Toga! Toga!

HENRY MORTON ROBINSON

The U. S. Senate is like an old wateringplace that has outlived its vogue:—the best people don't go there any more. Or to put it musically, the Senate is like a blind fifeand-drum corps trying to lead the national parade, without quite realizing that the procession is headed somewhere else. I could fetch you a dozen more similes for the Senate, but they would all be depressing and faded, like the tunes Amy Lowell used to play on her harpsichord. (You know those melancholy airs—reminiscent of the stuffed partridges and mounted mackerel one used to see in the parlors of parochial road-houses.)

Alice Longworth once said that the Senate is something the President consents to, and takes advice about. But to resume: the Senate consists of 96 members, chiefly from Alabama and Idaho. Florida also has a Senator, but then California has one too, so they cancel each other with practically no expense to anyone but consumers of citrus fruit and travel literature. It is also rumored that New York sends representatives to the Upper House, but this is merely a low canard. True, we used to have Senators, but that was long, long ago. I was only a child at the time, but I shall never forget how Jim Wadsworth and dear old Roscoe Conkling used to mail us free envelopes of giant-hibiscus seeds every year. But one year the seeds stopped coming, and for the past decade there has been onlysilence. If perchance there be a Senator from New York, let him know that all will be forgiven if he will send us our arrears of hibiscus seed, and a copy of the Congressional Record in which his speech appeared.

Preposterous as it now seems, the toga of a U. S. Senator was once held in general esteem as a wrap of some distinction. That was before the Senate became a popularly elective mob—before the 17th Amendment pulled the Upper House down to the Lower's level. Prior to 1913 it was possible to find an occasional gentleman and scholar (judiciously selected by a state legislature) occupying a nice seat on the aisle. In those days an elegantly whiskered customer like Henry Cabot Lodge could retain his frozen codfish manner and still be a power in national life. A literary blood like Albert J. Beveridge could, and did, write most of his Life of Lincoln during those classic debates on the Panama Canal—never dreaming of the

glamorous uses to which that same canal would be put by Richard (Hellespont) Halliburton. It was in this august forum that Chauncey Depew immortalized himself as one of the most venerable figures in the history of American anecdotage. It was here that Nelson B. Aldrich (tutor to our own Joe Grundy) rammed through his famous tariff in behalf of the embattled manufacturers, and fired the protective shot heard round the world. Ah, those were the days when a Senator was wrapped in a toga of appointive dignity, and didn't have to scurry around for votes like a Tammany top-sergeant. But democracy, always eager to blast away the last suspicion of elegance and aristocratic repose, has put the Senate on an elective basis—and since that time the old rooms have never looked quite the same.

Sartorially, spiritually, socially, the Senate is a job-lot—a job-lot in which handsome, well-dressed, and humanly engaging specimens are as scarce as advertisements in the New Freeman. Bingham of Connecticut, Harrison of Missouri, Morrow of New Jersey —these are three colourful dabs in a pitifully grey canvas, three twinkling points in a darkbrown senatorial sky. But they are not major luminaries, and even if they were, I doubt if they could light up the thick fog of mediocrity that settles over the Chamber. It would take a whole galaxy of billion-watt stars to do that. It would take the glitter of a Sheridan's Begum Speech to offset the peevish orotundities of a Borah harangue . . . and this particular Senate has no Sheridan. It has no Platt, no Crane, no Root. It has no LaFollette the Elder, and no Wadsworth the Younger. It has only a Simmons (N. C.), a Keyes (N. H.) and a Hatfield (W. Va.). And who ever heard of them or ever will, or ever wants to?

As our senior law-makers sit slumped in their chairs, with their pudgy hands folded pathetically over paunchy vests,—and with a reasonable quantity of dandruff sprinkling their toga-collars—they resemble nothing so much as the small depositors of a defunct savings-bank, who have long ago given up all hope of getting more than three cents on the dollar. Or, from another angle in the press gallery, they remind me of a lot of aggrieved school-boys being kept after hours to recite their lessons. Not bad boys, not lazy boys,— but just a lot of nondescript dunderheaded boys, rather puzzled and terribly bored by the lessons they never will be able to master.

P-sst!—one of them is rising to speak a piece. His name is Simeon—Simeon D. Fess, and he was the acknowledged "teacher's pet" of the Harding administration. Evidently Simeon has spoken the same piece before, because all the brethren who are not already in a state of coma now prepare to curl up their toes for a nice Senatorial nap. But Mr. Fess, who looks like an itinerant parson living off the crumbs of a hardscrabble congregation, speaks on. Ah, he is key-noting, as usual. Given a key-note, Parson Fess can pipe on it by the hour, repetando al fine, until the original note is woven into a smiling fugue of prohibition and prosperity. You wouldn't believe that so much lardy optimism could be squeezed from that bony frame, but under the admiring glances of Ella Boole of the W. C. T. U., the Senator can cook up a mighty savoury mess of red-herring oratory. It is rumored that if he can pick up fifty pounds somehow, he can probably get his name mentioned in connection with the Vice-Presidency in 1932.

That other figure is Sam Shortridge, the second-greatest Senator from California. But why does he look so lugubrious? Well, partly because he wears his clothes like a mortician, but chiefly because he has recently committed a blunder that is inexcusable even in a Senator. Briefly, he threw some patronagebones into the wrong kennel. It seems that Mr. Shortridge asked the President to confer a juicy Federal bone on a dear Republican friend in San Francisco. Now many tongues were watering for this particular bone, and it was important that it be crunched by exactly the right jaws. Of course the President took the Senator's word for it, and the bone was all wrapped up for delivery—when suddenly the Senator's friend turned out to be a resident of Maryland! "Stupid!" hissed the jobdolers, snatching back the marrow-bone; "Agreed" echoed the California voters. And ever since then Mr. Shortridge has appeared to be a little bit disgruntled.

Step up, step up, step up! This way to the Wildman. Ladies and gentlemen, this shaggy creature is Smith Wildman Brookhart (Wildman is actually his middle name) — the mealy-mouthed orator from Ioway. Mr. Brookhart's fame rests on two exploits, both of them dubious. The Senator from Iowa once attended an intimate banquet, gouged heartily into his host's provisions, sniffed the contents of the cheering bowl—and then went out and told! So perhaps it's his conscience that makes him wild. More recently, the wildeyed Senator discovered that real gin cocktails were being served at a prominent New York club. Aghast, he reported the find to his constituents, who in their corn-distilled innocence imagined their Senator had uncovered something. But if the Wildman really wants to get a story that will practically assure his re-election let him discover a prominent New York club where gin cocktails are not being served.

Once every four years the State of Maine emerges from penumbral darkness and shows the nation how the presidential election is going to turn out. Then she sinks back into the shadows of her tall timbers, and we forget our debt of gratitude to this plain little State. But she keeps on sending Senators to Washington just the same, and although no one ever hears of them, they go quietly about their business of representing Maine and incidentally the paper-makers. Right now a plucky chap named Gould is fighting Maine's paper battles in the Senate. His home is in Presque Isle, where the chief use of paper is in the manufacture of paper collars. Until Mr. Gould entered the Chamber he had always thought that collars of paper were quite the caper, but he was painfully disabused of this notion by glancing at the gentlemen from Arizona and Louisiana. One of them was wearing a celluloid collar, and the other was wearing no collar at all. This so confused Senator Gould that he voted for a criminally high tariff on a certain important clay, much prized by manufacturers of glossy-coated papers. Whereupon the Maine pulpmagnates descended upon Mr. Gould with a barrage of invective hot enough to wilt a horse-collar. And even though the Senator from Maine should change at once to linen chokers, he is not a promising prospect for the 1931 elections. . . .

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Now we are reaching the real exhibits. The Senator poring over the books is Reed Smoot (R.) Utah, and the books over which the Senator pores are obscene books, full of traditional pictures and information. The material was old stuff to the Greeks, and is pretty well known to most modern seminary students. But apparently it is all news, tingling, naughty news to the Latter Day Senator. He begged the books from the customs officials in order to pick out the choicer morsels to read to his colleagues. Yes, and they actually woke up to listen.

Who cracks the whip nowadays? Watson from Indiana has the unenviable name of being the Republican leader, but actually he is as much a Republican leader as Arthur Brisbane is a critic of literature. When he was only a Congressman, Mr. Watson used to be a shrewd ringmaster; but his whip handle has lost its cunning, and he can no longer put the Senators through their hoops. He finds that his wheel-horses have been transformed into insurgent geese, forever cackling about their own private goose-eggs.

Well, what are we going to do about it? If we were really sensitive about these matters, and not paralyzed by a philosophy of indifferentism, we would invoke the spirit of Guy Fawkes, that peremptory settler of parliamentary squabbles. We would loan him a nice big barrel of trinitrotoluol; we would lead him down into the Senate cellar and advise him to go through with his original plan. In this way our Senatorial muddle could be cleaned up at a single blast, and the columns of our newspapers could be devoted to constructive news about Marcus Garvey, the latest French Cabinet, and the unbonded Chicago debt.

But for those who dislike violence there is still an alternative. It is pretty well agreed that the country gets along somehow, no matter what the Senate does, or does not do. It is a cheering thought that love, bridge, novel-writing and backgammon go on anyway, even without the advice and consent of the Senate. So why not frankly recognize the situation, and turn it to everyone's advantage? How? Merely by isolating the Upper House on a little island somewhere, preferably in the Bering seal hatcheries, and by letting it convene, probe, debate, rebunk, obfuscate, and snore, until the seals object. The President could then take the net result of the year's activity, place it in a pint flask, and throw it into the ocean.

Or stay—we have already a better idea. Is there a taxidermist in the audience? If there is, won't he please step forward and volunteer to stuff and mount the Senate just as she stands?