The Mirrors of Washington | Page 7

of the past, his average hopes
and fears and practicality, his standardized Americanism which would
enable a people who wanted for a season to do so to take themselves
politically for granted.
The country was tired of the high thinking and rather plain spiritual
living of Woodrow Wilson. It desired the man in the White House to
cause it no more moral overstrain than does the man you meet in the
Pullman smoking compartment or the man who writes the captions for
the movies who employs a sort of Inaugural style, freed from the
inhibitions of statesmanship. It was in a mood similar to that of Mr.
Harding himself when after his election he took Senators
Freylinghuysen, Hale, and Elkins with him on his trip to Texas. Senator
Knox observing his choice is reported to have said, "I think he is taking
those three along because he wanted complete mental relaxation." All
his life Mr. Harding has shown a predilection for companions who give
him complete mental relaxation, though duty compels him to associate
with the Hughes and the Hoovers. The conflict between duty and
complete mental relaxation establishes a strong bond of sympathy
between him and the average American.
The "why" of Harding is the democratic passion for equality. We are
standardized, turned out like Fords by the hundred million, and we
cannot endure for long anyone who is not standardized. Such an one
casts reflections upon us; why should we by our votes unnecessarily
asperse ourselves? Occasionally we may indulge nationally, as men do
individually, in the romantic belief that we are somebody else, that we
are like Roosevelt or Wilson--and they become typical of what we

would be--but always we come back to the knowledge that we are
nationally like Harding, who is typical of what we are. "Just folks"
Kuppenheimered, movieized, associated pressed folks.
Men debate whether or not Mr. Wilson was a great man and they will
keep on doing so until the last of those passes away whose judgment of
him is clouded by the sense of his personality. But men will never
debate about the greatness of Mr. Harding, not even Mr. Harding
himself. He is modest. He has only two vanities, his vanity about his
personal appearance and his vanity about his literary style.
The inhibitions of a presidential candidate, bound to speak and say
nothing, irked him.
"Of course I could make better speeches than these" he told a friend
during the campaign, "but I have to be so careful."
In his inaugural address he let himself go, as much as it is possible for a
man so cautious as he is to let himself go. It was a great speech, an
inaugural to place alongside the inaugurals of Lincoln and Washington,
written in his most capable English, Harding at his best. It is hard for a
man to move Marion for years with big editorials, to receive the daily
compliments of Dick Cressinger and Jim Prendergast, without
becoming vain of the power of his pen. It is his chief vanity and it is
one that it is hard for him who speaks or writes to escape. He has none
of that egotism which makes a self-confident man think himself the
favorite of fortune.
He said after his nomination at Chicago, "We drew to a pair of deuces
and filled." He did not say it boastfully as a man who likes to draw to a
pair of deuces and who always expects to fill. He said it with surprise
and relief. He does not like to hold a pair of deuces and be forced to
draw to them. He has not a large way of regarding losing and winning
as all a part of the game. He hates to lose. He hated to lose even a
friendly game of billiards in the Marion Club with his old friend
Colonel Christian, father of his secretary, though the stake was only a
cigar.
When he was urged to seek the Republican nomination for the
Presidency he is reported to have said, "Why should I. My chances of
winning are not good. If I let you use my name I shall probably in the
end lose the nomination for the Senate. (His term was expiring.) If I
don't run for the Presidency I can stay in the Senate all my life. I like

the Senate. It is a very pleasant place."
The Senate is like Marion, Ohio, a very pleasant place, for a certain
temperament. And Mr. Harding stayed in Marion all his life until
force--a vis exterior; there is nothing inside Mr. Harding that urges him
on and on--until force of circumstances, of politics, of other men's
ambitions, took him out of Marion and set him down in Washington, in
the Senate.
The process of