Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at WashingtonGilbert, Clinton W. (Clinton Wallace)
History
Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington
Gilbert, Clinton W. (Clinton Wallace)
Harding, Warren G. (Warren Gamaliel), 1865-1923; United States -- Politics and government -- 1921-1923
Wadsworth of New York is an exception to the general run of Senators. He
belongs by birth to the class which is traditionally free from
hypocrisy. He is not boisterously contemptuous of the slavishness of
Senators as Penrose was. He is quietly contemptuous. His voice has a
note of well-bred impatience in it. He has not Penrose's pleasure in
mere shocking, but he has the aristocratic hatred of moral ostentation.
The kind of thing that is not done is the kind of thing that is not
done. You don't do it and make no parade of your abstinence. Wadsworth
does not open his home to all his New York colleagues in both houses
just because it is politically expedient. His house is his own, and
so is his conscience, which is not surrendered at the demands of woman
suffrage or of the dries. He has courage. He has convictions. He is
lonely. To be otherwise than lonely in the Senate you must be a
Frelinghuysen, an Elkins, a Newberry, a New, a Watson, or a Hale. He
will never be a leader. He has no more place in the Senate as it is than
Lord Robert Cecil, a much larger man, has in the House of Commons as it
is. Both belong to another day and generation. Neither is sure of
anything but himself and each counts the world well lost. Both represent
the aristocratic tradition.
[Illustration: SENATOR JAMES W. WADSWORTH OF NEW YORK]
Industry makes Reed Smoot one of the most useful of the Senators. He has
a passion for details. He reads all the bills. He makes himself a master
of the Government's appropriations and expenditures. He exudes figures
from every pore. By temperament Mr. Smoot is unhappy, and he finds cause
of dark foreboding in the mounting costs of government. His voice has a
scolding note. His manner and appearance is that of a village elder. His
heart is sore as he regards the political world about him, its
wastefulness, its consumption of white paper, on leaves to print and on
reports which no one reads. He is the aggrieved parent. "My children,"
he seems always to say, "you must mend your ways." He specializes in
misplaced commas. Nothing is too trivial for his all seeing eyes. In
committee he talks much, twice as much as anyone else, about points
which escape the attention of all his colleagues. Senators, wishing to
get through no matter how, regard him as a pest. Only an unimaginative
and uncreative mind can occupy itself as Smoot's does. He is a building
inspector rather than a builder. With his fussiness, his minor prophetic
voice, his holier-than-thou attitude toward waste, he can never be a
leader of the Senate to which the idle apprentice, the good fellow, who
dines out much in the Harding Senatorial set, the small business man
seeking a place in society, give its tone and character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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