From the incomplete yet arduously compiled list supplied me by the library of Congress I gather that the number of literary products sired by the Republic's Congressional statesmen in their first 148 years run deep into the hundreds, not including the works of Mrs. Frances Parkinson Keyes. There have, of course, been brilliant congressmen like John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and John Sherman, for instance, who have left works of enduring interest, but on the whole it is a dismal collection, appalling to the potential reader who merely thinks of fighting his way through it.

The ante-bellum statesmen left turgid, many-volumed collections of their oratory for posterity as difficult for said posterity to read as fruit cake is to eat on a heaving tropical sea on the Fourth of July. The Honorable Caleb Cushing, who ancestored a thin line of scholars in politics with puritanical laments for the excesses of the French Revolution, hardly bettered the Congressional reputation for urbanity in writing or suavity in outlook. The late Senator Albert J. Beveridge finally proved in his retirement that it was possible for the scholar in politics to produce humanly readable literature. But even so erutdite a statesman as Henry Cabot Lodge willfully excluded his faintly human waspishness from his historical writing, preserving only the dullness of the Harvard faculty in the 1870s. The grinders-out of "personal and political recollections" who swarmed toward the turn of the century are, if possible, in an even worse case for stodginess. Most of them bent even their most intimate revelations to accord with the thesis that a statesman never deserted his pomposity or the hand-in-the-frock-coat-bosom pose even in the most compromising of back-room or boudoir conferences. At their sprightliest these raconteurs of the Hayes and Arthur administrations essay a heavy-handed touch with Pat and Mike stories. Below the level of orators, scholars, and autobiographers runs a thin trickle of books on problems of the day by journalistically inclined congressman, written for the most part in the tradition of third rate editorial writers in a hurry.

Perhaps the list is not complete—though the Congressional Library omits to mention it—without reference to the fact that Mr. William Randolph Hearst once served a term in Congress. If his contributions to the progress of literature are thrown into the balance the Congressional grand total in authorship can be made to look somewhat like a Hunnish invasion of the kingdom of letters.

Under the circumstances when a congressman writes a book in which humor, horse sense, and a colloquial vocabulary are substituted for pomposity and pondedrosity it is simply another sign that another solemn American tradition has been ravished and desecrated by these wild young New Dealers. Yet the Honorable Maury Maverick [footnote: A MAVERICK AMERICAN. By Maury Maverick. New York: Covici-Friede. 1937. $3.] of San Antonio has done just that. The whalebone of pedantry, the bloat of oratorical gasses, the poison meat taints of political self-righteousness, simply are not in him.

On the contrary, the gentleman from Texas handles civilized ideas—spectacularly civilized for a congressman—with mirth, gusto, and, on almost every page, with near-Homeric laughter at his profession and himself. The only specimen of Congressional literature which approaches it for entertainment value is Davy Crockett's autobiography, which, however, did not deal particularly with civilized ideas or with Congress, and which Davy, being far on the illiterate side, did not write. Mr. Maverick wrote this, indubitably. Expert as they are in sounding the Joe Robinson tympani and the White House kettle drums, none of the Washington herd of ghostwriters could imitate the Maverick flow of talk.

All of this has nothing to do with the fact that the gentleman from Texas skips from autobiographical piquancies to public activities with the floating power and perfect knee action of the daring young man on the flying trapeze. To be sure, authentic Washington gossip has it that Mr. Maverick has never heard of William Saroyan. If so, the kinship in the two acrobatic performances merely proves how much stimulus there is in the Time Spirit.

Take ancestors, for instance. Mr. Maverick writes of his—distinguished and scandalous, bond and free—more than copiously. But writing of them with a studied irreverence inconceivable in any previous Southern congressman he makes them serve, like a genial piccolo prelude, to introduce discussions of sociology, economics, public morals, soil conservation, real estate rackets, and the imbecilities of the old Southern cult of magnolias and old massas.

In spite of having given their name to all the stray cows and unhousebroken cattle in the universe, the Mavericks, the gentleman from Texas informs us, were not even cattlemen. "I hereby declare to all men by these presents," he insists,

. . . . that nobody in my family ever yelled yipee! whoopee! or sang a cowboy song. . . . The Mavericks were land speculators . . . The old land-owning families [of the South] are similar to the old bond-holding families of New England who got their start buying depreciated American bonds from the American soldiers. Some of the bond purchasers were very worthy Tories who hid out during the revolution.

All this by easy stages leads up to a refreshingly un-Southern philosophy of ancestors. Any family's ancestors, the gentleman from Texas insists, are the story of early America. "Sometimes our ancestors exploited others, and sometimes they got exploited. But whatever they were, they were just like us—they sang and prayed and got drunk and wept and went broke, just like us."

A little later the attack on ancestor worship develops even more cogency. "It is disgusting," Mr. Maverick jibes,

to see certain people consider themselves better by blood today whose only superiority is economic; and to hear these self-made upper-crusters indulge in a lot of sin-talk about others who have less in money.

Sin! Those who commit social derelictions today are merely like some of our unfortunate ancestors of yesterday. . . . Lack of opportunity is the sin-breeder, whether in the poverty of the city slums or the poverty of the eroded hillsides.

Mr. Maverick also writes, with a more or less unprecedented degree of realism for a congressman, of his war experiences. It seems that he won a minor medal or two in the Argonne for a few of the more routine forms of distinguished conduct. But from the statesman's account you get a feeling that becoming a hero is less a matter of conscious purpose and self mastery in No Man's Land than of escaping alive from a cosmic explosion due to the happy psychological accident of having been able to cultivate at the right moment the nonchalant morale of a delirium tremens sufferer.

Here again the gentleman from Texas confronts us with new notes in Congressional authorship. Even the mildest of military records automatically converted the old-fashioned, standard-guage congressman into a life-long flag waver. Martial exploits, however, merely stimulate Captain Maverick to some of the most virile debunking of the war psychosis that has yet been shouted from the pacifist trenches. And incidentally inspire an interestingly sage conslusion concerning the psychology of veterans:

The soldier does not consider himself a part of a great historical movement any more than the Arkansas share cropper thinks of himself as part of a great economic problem. . . . The ex-soldier . . . lives in an economic system that will not use him and he faces futility and a blank life. Hence he is forced to think of the big game of life in terms of his wounds, his pensions.

What the Captain obviously regards as a much more adventurous chapter occurred when he voluntarily, as a means toward finding out what human rights might be about in a power age, went exploring into the hobo jungles of the deepest Hoover depression and subsequently founded a coöperative camp in San Antonio for the relief of starving transients.

The camp worked idyllically until some of the inmates began getting jobs on RFC and army projects. Then:

Castes began to form. . . . One man worked thirty hours in a week and got a dollar an hour. He had been the meekest, most respectable and hard working man in the colony. He drew his thirty dollars . . . arrived on the scene tight as a drum, . . . beat his wife, turned capitalist and left. Tony, an ex-sailor, made twelve dollars and forty cents, . . . began dressing up, . . . ran off with somebody's wife and three children, as ambitious a financier as I ever knew. . . .

The penny caste was composed of those who had less than a dollar and they were the advanced thinkers. Those who had over a dollar but under five dollars were the liberal Democrats . . . a little worried about radicalism. Those having over five dollars were the Tories and reactionaries and looked on the others . . . as a proletarian mob.

But the retired militarist saves his heavy artillery for the American tradition's more imposing stuff-shirteries. He writes of the current cult of Supreme Court worship, for instance, with a rambunctious impishness which the American people possibly need more in the late 1930s than a good nickel cigar, a revival of religion, or a perfect economic plan.




Consider the Maverick paraphrase of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes's rendition of his opinion in the Washington State Minimum Wage Law:

What he [the C. J.] said was not so bad in sentiment, but it was a speech pure and simple. He would pause now and then, gain the attention of his audience, and then come to a resounding conclusion. The speech was . . . an arsenal of prejudices slapped together to lend the impression that Pity descends from the Bench-on-High all the way down to the poor and downtrodden of the land.

He spoke of "the health, safety, morals and welfare of the people" in fervent tones. Then he pointed out that the Court had found there was a depression and people were out of work. He then got to comlimenting the women again and said they were a great sex; and that they should be protected from the "unscrupulous."

He gave the impression that he had sat up all night for many months in order to declare these startling and revolutionary facts, and that it took a man of great learning to say them. . . . He exuded liberality and progressiveness, which he exudes now and then.

But for that matter the statesman writes with similarly irreverent persiflage of the intellectual peccadilloes of his best friends. There is a pleasantly jocose passage, for instance, relating how Rex Tugwell stood on a sand hill in the desert outside Monterey, Mexico, practising his soon-to-be-famous Los Angeles speech on the gentleman from Texas:

"The workers and farmers," Tugwell orated to Maverick, "combining their genius, . . . shall form a nodule."

I blew up completely.

I said: "Rex, I am sore and insulted and do not want to hear any more."

"Why?" he asked.

"What in God's name is a nodule?" I said.

"A nodule is—" began Rex.

"Stop! Stop," I shouted. "Don't tell me. Whenever you use a word that I don't understand, it makes me mad. I am an American! The word nodule is not understood by the American people nor is it understood by me, which makes it worse. . . . Besides," I continued, "it sounds like sex perversion."

Then there is a chapter, roughly speaking, in defense of the technique of demagoguery, in which Mr. Maverick describes disposing of an election rival who charged him with living in a brick house, by publicly nominating the traducer, among insults, for president of the San Antonio Country Club. "All this is undignified and quite demagogic," the statesman admits, but readers of fair political sophistication in their delight with the Maverick brand of demagoguery can imagine the very Comanches whooping at it.

Along with all this exuberance and candor, the gentleman from Texas performs another notable service to his republic—namely the deflation of Congressional ponderosity. When he has solid conclusions to offer on national problems, he omits all "speechifying" verbiage, and does the job in neat idented paragraphs, rarely more than fifty words long and often less than twenty.

I give you two to show what, in a civilization ruled by candid congressmen, Southern statesmen might rise to:

The houses that I and others built (during a brief contractor phase) were a disgrace to this country. That is the reason the government should subsidize housing. Human beings should not have to live in the rotten habitations handed to them by speculators. . . .

The Negro must be recognized in labor. This can be stated selfishly, for if the Negro is not given economic justice, the white man must go lower and lower too.

No reviewer can guess from this work how Mr. Maverick will rank with the Pulitzer Prize pickers or the 1940 National Conventions, but of one thing I feel reasonably certain: If they are giving out Congressional Medals of Honor this year for the pursuit of the realities and nude grotesqueries of politics above and beyond the calls of decorum and expediency, the gentleman from Texas gets the one with the diamond custard-pie center.

In all this medley of persiflage and pugilistic violence, needless to say, Congressman Maverick's New Deal philosophy is implicit rather than explicit. He wastes no words either in annihilating troglodyte enemies or in defending theses which already have become the bromides of the economics of the late 1930s. You can take your New Deal ideology, the gentleman from Texas lets both friendly and hostile readers assume from his contexts, or you can leave it. There is no effort to win over the irreconcilables by education or argument. If you don't like the Maverick conclusions on tenant farmers or the W.P.A. beneficiaries' will-to-work, all the insinuations run, why aren't you reading Mark Sullivan?

There still remains, of course, the mystery of how a proud and iconoclastic spirit like this could, not so much hail from the late Confederate Bible Belt, but continue to be elected to Congress from the same state which is responsible for that paragon of Bible Belt Galahads, Prohibition's author, Senator Morris Sheppard. But the explanation of this is also contained in the Texas gentleman's insinuations. Now and then Mr. Maverick refers coyly to his emotional affinities with San Antonio's Mexican-American citizens. Once, for example, he relates how as a member of a Texas Chamber of Commerce "good will" expedition to Mexico, he approached a casual citizen on the streets of a Latin metropolis and demanded to be informed.

"Who are the greatest people on earth?"

"They are the greatest people," replied the local philosopher, "who live most scientifically and most conveniently to themselves—"

Such a race of voters is perfectly capable of permitting themselves to be represented indefinitely in Washington even by a congressman with a sense of humor and an original mind. Or should we say, by Capitol Hill's first working gargoyle?