Cass Mastern Thesis

In Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, The Case of the Upright Judge is used to show Jack firsthand how a person’s actions affect others and that every action has a reaction and that chains of events is never truly broken. An irreverent former student of history, Jack Burdren abandoned his dissertation on Cass Mastern because of his inability to connect with him and to see cause and effect, to understand why Mastern wanted to die. Jack did not come to understand the importance of the past until much later in his life, when his dealings with Judge Irwin rattle him to his core, making him question everything he had always known, both about Idealism and about Irwin, and making him face death once again. Because of the dirt that he was made

to dig up about Judge Irwin, in the face of his old world crumbling down around him, Jack is forced to reevaluate his belief in Idealism and finally understand that all actions have consequences that one cannot always control.
Calling himself a brass-bound Idealist during his school days, Jacked believed that “what you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real” (Warren 45). This belief shaped Jack’s misunderstanding of history as inherently unimportant because it was not actively affecting him, that because it was in the past it was no longer relevant. “If you are an Idealist,” he goes on to explain, “it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway “ (Warren 45). Adhering to such a creed, it is easy to see why Jack was not the best student of history and why he never finished his dissertation while in school; he had no concept of cause and effect, no basic understanding of why history was so important to study and to understand and what one could learn from the study of history. Jack also lacks the ability to account for his own actions because he does not perceive the repercussions of them.
Before starting and while working on his dissertation, Jack had trouble conceptualizing the past and seeing it as anything but fiction with no pull in the real world.

His subject, Cass Mastern, was not real to him - he did not “know” Cass Mastern and without “knowing Cass Mastern, he could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern’s world” (Warren 282). He ends up abandoning the dissertation because the facts are not enough - he has to be able to connect to Cass Mastern before he can write his dissertation on him. For Jack to be able to write about Cass’s troubles during the Civil War, Jack would have needed ability to empathize with Cass despite the generations that separate them. Jack lacked this ability to empathize - with Mastern and with Duncan - because of his Idealistic views. By believing that history had no effect on the present because it was in the past, Jack distanced himself from taking responsibility for his own actions and what they caused. However, it was not that Jack “could not understand” the impact that history had, it was more that “he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him” (Warren 284). Jack did not want to understand why Cass did what he did because it would mean understanding that actions have consequences and that those consequences live on, including his own. He was unable to write about Mastern because he had no emotional connection to the man, he failed to realize that nothing exists in a vacuum and

that everything has an effect that can ripple in time through the centuries.
Digging up dirt on Willie’s orders, Jack learns of the scandal that Irwin was involved in that lead to a man’s, Mortimer Littlepaugh’s, suicide. Learning this about Irwin seems to shatter Jack, makes him reevaluate everything he has ever known about the man that was more of a father to him than his real father. The man he only learns is his father after his suicide because of what Jack told him. With the dirt that he has on Irwin and Irwin’s later suicide, Jack is made to see the repercussions of other’s actions as well as his own hand in fate. He is made to see that Irwin’s actions have caused pain, they had caused death. They make him understand that actions have consequences beyond human control and that just because it is in the past, does not mean it is forgotten or done with. Irwin had seemed surprised when presented with Littlepaugh’s suicide, unsettled but not overly horrified, and his later suicide is more due to Jack than Littlepaugh, but to Jack these events are the gun that shatters the mirror. They are what he could never understand about Mastern, about Duncan, why a man would want to kill himself because of something another man did, they are why Jack could never move forward because “if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future” (Warren 656). Only by understanding the past could Jack move on and continue into the future, secure in the knowledge that he’d learned from the past what the past was there to teach him.
The Case of the Upright Judge forces Jack to see that history does not die, it is not stagnant and unaffected and something one just reads about at their leisure.

History lives and breathes and controls those that it leaves behind, it creates a need for revenge, for reparations, for rage. History has not forgotten about Cass Mastern or Mortimer Littlepaugh just because they are dead because those that live after them continue their stories and further their consequences. “Nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost,” Jack explains after the fact, realizing with sudden clarity that history does not die, that “all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us” (Warren 342). Through this epiphany, Jack realizes that history is important because humans give it importance, history lives through those that live it but also those that read it and carry it forward. History affects all people because its stories and its consequences survive the test of time, because “no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over” (Warren 534). A story does not end because it’s characters have died, it lives on eternally, without fail and without spite, to teach future generations the lessons of the

past.
Because of his act of digging up dirt on Irwin, Jack is finally forced to understanding why history is important and how everything can and does affect others in ways they may not be able to understand.