Pension?

There is no law requiring it, but it has become customary for Congress to pass a law granting a pension of $5,000 a year to the widow of a President. Last week a Congressman from Rhode Island, Richard S. Aldrich, introduced a bill for a $5,000 pension to Mrs. Thomas R. Marshall, saying it was about time that a similar provision was made for widows of Vice Presidents.

This Congressman Richard S. Aldrich hardly titillates the memory of the average man today. Yet he might well have gone to his brother-in-law and asked for $5,000 as a pension for Mrs. Marshall, his brother-in-law is John D. Rockefeller Jr. But his sister's husband and his sister's father-in-law, potent though they be, were not more noted than his father in the latter's day. For his father was Senator from Rhode Island, Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, one of the giants in the Senate two decades ago. Nelson W. Aldrich, who began life as a grocery clerk in Providence, married his employer's daughter and made a career for himself by doggedness and a keen mind. When he first went to Washington he made a close friend of General Sheridan and from him learned Grant's way of getting results on the battlefield, and Mr. Aldrich made politics his battlefield. He was a confidant of McKinley and close to Roosevelt. He made his plans with care and he executed them with pressure. He did not care for the opinions of others and almost never read newspapers but he was a first-rate appreciator of men. In his power he was called "the power behind the power behind the throne." In 1911 he refused renomination to the Senate to work on reforms of the U. S. financial system. Four years later he died. Now his memory seldom is mentioned except as his name is sounded when some newspaper refers to the Payne-Aldrich Tariff.

And his son? His son quietly goes his way as one of Rhode Island's three Congressmen and does not even mention in his official biography in the Congressional Directory that his father was Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich.