The losing candidate was just glad to put it behind him after months on the campaign trail.

He said: Thanks, friend; but you're wasting your time. You better warn Crocker. If that louse makes a play for me, he'll get hit with Chicago lightning!

Once in a while Werner tows Jutta as far as the entrance to Pit Nine, the largest of the mines, wrapped in noise, lit like a pilot at the center of a gas furnace, a five-story coal elevator crouched over it, cables swinging, hammers banging, men shouting, an entire mapful of pleated and corrugated industry stretching into the distance on all sides, and they watch the coal cars trundling up from the earth and the miners spilling out of warehouses with their lunch pails toward the mouth of the elevator like insects toward a lighted trap.

Yet unlike many of Jackson’s supporters, he would not label his fellow senators racist. “I’m not going to try to get into the head of my colleagues to understand what’s motivating them. It’s a fool’s errand,” he told me.