Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, subtitled A Novel of the New American Revolution, by Tristram Coffin was published by the Macmillan Company of New York in 1964. Kirkus Reviews described the novel, which centers upon a congressman from Arkansas during the era of civil rights, as a “damp and blowsy novel” that “could have been hilarious satire if pushed a bit further.” The title comes from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Part 1 of the novel opens with Timotheus Denney, a U.S. congressman who had been “born on the floor of a rotting cabin” in Yell County, back home in Arkansas. He is on the cusp of his greatest legislative success—a dam, “the biggest of them all, draining the waters of the Ozarks.” His hometown, the fictional River City, where he has lived for thirty years after coming down from the mountain country “in a truck loaded with moonshine whisky,” is described as positioned “on a rock cliff over the great river in southeast Arkansas, and called itself a little pathetically ‘the biggest little port on the Mississippi.’” (River City might therefore be modeled after Helena in Phillips County.) Denney’s wife, Dora Jane, and her brother, Sam Barber, own and operate a construction company that, thanks to Timotheus’s position in Congress, receives government contracts across the nation.

In Washington DC, Denney is concerned that his bill for the Denney Dam (as he likes to think of it) is trapped in the Rules Committee as the administration is making a big push for a federal voting rights bill, which Denney, a white southerner, has pledged to oppose. Henry Brandon, a northern congressman, offers Timotheus a deal whereby the bill for the dam will sail through committee if Denney supports the voting rights bill, saying, “It’s making good on the American Revolution before we have a new one.” To avoid this compromise, Denney goes scrounging for votes in an attempt to circumvent Brandon.

Part 2 of the novel shifts focus to David Denney, the congressman’s nineteen-year-old son, currently studying at George Washington University in Washington DC and feeling the need to “leave his father’s house while the courage was still upon him.” At a coffeehouse performance of music and art, he meets a Black scholar named Cleo. They quickly become lovers, but, feeling that he does not deserve her, David signs on to the civil rights work of a friend, Walter.

Part 3 returns to machinations in Washington DC. On a train to a colleague’s funeral, Denney confronts Speaker of the House Anderson Wyatt of Tennessee, who tells Denney that “you aren’t smart enough to see that you can’t go whizzing down the road in your Cadillac piled high with loot without hurting the system,” and that if he tries to hold back the tides of justice, “the wall is going to fall down, and a lot of us here will be hurt.” But Denney persists in trying to round up other congressmen who might help him pull his bill from committee to be considered on the House floor.

The fourth part of the novel tracks David’s initiation into the methods of civil rights activism, with his group “being sent into the South,” specifically, Jackson, Mississippi, “at spring vacation for sit-ins at segregated lunch counters.” One of his fellow activists—Michael Goodman, a student at Princeton University—is Congressman Henry Brandon’s nephew, while the other, Perley Gathings, is a Black veteran of the Korean War. Attempting to integrate a lunch counter in Jackson, the three activists, along with another man and two ministers, are arrested. The next day, David is beaten by white prisoners in the yard, an event that makes the news.

In the next section, back in Congress, Denney has decided to risk sparking race wars in order to overcome opposition to his dam while also preventing any civil rights advances. His ally, Congressman H. H. Hickum of Georgia, gives a speech in which he asserts that “the evil conspiracy to block the Arkansas Dam” is “part of a master plan of subversion decided upon at a secret meeting of the Communist chiefs of Africa at Conarky on January 14. The aim is to sow the seeds of atheism and interracial marriage in the one part of the world that has resisted godlessness and socialism. I refer, of course, to the Confederacy.” Meanwhile, Denney’s brother-in-law has been investing in land in anticipation of the dam being constructed and is now being hounded by creditors, in addition to being blacklisted by the White House for Denney’s obstruction of civil rights legislation, meaning that the whole family will be bankrupt soon. When Denney receives the news of David’s recent activities and injuries, he quickly leaves Washington DC. In River City, he holds a big public rally, announcing that he voted for the civil rights bill in order to ensure the passage of the Arkansas Dam bill, but he knows his political career is over. The novel ends with Denney being honored in New York with the Best Christian of the Year award.

For additional information:
Coffin, Tristram. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

Review of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1964. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/tristram-coffin-4/mine-eyes-have-seen-the-glory-2/ (accessed November 20, 2025).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas