The Need of Money

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946)
From Booth Tarkington: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

Interview: Thomas Mallon on Booth Tarkington: “He sees things through to their bitter, true conclusion” (Library of America)

“What Theodore Roosevelt Read in a Two-Year Period” (Micah Cobb, Thinking and Believing)

Previous Story of the Week selections
⦁ “Great Men’s Sons,” Booth Tarkington
⦁ “Running for Governor,” Mark Twain

Buy the book
Booth Tarkington: Novels & Stories
The Magnificent Ambersons | Alice Adams | In the Arena | 678 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $25.00

“State House, Indianapolis, Ind.,” c. 1904. Photochrom print by the Detroit Printing Co. From the Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress.

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In December 1904 Theodore Roosevelt invited Booth Tarkington to the White House for lunch. Roosevelt was a fan of the author’s books (especially his debut novel, The Gentleman from Indiana) and he had been reading Tarkington’s new political stories as they appeared in McClure’s and Everybody’s magazines. Roosevelt indicated to Tarkington that he enjoyed the stories, particularly for the realism behind their satire. But then, to Tarkington’s surprise, the President maintained that the stories were perhaps too realistic and cynical and chided him for exposing the darkest aspects of politics.

“I thought that perhaps if people could be made to realize some of the worst things that do go on they’d want to remedy them,” Tarkington said in defense. “You’re absolutely wrong!” Roosevelt vigorously interrupted, and then delivered a lengthy harangue that Tarkington attempted to reproduce in his 1928 memoir The World Does Move. “You’re helping to crystallize the feeling that politics is no ‘business for a gentleman,’” the President insisted. “Anything that encourages asses in their asininity is harmful; but it’s infinitely more damaging to give able young men reason to say, ‘Politics is too dirty; I’ll go into the law or into business, and leave it to the swine to run my country!’” Despite their rather one-sided conversation, the two men ended their meal on friendly terms, and Tarkington described the lecture as “entirely benevolent.” Besides, he added, “it is possible to look back upon [Roosevelt’s arguments] now and believe that they were at least a little prophetic.”

Tarkington had begun working on his first two political stories the previous year, when he was a state legislator in Indiana. After he came down with typhoid fever and was forced to resign from office, he wrote three more and gathered them in the collection In the Arena: Tales from Political Life. (See our introduction to the previous Story of the Week selection “Great Men’s Sons” to learn about the genesis of the sixth story in the collection.)

“The Need of Money,” the third story he wrote specifically for the book, was included in a special election issue of McClure’s in November 1904—the month before Roosevelt called Tarkington to the White House. The juxtaposition of the story’s bleak and hopeless view of the legislative process and the magazine’s in-depth coverage of the presidential election, including profiles of both Roosevelt and his Democratic opponent, Alton B. Parker, probably aroused Roosevelt’s indignation. Tarkington biographer James Woodress speculates that the central character of the story could have been based on any one of the “nine members of the house who offered no bills and remained inconspicuous and inarticulate” during Tarkington’s months in office. “Moreover,” Woodress adds, “the sordid dealing of the railroad lobby, which had been active during the session, was taken directly from the author’s experience. He had served on the Committee for the Affairs of the City of Indianapolis and in that capacity had fought unsuccessfully to force the railroads to elevate their tracks through Indianapolis.”

Weeks after the book was published Roosevelt wrote to Tarkington again with further thoughts now that all of the stories had appeared as a collection. His letter was filled with praise. “I like In the Arena so much that I must write to tell you so. I particularly like the philosophy of the Preface.” The “comedies and pitiful tragedies,” he concluded, “are just such as I myself have seen.” Tarkington immediately sent a response. “The Preface was almost directly your suggestion . . . [I hoped] that if you happened to see it you would believe that the Professor was a least trying to do his best.” And indeed, the book’s three-page Preface presents an “old-timer, a lean, retired pantaloon,” who offers up some “wisdom” echoing many of the arguments made by Roosevelt at the luncheon:

Looking back upon it all, what we most need ‘in politics’ is more good men. Thousands of good men ARE in; and they need the others who are not in. More would come if they knew how MUCH they are needed. . . . The exquisite who says that politics is ‘too dirty a business for a gentleman to meddle with’ is like the woman who lived in the parlour and complained that the rest of her family kept the other rooms so dirty that she never went into them. . . .

It seems an odd thing to me that so many men feel they haven’t any time for politics; can’t put in even a little, trying to see how. . . . Well, in politics, the country needs ALL the men who have any patriotism — NOT to be seeking office, but to watch and to understand what is going on. It doesn’t take a great deal of time; you can attend to your business and do that much, too. When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.

Notes: The phrase sea-green Incorruptible (used on page 568) was an epithet applied to the French revolutionary Robespierre. The men claimed as Democratic Party forebears on page 579 are Stephen A. Douglas, U.S. senator, 1847–61, and a candidate for president in 1860; Samuel Tilden, New York governor, 1875–76, and a candidate for president in 1876; Thomas Hendricks, Indiana governor, 1873–77, and U.S. vice president in 1885; politician and statesman Henry Clay (1777–1852), who was a member and co-founder of both the National Republican and Whig Parties; and George Washington, who did not belong to a political party.

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Far back in his corner on the Democratic side of the House, Uncle Billy Rollinson sat through the dragging routine of the legislative session, wondering what most of it meant. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Great Men’s Sons

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946)
From Booth Tarkington: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“Hoosiers: The Lost World of Booth Tarkington” (Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic)

“Then and Now: English Hotel and Opera House” (Joan Hostetler, Historic Indianapolis)

Previous Story of the Week selections
⦁ “The Hiartville Shakespeare Club,” Belle Marshall Locke
⦁ “Carmen,” Ring Lardner
⦁ “Xingu,” Edith Wharton

Buy the book
Booth Tarkington: Novels & Stories
The Magnificent Ambersons | Alice Adams | In the Arena | 678 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $25.00

Sarah Bernhardt in L'Aiglon. Hand-colored photographic postcard printed in France. Image courtesy of the Flickr account of European Film Star Postcards.

Sometime during the early years of the twentieth century, Booth Tarkington was walking down a street when he ran into an acquaintance of his youth who had since become a professor at an eastern university. “Let me see, what is it you are doing now?” he asked his old friend. “Oh, yes, I remember. You are doing the serious.”

In March 1901 Tarkington and his fellow Indianapolis residents submitted themselves to an evening of “doing the serious” when English’s Opera House hosted an appearance by the theater company led by the renowned French actors Sarah Bernhardt and Constant-Benoît Coquelin, then on one of their many tours across America. The productions staged by the extraordinarily popular Bernhardt were always performed in French—whether she stepped into the role of Jeanne d'Arc or of Cleopatra or even of Hamlet. For this performance, she played the lead role in L’Aiglon, the latest historical drama by the French playwright Edmond Rostand, remembered today as the author of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Local newspapers across the country had been drumming up excitement for the show since the French production of L’Aiglon made its U.S. premiere in New York in November of the previous year. An English-language performance of the play, starring the American actress Maude Adams, had debuted in New York only a month earlier, in October, and it would arrive for a three-night engagement in Indianapolis two weeks after the Bernhardt-Coquelin version. Comparing the two productions, the New York critic whose review was reprinted prominently in the Indianapolis Journal pronounced the French version as the one to see and said that comparing Bernhardt to Adams was like comparing a leopard to a kitten. “In a word,” he proclaimed, “[Bernhardt’s] production was a grand and masterly success.”

Bernhardt starred as the title character (“the Eaglet”), Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte, the son of Napoléon. Living in Austria for most of his life, François Bonaparte (Napoléon II) was known as Franz and by his title the duke of Reichstadt. The play’s hero, encouraged by significant Bonapartist support, must decide whether to return to France to install himself as emperor in continuation of his father’s line. In the sixth and last act, François Napoléon dies in Vienna while a description of his christening in Paris during his father’s reign is read aloud.

Tarkington’s next short story, “The Old Gray Eagle,” appeared a few months later, and it was inspired by the performance at English’s Opera House—or, more precisely, by the reactions of fellow theatergoers sitting through a six-act play composed entirely in rhymed alexandrines (twelve-syllable couplets) in a language most of the audience didn’t understand. The story pits the young Fiderson, who sees the production as an opportunity for Hoosiers to “get in touch” with Art (with that crucial capital A), against shopkeeper Tom Martin, who struggles doggedly with the plot and characters and finds similarities between the “Dook of Reishtod” and the son of a famous state politician. Tarkington treats Fiderson’s urban snobbery with the same gentle mockery he directed at the professor-friend he encountered on the street.

Tarkington himself came from a family of politicians. His father had served as the governor’s private secretary before becoming a state legislator and, later, a circuit court judge. Booth’s uncle (Newton Booth, for whom he was named) was first the governor of California and then a U.S. Senator. “A Hoosier will talk politics after he is dead,” Tarkington wrote in his first novel, A Gentleman from Indiana, but he apparently decided not to wait that long. The year after he published “The Old Gray Eagle,” he followed in his father’s footsteps and ran as a Republican for the Indiana House of Representatives, handily winning the election in November 1902. Midway through his first year in office, however, he suffered from a protracted case of typhoid fever (during which he lost eighty pounds) and gave up his political career.

Just before he fell sick, while he was still active as a legislator, Tarkington wrote two short stories inspired by his political experiences. He would end up writing three more over the next eighteen months, and in 1905 he collected them as In the Arena: Stories of Political Life. Tarkington rounded out the volume by adding as the concluding story “The Old Gray Eagle,” with its tangential political setting, under a new title, “Great Men’s Sons”; we present it here as our Story of the Week selection. In the Arena has been reprinted in full in the latest addition to the Library of America series, along with Tarkington’s two Pulitzer Prize–winning novels, The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams.

Notes: The anecdote that opens this introduction is recounted in Robert Cortes Holliday’s study Booth Tarkington (1918).

Tom Martin makes a few passing allusions to scenes of Rostand’s play that might need explanation. Wagram was the site the site in Austria of a battle Napoleon won in 1809 and is the setting for the fifth act. In act 4 the play’s hero asks the young woman Thérèse to meet him for a tryst (which never takes place) at his hunting lodge. The diplomat Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, chancellor and foreign minister of Austria for much of first half of the nineteenth century, is a prominent character in the play. The christening mentioned at the end of the story is a reference to the concluding scene noted above, in which François Napoléon dies while a description of his christening in Paris is read aloud.

The last words of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are said to have been “More light! More light!” William Marcy Tweed (Boss Tweed) was a New York City Democratic politician and leader of the party’s Tammany Hall political machine. With others, Boss Tweed swindled millions of dollars from the city treasury and was convicted on charges related to his corrupt activities in 1873. On his deathbed, Melville Bickner makes a joking reference to Millard Fillmore, who became president as a Whig on the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850, lost his party’s nomination in 1852, and then lost in 1856 as a Know Nothing candidate in his only presidential campaign.

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Mme. Bernhardt and M. Coquelin were playing “L’Aiglon.” Toward the end of the second act people began to slide down in their seats, shift their elbows, or casually rub their eyes. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.