Man in a Toga

Once he was a farm boy in Illinois, hating the black soil and the toil, reading the Bible and Shakespeare, yearning for Thespian grace and glory. He was a student in Kansas, boning for the law and persuading his roisterous fraternity fellows to pay a farmer for four stolen turkeys. He was a starveling lawyer, writing orations for practice in the hot, sandy afternoons; galloping his horse to & from a young man's fun in the Kansas night. He was the smartest sprig in Idaho, taking up for downtrod Chinese, farmers, Mormons while he served the corporations which owned the mines, the timber and the Republican Party in the State. He was the bridegroom of blonde Mamie McConnell (whose papa was Governor of Idaho). He was a renegade Republican, going down with the Democrats and Bryan and 16-to-1 Silver in 1896, striding back unchastened to the Republican Party in 1900. He was a theatrical, compelling, blackmaned orator, bewitching the people into making the Legislature send him to the U. S. Senate in 1907. Thereafter, until he died last week, he was Borah of Idaho.

Last week the Capitol Plaza in Washington was white with snow. Through the windows of Suite 139 in the Senate Office Building, the trees a-nod with ice beckoned William Edgar Borah to his customary walk in the Plaza park. But first, he had a little work to do.

In his inner office he was alone, save for the familiar things around him: the tidy desk; his old couch, black beneath a knitted blue shawl, two white pillows and an Army blanket (which he sometimes wore like a toga on cold afternoons in the park) ; on the wall, a framed copy of Stanzas on Freedom by James Russell Lowell; on the mantel, two ancient lamps and a cane, carved of wood from Borah Peak in Idaho. The secretaries in the outer office heard his full, fluid voice; the Senator was reading, aloud and twice over, some document which he wanted to memorize. Thus read, it would join his vast store from the Bible, Shakespeare, Britain's Burke and Fox and Pitt, Massachusetts' Daniel Webster, Emerson, many & many another remembered page.

Although no issue of moment was to come up, he attended the brief (20 minutes) Senate session that day. In the afternoon he read his mail and inquired about a Negro woman who had asked him to get her a job. He requested his young clerk, Charles Corker, to pick him up in the park around 4:30 and motor him home. "Are you sure you have the time?" twice asked Borah of Idaho, mindful that the stripling had pre-law classes to attend. Reassured, overcoated (without the blanket), the Senator trudged out of the office, along the echoing basement corridor, across Delaware Avenue to the park. His frail frame was stooped. His mane, still growing grandly down to his collar, was greying. Behind him on the whitened ground, he left the mark of his 74 years: the long, slurred footprints of one who has shuffled through the snow.

Next morning, a child's voice on the office telephone asked how Senator Borah was. A secretary wanted to know who was calling. "Oh," said the voice, "I'm just a little girl that talks to him in the park."

Death Watch. Borah of Idaho was dying. He lay abed in Apartment 41 at No. 2101 Connecticut Avenue, where he and childless Mrs. Borah had lived for 13 years amid the fruits of her ambulant, acquisitive curiosity: Oriental tapestries, shawls, prints, screens, chests, score's of elephant figurines carved in white, green, blue, black, pink. That morning he had risen punctiliously at 7:30, in dressing gown had paused at the door of his wife's bedroom to chat with wispy, grey-blonde "Little Borah."

To her he was "Billy." She had survived the first, sometimes difficult years with him when he was W. E. Borah of Boise, seemingly so engrossed in the law that he often had little time for his bride and home. She was with him when he burst on Washington, flamboyant in his Stetson hat and the long, square-cut, double-breasted coat which looked like a shortened topcoat above his baggy pants. Now "Little Borah," and all Washington, knew that lone-going William E. Borah would be indeed lost without her. She listened happily as he reported that his doctor had examined him and pronounced him sound. He went off to a bathroom. He did not return. "Little Borah" found him on the floor, unconscious, felled by an unpredictable, irreparable hemorrhage of the brain.

In coma broken by intermittent fits of consciousness and one call for his wife, he lived through four days and three nights. The chaplain of the Senate prayed, quoting the comfort of the 23rd Psalm. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow. . . ." On his last day, the Senate could bring itself to meet only for six minutes, gave up its usual weekend recess, and voted to reconvene next day--a Saturday. On Friday night his grey, weeping secretary, Miss Cora Rubin, who had worked for Borah 30 years, telephoned reporters on deathwatch in the Senate press gallery: "The Senator passed away peace fully at 8:45. . . ."

The flags on the Capitol dome dropped to half staff in the floodlit night. All the tired phrases of tribute and condolence, worn nearly meaningless by necessitous convention, were heard in Washington. But now real tears gave them meaning. The death of no other man could have moved the capital just as Borah's did. In the Senate he left ten colleagues of 70 or more. None was his close friend; lone Borah had no such intimate. But they grieved. "There was only one Borah," mourned the only Norris of Nebraska. "His life and public service will write his proud epitaph," said snow-haired Hiram Johnson of California. "A very old friend ... a very great American," said Franklin Roosevelt, berating himself for his recent barbs at The Great Isolationist. Weepy Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Nevada's Pittman, Shipstead of Minnesota said in radioed memoriam: "He was a serious, intense and lonely statesman . . . the Constitution's most stalwart and effective friend since Daniel Webster. . . . There is none to take his place!"

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. . . .

Over a grey casket, the chaplain of the Senate bowed. His hands brushed the calla lilies on the top, his right hand raised in benediction. Brief (227 minutes) but solemn was the state funeral for Borah of Idaho.

From the chamber of the Senate went Franklin Roosevelt, his Cabinet, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and his robed colleagues, the members of Senate and House. From the galleries filed Eleanor Roosevelt, 150 Idahoans, a lone little girl in blue overalls and a bright red sweater. "Little Borah" left the lobby room, just off the chamber, where she had chosen to wait out the service after one brief look beforehand at the casket. The doors of the Senate chamber swung shut and were locked; inside, until the journey to Idaho and the grave began, was left the body of Borah.

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