SENATOR WILLIAM M. CALDER OF NEW YORK
All of these men belong to a party and are limited by that party's weakness, its lack of principles, the caution which it has to use in avoiding the alienation of its loosely held supporters. The party program is something on which all kinds of people can stand. Necessarily the party men in the Senate are tied down to a cause that is largely negative. They can not be other than feeble and ineffective figures.
The weakness of parties has led to the emergence of a few outstanding individual Senators who must be examined to see whether around them the new Senate which will come with the shift of power and responsibility to the legislative branch can be built. The most brilliant and interesting of them is Senator Borah, but it is significant that the farm bloc looking for a leader did not turn to him, but chose rather much less significant and effective men.
Yet the Idaho Senator seems the natural rallying point for any movement which will give new life and force to the Senate. He is established. He is the most potent single individual in the upper house. So far as there is any opposition to President Harding and his friends, Mr. Borah is that opposition. His is the intelligence which inspires the Democratic party when it consents to be inspired by intelligence. He believes that the revolution has come, not one of street fighting and bomb throwing but a peaceful change which has made the old parties meaningless, destroyed the old authorities and set men free for the new grouping that is to take place. Others in the Senate see this and are frightened. Borah sees it and is glad. His bonds are loosed and he is a vastly braver, sincerer and more effective Senator than ever before.
It is absurd to use the word radical of Borah, Johnson, or LaFollette, for none of them is truly radical; but if one must do so for the lack of any better term, then Borah is the conservatives' radical. The angriest reactionary remains calm when his name is mentioned, perhaps because Borah never gets into a passion himself and never addresses himself to popular prejudice. He is not a mob orator. He is impersonal in his appeals. No one any longer suspects him of an ambition to be President. He seems, like a hermit, to have divorced himself from the earthly passions of politics and to have become pure intellect operating in the range of public affairs. He is almost a sage while still a Senator.
If we had the custom of electing our Ex-Presidents to the Senate, you can imagine one of them, beyond the average of intelligence, freed from ambition through having filled the highest office, occupying a place like that of Borah.
Borah perhaps likes it too well ever to descend into the market place and become a leader. His is an enviable lot, for he is the most nearly free man in Washington; why should he exchange the immunity he possesses for a small group of followers? Besides he believes in the power of oratory rather than in the power of organization. He said to me at the Republican Convention of 1916, "I could stampede this crowd for Roosevelt." The crowd was thoroughly organized against Roosevelt.
Nature made him an orator, one of the greatest in the country. And he has come to be satisfied with the gift he has. The unimportance of his state, Idaho, has freed him from any illusions about himself with respect to the Presidency. The habit of carrying a comb in his vest pocket marks him as free from the social ambitions which number more victims in the Senate than the ambition for the presidency. He is almost a disembodied spirit politically, of the revolution he discerns he will be a spectator.