All the King's Men

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1946

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

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

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 9 Summary

Jack returns to Willie, whom he refuses to tell what Judge Irwin did. Jack also quits his blackmail work for Willie and removes himself from the MacMurfee problem. Willie is very stressed, his only calm coming from watching Tom play football. Willie decides that he cannot allow MacMurfee to win the US Senate because it will derail Willie’s political career. If he waits a whole term to enter the US Senate, he will no longer be a young and exciting politician and others will believe they can walk all over him. He decides to solve the problem by buying Gummy Larson’s loyalty, giving him the hospital contract, and robbing MacMurfee of much of his support.

Tom is a confident young man, but Willie’s parenting makes him erratic. He and two teammates get into a serious bar fight and are suspended from the team. At halftime of the first game without Tom, Willie tells the team he knows they’ll do their best, and though they come out fighting, they lose. Willie then forces the coach to put Tom in the next game to keep the team’s championship aspirations alive, and he is knocked unconscious by a hit. Willie is called to the field house and sends Jack back to the Capitol, saying he will meet him there later.

Jack finds the offices empty except for Sadie, who is upset and says that she will leave town. Jack tells her that Tom is hurt and she leaves, soon calling Jack from the hospital saying that Willie needs him. Jack arrives at the hospital and Willie immediately sends him to get Lucy. When Lucy arrives, Willie assures her that Tom will recover. Adam is Tom’s doctor and explains that Tom broke his neck and is paralyzed. He tells them that if the spinal cord is not crushed, he can recover through surgery. A second doctor flies in from Johns Hopkins and confirms Adam’s diagnosis. Willie and Lucy choose the risky surgery for Tom but Adam returns after surgery with news that the spinal cord is crushed and that Tom will be paralyzed permanently and live with a high risk for infections.

The following Monday, as Jack waits at the office for Willie, he witnesses telegrams, flowers, and visitors all arrive in hopes of making politically advantageous shows of sympathy. When Willie finally arrives, he tells Tiny Duffy to break the contract with Gummy, upsetting Tiny Duffy. After this, Jack keeps working on the tax bill and receives a call from Anne, who says she needs him. When he arrives at her apartment, Anne is in the midst of a breakdown, panicking. She tells Jack that someone called Adam and told him that he received the directorship of the new hospital because of Anne’s affair with Willie and that now he will lose it because of Tom’s surgery. Adam comes to Anne’s apartment, yells at her about the affair, and leaves her.

Anne asks Jack to find Adam and bring him back so they can explain the situation with Willie. Anne also tells Jack that Willie is going back to Lucy and ended his relationship with her earlier. Jack searches everywhere in the rain for Adam, finding his car at his home but no Adam. He searches in bars and even calls the hospital but cannot find his friend anywhere. He goes back to his hotel and as he waits, reads a newspaper with a political cartoon portraying Willie as Little Jack Horner. Jack is summoned to the Capitol at nine that night. He arrives and finds Willie on the Senate floor. Willie invites him upstairs and as they walk through the lobby, Adam appears and shoots Willie. Sugar-Boy, trailing Willie, shoots and kills Adam.

Willie does not die and has a successful surgery to remove the slugs from the gun. However, after a few days, Willie gets an infection that proves deadly. Willie calls Jack in and asks why Adam shot him but Jack tells him he has no idea. Willie tells Jack that it could all be different. It is their last conversation. Willie dies the next morning and the funeral crowds the city, with people coming from all over the state to pay their respects. It is the second funeral Jack attends in a week, after Adam’s funeral in Burden’s Landing.

Chapter 10 Summary

Throughout Adam’s funeral, Anne’s expression does not change, and only after the funeral does she collapse. After Willie’s funeral in the city, Jack joins Anne in Burden’s Landing. They spend time together, reading and not speaking about what happened. Jack begins to wonder who called Adam, but when he asks Anne, she tells him that she only knows that it was a man. Jack begins looking for Sadie and finds her at the Millett Sanatorium. He asks her if she knows who called Adam and she admits that it was Tiny Duffy and that she told him to do it. She was unhappy that Willie was going back to Lucy and wanted to kill him. Jack forgives Sadie, knowing that she did it in a moment of passion, but sees Tiny Duffy’s actions as evil and cold. He and Sadie begin thinking of how to get revenge on him.

One day, Tiny Duffy, now comfortably ensconced as governor, calls Jack to the mansion and offers him the same job he worked under Willie but with a higher salary. Tiny Duffy is confident that Jack will accept and is shocked when he turns it down. Jack accuses Tiny Duffy of killing Willie and tells him that he will never be bought. As he walks out, Jack briefly feels like a hero but then feels poorly. Sadie writes Jack a statement detailing the plan to kill Willie and then leaves town, telling him that she will come back if he needs her to. Jack realizes that he feels poorly because he has made Tiny Duffy the villain to escape his own responsibility in the matter: In reality, he is as guilty as anyone.

Jack begins avoiding people and runs into Sugar-Boy one day in the newspaper room in the library. Jack asks him what he would do if someone was behind Willie’s death. Sugar-Boy tells Jack that he would kill that person, even after Jack tells him that he would hang for it. Jack toys with telling Sugar-Boy that it is Duffy behind the murder but decides against it in the end. Months later, Jack goes to visit Lucy and finds the visit to be awkward. Tom dies six months before their meeting from pneumonia, and though Lucy is resigned to the many tragedies in her life, she finds new purpose by adopting the baby who is allegedly Tom’s son. She names the baby Willie because she believes that he was a great man, and Jack agrees, believing that if Willie is a great man, so are the people around him.

Jack’s mother calls him down to Burden’s Landing to say that she is leaving her husband and moving to Reno because of the death of Judge Irwin. On the train platform before leaving, she tells Jack that she is giving the house to her husband. Jack realizes that she is giving him back his past by doing so, freeing him of the many lies, and finally finds that he feels ready to move into the future.

He visits Anne and apologizes for being absent. He soon moves into Judge Irwin’s house, marrying Anne and bringing his first father, now dying, to live with them. He no longer believes in the Great Twitch, having seen too many people live their lives and die. Jack begins working again on his book about Cass Mastern and tries to make amends for Judge Irwin’s misdeeds, hoping to give some money to Mortimer Littlepaugh’s sister, but finding that she is dead. He also discovers that the Judge’s house is heavily mortgaged, and he decides to let it go, as both he and Anne want to leave Burden’s Landing, though they will come visit again one day.

Chapters 9-10 Analysis

After Tom’s accident, The Corrupting Nature of Power makes any genuine expression of sympathy impossible. Each person sees their reaction to Tom’s accident as a means of impressing Willie and currying favor with him. Power and the pursuit of it corrupts even everyday human emotion and communication: “Every pinfeather politician [...] would see it in this morning’s paper and get off his telegram. Getting that telegram off would be like praying. You couldn’t tell that praying would do any good, but it certainly never did any harm” (384). Each of these people approaches Willie in the hopes of gaining something from their show of sympathy. Power makes the politicians in All the Kings Men hyper-focused on their appearance and interactions, hoping to derive some advancement from every interpersonal gesture. This pervasive social performance destroys real human emotions and makes it difficult for Willie to form bonds with others. Despite the outward appearance of an abundance of support and sympathy, there is actually none among the flowers and telegrams, each representing a political play rather than genuine action.

Willie has his sights set on the US Senate, and he believes that his best chance to win the seat is by using The Politics of Perception to portray himself as young and exciting. He does not want to let MacMurfee manipulate him into waiting, thinking it will change the trajectory of his path: “First, the timing would have been bad. Now was the time for the Boss to step out. Later on he would be just another Senator getting on toward fifty. Now he would be a boy wonder breathing brimstone. He would have a future” (358). In every decision he makes, Willie is minutely conscious of how he will be perceived. He is building a public image, and the first step is to imagine as accurately as possible how voters will view him.

The truth about his parentage startles Jack and completely changes how he sees his family, his life, his history, and the world. In seeking to use Truth as an Instrument of Power, he has put himself in a position where he must confront his own hidden truths. Suddenly, he plays a role not only in exposing Judge Irwin’s misdeeds but also in inheriting the profits of the misdeeds. It also fundamentally changes his relationship with his mother, as the truth of his parentage cannot change what happens: “Once or twice I almost knocked to go in. But I decided that even if I went in, there wouldn’t be anything to say. There isn’t ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself, whether it is good or bad” (429). Jack understands that nothing he or his mother can say will change the truth of their past. It does, however, change their future, as the revelation and Judge Irwin’s death force Jack’s mother to confront her true feelings and leave her husband, while they also put Jack on a path toward exiting politics and beginning a life with Anne Stanton. For Jack and Anne, the revelation of what their parents did in politics pushes them toward leaving Burden’s Landing, hoping to start a new life somewhere else.