Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

by Clinton W. Gilbert

Probably it is only in politics that we tolerate satire. In self-government we only half believe. We are divided in our own minds. We make laws furiously and laugh at the laws we make. We pretend that the little men of politics are great and then privately we indicate our real perception of the truth by telling how small they are. Politics is suspect and it stamps you as a person of penetration to show that you are aware what sham and dishonesty there is in them. It is almost as good an evidence of a superior mind as to say, "Of course I don't believe what I read in the newspapers." Now satire is enjoyed by superior minds, and it is only with regard to politics that we as a people have superior minds, politics not being like business the pursuit of honest everyday folk.

Jim Reed is then that part of ourselves which tells us that self-government is a good deal of a sham, in the hands of amusing charlatans. We tolerate him in perhaps the only place where we would tolerate a satirist, in the Senate. And in the Senate they fear him.

He was attacking the Four Power Pact. "People say," he declared, "that this ends the Anglo-Japanese alliance. I do not find it in the pact. I do not find it nominated in the bond," he shouted. And the friends of the pact sat silent afraid of Reed's power as a debater, until Senator Lenroot having studied the document several minutes in the cloakroom read the plain language of the agreement to end the alliance. Reed almost "got away with it" himself. But this is not leadership. One does not follow a satirist. One makes him a privileged character at most.

Reed and Borah are privileged characters each in his own way. The privilege of being "queer" is as old as the herd itself. The harmless insane man was almost sacred in primitive society. The "fool" was the only man whose disrespect did not amount to lése majesté. The wisdom of the "fool" was regarded with a certain awe and admiration. But the death rate among those who sought this franchise must have been high. It must be personality which decides who survives and achieves this license and who does not, a nice capacity for adjustment, a rare sense of what the crowd will endure. Borah and Reed have it, LaFollette has not or has not chosen to exercise it.

George Moore somewhere says that if you can convince a woman that it is all play, all Pan and nymph, between you and her, you have the perfect way of a man with a maid, when his aim is something short of matrimony. But if you are too serious about it—! LaFollette is perhaps too serious about it. If he could have said what he had to say with a laugh and so as to raise a laugh he might have been privileged like Reed, or, if he had to be serious, he should have been serious like Borah, in a detached and impersonal fashion; then perhaps he might still have been something less than the public enemy that he is. But LaFollette is serious, terribly serious, terribly in earnest. He has had convictions, clung to them, and probably suffered more for them than any man in Washington.

The Wisconsin Senator is one of the least understood men in public life. In the Senate he speaks violently, with a harsh voice and an excess of manner. He is small and some of this loudness and emphasis is no doubt that compensation for lack of stature and presence to which men unconsciously resort; some of it is an exterior which has been cultivated to cover up an unusually shy and sensitive heart. The character in history and fiction which most intrigues him is Hamlet, that gentle soul unfit for life. He has spent years studying the shy Dane. He himself is a Hamlet who has taken up arms against a sea of troubles. The "queer" man who would gain a franchise for his "queerness" must not be sensitive. The crowd likes better to persecute than to tolerate.

Then too LaFollette entered the Senate when minorities were less tolerable than they are today. He got the stamp of impossible when Roosevelt led a movement in his direction and he refused to be a part of it. Thus he became isolated, neither Progressive nor Old Guard. You can not safely be too uncompromising, too serious. It makes no difference if you were right in rejecting both wings of the party as reactionary which they speedily proved to be. It makes no difference if you were right in opposing the war, and no one is so sure today that LaFollette was wrong in doing so as men were when it was proposed to expel him from the Senate. Justification after the fact does no good. It is not your wrongness that they hate; it's your uncompromising quality, and that remains more unbreakable than ever.

An unusual loyalty explains the unwillingness to compromise. LaFollette attaches himself deeply. A characteristic act was his leaving the Senate for months to nurse a sick son back to health. It sets him apart from most men, who do not let sickness in the family interfere with their business and perform their full duty when they hire a trained nurse. People think of LaFollette, the public man, as an egoist but this nursing of his son showed the utmost absence of egoism. And so it is with all his intimate relations, which are unusually sweet and tender.

Whatever he is like privately, publicly he is placed, rated, catalogued; the general mind is made up. The farm bloc no more turned to him than to Borah for leadership. He will always remain isolated.

Now that party discipline has been broken down, what nonconformist Senators suffer most from is the tyranny of the teapot. Senator Kenyon referred to it when he said Newberry on trial for fitness for his seat "floated back into the Senate on an ocean of tea." An unparliamentary version of the same reference to the social influence is: "The Senate is one long procession of dinners and hootch."