By Robert Penn Warren
Harvest Books, Harcourt, Inc., New York, NY; 672 pp., 1946
Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn
Steven Zaillian, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, directed this recent movie based on the novel of the same title. He adapted the 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren as if the 1949 movie based on the book never existed – although it won best picture and best actor for Broderick Crawford.
The September release of this newly adapted movie prompted me to read the classic. I discovered, not surprisingly, that the movie only scratches the surface of the novel’s depth of characters, plot, and messages.
Mastery of Styles
One of the most fascinating aspects of this novel is the style. Warren masters various styles throughout and depending on the story’s events. The novel was first published twenty-four years after James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) – which made stream of consciousness style highly appealing.
Jack Burden narrates the story and often lets his voice flow down a stream that reflects Joyce’s influence on novels of the period. Burden takes on a key role, even that of protagonist, while all the time telling the story. This dual role leads the reader to believe that Burden weaves most all of the narration from his streaming consciousness, a way to make sense of the complicated world around him. When Willie Stark introduces his “gang” of aids to his father, Burden describes the interior of Old Man Stark’s farm house with fluid senses:
| “The gang of us sat around, and moved our thighs on the horsehair or on the split-bottom and stared down at the unpainted boards of the floor or at the design on the linoleum mat in the middle of the floor as though we were attending a funeral and owed the dead man some money. The linoleum mat was newish, and the colors were still bright -- reds and tans and blues slick and varnished-looking -- a kind of glib, impertinent, geometrical island floating there in the midst of the cornerless shadows and the acid mummy smell and the slow swell of Time which had fed into this room, day by day since long back, as into a landlocked sea where the fish were dead and the taste was brackish on your tongue.” |
Two Protagonists, One Born Wealthy, The Other Poor
A burnt-out idealist with a penchant for cynicism, a scion of the state's political aristocracy, and much more, Jack Burden uses his abilities as a historical researcher to help Willie Stark blackmail and control his enemies. One of the story’s driving forces revolves around the responsibility individuals bear for their actions in history’s procession, and this justifies how the story grows partly from real historical occurrences. Jack Burden’s character comes to life from Warren’s imagination, but a number of blatant parallels arise between the fictitious Willie Stark and the real-life Huey Long, who served Louisiana as both Governor and Senator from 1928 until his death in 1935.
Both the fictitious Stark and the factual Long were uneducated farm boys who passed the state bar exam and rose to political power by making reforms to help the state's poor. Both died by assassination at the peak of power by a doctor – in Stark’s case by Dr. Adam Stanton, Jack Burden’s close friend.
By the second chapter, most of the main themes and messages take center stage.
Stark makes a fundamental change in his understanding of politics after Sadie Burke informs him that he has been tricked into splitting “MacMurfee’s hick votes.” Sadie tells him: “You’re a sap and a sucker.” He reacts by drinking himself unconscious, and then the next day delivers the first of his many visceral and inspired speeches, making a fool of Tiny Duffy and captivating the crowd of poor folks. “Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me.”
When MacMurfee is elected largely because of Willie's help, Willie realizes that politics is not a game of ideals, but of willpower and manipulation. With this revelation, he flexes his will (Willie – as in willpower, Stark – German word for strong) to adapt, and emerges as the most powerful figure in state politics.
At the beginning of chapter two, Jack Burden describes Willie Stark as "Cousin Willie from the country," a gullible hick. However, by chapter’s end, Burden becomes one of Stark’s employees. Willie transforms from country boy into the Boss.
Burden goes on to reveal the corrupt business of Southern politics in the 1920s and '30s. Willie Stark is vaguely related to Dolph Pillsbury, the political boss of backwater Mason County, a relation that gives Stark a chance in the election for County Treasurer.
Willie first becomes embroiled in controversy when the county awards a building contract for a school – Pillsbury wants to give it to a man who offers him a kickback, and Willie tries to block the deal. As a journalist at the time, Burden writes an article about this case, which gains more importance because it later helps Stark gain popularity and win the race for governor, and it later sheds light on Stark’s hospital building contract.
Politics of graft, blackmail, bribery, and trickery – amply demonstrated by the Harrison gang's dummy campaign for Willie – propels state politics throughout the novel. Willie initially opposes this cynical politics of manipulation, but ultimately he is forced to master it.
Stark’s growing appetite for power and expanding need to hold it push the once honest politician over the edge of innocence. As Stark gains power, his belief system adapts. He loses faith in humanity’s natural inclination for good. While convincing Dr. Adam Stanton to head the new hospital, he explains, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.”
According to Stark’s newly developed outlook, doing good is not an inherent human characteristic. Goodness has to be made. “You just make it up as you go along,” he says as if goodness arises not as any absolute ideal, but society defines it depending on its needs at any given time. Yet, Stark comes across as a more complex person than this Machiavellian philosophy suggests. At heart, he seems to carry the country boy’s idealism, and this becomes apparent in the end when he rectifies a crooked deal for the hospital’s construction. The demise of Stark’s son, Tom, shakes him back to his core values – to do good.
Unlike Burden, social recognition and rewards motivate Stark more than self-knowledge and understanding. Yet, Burden was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he need not preoccupy himself with money or the stark realities of life. On the other hand, Stark started life in a pig farm shack and climbed up the social ladder by focusing on accomplishing practical goals.
Jack Burden takes a prominent part of the story and shares the role of protagonist with Willie Stark. Unlike the strong willed Stark, Burden lacks direction and ambition, but does most of the intellectual work, sorting out the meaning of events in the story. Like most of the secondary characters, Burden gravitates toward Stark because the Boss has ambition, direction, and a sense of purpose no matter how confused that becomes at times. By analyzing, reflecting, and, above all, reviewing the past, Burden discovers himself through his involvement with Stark. Jack Burden carries the philosophical voice of the story in which his own existence represents a debate between free will – that humans can act freely and with good purpose – and determinism -- that humans are tangled in a web of events without control.
Upon learning that his life’s love, Anne Stanton, is sexually involved with Stark, Burden suffers. He recoils by taking a compulsive ride into the west where he develops the whimsical theory of the “Great Twitch,” which only seems to serve as a way to ease his pain by reducing human actions to insignificant tics.
Eventually, Burden too comes around to validate his values in human responsibility and in doing so, he learns more about himself. He realizes that he is at least partly responsible for most of what has happened to himself and to those around him in various events. When considering the death of Judge Irwin, whom he now knows was his real father, Bruden notes, “But Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin in the end. Or had it been Mortimer? Perhaps I had done it. That was one way of looking at it. I turned that thought over and speculated upon my responsibility.”
When he sees how much his mother loved Judge Irwin, he reclaims a direction and purpose in his life. “And that meant that my mother gave me back the past.” His past takes on value, purpose, and meaning.
When he learns that his inheritance is not as lavish as he had first imagined, he finds ambition, the key element that he lacked, and when he finally finds it, Anne Stanton finally marries him and he begins to accomplish practical goals, such as finishing the book about Cass Mastern.
Politics of Manipulation – Lessons for Today
One of the big picture messages we can take away from this story: the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have been debating about the equitable distribution of wealth. This novel places the debate in center stage where Willie Stark pulls himself from a pig farm by his bootstraps. He understands the needs of the poor in terms of justice, education, and healthcare. By promising these things to his “fellow hicks,” he gains popularity enough to win the race for governor. Stark sincerely seeks to do good, but eventually the power scrambles his moral compass, at least until his son’s death helps him to find his direction again.
Jack Burden hooks his wagon to Stark’s ambitious drive to do good. As a wealthy lad, Burden has the luxury to contemplate his place in the universe, his origins, who his father is, his identity, and his purpose in life. Doing good, serving a purpose are what attracts Burden to work for Stark. But Burden takes this noble path one step farther by pursuing the truth. After all, he is a journalist and a history researcher. Eventually, he finds out the truth about who his father, Judge Irwin, is as well as the weak moments in the man’s past. Burden also learns that his life’s love, Anne Stanton, has an affaire with Willie Stark.
When Anne’s idealistic bother, Adam, learns of his sister’s tryst, he kills Stark in a rage of moral indignation. But Adam acted just as Stark’s political opponents had hoped. Adam became a mere “sap and sucker” for Duffy’s political manipulations. Once Stark is killed, Duffy becomes Governor.
Burden digs up the truth in this affair. He questions Sadie Burke about who informed Adam about his sister’s affair with Stark. Sadie Burke admits that Duffy made the call to Adam, inflaming him to kill Governor Stark, who had a weakness for women. Like Humpty Dumpty, Stark’s weakness made him stumble off the wall. And All the Kings Men could not put him back together again.
Before Stark took office, political manipulation is what Stark warned his “fellow hicks” about. The hicks did not realize that big corporations, mostly energy companies and contractors, were using money to influence politicians for their own benefit and not for the interests of the people they represent. The hicks were not aware that, as citizens, they were entitled to social benefits. Big businesses took advantage of the hick voters’ ignorance by influencing the politicians. The wealthy class grabbed the social entitlements in the form of no-bid contracts, low inheritance (death) tax, and campaign manipulations.
“I discovered that its delicate little root, with many loops and kinks, ran all the way to New York City, where it tapped the lush dung heap called the Madison Corporation. The flower in the cranny was the Southern Belle Fuel Company. So I plucked another little flower called the American Electric Power Company, and discovered that its delicate little root tapped the same dung heap.” |
The debate about the equitable distribution of wealth continues today. More than sixty years since this novel was published, Americans still struggle with rudimentary notions about universal justice, education, and healthcare for all social classes. Meanwhile in other industrialized countries, such as Japan or Europe, where the industrial-military complex does not consume huge portions of tax income, these social “entitlements” seem resolved in comparison. Many Americans understand the European or Japanese economic systems as socialistic, a four letter word in the American lexicon.
Yet today like no other period of American history has the manipulation of the public been more blatant. Under the administration of this 43rd President, thousands of lobbyists influence government contracts with little or no regard to public interests. Most flagrant of the abuses of political power arises in how Vice President Cheney exercises free reign in awarding his own company, Halliburton, with billon dollar, no-bid contracts to reconstruct an occupied country where the chaos of civil war allows for no reconstruction at all.
All the King’s Men instructs all us citizens, hicks or not, to take warning against the political abuses and manipulations. As an American classic, this novel reminds us of our responsibility in history, “and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.”
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