Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men by Jonathan S. Cullick

Author:Jonathan S. Cullick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

The Pandering Populist

“Don’t Try to Improve Their Minds”

Willie Stark didn’t start out as a fake. He had to learn how to appeal to the people, and the way to do that was to appeal to himself. The humiliation of being used by the state government “big boys” for their own purposes steered him toward sympathy with the rural people, who were being disserved by the political establishment. This humiliation initiated a key moment in his career that led to the emergence of his populist voice.

As a reporter for the Chronicle, Jack was assigned to cover Willie’s first campaign for governor. Jack explains to us that at that time Willie’s speeches were recitations of statistics and data points that he would rehearse in his hotel room as if he were preparing some great oration. While delivering the speeches, he would fumble with sheets of the papers filled with all the data about his tax program or road program. The speeches were boring and ignored.

Then, as Tom Eblen describes the scene, “Burden gives Stark a lesson in political rhetoric that, sadly, is as relevant today as it was then.”1 Burden’s advice to Stark is to keep his speeches simple and limited to slogans—to stop talking about issues and start delivering talking points—in order to appeal not to the intellect but to the emotions. This part of the scene is significant and well known among the novel’s readers: “You tell ’em too much. Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys, and forget the rest of the tax stuff…. Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh…. Or make ’em mad…. It’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”2

In this scene, which Michael Washburn of Louisville Public Radio calls “the novel’s most pivotal scene,” Jack is Willie Stark’s “fixer,” and Willie is the “neophyte.”3 The character Jack Burden could be any one of today’s celebrity campaign strategists—James Carville, Lee Atwater, Mary Matalin, Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, David Plouffe, Jim Messina, or Kellyanne Conway—who script, stage, prepare, and rehearse their candidates for cable television interviews and debate performances and, it must be allowed, for the “spontaneous” moments as well. In the sound bites and photo ops of campaign advertisements and speeches, we see for ourselves candidates who “don’t try to improve their minds.”

The result of putting this advice to practice for Willie Stark is a breakout speech—a “nonspeech”—in which he discovers his populist voice after his aide, Sadie Burke, reveals to him that he is being used by the party establishment only to split the vote. He finds that voice in a sense of shared victimization and resentment with his audience. Standing on the platform humiliated and disoriented (as well as hung over from an atypical binge the previous night), Willie begins by theatrically tossing the written speech aside and telling the story of his own life, a story crafted to connect to the lives of his listeners.

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