All the King's Men

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1946

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary

For the first time in a long while, Jack returns home to visit his mother. She disapproves of Jack’s choice to work for Willie, and they argue over it. She tells him that her new husband, Theodore, can get him a job. The next day, he takes a walk by the bay and remembers a picnic he had with Anne and Adam when he was a teenager. It was the first time he really saw Anne as a person, and the seeds of a future love were planted. Jack goes with his mother and her husband to eat dinner at Judge Irwin’s house with neighbors, and when the party retires to another room for coffee and politics, everyone openly criticizes Willie, believing that Jack’s allegiances still lie with the town rather than with Willie. Jack seethes quietly for many minutes, though he does eventually push back.

The next day, Jack’s mother speaks to him about his behavior and begs him not to become involved with any corruption and to please find himself a girl. He tells her not to worry about him, and that he is fine as he is. Jack realizes that his mother loves him but commits to leaving town. When he returns to his hotel, the front desk tells him to call Sadie, who summons him to Suite 905, where he finds Willie speaking with Byram B. White, the state auditor. White has been misappropriating public funds for corrupt purposes, and he now faces impeachment. Jack watches as Willie chastises the man for his actions and forces him to write a resignation letter with no date for Willie to use when he chooses. He tells White that he will not let him be impeached because that will signal others to attack the rest of the administration.

After White leaves, Willie explains that his office is rounding up legislators and blackmailing them to drop the impeachment. He asks Jack to begin digging on some men he has no dirt on yet. Before Jack can leave, Mr. Miller, the attorney general, arrives and protests that the law cannot allow White to get away with his crimes. Willie argues that the law is malleable and ineffective and that White is merely a cog. Miller resigns on the spot, and after he leaves, Willie tells Jack about the big hospital he wants to build, with state-of-the-art equipment and free to the public, to show his opponents just how good he is.

Willie also tells Jack that Lucy is leaving him over Byram B. White’s impeachment as well. Jack suggests that maybe it is because of his affair with Sadie, but Willie is confident Lucy doesn’t know of it. Jack first became aware of Willie’s unfaithfulness a few months after he was elected, when Jack and Willie went up to Chicago and Willie fell for an ice skater. When they returned, they found that Sadie had learned of the ice skater through her underground channels and was furious that Willie was two-timing her. She spoke with Jack about it and declared that Willie would come back, as he always had.

Lucy decides not to leave Willie because she does not want to add to the stress now that Willie is also being impeached. His rivals see an opportunity after all the blackmail he has committed. Willie runs around the state, making speeches and exciting the masses as a populist figure who cites God and his own belief in the people. Throughout all this, he still threatens and blackmails others. On April 4, 1933, crowds gather in the Capitol as the impeachment vote approaches. Willie sends Jack to Mr. Lowden, a MacMurfee surrogate, with a statement signed by many committing not to vote against Willie. The impeachment falls apart because too many of MacMurfee’s allies are terrified of blackmail, and Willie goes to address the crowds with good news. Jack joins Willie at the mansion afterward, where Lucy refuses to see Willie. She inevitably leaves him during his second term, though they keep up appearances, like the photography opportunity at Willie’s father’s house.

Chapter 4 Summary

When Willie asks Jack to investigate Judge Irwin, it prompts Jack’s second concerted adventure into the past, though his first foray was a failure. While earning his PhD, Jack lived in squalor with two other miserable students. When Jack inherited the papers of his great-uncle Cass Mastern, Jack’s advisor told him to do an autobiographical study of Cass for his PhD. Cass and his brother Gilbert grew up poor in Georgia, but Gilbert later became a wealthy planter and then essentially adopted his younger brother Cass, educating him on plantation life and then gifting him a plantation of his own. Gilbert eventually sent Cass to Transylvania College to study for a role in politics. During his time at college, Cass experienced “darkness and trouble” for the first time. He was introduced to Mr. Duncan Trice, who showed him the vices of alcohol and substance misuse. Cass began an affair with the man’s wife, Annabelle Trice, seven years his elder.

Duncan died while cleaning his gun on March 19, 1854, a year after the affair had begun. Cass was one of the pallbearers at the funeral and afterward, he and Annabelle met at the small summerhouse, their usual place. She told him that Duncan died by suicide, that he knew of the affair, and that her enslaved maid Phebe found Duncan’s wedding ring afterward under Annabelle’s pillow. She gave the ring to Cass, committing to him but also demonstrating paranoia about Phebe knowing of the affair and Duncan’s death by suicide and possibly spreading the word.

Annabelle went to Louisville and when she returned, she told Cass that she had sold Phebe so that the girl could not tell anyone their secret. Cass was horrified that his adulterous actions led not only to Duncan’s death but also to Phebe’s forced separation from her family. He committed to finding and freeing Phebe, but Annabelle said that if he did, their relationship would be over. Cass pursued Phebe anyway, tracking her to Paducah, where lost the trail. Cass returned to Mississippi and oversaw his plantation, freeing enslaved workers and trying to pay them wages, much to the disapproval of Gilbert and others. After one of Cass’s formerly enslaved workers ran away with his wife, who had been enslaved on another plantation, Cass sent all his workers North.

Cass became very religious, and Gilbert encouraged him either to preach or to study the law. Cass therefore went to Jackson to study, but when the Civil War broke out, both brothers joined despite being personally opposed to secession. Gilbert became a colonel, while Cass was a common soldier. Cass committed to not killing anyone as a penance for his sins, and he waited a long time before a bullet found him near Atlanta. He died from an infection in a field hospital there. Another soldier sent Gilbert all of Cass’s papers and Duncan’s ring after the war.

Jack stopped writing about Cass because he felt that he could not know Cass completely. He read the facts but never truly understood Cass or the world around him. He entered a Great Sleep and eventually left his apartment, taking nothing. His landlady sent the manuscript to him, but he never opened it, and it follows him everywhere.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Willie’s stint as the governor provides ample evidence of The Corrupting Nature of Power, as it becomes impossible to disentangle his genuine desire to help people from his overriding interest in increasing his own power. He is intent on building a new hospital, and this obsession leads him to employ dirty political practices with increasing ease to achieve his goals. It’s important to note, however, that the hospital itself is not a grift. Unlike the more conventionally corrupt politicians he has defeated, he is not interested in using the project as a means of securing kickbacks from shady contractors, for example. He has no desire to grow quietly rich through bribery. He wants to build the best possible hospital, and to put his name on it, because his primary interest is not in money but in public acclaim and the power that comes with it. Willie’s single-minded obsession with his growing power becomes an advantage in itself: “He’s interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius” (126). He defeats his enemies not because he is either more or less corrupt than they are, but because his self-interest takes a purer form: They pursue power in order to enrich themselves through kleptocracy, while he pursues power for its own sake.

Having mastered The Politics of Perception, Willie maintains different images for different groups of people whose esteem he requires. Among politicians, he portrays himself as a tough and shrewd leader who should not be underestimated. Meanwhile, to the voters, he presents himself as a stable family man who has not abandoned his rural roots. Willie’s need to keep up his image as an everyday man requires that he misrepresent his private life to the public, for example by performing a happy marriage with Lucy in public despite their private separation:

The Boss himself used to go out to the poultry farm occasionally, to keep up appearances. Two or three times the papers—the administration papers, that is—ran photographs of him standing with his wife and kid in front of a hen yard or incubator house (156).

Ironically, this performance of family happiness does real damage to his already strained family. He poses with Lucy and Tom to show that he cares for his wife and son despite the busy world of politics, that he loves them and acts with them in mind, though in reality Lucy despises and feels ashamed of this deception. Even Tom, a public figure in his own right, is a victim of this publicity stunt, as his poor connection with his father is erased with a smile, all in the name of preserving power.

Jack Burden’s job in Willie’s office consists primarily of what would now be called opposition research, intended to uncover unsavory facts about Willie’s political opponents. The job is a kind of moral inversion of his previous work as a reporter and, before that, as a scholar, but it is in this role that Jack finally makes peace with Truth as an Instrument of Power. His struggles in this regard originate from his time as a PhD candidate, when he could not make sense of his great uncle Cass Mastern’s life and world:

Jack Burden sat down at the pine table and realized that he did not know Cass Mastern. He did not have to know Cass Mastern to get the degree; he only had to know the facts about Cass Mastern’s world. But without knowing Cass Mastern, he could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern’s world (188).

This divide between facts and truth occasions a crisis for Jack, prompting him to quit the PhD program and enter a period of inactivity and hopelessness he calls the “Great Sleep.” Because he doesn’t know how to make a coherent narrative from the facts, he feels overwhelmed and threatened by them. Not until he works for Willie does he reconcile this divide between facts and truth. Willie’s obsessive ambition supplies a narrative purpose for every fact. Every fact can be fit into a narrative that serves to increase Willie’s power, and in serving this purpose, facts become truth.