Ohio History Journal

A BRAND FROM THE CRITICS' FIRE: OR A WORD FOR

WHITLOCK

 

by WINTHROP TILLEY

Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut

 

Now in midcentury, when so much badly needed revaluation of

America's literary product is going forward, seems an appropriate

time to speak a word for Brand Whitlock. The new Literary History

of the United States by Spiller and others mentions Whitlock only

as a single-taxer, a "humanitarian" and an early realist, and adds

that The Thirteenth District is "concerned with the professional

politician."¹ Quinn's estimate in American Fiction, the most exten-

sive by a literary historian, is incomplete, and tends to value Whit-

lock's work pretty much in accordance with its popular reception.²

Even Kazin in On Native Grounds makes only brief and misleading

mention of Whitlock as the author of The Thirteenth District,

which is spoken of in the same breath with that low piece of

hackmanship, Alfred Henry Lewis' The Boss.

Brand Whitlock (1869-1934) has fared better at the hands of the

historians than the litterateurs. A biographical sketch by Allan

Nevins is contained in The Letters of Brand Whitlock, which ap-

peared under Nevins' editorship in 1936. Whitlock was born in

Urbana, Ohio, and spent his boyhood in one small Ohio town

after another, his father being a Methodist preacher. Following his

graduation from high school in Toledo, he was a reporter for three

years on the Toledo Blade and thereafter for three years more on the

Chicago Herald. In 1892 he was sent to Springfield as legislative

reporter. He met and admired Governor Altgeld and in 1893 became

executive clerk in the secretary of state's office. He also began the

study of law. In 1894 he was admitted to the bar. Shortly after he

opened a law office in Toledo in 1897, he became associated with

and in time the close friend of Sam ("Golden Rule") Jones, reform

mayor of Toledo, and on Jones's death in 1904, ran for mayor on

 

1 Robert E. Spiller and others, eds., Literary History of the United States (3 vols.,

New York, 1948), II, 978, 1255; III, 150, 352.

2 Arthur H. Quinn, American Fiction (New York, 1936), 635-640.

145

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146      Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

an independent ticket. He was elected in 1905 and served as mayor

for eight years. Having retired from politics, as he thought, in 1912,

Whitlock was appointed minister to Belgium by President Wilson

in 1913 and served in that capacity through and after the war

years, at Brussels and later at Havre and then at Brussels again,

until he was replaced by a Harding appointee in 1921. So ended

Whitlock's public career, the brilliant success of which may well

have helped obscure the worth of his creative work. Thereafter he

lived quietly, mostly at Cannes, and it was there that death came

in 1934.

Here only his more substantial nonfiction will be given brief

mention. The three major items are his autobiographical Forty Years

of It (1914), which deals largely with his active political life in

Ohio, Belgium: A Personal Record (1919), one of the few classics

growing out of World War I,³ and Lafayette (1929), which Nevins

characterizes as "incomparably the best biography of Lafayette in

any language, a substantial contribution to the history of both the

American and French Revolutions, and a work of absorbing in-

terest."⁴ The Little Green Shutter (1931) takes for its apparent

subject prohibition and drinking in America; actually it is a

thoughtful and extremely readable essay on the nature of democratic

government-an essay which would be of small comfort, in the

unlikely event that they should read it, to those northern liberals

so hot to cram comprehensive civil rights legislation down southern

throats.

Whitlock's creative work-his true-love, as his letters make clear

-was accomplished in two periods: from 1898, the date of pub-

lication of his first story, to 1912, and after the long and arduous

Belgian experience, from 1923 to 1931.

Of the six books of the first period, two, The Gold Brick (1910)

and The Fall Guy (1912), are collections of short stories, many

of them stories of politics. The other four are novels-The Thirteenth

District (1902), Her Infinite Variety (1904), The Happy Average

3 It is, by the way, a shock, on reading from the pages dealing with the German

occupation, the Cavell affair, and the burning of the Louvain library, to realize that

the rejection by Germany of the painfully slowly built moral edifice of Western

European civilization was no invention of the Nazis. Who besides William L. Shirer

in our day fully realizes it?

4 Letters, lxvii.

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A Brand from the Critic's Fire           147

(1904), and The Turn of the Balance (1907). Her Infinite Variety

is brief and amusing. Actually it is more like a short story than a

novel, being a treatment of a single incident--an effort to get a

woman suffrage bill through the Illinois legislature. But slight as

the story is, the characterization of the chief male character, well-born

State Senator Morley Vernon, is quite skilful, and Whitlock depicts

convincingly the uneven and shifting mixture of desire for public

service and for personal glory which governs his behavior. The

Happy Average is a story of a successful marriage. The Turn of the

Balance brought Whitlock his first substantial public recognition. The

book is a muckraker without a doctrinaire ending, such as that of

The Jungle, which had appeared only the year before. But it is not a

good novel, for Whitlock seems never to have been clear whether

he was creating character and telling a story or attacking and ex-

posing the judicial and penal systems. Essentially it is a sort of study

of the very different impact of these two institutions on the rich

and well connected and on the poor and defenseless. Though less

well received than The Turn of the Balance, The Thirteenth District

now seems a more satisfactory work of fiction. One of the besetting

sins of novelists who have taken politics as a theme has been an

effort to take in too much social territory, if I may so put it, to

make large sociological and confused reflections on the nature of

the democratic process and to offer pseudo-diagnostic statements

about its ills. Into this pit, however, Whitlock did not fall. His book

bears the subtitle "The Story of a Candidate" and it is just that. Here

is the story it tells. Jerome Garwood has received the nomination

to congress thanks to the help of his political sponsor Jim Rankin.

The local editor, Pusey, tries to get blackmail money in exchange

for support, there being a shady spot in Garwood's record as a state

legislator. Garwood refuses to pay and is branded a boodler in the

local press. His fiancee is deeply shocked. He lets her think the

charge is a lie. Encouraged by the scandal, Garwood's opponent

undertakes an active campaign. Garwood persuades his mother to

mortgage her house so that he may pay campaign assessments.

He is elected and marries. The second part of the book opens with

the problem faced by Garwood to achieve renomination. Though the

nominating convention is called "quick and dirty" by Rankin in an

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148     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

effort to get Garwood nominated, the affair gets tied up in a three-

cornered race, and Garwood is able to win only after he has made

some sort of secret promise to the editor Pusey. After his reelection,

Garwood's wife and baby pay a short and unsuccessful visit to

Washington. Shortly after, Rankin is given the brush-off when

Garwood appoints Pusey to the postmastership. When Mrs.

Garwood's father dies, almost all is left in trust to his daughter, with

only $1,000 to Garwood. Most of this he loses in a poker game.

Later his wife buys up and cancels the mortgage on Garwood's

mother's house, still unpaid since Garwood's first campaign. In

financial difficulties, Garwood gets his wife to co-sign a note, and then

angry and a little drunk, he tells her the boodle charge of his first

campaign was true. By renomination time the primary system has

replaced the political convention and Garwood is defeated. His

wife pays his debts, and closes the big old house. He supports the

ticket and hopes for some sort of political job, but she knows he

will not get it, and is in a way happier now that the shoddiness of

politics no longer rules his life and hers.

Except for the introduction of certain minor characters (not men-

tioned in the preceding synopsis) this is an able performance. It

has depth of characterization, wit, and knowledge of the subject.

Garwood is very much of a human being--not a highly admirable

one, to be sure. He is weak, he is lazy, but he is not inherently

vicious, and his questionable actions are brought about by the pres-

sures around him acting on a not-very-strong character. Whitlock's

wit manifests itself in cynical observations like these: "A conscience

. . . is about as great an impediment to a practical politician in these

days as it is to a successful lawyer" (p. 326) and "The Congressional

Record, where, for the benefit of posterity, the national politicians

keep a carefully revised record of the things they wish they had

said" (p. 480). The author's knowledge of his subject is amply

indicated by the facts of his experience. Certainly this is one of the

best novels written by an American author on the American poli-

tician, in many a way far superior to other novels on the theme

which have for obscure reasons been better remembered, such as

Winston Churchill's Coniston and Mr. Crewe's Career, and Paul

Leicester Ford's The Honorable Peter Stirling. There is no more

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A Brand from the Critic's Fire         149

tightly written and exciting scene in American political fiction than

that in which Whitlock describes the hotly contested nominating

convention where, as he says, "Amid all this beauty and mystery

[of Nature], men were fighting one another, bribing, deceiving and

coercing one another, in order that the offices of the republic might

be taken from one set of men and turned over to another set of

men" (pp. 116-117). He makes you see it, feel it, and understand

it. Alone of American novelists, Whitlock had both the experience

and the talent to make this sort of thing come alive.

Once the war years were over and Whitlock had recorded his

experiences in Belgium, which must have almost written itself, he

turned again to fiction and produced between 1923 and 1933 six

books, in addition to two of nonfiction. Of J. Hardin & Son (1923)

a novel of small-town life in Ohio, more below. Uprooted (1926)

tells the story of an expatriate American girl in France. It is in many

ways a slighter and happier Daisy Miller, with some well-aimed

satirical thrusts at rich American vulgarians and rotten-at-the-core

European aristocrats. It is amusing, and sustained pretty well by a

certain consistency of tone, but it is by no means a great novel.

Transplanted (1927) also has an international theme. It is a story

of Dorothy Manning, a rich American girl, who has married into

an old and noble French family, and of her adjustment to and final

acceptance of the role which she has elected to play. It is a good

workmanlike book, possibly at moments a bit dull, but informed

with a quiet sort of charm. There are no quivering Jamesian spider

webs here, and Whitlock's French family does not take the in-

credible attitude towards American money of James's Bellegardes.

Dorothy, like Christopher Newman, is better stuff than the some-

what decadent Europeans, but she is less quixotic than the James

hero, and has more reality as a human being. Though the book ends

on a relatively happy note, with the birth of Dorothy's child and

her escape from the confines of the stuffy Paris house of her hus-

band's people, through this ending as through the book as a whole

sounds a note of pathos and controlled sadness-not only the sadness

of Dorothy's life, but of the life of all men and all women. This

consistently maintained overtone makes the book an authentic work

of art.

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150     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

In Big Matt (1928) Whitlock takes up again the theme of

politics. The central problem of the book is actually a moral one.

Governor Blake has been elected because of the political sagacity

of the chairman of the state central committee, Big Matt Holt.

Under pressure and with some misgiving, Blake appoints Matt to

the public utilities commission. Stories about graft within the com-

mission get noised about. There is an abortive legislative investiga-

tion. During his campaign for reelection Blake learns that Matt

has really been guilty, but he goes on with his campaign, feeling

that failure to press his cause with vigor would rouse suspicion.

He makes a great final speech full of idealism and high moral

purpose, and is reelected. Shortly after, Matt is indicted by a grand

jury, tried, and convicted. He takes the rap to protect Blake, to

whom he is devoted and who is in poor health. So Blake is finally

free to be the straightforward and honest governor he wants to be.

He goes to visit Matt in jail, wants to pardon him, but Matt talks

him out of it on the grounds that it would be politically inexpedient.

So Blake gets credit for being a man of stricter principle than he

really is, and his popularity as governor is high. But he doesn't

feel right inside. This book is not so able a performance as The

Thirteenth District.

Two other books are quite different from the preceding and

from one another. Narcissus (1931) is a brief, highly romantic

sketch of an imagined event in the life of Van Dyck, the story being

woven around and constituting an explanation of the qualities of

the painting "St. Martin Dividing His Cloak." Evidently there was

some difficulty in getting this into print, for Whitlock in a letter

written in September 1930 to Rutger B. Jewett, editorial chief of

D. Appleton and Company, said: "I asked you to send back the MS

of Narcissus. Evidently I am unable to write anything that will

satisfy the editors of our magazines, and there is something un-

dignified and even humiliating, at my age, in hawking about MSS.

I will not do it any more. So send the MS back-or better destroy

it, which would save postage."⁵ Yet after publication the book

was received enthusiastically by as discerning a reader as Albert Jay

Nock.6

5 Nevins, Letters, 470-471.

6 Ibid., 502.

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A Brand from the Critic's Fire              151

The Stranger on the Island (1931?) apparently came hard. In

September 1930 Whitlock speaks of having abandoned it. The

story concerns a Mormon colony established on Beaver Island by

James J. Strang in 1846. Eventually Whitlock found the key to the

problem presented by this essay at historical fiction, a type he tried

only this once. Writing to a friend in 1933, he says:

 

I did, as you divined, take a lot of pleasure in writing that story, but I

found it no easy job to do. Do you know I worked on it, off and on, for

nearly four years? (The result I fear is sadly disproportionate to the time

spent upon it.) But in the first place I encountered the difficulty, almost

insuperable, that always arises when one tries to combine fact and fiction.

They are two distinct worlds, and their inhabitants live on different planes.

The real characters always seem less alive than the imagined ones, and I

had to put Strang out of my mind, so far as that was possible, and create

another man with another name before I could get on with the story. . . .

However, I got the book done finally, and if you like it I am repaid, for

something of the charm of that lovely country succeeded perhaps in getting

itself into it.⁷

It did indeed. And Whitlock's general observation here brings an

amen when one recollects the wooden generals and statesmen who

stand stiff and lifeless in so many historical novels.

In his biographical introduction to Whitlock's Letters, Nevins

chooses two volumes as having "qualities of permanence"--the

biography of Lafayette, referred to briefly above, and the novel

J. Hardin & Son. One is glad to accept the historian's word as to

the former, and to accept the major part of his single paragraph

of comment on the latter. But to one whose primary interest is in

fiction this novel deserves more detailed comment than Nevins

chooses to give, as I am certain he would agree.

The fact is that despite its solid qualities and what now seems its

sure and quiet depiction of the quality and tone of life in a small

Ohio town, J. Hardin & Son made no great stir on publication and

failed to achieve any substantial recognition. The book was only

briefly reviewed, and in general the critics seem to have succeeded

in damning it with faint praise, whether this was the intention or

not. Apparently the sales were as disappointing as the reviews and

7 Ibid., 553.

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152     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

Whitlock was so discouraged that he wrote to a friend in May 1924:

"I have been for weeks and months so depressed and disheartened

by the failure of J. Hardin & Son to make any impression, or to

receive any recognition, that I have seriously asked myself if there

were really any use in going on at all."⁸

A little glance at the publication dates of some famous American

novels of the time helps us understand that the coolness towards

J. Hardin was rooted at least partly in the fact that it was difficult

to hear its quiet note when so many literary firecrackers were going

off. Main Street was the smash hit of 1920, and Edith Wharton's

The Age of Innocence, Sherwood Anderson's Poor White, and Zona

Gale's Miss Lulu Bett appeared in this year also. Babbitt had come

in 1922. In 1923, in addition to Whitlock's volume, Willa Cather's

A Lost Lady, and Zona Gale's Faint Perfume also saw the light

of day. Howells was dead and then in the process of being forgotten,

Dreiser was in the long silence between The Genius (1915) and

An American Tragedy (1925), Ellen Glasgow had still to attain

the success which came with Barren Ground (1925). Dos Passos,

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Elizabeth M. Roberts were

still to be heard from. In December 1923, the time of publication of

J. Hardin, the bestsellers among American fiction are listed by the

Bookman as Gertrude Atherton's Black Oxen, Zona Gale's Faint

Perfume, Harold Bell Wright's The Mine with the Iron Door, James

Oliver Curwood's The Alaskan, Emerson Hough's The Covered

Wagon, and Willa Cather's One of Ours.

It is clear that Whitlock was not alone in turning to small-town

midwest America for material. Sherwood Anderson had already

done three volumes on it, Winesburg, Ohio, in 1919, Poor White

in 1920, and The Triumph of the Egg in 1921. In these, of course,

Anderson was deeply concerned with distorted and misshapen

egos, pulled out of shape by the force of unsatisfactory sex lives

and to a lesser degree by the impact of industrialism. Honest and

important as his work was, it seems now to have been a very

special, highly personal Andersonian message. Main Street and the

two books by Miss Gale (apostate to the theme of sweetness and

light as dwelling in the Friendship Villages of America) may

8 Ibid., 351.

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A Brand from the Critic's Fire             153

perhaps be best described in a phrase as malicious cartoons, flashy,

funny, bitter, but not very deep.

Whitlock's book has neither the mystical, groping romanticism

of Anderson nor the brittle sophistication and cynicism of Miss

Gale and Lewis. His book is, as Nevins remarks, in the tradition

of honest realism. It has its foundation in careful observation and

straightforward recording. Fundamentally it has much in common

with the literary method of the earlier Howells, but is free from

the much-criticized Howells prudery. J. Hardin is a manufacturer

of carriages in Macochee, Ohio, and has a prosperous business, his

product being noted for the excellence of its craftmanship. The son,

Paul, after some teen-age sex adventures, seriously frowned upon

by his father (who also regarded the drinking of a glass of beer

as a mortal sin), enters the business and assumes a good deal of

responsibility in the shop. Mass-produced carriages at considerably

lower prices and of inferior quality come on the market. J. Hardin

stubbornly refuses to change his methods or the quality of his

product. As his business declines, he becomes more and more in-

terested in the Anti-Saloon League, regarding the establishment

of Prohibition as a crusade, the dominating aim of his life. Paul

makes fortunate investments, eventually marries Winona Dyer,

daughter of the richest man in town. It is a loveless marriage, and

he takes a mistress, a local milliner. This is no casual affair; he loves

Evelyn. As a result of a fire in the building containing her apart-

ment, the affair becomes notorious and Winona goes away. Paul,

lonely and unhappy, stays in town, is asked to resign as vice

president of the local bank because of the scandal, does so. Evelyn's

husband dies, and he and she plan to go to California together.

But at this point he is offered the presidency of the local bank and

gets word from Winona that she will come back unless he asks

her not to. After an internal struggle he decides to keep his position

in Macochee as a solid citizen, to have Winona back, and to terminate

his affair. He does this, though his heart is full of love for Evelyn.

It is made clear that since he is the kind of man his temperament

and life in Macochee have made him, he was incapable of making

any other choice.

From this very brief statement it will be clear that the story

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154     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

is not extraordinary, the special qualities of the book resting not

in the story but in the handling of it. Though the solid craftman-

ship of J. Hardin is given full credit, the other and decidedly un-

lovely facets of that solidity of character are by no means over-

looked. The work as a whole portrays with skill and truth the

puritanical narrowness and dourness of a midwest small town, its

distrust of any joy, its indifference to any beauty, its concentration

on material gain, pursued within a narrowly bigoted social frame-

work. All the persons of the story, and especially Paul Hardin, are

pathetic in their inability to know how to live a good life.

It is, as W. E. Woodward remarked in his review at the time

of publication, "a real book, genuine, vital, and sincere."⁹ It deserves

reprinting and rereading as Nevins says. Or should one amend the

last word to "reading," since J. Hardin & Son seems to have been

so thoroughly neglected during the frenetic 20's?

Some successful appeals from the verdicts of American literary

history have been taken. Let us hope, then, that future literary his-

torians will speak for Whitlock words in better agreement with his

achievement.

 

⁹ Nation, CXVII (1923), 654.

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