Godlike Daniel*

DANIEL WEBSTER--Claude M. Fuess-- Little, Brown ($10)./- If a decent interval has interposed between you and your schooldays, you probably think of Daniel Webster as a forbidding old party who invented U. S. oratory and was somehow not elected President. Perhaps you may have the idea he wrote a dictionary.**With the exception of the bit about the dictionary, your memory is accurate if not exhaustive. No debunker but a solid and serious historian, Fuess has filled two fat volumes with facts about his hero, facts which somehow, however, do not add up into a speaking likeness. Some facts you may have forgotten: that Daniel Webster took drugs for his chronic diarrhea, drank a good deal, and died of cirrhosis of the liver. No less authorities than the late Henry Cabot Lodge, James Ford Rhodes implied that Webster was overfond of women, but Fuess categorically denies it. Webster had a slow but inexhaustible mind, no reputation as a wit, no interest in the arts. He reread Robinson Crusoe every year. When he spoke extemporaneously he often groped for the right word, would not be happy till he got it. Fuess makes no idol of Webster, but his biography will honor Webster's memory. "Even those biographers who have taken a malicious joy in exposing the blemishes on his character have been overawed by his splendor. In all American history there has been no statesman who, in manner and bearing, appeared so noble." Of good New England stock (his father fought in the Continental Army), Daniel Webster was born (1782) in Franklin, N. H., died 70 years later on his Massachusetts farm. Between those dates he had been lawyer, Congressman (from New Hampshire, from Massachusetts). Senator (from Massachusetts), twice Secretary of State (under Presidents Tyler and Fillmore), "Defender of the Constitution." After an education at 13-year-old Phillips Exeter Academy and at Dartmouth, where "most of the stereotyped reminiscences of his friends seem to indicate that he was something of a prodigy and prig," Webster set his foot on the rung of Law, hoping the ladder would lead him to the presidency but his party, first calling itself Federalist, later Whig, was almost always out of power, too often for political expedience, upheld unpopular causes: a U. S. bank, peace with England in 1812, the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Law. More, his cold dignity repelled warmhearted U. S. crowds. Thinks Biographer Fuess: "It may be that the American people admire, but have a deep-rooted distrust of orators. His very fluency made them wary. He was a man who talked too much."

Most impressive figure in the Senate, Webster, 5 ft. 10 in., 200 Ibs., with coarse black hair and glowing eyes, always wore a blue coat with brass buttons. His fame was international. When he visited England he was lionized, called "the Great Western." After an audience with sprightly young Queen Victoria, Webster pronounced her "intelligent and agreeable." Practical farmer and lover of the country, Webster was a first-rate angler. He thought his success due "to careful and thorough fishing of the difficult places which others do not so fish." Once out shooting he peppered a stranger by mistake. ''Webster rushed up and asked solicitously: 'My dear sir, did I hit you?' The victim, still rubbing his shoulder, said ruefully: 'Yes, you did hit me; and from your looks, I should think that I am not the first man you have shot, either.' "

When this speaker, accustomed to audiences, lay dying, his mind wandered for a few moments; when he came to himself he asked: "Have I, on this occasion, said anything unworthy of Daniel Webster?''

For all that Biographer Fuess has done, it is not as a statesman but as the orator of the Plymouth oration, the Bunker Hill address, the reply to Hayne, that the U. S. remembers Daniel Webster. Some Websterisms:

"The past, at least, is secure." "Sea of upturned faces." "Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable." (And Alexander Hamilton) "He touched the dead corpse of Public Credit and it sprung upon its feet." "Thank God--I also--am an American!" "Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country." "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish I give my hand and my heart to this vote." "One country, one constitution, one destiny." "When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization." "There is nothing so powerful as truth --and often nothing so strange." The Author. Claude Moore Fuess. 45, is instructor in English at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. He has also written: The Life of Caleb cushing, Rufus Choate: The Wizard of the Law.

/- Published Oct. 17.

** No lexicographer was Daniel. Noah (1758-- 1853!. no relation, did it.

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