All the King’s Men, Chapter One, Pages vii–75, Lynn Cowles

Warren opens his novel by introducing readers to the slow rhythm and varied landscape of the American south. Upon introducing the voice of the narrator, the author instills a sense of overlapping time into the work in noting that the events around which the plot of the novel unfold occurred three years before the writing of the work itself. Jack Burden introduces most of the main characters that will populate the novel until its conclusion, including Willie Stark, his son Tom and wife Lucy, his secretary Sadie, his driver Sugar-Boy, and his colleague Tiny Duffy. The awe of Willie’s constituents at his presence is evident in the trip to Mason City, and in a flashback meeting at Slade’s Place, Jack enlightens readers to the disparity between the naïve person that Willie Stark was before he became a political figure and the person that he is afterwards. Jack’s reveals his isolated worldview when he proclaims himself a “brass-bound Idealist” as he refuses to acknowledge any human presence in his life other than his own. Readers become aware of Willie’s relationship with Sadie as she tells him that Judge Irwin is supporting a candidate not backed by Willie, and on the way to the judge’s house, Jack establishes his strained relationship with his mother and his nostalgic perceptions of Anne and Adam Stanton, childhood friends. The trip to the judge’s house and Jack’s assignment from Willie to discover any indiscretion from the judge’s past displays Willie’s belief in the idea that all men are inherently sinners and sets Jack on the road to personal maturity and the realization of personal responsibility that dominates the rest of the novel.

1. vii.1 Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde

“By curse of theirs man is not so lost that eternal love may not return, so long as hope retaineth aught of green” is from Dante’s La Divina Commedia (Purgatorio III.135) (only the italicized section of the quote appears in the epigraph). Charles Eliot Norton, in his 1920 translation of the work, makes the following note in regards to this line: “While life lasts and man may hope by repentance, however late, to obtain forgiveness of his sins” (21).

2. ix.1 All the King’s Men

An allusion to the nursery rhyme/riddle of Humpty Dumpty, which is defined as “a short, dumpy, hump-shouldered person[…]commonly explained as signifying an egg (in reference to its shape); thence allusively used of persons or things which when once overthrown or shattered cannot be restored.”

3. 1.1 Mason City

There is no existing place in Louisiana called Mason City, although there is a Mason, LA in the north-eastern region of the state which is a tiny village—the U.S. Census Bureau does not count even count its population, and one can only see it on MapQuest if the zoom level is at its highest. Thus the city in the novel is most likely fictional.

4. 1.2 Highway 58

I can’t find the location of this highway (if it even exists as a state route in Louisiana)—US Highway 58 runs from Virginia Beach to Cumberland Gap, TN, so it’s not that one. However, it is interesting that Mason, LA (see number three above) sits in the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development’s fifty-eighth district. Perhaps Warren put those two aspects of Louisiana together to create this setting—but it could be a coincidence. Huey P. Long’s extensive development of the highway system in Louisiana in the late twenties and early thirties makes it fitting that Warren would start his novel on the road.

5. 1.5–6 black line…against the white of the slab

There was no standard for road surface materials in the early twentieth century and crews often built roads with concrete, which could account for the whiteness of the road. In 1926, American Association of State Highway Officials adopted a national system of highway markings according to which “center lines were painted with various colors depending on location, and were either black, white, or yellow.”

6. 2.2 vitriolic

A vitriol is “any of certain hydrated sulfates or sulfuric acid,” and they are compounds ordinarily used in industrial endeavors; therefore, Warren juxtaposes industry and agriculture in describing cotton as vitriolic.

7. 2.7 heliograph

Invented by British scientist and engineer Sir Henry Christopher Mance (1840–1926), the heliograph is “a signaling device that employs two mirrors to gather sunlight and send it to a prearranged spot as a coded series of short and long flashes.” The American army used it primarily to organize campaigns against Native Americans which escalated in the mid-nineteenth century after Congress passed of the Indian Removal Act (1830) to which some tribes retaliated with force.

8. 2.10–11 a skull and crossbones

Before the national highway department developed templates for standard road signs, local governments planted next to the road indicators of dangerous turns or accident areas. Sometimes, as below, they were called “Horror signs.”

9. 2.23 internal combustion…into its own

The development of gasoline engines (a subset of internal combustion engines) was pioneered largely by German and French engineers, but an 1895 United States patent credited American George B. Selden as the inventor of the automobile (although Karl Benz of Germany ignited his first three-wheeled working vehicle in 1885). The first automobile race consisting of more than two vehicles occurred in November 1895, and the personal vehicle became a symbol of American prosperity after the Ford Motor Company started selling Model Ts in 1908.

10. 2.24 Barney Oldfield

(1878–1946), a popular racing driver who set speed records with Henry Ford’s racing team.

11. 2.24–25 organdy and batiste

Thin fabrics.

12. 3.1–2 red-eye

Cheap liquor.

13. 3.5 God have mercy on the mariner

An allusion to the final line from a sonnet written in 1799 by Robert Southey: “O God! have mercy on the mariner!” The poem’s speaker fears for the life of a mariner who sails “the wild sea

that to the tempest raves” (line 8).

14. 3.10 pickaninny

A derogatory term for a black child.

15. 3.12 red hills

In the developed areas of the United States’ piedmont regions, which consist of the low land in between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains and the coastal plains near the Atlantic Ocean, much of the nutrient-rich, dark brown topsoil has been depleted and washed away due to years of agricultural use. What is left behind is the soil more deeply embedded into the earth that has been stained by iron oxides and other minerals washing off of the mountain ranges over hundreds of years, so the soil exhibits a reddish hue. Thus many smaller clusters of hills in the South are known as the “red hills.”

16. 3.11 Billiken

A small statuette designed by a Missouri art teacher in 1908.

Many people collected them, and the likeness was used for

pins, belt buckles, even salt and pepper shakers.

17. 3.13 blackjack

A shrubby oak native to the South.

18. 3.20–21 pine forests…are gone

Wealthy northern executives in the lumber industry recognized the necessity to fell Southern forests in the late nineteenth century when New England’s forests were running short on trees due to two hundred years of logging. During Reconstruction (1865–1877), people in southern states used the term carpetbagger to denote northern politicians who descended on the South in order to make money while destroying the southern way of life by promoting industrialism and integration. When northern lumber barons traveled south to make money from southern timber (they bought a good deal of southern land when people were desperate for money during the 1907 economic crisis), they became known as “carpetbaggers of the woods.” New Orleans was one of the major U.S. centers of the lumber industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so many forests in Louisiana were felled in order to get resources to the city. The decline in logging in the South began in 1909 and continued until “the mid-1930s, [when] logging the southern woods was essentially complete.”

19. 3.25 canted

Inclined.

20. 3.30 sowbelly

Salted pork.

21. 4.1–2 four years of fratricidal strife

The American Civil War (1861–1865).

22. 4.20 July flies

Cicadas.

23. 4.23 Cadillac

Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac (1658–1730) was a French soldier and the founder of Detroit. The Cadillac automobile is names for him and was bought by General Motors in 1908. Cadillac was also the governor of Louisiana ,1711-1716.

24. 5.18 Flit gun

An apparatus used to spray insecticide before the invention of aerosol.

25. 6.1 Papist

A disparaging term for a Roman Catholic. Anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States was heightened in the time before and during the Great Depression (1929–1939) due to the widespread belief that Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were taking American jobs and spreading revolutionary ideologies such as communism and anarchism.

26. 6.2 St. Christopher

The patron saint of travelers, but is no longer an important figure in Catholic mythology—in 1969 “his name was dropped from the calendar of the Roman Catholic church, and his feast day is no longer obligatory.” His legend told that he devoted his life to carrying people across a river, and once, when he was transporting a small boy, he complained that the child was oppressively heavy. Then, Saint Christopher was told that “he had borne upon his back the world and Him who created it; Hence, Christopher (Greek: “Christ-bearer”) is generally represented in art carrying the Christ child on his back.”

27. 8.15 china marbles

Small, round pieces of baked and lacquered ceramic (glass

marbles are more common in the United States).

28. 9.7–8 Palm Beach suit: a suit first tailored by Maine’s

Goodall Worsted Company that became popular in the late

twenties. It had no waistcoat and was therefore more casual

than traditional men’s suits. A 1941 advertisement:

29. 9.19 My study is the heart of the people

Warren’s adaptation of Huey P. Long’s real campaign slogan, “I know the hearts of the people, because I have not colored my own.”

30. 9.28 General Forrest’s cavalrymen

Alluding to the Confederate cavalry unit lead by Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) during the Civil War. While he was widely known as a military genius, Forrest also became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and his troops were responsible for the 1864 massacre of over 300 black civilians following the surrender of Fort Pillow, TN.

31. 9.29 Leather-Face

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that Mark Twain was the first author to use this expression in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): xxviii, 287.

32. 9.30 brogans

Heavy shoes.

33. 10.5 Malaciah

Malachi was the name of an Old Testament prophet, the author of the Book of Malachi. The name means “messenger” in Hebrew.

34. 10.9 grabblen

A southern idiomatic form of the present participle of “grabble”: to feel or search with the hands, to grope about.

35. 10.21 Tough tiddy

Tiddy is perhaps a corruption of tid-bit, meaning small or tiny. The phrase here is a common expression indicating a difficult situation.

36. 10.26–27 keep his tail over the dashboard

When horses properly pulled wagons at a relatively fast speed, when the process was persisting correctly, they kept their heads up and their tails over the dashboard of the wagon they pulled.

37. 11.10 summer complaint

Diarrhea.

38. 12.31 after the bit is in and he’s full of beans

Beans were used as fodder for horses; thus, the horse has energy and the bit puts him on edge.

39. 13.2 grass roots

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that this term first became applied to politics n 1912, during the Progressive Era (1911–1925), when politicians who represented the interests of the poor population (the people who toiled in the grass) particularly in the mid-western and some southern states, began to advance into executive and legislative offices.

40. 14.16 catalpa trees

Native to North America, people use the worms that inhabit these trees as fish bait.

41. 15.6–10 ‘There are three things…it is enough’

Proverbs 30:15–16. The text of the verses read as follows: (15) “The leech has two daughters. ‘Give! Give!’ they cry. “There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, ‘Enough!’: (16) Sheol, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water, and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’” Sheol is Hebrew for “the grave.”

42. 15.10 Solomon

The Book of Proverbs’ superscription mentions Solomon, the wise tenth century king of Judea, and is written under the precedent of his wisdom, though most of the sayings existed before his time.

43. 15.28 get shet

Get rid of.

44. 19.2 needle beer

During Prohibition (1920–1933), businesses sold non-alcoholic beer to which some barkeeps would illicitly add moonshine. I assume that many people used gin, which is inexpensively distilled from juniper berries (a tree in the evergreen family), hence the term, “needle.”

45. 19.14 cow patty

A mound of cow dung.

46. 19.22 cribhouse

A saloon, dive bar, or brothel.

47. 19.23 protection account

Formal protection rackets (versus understood, “under-the-table” agreements made between people to avoid persecution for illegal activities throughout history) originated in the United States in the late nineteenth century, as the development of official policing progressed following the establishment of the first American police department in New York City in 1844.

48. 20.7 effluvium

A noxious vapor.

49. 20.23–24 homme sensuel

French for “sensual man,” or a man rooted in the physical, sensory world; that is, not cultivated or highly intellectual.

50. 21.10 jumping beans

The Oxford English Dictionary records the first English documentation of the jumping effect cause by moth larva within a Mexican cactus plant in 1889.

51. 21.26 breeding paddock

An enclosure that serves as a designated area for mating farm animals.

52. 23.17 dead pan

An expressionless or impassive face, especially one that is deliberately assumed.

53. 23–24.31–1 St. Regis Hotel

Although St. Regis is now a multi-national luxury hotel chain, until 1999, there was only one location, in New York City.

54. 24.27 albumen

The white of an egg, which contains the majority of its protein, the building block of muscle, thus strength.

55. 25.6 Campbellite

A follower of West Virginia religious leader Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), who founded a small reformist group, the Disciples of Christ.

56. 26.14 the toad bears a jewel in its forehead

“Sweet are the vses of aduersitie / Which like the toad, ougly and venemous, / Weares yet a precious Iewell in his head”. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1, Lines 12–14.

57. 26.17 Repeal

Congress repealed Prohibition in 1933 with the passing of the Twenty-first Amendment in order to repeal the Eighteenth, which enforced prohibition in 1920.

58. 26.20 the jack

American slang term for money, first recorded in 1890.

59. 26.27 poison

An American colloquial reference to alcoholic drink, first recorded in 1805. Hence, “What’s your poison?”

60. 27.7–8 give it the hammer

Before more modern methods of stunning livestock before slaughter, such as electrocution, gassing, or the use of a gun, people would hit cows in between their eyes with a heavy hammer in order to render them unconscious before they were killed.

61. 30.3 Find out…get a lawyer down

Willie’s devotion to his constituents mirrors the philosophy behind the leaders of the New York City political machine, Tammany Hall, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Politicians secured the votes of their voters by providing basic forms of social insurance such as disability benefits and court services since legislators had passed no laws regarding welfare systems or judicial rights at the time.

62. 37.26 floating island of Gulliver

Refers to the floating island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

63. 37.27 carpet in the Arabian Nights

Refers to a prince’s flying carpet in 1001 Arabian Nights, which was first translated into English in the eighteenth-century.

64. 41.28 thunder-mug

A chamber-pot.

65. 43.20 loblolly

A mud-hole.

66. 49.23 mourning dove

A common pigeon found throughout the Americas. It has a plaintive call, and its wings whistle when it flies. You can listen to its call at this website:

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Mourning_Dove.html.

67. 51.4 blue serge

Serge is a woolen fabric “often referred to as worn by the

poorer classes (both men and women), perhaps rather on

account of its durability than of its price, which seems not

to have been extremely low.”

68. 56.17 jalousies

Shutters, as in external window coverings.

69. 56.30 adenoidal sibilance

Glandular hissing; that is, soft snoring.

70. 56.31 it was all legal

Common law marriages were never adopted in Louisiana, so a man and a woman who lived together must have been officially married to one another.

71. 57.24 Panama

Refers to a Panama hat, woven of straw and typically circled by a black band. They became hugely popular after the Spanish American War (1898), during which time the American government bought large numbers of the hats from Ecuadorian weavers for soldiers to wear.

72. 59.3–4 a brace of Republican Congressmen to be caddy for him

After the Civil War, the North and South were still largely divided in terms of politics. Republicans were detested in the southern states for their role in the abolition of slavery and for their failure to create order during Reconstruction (1865–1877). The South remained solidly democratic until the Civil Rights Era, when Democratic leaders began to push the integrationist platform.

73. 59.13 scimitar

A short, curved, single-edged sword, typically used by Turks and Persians.

74. 59.13–14 High Grand Shriner

A leader in the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, an American social and charitable organization modeled after the British Freemason tradition.

75. 65.9 Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) was an Italian printmaker, architect and art theorist whose massive prints of classical structures, such as the Colosseum, unparalleled in their accuracy infused with romantic grandeur, contributed to a growing interest in the Neoclassical movement.

76. 68.11 chess pie

A pie with custard-like filling.

77. 70.5 single-footing

A particular gait of a horse that must be taught.

78. 70.6 toddies

Drinks made with whiskey, hot water and sugar.

79. 70.26 bluebottle flies

A subgroup of the blow fly, bluebottle flies are large and a metallic blue, green, or black in color. They are noisy at night and although “adult blow flies feed on a variety of materials[…]the larvae of most species are scavengers that live on carrion or dung.”

80. 71.3–4 he who touches the pitch shall be defiled

Ecclesiasticus 13:1. The following line in the book states, “And he that hath fellowship with a proud man shall become like unto him.” Ecclesiasticus is a proverbial book of wisdom rejected as a legitimate biblical work in the canons of Judaism and Christianity, but it is accepted in the Roman Catholic canon.

81. 75.1–3 Man is conceived in sin…

Psalms 51:5 states, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”