This Day in Senate History (Robert Byrd Becomes Longest-Serving Member)

 

June 12, 2006—Having already occupied the most powerful leadership posts in the upper chamber of Congress, Robert Byrd surpassed Strom Thurmond as the longest-serving member in the history of the U.S. Senate. 

By the time he died four years later, at age 92, the Democrat from West Virginia had also become the longest-serving member in the history of Congress as a whole; had cast more votes than any other member; and had won an unprecedented ninth term for his office.

If Byrd had completed only his second, or even third, term as Senator, he might have been remembered far more negatively. In an entry for October 2, 1971 that was posthumously included in The Haldeman Diaries, H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff for Richard Nixon, recorded that his boss, annoyed that a potential Supreme Court nominee, Richard Harding Poff, was withdrawing from consideration for a Supreme Court vacancy, had decided to “really stick it to the opposition now”:

“On the court, he came up with the idea of (Robert) Byrd of West Virginia because he was a former KKK’er, he’s elected by the Democrats as Whip, he’s a self-made lawyer, he’s more reactionary than Wallace, and he’s about 53.”

Byrd indeed was “a former KKK’er,” a recruiter and organizer in the 1940s (though never a Grand Wizard, as some recent GOP misinformation states), as well as an advocate for racial segregation and a supporter of the Vietnam War. 

But the need to secure votes among non-Southern colleagues for Senate leadership offices led him over the years to moderate old positions. Eventually, Byrd backed renewal of voting-rights legislation—a stance that won him praise from civil rights icon John Lewis and Barack Obama, the first African-American President—and he opposed both Ronald Reagan's aid to the contras in Nicaragua and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

As alluded to by Nixon, Byrd defeated the incumbent Democrat whip, Ted Kennedy, in 1971, shocking many political observers of the time. Thereafter he was elected twice as Senate Majority Leader. 

“I ran the Senate like a stern parent," Byrd recalled in his memoir, Child of the Appalachian Coalfields. He had little time for small talk or glad-handling, as, for instance, the convivial Kennedy had. But his mastery of Senate rules gave him an unrivalled ability to rack up votes.

Unsurprisingly, then, despite his reputation for oratory (with speeches often studded with references to Roman history or literature), Byrd made a more lasting mark as a legislative technician.

Sanford Ungar’s 1975 Atlantic Monthly profile demonstrated how Byrd structured (or restructured) the Senate business on his way up the hierarchy (including shortening the chamber’s “morning hour” and moderating who could speak on the floor). 

Were he alive today, Byrd might not recognize the political climate in either his native state or the Senate he had served so assiduously. Joe Manchin has been the only Democrat to hold a statewide office in the last four years, forcing him to tack to the right—a far cry from the days when Byrd regularly romped to landslide victories in the general election, or even ran unopposed. (Donald Trump took the state with nearly 69% of the popular vote in both the 2016 and 2020 Presidential races.)

Particularly during his two decades as chair or ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Byrd earned the nickname “The King of Pork” for the enormous federal largesse he secured for West Virginia--$1.2 billion through the Senate from 1991 to 2006, largely due to his efforts, according to an analysis by the nonprofit group Citizens Against Government Waste.

Though the use of earmarks is now being revived in Congress, the odor of illegality and ethical misdeeds continues to cling to the practice a decade after its use was banned. That complicates Senators’ hopes of proving their value to constituents—and the bargaining leverage for complex, often controversial bills that prior Senate leaders like Byrd would have possessed.

Finally, one suspects that Byrd—an institutionalist who defended the use of the filibuster in the Senate—might have lifted his eyebrows, annoyed at how Ted Cruz and his GOP colleagues have weaponized the practice. Rather than totally ban the filibuster, however, Byrd would probably have tried to punish Cruz for his showboating—perhaps by using an arcane parliamentary rule to stall a pet project—while warning Democratic colleagues against outlawing a procedure that they might find handy to use someday, albeit less frequently.

Photo of the Day: A Black Reconstruction Senator’s Residence in Washington, DC

The striking property here—2010 R Street, Northwest—might look much like any other in DC’s elegant Dupont Circle neighborhood. But the marker outside indicates another story.

When I passed by while on vacation in November 2015, I never could have anticipated that the life and times of Blanche Kelso Bruce—born on this date in 1841—might possess even more relevance now than it did when I read the inscription explaining why his home had been selected as part of the African American Heritage Trail in our nation’s capital.

Bruce was one of the most striking figures in the Reconstruction Era, the post-Civil War period when freedmen sought greater economic opportunities and achieved fleeting political equality with whites. In an era of polarization, with racism and reaction ever-present threats to his gains and those of the base that propelled him to prominence, he was obliged to step carefully through multiple political minefields.

This past week, I saw a meme on Facebook questioning the need for Black History Month. The remarkable rise of Bruce—the second African American to serve in the U. S. Senate and the first to be elected to a full term—and his equally astonishing fall back into relative obscurity demonstrate that there might be more need for this collective commemoration than many Americans would care to admit.

A runaway slave from Virginia, fathered by his white master, Bruce made his way west of the Mississippi, where during the Civil War he taught black children in Kansas and Missouri. After the conflict he worked as a steamboat porter out of St. Louis, then moved down to Mississippi in hopes of finding more opportunity. His business sense proved acute, as he turned an abandoned cotton plantation into a thriving property over the next decade.

Large, imposing, and gifted with a strong voice, Bruce possessed a charisma that attracted the attention of the Republican Party. Soon he was accumulating political IOUs along with his real estate fortune, holding simultaneous Bolivar County offices as sheriff, tax collector and superintendent of education. With the help of Black Republicans and Gov. Adelbert Ames, Bruce was selected by the state legislature to serve a term in the U.S. Senate.

With both blacks and whites suffering in the economic collapse brought on by the Civil War, Bruce sought to work in the interests of both groups and forge a biracial electoral coalition. For whites, he advocated for internal improvements and financial incentives, including federal funding to control flooding and the creation of a channel and levee system for parts of the Mississippi’s edge. For blacks, he ardently promoted black servicemen, including pressing for integration of the armed forces.

But as an “aristocrat of color,” Bruce lost some favor with his African American base, and whites were not generally inclined toward him to begin with, even though even the likes of fellow Mississippian Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a former secessionist, acknowledged his intelligence and moderation. With Democratic forces gathering strength back at home in an attempt to suppress the African American vote, Bruce didn’t even try for a second term, stepping down in March 1881.

After several years of continuing participation in Mississippi politics, Bruce returned to the nation’s capital. serving as register of the U.S. Treasury and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. He and wife Josephine—the first black teacher in the Cleveland public schools and the daughter of a prominent mixed-race dentist before she wed the Senator—remained fixtures on the local social scene, living at their R Street property from 1890 to 1898.

Bruce’s career is a reminder of how far all Americans can rise when they are presented with adequate opportunities to match their own drive and ambition. It is also evidence of how those gains may be lost when powerfully entrenched forces mobilize to exploit fears of an uncertain new political and social environment.

This Day in Senate History (Robert Taft, Linchpin of Political Dynasty, Born)

September 8, 1889—Robert A. Taft, the middle figure in an Ohio family that, over five generations, held the highest offices in their state or the federal government, was born in Cincinnati. His dad, William Howard Taft, a state judge at the time, jovially wrote of his eight-pound son: “I am obliged to give judgment to those who contend that the boy is one of the most remarkable products of this century.”

The tragedy of Will Taft’s life was in winning the Presidency, an office he did not want; the tragedy of Robert’s was that he pursued the same office more aggressively without ever achieving it.

As much as he valued his forebears, Robert was also keenly conscious of the burden of the legacy. The family name, this leader of the conservative wing of the GOP noted, "supplies the impetus which gives a man his start, but that impetus does not last forever. After the start is made, it is only by his own effort that a man can keep going, and one with a family name has a lot to live up to."

The Tafts, while hardly perfect, managed to “live up to” the burden of public service without the shattering traumas endured by others. An article I came across on America’s top 10 political dynasties ranks the Tafts at only #7. But I would move them up at least several notches. Consider the principal figures in this remarkable family:

*Alphonso Taft (1810-1891), one of the founders of the Republican Party in Ohio, served as Attorney-General and Secretary of War in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, and later as U.S. minister to Austria-Hungary and Russia.

*William Howard Taft (1857-1930) did not immediately get his heart’s desire—appointment as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—because he wanted to see an important job (Governor-General of the Philippines) through, then later because, against his better judgment, he was persuaded by his wife to accept Theodore Roosevelt's anointing as his successor for President. What followed was the breakup of his friendship with TR, loss of his reelection bid in 1912, and a sundering of the Republican Party between its conservative and more moderate wings that has lasted the good part of a century.

*Robert Taft (1889-1953) did not won the nomination of his party in three tries, but he won the respect of Senate colleagues who nicknamed him “Mr. Republican” and elected him Senate Majority Leader.

*Robert Taft Jr. (1917-1993) also was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio.

*Robert (Bob) Taft III (1942-) served as governor of Ohio for two terms.  His no-contest plea to charges of accepting undisclosed gifts ended not only his own political career but also, in all probability, the extraordinary influence his family had exerted in the state over 150 years.

This post was originally intended as a “Quote of the Day,” which, given that Monday is the start of a workweek, I usually reserve for humor. I hoped to include a sample from Senator Taft. The closest I could find, from his statement opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend Lease program in February 1941, was the following:

“Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum—you certainly don’t want the same chewing gum back.”

If you don’t think the result displayed here ranks with Letterman, Fallon or Kimmel, too bad. Had I realized beforehand how arduous my self-imposed assignment would be—how many vast, deserted cybertracts I would have to traverse to come up with even this—I would never have taken it on.

Reading the statement from which this quote came, I doubt that Taft—admired by friend (and even foe) for his ferocious intellect and diligence—had a ghostwriter work on it. (At a time when this was becoming more the norm in Washington, he disdained the practice.) It’s filled with the kind of thoughtful, cogent constitutional arguments he would have made in college at Yale and Harvard Law School.

But I strongly suspect that Taft would have solicited opinions in order to come up with this line. Put it this way: if you were an overachiever in high school and college—if you were the son not only of a President but of a formidable First Lady—what are the chances you would have even touched chewing gum, let alone chewed it?

Actually, the quip reveals a great deal about Taft. He was looking to counter FDR’s folksy, effective line supporting Lend Lease: that the unusual deal between the U.S. and Britain would be like a hose used to put out a neighbor’s fire. But FDR’s metaphor was not out of place with either his normal way of talking or this statement in particular. Taft’s was, on both counts. I think that the electorate sensed this incongruity.

I’ve been thinking a good deal about Senator Taft lately as I struggle to make sense of how he might have fit in given our current political environment. In certain ways, the current hue and cry over GOP obstruction of the President’s program would have sounded awfully familiar to Taft.

From the moment he entered the Senate in 1939, there was hardly any aspect of FDR’s program, foreign or domestic, that he did not oppose. He not only saw the New Deal as a nightmare, but feared that the President’s crypto-interventionism would involve the United States in a bloody second world war.

It was just as bad with Truman, as Taft opposed (unsuccessfully) the creation of NATO and (successfully) the President’s health-care program.  The President took the measure of Taft and his other Republican opponents with jibes about the “Do-Nothing Congress”  en route to his 1948 re-election victory.

That fierce partisanship would have formed a bond between Taft and today’s GOP.

In other crucial senses, though, Taft would not have felt at home in today’s political world in general or the Republican Party in particular.

In interviews in advance of the premiere of his documentary series The Roosevelts later this month, director Ken Burns has indicated that neither Teddy nor Franklin Roosevelt could have achieved high office, given current political conditions. The same is even more true for Taft. 

Already by the time he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Taft’s dry, statistics-laden speeches did not lend themselves to the dominant medium of the age—radio—and he was at a distinct disadvantage against Franklin Roosevelt, the master of the fireside chat.

But by temperament as well, Robert Taft would have been an odd man out.  While the undisputed leader of conservatives (the same wing of the GOP that backed his father against Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive insurgency), he still was ready to stake out certain positions that cut no ice with his constituency: opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and backing of federal housing and aid to education. 

Whether one agrees or not with his opposition to the Nuremberg Trials, his reasoning--that the proceedings would constitute a dangerous precedent for "victors' justice"--could not have been more sincere. That stance, made in the teeth of great public disapproval, helped earn Taft a place in a bestselling book by a young senator who had only gotten to know the Majority Leader for a few months before the latter's death of cancer: John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

Essentially secular by personal conviction as well as family conviction (his grandfather wrote a key precedent on prayer in the state, and his father’s Unitarianism became an issue, briefly and foolishly, in the 1908 campaign), Taft would have been out of step in today’s more evangelically-oriented GOP.

Deeply private, disdaining gladhanding while campaigning, Taft would also have felt that today’s 24-hour news environment was overly intrusive.

This Day in Senate History (Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln Rival and Union Supporter, Born)

April 23, 1813--Stephen A. Douglas, “The Little Giant” who became the most significant political rival of fellow Illinois resident Abraham Lincoln, was born in Brandon, Vt. 

His status as one of history’s best-known famous also-rans means that unfortunately, on the bicentennial of his birth, little attention will be paid to how he fueled his adopted state’s enormous commercial growth, how he promoted the transcontinental expansion of America, and how his formidable speaking skills pushed his opponent to reach the top of his game.

If you’ve seen any Lincoln biopic that takes the future Great Emancipator up to his first inauguration, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Douglas, in at least one scene. Indeed, he made for an ideal cinematic foil to Lincoln. 

On the stump, the short, stocky senator, once described as a "a steam engine in breeches,” dominated by his violent language and gestures, while Lincoln would slowly unwind his argument the way he would his lanky frame. Even love marked the two men as rivals, since, it appears, Douglas courted the young Mary Todd around the same time that Lincoln—more successfully--did.

In a prior post, I described how, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates that highlighted their 1858 race for the U.S. Senate, the Republican challenger, in effect, lost the battle but won the war. By responding affirmatively to Lincoln’s crafty question on whether a majority of a territory could exclude slavery, Douglas alienated Southern voters in the Presidential race two years from then. 

With another candidate dividing the votes of the Democratic Party, Lincoln was able to win the Presidency in November 1860.

The two men had been taking each other’s measures since 1834, as first-term members of the Illinois General Assembly. They had frequently been at odds, especially over slavery (Lincoln opposed the expansion of the “peculiar institution” into territories, while Douglas figured, through his doctrine of popular sovereignty, that the controversy would abate through political compromise). 

But by March 1861, when secession loomed, the two united against this mortal threat to the republic. Douglas had only a few months to live, but he displayed during that time his best qualities, including a passion for the welfare of his country.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by a story told in The Modern Researcher, by John A. Garraty and Henry Graff, about one historian’s strenuous efforts to verify an anecdote in the anonymously published The Diary of a Public Man concerning Douglas at Lincoln’s first inauguration. 

Lincoln had no room on his tiny table to hold his stovepipe hat, the story went, so Douglas, sitting on the dais, graciously took the headgear and held it throughout the long ceremony.

Garraty and Graff, following this historian’s lead, believed that the incident probably didn’t happen. Other scholars more recently have concluded that it did. 

Part of the reason for the intense interest in this anecdote, I think, is that it tells us something fundamental about America’s fondest wishes for their politicians: that, despite their ambitions and clashing visions for the nation, they will display respect and grace at the most solemn ceremonies involving this country’s civil religion.

As it happens, there is at least a grain of truth to the story, in that the two came together to face a danger bigger than their decades-old rivalry. They met again, several weeks after the inauguration, as Lincoln was even more beleaguered than before, with several more Southern states joining the rebellion against the federal government when Fort Sumter was fired upon.

It’s interesting to speculate on the course of this conversation. 

Did the President uncork the kind of out-of-left-field joke told in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln? 

Did they touch in any way on the major form of transportation they had both come to champion, the railroad--Lincoln as one of their most skilled legal advocates, Douglas as a longtime tireless Senate voice for a transcontinental railroad terminating in Chicago? 

Did the two engage in small talk about their days as lawyers in Illinois, or the towns they visited during their Senate debates? 

Did they commiserate over parents lost in childhood, and children (and, in the case of Douglas, a wife) dead more recently? 

Could they see, in the moments of silence between the jokes and the small talk, the affliction that the other endured because of  early disorder and subsequent sorrows? (Lincoln suffered from depression, while Douglas had taken to stronger quantities of alcohol.)

We don’t know exactly what was said or happened that day, except that Lincoln set aside several hours from his frenetic schedule for the meeting. 

By the end of it, Lincoln eagerly seized Douglas’ offer of support to help preserve the Union. Could Douglas go on a speaking tour in the Midwest and border states in an attempt to keep them in the Union? Douglas agreed to try.

Douglas threw himself into the Union cause with his usual customary energy, but exhaustion—and his years of heavy drinking—caught up with him. 

He died of typhoid at his home in Chicago, only 48 years old, disappointed in nearly every way one could imagine: his hopes for the Presidency gone, his financial resources so depleted that his widow had a tough time surviving for a while after his passing, and even his dream of a united, sea-to-sea republic—“Young America,” the movement was called—in jeopardy.

In time, of course, Lincoln would preserve the Union, enabling that the nation to which he and Douglas gave their “last full measure of devotion” would endure. In this, as in their public ambitions and private agonies, they had more in common that they realized for much of their lives.

Quote of the Day (Henry Clay, Telling Off a Boring Congressman)

“It seems you are resolved to speak until your audience arrives.”—Henry Clay, responding to a fellow member of Congress, speaking interminably in debate, who had just told him, “You, sir, speak for the present generation, but I speak for posterity,” quoted in Samuel A. Bent, comp., Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men (1887).

It pains me to write this, because I don’t think much of the man, but I was inspired to use this quote while listening to a portion of an address given by Senator Mitch McConnell on his great predecessor from Kentucky, Henry Clay (1777-1852). McConnell couldn’t, in his wildest dreams, match Clay for intellect, charm, and most of all, the willingness (let alone ability) to forge compromises on the nation’s most divisive issues.

But let’s give the Senate Minority Leader credit where it’s due—he knows a good example of rapier wit when he hears one, not to mention one of the most consequential politicians never to reach the White House. (Clay was, however, the hero of a man who did become President: Abraham Lincoln.)

(In the image here, Clay is addressing the U.S. Senate around 1850, toward the end of his career, with the other two members of the “Great Triumvirate” also here—Daniel Webster, seated to his left, and John C. Calhoun, seated to the left of the Speaker’s chair. The image, now in the Library of Congress, was drawn in 1855 by Peter F. Rothermel and engraved by Robert Whitechurch.)

Quote of the Day (Anita Hill, Opening a New Era in American Life)

“My working relationship became even more strained when Judge [Clarence] Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions, he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects, or he might suggest that, because of the time pressures of his schedule, we go to lunch to a government cafeteria. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters.”—Anita Hill, in her opening statement at the Senate confirmation hearings on Judge Clarence Thomas, October 11, 1991

Anita Hill then proceeded to catalog, in sometimes graphic detail, what those “sexual matters” were, transfixing—and revolting—Americans as they sat in front of their TV sets, watching the Senate Judiciary Committee reconvene its hearings on Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court, this time to consider Hill’s charges that her former boss had pressed for dates when she worked for him a decade before.

At the time of the hearings, individual political leanings largely determined whether you believed Thomas or Hill. Not much has changed in the two decades since, at least in that respect.

I should hasten to stress, in that respect only. The high-profile case gave greater prominence than ever before to the nature of sexual-harassment law as it had been developing over the last decade of litigation and decisions.

Out at lunch one day during the hearings, I heard a boyfriend and girlfriend discuss what constituted sexual harassment:

HE: “Okay, so you work for me and I say, ‘That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing.’ Is that sexual harassment?”


SHE: “No, because it’s the dress, not me.”

HE: “Okay. Now what if I say, ‘You look pretty’?”

SHE: “Hmmmm…still okay, I guess.”


HE: "Okay. How about, 'You look good enough to eat'?"

SHE: “BINGO!” 

I suppose conversations such as this, in one form or another, occurred all over America at this time. The same thing happened, with considerably higher stakes, in the business world. An attorney friend of mine told myself and a couple of other college friends that his large company had decided to settle a couple of cases in the immediate aftermath of the Thomas-Hill controversy. In the wake of the hearings, the mere fact that a male boss had slept with a female subordinate, he said, had made these sexual-harassment lawsuits harder to defend.

The case had repercussions in the political arena as well. Senator Bob Packwood was driven from office for improper advances on at least 10 women. Most famously, by the end of the decade, Bill Clinton would face impeachment, brought about partly as a result of sexual-harassment legislation he himself had signed into law.

Ironically, a boomerang from the case may have upended the career of one of those who expressed disbelief about Hill’s story. Finding that GOP primary voters now considered him a RINO (Republican in Name Only), Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter sought refuge as a Democrat. But last year, Democratic primary voters cast him out. For feminists who loathed how he had grilled Hill nearly 20 years before, revenge was all the sweeter for the long delay.