Daniel Webster, one of the most eloquent of men, was fifty years old when he first began to suffer from the summer catarrh. I was only six when my first paroxysm came on. Most of Mr. Webster’s biographers have ignored the whole subject of hay fever and its effect on the man’s career. In my own case, even my close friends possess very slight knowledge of the part pollinosis plays in my life. I suspect that the matter has never been properly explored.
In May, 1937, the Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine published a paper by Creighton Barker called “Daniel Webster and the Hay-Fever.”* I have just come across it in my files and have reread it with the closest attention. Monday will be the first day of August; at this point in the summer my own fever (which is the early type) is waning. From my study window I can look across to the stubble fields where the hay was cut two weeks ago and can feel the relaxed membrane and general prostration characteristic of the last stages of the disease. Webster, who suffered the autumn type of pollinosis, was in midsummer merely anticipating the approach of trouble. August found him wary, discreet. On August 19, 1851, he wrote to President Fillmore: “I have never had confidence that I should be able to avert entirely the attack of catarrh, but I believe that at least I shall gain so much in general health and strength as to enable me, in some measure, to resist its influence and mitigate its evils. Four days hence is the time for its customary approach.”
The four days passed with no ill effects. The fever was late arriving that year. On the evening of the 25th, Mr. Webster took a blue pill, and the following morning a Rochelle powder. The weather was clear and quite cool. Not till the 31st do we find in his correspondence any evidence of distress. Then (writing to Mr. Blatchford), “Friday about noon: I thought I felt catarrhal symptoms. There was some tendency of defluxion from the nose, the eyes did not feel right, and what was more important, I felt a degree of general depression which belongs to the disease.”
Here, in the fading lines of this apprehensive letter, history suddenly grows vivid, and I experience an acute identity with one of the major characters. Webster had had Presidential ambitions, but by this time it had become apparent to him that anyone whose runny nose bore a predictable relationship to the Gregorian calendar was not Presidential timber. He was well past middle life when this depleting truth was borne in on him. I (as I have said before) was a child of six when it became clear to me that a hypersensitivity to the blown dust of weeds and grasses was more than a mere nasal caprice—it was of a piece with destiny.
In 1905, when my parents first discovered in me a catarrhal tendency, hay fever was still almost as mysterious as it was when Mr. Webster was taking his iodate of iron and hydriodate of potash by direction of his physician—who was thinking hard. The first indication I had that I was different from other boys came when I used to go out driving on Sunday afternoons in the surrey. I noticed that every time I rode behind a horse my nose began to run and my eyes grew unbearably itchy. I told my father that it was the smell of the horse that did this thing to me. Father was skeptical. To support a horse at all was a considerable drain on his finances and it was going a little far to ask him to believe that the animal had a baleful effect on any member of the family. Nevertheless he was impressed—I looked so queer, and I sneezed with such arresting rapidity.
He refused absolutely to admit that his horse smelled different from any other horse, and at first he was disinclined to believe that his son had any peculiarity of the mucosa. But he did call a doctor.
The doctor dismissed the horse and announced that I suffered from “catarrhal trouble.” He rocked back and forth in the rocker in my bedroom for about ten minutes in silent thought. Then quickly he arose.
“Douse his head in cold water every morning before breakfast,” he said to Mother and departed.
This treatment was carried out, with the aid of a cheap rubber spray, daily for almost two years. I didn’t mind it particularly, and except for destroying the natural oil of my hair it did me no harm. The chill, noisy immersion provided a brisk beginning for the day and inoculated me against indolence if not against timothy grass and horse dander.
It was twelve or thirteen years after the Missouri Compromise had temporarily settled the slavery question that Webster had his first attack of the fever. A Whig and an aristocrat, he undoubtedly accepted this sudden defluxion from the nose as a common cold. He was in the prime of life; his youthful ideals had matured; his powers had been demonstrated. He was an ornament to the young republic, when he began to sneeze. Years later, with the ragweed dust of many summers in his veins, he joined Clay in the Compromise of 1850 and heard his own friends vilify him for betraying the cause of humanity and freedom.
How little these critics knew of the true nature of his defection. They said he had his eye on the vote of the South. What could they know of the scourge of an allergic body? Across the long span of the years I feel an extraordinary kinship with this aging statesman, this massive victim of pollinosis whose declining days sanctioned the sort of compromise that is born of local irritation. There is a fraternity of those who have been tried beyond endurance. I am closer to Daniel Webster, almost, than to my own flesh. I am with him in spirit as he journeys up from Washington to Marshfield, in the preposterous hope that the mountain air will fortify and sustain him—to Marshfield, where he will be not just partially but wholly impregnated with ragweed bloom. I am with him as he pours out a pony of whiskey, to ease the nerves. I pour one, too, and together we enjoy the momentary anesthesia of alcohol, an anesthesia we both know from experience is a short-lived blessing, since liquor (particularly grain liquor) finds its way unerringly to the membrane of the nose. I am at his side as he sits down to write another letter to Fillmore. (I understand so well the incomparable itch of eye and nose for which the only relief is to write to the President of the United States.) “I go to Boston today where Mrs. Webster is, and thence immediately to Marshfield. By the process thus far, I have lost flesh, and am not a little reduced. Yesterday and Sunday were exceedingly hot, bright days, and although I did not step out of the house, the heat affected my eyes much after the catarrhal fashion. I resisted the attack, however, by the application of ice.”
Ice with a little whiskey poured over it, he neglected to add.
Webster died on October 24, 1852, of liver trouble and dropsy. They did a post-mortem on him and found a well-marked effusion on the arachnoid membrane. It was in the cards that he would never attain to the Presidency; his reaction to flower dust nullified his qualities of leadership. I am sure Webster knew this, in his bones, just as I knew, sneezing in the back seat of the surrey, that I was not destined to achieve my secret goal.
Our lives, Webster’s and mine, run curiously parallel. He had an expensive family and expensive tastes—so have I. He liked social life. I do, too. He liked eating and drinking, specially the latter, and was happy on his great farms in Franklin and in Marshfield, whither he turned for sanctuary during the catarrhal season. The fact that he sought the burgeoning countryside in ignorance of what he was doing, while I expose myself wittingly to the aggravation of hay, does not alter the case. Webster lived to align himself on the side of compromise. In time of political strain my own tendency is toward the spineless middle ground. I have the compromising nature of a man who from early childhood has found himself without a pocket handkerchief in a moment of defluxion. Had I lived in slave days, I would have sided with Clay and been reviled by my friends.
It is only half the story. Webster, even though he knew very little about the cause of hay fever, must have found, just as I find, in this strange sensitivity to male dust and earth’s fertile attitude a compensatory feeling—a special identification with life’s high mystery that in some measure indemnifies us for the violence and humiliation of our comic distress and that makes up for the unfulfillment of our most cherished dream.
*Presented before the Beaumont Club, March 12, 1937.