THE SATURDAY ESSAY: The Fiction of American Democracy

Great writers have always challenged us to measure the compromised reality of politics against our national ideals.

Image from article: Henry Adams, author of ‘Democracy: An American Novel,’ 1883.

By Adam Kirsch

The Wall Street Journal

Oct. 30, 2020 10:56 am ETArticle contains additional illustration

America’s independence was won on the battlefield, but American democracy was written into existence. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution created the country that America aspires to be, where all people are created equal and politics is a common effort to establish a more perfect union. This is the ideal democracy that Walt Whitman likened to “leaves of grass”: “Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,/Growing among black folks as among white,/Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.”

When Whitman wrote those lines in 1855, of course, the divisions among whites, Blacks and Native Americans were stark and bloody. But like so many American writers, Whitman couldn’t reconcile himself to the way reality fell short of the founding ideal. The idea that literature should keep a distance from politics, that art should exist for its own sake, has never found much traction in this country. On the contrary, American literature is constantly analyzing the state of the nation, posing in countless ways the question that the poet Allen Ginsberg stated directly and plaintively: “America, when will you be angelic?”

Today’s writers continue that tradition, whether they are telling stories about real politicians—like Curtis Sittenfeld and Thomas Mallon, who have used fiction to delve into the minds of Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon—or using the techniques of fantasy and science fiction—like Suzanne Collins’s popular “Hunger Games” series, set in a dystopian future where a wealthy Capitol takes poor children as “tributes,” forcing them to compete in a televised fight to the death. Even contemporary novelists who don’t tackle politics head-on often end up writing about it—like Ben Lerner, whose 2019 novel “The Topeka School” draws on his own experience as a high-school debater to show how political argument becomes toxic. 

On the eve of a particularly bitter presidential election, literature offers a useful reminder that Americans have always been consumed by politics and partisanship. Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle,” which turns 200 this year, may be the earliest work of American fiction that is still widely known. Everyone remembers that the title character falls asleep for many years and returns home to find a changed world. But the specific change that Irving had in mind was the way the Revolution had made Americans—even the residents of a remote village in New York’s Catskill Mountains—obsessed with politics.

The first question that Rip is asked when he returns to town is what “side” he votes for: “Rip stared in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear, ‘Whether he was Federal or Democrat?’” His answer shows that he is out of step with the times: “I am a poor, quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the king.” The problem isn’t just that there is no more king; after the Revolution, it’s impossible to be a “poor, quiet man” with no interest in politics. Everyone has to choose a side. 

It wasn’t until after the Civil War, however, that a novel promised to take readers behind the scenes of politics at the highest level. The title of “Democracy: An American Novel,” which was published anonymously in 1880, quickly turns out to be satirical. The novel’s heroine, Madeleine Lee, is a wealthy and ambitious widow who decides to move from New York to Washington, D.C., “bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.”

What she finds is that the nation’s capital actually runs on cronyism and bribes. Fifteen years after the Civil War, there is not an iota of idealism or self-sacrifice to be found among the congressmen and cabinet secretaries who visit Mrs. Lee’s salon. Their creed is that “democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators.” Worst of all is Senator Silas Ratcliffe, who pursues Mrs. Lee as unscrupulously as he schemes for power. In the end, she is saved only by rejecting him and Washington together. 

Today, when cynicism about politicians is widespread, it’s hard to imagine how shocking “Democracy” must have been to its first readers—all the more so because of its anonymity, which implied that the author was a D.C. insider. In fact, he was: After his death in 1918, it was revealed that the novel’s author was Henry Adams, a descendant of two presidents.

“Democracy” created the template that American political novels have followed ever since. Like Madeleine Lee, the main character in these stories gets into politics by the back door, as an aide, relative or friend of a charismatic politician. They are drawn to the political world partly by the fascination of power but also because they sincerely want to do good. Once through the looking glass, however, they learn democracy’s ugly secret: Politicians succeed not by appealing to the better angels of our nature but by playing on emotion and self-interest. This isn’t a partisan issue; like “Democracy,” political novels often refuse to say which party the characters belong to. What matters is that our leaders are no better than the people who elect them.

That isn’t the whole story about American politics, of course, but it’s a story that writers can’t stop telling, sometimes as tragedy and sometimes as satire. In his 1956 bestseller “The Last Hurrah,” the Boston journalist Edwin O’Connor puts a ruefully comic spin on the story of Frank Skeffington, who is clearly based on the city’s longtime mayor James Michael Curley, a master of old-style machine politics. Skeffington invites his nephew Adam Caulfield, a newspaper cartoonist, to observe his last reelection campaign from the inside, seeing how the sausage of municipal government is really made.

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Unlike in Adams’s Washington, in O’Connor’s Boston—unnamed but clearly recognizable—politics doesn’t even pretend to be about ideals; it’s strictly a matter of quid pro quo. Skeffington holds a daily open house where, like a medieval king, he receives petitions and dispenses favors—helping a woman whose son is in trouble at school, giving an old supporter a few dollars to buy booze. More serious kinds of corruption follow. When a banker refuses to give the city a loan to build new housing, Skeffington offers to make his son the fire commissioner; if he refuses, Skeffington insinuates, he will tell everyone that the man demanded the appointment as a bribe. “Cheap and vicious and thoroughly typical of you and all that you represent,” the banker complains as he gives in.

Still, O’Connor writes about Skeffington with a certain admiration. When he’s defeated by a younger, cleaner-cut candidate who comes across better on TV, it represents the end of a more colorful era. In literature as in real life, rogues in politics can be seductive, their shamelessness a breath of fresh air among the usual stale pieties. It can be hard to tell where their populism ends and their corruption begins, since both have a similar Robin Hood appeal. Skeffington squeezes the rich and doles out to the poor, while keeping a healthy share for himself. 

The most ambitiously literary American novel about politics tells a similar story, set in the deep South. Willie Stark, the politician at the center of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel “All the King’s Men,” broadly resembles Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator who seemed poised to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency before he was assassinated in 1935. The book is narrated by Jack Burden, a reporter who becomes Stark’s aide and chronicles his growing cynicism and lust for power.

“All the King’s Men” is a tragedy, not a satire, because it’s not only Burden who becomes disillusioned by democratic politics. It’s Stark himself, who starts out as an honest reformer but doesn’t begin to win elections until he realizes that voters don’t want facts and figures, only flattery and entertainment. As Burden tells him, “Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years.”

Stark learns the lesson, winning the governorship with theatrical appeals to the “hicks” he represents and identifies with. But the only way to get things done in politics, he comes to believe, is through blackmail, bribes and threats; you can’t appeal to people’s reason or goodness, since “man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” As Stark degenerates from a clean-cut young reformer into a philandering, bullying drunk, Warren suggests that he is as much victim as villain. Democracy has failed to live up to his high expectations, and he takes revenge on it out of sheer disappointment.

The fact that books keep being written to debunk American politics is an ironic tribute to the durability of our national idealism.

The fact that books keep being written to debunk American politics is an ironic tribute to the durability of our national idealism. Generation after generation, writers feel the same urge that drives Adams’s Mrs. Lee: “There is only one thing in life…that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is right or wrong.” The answer is usually that our politics are wrong, but that is because they are being judged against an ideal that even the most cynical writers secretly share.

The authors of the best-known novels about politics and politicians share something else, too: From Henry Adams down to Joe Klein, author of the 1996 Bill Clinton expose “Primary Colors,” they are all white men. This makes sense, when you consider how recently people other than white men began to gain access to the highest levels of American politics—not just as candidates but as the behind-the-scenes players and journalists who are best positioned to learn its secrets.

To be political, however, a novel doesn’t have to deal with elections and campaigns. “Democracy” and “All the King’s Men” are minor classics, but they’ve done far less to shape the way Americans think about politics than other books, many by women and people of color, that never come near a ballot box or a smoke-filled room. In terms of sheer political impact, probably the most important novel in American history is “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 as a direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern states to apprehend escaped African-Americans and return them to bondage in the South. 

Stowe drew a direct connection between the suffering of Eliza, a runaway slave chased across an icy river by slave-hunters, and the politicians who voted for the Act. When the fictional Senator Bird defends his vote to his wife, saying “we mustn’t suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment,” she adamantly insists that Christian charity is more important than preserving the Union: “Now, John, I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.”

This was Stowe’s model for how women, who didn’t have the right to vote, could use moral suasion to influence American politics. And “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did have a huge influence, selling 300,000 copies and reaching many more people through dramatizations. According to a famous anecdote, when Stowe visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1862, he greeted her with, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Historians now doubt that this remark was actually made, but even if it was invented, it captures a connection between literature and politics that was very real.

Some of the most beloved American books intervened in their political moments in a similar way. John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” published in 1939, made an implicit case for the New Deal, showing how government-run migrant camps offered a haven to Dust Bowl refugees like the Joad family. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960 during the civil-rights movement, challenged readers with the story of a Black man wrongly convicted of rape by a white jury.

No matter who wins next week’s election, millions of Americans will be left feeling disappointed in our politics. Literature may not be able to cure that feeling, but it can remind us that Americans have often seen our democracy fall short—which is why we can’t stop hoping for a more perfect union. What Whitman wrote in “Democratic Vistas” in 1871 could be echoed by American writers down to the present: “America…counts, as I reckon, for her justification and success, (for who, as yet, dare claim success?) almost entirely on the future.” 

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Appeared in the October 31, 2020, print edition as 'THE FICTION of AMERICAN DEMOCRACY The American Republic of Letters.'