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?