When Senator-elect Wharton went back to Washington, it was not into a strange country. He had measured swords with many of the Senators when he and they had been members of the lower house of Congress together. He had been on conference committees at the end of two sessions of Congress, and, being a member of the steering committee of his party's caucus, knew the kind of timber of which every Senator was made. On the other hand, Wharton knew that the Senate knew Tom Wharton. So, when he was cartooned by Coffin, in the Washington Post, as an Agrarian Hercules, in a breech-clout and a straw hat, cleaning out the Augean stables of senatorial flub-dub, Wharton's cup of satisfaction brimmed.
When Wharton took the oath of office he walked down the middle aisle of the Senate Chamber in a gray sack coat and a lay-down collar, with one hand in his trouser's pocket. His only sign of nervousness was manifested when he bit at his bristly, close-cropped mustache as the informal ceremony proceeded. He lounged hulkily back to his seat with his thumbs in his vest holes, sucking his teeth and holding his head at an angle which seemed to him to proclaim his composure.
A year later Wharton was walking alone up and down the red-carpeted lobby of the Senate, his eyes on the floor, his hands clasped behind him, his cigar trailing a white wraith over his shoulder. Senator Felt, from a New England State, nudged a companion and said:
"See Tom Wharton over there?"
"Yes."
"Well, he thinks he's thinking."
That remark came to Wharton's ears and opened a most cordial and interesting enmity, an enmity bred of physical, mental, moral, and political antipathies, so marked that descriptive writers doing the Senate always linked the two men, Wharton and Felt, in beautifully balanced sentences, which made Wharton swear in English, Spanish, and Missouri Valley.
Wharton still foraged in pensions. He kept four clerks, besides his private secretary, busy answering letters from pensioners, or from those who would, could, should, or might be pensioners. He attended camp-fires and contributed money to soldiers' societies without stint. Before he had been in the Senate a year Wharton's old army friends began to appear as messengers and guards and guides, until the Senate pay-roll became almost a copy of Tom Wharton's company roster. He would help other Senators with bills, general bills, or local bills, and in return for his services required that his cohorts be cared for.
Early in his first senatorial term he edged into the Committee of the District of Columbia and traded everything for good standing there. He retained certain ideals of honesty. He was, as he said, as honest as the times would permit; and his standard of political honor in others only drew the line at taking money from both sides of an issue. Personally Wharton made it a point never to take money at all, but he made propitious investments in real estate, in Massachusetts Avenue Extended, and in street railway stock. He reasoned, however, that his constituents were none the worse off for his foresight, and because no one accused him of taking bribes his conscience did not prick. During his first term in the Senate, Wharton spoke vehemently and voted for all laws which expanded the currency and curtailed what he called "the money power." The day after one of his denunciations of the railroads he returned all his passes, and a friend from Baxter who was in Wharton's committee-room when the Senator was dictating letters to the railroads, told at home that Tom said he was rich enough to afford the luxury of being honest; and the remark passed into the proverbial literature of the State.
Shortly after this proverb became public property, Senator Wharton, who, in his congressional days, had been tempted by the devil in various disguises, began to hunt up the devil and to employ a broker. Now it is a long jump from taking a little $5,000 nibble at an Indian supply contract or munching a $10,000 bit of public land grazing lease, when these things come one's way, to grabbing for plums right and left and standing at the pantry door demanding that nothing shall go to the table until it is divided. The devil helped Wharton to make the jump. After he took the jump Wharton concerned himself with the interests of Wharton first, and considered his constituents afterward.
