Politics in Franklin Street

I

ONE night at dinner my father furnished us with a surprise. Calmly, almost disinterestedly, he said, ‘They want me to run for Congress in the next election.’

From the expression my mother betrayed I could see that she disapproved.

‘I hope you won’t get mixed up in politics,’ she said.

My father made no reply, but took from a small side plate an ear of corn, which he buttered and salted, and then proceeded to handle as if it were a mouth organ. After running the scales back and forth, he put it down, wiped his mouth with an exaggerated formality, and said, ‘The great Plato tells us that the penalty superior men pay for taking no interest in politics is to live under the rule of inferior men.’

‘That’s from the Georgics,’ I bluffed, knowing no more about it than did he.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

‘ Plato,’ my mother repeated. ‘ Wasn’t he the brother-in-law or something of Socrates?’

‘Exactly,’ my father said.

‘Wasn’t he killed by Brutus?’ my mother asked.

‘The mystery of his death,’ my father explained, ‘has never been cleared up.’

‘How,’ I asked, for at eighteen I was thick in Grote’s History, ‘could he have been killed by a man who lived four hundred years later?’

Looking at me sternly, my father replied, ‘I believe I just told you that the mystery of his death had never been cleared up.’

Nothing ever pleased me more than to get my father into a tight corner, especially when he would try to turn dismay into triumph. I followed up my advantage by saying that Socrates met death by his own hand in drinking a cup of hemlock; that the circumstances of his death were as well known as the circumstances of Cæsar’s death. Did he want better evidence than was to be found in his own Plato?

‘I’m afraid, my son,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand the vagaries of evidence. Only the other day I read of a case in court where the testimony of two witnesses differed so widely that the jury couldn’t make up their mind whether a man had been run over by a horse or a horse by a man. And yet you take Plato’s word as a conclusive fact!’

My mother, who hated any kind of controversy at the table, came to my father’s assistance, saying, ‘After all, none of us were there to see it, were we?’

‘ I wasn’t,’ I cheerfully admitted.

‘And I wasn’t,’ my mother said laughingly.

My father didn’t speak, but went on eating.

‘Were you?’ I asked him.

‘Was I what?’ he said, suddenly looking up.

‘Present at Socrates’ death.’

‘ I don’t believe so.’

‘But you’re not certain.’

‘I’m not certain of anything.’

‘Are you certain you’re alive?’

‘Don’t try to work that old catch on me. Of course I’m certain I’m alive.’

‘You won’t be very long,’ my mother said, ‘if you go on eating corn that way. You don’t half chew it!’

‘Corn’s only fit for chickens, anyway,’ he said.

‘Why do you eat it, then?’ I asked.

He drew himself up importantly, turned to me, and, in a manner that seemed to be conferring some great favor, said, ‘Would you really like to know why I eat corn?’

I said that I would, without being in the least curious.

‘Very well then, my son,’ he said, ‘you shall know. I eat corn because I like it!’

‘Let’s get back to Socrates,’ I suggested.

‘The hell with Socrates,’ he said, taking up another ear of corn and buttering it fondly.

We continued our dinner peacefully. When things had been cleared away and my mother had brought on the large bowl of fruit and nuts, over which he would linger endlessly, I asked, ‘Which party wants to nominate you?’

‘You ought to have more sense than to ask that,’ he said. ‘There’s only one party— don’t you know that?’

‘I thought there were two,’ I said, one topic being as good as another for dinner-table controversy.

‘You thought wrong,’ was his reply. ‘The only party is the party of Lincoln, the party of prosperity, the party of the full dinner pail —the Republican Party!’

‘Huh-huh,’ I said.

When he had left the table my mother winked at me and, under her breath, said, ‘Just another one of his brainstorms.’

II

Nothing further was heard about running for Congress till one night a few weeks later when, again at dinner, my father revived the subject. He said he hadn’t been able to make up his mind — not that he had any fear of the outcome, for a nomination meant election almost to a certainty.

‘There are a lot of Democrats, don’t forget,’ I said.

‘Most of them are in jail,’ he replied, with no bounds to his prejudice. Yet this prejudice was not just a personal one, but a political infatuation of that day that was characteristic of our street, our ward, our town, and our state. Democrats were simply criminals who hadn’t yet been caught.

‘Would we,’ my mother ventured timidly, ‘would we have to live in Washington ? ‘

‘Part of the year, yes,’ my father said.

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘As long as we’re in session,’ he said. ‘It all depends on how much business we have to dispose of.’

The ‘we’ could not have escaped my mother any more than it had escaped me. Already in the reality of fancy, which is adequately real for people like my father, he was a Congressman, being addressed as ‘Honorable,’ being sought after for jobs and favors, being invited to spread after-dinner wit at banquets and patriotic jabber at soldiers’ monuments on Decoration Day. Perhaps in the height, depth, and width of this fancy he saw himself granting reprieves and issuing pardons; perhaps he even saw himself as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, empowered to declare war and negotiate peace. In any case, there he sat, munching dreamily at his almonds and raisins, the while riding up Pennsylvania Avenue on a white charger.

‘Then you’ve decided to accept?’ my mother asked.

‘Practically,’ said my father.

My mother began to make plans. Washington would not be a strange city to her; born and brought up in Baltimore, she had, as a young girl, made many visits to the Capital; in fact, she had a sister living there, besides a good many friends. Nevertheless, she contemplated the move with regret.

But she was not unreasonable and she was not unpractical; if Washington called, she would answer; if Washington was my father’s goal, his life’s ambition, she would interpose no obstacles. Her place was by his side, and no one recognized the responsibility more clearly than she herself.

Yet she made stipulations. She would not live at a hotel, where you had to tip at every turn, even for a glass of ice water. We would rent a modest house, furnished, and take along Irish Mary, giving her the help of a local colored girl for ‘upstairs work’ and waiting on the table, and, of course, a laundress to come in once a week. My father agreed.

And she didn’t intend to go out and buy a lot of clothes.

‘If people don’t like the way I dress, you know what they can do,’ she said, mincing no words about it.

To this my father did not agree, and it must be said that he was entirely in the right.

He knew, as my mother probably did not, that the Washington Season, as it affected a Congressman, meant a round of dinners and receptions at embassies, at the residences of Senators, Supreme Court justices, and Cabinet members, at the homes of influential wire-pullers. And then there were the state functions at the White House, most important of all, for they virtually were command appearances.

‘What would the President think,’ my father asked, with an appeal to her pride and her reason, ‘if he saw you in that old velvet thing you wear to the opera?’

‘I don’t care what he’d think,’ she said, defiantly. ‘I’m not going to get myself up like a clotheshorse to please the President.’

Undoubtedly she meant it.

All he could say, at the end of his patience, was ‘I swear, you talk like the wife of a Democrat!’

III

From time to time, that winter and the following spring, the Washington prospect was discussed frequently — always, it seemed, at dinner. Gradually, out of what at first was vagueness, came a defined and calculated plan, as of a near-approaching situation to be faced. There even was talk of their taking a trip to Washington to look over certain residential neighborhoods and determine the rentals of houses that would fit their requirements — or, put differently, to determine how great a show they could make for the rental they could afford. But nothing was said about my mother’s wardrobe; nothing needed to be said, for my father and I noticed ladies’ fashion magazines lying about, magazines that never before had been brought into the house. One day on her bureau I saw ten or twelve little groups of swatches of silks, satins, and velvets, each group containing a range of shades, and remarked on their beauty.

‘Whom are they for?’ I asked, playing curious and dumb.

‘You’ll see,’ was all she cared to say.

My mother wrote to her sister in Washington telling of the wonderful news, and asked that she keep an eye out for a suitable house, something that would be in keeping with the station of a Congressman from an important district of an important state. Not long afterwards my aunt was able to inform us that she had found what she considered ‘a most attractive home’ on Connecticut Avenue, comprising thirty-three rooms and six baths, with a stable in the rear, formerly occupied by the Bulgarian Embassy.

My mother was indignant. She said, ‘What does she think we’d do with thirty-three rooms, the fool!’

‘We could take just the stable,’ my father said, momentarily regaining the humor which his political aspirations had seemed to destroy.

In the day of which I speak, 1903, there were no primary elections: nominations came, not out of the ballot box, but out of the vest pockets of leaders, styled ‘The Committee.’ This Committee alone was in the driver’s seat; it alone did the steering. But it did more: it formulated the strategy and worked out the tactics of electioneering; it collected and disbursed campaign funds; and it had complete control of patronage. This system, in all its phases, was known as ‘The Machine.’ It was the era, as we are often reminded today, when there was real democracy in America, by God! Somewhere in the spheres Demos was debauching.

One of the members of the Republican Committee in our town was Billy Carroll, less well known as William Aloysius Carroll. He was the right-hand man of the chairman of the committee, the Boss Himself, the Big Bashaw — in short, the Works, the Honorable (why he was called ‘Honorable’ when he held no public office I don’t know), the Honorable Ignatius Xavier Hurley, better known as Czar Hurley, and still better known as ‘Three-fingers’ Hurley, a nickname that had been affectionately attached to him since his apprentice days in a butcher’s shop when, so the story went, he had two fingers chopped off by his employer for monkeying with the cash drawer. If Czar Hurley, as a politician, could steal the amount he stole with only eight fingers, think of the good fortune of our town that he didn’t have ten!

My father’s nomination, then, was really up to Hurley; and Billy Carroll, with a wink and a nod of the head, said, ‘It’s all fixed.’

That was all my father needed to know: if he heard it from Billy’s lips it was as good as hearing it from Hurley himself. Billy was his lifelong friend; they had gone to grammar school together, were members of the same boat club, and once went off to Canada, just the two of them, to hunt lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and whiskey, if not too young. Billy said, ‘It’s all fixed.’

Admittedly, this was a relief both to my father and to my mother, for, though they had felt seven-eighths certain right along, there was nothing like certainty being made doubly certain.

It was very curious, I thought, and told my father so, that Hurley, whom he knew but slightly, should give him the nomination.

‘ Maybe he expects a fight in this congressional district and wants the strongest candidate he can get,’ my father said, with no trace of a blush that I could detect.

‘Whatever the reason,’ said my mother, ‘it’s finally settled now, and I’ll have to get busy with my clothes.’

‘You have plenty of time,’ I said.

‘No,’ she reasoned, ‘summer’s the best time. If I wait till fall every dressmaker will be busy. Besides, they’re cheaper in the summer.’

Over his nuts and raisins, paying no attention to what we were saying, my father was smiling to himself, moving his lips as if orating, with an occasional expressive raising of the brow.

‘What are you thinking about?’ my mother asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he answered, to put her off.

‘He’s going over his maiden speech,’ I said laughingly.

He made no reply to this, but only smiled benignly and with extreme satisfaction. After a little while he asked, ‘What is that thing of Patrick Henry’s — you know — “ Cæsar had his Brutus —’”

‘“Charles the First his Cromwell —"'

‘That’s it!’ he interrupted. ‘I never can think of that second pair.’

He resumed his smile, and his nuts and raisins.

‘Won’t you be nervous when you get up to speak in front of all those other Congressmen?’ my mother asked.

‘It’s too late to turn back now,’ he answered.

IV

The nightly dinner talk turned to only one topic or to one of the many phases of the topic: my father’s explaining of how he was arranging his business so that his absence in Washington would not be too greatly felt; my mother’s complaining of how dressmakers’ disappointments — indeed, their reckless disregard of promises — were taking all the pleasure and anticipation and excitement out of this whole business of going to Washington; my father’s describing of the cut of his new dress suit (which my mother said he didn’t need, having got a new one only the year before); my mother’s lamenting of the long, fatiguing fittings that almost daily had to be suffered — and so on and so on, ad infinauseam.

One night I mentioned that I had seen in the papers that Owen Fitzpatrick had got the Democratic nomination.

‘His name will be Dennis Fitzpatrick when I get through with him,’ my father said.

‘Isn’t it time they were announcing your nomination?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I leave that to the boys downtown,’ he said. ‘ They know what they’re doing.’

My mother’s seven new dresses — four of them evening gowns — came to more than four hundred dollars. My father winced a little, but said nothing, probably realizing that he himself was the author of the splurge.

One night that fall — it must have been several weeks after election — my mother tried on all seven of the dresses for my father and me. We sat up in her bedroom and she would appear, coming from the adjoining room, like a professional model, showing one creation after another. We had seen the dresses before, as they were delivered, but had not yet seen them on her. As she came into the room each time we, the audience, would applaud long and loud, and she, trying hard to complete the fun of the moment, would smile, but her smiles were sad, with no mirth in them.

The most expensive gown of the lot she saved for the last. It was a silver metal affair, cut very low fore and aft, and really very beautiful, if such things can be said to be beautiful. We clapped and clapped, and my father, like the sweet fool he could be at times, shouted ‘Bravo! Bravo!’

Very dejectedly my mother said, ‘This is the one I was going to wear to the White House.’

Then she burst into tears.

My father took her in his arms, kissed her, and tried to comfort her with that profound platitude about all of us having our health, and health being a richer prize than wealth or fame.

‘It was all Billy Carroll’s fault,’ she said when she caught her breath between sobs. ‘I always knew he was a big liar.’

‘Now don’t cry,’ my father kept telling her tenderly. ‘You’ll get your nice dress all spotted.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, wiping a tear from her eye. ‘Nobody’ll ever see it again, anyway.’

This, of course, was only the exaggeration of despair, for in time all her friends saw it, and admired it, and told her how lovely she looked in it, and whenever she put it on for them she would always go to the pains of fixing her hair and powdering her face. At such times, whether afternoon or evening, her manner unavoidably would become formal and her posture stately. One could even notice the dress’s influence on her speech and conversation when she had it on. She was very proud of it, and always spoke of it as her ‘White House’ dress.