Solid Citizen

PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN (344 pp.)--Bascom N. Timmons--Holf ($5).

Longfellow never wrote it, but he owed the great-great-grandfather of Charles Gates Dawes a poem. On the night when Paul Revere "spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm" between Charlestown and Lexington, William Dawes was rousing the sleepy colonists between Boston and Concord. In recent American history, the Dawes name has been hitched to three things--a pipe, a plan and a peppery phrase. The pipe was a low, underslung affair that traveled the smoke along a 15-inch channel, the plan was a reparations agreement that helped put Germany on its feet in 1924-1929, and the phrase was "Hell and Maria."

Biographer Bascom Timmons, veteran Washington correspondent, uses these as springboards to dive into the deeper waters of the man's character and career as lawyer, banker, statesman, philanthropist and Coolidge's Vice President. Unfortunately, Author Timmons spends most of his time splashing around amid the floating debris of Dawes's public speeches and old nespaper headlines. The Impact of Portrait of an American is not so much that of memorable biography as that of a memorable man who put "Is it right?" before "Will it pay?"

Steady Job Without Pay. Charles Dawes's bedrock integrity never led him into a silly contempt for money. In 1880, when his father was running for Congress, young Charley, 15, startled his staunch Republican family by parading past their Marietta, Ohio home tootling a flute in the opposition band. It was, he explained airil when he got home, a purely professional appearance for which he had received one silver dollar.

His taste for selfless public service showed up early. As a young lawyer making his way in Lincoln, Neb., he became counsel for the Lincoln Board of Trade and soon tangled with the railroads over discriminatory freight rates. He never asked for or received a fee in these freight-rate cases. "It is a good, steady job without pay," he wrote philosophically. Described on an 1889 list of eligible bachelors as an "antimonopoly agitator" with the "neatest mustache in Lincoln," Dawes fluttered the hearts of the local belles. But his own heart belonged then, and for the next 62 years, to Caro Blymyer, a dark-eyed Cincinnati girl who was a direct descendant of Miles Standish.

The next few years brought Dawes a son and daughter, success as a lawyer, choice property purchases, and a directorship of the leading Lincoln bank. When the panic of '93 struck, no depositor of the Lincoln bank lost a dime, but Dawes had to borrow $200,000 to keep the bank afloat.

Too Much for Mules? In 1896, Presidential Candidate McKinley asked Dawes to handle his campaign funds. Dawes raised and spent the formidable sum of $37562,325.59. From then on, U.S. Presidents got the habit of calling on Charley Dawes. In World War I, he handled the purchase of more than ten million ship tons of supplies for Europe. Under Harding, he was an economizing Director of the Budget, ran his own bureau for almost half of its $225,000 appropriation ("We took our own medicine"). Under Hoover, he served as Ambassador to Britain and helped to draft the Administration's war-debt moratorium after the '29 crash.

Once asked to rate the Presidents he had known, Dawes said of the four he most admired: "Cleveland--courage; McKinley --quiet effectiveness; Wilson--intellect; and William Howard Taft--principle and usefulness." Dawes himself was a blend of precisely these qualities plus another--salty common sense. Testifying before a hostile congressional investigating committee after World War I on his role as purchasing agent for the A.E.F., Dawes was asked: "Is it not true that excessive prices were paid for mules?"

"Hell and Maria!" the reporters thought they heard Dawes exclaim. Then he continued : "I would have paid horse prices for sheep if the sheep could have pulled artillery to the front!" Timmons insists that the expletive the reporters thought they heard was merely a nice-Nellyism from his Nebraska days: "Helen Maria!" But the phrase caught fire in its firmer version, followed Dawes the rest of his life.

A "By-Golly Man." Actually, as he said himself, he was much more of a "mild, by-golly sort of a man" who loved such homely pleasures as playing Tea for Two on the flute for his wife. With the coming of the New Deal, Dawes did not want, and was not asked, to share the political limelight. "Unhurried and unharried," he spent part of each day at his board-chairman's desk at the Chicago bank he helped to found, the City National Bank and Trust Co. In the evenings, he pored over Greek and Roman history in his library. To a visitor who joined him there, Dawes said: "If I did . . . give my views publicly . . . it would be in the shape of a five-word prayer for all of us: 'God give us common sense.'

On April 23, 1951, close to his 86th birthday, Dawes was sitting in his library again. Caro Dawes came in. He looked up from his chair, smiled gently at her, sank back and died.

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