The Corruption of Power
By: Aaron Schnoor
Tags: Literature, Books, Politics, Writing, Essay

The Corruption of Power

Years later, Robert Penn Warren’s writing still speaks to the decay of political systems

Image courtesy of mrderofcrows.wordpress.com

It is Willie Stark, the populist politician in Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men, who announces in the first chapter that “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption.”

Penn Warren’s novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize the year after publication, has stood the test of time as a popular diatribe against the corruption of politics. It is through the rise and fall of Willie Stark that Robert Penn Warren weaves a tale of human potential, greatness, and ultimate downfall. Here we see the story of a man who tried to use his own power to rise above the law, paying the ultimate price in his pursuit of preeminence.

Even today, it is a lesson that many readers will find familiar.

Stark’s view of human corruption is a powerful theme throughout the novel. Through the eyes of Jack Burden, the young assistant to Willie Stark, we learn that the politician initially rose to power by fighting against ongoing corruption and through advocating for political reform. Stark establishes himself as an honest, crime-fighting man, becoming immensely popular throughout the state.

As readers, we are drawn to the Stark’s larger-than-life personality and charismatic eagerness. He is portrayed as a hard worker, a man who came from nothing and established himself as something. Stark is a good public speaker, but it is clear that he possesses none of the intelligence or education that Jack Burden displays. Instead, the politician acts upon instinct, relying on motivation, influence, and power to achieve his goals.

Willie Stark’s brash instinctual mindset is displayed during a speech to supporters. Standing on the steps of the Louisiana State Capital, Stark exclaims:

“I shall live in your will and your right. And if any man tries to stop me in the fulfilling of that right and that will I’ll break him. I’ll break him like that…I’ll smite him. Hip and thigh, shinbone and neckbone, kidney punch, rabbit punch, upper cut, and solar plexus. And I don’t care what I hit him with. Or how!”

As we watch Stark’s rise to governor, we see his thirst for power push him toward unethical actions. The politician asks Burden to find dirt on his political rivals, eventually resorting to bribery to meet his needs. As the New York Daily News wrote in a 1949 review, Stark “ is gradually metamorphosed into a man so drunk with power that he wields it like a Stalin, a Hitler or a Mussolino.”

The Boss, as Jack Burden calls Willie Stark throughout the novel, has more problems than just bribery and political corruption: despite being married with one son, he becomes involved in multiple sexual affairs. Those affairs threaten his marriage, rocking his political career. And, after the brother of one of Stark’s mistresses hears sordid rumors, the brother decides to take actions into his own hands. He confronts Stark in the capital building, gunning The Boss down.

Willie Stark, after a meteoric rise from poverty to power, is suddenly dead.

Robert Penn Warren’s novel tells the tale of Willie Stark’s rise to prominence and eventual downfall, but there is so much more to the story than just the biography of a fictional politician. Like Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Willie Stark’s life and death serve as a reminder of the instability of power. Stark wanted the world, and for a time he held it in his hands. But then, in the midst of his own greatness, the power he once grasped fell from his reach.

As Penn Warren reminds the audience, power is fleeting. The past — once transformed by the misleading shine of power — returns as before.

Jack Burden reminisces on this fact at the end of the novel, stating, “In one sense it is strange that I should be here, for the discovery of truth had one time robbed me of the past…But in the end, the truth gave the past back to me.”

The novel’s focus on time continues in the final paragraph, written beautifully by Penn Warren and told through the voice of Jack Burden. As Burden and his wife attempt to move on from the death of Willie Stark by leaving their home, the narrator states:

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among trees as soundless as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

And so Time, the formidable, unsurmountable component of all humanity, wipes clean the corruption of power. Willie Stark, the governor who rose out of poverty to reign on a decrepit throne of grandeur, stands as another footnote in Time’s long list of conquests. And Penn Warren reminds us, with his masterful use of prose, that we too are mere tokens of the “awful responsibility of Time.”