All The Chairman's Men and the Willie Stark Effect

Galrahn has recently chosen to highlight the visual tragedy of the Chinese earthquake for Information Dissemination. The pictures are certainly worth a look, but what caught my eye was Galrahn's observation that the deaths of schoolchildren continue to generate outrage towards those responsible for school construction. As Galrahn notes, "In many areas, the schools collapsed killing hundreds even when most other buildings nearby did not."

At this point I looked at my bookshelf and found the perfect literary analogy.

All the King's Men is the definitive novel of American politics, partially because of Robert Penn Warren's writing and partially because it resembles the career path of legendary Louisiana governor Huey Long. Huey Long's doppelganger, Willie Stark, rises from anonymity to become the most powerful man in the state. But how did Stark make his first political mark?

As I said, if a man like Willie can be said to live in the world of luck, Dolph Pillsbury and the Sheriff were his luck. They ran it over Willie and got the new schoolhouse built by J.H. Moore. J.H. Moore used the brick out of the kiln owned by the distant relative of Pillsbury. It was just another big box of a schoolhouse with a fire escape at each end. The fire escapes weren't the kind which looks like a silo and which has a corkscrew-shaped chute inside for the kiddies to slide down. They were iron stairs attached to the outside of the building.

There wasn't any fire at the schoolhouse. There was just a fire drill.

About two years after the place was built, it happened. There was a fire drill, and all the kids on the top floor started to use the fire escapes. The first kids to start down on the fire escape on the west end were little kids and and they couldn't get down the steps very fast. Right after them came a batch of big kids, seventh and eighth graders. Because the little kids held up the traffic, the fire escape and the iron platform at the top got packed with kids. Well, some of te brickwork gave and the bolts and bars holding the contraption to the wall pulled loose and the whole thing fell away, spraying kids in all directions.

Three kids were killed outright. They were the ones that hit the concrete walk. About a dozen were crippled up pretty seriously and several of those never were much good afterwards.

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

Willie didn't try to cash in on the luck. He didn't have to try. People got the point. Willie went to the triple funeral the town had for the kids that got killed, and stood modestly in the background. But old Mr. Sandeen, who was the father of one of the dead kids, saw him back in the crowd and while the clods were still bouncing off the coffin lids Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head and said, loud, "Oh God, I am punished for accepting inequity and voting against an honest man!"

It brought down the house. Some women began to cry. Then other people began to come up and grab Willie by the hand. Pretty soon there wasn't a dry eye in the house. Willie's weren't dry, either.

It was Willie's luck. But the best luck always happened to people who don't need it.

He had Mason County in the palm of his hand. And in the city his picture was in all the papers. But he didn't run for anything. He just kept working on his father's farm and studying his law books at night. The only thing he did about politics was to get out and make some speeches for a fellow who was running in the primary against the Congressman who had always been a pal of Pillsbury. Willie's speeches weren't any good, at least the one I heard wasn't any good. But they didn't have to be good. People didn't bother to listen to them. They just came to look at Willie and clap and then go vote against the Pillsbury man.

Then one day Willie woke up and found himself running for governor.

One reformer, in the right place at the right time. For honest government advocates in Sichuan Province, it is both. Anyone who had staked their career on fighting corruption will be able to attract supporters without exploiting the situation. The scale of the tragedy in China dwarfs the schoolhouse in Mason County, but the outcome should be the same. Expect to see new faces in local and regional government posts. This is one of the biggest openings imaginable for new leadership. If the earthquake cannot move the Chinese to rein in their government, nothing will move them.

This leads me to suggest the existence of the Willie Stark effect: A populist uprising against entrenched machine politics in the wake of a mismanaged or preventable human tragedy. The Willie Stark effect may represent the best hope for grassroots democratization around the world, since it takes advantage of totalitarian bureaucratic shortcomings to unleash powerful internal forces for government accountability. By no means am I trumpeting the onset of democracy in China, but the accountability of public officials at all levels of government is an important step towards free and fair elections. Once people feel the consequences of poor governance, they are much more likely to promote alternatives to the usual slate of candidates. And if those alternatives pan out, a new generation of politicians might begin to follow Willie Stark up the political food chain to positions of higher power.

Keep an eye on Sichuan and other provinces dealing with with similar hardships, such as environmental degradation and industrial accidents. There just might be a thousand Willie Starks waiting in the wings.