations were to evoke laughter he would deliberately choose a less satirical or flippant method of expression.

This temperamental characteristic was illustrated by an episode in the Senate chamber not long ago. Penrose, entering, found his chair occupied by a Democratic colleague who had overestimated his capacity for the doubtful stuff that is purveyed in these days of Volsteadism and whose condition was apparent to everyone on the floor and in the galleries. Penrose is, perhaps, the most widely known personage in the Senate. His towering figure makes him conspicuous. But the most of the myriads of trippers who visit the Capitol do not know one senator from another. They rely for identification upon little charts showing the arrangements of the seats on the floor each one of which is labeled with a senator's name.

Now Penrose, might or might not have suspected that these trippers following their charts, would pick out the snoring recumbent figure as his own. He decided to remove all possibility of error and addressing the chair with usual solemnity said, "Mr. President, I desire the chair to record the fact that the seat of the senior Senator from Pennsylvania has not been occupied by himself at the present session. It is occupied by another." The galleries roared; the somnolent Senator shambled over to his own side of the aisle and Senator Penrose was given credit, by the unwise, for humor quite unintended.

Life with Mr. Penrose is a much more serious business than most people imagine. And it became even more serious a little while ago when illness laid hold of him and his brother, a physician, prescribed dietary rules restricting the freedom that he had once exercised without restraint. There was something lion-like in the gaunt figure in the rolling chair which he occupied when he returned to the Senate from his sick bed. It was amazing that he recovered; it was even more amazing that he should have submitted to the rigorous rules laid down by his doctor, even if that doctor was his own brother. The bated breath with which Pennsylvania politicians awaited bulletins from his bedside was a striking acknowledgment of the power he wields.

The evolution of Boies Penrose is an amusing commentary upon American politics in more ways than one. Three years after he was graduated from Harvard College he was elected to the Pennsylvania State Legislature on a reform ticket. His election was made the occasion for great rejoicing on the part of the good people of Philadelphia. And well might they rejoice. They had at last driven a wedge into the sinister political machine that had brought the city of brotherly love into disrepute as a boss-ridden municipality.