All the King's Men

“But, then, who the hell is this in the back seat of the big black Cadillac that comes ghosting through the town? Why, this is Jack Burden. Don’t you remember little Jack Burden? He used to go out in his boat in the afternoon on the bay to fish, and come home and eat his supper and kiss his beautiful mother good night and say his prayers and go to bed at nine-thirty.”

Jack struggles throughout the novel with his self-perception, unable to understand and accept how he changes over time. When he returns to his hometown in Chapter 1 with Willie to pressure Judge Irwin, he thinks of how his career in politics has robbed him of his childhood innocence.

“It was a weird mixture of facts and figures on one hand (his tax program, his road program) and of fine sentiments on the other hand (a faint echo, somewhat dulled by time, of the quotations copied out in the ragged, boyish hand in the big ledger).”

At first, Willie is not an exciting political candidate, relying on facts to captivate the electorate rather than impassioned speeches and interesting stories. It shows how he initially has faith in the people and the government to listen to reason and vote in their own best interests.

“Whatever a hick wants he’s got to do for himself. Nobody in a fine automobile and sweet-talking is going to do it for him. When I come back to run for Governor again, I’m coming on my own and I’m coming for blood. But I’m getting out now.”

After Willie discovers that his gubernatorial campaign is a vote-stealing ploy, he exits the race and officially establishes himself as an outsider candidate for the next race. He will run to avenge the manipulation done to him and repay his enemies for thinking so little of himself and the people he represents.

“In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn’t be anything but the whiff of smoke.”

Willie does not forget his enemies easily and always finds a way to control and manipulate them. Tiny Duffy, one of the first people Willie identifies as an enemy, gains in prominence from his proximity to Willie, but suffers from the knowledge that Willie can end his career at any moment.

“You grow up with somebody, and he is a success, a big-shot, and you’re a failure, but he treats you just the way he always did and hasn’t changed a bit.”

The defining feature of the relationship between Adam and Jack is that their status as childhood friends grants them a special friendship in which they can ignore many negatives of adulthood. Despite being on different career paths with different levels of success, they ignore their differences, remembering the easiness of childhood.

“What they’re after is to break the administration. They don’t care about Byram, except so far as it’s human nature to hate to think somebody else is getting something when you aren’t.”

Willie’s primary worry with Byram’s impeachment isn’t focused on the actual crime committed but instead on the opportunities the impeachment will open up. He believes that if Byram is impeached, the administration will begin to crumble as other officials are targeted. Therefore, he works to protect Byram, hoping to protect the administration as a whole.

“There is nothing like the roar of a crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in every man in the crowd but is not himself. The roar would swell and rise and fall and swell again, with the Boss standing with his right arm raised straight to Heaven and his red eyes bulging.”

Willie becomes a populist figure in his state, capturing the strong support of the people. When he gives this speech on a tour arguing against the impeachment brought against him, Jack witnesses the populist swell of the crowd, as if there is a bigger movement sweeping through the people.

“Of course, it would be more effective politically for the Governor to let the matter come to a vote, but he was willing to let you do it the easy way, particularly since there’s a good deal of unrest in the city about the matter.”

Willie becomes an expert in blackmail, using the widespread corruption around him to increase his power. In his efforts to halt the impeachment against him, he blackmails enough of his opponents to ensure that the impeachment vote will fail. Always looking to make politically expedient deals, he offers the leader of the impeachment an opportunity to stop it behind closed doors rather than experience the humiliation of letting it publicly fail on the floor.

“Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret.”

Jack struggles with facts and the truth throughout All the King’s Men and this excerpt demonstrates why. He is good at finding facts, but he struggles to assemble those facts into a cohesive narrative with a single, identifiable meaning. This is what Willie does exceptionally well, and it is the source of his power.

“But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once, not if you are a student of history. If you found it all at once, there would be no opportunity to use your technique.”

Jack’s role as Willie’s blackmailer comes from his work studying history in school. For Jack, this work is an art, a whole process by which he must hunt and uncover the truth. He takes his time, methodically strategizing and searching, demonstrating patience.

“Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness.”

Throughout the novel, Jack struggles with finding meaning in the world around him, and is wary of religion, particularly when discussing it with his father. In the way he arranged the world in his head, Jack finds God to be meaningless, and this sentiment is reflected later in his perception of the nihilistic Great Twitch.

“I asked myself: If a man needs money, where does he get it? And the answer is easy: He borrows it. And if he borrows it, he has to give security? Most likely his house in Burden’s Landing or his plantation up the river.”

As Jack searches for information on Judge Irwin, he employs his art of historical searching and formulates a targeted plan to discover Judge Irwin’s misdeeds. He thinks of who Judge Irwin is as a person, coming up with motives that would make him commit a crime, and finding that it is most likely money, thinks of situations that would push him to need money, giving him direction in his search.

“[I]t is because he is Adam Stanton, the son of Governor Stanton and the grandson of Judge Peyton Stanton and the great-grandson of General Morgan Stanton, and he has lived all his life in the idea that there was a time a long time back when everything was run by high-minded, handsome men wearing knee breeches and silver buckles.”

Adam is guided by his own notion of what politicians should be like, informed by his father and ancestors. This idea leads him to be suspicious of Willie and sensitive to any criticisms or hints of corruption within the hospital, making him a difficult person to work with and leading Jack to manipulate his perception of politicians in exchange for compliance.

“I gave them to him—those things—and he read them and then he just stood there—he didn’t move—he didn’t make a sound—and his face was white as a sheet and I could hear him breathing. Then I touched him—and he looked at me—he looked at me a long time. Then he said—he looked at me and said, ‘You.’ That was what he said, ‘You.’ Looking at me.”

When Anne shares the information about the corruption of their father, Governor Stanton, with Adam, he does not react well. His whole notion of what a real politician should be is shattered, and it fundamentally changes his memories of his father and his relationship with Anne, as he blames her for the information.

“But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass.”

Jack speaks frequently about how the self is informed by relationships with others, and he believes this when it comes to love as well. In his romance with Anne, Jack believes that their love for each other shapes their individuality, making them inextricably connected.

“For certainly if Anne and I had been trapped in that room, my mother and Governor Stanton would have set us up in matrimony, even if grimly and grudgingly. And then whatever else might have happened, the thing that had happened to send me west would never have happened.”

Jack understands that if he and Anne are found together romantically, the automatic next step is marriage, to keep the appearance of moral good standing. When he thinks back to this moment later in his life, he also understands that if they had married, his life would be on a completely different path, showing the fragility and importance of each moment.

“[F]or you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit.”

As Jack struggles with the pain of discovering the affair between Anne and Willie, he comes to accept new truths about the nature of life to help him cope. He realizes that he and Anne never truly had the love they needed to be together, and therefore he cannot be upset with how she lives her life.

“The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise remarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all?”

Jack begins to play with the idea of the nihilistic Great Twitch, which minimizes the importance of the world to only energy coursing through a body. The question he asks at the end of this passage suggests that, even in the depths of his nihilism, he can’t shake the belief that there must be something more. His commitment to the idea of the Great Twitch functions as a coping mechanism as more and more tragic events happen around him.

“Yes, those pictures were an asset to the Boss. Half the people in the state knew that the Boss had been tom-catting around for years, but the pictures of the family and the white leghorns gave the voters a nice warm glow, it made them feel solid, substantial, and virtuous.”

Willie’s public image is key to his success as a politician, and he uses it to mask the well-known truth about his personal life. Even though his infidelity is no secret, the public image of him as a family man is enough to convince the voters that he is one, and they become willing to play along with this identity.

“I thought how he had forgotten the name Mortimer L. Littlepaugh, had forgotten that he had ever existed, but how Mortimer had never forgotten him. Mortimer had been dead more than a score of years but he had never forgotten Judge Irwin.”

After discovering the consequences of Judge Irwin’s crime, Jack struggles to accept how devastating and abusive the relationship between the powerful and their victims is. Judge Irwin is the most important figure in Littlepaugh’s life, ruining his life and career and driving him to die by suicide. Judge Irwin, however, barely remembers Littlepaugh, seeing him only as an insignificant piece that needed to be moved for the judge’s success.

“But I would have to go on the money from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough, a bond that held me here.”

Jack struggles to accept his inheritance from his father, Judge Irwin, and finds it to be a paradox. While this new money opens up his life, giving him the opportunity to go anywhere with it, he finds that it actually prevents him from leaving, as his guilt and misgivings over how the fortune came to be.

“Those things don’t matter. Having somebody’s name cut on a piece of stone. Getting it in the paper. All those things. Oh, Willie, he was my baby boy, he was our baby boy, and those things don’t matter, they don’t ever matter, don’t you see?”

In Chapter 9, with the injury and death of Tom Stark, Willie must confront his own obsession with legacy. As his son suffers, he tries to cope by thinking of ways to preserve Tom’s legacy, and Lucy quickly reminds him that it does not matter what he does to solidify Tom’s memory because it will not change what happens to Tom.

“There had been a time and it hadn’t been very long back when the name Jack Burden got something done around that joint. But that voice, the tone of that voice, told me that the name Jack Burden didn’t mean a damned thing but a waste of breath around there any more.”

After Willie’s death, Jack discovers the fleeting power of politics as his own influence quickly wanes and disappears without Willie in office to amplify it. He finds that channels he could once access easily are now closed, and there is no sympathy for him.