The Widow & the Senator

DEMOCRACY (246 pp.)--Henry Adams --Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

Being the grandson of one U.S. president and the great-grandson of another, Henry Adams was nurtured in the cozy expectation that he might one day become the third in line. That he turned out to be a Harvard history professor so disappointed him that he spent most of his life investigating what sort of a world it was that didn't have a better use for Henry.

In the course of this investigation Adams made himself an American historian of absolutely first rank, a shrewd political observer, and an old sourpuss. Democracy, republished this week for the first time in a quarter-century, is one of the two novels Adams wrote in his lifelong expostulation with a nation that failed to give him his birthright. Though the U.S. has achieved success and power far beyond Adams' gloomy dreams,* Democracy, first published anonymously in 1879, is still just about the best satire ever written about the Government of the U.S. "The Prairie Giant." The business of the book is, outwardly, to describe the adventures of a certain Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, wealthy, intelligent Philadelphia widow who becomes so weary of human society that she goes to live in Washington, D.C. There, she thinks, she can get "to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy." She thinks also that she can get "power." Her bid for both involves the leading Senator of his day: Silas P. Ratcliffe,

"The Prairie Giant of Peonia, Ill.," a sort of composite portrait of Thaddeus Stevens and George Sewall Boutwell, a notorious five-percenter of the Grant Administration.

Ratcliffe is "a great ponderous man, over six feet high, very . . . dignified," with "rather good features" and a bald Websterian head. "A single glance at Mr. Ratcliffe's face showed Madeleine that she need not be afraid of flattering too grossly; her own self-respect, not his, was the only restraint..." Accordingly, she remarked with "apparent simplicity": "Was I right in thinking that you have a strong resemblance to Daniel Webster in your way of speaking?"

Romantic Filibuster. The Prairie Giant fell with a crash that reverberated through the social circles of the capital. Summoning all his demagogue's dialectic and caucus cunning, Senator Ratcliffe sets out to filibuster Mrs. Lee out of her heart, her hand and her income. As the senatorial courtship wheezes forward, Adams steps out of the wings to take a peek at U.S. society of the late 19th century.

As for the whole process called "democracy," Adams finds it "nothing more than government of any other kind," but adds, in the words of a half-tolerant cynic: "I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts ..."

In the end, Mrs. Lee sees through her Senator: "His courage was mere moral paralysis . . . He talked about virtue and vice as a man who is color-blind talks about red and green." She also sees through herself: much of her ambition had been mere "blind longing to escape from the torture of watching other women with full lives and satisfied instincts." As the Senator builds steadily toward the presidency, Mrs. Lee hops off the bandwagon. "The bitterest part of all this horrid story," she concludes, "is that nine out of ten of our countrymen would say I had made a mistake."

* President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 righteously rebuked it as "that novel which made a great furor among the educated incompetents and the pessimists generally . . . It had a superficial and rotten cleverness, but it was essentially false, essentially mean and base, and it is amusing to read it now and see how completely events have given it the lie."

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