Abstract
In this chapter I show how Drury’s rabid anti-communism and distain for liberalism influenced his portrayal in Advise and Consent of the politics in the US Senate surrounding a nominee for Secretary of State. I focus on what I call the “moderate ruling-elite ideology” of these senators, how their upper-class desire for personal fulfillment and “desire to serve” is manifested primarily in their personal ambition and sense of integrity rather than any shared ideology or empirical examination of the world as it is. In dealing with the senators’ attitudes toward the nominee’s view of communism, Drury relies on political stereotypes and reduces the issue to an overly simple binary choice: aggression versus appeasement.
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Notes
- 1.
For a brief history and analysis of the Bohemian Club, see Didion (2003, 1005–09).
- 2.
Perhaps because Drury has no distinctive literary style and uses conventional literary structures, there are no major critical studies of his work done by literary scholars other than Kemme (1987). The two best critical analyses of Advise and Consent are by journalists: Kaplan (1999) and Miller (2015).
- 3.
During the late 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement also provoked a great deal of violence. From the mid- 1950s to 1963, black churches and meeting places in Birmingham, Alabama, were bombed 59 times. And “[b]etween January 1956 and July 1963 not a single month had gone by without a racial bombing somewhere in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy” (Perrett 1979, 697), a subject Drury never mentions in Advise and Consent, although he does deal with issues of race in his next novel, A Shade of Difference.
- 4.
The series entitled “The National Purpose” began with the May 23, 1960, issue of Life. It was a response to an earlier charge by Walter Lippmann that Americans no longer had “great purposes which they are united in wanting to achieve.” Rather, Lippmann thought, Americans were defensive, wanting “to conserve, not to push forward and to create.” They talk about their country as if it “were a completed society, one which has achieved its purposes, and has no further great business to transact….” (Life 1960, 23). The series included responses by Adlai Stevenson, Archibald MacLeish, Billy Graham, John Gardner, David Sarnoff, Albert Wohlstetter, and Clinton Rossiter. For a reasoned response as to whether nations can even have some broad philosophical purpose, see Meyerhoff (1960).
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Smit, D. (2019). Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent: Moderate Ruling-Elite Ideology. In: Power and Class in Political Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_5
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