The 1916 United States presidential election becomes a test of political hope and friendship in the experience of Richard Ellsworth Savage, who believes Woodrow Wilson’s reelection will keep the United States out of war. The account follows Richard from an earlier season of energetic campaigning into a raw Boston election night, where Ned’s habitual dismissal of politics collides with Richard’s need to watch the returns. A newspaper extra announcing Hughes’s victory briefly makes the outcome appear to reverse Richard’s hopes; by morning, Ned reports Wilson’s election. The episode’s decisive significance lies not only in the result, but in the way the election exposes how differently the two friends understand political responsibility.

Campaigning and political expectation

In the summer before the election, Richard campaigns for Hiram Halsey Cooper, working twelve hours a day to prepare releases and persuade small-town newspaper editors to give more space to Cooper’s speeches. His labor is tied to a wider enthusiasm for Wilson’s New Freedom, the promise of staying out of war, and the prospect of industrial harmony between capital and labor. He brands privilege and attacks the interests; politics, for him, is not an abstract topic but a cause demanding time and effort. The contrast with his return to the Yard is pointed: university lectures seem to advocate nothing and attack nothing, while the campaign has given him a purpose and a public stake.

That conviction shapes Richard’s expectations on Election Day. He cuts all his classes, and even during a walk with Ned around the North End and out to the end of T wharf, his attention keeps turning to the state-by-state vote. The friends have a private plan to buy a small yawl or ketch after graduation and sail down the coast to Florida and the West Indies, through the Panama Canal, and into the Pacific. Ned has bought a navigation book and begun studying it, but Richard cannot hold his mind on the proposed voyage. Their shared future is present from the beginning of the evening, yet the election divides their attention: Ned wants to talk about sailing; Richard wants to know who is winning.

Election night in Boston

The two eat supper at the Venice, where the crowded restaurant serves cold scallopini and spaghetti with wretched service. Ned orders another bottle of white orvieto as soon as the first is finished. They leave leaning slightly against each other, then find themselves among the crowd gathered around the bulletin board on the Boston Herald building. Ned calls out, “Who’s winning? Batter up. . . . Hurray for our side,” treating the returns as a game. When a man behind them objects, Ned answers with the phrase he uses whenever political talk arises: “Blahblahblahblah.” Richard has to pull him away among the trees to keep the exchange from becoming a fight. He whispers that they will be pinched if Ned continues, but also insists that he wants to see the returns because Wilson might be winning.

Richard refuses Ned’s suggestion that they go to Frank Locke’s for a drink. He is excited, does not want more alcohol, and connects Wilson’s success directly to the possibility of avoiding war: “It means we won’t go to war.” Ned answers thickly that war would be amusing, then proposes drinking to it whether there is a war or not. The disagreement is more than a difference in mood. Richard treats the election as a decision with consequences beyond the evening; Ned turns both the campaign and its stakes into material for mockery and a drink.

At Frank Locke’s, the barkeep refuses to serve them, although he has served them before. As they make their way down Washington Street toward another bar, a boy runs by carrying an extra in large black type: “HUGHES ELECTED.” Ned cheers. Richard puts a hand over Ned’s mouth, and they wrestle in the street as hostile onlookers gather. Richard hears them identify the two as college boys and Harvard men; his hat falls off, and Ned releases him so he can pick it up. A policeman is making his way through the crowd. The friends straighten up and walk away soberly, faces red. The abrupt, emphatic headline interrupts Richard’s confidence, while the crowd’s hostility makes their public celebration—or apparent celebration—feel dangerous rather than triumphant.

The result and the quarrel between friends

They walk toward Scollay Square. Richard dislikes the look of the crowd there and wants to return to Cambridge, but Ned instead begins talking to a tough-looking man and an unsteady sailor. When the man suggests taking them to Mother Bly’s, Richard warns Ned that the pair want to get him drunk and take his money. Ned, already drunk, takes the sailor’s white cap and puts it on his own head. Richard finally lets go of his arm and walks away, leaving Ned behind. The election night has become a separation in miniature: Richard chooses safety and returns alone, while Ned follows the unpredictable company he has picked up.

Richard walks across Beacon Hill and all the way to Cambridge. His ears ring, his head feels hot and thumping, and he reaches his room shivering and tired, close to tears. He cannot sleep, even after piling a rug on top of his blankets, and spends the night listening for every sound in the street. The passage gives his reaction a physical aftermath, showing that the political disappointment and the rupture with Ned have unsettled him more deeply than a casual disagreement would. The supposed Hughes victory remains in the air through that sleepless night.

In the morning, Richard gets up with a headache and a sour, burnt-out feeling. At a counter beneath the Lampoon Building, Ned appears fresh and rosy, smiling as he tells Richard, “Well, my young politico, Professor Wilson was elected and we’ve missed out on the sabre and epaulettes.” The remark restores the result Richard had hoped for, but does not undo the night’s conflict. Ned says he had worried about Richard and asks where he disappeared to; Richard snaps that he went home and went to bed. Ned then recounts the rest of his adventure: the man, Barney, proved to be a boxing instructor, and they ended up in a Turkish bath. Richard feels like smashing him in the face, says he has a lab period, and leaves. The election has delivered relief about war, but no corresponding reconciliation between the friends.

Political hope against political evasion

The episode sets Richard’s serious investment in Wilson’s reelection against Ned’s repeated “Blahblahblahblah,” a verbal shrug that he deploys when conversation turns to politics or war. On Election Day, the phrase moves from an eccentric response in their Cambridge room into a public provocation: Ned yells it at a stranger, then mutters it after the confrontation over the false report. Its recurrence makes his detachment an active source of friction, especially because Richard’s fear of war is expressed plainly and specifically. Richard wants the returns because he believes the outcome matters; Ned turns the same uncertainty into an excuse for drinking and improvisation.

The scene’s sequence preserves that uncertainty long enough for the election to become a personal ordeal. Richard spends the evening waiting for returns, encounters a headline declaring Hughes elected, loses Ned in the crowd, and endures a cold, sleepless night before hearing that Wilson won. Yet the final reassurance is deliberately limited: the result settles the immediate question of who was elected, not the larger question of what political change can guarantee. Ned’s joke about “the sabre and epaulettes” treats the avoided war as one more adventure missed, while Richard’s exhaustion registers the human weight he attaches to it. The election therefore concludes in two registers at once: Wilson wins, and Richard remains estranged from the friend who had spent the night refusing to take the stakes seriously.