The Willebrandt Searchlight

...In all things she, and other female politicians, act just as Henry and Terry would (and have, from time immemorial) and from the same motives...

...Hoover ungratefully sacrificed her to public opinion for merely following the directions of his political boon companions...

...Willebrandt to make the speech...

...She shows them to you barearmed, unshirted, from anvil to cutting-machine, clipping the clothes and stirring the vats for the heroes facing the footlights...

...and who is Mr...

...Willebrandt's motive...

...no hypocrisy is involved...

...Thompson has used it excellently as an incentive to focusing a searchliyht upon habits of mind and [orms o[ action which sometimes are not what they seem...

...Anybody who knows the A B C of politics knows that the word "urged" means "ordered...

...There is nothing new about what they do...

...It would convey a much clearer idea to drop that word and say simply, "Mr...

...it is all as old as politics...

...But on Sunday afternoons he was the guest of aristocratic art protectors, and Trio Fleuri, the three white-clad ladies in the sunny garden, could not have been surpassed by any court painter ~ la mode...

...The great men who have September 4, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 439 the direction of the popular mind, destitute themselves of convictions which would make them fight or die for these "issues," reckon mathematically the precise degree to which an "issue" may affect the local vote in the state of Kentaska or the state of Michinois, and play it up or down, or omit it altogether, accordingly...

...Willebrandt did...

...He thought Work was a cleverer man than he turned out to be...

...Over my own written protest," she says, she was "urged" by that committee "to make that speech...

...It was not fanatical about either prohibition or the putting of churches in politics...

...At present, he is one of Mr...

...As a boy of fifteen he was sent to Holland to study for a post in the Dutch East Indian civil service...

...She says it was not, and divests herself of the fame she got...

...She was an office-holder, and office-holders who are also stump speakers know well what it means when the party bosses "urge" them to make a certain kind of campaign speech, or to do anything else, for that matter...

...In the same way, the publicity was directed by Henry J. Allen, now Senator from Kansas, who, though not a bigoted man, gave considerable attention to arousing prejudice of certain peculiar kinds against Governor Smith...

...The correct preconception, if one is to talk about her doings at all, is that she is a politician...

...She charged him, not with urging, but with editing...

...Hoover's "secretaries," and also one of the managers of the machine in the House of Representatives, where he is supposed to be the President's courier...

...Willebrandt knew all the ins and outs of the game from the beginning, and before she started to play it...

...WiUebrandt's further elucidations...

...I have in mind the ex-governor of a very great state, one who not so long ago had presidential ambitions, who proceeded in this matter exactly as Mrs...

...Hoover (who took an unusually close personal interest, for a candidate, the general management of the recent contest...

...It wanted to stack up the Methodist vote in its pile of chips...

...She does not say this last, but it is the fact, as I will demonstrate...

...Despite this, she was still recalcitrant, for she says it took "two telegrams" from the Hoover managers to get her on the train for Springfield, Ohio, speech in hand...

...The death of a great painter ought to be felt as a bereavement in a country more famous even for its schools of painting than for any of its other manifold glories...

...The first lesson to be drawn from her revelations is that in politics--not in the much-abused municipal politics, but the high-toned, kid-gloved game played in campaign times by Presidents and national committees and senators and Cabinet officers--principle counts for nothing, expediency for everything...

...Of anything possessed of the essential commodity, which is votes...

...many a man whose aim is office-holding gets admitted to the bar as the first step and then begins to pull wires, not for clients but for jobs...

...According to her story, she revels in the friendship of Catholics and has no prejudices whatever against the Church, and there is no reason whatever to doubt her...

...And he properly analyzes his subject, not as a woman, but as a politician.--The Editors...

...Issues," to its mind, were only rakes for voters...

...Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do what the managers tell them to...

...It was not her exploit at all...

...438 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, 1929 THE WILLEBRANDT SEARCHLIGHT By CHARLES WILLIS THOMPSON ELDOM does a professional politician lift the veil and let the audience see the wheels go round, intentionally or unintentionally...

...In the following paper Mr...

...He was a close friend of the deeply religious Derklnderen, who later on as Allebe's successor became one of the lights of his art...

...But this article will courteously but firmly refuse to listen to her on prohibition, and focus its gaze on this byproduct, which might be called, if The Commonweal's length of headline permitted, A Professional Politician Shows Up Professional Politics Good and Plenty...

...Willebrandt, before delivering her speech, submitted it to a Catholic official of the Committee to edit, if he chose...

...Who, then, were the people whom Mrs...

...Holland never cared greatly for her own great men, even when their names were pronounced with veneration throughout the civilized world...

...Willebrandt named no names when she told how her protest was overridden in "two telegrams" from "the National Committee...

...She may not have had such opinions, but she does tell us that she was neither a prohibitionist on principle nor an anti-Catholic on principle...

...During the week he took the dirty beggars from London Bridge to his studio or painted his Before the House of Refuge, in which all the misery of a great town is told...

...Let us divest ourselves of these preconceptions and try to proceed on the theory that her name is Boies Penrose, politician, incidentally to her exposition of her experiences in enforcing the prohibition law, lifts the veil with almost indecent frankness...

...Willebrandt's own opinions were in line with the speech she was called on to make or not...

...President Hoover himself chose Hubert Work to head the Committee, and did it against the wishes of the best politicians in the party, such as Senator George H. Moses, and of the men who had brought about his own nomination, such as James W. Good, now Secretary of War...

...He was a Socialist...

...Mabel Walker HTillebrandt as a woman of letters...

...and his denial is that of a man who, charged with forging a check, should indignantly say, "Why, to say that I robbed a hen-roost is wholly false...

...and (2) that she is a fanatic, ready to light the fagots to carry to the utmost limit her idealistic devotion to what she, being a woman, thinks a sacred cause...

...The managers did not care, either, whether Mrs...

...Nor was she bigoted in religion...

...A word more about her equipment...

...Then only will we be in a mental condition to understand the revelations she makes when she lifts the lid off the political pot and shows us the crawlings of the peevish crustaceans in the hot water...

...The highest aristocracy are united with the Communist intelligentsia, conservative Cabinet ministers with the leaders of the Socialist party, the Catholic episcopate with the heads of other denominations, to honor his genius...

...Besides, the little touches on that subject in her story have the accent of truth...

...But the National Committee cared nothing what her opinions were...

...the irrelevant but confusing fact that her name is Mabel and that her garb includes skirts instead of trousers bewilders the critical faculty...

...If her name were Henry Simpkins or Terry Harrigan instead of Mabel Willebrandt, her political proceedings could be appraised by anybody...

...H/'hether you agree with this diagnosis or not, you are likely to agree that Mr...

...Out of office a stump speaker can be more independent, and the late Bourke Cockran, for example, could and did refuse to make speeches unless his conditions had been accepted...

...But the student of Delft's technical university was far more thrilled by the artistic genius of old Delft masters like Vermeer than by the modern genius of Delft's renowned engineers...

...Toorop was under thirty and his heart was the dominating impulse in all his actions...

...After a wasted year he went to Amsterdam to study under Professor Allebe at the National Academy of Arts...

...No, it had sub-committees to attend to such details...

...Being interpreted, as every politician knows, this meant "until it became bad politics to be known as a drinker, even in moderation...

...It was in the days when a Dutch statesman had wittily remarked: "He who is under thirty and not a Socialist has no heart, but he who is over thirty and still a Socialist has no head...

...but after protesting in writing and getting that second telegraphic order, she obeyed, being, to her own mind, a good soldier...

...National Committee" is a combination of words that sounds mystical to the non-political mind, as such corporate names always do...

...not Republican politics, but any kind of politics...

...It was the exploit of the Republican National Committee...

...More, they reckon in the same mathematical mannermthat of a physician with a stethoscope--on the heart-beats not only of a state or city, but of a religious denomination or a racial bloc or anything else...

...She was so far from being a prohibitionist that she drank herself---in moderation, of coursemuntil the advent of Volsteadism...

...The son of a Scandinavian father and a Javanese mother, Toorop was born in 1858 at Poeworedjo on Jav~, the main island of Holland's colonial empire...

...soulless, crafty, without heart or mind...

...Reading her, you get a close-up of politics with all the wheels clanking, all the forges burning behind the scenes, all the foremen and assistant foremen putting the mechanics at their stools, all the ingredients of the patent medicines brewed in the factory...

...After their Amsterdam years, the two boys went together to Belgium, where Toorop lived in the little village of Machelen...

...Thompson contends that she is neither Little Red Ridiny Hood nor Carrie Nation but a woman who is reporting what she saw in the inner citadel of American politics...

...The advent of Volsteadism coincided with Mrs...

...With his friend, Jules Destr~e, he helped the strikers in the Borinage and was later arrested for having demonstrated in Parliament before the reading of the Speech from the Throne...

...To begin with, we must rid our minds of an irrelevant preconception which invariably plays hob with any discussion of the interesting activities of Mrs...

...The favorite theories have been (I) that she is an innocent, venturing into an unknown field and doing rather odd things because of Charles F. Murphy or John F. Hylan, instead of Mabel Walker Willebrandt...

...Willebrandt's first chance to make good in politics, and it was the .part of wisdom to banish the social glass from her home...

...Toorop (who died nine months after her husband, in January) was herself Anglican, but together they used to go to the Farm Street church, or listen to the liturgical singing at the Oratory...

...She might, for all they cared, have rooted opinions against inciting Methodists to go into politics in their capacity as churchmen...

...Willebrandt...

...She does happen to be a woman, but politics is of no sex...

...And today, when overdeveloped individuality has resulted in countless divisions between classes and cliques, political parties and groups, religious creeds and sects, nothing proves more strongly the super-national eminence which Toorop attained than the committee which is preparing the erection of his statue...

...Could Jules Destr6e have imagined in those Borlnage days that in later years he himself would be a minister of state and his equally hot-blooded Dutch friend, the painter of royalty...

...And this is nothing to his discredit, or hers...

...what it was fanatical about was getting votes by hook or crook...

...Burke's so-called "denial" is no denial...

...For the first time he tasted the social doctrines of the Catholic Church and the impression of England's Cardinal remained with him all his life, as can be seen from the many Manning faces incorporated in his later creations...

...It is needless to say that the whole fortyeight did not meet solemnly in conclave every time a speaker was to be sent anywhere, or every time anything was planned by Chairman Work or Mr...

...She was intent on revealing her adventures as a member of two presidential administrations, nothing more...

...He says he did not "urge" Mrs...

...It projects the image of a vague and inhuman personality...

...It is the oldest story in politics...

...It is that of a chronic and professional office-holder, which term I do not mean to be disrespectful, having known many admirable persons who made a profession of officeholding...

...Mabel Walker Willebrandt, a professional What is the significance of Mrs...

...it wanted a speech made that would copper-rivet that bank of votes beyond reclaim, and in casting about for the right speaker to turn the trick it fixed on Mabel Willebrandt...

...Along with this goes the revelation that the so-called "issues" which so excite the voter quadrennially that he is ready to die for them, or at any rate fight for them, are bunk --carefully calculated bunk...

...Just because this erroneous preconception does bewilder the critical faculty, editorial persons seek to account for the Willebrandt doings on some theory, which they would not do if Barney or Terry did precisely the same things...

...But Toorop was the first artist who found himself at the end of his life already universally recognized as a national figure...

...that virgin outlook of hers...

...Not at all...

...Mrs...

...It is amusing to follow the mockeries of history...

...This is not new...

...they both valued the fun of drinking much less than they did their political position and prospects, and had every moral right to make that choice...

...it was composed of Hoover's managers, headed by his personal nominee for the chairmanship, exSecretary Hubert Work...

...Willebrandt's most famous exploit her address to the Methodist ministers, inciting them to work as Methodists against Alfred E. Smith...

...The numerous memoirs and autobiographies of politicians tell the .gallery nothing on that subject...

...She herself is no hypocrite and does her level best to purge the contemporary mind of its preconceptions of her as being different from other politicians because of the accident that she wears skirts and is called Mabel...

...I am not unwilling to be regarded as, nor perhaps is it unfair, to call me a 'politician,' " she says, and throughout her articles she proceeds to prove it up to the hilt...

...In the next article I shall discuss Mrs...

...Was the National Committee, then, composed of religious bigots or fanatical prohibitionists...

...It was in London that Toorop met Cardinal Manning, whose social ideas made a tremendous impression on the young idealist...

...Newton...

...How little it was bigoted on either subject may be seen from the fact that it included both wets and drys in its membership, and that Mrs...

...Finally, the speech was examined by James Francis Burke, a Catholic, and received his O.K...

...The rest of the Committee consisted of a man from each of the forty-eight states, chosen by the politicians of the state as the best man in it to handle national politics from its angle...

...Willebrandt, not caring to be too explicit except in one case, designates by that comfortable, far-away title of "National Committee...

...She did not want to do it, for some reason she does not state...

...JAN TOOROP By KEES VAN HOEK HEN Jan Toorop died in March, 1928 ' the whole Dutch nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest sons...

...Nobody would have thought, when the young heathen rascal Toorop went abroad with the pious Derkinderen, that the former and not the latter would emerge as the great inspirer of a new religious art...

...The talent nearly suffocated in the cold mathematical atmosphere of Delft blossomed into ripe promise...

...This was not Mrs...

...With most office-holding politicians it would not have taken more than one...

...The chairman of its Speakers' Bureau was Representa440 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, 1929 tire Walter Newton of Minnesota...

...Together with Destr6e and Emile Verhaeren, Tootop came to London, where he stayed from I885 to 1889 . The painter of contrasts--which he remained all his life--he found in the great metropolis ample stimulus for his versatility...

...Hoover's managers...

...Soon after she was admitted to the bar, she held her first office--unremunerative, but a steppingstone to fatter ones--and kept on until Mr...

...What we have seen so far is politics...

...For illustration, there is Mrs...

...This preconception is that she is a woman...

...Herein, for she speaks the solid truth there, lies the value of her revelations about politics from the inside...

...He married, in London, the beautiful Irish Miss Hall...