by Gore Vidal
“Maybe he’ll get here one of these days,” said Jess, who would have given an arm and a leg to be a member of this extraordinary club just as long, of course, as he never had to get up and make a speech. Even more than the dark and guns and the infamous downstairs broom closet, public speaking terrified him. Much of the awe in which he held W.G. was at the ease with which he could stand up before a crowd and talk and talk without the slightest hesitation or any sign of nerves. Of course it helped to be as handsome as W.G.; and as likeable.
“No. Daugherty lost for good two years ago. If you can’t beat Myron Herrick in a Republican primary, you’re never going to get elected in Ohio.”
The senator from New Mexico came off the floor. He was a genuine cowboy with huge moustaches. He had been one of T.R.’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and he was a regular at the Harding-Longworth poker evenings. “Howdy, Duchess. Jess.” Albert B. Fall never failed to remember Jess’s name.
“I thought you’d gone home to repair some fences.” The Duchess had no real interest in politics but she doted on elections. Like a baseball fan, she knew everyone’s score. Fall was up for re-election in November.
“I’m on my way.” Fall looked curiously at Harding, who was checking his notes. With his glasses on and thick white hair ruffled, W.G. looked more than ever like the editor-publisher of the Marion Star whom Jess had first met as a boy. “You speaking?”
“A bit of bloviation to swell the senatorial choir, Brother Fall.” Harding looked up; and smiled. “I shall call for brotherly love, as we accept once more in the concert of nations the good people of Germany no longer duped by their bad leaders now fallen from their thrones.”
“That will please Carrie Phillips.” The Duchess did not so much speak as hiss. Jess felt his face grow hot; palms start to sweat. W.G. stopped smiling. Senator Fall, who had no idea who Carrie Phillips was, merely said, “I just made pretty much the same speech. By the way, I’m getting Colonel Roosevelt to campaign for me.”
“Bully,” said Harding, in a bad imitation of the Colonel, “for you.”
“He’s high on you, W.G.”
“He told Daugherty last May that if he was the candidate in 1920, he’d like having Warren on his ticket. That was when he was speaking in Columbus,” added the Duchess, as if erasing with the odd detail her tactless mention of Carrie Phillips.
“He’ll need Ohio, and that’s you, W.G.”
Harding took off his glasses and pocketed his notes. “The Colonel once said to me, ‘I think I understand most things pretty well, except Ohio politics.’ ”
“Simple,” said Fall. “Cincinnati is one place and Columbus is another. Lot of folks get confused.” Then Fall joined Penrose and whispered something in the fat man’s ear.
“Where is Daugherty?” asked the Duchess.
“Cincinnati. Or maybe Columbus.” W.G. was relaxed. “I haven’t heard. But then I’ve been on the circuit.”
With the President’s blessing, Chautauqua was more than ever popular, and those politicians who earned the major part of their income from speaking in the tents were encouraged to speak as much as they liked on condition that they, subtly or not, support the war effort. Harding’s set speech for years had been the career of Alexander Hamilton, the result of once having read, while taking the cure at Battle Creek, a novel based on Hamilton’s life. Jess had heard the speech a dozen times and could hear it a dozen more. Harding never altered a word or any of the six gestures that he always used, in the same sequence, as prescribed by the elocution book. But the coda of the unalterable speech was changeable. Harding could always join his hero, Hamilton, with whatever contemporary issue he chose—in this case the winning of the war to end all war in democracy’s name.
“Daugherty’s a brilliant man.” W.G. combed his hair, without a mirror, something the thin-haired Jess could never have done. “But he’s got so many political hatreds now that I worry about him. He takes things too hard.”
“He’s a good friend.” The Duchess had been made an ally very early in Daugherty’s campaign to make W.G. president, a most unlikely enterprise, if Theodore Roosevelt was going to run, which he was. But vice president wasn’t so bad, as even Daugherty tended to agree when he and Jess discussed, endlessly, the subject.
“I wish,” said W.G., standing up, and straightening his jacket while the Duchess brushed dandruff from his shoulders, “that he wouldn’t keep mixing up my politeness with folks as agreement or weakness. Somehow or other he’s got the notion that I’m politically sort of below par. You know, easily ‘strung.’ ”
“You’re too nice to people. You trust everybody.” The Duchess echoed Daugherty.
“Trust everybody, and you don’t have to trust anybody. Anyway, you get more flies with honey than vinegar.” Harding pulled in his stomach; held high his head. There was no handsomer man in public life, thought Jess. Then the Senator pushed open the swinging doors and walked onto the Senate floor and into the day’s history.
FIVE
1
As the crucifix was raised high, Caroline shut her eyes. To date, she had watched Huns from Hell a dozen times, and each time she had found something new to dislike despite the fact that she had been compared favorably to Duse, the actress of muted effects. To herself, she seemed more school of Bernhardt, all artifice and embarrassing broadness of gesture.
The moment safely passed, she opened her eyes, and glanced at the President; who was absolutely concentrated on the screen while next to him, Mrs. Wilson gasped inadvertently as the crucifix, yet again, made its fateful rendezvous with poor Pierre’s skull. For all eternity, or until the celluloid turned to dust or whatever celluloid was scheduled to become, Caroline would be raising and lowering that crucifix and Pierre would be falling backwards, backwards, backwards. Could this be hell, repetition?
At the end, a new title card had been added, to acknowledge the string of inexorable American victories from the Marne to the Argonne, as the Hun was driven back toward his lair across the Rhine. The guests in the East Room applauded the victories, undisturbed that the Allies, who had contributed so much, were not mentioned. “We’ll have different cards in the different countries,” Ince had said. “That way everybody gets to win the war except the Huns.” To which Tim had responded, “There’s quite a German audience, too. Why not let them win in the German market?”
There was more applause as the picture ended with a long shot of Caroline, gallantly walking into the future, wind from a machine in her hair, eyes aglow with a bad case of kliegitis, and everywhere desolation, broken only at the end by a cloud’s passing and—look! the sun. It had taken two days to get this cloud effect from the pier at Santa Monica.
The lights in the East Room were switched on. The red-eyed guests of the President got to their feet. The President shook Caroline’s hand. “You should be very proud of having produced this.”
“I’m afraid it comes a little late for the war effort.” Caroline, as always, marvelled that after two hours of watching her on the screen people could then turn to her in real life and make no connection at all between the giant shadow-image and the real-life miniature. She had given herself credit as producer because Triangle had run out of money halfway through and to shut down would have been fatal to Tim’s career, or so she liked to think and he to say.
Huns from Hell had been astonishingly successful; and there was great curiosity about Emma Traxler. There were also numerous photo-play offers for her services, all sent in care of Mr. Ince, who thought that she should take her new career seriously. But Caroline understood luck, if nothing else. There were certain accidents in life that did not recur. This was one. Of course, she could be an old actress, but that was rather worse than being an old private lady who was not obliged, ever, to look into a mirror.
Edith Wilson took Caroline’s arm, and led her from the East Room across the hall to the Green Room. “A few people are staying for coffee. Do join us.”
“Of course, but …”
“Mr. Farrell, too.” Mrs. Wilson was tactful. “I hadn’t realized how—well, powerful, a photo-play can be. In a way, it’s more exciting than the theater.”
“Quicker, certainly.”
“We should have had music. I told Woodrow to get the Marine-band pianist. But, poor man, he’s dead—just like that. The flu. And where do you find someone good on such short notice?” The Green Room was now beginning to fill up. From the War Council, there was the Californian Herbert Hoover, who was thought to be a genius of organization, or so Caroline read in the Tribune. Caroline had found him agreeably shy at dinner. They had talked of China, where he had been an engineer at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. They had not discussed food rationing, a subject which his chubby face, somewhat incongruously, personified.
George Creel and Tim came in together. Creel was delighted. “We’ll show this all over Europe,” he said to Caroline. “Show them just what they owe us.”
Caroline was startled by the crudeness. “Surely they know better than we do what they owe us, if anything.”
“You should take a look at their press! You’d think we hadn’t been in the war at all. That’s why a movie like this is so important. They’ll pretend they won all by themselves and then they’ll try to find reasons not to accept the German peace offer.” The room was dividing into swarms. The largest flocked about the President and Colonel House, who was due to return to Europe, where he would have to convince the Allies that the Fourteen Points were America’s immutable terms for peace.
“I don’t think they’ll want to go on fighting without us.” Creel smiled. “Remember last summer? France was done for. England broke. Well, we’ll arrange the peace whether the Allies like it or not. What will you do next, Mr. Farrell?”
Tim smiled his altar-boy smile. “Now the war’s over—and won—I think I’d like to do something on Eugene V. Debs.”
Creel was taken aback. “Debs? But he’s on his way to prison.” The leader of the Socialist Party had never much interested Caroline, but now that she was obliged to see some of the world some of the time through the eyes of her lover, she had become interested in Debs, who had received a million votes for president in 1912. Then, with violent rhetoric, Debs had opposed the war as well as capitalism. He was also given to praising if not, perhaps, reading Marx and Lenin, and he did not view the Bolshevik revolution as inimitable. Briskly, the United States government had charged Debs with violating, through the exercise of free speech, the Espionage Act of 1917. As briskly, a court had sentenced him to ten years in prison. Currently, he was free on appeal. But everyone knew that the Supreme Court would unanimously find him guilty, invoking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s celebrated condition of when speech was free and when it was not. Speech was absolutely free, he had ruled, except when there was “a clear and present danger.”
If nothing else, Tim had confronted Caroline head-on with the realities of this, more than ever, strange country whose harsh contradictions she had tended to take for granted. Although she was not as sentimental as he about such abstractions as justice, her Cartesian education made her wary of illogical propositions. Either one could speak freely of political matters or not; if not, do not claim that there is freedom of speech when its exercise means ten years in prison. The “clear and present danger” proposition was, to Caroline, itself a clear and present danger to freedom itself. She had argued as much to Blaise, who had said that she had misunderstood the nature of a republic whose contradictions were, in some mystical way, its strength.
Meanwhile, Creel’s swift energetic crude mind had now taken up the idea of a film about Debs; and found it good. “You know, it’s inspired, Mr. Farrell. You’re quite right. You’ve shown us the Huns from Hell. Well, we’ve taken care of them. So what’s next? The Bolsheviks, communism, socialism, labor agitators, the enemy within our own country. That’s where the real danger is now. Show Debs and Trotsky, working together to enslave every American, something not even the Huns thought of doing because we’re both Christian nations with the same capitalistic systems. But the Bolsheviks have got a new religion that could just take off in this country. Look at the railroad strikes, the coal strikes—you can’t tell me someone somewhere isn’t manipulating our workers in order to destroy our freedoms …”
“Of which,” Caroline was sententious, “freedom of speech is the most important.”
“Absolutely …”
“Even when danger is clear and present …”
“Exactly!” Creel was beside himself with a new crusade. Caroline gave Tim a reproachful look. Tim shrugged. It was inevitable that the Creels would find a new enemy to take the place of the Huns. As Tim described the searing indictment of Debs that Creel would want him to make and that he would not, Edith Wilson drew Caroline into the President’s orbit. “You know, that marvellous actress looks quite a bit like you. Naturally, she’s older.” That was the closest people ever came to working out the identity of Emma Traxler. At first, Caroline had been mystified to discover that no one realized that she was Emma. But Tim had explained it to her: “It’s because people don’t really look at other people if they know them.” Tim’s life work was to see precisely what he saw. “But a stranger who doesn’t know Caroline Sanford will see you on a street and realize that you are Emma Traxler.” This had happened more than once in New York and Washington. But so clearly was she identified with herself among those who knew her that she simply could not be anyone else. Also, Emma’s hair was different; and her luminous Madonna face was the result of careful lighting which real life—light—cruelly refused to supply.
“Emma Traxler is Swiss, from Unterwalden in Schweiz. A very old family. I knew her in Paris when she was on the stage.” Caroline loved inventing Emma. But then so did the press, who had changed her provenance to Alsace-Lorraine, that lovely divided borderland which had reputedly given the world so much, not least the creator of the Universal movie studio, Carl Laemmle, from neighboring Wsürttemberg.
Colonel House took Caroline’s hand in both of his. Edith withdrew. Like a kindly gray rat, House whispered compliments into Caroline’s ear, particularly for the Tribune’s editorial policies. Behind him, the President held court.
“The Allies will be difficult, won’t they?” Caroline had never been able to determine the nature of House’s influence over Wilson. Plainly, the little man was an adroit flatterer in the lay-it-on-thick Texas style; plainly, he was disinterested in the sense that he did not want money or public office, which impressed everyone but Caroline, who knew that to exert power in the world was the most exquisite of all interests; plainly, he was intelligent. The mystery, if mystery there was, had more to do with Wilson’s singularly remote personality than any design, no matter how interested and interesting, of the Texas Colonel. Wilson had no men friends because he believed, as only a university professor could, that he had no equals; certainly this was the impression that he had made on the leaders of his own party, men who took themselves quite as seriously as he took himself. For someone so isolated by his own forbidding rhetoric and by the Constitution’s war-time powers, a Colonel House was a necessary link to the world outside himself.
“… I sail on the fourth of December. I expect, before I go, we’ll be hearing good news from Germany.”
“What about from France and England?”
“We have most of the cards, Mrs. Sanford. Fact, maybe all of the cards, for now. The real problem is afterwards, making peace.”
“I’ve met some of your young men. They are formidable.”
“The Inquiry?”
Caroline nodded. A year earlier House had set up a board of young scholars whose task it was to make plans for the new world that would emerge from the peace conference. Historians were put to work studying Europe’s boundaries, language groupings, religions; also, they were allowed to study the secret treaties that the Allies had made with one another and with interested countries like Italy, which had been promised a large chunk of the Austro-Hungaria
n Empire in return for a collusive neutrality followed by war. The Bolsheviks had published the lot, embarrassing the President, who pretended that he had not known of the treaties. Since the Fourteen Points meant redrawing Europe’s map, the unenviable task of the Inquiry group was to conform Wilson’s generous “peace without victory”—a phrase invented by one of the Inquiry men, a New Republic editor, Walter Lippmann—and the secret treaties, which represented total victory for the Allies and not much peace.
The soft whisper was eminently soothing. “… the Kaiser will abdicate, and there will be a republic, and an armistice, and then the peace conference, where, I hope I’m not bragging too much, we’ll go in, those boys of mine, certainly, the best prepared of the lot. We’re ready for anything, including, if we have to, the partition of Schleswig-Holstein, along racial lines.”
“How amazed the French will be! They think us totally ignorant … of European politics,” she added, quite aware of France’s jealous contempt for everything American.
“The British Foreign Office has a sort of French mentality, too.” The gray rat’s eyes gleamed with good humor. In the background the President, eyes half-shut, seemed to be giving a sermon.
“Who will negotiate for us?” Caroline expected no answer but often the way that a question was not answered was revelatory.
“I suppose we’ll continue as we are.”
“With you in Paris—or wherever …”
“And the President here, telling me what to do.”
“No Lansing?” The President’s dislike of his secretary of state was common knowledge.
“Well, maybe, not too much Lansing.” House chuckled. “Anyway, it shouldn’t take very long. We’re ready for once.”
“The President stays here?”
House nodded. “This work isn’t for the chief of state. After all, he’s the British king and prime minister all rolled into one. He’s too huge for our sort of a conference. He should come over, briefly, show the flag—they think he’s God, you know. Then vanish into the empyrean, just like God.”