Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online Page A

Wallace; now, the stormhaving subsided, I was being asked to lead that College in the routine performance of its constitutional duties. I wondered if I had a right to accept that leadership.
    I walked the short distance to the magnificent capitol building, one of the grandest and most gracious in the fifty states. I had known the building since childhood, and its history had always fascinated me, for in addition to being beautiful, this capitol was also the most infamous in American state history, winning that honor by a nose over the notorious structure in Colorado.
    In 1897, while the legislature was in session, the old capitol had burned right to the ground. It must have been a fine blaze, because we had prints of it in our classroom in primary school, with agitated firemen running here and there in dashing poses and accomplishing nothing. Quickly the legislature authorized $500,000 for a replacement, but the result was appalling. “Nothing but a warehouse!” some newsman protested when he saw the finished job, and this became the accepted verdict. It was a disgrace to the commonwealth, and the legislature, properly embarrassed, had promptly voted $4,000,000 to build a real capitol.
    For those days the fund was ample, and the result was noble. The halls were spacious. The rotunda dominated the countryside. And the building looked so solid and clean and stable that everyone agreed the state had got even more for its money than the plans had promised.
    In this mood of euphoria the legislature reasoned: “If the people wanted us to spend not $500,000 but $4,000,000 and if they wanted not a warehouse but a granite masterpiece,they would also like to see it well furnished.” So by one device or another, but principally by the trick of setting up personal companies which would sell chairs and rugs and lighting fixtures—companies which would be owned by the legislators themselves—these public servants managed to spend $9,600,000 at 1906 prices. Chairs were sold at $5,000 each. Chandeliers which were bought in New York for $40 were sold in Harrisburg for $3,000. Rugs were paid for at a rate that would have exhausted the looms of Samarkand and Bokhara, but the rugs that were delivered had been woven in Brooklyn. It was a steal of such magnitude that it set a lasting standard for the history books. “The Harrisburg capitol!” I heard again and again in my youth, and men who had sold brass spittoons at a price they would have brought if made of solid gold were pointed out to me as folk heroes, which they were, for so far as I knew then, no one connected with the vast swindle ever went to jail.
    I remember when I first saw the result. It was about 1920, when the building was fourteen years old and I thirteen, and it seemed so handsomely proportioned, so ornately ornamented and with such splendid chairs and spittoons that I outraged my civics teacher by blurting out to our class, “It was worth every penny.”
    Now, as I approached it for serious duty, I thought of that high-domed room, still captivating to schoolchildren, where the flamboyant murals of Violet Oakley had occupied my attention on that first visit. Around the inside of the dome Miss Oakley had painted the procession of the hours, all twenty-four of them, from midnight through high noon andback to midnight in one marvelous swirl of tall and graceful ladies, those for the night hours clothed in ominous black, those for daylight mainly naked. It was quite a performance.
    The Electoral College was to meet, I was told, in the Senate Chamber, one of the finest small rooms in American government, a striking symphony of gold and green and dark blue. Staring at us here would be a somber Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, standing under the emblazoned words which he had spoken at that battlefield on November 19, 1863: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated to the unfinished work.”
    When I met with the officials I found that all was not well with the Electoral