I barely made it over here today, but fortunately had a very skillful taxi driver. I was about to give him a large tip and tell him to vote Democratic, when I remembered the still more effective vote-getting technique Senator Green had told me about – so I gave him no tip at all, and told him to vote Republican.
It is a genuine pleasure to be here today at the Women’s National Press Club Luncheon. Your members have distinguished themselves among Washington journalists for their competent reporting, their comprehensive understanding of the legislative process, and their complete fearlessness in predicting the outcome of the 1956 conventions and elections.
The Senate, too, is engaged in that age-old guessing game of picking candidates – and I am often reminded of the prediction made by the late Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed when he prophesied that the time would eventually come when the Constitution would be amended so as to provide that Presidents should always be chosen by the Senate, out of the Senate. The American people, as Reed described the situation, awaited with the tensest excitement the result of this first trial of
“the choice of the wisest men by and out of the wisest body of men. When the time came for the announcement of the first such vote,” Reed went on, “the presiding officer’s hesitation and pallor indicated that something unexpected had happened. He shouted to the vast multitude the astounding result: 96 Senators had each received one vote:
“for a moment a stillness as of death settled upon the multitude. Never till that moment had the people recognized that…the Senate of the United States was one level mass of wisdom and virtue, perfect in all of its parts.”
But whatever may be the accuracy of the predictions of Thomas Reed or Doris Fleeson, the members of this group are noted for responsible journalism, a vital ingredient in the world today. In the course of my recent research on political courage, I learned a lot about responsible – and irresponsible journalism. Some of the harshest and most abusive attacks on the Senators described in my book came not from opposing politicians, not from intellectual constituents, but from newspapers.
When Daniel Webster supported Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850 in order to prevent secession and Civil War, the New York Evening Post called it a “traitorous retreat”. When Thomas Hart Benton split with the State of Missouri over the questions of slavery and states’ rights, the Missouri Register declared that Senator Benton is “a blustering, insolent, unscrupulous demagogue.” When Edmund G. Ross cast his historic and decisive vote against the conviction of the impeached Andrew Johnson, a Kansas newspaper charged that he was a “poor, pitiful, shriveled wretch” who had “sold himself…basely lied to his friends…and signed the death warrant of his country’s liberty…because the traitor, like Benedict Arnold, loved money better than he did principle, friends, honor, and his country.” When Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois pardoned the three remaining defendants in the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886, the Chicago Tribune termed him as “anarchist…socialist…apologist for murder…and fomenter of lawlessness”; and declared there was “not a drop of true American blood in his veins.” And when George Norris and his eleven colleagues filibustered to a temporary grave Woodrow Wilson’s armed ship program in 1917, the New York Herald Tribune was certain that the name of George Norris would “go down into history bracketed with that of Benedict Arnold.” I must say that the failure of this particular prediction has not discouraged the columnists of the Herald Tribune from continuing to engage in the dangerous art of political prophecy.
When we read these and similar attacks which have been made in more recent times, those of us in the Senate are comforted by the description which Senator Grimes of Iowa gave to the reports of Washington correspondents during the Johnson Impeachment Trial. They were, he said, “lies sent from here by the most worthless and irresponsible creatures on the face of the earth.” At the time Senator Grimes spoke, of course, female correspondents were not yet admitted to the Press Gallery.
Politicians are, from time to time, still troubled by irresponsible journalists and authors – just as journalists and authors, from time to time, are still troubled by irresponsible politicians. But it is a tragic fact that there are few groups where the problems of the politician are given as little genuine comprehension as they are among the writers, who seem to possess that talent for finding the right and wrong on all questions with none of the difficulties that face the politician. It was this extraordinary faculty of so many literary figures that prompted Lord Melbourne’s statement that he would like to be as sure of anything as the youthful historian T. B. MacCauley seemed to be of everything.
I do not wish to minimize the difficulty that the author faces in being faithful to his talent. Nor do I wish to defend the art of the politician if it results in situations which are in Shaw’s words “smirched with compromise, rotted with opportunism, and mildewed by expedience.” Certainly I do not seek any cessation of the writer’s critical faculties in their application to my profession. For it is one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian when criticism is directed only against the enemies of the state, rather than against the state itself. And certainly all too frequently it has been the writer and not the politician who has been the truer friend of liberty.
But I do suggest the need for a greater comprehension of the very real and difficult problems involved in the successful governing of a democratic state. In few other professions but politics is the urge so great to follow the example of Congressman John Steven McGroarty of California, who wrote a constituent in 1934:
“One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.”
And in few other professions but politics is it expected that a man will sacrifice honors, prestige and his chosen career on a single issue. I do not say that authors, teachers and others do not face difficult decisions involving their integrity – but few face them as does the politician in the spotlight of publicity. And few bear the continual weight of temptations and pressures to take the primrose path of never-ending compromise. Torn between his obligations to his constituency, his concern for the welfare of his family, his gratitude to his supporters, his loyalty to his party, his personal ambitions, his sense of public duty, and his awareness that right and wrong on most issues are almost inextricably mixed, the politician stumbles along, seeking shelter from the slings and arrows of his critics – most of them interested, only a few disinterested.
It is no wonder that we do not have more men of political courage, willing to go out on a limb for what they believe. It is no wonder that a famous Senator half a century ago had become so accustomed to political caution and guarded opinions that when he went to see the Siamese Twins at the World Exposition, he asked the guard at the exhibit: “Brothers, I presume?”
And it is no wonder that it was said of a similarly inclined and similarly cautious Senator of a generation ago, William B. Allison of Iowa, that if a piano were constructed reaching from the Senate Chamber to Des Moines, Allison could run all the way on the keys without ever striking a note.
Our course is not made easier, of course, when it is under constant attack from authors and journalists using those horrible weapons of modern internecine warfare: the barbed thrust, the acid pen, and – most sinister of all – the rhetorical blast. My desk is flooded with books, articles and pamphlets criticizing Congress. But rarely, if ever, have I seen any writer bestow praise upon either the political profession or any political body for its accomplishments, its ability or its integrity – much less for its intelligence. Fictitious politicians – whether members of Parliament in the time of Charles Dickens or mayors of Gibbsville in the time of John O’Hara – are inevitably shabby, slippery and selfish. Many of today’s intellectuals and authors share the views of Henry Adams, who in 1869 was told impatiently by a Cabinet member: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout.” And in quiet derision Adams had replied: “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?”
And real-life politicians to much of the literary world today represent nothing but censors, investigators, and perpetrators of what has been called “the swinish cult of anti-intellectualism” – a cult, I might add, which is matched in the current clash by what might be termed “the superior cult of anti-politicalism”.
Unfortunately it is also true that most politicians have little but disdain for most authors and scholars. In Washington we award medals and memorials to distinguished civil servants, to famous military men, to outstanding scientists and, of course, to retiring politicians – but nothing to distinguished authors. In fact, I have serious doubts that a national poet-laureate could ever get Senate confirmation.
But I have come here not to accentuate the differences between the politician and the author, but to stress what they share in common:
First: The American politician of today and the American author of today are descended from a common ancestry. For our nation’s first great politicians – those who presided at its birth in 1776 and its christening in 1787 – included among their ranks most of the nation’s first great writers and scholars. The founders of the American Constitution were also the founders of American scholarship. The works of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Paine, John Adams and Samuel Adams – to name but a few – influenced the literature of the world as well as its geography. Books were their tools, not their enemies. Locke, Milton, Sidney, Montesquieu, Priestly, Coke, Bolingbroke, Harrington and Bentham were among those widely read in political circles and frequently quoted in political pamphlets. Our political leaders traded in the free commerce of ideas with lasting results both here and abroad.
For more than a century this link between the American literary and political worlds was maintained unbroken. Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen were not only political philosophers but biographers, historians, essayists, humorists and in some instances writers of poetry. Listen, if you please, to this poem of a young girl:
“Remember Thee?
Yes, lovely girl;
While faithful memory holds its seat,
Till this warm heart in dust is laid,
And this wild pulse shall cease to beat…
Still, cousin, I will think of Thee.”
The author is not Christina Rossetti, but the Senator from Texas – Sam Houston.
And literary men, when not directly active in politics themselves, maintained a strong influence on political events. The gifted Abolitionists of New England – Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier and others – influenced strongly the years before the Civil War. And Henry Adams’ education was involved even more with political matters than with the symmetries of Chartes and Mount St. Michel.
But today this link is all but gone. Where are the scholar-statesmen of yesteryear?
The modern politician – although not all of them, I should make clear – knows well that what he says but never writes can almost always be denied; but that what he writes and never remembers may some day come back to haunt him. The thought of Job’s lament “O, that my adversary had written a book” has dried up many a politician’s pen. Political memoirs and diaries, published at the end of one’s career, and with the incalculable advantage of hindsight, are considered to be relatively safe. But even this type of publication is increasingly rare. The only fiction to which many modern politicians turn their hand is the party platform – the only muse which they invoke is their party leader. As for Locke, Milton, Coke, and Bolingbroke – the only Locke in which they are interested is on the treasury door – Milton is on television Tuesday nights – Coke they drink – and Bolingbroke they never heard of.
At the same time, too many American authors and scholars – forgetting that their forefathers were politicians, too – are fearful that the rough and tumble of politics will damage the fine hand by which they spin out carefully conceived works. “All literary men,” wrote John Galsworthy “can tell people what they oughtn’t to be; that’s literature. But to tell them what they ought to do is politics.” Many literary men will tell us what we ought to do – to that extent they will enter politics. But few will put themselves into the open arena, exposed to the pressures of public calumny and to the humiliation of the ballot-box. They prefer to remain on the marksman’s end of the rifle of political criticism, and not on the bull’s-eye. This is indeed unfortunate – for our political life would be refreshened if our literary men of today would assume the position of leadership they held so decisively in past years.
Secondly: Politicians and authors are mutually dependent upon each other. Politics, politicians and government have – since man first carved out his thoughts on the walls of caves – ranked second only to romance as a subject for literary plots. The relationship of a Solomon with the Queen of Sheba, the conquests of a Charlemagne, the tragedy of a Lear – these are the tales of politicians, their governments, their laws, their battles. It took politics to hang the witches at Salem, to plunge the knife into Duncan at Dunsinane and to quarrel over the remains of Caesar at Rome. It was politics that sent Joan of Arc to die in the city square at Rouen, that sent De Bonnivard to the Chillon dungeons, that sent Davy Crocket to the Alamo. Without politics and governments, there would be no spies, no court intrigue, no revolutions, no prisons, no poorhouses. Certainly without politics, there would never have been a Civil War in this country – and thus no Rhett Butlers or Scarlett O’Haras to pursue each other through the pages of about 90% of today’s historical novels.
Politics and government, finally, have touched the lives and works of all the authors and poets we have ever honored. They ordered Lawrence to Arabia, sent Byron to die in the rain at Missolonghi, exiled Shelley to Italy, dismissed Poe from West Point and sent Rupert Brooke to die near Troy.
Nor is this a one-way street. The influence of literature upon the course of our political life has been equally vast and immeasurable. Time and again, great works of literature like Rousseau’s “Social Contract” have given rise to great political struggles – and time and again, great political struggles have given birth to great works of literature.
Modern politicians, whatever they may say, could no more get along without authors than authors could get along without politicians.
Finally: The politician and the author are motivated by a common incentive – public approval. “How many books will I sell?” asks the author. “How many votes will I get?” asks the politician. The problem, of course, is to prevent the natural desire of both groups for public approbation from becoming dominant, to prevent Gresham’s Law from operating in the literary and political world wherein the bad would inevitably drive out the good.
And thus may I conclude with a plea for greater comprehension on both sides of the problems each of us faces, for a greater recognition of how inextricably our professions and our fates are involved. In this way the synthesis of our efforts and talents may be a greater service to the cause of freedom – a bulwark against the challenge of the future.
Link to image of draft one
Link to image of draft two