National Affairs: Turn of the Wheel

Key Pittman liked straight shooting, straight talk, straight whiskey. Despite his 68 years, he was tall, lean and lithe as a whip. It was said that he kept flat-waisted by bowing gracefully. He had plantation manners—the soft-voiced courtesy of his Vicksburg, Miss, breeding. But he was tough, too, in the tradition of Westerners, never more dangerous than at his extreme politest, with a laconic wit that shot from the hip.

The Senate’s champion of silver was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, of U. S. aristocracy. His mother, Catherine Key Pittman, was of the Marshalls of Virginia, and descendant of Francis Scott Key; his father, William Buckner Pittman, had as ancestors the Pittmans of North Carolina, the Buckners of Kentucky. It was a magazine cover that made a frontiersman out of wealthy, idle, spoiled young Key Pittman—perhaps the last old frontiersman to sit in the U. S. Senate. One day in 1892 (he was 20) he was leaning on his cue in a Tuscaloosa, Ala. poolroom, when he saw on a chair a brilliantly colored hunting magazine, its cover an elk’s head. He decided to go to the Olympic forests of Washington to shoot elk. Next day he left for Vicksburg, settled up with his guardian, set off for the Northwest. He had no particular goal, and only one letter of introduction. A friend of his father’s had remembered that in his youth in Georgia he had known a brilliant town dandy, one Dude Lewis, now supposedly out West practicing law.

Young Pittman made inquiries at Seattle. Dude Lewis was well known. The slim Southerner was straightway taken in to a law office that was as luxuriously civilized as Seattle was rough and pioneer; greeted by a redhaired, red-bearded man of extreme elegance—James Hamilton Lewis, then only a dude lawyer, but soon to be a Congressman from Washington, later a Senator from Illinois.

Key Pittman lost interest in elk. He sank his whole inheritance in boomtown lots in Seattle. He listened eagerly to tales of a gold strike in the Klondike. He headed north. In the Klondike he was soon chopping wood for a living. Chasing whispers of gold in Alaska, Pittman mushed over the snow wastelands to Nome, to find that the tough guys were running affairs. But vigilantes took over, and Key Pittman got his first real job: he became Nome’s first prosecuting attorney. By 1901 he had absorbed just enough law to give him a belief he always cherished: that laws, unless constantly amended or discarded, serve only to interfere with common sense.

He married Mimosa Gates, a prospector’s sister, soon headed south for California. In California came the whisper again: Gold in Nevada! Key Pittman arrived in Tonopah, Nev. by stagecoach, a journey colder and more hazardous than any Klondike trip. That was 1902. “Winter of Death,” when men dug as many holes for graves as for gold. Pittman missed both, settled down as Tonopah’s legal light. By 1910 he was restless again. Congress didn’t seem to understand mining—especially silver mining. He went to the Senate in 1912, was re-elected in 1916, 1922, 1928, 1934 and again last week.

Key Pittman had gone far: the spoiled Vicksburg boy was president pro tempore of the Senate, chairman of its top committee, Foreign Relations, a major voice in U. S. foreign policy. Still a believer in directness, he spoke his mind with no feeling for statesmanlike discretion. When he felt exuberant sometimes he was downright careless with words. He once called Hitler “a coward.” He endorsed sanctions against Italy: “Why shoot a man when you can starve him to death?” On a quiet Thursday morning in December 1938, he typed out a brief statement of U. S. foreign policy:

“1) The people of the U. S. do not like the Government of Japan.

“2) The people of the U. S. do not like the Government of Germany.

“3) The people of the U. S., in my opinion, are against any form of dictatorial government, Communistic or Fascistic.

“4) The people of the U. S. have the right and the power to enforce morality and justice in accordance with peace treaties with us. And they will. Our Government does not have to use military force and will not unless necessary.”

For a long time the air was thick with wounded feelings, with horror at such disregard of punctilious protocol. But that week Adolf Hitler, who had been sounding a harsh A for many days, was silent. It was believed that he understood such language. Up to last week the simple, tactless little statement had not yet been improved on.

In his 1940 campaign Key Pittman tired easily and often, returning many an evening worn out to his small suite—in Tonopah’s five-story brick Mizpah Hotel. Four days before Election he was taken to the Washoe General Hospital, on Reno’s outskirts. On Nov. 5 he was reelected, by 6,000 votes, over Republican Samuel Platt. But Key Pittman was dying. His heart was feeble. An oxygen tent kept life in him for several hours. Just after midnight, as Sunday began, he died.

Soon Senate attendants will remove the little engraved golden plate from his second-row mahogany desk, on the aisle. Off the blue-baize-covered table of the Foreign Relations Committee room will come the little golden plate, stamped with his name. In the leather chair where he presided, where he wrestled out foreign problems with the late William E. Borah, will sit a new chairman—almost certain to be Walter F. George, of Vienna, Ga.

Pompous Senator George, on whom all clothes look formal, is a grey, humorless, urbane man. He will preside over the committee’s deliberations during the grave days that lie ahead. Franklin Roosevelt will be forced to deal directly, week after week, with the man he tried to purge from the Senate in 1938. No one accuses Senator George of being vengeful; but neither is he forgetful.

Washington, with its eyes on the funeral of Key Pittman, waited to see what this full turn of the wheel would mean.