Willie wised up.
They thought they had him tricked. Bilked. Bamboozled. They thought they could use him, the way you’d use an old rag to swab out the slops bucket after you finish with the pigs, and they thought he’d never find out.
He found out. And in a pivotal scene in Robert Penn Warren’s lush, lively novel of cornpone politics and soul-crimping corruption, “All the King’s Men” (1946), Willie Stark turns that moment of personal epiphany into a speech that could singe the creosote off a fence post:
“Friends, red-necks, suckers and fellow hicks. . . . Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we’re for. To fool. Well, this time I’m going to fool somebody.”
When Sean Penn, who plays Stark in the riveting new movie based on Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, delivers that speech, you feel the force of his outrage and umbrage push through you like an electrical current forking across a power line. After that, Willie’s on his way: straight to the governor’s mansion and then — well, who knows? Maybe the White House.
Book and film offer a vivid, stinging yet simplistic portrait of American politics, of how a wild-haired, squinty-eyed demagogue can twist people’s hopes and dreams to his own dark uses. Stark says, in effect: “Vote for me because I’m just like you, right down to the sweat on my neck and the calluses on my palms. Vote for me, and I’ll give you what you need.”
Warren’s story works as art. But does it hold water as political science? Would a real-life Stark — a candidate whose gritty, visceral appeal comes from voters’ identification with him — get elected?
Nope, argues a recent book by Thomas Frank. In “What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” (2004), he declares that voters actually don’t vote for candidates who resemble themselves — that, in fact, they vote for candidates who deliver the exact opposite of voters’ needs. The author calls that disconnect “the preeminent question of our time.”
Conservative Republicans have been successful at the ballot box — currently they control the presidency and both houses of Congress — because, Frank says, they understand, far better than do liberal Democrats, that people don’t go for the Willie Starks of this world — at least beyond the local level. Voters are “getting their fundamental interests wrong,” Frank adds, a fact that is “the foundation of on which all else rests.”
Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush hardly resembled the mass of humanity. They were — they are, in Bush’s case — much richer, a lot smarter, definitely handsomer and infinitely better-connected than the rest of us. Yet each has been elected president.
Does a real-life political truth — the fact that voters generally don’t end up pulling the lever for a reflection of themselves — lessen the achievement of “All the King’s Men”? Can a novel be a work of art — and still get its field all wrong?
Yes, say several political scientists, for a couple of reasons: We don’t have many top-flight novels about American politics, thus Warren’s tale, flawed as it may be about electoral realities, still is better than most. Moreover, “All the King’s Men” elucidates truths about life that go beyond the political arena — truths that trump whatever inaccuracies it contains about actual voters and the candidates who woo them.
“Politicians like Willie Stark really don’t travel well,” notes Ryan Barilleaux, a political science professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who teaches courses on the political novel and the American presidency. “They may work on a regional level, but in other places, they don’t.”
He agreed that voters don’t necessarily cotton to candidates who look like themselves: “They vote for people who are better looking.”
Not so ordinary
Even presidents regarded as homely, plainspoken “men of the people” — Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman and even Huey Long, the Louisiana politician widely believed to the model for Stark in “All the King’s Men” — weren’t so ordinary after all, Barilleaux says. “Lincoln was incredibly well-spoken, which set him apart from his neighbors. What came out of his mouth was amazing. And Truman was not a `common man.’ When he served in World War I, he was elected captain” of his regiment, Barilleaux adds.
Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University professor who wrote a book on Long, believes that voters don’t want a mirror of themselves in public office. “I think, in general, that voters do want to support leaders who they think are more capable than they are — and as a result can be deluded by things that suggest wisdom and competence — family name, appearance, eloquence, etc.” he writes in an e-mail.
“The real Huey Long — if not, perhaps, Willie Stark — never thought that the way to win support was to seem to be one of the people,” adds Brinkley, now Columbia’s provost. “He always tried to appear better than them — smarter, better dressed, wealthier, but still committed to their interests.”
Concurs Barilleaux, “Willie Stark said, `I’m a hick.’ But he was a hick who made good.”
Joseph H. Lane, author of an article about the political realities of “All the King’s Men” published in 2001 in the American Political Science Review, points out that Long, a bombastic and histrionic governor, U.S. senator and probable presidential candidate before his assassination in 1935, actually had little national success. “In the Senate, his kind of rhetoric wasn’t as effective as it was at the state level. A lot of factors in the present age might mitigate against that success.”
Indeed, voters often aren’t receptive to real-life Starks, Lane acknowledges. They don’t vote for the man or woman who looks like themselves, who sees the world the way they do. Yet there’s a deeper truth unloosed in the novel, he says — a truth based on the very gap between Stark’s populist ambitions and the rigid realities of politics.
“It gets at a fundamental tension in democracies — and not just American democracies: How do you make the rule of the people effective in societies where elites enjoy so many advantages?” ponders Lane, political science professor at Emory and Henry College in Emory, Va. “Reflecting on this conflict is something we’ll always have to do as a democracy.”
Barilleaux, too, believes the value of “All the King’s Men” lies in what it has to say about the world beyond politics. The action in Stark’s campaigns, while colorful, is less significant than the conflicted vigor of Jack Burden’s ruminations. Burden, the novel’s brainy, restless narrator (expertly played by Jude Law in the new film), works for Stark but hates himself for doing so. Burden is a man of thought; Stark, a man of action. Action prevails.
Still, When it comes to American political novels, “All the King’s Men” is about as good as it gets, many say. “In this country, we don’t have a lot of great political novels,” Barilleaux says. “The people who have been deep in politics don’t write novels, and the writers are divorced from politics. They’re generally thrillers.” In Europe and other parts of the world, by contrast, many of the finest writers — France’s Andre Malraux, Latin America’s Carlos Fuentes — have turned out extraordinary political novels, he notes.
Reflecting reality?
Adds Lane, “In America, the novels people point to as political are pretty facile. They aren’t deep readings of political realities.”
And so we forgive “All the King’s Men” its shortcomings. We look past the fact that a real-life Stark probably wouldn’t make it past a county commissioner’s office. Because the novel is not a political handbook. Karl Rove would have absolutely no use for it.
Instead, it is a fiery, eloquent record of a soul’s reckoning — Burden’s, not Stark’s. That soul writhes and seethes and suffers and finally comes to terms with its own blackened and compromised condition, with what that unrepentant rascal Stark calls “God’s blessed and unflyblown truth”: We all want what we want, and sometimes getting it can be worse than doing without.
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jikeller@tribune.com
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`All the King’s Men’ isn’t the last word in political fiction
“The Last Hurrah” (1956) by Edwin O’Connor. An old-fashioned politico makes his last run for the Boston mayor’s office.
“Advise and Consent” (1959) by Allen Drury. A nominee for Secretary of State is deemed too liberal, setting off fireworks in the Senate confirmation process.
“Lincoln” (1984) by Gore Vidal. What really made the nation’s most beloved political leader tick — and how did he amass and retain political power?
“The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert” (1998) by Ward Just. Canny, elegantly written stories about the nuances and compromises of political power.
“Primary Colors” (1998) by Anonymous (Joe Klein). The inside story of a candidate who sounds a lot like Bill Clinton. Owes a large debt to “All the King’s Men.”
