"Proud Tower"

[fiefoe]

The most gripping section of the book:

• He was Thomas B. Reed, Republican of Maine, aged fifty. Already acknowledged after fourteen years in Congress as “the ablest running debater the American people ever saw,” he would, before the end of the session, be called “the greatest parliamentary leader of his time … far and away the most brilliant figure in American politics.”
• The abdication of the rich was born out of the success of the American Revolution and the defeat of Hamilton’s design to organize the State in the interests of the governing class. Jefferson’s principles and Jackson’s democracy had won. The founding fathers and the signers of the Declaration had been in the majority men of property and position, but the very success of their accomplishment ended by discouraging men of their own kind from participating in government.
• Retreating to the comfort of their homes and the pursuits of their class, they left government increasingly to hard-driving newcomers pushing up from below. Such energies as they had they devoted to making money in banking and trade, rather than from the land which they gradually abandoned. The great estates of the Dutch-descended patroons of New York declined first; the Southern plantations went with the Civil War; Boston’s old families remained active and prosperous but on the whole aloof from government.
• Without land to hold on to, a hereditary governing class had failed to develop, and the absence of such a class bound by a traditional morality left America open to the unrestricted exploits of the “plungers” and plunderers, the builders and malefactors and profiteers—and through them to the corruption of politics.
• Government was a paid agent. Its scandals and deals, becoming blatant, had aroused anger and people were demanding reform.
• He never used an extra word, never stumbled in his syntax, was never at a loss, never forced to retreat or modify a position. He was instant in rejoinder, terse, forcible, lucid. He could state a case unanswerably, illuminate an issue, destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. “Hardly time to ripen a strawberry,” he said to describe a lapse of two months.
• His epigrams were famous. “All the wisdom in the world consists in shouting with the majority” was one. “A statesman is a politician who is dead” was another. He rarely made a gesture when speaking.
• After one retort which left its victim limply speechless, Reed, looking about him sweetly, remarked, “Having embedded that fly in the liquid amber of my remarks, I will proceed.”
• The existence of a national library is owed to Reed, whose persistent and eloquent insistence finally wore out the natural parsimony of the House to secure adequate funds for the Library of Congress.
• Reed composed probably the most memorable tribute ever made to him: “Theodore, if there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” With a little less prescience he had also said, “Theodore will never be President; he has no political background.”
• He reached his decision to attack the silent quorum, and planned his campaign, alone, partly because no one else would have thought there was a chance of success and partly because he was not sure that even his own party would support him.
• Once, when mistaken for Cleveland in an ill-lit room, Reed said, “Mercy! Don’t tell Grover. He is too proud of his good looks already.”
• Captain Mahan’s pronouncements were somehow couched in tones of such authority, as much a product of character as of style, as to make everything he wrote appear indisputable. He was already the author of The Influence of Sea Power on History, given originally as lectures at the Naval War College in 1887 and published as a book in 1890.
• What Mahan had discovered was the controlling factor of sea power; that whoever is master of the seas is master of the situation. Like M. Jourdain who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, it was a truth that had been operative for a long time without any of its operators being consciously aware of it, and Mahan’s formulation was stunning.
• “it struck me how different things might have been could Hannibal have invaded Italy by sea … or could he, after arrival, have been in free communication with Carthage by water.” All at once Mahan realized that “control of the sea was an historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated and expounded.” It was “one of those perceptions that turn inward darkness into light.”
• he had a long, narrow face with narrowly placed pale-blue eyes, a long, straight, knifelike nose, a sandy moustache blending into a closely trimmed beard over an insignificant chin. All the power of the face was in the upper part, in the eyes and domed skull and the intellectual bumps over the eyebrows.
• So unrelenting was his pursuit of corrupt practices by Tammany politicians that on one occasion they had him arrested for criminal libel three times in one day. James Russell Lowell agreed with the opinion of an English journalist that Godkin had made the Nation “the best periodical in the world,”
• What disturbed him more bitterly was the “deeper consideration” that the rise of democracy was not proving, after all, “a safeguard of peace and civilization,” because it brought with it “the rise of the uncivilized whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason.” It might have been Lord Salisbury speaking. Norton felt the bitterness of a man who discovers his beloved to be not as beautiful—nor as pure—as he had believed.
• Now he was replaced by McKinley, who, though personally opposed to war with Spain, was unpracticed in the art of living up to his convictions.
• He could not keep the ultimatum to Spain from coming to the floor, and the vote for it in the House of 311 to 6 was a measure of the cyclone. To one of the six Reed said, “I envy you the luxury of your vote. I was where I could not do it.”
• The taste of empire, the rising blood of nationalism expressed in terms of wide-flung dominion, found in Albert Beveridge its most thrilling trumpet. Like Bryan, he possessed that dangerous talent for oratory which can simulate action and even thought.
• fend off a vote on the Hawaii Resolution, but he could not change sentiment. He knew that his own, the majority, party wanted annexation and that the House on the whole was in favor of it. By summoning all his authority he might frustrate the resolution, but if he did, his success would nullify what he had earlier won: the reform which assured that the House really controlled itself, that no tricks of procedure, no arbitrary rules of a Speaker could obstruct the will of the majority. The purpose of the quorum battle had now come to a test, and with tragic irony, against himself. He would have to choose between his hatred of foreign conquest and his duty as Speaker; between, on the one hand, his own deepest beliefs, and on the other, Reed’s Rules.
• There was only one choice he could make. Knowing too well the value of what he had accomplished in the Fifty-first Congress, he bowed to the majority.
• When it came to negotiation of peace terms, all the passion lavished during the past three years on the cause of Cuban liberty, all the Congressional resolutions favoring recognition of an independent Cuban Republic and disclaiming intention to annex it proved a serious obstacle to Senator Lodge’s “necessity.” To take Cuba as the fruit of conquest was impossible, however alluring its strategic and mercantile advantages, but a smaller island, Porto Rico, at least was available.
• Now, through some sorcery of fate, the war had turned into a matter of imposing sovereignty over an unwilling people by right of conquest. America had become the new Spain. In this unhappy moment impressive advice was offered through the combined effort of two men with the same extraordinary sensitivity to history-in-the-making... Rudyard Kipling addressed to the Americans in their perplexity. Take up the White Man’s burden Send forth the best ye breed, Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild, Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.…
• Suddenly, William Jennings Bryan arrived in Washington and to the amazement of his followers urged them to vote for the treaty. As leader of the Democratic party, he fully intended to be the standard-bearer himself in 1900, but he recognized the need of a new standard. Calculating that he could not win on a repetition of the silver issue, he was perfectly prepared to give it up in favor of imperialism, a new crown of thorns. He was sure that retention of the Philippines would be productive of so much trouble as to make a flaming campaign issue—but it must be consummated first. Consequently, he told his party, it would not do to defeat the treaty. This extraordinary reasoning astounded and even shocked those legislators who had thought a principle was involved.
• it said, and pointed out that if, as McKinley had once declared, the forcible annexation of Cuba would be “criminal aggression by our code of morals,” annexation of the Philippines would be no less so. Its text was unanswerable but it offered no judgeships, political futures or other coin that Lodge and Bryan were dealing in.
• William James in a private letter. Publicly, to the Boston Evening Transcript, he wrote, “We are now openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world—the attempt of a people long enslaved” to attain freedom and work out its own destiny. The saddest thing for men such as James was the parting with the American dream. America, Norton wrote, “has lost her unique position as a leader in the progress of civilization, and has taken up her place simply as one of the grasping and selfish nations of the present day.”
• It was too late. Reed’s sluggishness was that of a man for whom the fight has turned sour. Others whose main interest lay in non-political fields could feel as deeply without being shattered. Reed’s whole life was in Congress, in politics, in the exercise of representative government, with the qualification that for him it had to be exercised toward an end that he believed in. His party and his country were now bent on a course for which he felt deep distrust and disgust. To mention expansion to him, said a journalist, was like “touching a match” and brought forth “sulphurous language.” The tide had turned against him; he could not turn it back and would not go with it.
• For him the purpose and savor of life in the political arena had departed. He had discovered mankind’s tragedy: that it can draw the blueprints of goodness but it cannot live up to them.

Interminable indeed:    

• During those “two interminable years” of struggle to secure the retrial of a single individual unjustly convicted, “life was as if suspended,” wrote Léon Blum, a future premier, then in his twenties. It was as if, in those “years of tumult, of veritable civil war … everything converged upon a single question and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships everything was interrupted, turned upside down, reclassified.… The Dreyfus Affair was a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.”
• The Revisionists, who fought for retrial, saw France as the fount of liberty, the country of light, the teacher of reason, the codifier of law, and to them the knowledge that she could have perpetrated a wrong and connived at a miscarriage of justice was insufferable. They fought for Justice. Those on the other side claimed to fight in the name of Patrie for the preservation of the Army as the shield and protector of the nation and of the Church as the guide and instructor of its soul. They assembled under the name of Nationalists and in their ranks sincere men were partners of demagogues and succumbed to methods that were reckless and brutal and terms that were foul, so that the world watched in wonder and scorn and the name of France suffered.
• the Duchessc de Guermantes found it “perfectly intolerable” that all the people one had spent one’s life trying to avoid now had to be accepted just because they boycotted Jewish tradesmen and had “Down with Jews” printed on their parasols.
• The only way to force the evidence onto the record was to provoke a civil trial. This was the purpose of Zola’s open letter addressed to the President of France. He conceived it on the day of Esterhazy’s acquittal with deliberate intent to bring himself to trial. He told no one but his wife and did not hesitate. Locking himself in his study, he worked without stopping for twenty-four hours, mastered the intricacies and mysteries of what by now had become one of the most complex puzzles in history and wrote his indictment in four thousand words. He took it over to l’Aurore on the evening of January 12, and it appeared next morning under the title...: J’ACCUSE!
• leader of Academicians, Anatole France... wrote prose clear as a running brook. He had lived in the home and adorned the salon of his mistress, Mme Arman de Caillavet, since 1889, when, after a final quarrel with his wife, he walked out in dressing gown and slippers, carrying on a tray, quill pen, inkstand and current MS, and proceeded down the street to a hotel, sent for his clothes and never went home.
• one painter, Claude Monet, from sympathy with Clemenceau. The only political action of Monet’s life, his signature caused a quarrel with Degas and they did not speak again for years.