I had, but remained unmoved. I now continue unmoved after reading Balzac’s tome on Gladstone. It is, in its small way, a tragic book. Here, obviously, is the best that Mississippi can do, in theme and treatment—and it is such puerile, blowsy stuff that reviewing it realistically would be too cruel. Here the premier literary artist of Mississippi devotes himself con amore to the life and times of the premier Mississippi statesman—and the result is a volume so maudlin and nonsensical that it would disgrace a schoolboy. The book is simply mush—and out of the mush there emerges only a third-rate politician, professionally bucolic and as hollow as a jug.
Yet this Williams, during his long years in Congress, passed in Washington as an intellectual. Cloak-room and barroom gossip credited him with a profound education and very subtle parts. Such ideas, when they prevail in Washington, perhaps need and deserve no investigation; the same astute correspondents who propagated this one later coupled the preposterous Coolidge with Pericles. But maybe there was some logic in it, after all; Williams, at some time in the past, had been to Heidelberg and knew more or less German and French. That accomplishment, in a Southern politician, was sufficient to set the capital by the ears. So the Williams legend grew, and toward the end it rose to the dignity of a myth, like that of Dr. Taft’s eminence as a constitutional lawyer. Even the learned hero’s daily speeches on Teutonic mythology during the war did not drag him out of Valhalla himself. The press-gallery gaped and huzzahed.
But the Heidelberg chapter in Mr. Dickson’s book leaves the myth rather sick. It starts off, indeed, with a disconcerting couplet:
In Germany ’twas very clear
He’d leave the rapiers for beer.
And what follows is distressingly silent about cultural accretions. Young Williams’ main business at Heidelberg, it appears, was putting the abominable Prussian Junker in their place. They naturally assumed that their American fellow-student could be thrown about with impunity. Encountering him on the sidewalk, they tried, in the manner made historic by the Creel Press Bureau, to shove him off. Presently one of these fiends in human form came melodramatically to grief. Williams challenged him, and “according to Prussian ethics,” named the weapons—pistols. A shock, indeed! The monster expected sabers, at which he was diabolically expert, but Williams didn’t intend “to go home with his face all slashed, and have folks jeer at him for getting his jaw cut on a beer glass.” Facing cold lead, the Prussian was so scared that he fired prematurely. Worse, he so lost his wits that he addressed his antagonist as Freiherr Williams. That antagonist fired into a snowbank. Some time later, having thus got all that was of worth out of Heidelberg, he came sailing home, “full even then of his ultimate intention: he’d go in for politics, he’d become a professional politician.”
A professional politician he remained for thirty years, always in office, first in the House and then in the Senate. His start was slow—he practiced law for a time—, but once he was on the payroll he stayed there until old age was upon him. For a number of years he was Democratic leader in the House; twice he got the party vote for the Speakership. In the Senate he was technically in the ranks, but on great occasions he stepped forward. His specialties, toward the end, were the divine inspiration of Woodrow Wilson, the incomparable valor of the American soldier, the crimes of the Kaiser, the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon,” the godlike bellicosity of the Confederate gentry, and the nature and functions of a gentleman. On these themes he discoursed almost every afternoon. The boys in the press-gallery liked him, and he got plenty of space. Always his rodomontades brought forth dark hints about his esoteric learning, and the news that, next after Henry Cabot Lodge, he was the most cultivated man in the Senate.
Mr. Dickson prints extracts from some of his speeches. Criticism, obviously, is an art not yet in practice in Mississippi, even among the literati. I used to read him in the Congressional Record; he was really not so bad as Dickson makes him out. His career, seen in retrospect, seems to have been mainly a vacuum. Once or twice he showed a certain fine dignity, strange in a Southern politician. He opposed the Prohibition frenzy. He voted against the bonus. But usually, despite his constant talk of independence, he ran with the party pack. For years a professional Jeffersonian, he brought his career to a climax by giving lyrical support to the Emperor Woodrow, who heaved the Jeffersonian heritage into the ash-can. During the La Follette uproar he was one of the most vociferous of the witch-burners. He passed out in silence, regretted for his rustic charm, but not much missed.
I commend “An Old-Fashioned Senator” to all persons who are interested in the struggle of the South to throw off its cobwebs. Both as document and as work of art the book makes it very plain why Mississippi’s place in that struggle is in the last rank.