Office Holders: Rules and Skills
Trollope’s novels constitute an excellent primer for the politician. Phineas Finn’s political eclipses are caused primarily by his persistent habit of voting in accordance with his conscience rather than the Liberal Party line. Edward Wilcher in To Be a Pilgrim takes what he believes will be a vacation from politics after losing his seat in a close election. When he is ready to return, he finds that his party will not have him. His brother Tom reflects, “Perhaps they were always doubtful of him. They may have felt that he wasn’t single-minded enough. They didn’t like his writing, especially things like essays and criticism. Just as the Tories never liked Balfour’s writing philosophy.” When Phineas Finn’s friend the Duke of Omnium becomes Prime Minister, he permits himself the same luxury of being impolitic. The death of the Marquis of Mount Fidgett gives him a chance to award the Order of the Garter, normally given as a party spoil rather than a tribute to merit. When Omnium bestows it upon the good, fuddled, philanthropist Lord Earlybird, he nearly deals the deathstroke to his weakening coalition. Mr. Daubeny, on the other hand, is a consummate artist at the game of politics. Needing a vote of confidence to remain in office, he conjures up a seemingly foolproof and completely hypocritical measure for the test. As the head of the Tories, he introduces a bill for the disendowment of the Established Church. He assumes that the Liberals will be forced to vote for it as legislation they might themselves have proposed. But the Liberals play the expedient game, too, with the result that the Tories support what they are against to remain in office while the Liberals oppose what they are for in order to turn the Tories out. In other novels the conservatives also appear just as adept at rough and tumble politics as their opponents. Lord Lostwithiel hires Tom Hannaway to bribe Hamer Shawcross, who is standing for Parliament against Lord Lostwithiel’s son. When the attempt fails, Tom defames Hamer by asserting that he has done nothing for his mother even though he has had remarkable success. Hamer’s counterstroke is to take the night train to Manchester, pluck his mother from the happy home she shares with another widow, and exhibit her at a rally the next day to refute the charge. The whole atmosphere of English politics seems permeated by vigilance against quick marches. The wife of a cabinet minister, Nina Nimmo remembers the constant intrigues of groups within that small circle. Quite as wary are the rank and file of the House:
Everything they do is meant to have some effect beyond itself. Indeed many ... had got so plotty that everything that happened somewhere was “significant” of some “development.” If you only asked them to take an ice, they looked at you knowingly as if to ask themselves what you were “starting” and why.
The technique of buying off an opponent is more common in the American political novel than in the English. But the attempt to purchase Jack London’s Ernest Everhard is more subtle than that practiced on Hamer Shawcross. Everhard is offered a job as United States Commissioner of Labor. Even though this fee is more respectable than that offered Shawcross, Everhard rejects the offer in order to retain his freedom of action. The ways in which a political opponent can be embarrassed are legion. When Paul L. Ford’s Peter Stirling is called out with his militia regiment to protect six hundred strikebreakers, he is ordered to Grand Central Station, the spot where it is most likely that the militia commander will be forced to order his men to fire upon the strikers. Nick Galt in The Voice of the People makes the Duke of Omnium’s error when he persists in making political appointments on merit. He earns the name of “The Man with the Conscience” but he loses important political support.
“Straws in the wind” may be a journalistic cliché, but the political novel is littered with them. Like Nina Nimmo’s hyper-suspicious acquaintances, they are another index of the complex behavior patterns of highly political groups. The ability to sense the meaning behind occurrences which often seem slight in themselves is another talent of the acute politician. When Jethro Bass, in Coniston, learns that the postmastership of the small town of Brampton is to go to another’s protégé, he realizes that this is the first skirmish in a coming battle for control of the state. His riposte is to take his candidate to Washington. An old soldier, he gains President Grant’s sympathies and the job. The invocation of a dusty city ordinance which pushes James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike and his iron kettle off the corner traditionally marks the invasion of Mike Grogan’s ward by reform elements. Willie Stark in All the King’s Men rightly interprets the attempt to indict his state auditor as the first barrage in an attack against him by resurgent opponents. In The Charterhouse of Parma the seemingly imminent execution of Fabrizio del Dongo makes Parma’s incumbent regime totter. The Archbishop is one of the very few acute enough to realize that “honour forbade the Conte to remain Prime Minister in a country where they were going to cut off the head, and without consulting him, of a young man who was under his protection.”
The Mechanics of Control
The mechanics by which power is attained and kept require mastery for successful execution and close observation for understanding. Proficiency in applying these techniques is as much the hallmark of the professional political class as are the basic attitudes of the upper, middle, and lower economic and social classes. If possible, an opponent is thrown off stride before the race begins. Jerome Garwood in The 13th District feels that his renomination to Congress is assured. But he is hurriedly called home to find that control has been wrested from his chief supporter by an opponent who has called an early district committee meeting after taking the precaution of securing enough proxy votes to establish his supremacy. In Number One Dos Passos had noted the importance of seating convention delegations nine years before the celebrated controversies at the Republican national convention of 1952. In this novel Chuck Crawford defeats a rival in seating his delegation to the Democratic convention partly through the offices of friends who have influence in the White House. Often the law is scrutinized for advantages lying buried within it. Hank Martin in A Lion Is in the Streets is swept into office on a tide of votes cast under his “God-blessed Grandpappy Law.” Passed at the state’s 1898 disenfranchising convention, the statute set up educational or property qualifications for voters but made them inapplicable to descendants of men who had voted before 1868. Obtaining photostats of the list of these men, he parcels them out as ancestors to his illiterate followers who would otherwise be unable to vote. Counter-measures against a dangerous opponent include the old dodge of conquering through division. When in All the King’s Men the Harrison city forces want to split the rural “cocklebur vote” of MacMurfee, they see to it that Willie Stark enters the gubernatorial primary election. Of course, if one has sufficient magnetism, he can charm and beguile an opponent out of his path. In The Grand Design hopeful candidate Walker Watson returns from dinner at the White House immensely pleased that the President wants him to “take care of his health.” This solicitude takes the form of advice for a rest on a ranch in Montana before the convention, “and particularly no speeches.”
The mechanics of political success must of course be applied beyond this highly technical behind-the-scenes area. President Roosevelt tells Lanny Budd that he is moving toward alignment with the Allies as fast as public opinion will allow him to go. In a less admirable concern for the same force, Governor Fuller of Massachusetts had denied a last appeal by Sacco and Vanzetti, according to Sinclair, because he wanted the job for which Coolidge did not choose to run. A refinement and elaboration of this technique is used by Senator O’Brien in Stranger Come Home when he tries to time his committee’s most sensational charges to coincide with press time for late newspaper editions.
The organization of political machines is also refined into a science, particularly by people like Hank Martin in A Lion Is in the Streets, who splits his domain into territories and keeps elaborate files, one on promising opposition men who are to be destroyed politically. Methods designed to insure conformity include devices such as the safe deposit boxes of Ben Erik in The City of Anger which contain documentary evidence of the purchase of key city officials. Nor is the psychology of interpersonal relationships forgotten. Jethro Bass in Coniston always remains silent at the beginning of an interview in order to force the other to speak first at a possible tactical disadvantage. Even the protocol of visits is analyzed in The Plum Tree by Harvey Sayler, who believes
there is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in the very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there—by going to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the concession of going.