Senate.
“Younger and more vigorous, my God!” his junior colleague, H. Harper Graham, comments to his fellow Senator. “Could anybody be more vigorous than Seab?” But Harper Graham knows the talk, too, and Seab Cooley has good reason to believe that among those who would not be at all averse to seeing him defeated is Harper Graham himself, melancholy, dark-visaged, filled with ambition and temper almost as great as his own, burning like a dark flame in the Senate. He would not put it past Harper at all to actively seek his political downfall, Seab concludes, and the thought brings an ominous scowl to his face for a moment as he sees his colleague entering at the back of the big brown chamber. Then the look passes almost as it comes and is replaced by the sleepy, self-satisfied expression his fellow Senators know all too well. “What’s that old scallywag cooking up now?” Powell Hanson of North Dakota murmurs to Blair Sykes of Texas as they enter the Senate together, and they speculate for an idle and amused moment that he is probably dreaming up some way to get Harper Graham: so well-known to the Senate is the nature of the bond that unites the senior and junior Senators from South Carolina.
Actually, as is so often the case with Seab, the somnolent look conceals a mind at work on much more far-ranging matters than merely how to remove the threat of a bothersome colleague. “Getting Harper” is part of it, but his entire political problem is what engages him now, and the self-satisfied expression is really due to one of those flashes of intuition—or inspiration—“or hashish, or whatever it is,” as Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts once put it—which occasionally show the senior Senator from South Carolina how to work his way out of difficult situations.
It is not even, in this case, anything particularly specific, nor is it associated with the man on whom his eye happens to fall just now; it is just that Seab is reminded that on one issue, at least, neither Harper Graham nor any other successful politician in South Carolina can afford to take a position different from his. The man he sees is Cullee Hamilton, the young colored Congressman from California, but the thought Cullee immediately inspires in the mind of Seab Cooley is not one that directly concerns him; it is simply a generalized reaction, prompted by his presence, going back into the bitter past of a troubled region, stirred by emotions as new as tomorrow’s headlines, as old as the tears of time. It is not an especially original thought, but in a political sense it works; and contrary to much violently expressed northern opinion, which conveniently forgets such areas as Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem, it does not work simply because politicians both white and black make use of it for their own selfish purposes. It works because the overwhelming majority of his fellow southerners, like Seab himself, are absolutely convinced of it by birth, by tradition, and by belief. This poses many deeply tragic problems, but the Senator and his fellow citizens can no more change on that particular subject than they could fly, unassisted, to the stars.
By the same token, neither can Cullee Hamilton, as he stands at the center door of the Senate chamber looking about for California’s junior Senator, the dashing and slightly over dapper Raymond Robert Smith. There is a bill involving a proposed water viaduct in the San Fernando Valley which is on the Senate calendar awaiting action, and Cullee, aware that this is important to a number of constituents in his sprawling district just north of Los Angeles, wants Ray Smith’s help in persuading Bob Munson to pass it through the Senate by unanimous consent in what everybody believes to be these closing hours of the Congressional session.
Cullee already has the Speaker’s promise to pass it through the House tomorrow—the Speaker has always been fond of him, personally as well as politically, and Cullee has
“Younger and more vigorous, my God!” his junior colleague, H. Harper Graham, comments to his fellow Senator. “Could anybody be more vigorous than Seab?” But Harper Graham knows the talk, too, and Seab Cooley has good reason to believe that among those who would not be at all averse to seeing him defeated is Harper Graham himself, melancholy, dark-visaged, filled with ambition and temper almost as great as his own, burning like a dark flame in the Senate. He would not put it past Harper at all to actively seek his political downfall, Seab concludes, and the thought brings an ominous scowl to his face for a moment as he sees his colleague entering at the back of the big brown chamber. Then the look passes almost as it comes and is replaced by the sleepy, self-satisfied expression his fellow Senators know all too well. “What’s that old scallywag cooking up now?” Powell Hanson of North Dakota murmurs to Blair Sykes of Texas as they enter the Senate together, and they speculate for an idle and amused moment that he is probably dreaming up some way to get Harper Graham: so well-known to the Senate is the nature of the bond that unites the senior and junior Senators from South Carolina.
Actually, as is so often the case with Seab, the somnolent look conceals a mind at work on much more far-ranging matters than merely how to remove the threat of a bothersome colleague. “Getting Harper” is part of it, but his entire political problem is what engages him now, and the self-satisfied expression is really due to one of those flashes of intuition—or inspiration—“or hashish, or whatever it is,” as Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts once put it—which occasionally show the senior Senator from South Carolina how to work his way out of difficult situations.
It is not even, in this case, anything particularly specific, nor is it associated with the man on whom his eye happens to fall just now; it is just that Seab is reminded that on one issue, at least, neither Harper Graham nor any other successful politician in South Carolina can afford to take a position different from his. The man he sees is Cullee Hamilton, the young colored Congressman from California, but the thought Cullee immediately inspires in the mind of Seab Cooley is not one that directly concerns him; it is simply a generalized reaction, prompted by his presence, going back into the bitter past of a troubled region, stirred by emotions as new as tomorrow’s headlines, as old as the tears of time. It is not an especially original thought, but in a political sense it works; and contrary to much violently expressed northern opinion, which conveniently forgets such areas as Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem, it does not work simply because politicians both white and black make use of it for their own selfish purposes. It works because the overwhelming majority of his fellow southerners, like Seab himself, are absolutely convinced of it by birth, by tradition, and by belief. This poses many deeply tragic problems, but the Senator and his fellow citizens can no more change on that particular subject than they could fly, unassisted, to the stars.
By the same token, neither can Cullee Hamilton, as he stands at the center door of the Senate chamber looking about for California’s junior Senator, the dashing and slightly over dapper Raymond Robert Smith. There is a bill involving a proposed water viaduct in the San Fernando Valley which is on the Senate calendar awaiting action, and Cullee, aware that this is important to a number of constituents in his sprawling district just north of Los Angeles, wants Ray Smith’s help in persuading Bob Munson to pass it through the Senate by unanimous consent in what everybody believes to be these closing hours of the Congressional session.
Cullee already has the Speaker’s promise to pass it through the House tomorrow—the Speaker has always been fond of him, personally as well as politically, and Cullee has
Similar Books
