Why You Should Read “All the King’s Men”

Our friends at the University of Louisville's McConnell Center launched an interesting program this year in which they are asking authors and experts to tell us why WE should read the books that helped shape them or those that have significantly impacted human history. Through YouTube video lectures and podcasts, these experts will give us core synopses of major works, help us comprehend what we might get out of reading them ourselves in the 21st century, and inspire us to pick up a great book or two this year and see where the adventure takes you.

Recently, Steve Ealy visited the center to talk about his favorite book, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Check out his lecture below, along with a lightly edited transcript of his lecture.

Watch on YouTubeGary Gregg 

Welcome back to the McConnell Center series, Why You Should Read,” once again. If you haven't liked and subscribed to the video, please, please do. Today we're here to talk with Steve Ealy, an old friend of myself and the McConnell Center. Steve graduated from Furman University, Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Georgia. He's taught at several universities, but I know him best as a retired now senior fellow at the Liberty Fund, where Steve introduced me to a book that he is going to introduce you all to tonight, and I will second his argument that you really need to read. Robert Penn Warrens All the King's Men. Steve is currently working on projects with on Robert Penn Warren, and other 20th century authors. Ladies and gentlemen, it was my pleasure to welcome Steve Eley.

Thanks, Gary. It's a real pleasure to be here and talk with you all about All the Kings Men. Let me say something first about the author Robert Penn Warren. He was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, went to Vanderbilt University, went to got a master's degree at the University of California in Berkeley, was a Rhodes Scholar, promised his good friend Alan Tate, that he would never get a PhD because Tate said getting a PhD would ruin him as a writer, and he was committed to a career in writing. In addition to the book, I'm going to talk to you about, All the Kings Men, which won Pulitzer Prize. He was also a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Two of his collections of poetry won the Pulitzer. He's the only author who ever won Pulitzer Prize for both poetry and for fiction. When he started writing All the King's Men, it wasn't called All the King's Men, it was called Proud Flesh, and it wasn't going to be a novel.

It was going to be a play in verse. And he started working on this in the late 1930s. While he was on the faculty of Louisiana State University, he went to Europe, worked on it over there, finished a draft of the play in verse, sent it to his friends in the States, and then when he came back to the States and finished the work, he had rethought it. And instead of a play, it had become a novel and instead of Proud Flesh, it was All the King's Men. It was published in 1946 and 1947, it won the Pulitzer Prize In 1948, it was made into a movie starring Broderick Crawford as the lead character governor Willie Stark. The movie won three Oscars- best actor, best actress, and best picture of the year. So it got off to a roaring start. I'm not going to try. It's a long novel, 450 pages.

I'm not going to try to summarize the entire novel, but I want to give you a little taste for it. But one of the things I want to emphasize, many people think of it as a political novel and it takes place in the world of politics, but there's much, much more in it than just that. Instead of talking about the main character right now, Governor Stark, I want to talk about one little scene that sort of captures the political flavor of it and then introduce you to the other characters. The narrator of the novel's name is Jack Burden. He had been a newspaperman. He goes to work for Governor Stark. He comes back from vacation and discovers that there's a minor crisis going on. So he's immediately called into the governor's office and he finds the governor tongue lashing a bedraggled, middle-aged, sad looking man. And he says, he hears the governor saying, Byron, God never intended you to be wealthy. If he had, he would've already made you that.

What makes you think you deserve to be wealthy? It's blasphemous. Say, it's blasphemous for me to be wealthy. Byron White repeats it. It's blasphemy for me to be wealthy. He then says, Byron, write out a resignation. White writes out the resignation, sign it. He signs it. Don't put a date on it. He doesn't put a date on it. Then he says, I just misjudged you, Byron. I thought you were smart enough to know you were supposed to follow my orders and nothing else, but you didn't, now get out of here. And he gets out and as soon as he leaves, the governor turns to Jack and says, I gave him every chance, every chance. He didn't have to say what I told him to say, he have to listen to me. He could have just walked out of here and kept on walking. He could have put a date on that resignation and then handed it to me and been through with it. But did he? No, not Byron. Although Jack had seen the governor's anger, he had no idea of what had caused it. So he asks. Byron was the state auditor, and he had been involved in a scheme to put money in his own pocket by funneling funds through a realty company into his private bank account. He had the assistance of another man who had in another agency who had actually escaped and was now living in Cuba.

So why did the Governor instead of firing Byram, keep him on board? Because Byron had become the target of an impeachment effort in the legislature. The anti-Stark forces were trying to undermine the governor by impeaching his state auditor. And so Stark feels he has to support White to protect his own administration. So he's explaining to Jack exactly how he's going to do this, but they're interrupted by the State Attorney General, a distinguished lawyer who comes in and says, Willie, you're going to save his butt, aren't you? He's guilty. And Stark says, listen, you don't use terms like innocence or guilt when talking about something like Byron White. When you're adding machine breaks down, you don't accuse it of being bad, you repair it. White's a piece of equipment, and I've repaired him. So he will always in the future, do exactly what I tell him to do.

And the Attorney General says, yeah, but you're defending a guilty man. I'm going to resign. And Willie can't talk him out of it as he's leaving, as the Attorney General is leaving says, you'll have my resignation in the morning. Willie says, Hugh, you're leaving me with the son of bitches. There's and mine. And Jack still doesn't know what's going on. And the governor says, should I have thrown to the wolves? And Burden says, well, that's a great time to be asking after you've decided that you're going to protect him. He said, well, tell me what do you think? What ought I do? And Burden won't answer. He says, well, that's a funny word. And then finally he says, tell me what should I do? What do you think? And Jack says, thinking ain't my line. And that ends that part of the conversation. Now, a lot of people think the whole point of All the King's Men is to prove, Lord Acton's famous aphorism, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. So we have a little case study here. Here's a guy who's had his hand caught in the cookie jar. Does that prove or disprove Lord Acton's statement? Well, from the evidence we have, and I've basically given you all the evidence, the novel presents on state auditor Byron White hard, hard to say that he was ever an upright public servant who was somehow undermined by power. He might've been greedy from the beginning. He might have been stupid and conned by others, but he disappears from the novel. That's it. Four pages and he's gone. There's a lot more politics. But I want to talk not about politics, but give you a little profile of the other characters which will involve some politics and share some of Willie's best statements to give you a flavor of the novel. So Willie Stark, who is governor of the state when we meet him, started out as a county treasurer.

And he first comes to the attention of people in the Capitol when he is fighting the County Commission in his county Mason County because they have accepted a bid to build a new schoolhouse is not the low bid, and Willie thinks they should accept the low bid. He thinks that they chose a dishonest builder who happened to be related to a member of the county Commission. And so he is getting himself into hot water, but he's also getting a lot of press attention. And Jack first meets him when he's sent by the newspaper. He works for in the Capitol up to Mason City to find out what's going on. And so he talks to people on the county commission. He talks to Willie Stark and his wife. He follows the story as it develops. Stark is defeated for reelection. The schoolhouse is built, and a couple of years later during a fire drill, one of the outside staircases collapses.

It's full of children. A handful of the children die, many more are injured. And Willie Stark is back in the news. And this leads to the beginning of his real political career. Without going into all the details, he goes from making an unsuccessful run as governor to becoming governor and becoming all powerful in the state. He basically controls both houses of the state legislature and they do whatever he tells him to do. He's one character, and we'll come back to him in a second. The narrator of this story, as I've said, is Jack Burden. Jack, very different background. He grew up in an elite family, in a small little community with a lot of wealthy people around him. He got on the outs with his mother when his mother and his father divorced. And he never quite understood why that was going on. And he sort of drifted.

He went off to college, didn't know what he wanted to do. He went to graduate school, started writing a dissertation, couldn't finish it. Jack was sort of a floater. He floated around when he left graduate school, he floated into the newspaper business. He covered Willie. When Willie ran again for governor, Burden was favorable to him. The newspaper editor told him he was not following the paper's line, and so Jack quit. He had enough resources from his family that he didn't have to work. So he just went home and laced around. And after Stark was elected, Stark sent one of his people to Jack and said, I want you to come and work for me. So Jack goes to work and he is sort of a handyman, a hitman, but not physically shooting him by delivering envelopes full of blackmail material to force his way. So Jack avoids responsibility as that little exchange with the governor where he won't say whether he thought the governor should fire or protect Byron White. Jack was going through his entire life, avoiding responsibility. So there's one big difference between the novel and the movie version with Broderick Crawford as Governor Stark. And that is in the novel. Both Jack and Willie are protagonists. And as Jack says at one point, the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are in a sense the same story in the movie version. Jack is still there, but he's just a minor character on the side. The real attention in the movie is all on the governor. And what makes the novel so much richer is that in the novel, you get two stories, but two very different kinds of stories. If you like action, you want to follow Willie Stark. He's the action character. He's the guy in politics, the rough and tumble, getting in fighting, forcing people to do what he wants. But if you are want to think about things, then you want to follow Jack Burden.

If you want to see something about not the exterior, but the inner struggles, then you have to watch Jack. Why didn't Jack finish his dissertation? He had it almost done. He had all the materials, all he had to do was write it. He was going to have his PhD, and then he could have gone on. Why not? So you get these two stories and they don't always fit well together. So in the movie, Willie has to come to the forefront, but in the novel, you get both stories. The other thing about the novel is it's not told in chronological order. It jumps back and forth. It's like a time machine. We go back 20 years, we go ahead 15 years, we go back 10 years and you've got to piece it all together. So we learn about Jack's childhood, not at the beginning of the story, but in the middle of the story. And so it's very complicated.

May require lots of readings, it's worth lots of readings. But I want to share with you some of the things that Willie says give you a flavor of him. He's sort of like a Cracker Barrel philosopher in some ways. So I'm just going to read a few passages from the novel. And most of these are in conversations with Jack. So he says, 

Yeah, I'm Governor Jack. And the trouble with governors is they think they got to keep their dignity, but listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please God like to do? You can do and keep your dignity. The human frame just ain't built that way. 

Later when he sends Jack out on a mission to find evidence about one of the men who helped raise him when he was a child after the divorce of his parents judge, the judge Jack takes the assignment but says, I don't think you're going to find anything on the judge.

And the boss said, 

There's always something. And I said, maybe not on the judge. And he said, man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, and he passeth from the stink of the Diddy to the stench of the shroud. There is always something two miles more. And he said, and make it stick His view of the law. 

He had been a practicing lawyer before he became a governor, and he's got an interesting view of the law. So let me read just one brief passage on law. This is in when he's trying to convince the state attorney general not to quit.

I practice law, but I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a coal night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling. And somebody is always going to nod, catch pneumonia, hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy. But it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shank bones in the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is something and then do something and then make some law to fit it. And by the time you get the law and the books, that would've done something different. So law is not something that should govern us, but that we should govern and use to achieve our ends.

So Willie plays fast and loose with the state constitution, with the law. He's willing to achieve his goals. One interesting thing about Willie is he's always true to his goals. He's for the common man to help them to build roads into communities that have only dirt roads, to establish a healthcare system for those people who can't afford to see private doctors. So he's got a whole vision of things he wants to do, and he never deserts that vision. He's always faithful to it, and he's always faithful to the people who support him. But the way in which he achieves those ends sometimes are questionable. So we've got that tension. We've got a political angle to this story, but Warren sets this novel in a much broader framework. The epigram for this novel is taken from Dante's long poem, the Divine Comedy, and it deals with a knight who dies in combat, Manfred, and the epigraph says their curse cannot sow damn a man forever, that the eternal of may not return while one green hope picks forth, sticks forth.

Its feeble sliver. So as long as there's any green, there's hope. But that puts the story out of the realm of earthly politics, maybe into the world of divine politics. And as the story goes on, Willie meets a very bad end. He's assassinated, and he has a conversation with Jack on his deathbed. It could have all been different, Jack and Jack said, yeah, sure, sure, it could have been. And well, he says, no, it could have been because he had been trying to reform, he had been trying to get away from some of his negative practices, and his reward for trying to go straight after many crooked years is assassination. So that's a quick overview of the story. Now, why is it worth spending time on? Because it gives you in. Warren wrote an essay entitled Why We Read Fiction, and he says, it's real simple.

We read fiction because we are interested in what's going to happen to us ourselves. And we can imagine possibilities when we read about the lives of others. And sometimes we can become so enthralled in the story. We think for a while that we are the protagonist or the hero, but then we realize that we aren't. But it helps us to reflect on ourself. What would I do in this situation? How would I act differently? How would I overcome this problem? Near the end of the novel, Jack is reflecting back on everything that's happened, and he's talking to his teenage girlfriend who he has finally after decades, has married. And there's this line in it. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future for without one. There cannot be the other. And how if you could accept the past, you might hope for the future, for only out of the past.

Can you make the future? This battle with the past or this coming to terms with the past and the burden of the past is crucial. In all of Warren's writings, in his fiction, in his poetry, and in his nonfiction writings in the fifties and sixties, Warren wrote two books on race relations in the South. And that coming to terms with the past and its burden was crucial to everything that he wrote, everything he thought about. And we have to do that too in terms of our own life, in terms of understanding our community's history, our national history, what's the burden of our past and how do we turn that burden into something positive for the future? That's the challenge that Warren puts to us in this novel through characters that tend to jump off the page. Probably jump off more clearly than I've been able to articulate today, but it's worth spending time on. Get to know the major and minor characters and see how the story unfolds. And one of the ultimate questions that's never quite resolved in this novel is, well, we see some of the king's men. We need to ask who in this novel is the king? And for that, Warren gives us only clues that we can all then follow. So I hope you'll take a look at it and find it as interesting and fruitful as I have. Thank you very much.