The Mirrors of Washington | Page 8

uprooting him from the pleasant place of Marion is
reported to have been thus described by his political transplanter, the
present Attorney General, Mr. Daugherty: "When it came to running
for the Senate I found him, sunning himself in Florida, like a turtle on a
log and I had to push him into the water and make him swim."
And a similar thing happened when it came to running for the
Presidency. It is a definite type of man who suns himself on a log, who
is seduced by pleasant places like Marion, Ohio, whom the big town
does not draw into its magnetic field, whose heart is not excited by the
larger chances of life. Is he lazy? Is he lacking in imagination? Does he
hate to lose? Does he want self-confidence? Is he over modest? Has he
no love for life, life as a great adventure? Whatever he is, Mr. Harding
is that kind of man, that kind of man to start out with.
But this is only the point of departure, that choice to remain in a
pleasant place like Marion, not to risk what you have, your sure place
in society as the son of one of the better families, the reasonable
prospect that the growth of your small town will bring some accretion
to your own fortunes, the decision not to hazard greatly in New York or
Chicago or on the frontier. Life asks little of you in those pleasant
places like Marion and in return for that little gives generously,
especially if you are, to begin with, well placed, if you are
ingratiatingly handsome, if your personality is agreeable--"The best
fellow in the world to play poker with all Saturday night," as a
Marionite feelingly described the President to me, and if you have a
gift of words as handsome and abundant as your looks.
Mr. Harding is a handsome man, endowed with the gifts that reinforce
the charm of his exterior, a fine voice, a winning smile, a fluency of
which his inaugural is the best instance; an ample man, you might say.
But he is too handsome, too endowed, for his own good, his own
spiritual good. The slight stoop of his shoulders, the soft figure, the

heaviness under the eyes betray in some measure perhaps the
consequences of nature's excessive generosity. Given all these things
you take, it may be, too much for granted. There is not much to stiffen
the mental, moral, and physical fibers.
Given such good looks, such favor from nature, and an environment in
which the struggle is not sharp and existence is a species of mildly
purposeful flanerie. You lounge a bit stoop-shoulderedly forward to
success. There is nothing hard about the President. I once described
him in somewhat this fashion to a banker in New York who was
interested in knowing what kind of a President we had.
"You agree," he said, "with a friend of Harding's who came in to see
me a few days ago. This friend said to me 'Warren is the best fellow in
the world. He has wonderful tact. He knows how to make men work
with him and how to get the best out of them. He is politically adroit.
He is conscientious. He has a keen sense of his responsibilities. He has
unusual common sense.' And he named other similar virtues, 'Well,' I
asked him, 'What is his defect?' 'Oh,' he replied, 'the only trouble with
Warren is that he lacks mentality.'"
The story, like most stories, exaggerates. The President has the average
man's virtues of common sense and conscientiousness with rather more
than the average man's political skill and the average man's industry or
lack of industry. His mentality is not lacking; it is undisciplined,
especially in its higher ranges, by hard effort. There is a certain softness
about him mentally. It is not an accident that his favorite companions
are the least intellectual members of that house of average intelligence,
the Senate. They remind him of the mental surroundings of Marion, the
pleasant but unstimulating mental atmosphere of the Marion Club, with
its successful small town business men, its local storekeepers, its
banker whose mental horizon is bounded by Marion County, the value
of whose farm lands for mortgages he knows to a penny, the lumber
dealer whose eye rests on the forests of Kentucky and West Virginia.
The President has never felt the sharpening of competition. He was a
local pundit because he was the editor. He was the editor because he
owned the Republican paper of Marion. There was no effective rival.
No strong intelligence challenged his and made him fight for his place.
He never studied hard or thought deeply on public questions. A man
who stays where he is put by birth tends