I see news every day about how partisan and contentious the politics in our nation’s capital are. According to multiple stories, the bickering in the Senate between the two parties has reached epic proportions, said to be ”unique in our nation’s history”.
Horse hockey.
Today, politics is utterly tame in comparison to the politics of the 19th century. Our august representatives may argue on the Senate floor, but there hasn’t been a fistfight in more than a century. What happens in Senate offices is a topic best left alone, of course.
From the very beginning, the Senate drafted a set of rules designed to promote good behavior and polite discourse. Of the first twenty Senate rules passed, ten dealt with the behavior of the members. Most of these rules were influenced by Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s now-classic Manual of Parliamentary Practice. One particularly telling passage reads as if it had been taken from a schoolroom wall:
"No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting, speaking or whispering to another; nor to stand up or interrupt him; nor to pass between the Speaker and the speaking member; nor to go across the [Senate chamber], or to walk up and down it, or to take books or papers from the [clerk's] table, or write there."
Reading this, I’m immediately reminded of a diversionary tactic Winston Churchill once used in Parliament. Wanting to divert attention away from the speech of an opposition member, Churchill lit a long cigar and merrily puffed away. As the speech droned on, the ash of Churchill’s cigar grew longer and longer and impossibly longer. Soon, most of Parliament was watching the cigar and waiting for the ash to drop...Waiting in vain, since Churchill had inserted a long thin wire up the middle of the cigar to hold the ash on. Jefferson would have been pissed.
Sumner was unconscious and never completely recovered either emotionally nor physically, not returning to his sear in the Senate for three years. Brooks also needed medical attention as he had beat Sumner so savagely that as he swung the cane backwards to deliver another blow, he had inflicted several blows against his own forehead. (He was passionate, but not overly intelligent.)
Both Keitt and Brooks were forced to resign, and in the next election, both were sent back to the House of Representatives. It may give the reader some satisfaction to learn that almost immediately after returning to the House, Brooks caught the croup, and as he painfully died, he was so desperate for air that he tried to rip open his throat with his bare hands.
There have been, other, occasionally violent, memorable moments on the Senate floor. During the debate over the Missouri Compromise, Senator Henry Foote pulled a pistol on Senator Foote, who screamed "Let him fire! Let the assassin fire!", as Foote was wrestled to the floor. Fifty years later, the senior senator from South Carolina had a fistfight with the junior senator from the same state, despite the fact that the two men were both in the same party. The fight was so violent that most of the senators who tried to stop the fight suffered blows requiring first aid. And at the start of the first World War, Senator La Follette lost his temper and had to be physically restrained from hurling a brass spittoon at Arkansas’ Joseph Robinson.
If you are like me, at this point you are probably wondering when the spittoons left the Senate. The answer, of course, is that they haven’t—there are still two on the Senate floor, though no one has actually used one in the last forty years. And though smoking in the Senate has been banned since 1914, there is still no rule against chewing tobacco. The two snuff boxes installed by Millard are still present but are no longer filled: the last Senator to avail himself of snuff was Senator Overman in 1930. (Overman once staged a filibuster to prevent the passage of an anti-lynching bill, saying that passage would give ignorant black people in the South permission to "commit the foulest of outrages.” Overman died in 1930, I hope it was the snuff that killed him.)
Sadly, there have been a few times when a good cane or a well-aimed spittoon would have been useful, but no senator had the nerve to provide it. A monstrous (and unfortunately all too recent) example would be when the deranged racist, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who was inspired by the example of Adolf Hitler to rise in 1938 to make an impassioned plea for Congress to set aside $250 million dollars for his pet project: the deportation of twelve million African Americans to Liberia.
It will surprise no one to learn that Bilbo—a dedicated, lifelong member of the KKK—was so inept an administrator that while governor of Mississippi (and despite starting the first state sales tax in America), he left the state millions of dollars in debt with slightly less than $1300 in the state treasury at the end of his tenure. Recently, his statue was removed from the statehouse rotunda to a room used the Legislative Black Caucus, whose members use the statue as a coat rack. This is probably the best example of Mississippi humor since Mark Twain steamed past the state on a riverboat.
Lest you think the Senate has always been sort of a reform school for overaged children, I would point out that the two political parties have occasionally been capable of remarkable cooperation. Between 1953 and 1954, during the 83rd Congress, the Senate was so incredibly balanced between the two parties, that the death of a single Senator could tip the majority to the opposite party. Normally, the death of a senator is such a relatively rare thing that a single death is an outlier and a statistical anomaly.
But, in 1953, the average age in the United States Senate was slightly higher than that of Great Britain’s House of Lords, where membership is a privilege for life. Over the next 24 months, there were nine deaths and one resignation (the latter probably for fear of being a member of a legislative body that had a mortality rate similar to that of the units that assaulted Normandy Beach on D-Day).
Majority control of the Senate changed so many times, switching back and forth between the two parties, with each switch prompting a new election for majority leader and the requisite change of offices and stationery, that finally, the Republicans, despite being technically the majority party, just told the Democrats to keep the office and pretend they were in the majority. This made perfect sense, since before they could actually vote on any important piece of legislation, somebody else was likely to die.
As for bipartisan cooperation today, if the 1953 model is the only way we can achieve it, I’m for it.
One can understand, given the character of both houses of Congress, why Davy Crockett told the Whigs, "Y'all can go to hell -- I'm going to Texas"
ReplyDeleteThe House was even less civil than the senate. An account of the most infamous brawl on the House floor is recorded for posterity on the house.gov website.
"The most infamous floor brawl in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives erupted as Members debated the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution late into the night of February 5-6. Shortly before 2 a.m., Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt exchanged insults, then blows. “In an instant the House was in the greatest possible confusion,” the Congressional Globe reported. More than 30 Members joined the melee. Northern Republicans and Free Soilers joined ranks against Southern Democrats. Speaker James Orr, a South Carolina Democrat, gaveled furiously for order and then instructed Sergeant-at-Arms Adam J. Glossbrenner to arrest noncompliant Members. Wading into the “combatants,” Glossbrenner held the House Mace high to restore order. Wisconsin Republicans John “Bowie Knife” Potter and Cadwallader Washburn ripped the hairpiece from the head of William Barksdale, a Democrat from Mississippi. The melee dissolved into a chorus of laughs and jeers, but the sectional nature of the fight powerfully symbolized the nation’s divisions. When the House reconvened two days later, a coalition of Northern Republicans and Free Soilers narrowly blocked referral of the Lecompton Constitution to the House Territories Committee. Kansas entered the Union in 1861 as a free state.
And we thought the British Parliament could get rowdy. And President Jackson was not shy about using his cane. One Richard Lawrence an utterly deranged would-be assassin who believed he would become King Richard III in England if he killed Jackson pointed two pistols at Jackson. This was before the era of Secret Service protection details. The pistols misfired and the 67 year-old Jackson proceeded to nearly beat the erstwhile King Richard to death.
And the Democrats think Trump played rough!