ignited so much ire. Little did I suspect that, armed with my newly acquired righteousness from Hampden Scarborough, I could be so aroused by a six-year-old diatribe against a foreign institution; but as Phillips laid out his charges, the more indignant I became.
He had begun with a clarion call to arms: “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterise the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous.” Ingeneral terms, he referred to “the utter rottenness of the leaders of the Senate and the House” and to their “thievish legislation, preventing decent legislation, devising ways and means of making rottenest dishonesty look like patriotism.”
Although such language appeared most vehement, even I was a sophisticated enough observer of the political stage to know that politicians allow their critics a voice as long as that voice does not become too personal. For their part, members of the press generally honour such a relationship in order to keep on a safe footing with representatives of the government who can furnish them with interesting stories and pregnant titbits of information. Phillips, therefore, must have surprised many a prominent figure with his complaints that the moneyed trusts had purchased control of the United States Senate and that the easily bought state legislatures should be replaced by the voting public as determiners of who should represent the people in that august body.
Since accusations of such a general nature are always being made by the discontented, I was greatly shocked at Phillips’s personal attacks on specific members of the government. He called Senator Chauncey Depew of New York “the sly courtier-agent, with the greasy conscience and the greasy tongue and the greasy backbone and the greasy hinges of the knees.” He described Millard Pankhurst Buchanan, the other New York senator, as an “in-law of the upper class whose marriage licence seemed instead a hunting permit that offered up the American people for sport.” He said that Maryland’s Arthur Pue Gorman had “absorbed and assimilated all the mysteries of the Senate—all its crafty, treacherous ways of smothering, of emasculating, of perverting legislation,” while to Philander Chase Knox of Pennsylvania, Phillips wrote,“America has meant, not the American people, but the men who exploit the labour and the capital of the American people of all classes, even of their own small class of the colossally rich.” More than twenty senators received such treatment from Phillips. It was heady stuff, I thought, but was it grounds for murder?
As Phillips’s writings had made eventful an otherwise uneventful voyage (if one’s maiden journey to America can ever truly be regarded as uneventful), it seemed appropriate that I had imbued myself with Phillips’s honest yet almost naive American voice; for when at last on that sunny afternoon I first saw the Statue of Liberty holding high her torch, I viewed that lamp as symbolising not only political freedom, but also the artistic freedom that had enabled this literary provocateur to criticise his own government. Indeed, that last day at sea, it was as if I were reading The Treason of the Senate not by sunlight at all but rather by the illuminating flame of that monument to freedom.
Soon, amid a great clatter of bells and sirens, the Majesty entered the Port of New York, released her families of immigrants to the customs authorities of Ellis Island, and with the help of a fleet of tugboats was pushed, cajoled, prodded, and coaxed up the Hudson River to berth just opposite, as my map revealed, the centre of Manhattan.
All large seaports, I should imagine, have much in common: the bustle of individuals on their own specific missions that, when taken in the aggregate, seem but a baffling hurly-burly: stevedores
He had begun with a clarion call to arms: “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterise the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous.” Ingeneral terms, he referred to “the utter rottenness of the leaders of the Senate and the House” and to their “thievish legislation, preventing decent legislation, devising ways and means of making rottenest dishonesty look like patriotism.”
Although such language appeared most vehement, even I was a sophisticated enough observer of the political stage to know that politicians allow their critics a voice as long as that voice does not become too personal. For their part, members of the press generally honour such a relationship in order to keep on a safe footing with representatives of the government who can furnish them with interesting stories and pregnant titbits of information. Phillips, therefore, must have surprised many a prominent figure with his complaints that the moneyed trusts had purchased control of the United States Senate and that the easily bought state legislatures should be replaced by the voting public as determiners of who should represent the people in that august body.
Since accusations of such a general nature are always being made by the discontented, I was greatly shocked at Phillips’s personal attacks on specific members of the government. He called Senator Chauncey Depew of New York “the sly courtier-agent, with the greasy conscience and the greasy tongue and the greasy backbone and the greasy hinges of the knees.” He described Millard Pankhurst Buchanan, the other New York senator, as an “in-law of the upper class whose marriage licence seemed instead a hunting permit that offered up the American people for sport.” He said that Maryland’s Arthur Pue Gorman had “absorbed and assimilated all the mysteries of the Senate—all its crafty, treacherous ways of smothering, of emasculating, of perverting legislation,” while to Philander Chase Knox of Pennsylvania, Phillips wrote,“America has meant, not the American people, but the men who exploit the labour and the capital of the American people of all classes, even of their own small class of the colossally rich.” More than twenty senators received such treatment from Phillips. It was heady stuff, I thought, but was it grounds for murder?
As Phillips’s writings had made eventful an otherwise uneventful voyage (if one’s maiden journey to America can ever truly be regarded as uneventful), it seemed appropriate that I had imbued myself with Phillips’s honest yet almost naive American voice; for when at last on that sunny afternoon I first saw the Statue of Liberty holding high her torch, I viewed that lamp as symbolising not only political freedom, but also the artistic freedom that had enabled this literary provocateur to criticise his own government. Indeed, that last day at sea, it was as if I were reading The Treason of the Senate not by sunlight at all but rather by the illuminating flame of that monument to freedom.
Soon, amid a great clatter of bells and sirens, the Majesty entered the Port of New York, released her families of immigrants to the customs authorities of Ellis Island, and with the help of a fleet of tugboats was pushed, cajoled, prodded, and coaxed up the Hudson River to berth just opposite, as my map revealed, the centre of Manhattan.
All large seaports, I should imagine, have much in common: the bustle of individuals on their own specific missions that, when taken in the aggregate, seem but a baffling hurly-burly: stevedores
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