Revelry is a political novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, subtitled “A Novel of the Time Just Beyond Our Own Day” and set in a thinly futuristic Washington where a genial, poker-playing President presides over an administration rotten to its core. Published in 1926, it follows Willis Markham—”Old Bill” to his cronies—from his private card games and midnight truancies through the slow exposure of the graft that surrounds him. The book moves across thirty chapters, from “Le Roi S’Amuse” to “‘Eroica’,” tracing how a likable man’s loyalty to his friends becomes the instrument of his ruin.
“It slept by day and woke at night.”
How the Revelry Unravels
A Late-Night Poker Table in Washington
The novel opens on a raw March evening outside a prim white house that sleeps by day and wakes at night. Smoke and thick laughter drift past a tolerant policeman, who listens at the hedge and moves on. Inside, four coatless men drink and smoke while waiting on “Bill,” debating whether to begin without him. They marvel at his punishing pace, which has aged him a decade in a year, and one remarks that Bill would sooner sit in this game than dine with the Prince of Wales. The servant Rastus announces a telephone call and the Chief’s imminent arrival; the table is made ready.
Bill enters and the room warms. He is broad and fair, about forty-five, with florid cheeks, a noble flourish of hair, restless small hands, and a slight concealed limp. Aunt Sue, discreet rather than stupid, serves him a mint julep, and he complains that dry dinners are hard on the system. His best news of the day: Liscomb is “through”—not a crook, but a man who wanted to run too many jobs—retired on grounds of ill-health, with the papers to have it tomorrow. Dan Lurcock, once said to have been a detective, comments crudely; Andy Gandy must leave at one for “Marie.” They play twenty-five-limit poker, double on roodles. Henry Forrest, the youngest, defers to Bill; Tim Fosgate dozes; Gandy draws to inside straights. Bill needles the upright Secretary of State, whom Lurcock and Forrest disparage. When his luck turns and Lurcock folds a full house after calling, Forrest protests, and Fosgate explains the group lets the Chief win because he loves winning and needs the money—Gandy says Bill is hard up running his part of the show. Talk drifts to Northeastern Waterways business and leaked inside stuff, with suspicion falling on Andy’s girl. Charley Madrigal arrives with Sigmund McBride, heir to mail-order millions, who declines to play. Bill, up $378, insists on walking home alone despite the others’ anxiety. After he goes, Lurcock erupts: “he’s President of the United States, ain’t he!”
The President Slips His Guards
Willis Markham steps out briskly, knowing the boys will alert the secret service men whose duty is to follow him. He calls giving them the slip a dirty trick and praises the guards, but he is sick of constant surveillance and of never being alone with his thoughts except in bed. Flushed with drink and the exhilaration of flight, he indulges grandiose visions of an incredible, heroic progress he attributes to luck. He fumbles a classical allusion—the stars fought against Cicero, not for him—nearly confuses the name with Sisyphus, giggles, and concludes the stars are friendly, winking at the largest overhead. He reflects on his loyal gang sharing the fruits of victory, whose whist parties have kept him from cracking under the strain. Critics are soreheads; nothing has ever been pinned on him, and his fun has involved no debauchery, scandal, or woman that counted.
He thinks of his wife, Sara Belle, a nervous wreck in a mountain retreat, planning a holy war to make him Emperor of the World; he insists he was always good to her and credits her, with Lurcock, for his rise. Hearing a speeding car, he assumes secret service and dodges into a yard, hiding on a bench like a truant boy. Drink sours his blood and the presidency becomes a hell of petty demands—judge, executive, arbiter, party leader, speechifier. He dreads tomorrow: hundreds of letters, the House floor leader, a Coast Senator howling about the Japs, and Secretary of State “Susie” Sheldon with his black grief-case, full of European complications and the debt of Juggo-Slobbia. He fantasizes a vulgar monosyllable at Sheldon’s face, then runs through Welling the prairie-dog insurgent, a W. C. T. U. delegation requiring him to watch his breath, a judgeship, commissions, a Corner-stone laying, foreign scientists, the Chamber of Commerce, the Order of Moose. He suspects a headache from Forrest’s liquor—Forrest having been bootlegger to the Senate and Cabinet.
A car stops; he fears being found in a private garden at three in the morning, though he trusts the newspapers not to print personal scandal about him. He resolves to beat the guards to the White House, climbs a rear fence, lands in an alley, recoils from a wall, and goes down. His first thought is that this cannot be kept out of the papers. He is not dead: he looks into a small metallic hole and asks if it is loaded; a woman answers, “It is.” She does not particularly want to shoot him, asks if he is hurt, and wonders why he jumps fences.
The Convention Turns
Peter Westervelt tells Edith how the nominating convention swung. The delegates were convinced, but Bowdoin held a long lead until a scandal leaked: Bowdoin money had bought delegates “like cattle over the counter.” The charge reached the wires, two delegates half-confessed, and the half-truth proved more damning than the whole. The convention stampeded to Markham, nominated amid frenzied flag-waving—the flag he had defended with his heart’s blood. Edith concludes, “And that is politics,” and Peter gravely agrees. She says his book would tell her nothing more; he admits he has been garrulous, and she takes it as a compliment. He calls it one of her seven deadly charms that she draws men into indiscretion while keeping her own. She asks whether association with the President would prove discretion; he doubts it, for a woman of her position. She calls her position a bore and her pride a mask for timidity. He denies anyone will accuse her of timidity. She says she enters “this fray” fully armed with knowledge; he denies it comes from him. She demands the dark secret he conceals in the hero’s life. He says the personal sketch is complete, but she will never understand Markham’s administration—nor does Markham—until she has a line on the men around him, the “whist parties.”
The Whist-Party Circle
He sketches Lurcock, whom Markham wanted as Attorney-General in fact, but who had never been admitted to the bar; Hambidge was installed for Lurcock to handle—honorable, upright, a gentleman, but “just a very leetle bit epileptic.” Edith revolts at the limits of credulity; Peter insists one distinguished president had an epileptic Postmaster-General, far less tactful than the present incumbent, who seldom performs in public. The ailment makes him self-distrustful and amenable to a stronger character. All is well in the Department of Justice while Lurcock is “on the lid”—he is too shrewd. Edith notes his emphasis on “there.” Peter says abruptly, “I’m afraid of Gandy,” the Secretary of Public Health, whose greed is the danger—”He can’t smell money without his ears twitching.” Worse, young Madrigal is with him, another of the President’s whist-party friends; Gandy too played poker with Markham when they were Senators. Gandy affects the Wild Western pose, carries a gun, is supposed to have killed his man; he is no more a doctor than Lurcock is a lawyer, but the oil crowd backed him and Markham put him in, fly-by-night diploma and all, despite the profession’s howls. He is doing very well—for Gandy. Madrigal is the curled and scented darling of every telephone girl and department flapper in Washington; bland as a cake of soap, magnetic in a greasy way, a confident talker with the latest story up his sleeve—”Full of wise cracks and modern frinstances,” as a correspondent said. He is the fair-haired boy of the White House, devoting himself to the President’s niece, pour le bon motif.
Edith asks about her “seal-like little man”; Peter says Fosgate is politically nil, wanting only to be near Willis Markham—disinterested devotion, the moth to the star hitched to the wagon Dan Lurcock pulled so mightily. Others in the charmed circle: a casual Senator or two; Secretary Guy of the Interior, forecast as the scandal-center but playing safe and letting Gandy do the dirty work; Forrest, an ex-bootlegger with a beautiful wife to whom Madrigal has paid dubious court; and Sig McBride, whose invitations Edith receives—Peter grins that everybody in the Society column gets them. Sig is an amusing Croesus who loves to play amiable lackey to greatness; he and Fosgate are the only ones not out for money. Markham himself is “the tool of grafters but not one himself.” He lets them use him because he doesn’t know what it’s all about—a fanatic where his friends are concerned; if a crash comes he’ll go down with them before he can be warned. Why doesn’t somebody tell him? He wouldn’t listen. Peter says a woman could tell him, if—and stops; Edith supplies “If he loved her,” and Peter adds “with a love passing the love of friends.” She notes a curious hiatus: no woman figures in his history. Peter says women have not figured in Markham’s life except casually and practically. His wife is “as good as dead. She will be soon.” Had she not broken she might be the one to warn him. As it is, he rattles around happily in his job, though sometimes he begins to realize how big it is—not how small he is; he is too well buttressed with sycophants, as every president is.
The Iliad Oil Company and the Bloodless Battle of Section Sixty-Five
A reluctant man balks at paying off every “lousy grafter” who threatens him, until the Secretary of the Interior soothes him by calling it a special deal involving Mr. Lurcock. At the mention of Dan Lurcock’s name the man relents—Lurcock, he says, plays a straight game—and agrees to take on what another voice calls a losing proposition handed to the government.
Five weeks later Charles Madrigal, stiff and sore, reaches a desert location marked on his map and finds active operations. A leather-tanned young foreman behind a barbed-wire fence denies being one of Clairborne’s people and backs the order to leave with a forty-five aimed at Madrigal’s midsection. Asked for the nearest drink, the foreman grins, cuts the electric current from the wires, and offers his flask. He represents the Iliad Oil Company, which owns the location, and warns that any Clairborne man who disputes it can tell it to the judge.
Madrigal’s Telegram and the Marines
After inquiries at the county seat, Madrigal—a deputy of the Secret Service—sends a long coded telegram to Daniel Lurcock, whose floral cypher is “Rosebud.” Lurcock growls that Madrigal wants court action and vows to show “those guys something better than law.” Borrowing Attorney-General Hambidge’s car and chauffeur without asking, he hurries to the Navy Department, where Secretary Loomis sees him at once. Lurcock asks for a detachment of marines to clean out squatters on government property in Texas; Loomis agrees to send twelve men under a reliable officer by Friday noon, noting that officials are usually obliging to Lurcock, who obliges them in return.
Madrigal tells his clerk, Miss Zoa Farley, to keep under cover because “the devil dogs are coming,” and instructs the expedition’s commander to treat the squatters gently and give the young foreman a drink, a debt he owes. The “bloodless Battle of Section Sixty-Five” is never reported and leaves no legal aftermath, since fighting the U.S. Government is as futile as fighting the Marines.
Oil on the Traded Land
Everything proceeds to schedule: the hospital site is staked out and abandoned; the land, including the supposedly uncompleted boring, is sold to a dummy and exchanged for Oklahoma timber holdings. One day Mrs. Beryl Hartley rushes into a Cabinet meeting, flings herself on the President’s shoulder, and tells “Uncle Willis” that they have struck oil on the Texas land obtained on Charley Madrigal’s advice by trading off the old Oklahoma swamp—they will be rich, and isn’t she a mascot? The President smiles affectionately at his niece while Loomis looks as though he remembered something he wished he hadn’t. Burrl may buy a horse with her share. As money floods in, the President always means to look into it in detail but never does, being too busy and too tired.
Thorne Warns Edith Westervelt
Senator Peter Thorne tells Edith Westervelt that all Washington is talking. She claims invulnerability, having nothing hurtable left. Thorne notes the President is a constant visitor and that a President is not in the position of an ordinary man; she counters that he chooses to associate with her. Thorne calls it a matter of expediency because it is infernally open, and almost thinks a clandestine meeting would be better than word-of-mouth publicity. She insists she has never done anything secretly. He calls her a political issue; she reveals that Daniel Lurcock warned her indirectly days after the accident, though she could not prove the threats or espionage came from him, and that the shadowing stopped after she mentioned her dislike of it to Mr. Markham, who seemed annoyed.
Down the block Jeff Sims bellows about a Trade Board fuss. Thorne calls Edith a dove who has fluttered the crows and has her wait until Lurcock emerges from a house. Invited for a drink, Lurcock accepts upon seeing Edith, and Thorne introduces them. Lurcock knows of her from Department of Justice inquiry agents whose findings were scant, and is struck by her self-possession, which defies his expectations of a woman involved with a married President. Edith sees a heavy, gross man with exaggerated hands and feet and an asymmetrical face, one eye set higher, giving an impression of jovial obscenity. Thorne remarks that she finds politics interesting and has a gift for acquiring information without seeking it—politically, a sensitive. Lurcock asks if she is with the Party; she says she is an onlooker, and he approves, calling it safe.
The White House Staff and Edith’s Summons
The staff who ran the White House—the ushers, secretaries, and servants who knew the President’s moods better than any politician—adored Willis Markham for his kindness, his sunny manners, and his total lack of “side.” Secrets were safe with them, and they understood that any word from Mrs. Westervelt outranked messages from the mighty. So when her request arrived the morning before Senator Welling was to offer his resolution, Markham cleared his calendar with an oath, told Frothingham to inform Secretary Maxson he was called away on imperative business, and went to her at four-thirty. He mused that this was the first time Edith had ever sent for him—an advance in intimacy—and hoped she wanted something of him.
She wanted something, but not what he hoped. She asked whether he meant to endorse Secretary Gandy. He bantered about women meddling in politics and evaded; she refused to name her source and begged him to hold off until his department was investigated. He insisted it had been investigated and was “O. K.” by Dan Lur—the Department of Justice—and that he could trust Dan to the limit. She pleaded as she had never pleaded before; he agreed amiably, concealing that the statement was already in an administration spokesman’s hands. His attitude toward women was “Anything to keep ’em happy”; he thought she was testing his devotion and playing at power. He asked what he got for it, and she accepted his kiss with acquiescence rather than response. He declared he was starved for her and asked whether she would marry him once her mourning and divorce were done. She called it a harder question, warned she would be an intolerant wife, and raised his drinking. He dismissed the dry law, called his Temperance Temple address “just for effect”—”guff”—and asked her for a cocktail, which she gave, taking it as acceptance of his view. At goodbye she thanked him for coming; he said it would be all right about Gandy, which she took for a promise. The narrator notes how far each was from comprehending the other.
The Crow’s Nest and the Shooting
At the Crow’s Nest, Dan Lurcock and Jeff Sims confabulated. Lurcock disliked that Edith was too good-looking and too brainy, supposed she wanted her hooks in Bill, and repeated hearing she wasn’t straight. They discussed Welling: he would be beaten when Benson sprang it on the Senate that the Old Man was back of Andy. Lurcock called Charley Madrigal a “big horse’s rump” who would be told where he gets off, and claimed the Department had enough on him to send him up for a century—but he knew too much to be safely crossed. In the White House, Markham dreamed of higher statesmanship inspired by Edith: world problems, a model tax system, a pan-brotherhood of Western republics, help for farmers. Meanwhile Duke Forrest, drunk for days, grew sober.
At the whist party—Fosgate, Gandy, Madrigal, Sig McBride, Lurcock, Markham—stakes were doubled and drinks trebled for Gandy. Welling’s resolution had been referred, amid derision, to the Committee on Highways and By-ways. Senator Benson delivered a statement that Gandy’s procedure had the President’s full knowledge and approval, whipping members in line. Gandy, drunk, cheered “Atta-boy, Bill”; Markham beamed; Fosgate sat glum. Then Henry Forrest appeared silently, sobered but poisoned by three days’ debauch, eyes red. Amid the card game he told Madrigal, “You stole my wife, you bastard,” and “I’m going to fix you for it.” Gandy dived under the table; Markham barked “Drop it!” as Fosgate struck upward; the bullet went into the wall; Madrigal fainted. Secret service men pinned Forrest, smashing his face; Markham said “No harm done. Accident,” and refused to have Forrest taken. Forrest spat out a tooth onto the trey of clubs and refused to talk.
“Easy Markham” and the Letter
Edith reflected on the phrase “Easy Markham,” which wounded her pride in Willis and her hope of what she might mold him into. She catalogued him as gull, dupe, sham, and finally “boob”—the people’s idol until discovered, when laughter would shatter his career. She thought of the roach powder rake-off to Madrigal of $1,350, and a hint in the letter suggesting the Madrigal scandal was one of many that would surface unless the grafter were attended to. Though she judged Markham not worth saving from his folly, a steadfast loyalty told her she must do what she could, owing it to his belief in her.
Doubt about the letter’
Edith Refuses the Ex-President
The man whose eyes had gone lifeless asks Edith whether she cares enough to become the wife of an ex-President. She summons the courage to say no, and the refusal strikes down his last staggering hope. He accepts it quietly—”You’re right. So, good-by.” Outside, Daniel Lurcock is waiting; he had a hunch she would dish them. She asks what the man meant by calling himself an ex-President, and whether he intends to resign. Lurcock answers that the man only thinks he is one: Presidents never resign.
Zoa Farley’s Price
Secretary Gandy will not step down, though leading Best Minds hope he will for the Party’s sake; he clings to the President’s official family because it advertises his friendship with Willis Markham, who stood by his friends. His fate actually rests with Zoa Farley, a frail, tinted wisp of a girl whose passion has cooled into shrewd purposefulness. On a rainy night she meets Senator Peter Thorne and Daniel Lurcock at an obscure roadhouse to resume talks about the Madrigal papers, and demands fifty thousand dollars. Lurcock calls her cuckoo; she insists it ought to be a hundred thousand and that she is letting them down easy. When Lurcock suggests she ask the President herself, she retorts that his gunmen would shoot her as a lady anarchist. Thorne, suave and persuasive, explains that a secret Party emergency fund holds about twenty thousand, and that he can raise ten thousand more—thirty thousand in all. She takes it. Lurcock warns savagely that she will be croaked within a month if she double-crosses them; she says she is taking a trip to Europe for her health.
The Vengeful Bargain
Three copies of Madrigal’s letter went to three Cabinet officers, she explains, but the real proof lies in the locked documents, and she is holding out a copy. Thorne protests that while one document remains the others are worthless; she agrees to hand over the other after Gandy has resigned. Her motive is revenge: Gandy took a cut of every deal Cholly put through and then put him away when trouble came. She will sacrifice the money and her own safety for justice to her dead lover. The two men withdraw to confer and return agreeing to her terms. The following week Gandy resigns as Secretary of the Department of Public Health, citing failing health. A month later Zoa Farley sails for Europe—her name on no passenger list, though a Mrs. J. K. Smith strongly resembling her is on a French liner. Lurcock holds the Madrigal documents and is reasonably content, not knowing that before sailing she spent a long evening privately with Senator Welling, proposing to have her money and her revenge too.
Debacle
A To Let sign marks the cottage on Blue Street. Inside, Lurcock and Jeff Sims talk; Lurcock has aged ten years in the six months since Duke Forrest’s death started a rolling rock of ruin and scandal. The investigation resumes Tuesday; Welling is gunning for the Old Man, possibly on oil, though he bows off when the Clairborne deal comes up. Clairborne has gone to Europe; the Iliad Oil man is bound for Peru. Gandy is sick in bed with a doctor’s certificate; Sig McBride lies in a private hospital with nervous prostration, having first testified he lent Gandy ninety grand and then weakened, fearing indictment. The Attorney-General has been having epileptic spasms but will not resign. Sims reveals that Zoa Farley is in Europe with a man called Smith—really Pelchek from Detroit, a former pal of Madrigal’s. Lurcock refuses to flee to Russia: there is no yellow on his belly, and Old Bill will need a friend. He has been to the White House and got the air; now he will smell around the Hill. The Welling Committee began slowly, then brought in fish, small at first, then larger.
The Dead-Man’s-Hand
At the card table, Secretary Guy asks whether he caused Markham’s disturbed reaction—the President looked at him like a ghost. The millionaire explains it was the wisecrack Charley Madrigal always made, Madrigal being the man croaked trying to make his getaway. Ziegler spreads out Markham’s abandoned cards—three eights and two aces—and, told he drew one, announces triumphantly that Markham drew to aces and eights, the Dead-Man’s-Hand. Lurcock shouts, “Forget it, damn you!”
The Poison Phial
Outside, Markham asks Tim Fosgate to walk with him; he cannot sleep and has had no decent sleep for weeks. He has lost his taste for life, he says, and there was no feel to the evening’s reunion except liquor. Fosgate warns against combining drink with sleep dope, and Markham forgoes the nightcap, sending him home in the car.
The President and His Court
Markham himself is the novel’s central study: a broad, florid man of forty-five with a concealed limp and a hunger for winning, who genuinely loves the crowds he shakes hands with and genuinely cannot see that the men he calls princes are picking the country’s pockets. His political creed is simple to the point of blindness—the Party can do no wrong, loyalty is the first virtue, and a man who turns on his friends is a yellow dog. That creed is his charm and his fatal flaw at once. Around him Adams arranges a court of predators and hangers-on: Daniel Lurcock, the jobless lawyer who actually runs the Department of Justice and treats the figurehead Attorney-General Hambidge like a child to be managed; Andy Gandy, the fake doctor and Secretary of Public Health whose ears twitch at the smell of money; and Charley Madrigal, the scented, magnetic fixer who trades on his intimacy with “Charley and Bill” to sell pardons, liquor permits, and oil land. Against them stand the decent and the watchful—Tim Fosgate, whose devotion to Markham is the one disinterested love in the book; Senator Peter Thorne, the veteran who sees everything and can prevent nothing; and Edith Westervelt, the society woman with a past who becomes the President’s confidante and, briefly, the one person who might have warned him.
What the Book Is Really About
Adams builds his satire on a single insight: that corruption in a democracy does not announce itself as villainy but arrives wearing friendship. The Crow’s Nest, where the real cabinet meets over cards and highballs, is a brilliant figure for this—the “whist parties” are the government, and the government is a private game in which the public’s business is the ante. The novel’s title points two ways at once. There is the chaste revelry of the poker table, and there is the larger revelry of an administration feasting on the nation’s trust while the nation looks the other way, more interested in the baseball scores than in the hospital-graft investigation. Adams is equally sharp about the machinery of secrecy—the secret service men who shadow the President’s friends and rifle Senators’ offices, the tapped wires, the floral ciphers, the dummy corporations—and about the moral double standard that lets Markham forgive his cronies anything while judging Edith by a rule he never applies to himself. Her confession of a past lover, offered without shame, exposes the small-town rigidity beneath his geniality more surely than any scandal could.
The Novel’s Bitter Legacy
What gives Revelry its staying power is the way it refuses to let its villains be simply villainous or its victim simply innocent. Markham is not a crook; he is a man who wanted to be liked and let himself be used, and the book’s closing movement—the “Debacle,” the chapter that gives the novel its name, and the final “Eroica”—carries him down with the friends he would not abandon. Madrigal’s safe-deposit boxes of dynamite, the oil well that comes in ten days after the marines withdraw, the niece who pockets her uncle’s share and buys two dozen smart hats: these are the small, plausible details that make the larger rot believable. Adams wrote in the shadow of Teapot Dome, and the novel reads as a warning dressed as entertainment—a study of how a decent man’s loyalty, in the wrong company, becomes the most useful tool a conspiracy ever had.
