OCR Text |
Show TWO WESTERNERS ' j I sat in a high apartment building, in Washington at night and looked j out over that city from which a na- tion is governed, meditating on whatj lay beneath me until I got to talking; to myself and that is why I said: Of all pictures created of paper and ink, which is most familiar to the individuals who go to make up that homogeneous people 117 mil-j lion strong all speaking the same, language and calling themselves Am-1 ericans. ! I called for an answer until I felt that some psychic man must have re- j sponded: "Well, Mr. Bones, which' picture is most familiar." and I replied: re-plied: j The picture of a dome emerging ' from the trees of a gentle rising hill in fact, the dome of yonder Capitol Capi-tol Building where the light at its tip indicates that Congress is meeting meet-ing in night session on the people's business. That building has come to be almost al-most synonymous with Old Glory, to stand for that world figure which is the young giant among nations and at the same time the grandfather grandfath-er of free institutions impersonating the government of the United States. The Capitol yonder, I thought, is the fountain source, of government. From beneath it bubbles the double spring of beneficent laws, flowing from the house and senate and water ing all the world that lies beneath the flag. Who, I wonder are the individuals individu-als sitting at the headwaters there and regulating the flow of that stream. Who today are the most powerful men on Capitol Hill at Washington. To get the answer to that question ques-tion I made a week-long canvass and this was the result Smoot of Utah, and Modell, of Wyoming: Smoot in the Senate and Modell in the House. Remembering the days of Aldrich ami Payne, of Crane and- Cannon. I concluded that the center of influence influen-ce was moving west. Checking over the biographies of the two, I found that, contrary to the general run of these self-prepared sketches, neither was a lawyer, neither had taught school, neither made any claim to having been a farmer. I would go to see these two men and ask each how he got where he is. Senator Reed Smoot, I knew, is an apostle in the Mormon church of Utah. Ut-ah. He has been in the senate for eighteen years and is elected for another ano-ther six-year term. He has reached the age of 59, J six feet two and weigns 1UU pounds .Physically he is a remarkable specimen of manhood., big-boned, vigorous, carrying no undue un-due flesh. Since the day of his birth, he says he has never known an illness. ill-ness. He is blue-eyed, well thatched with stubby hair, has a close oronped mustache, is old American stock. Smoot is chairman of the joint committee of Congress which has in hand the reorganization of t'm government departments. This means that he is the efficiency exnert who will, within the year, rearrange and resrroup all those bureaus through which the government functions. He is chairman of the jo'nt committee com-mittee on printing which says wbr-.t may and what may not be nnblish-ed nnblish-ed by government agencies Some of the departments are likely to say that he is an autocratic and unsympathetic unsym-pathetic czar, that he is not. a competent com-petent judge of the matter tint a scientific bureau should print. He is chairman of the Senate eotn-mittee eotn-mittee on expenditures in the Interior Inter-ior Department. He is second man on the all powerful committee on r-n-propriations and pensions. II" ranks third on the committer, on (ir-ipr-n fourth on civil son-joe, sixth on territories. ter-ritories. T asked Senator Smoot how he eained such power in th" Upper ' House. He said he rlid it bv v r.-'--ing. He stated I'-n there was just lone thing to which he crerli'rrl evi success he had mjJp in life work. He protested himself a plain '"an with a commonplace mind. I asked this man how manv hours a dav he worker. IT" en id that he !'uck at it 1 fi tiourc a day but runtimes run-times he worVer IS ITe never sc.. .- for golf or ba-eball. He believes that the theory that sb-'-i.i ,.t ... i(t eertain time for rr-'-r -ri t ion is Hi irf. fie. He has never pj:.v(., ;,nd never ( continued to page 4 RKED SMOOT (continued from page one) taken a vacation. To all appearances he is the lit! est man ot 59 in the Senate. Sen-ate. He recommends seven hours sleep in twenty-four as recreation, j He snaps oil' consciousness with the j light, sleeps until he is normally re-j freshed, gels up and goes to work aga-n. When Senator Smoot, first cc.me to Congress tr: was put on the committee commit-tee on claims. It was the dullest, dryest assignment to be l" There were thousands of P"r: ; . praying for relief by the govcr tiv nt from some loss, real or imujI.K JL. Each claim was fortified by endless sot-tings sot-tings forth facts, arguments, hearings. hear-ings. No other man ever dug thro these claims as did the young Senator from Utah. He worked on them 16 hours a day. So it came to pass that when a case came up, Smoot would be asked the gist of it. He would set forth the facts, baldly, prosaically, but correctly. correct-ly. It has not often happened in IS years that anybody has disproved Smoot's facts. j The older Senators began to notice that this man was very useful. He was a great digester of intellectual food that was unpalatable to the majority. ma-jority. Finallly the time came when the tariff was to be revised. The Al-drich Al-drich tariff commission. something more than a decade ago. made one of the most exhaustive studies of that complicated subject ever undertaken l Smoot was made a member of that commission. He ground those 1G 1 hours a day for years on tariff. He came to be a walking encyclopedia of tariff schedules. He could reel them off, past, present and proposed, without end. He was instinctively a high protectionist. Though his father was a Kentucky Democrat, he had chosen for himself the Republican Repub-lican fold. His views agreed v.-! Mi those of the men who dominated the Senate. He proved very useful. His knowledge was a matter of great satisfaction to his associates. They did not need to look up the facts. They asked Smoot. Gradually Smoot has been gathering gather-ing to himself more and more power. pow-er. It comes because he is willing to shoulder the work. Few Senators work hard enough to master the detail de-tail of the government machine. Mr. Smoot does. He is a horse for work. He accepts any work put upon him. works until he gets on top of it, adds that much power to himself. SO', today., he is sometimes called the general manager of the United States. It is undoubtedly true that he has more to do with the actual operation of the government than any other man on Capitol Hill. I asked Senator Smoot where he got his idea of happiness through work. He said that his mother taught it to him. She had come to Utah with j the early migration of the Mormons The settlers came on foot. His mother moth-er was a girl of eighteen. She walked and pushed a hand cart from the. Mis souri River to Utah. There she took vigorous part in carving an empire ' out of the- plains. She believed in work, taught it tr her boy. When he was in grammar school he worked Saturdays and hol idays in a woolen mill near by. He j worked awhile on one machine and ! awhile on another. He found it a I lot of fun to master one machine af- ter another. Boys love machinery. 1 He believes he had as good a time as ' the boys who played ball and went , fishing. When he was 22 he became manager of this same mill and ran it for many years. In the interim he jhad completed college before he was ' eighteen, had managed a general store for four years, had become the : proprietor of a drug store which he still owns. Long ago he became a ,;man of independent means. |