If you are regular politically you are regular socially. Given the habit of voting with the crowd, of putting others at ease by a not too great display of intellect, a good cook, a pre-war cellar, and a not impossible wife, and you belong to the Senatorial middle class, the new rich insurance agents, lawyers, miners, and manufacturers who control the fate of the socially ambitious. You may not be invited to the Wadsworths', or may be seldom asked there. But you are accepted by what Mencken might call the wealthy "booboisie," the circle Mr. Harding frequented before he was advanced to the White House.
If you don't you are of the Senatorial proletariat. You are invited out seldom or not at all. You have to organize a little set of intellectuals, not found in the Senate, for your wife's tea parties.
Senator Kenyon was a moderate nonconformist. Intellectually he was honest, but not strong, so that an outsider might have thought that his honesty and independence would be overlooked. But he was never accepted by the "booboisie." He was virtually cold shouldered out of the Senate, for it was with immense relief that he escaped from teapot ostracism to the securer social area of the Federal bench.
I repeat a bit of gossip about the Iowa Senator without vouching for it. When he was retiring, it is said, a reporter asked, "What can be done with the Senate?" "Nothing," replied the Iowan, "The only thing to do is to destroy it." If he said this he really flattered the "booboisie." Destruction is reserved for wicked things like Sodom and Gomorrah. But the Senate is not wicked. It is good, honest in the sense of not stealing, well-meaning, timid, petty, tea-drinking, human, commonplace. You can't destroy it unless you have something to put in its place, and there is nothing. Much better turn it over to the blocs and see what they will do with it.
CHAPTER XI
A PEAK OF REALITY THRUSTS UP ON THE LEVEL PLAIN OF SHAMS
As well fear blocs and minorities as fear the centrifugal force on the ground that it is seeking to pull us off the face of the earth. Minorities are the centrifugal force of politics. They maintain the balance of forces which makes political existence possible. Without them the State would become unbearable; it would destroy us or we should be compelled to destroy it.
We have just passed through a period, the war, in which minorities were suppressed, in which the general will brooked no resistance, in which the bodies of men between certain ages and the minds of men and women of all ages were brought into compulsory service of the State. The mental draft dodger went to jail just as much as the physical draft dodger.