hick like everyone else in the crowd, and that he was withdrawing from the
race to support MacMurfee. But if MacMurfee didn't deliver for the little
people, Willie admonished the hearers to nail him to the door. Willie said
that if they passed him the hammer he'd nail him to the door himself. Tiny
Dufiy tried to stop the speech, but fell off the stage.
Willie stumped for MacMurfee, who won the election. Afterwards, Willie
returned to his law practice, at which he made a great deal of money and
won some high- proffle cases. Jack didn't see Willie again until the next
election, when the political battlefield had changed: Willie now owned the
Democratic Party. Jack quit his job at the Chronicle because the paper was
forcing him to support MacMurfee in his column, and slumped into a
depression. He spent all his time sleeping and piddling around--he called
the period "the Great Sleep," and said it had happened twice before, once
just before he walked away from his doctoral dissertation in American
History, and once after Lois divorced him. During the Great Sleep Jack
occasionally visited Adam Stanton, took Anne Stanton to dinner a few times,
and visited his father, who now spent all his time handing out religious
iers. At some point during this time Willie was elected governor.
One morning Jack received a phone call from Sadie Burke, saying that the
Boss wanted to see him the next morning at ten. Jack asked who the Boss
was, and she replied, "Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don't you read the
papers?" Jack went to see Willie, who offered him a job for $3,600 a year.
Jack asked Willie who he would be working for--Willie or the state.
Willie said he would be working for him, not the state. Jack wondered how
Willie could afiord to pay him $3,600 a year when the governorship only
paid $5,000. But then he remembered the money Willie had made as a lawyer.
He accepted the job, and the next night he went to have dinner at the
Governor's mansion.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jack Burden tells about going home to Burden's Landing to visit his mother,
some time in 1933. His mother disapproves of his working for Willie, and
Theodore Murrell (his mother's husband, whom Jack thinks of as "the Young
Executive") irritates him with his questions about politics. Jack remembers
being happy in the family's mansion until he was six years old, when his
father ("the Scholarly Attorney") left home to distribute religious
pamphlets, and Jack's mother told him he had gone because he didn't love
her anymore. She then married a succession of men: the Tycoon, the Count,
and finally the Young Executive. Jack remembers picnicking with Adam and
Anne Stanton, and swimming with Anne. He remembers arguing with his mother
in 1915 over his decision to go to the State University instead of to
Harvard.
That night in 1933, Jack, his mother, and the Young Executive go to Judge
Irwin's for a dinner party; the assembled aristocrats talk politics, and
are staunchly opposed to Willie Stark's liberal reforms. Jack is forced to
entertain the pretty young Miss Dumonde, who irritates him. When he drives
back to Willie's hotel, he kisses Sadie Burke on the forehead, simply
because she isn't named Dumonde. On the drive back, Jack thinks about his
parents in their youth, when his father brought his mother to Burden's
Landing from her home in Arkansas. In Willie's room, hell is breaking
loose: MacMurfee's men in the Legislature are mounting an impeachment
attempt on Byram B. White, the state auditor, who has been involved in a
graft scandal. Willie humiliates and insults White, but decides to protect
him. This decision causes Hugh Miller, Willie's Attorney General, to resign
from offce, and nearly provokes Lucy into leaving Willie. Willie orders
Jack to dig up dirt on MacMurfee's men in the Legislature, and he begins
frenetically stumping the state, giving speeches during the day and
intimidating and blackmailing MacMurfee's men at night. Stunned by his
aggressive activity, MacMurfee's men attempt to seize the offensive by
impeaching Willie himself. But the blackmailing efiorts work, and the
impeachment is called off before the vote can be taken. Still, the day of
the impeachment, a huge crowd descends on the capital in support of Willie.
Willie tells Jack that after the impeachment he is going to build a
massive, state-of-the-art hospital; Willie wins his next election by a
landslide.
During all this time, Jack re ects on Willie's sexual conquests--he has
begun a long-term afiair with Sadie Burke, who is fiercely jealous of his
other mistresses, but Lucy seems to know nothing about it. Lucy does
eventually leave Willie, spending time in St. Augustine and then at her
sister's poultry farm, but they keep up the appearance of marriage. Jack
speculates that Lucy does not sever all her ties with Willie for Tommy's
sake, though teen-aged Tommy has become an arrogant football star with a
string of sexual exploits of his own.
Chapter 4 Summary
Returning to the night in 1936 when he, Willie, and Sugar-Boy drove away
from Judge Irwin's house, Jack re ects that his inquiry into Judge Irwin's
past was really his second major historical study. He recalls his first, as
a graduate student at the State University, studying for his Ph.D. in
American History. Jack lived in a slovenly apartment with a pair of
slovenly roommates, and blew all the money his mother sent him on drinking
binges. He was writing his dissertation on the papers of Cass Mastern, his
father's uncle.
As a student at Translyvania College in the 1850s, Cass Mastern had had an
afiair with Annabelle Trice, the wife of his friend Duncan Trice. When
Duncan discovered the afiair, he took off his wedding ring and shot
himself, a suicide that was chalked up to accident. But Phebe, one of the
Trices' slaves, had found the ring, and taken it to Annabelle Trice.
Annabelle had been unable to bear the knowledge that Phebe knew about her
sin, and so she sold her. Appalled to learn that Annabelle had sold Phebe
instead of setting her free--and appalled to learn that she had separated
the slave from her husband--Cass set out to find and free Phebe; but he
failed, wounded in a fight with a man who insinuated that he had sexual
designs on Phebe.
After that, he set to farming a plantation he had obtained with the help of
his wealthy brother Gilbert. But he freed his slaves and became a devout
abolitionist. Even so, when the war started, he enlisted as a private in
the Confederate Army. Complicating matters further, though a Confederate
soldier he vowed not to kill a single enemy soldier, since he believed
himself already responsible for the death of his friend. He was killed in a
battle outside Atlanta in 1864. After leaving to find Phebe, he had never
set eyes on Annabelle Trice again.
One day Jack simply gave up working on his dissertation. He could not
understand why Cass Mastern acted the way he did, and he walked away from
the apartment without even boxing up the papers. A landlady sent them to
him, but they remained unopened as he endured a long stretch of the Great
Sleep. The papers remained in their unopened box throughout the time he
spent with his beautiful wife Lois; after he left her, they remained
unopened. The brown paper parcel yellowed, and the name "Jack
Burden,"written on top, slowly faded.
Chapter 5 Summary
In 1936, Jack mulls over the problem of finding dirt on Judge Irwin. He
thinks the judge would have been motivated by ambition, love, fear, or
money, and settles on money as the most likely reason he might have been
driven over the line. He goes to visit his father, but the Scholarly
Attorney is preoccupied taking care of an "unfortunate" named George, and
refuses to answer his "foul" questions. He visits Anne and Adam Stanton at
their father's musty old mansion, and learns from Adam that the judge was
once broke, back in 1913. But Anne tells him that the judge got out of his
financial problems by marrying a rich woman.
At some time during this period, Jack goes to one of Tommy's football games
with Willie. Tommy wins the game, and Willie says that he will be an All-
American. Tommy receives the adulation of Willie and all his cohorts, and
lives an arrogant life full of women and alcohol. Also during this time,
Jack learns from Tiny Dufiy that Willie is spending six million dollars on
the new hospital. Soon after, Anne tells Jack that she herself had lunch
with Willie, in a successful attempt to get state funding for one of her
charities.
Jack decides to investigate the judge's financial past further. Delving
into court documents and old newspapers, he discovers that the judge had
not married into money, but had taken out a mortgage on his plantation,
which he was nearly unable to pay. A sudden windfall enabled him to stop
foreclosure proceedings toward the end of his term as Attorney General
under Governor Stanton. Also, after his term he had been given a lucrative
job at American Electric Power Company. After some further digging, Jack
extracts a letter from a strange old spiritual medium named Lily Mae
Littlepaugh, from her brother George Littlepaugh, whom Judge Irwin replaced
at the power company. The letter, a suicide note, reveals that the judge
received a great deal of stock and the lucrative position at the power
company as a bribe for dismissing a court case brought against the Southern
Belle Fuel Company, which had the same parent company as American Electric
Power.
Littlepaugh says that he visited Governor Stanton to try to convince him to
bring the matter to light, but Stanton chose to protect his friend the
judge; when Miss Littlepaugh visited the governor after her brother's
suicide, he again protected the judge, and threatened Miss Littlepaugh with
prosecution for insurance fraud. After seven months of digging, Jack has
his proof.
Chapter 6 Summary
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