A Treasury of Great American Scandals (17 page)

Congressional Follies

 

If, as columnist Joseph Alsop once suggested, “the only way to look at a congressman is down,” the view below in many instances would include a motley assortment of rascals and thieves, fools and philanderers. From a widely representative body like Congress, such detritus must inevitably spew. Some of it is regurgitated here.

Floor Fights

 

 

 

 

The first recorded clash between congressmen started with spit. In 1798, Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont stalked across the House floor and hocked one right into the face of Connecticut's Roger Griswold for making fun of his Revolutionary War record. A resolution to expel “Spitting Lyon” failed, but Griswold got his own revenge. Two weeks after the loogie landed, he walked over to where Lyon was sitting and whacked him over the head with a large hickory cane. Stunned, Lyon struggled to his feet, grabbed some fire tongs, and started hitting Griswold back. The undignified brawl was quickly broken up, and the next day both men signed a pledge not to commit any act of violence upon each other from that day forward. It was a peaceful resolution, but a precedent had been set.

 

 

Some congressional quarrels became so heated that opponents routinely decided to settle their differences on “the field of honor,” where many died or were severely wounded. One of the most notable duels took place between William Jordan Graves of Kentucky and Jonathan Cilley of Maine in 1838. Strangely enough, neither man had a problem with the other, but fought nonetheless because a provision in the Code Duello, the bible of dueling principles, required it. Cilley had made some critical remarks about Colonel James Watson Webb, a New York newspaper publisher, during a House debate. Webb was insulted and issued a challenge to Cilley through his second, Congressman Graves. Cilley refused to accept the challenge, however, arguing that under the Constitution he was not responsible outside the House for anything he said within it. Graves agreed that Cilley was legally correct, but issued him a challenge of his own because, according to the dueling code, Cilley's refusal of Webb's challenge constituted a grave insult to his second, Graves. These were touchy times indeed.

Cilley accepted Graves's challenge, though he apparently thought the whole matter absurd. As it happened, Graves chose Representative Henry Wise of Virginia, one of Cilley's most hardened enemies, as his second. If there was any chance the two sides might have settled their differences without bloodshed, Wise was quick to undermine it. It was he who was largely blamed for coaxing Graves forward. On the day before the duel, as Graves was practicing his shot, Wise reportedly clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Graves, you must kill that damned Yankee.” And so he did, with a rifle blast through Cilley's femoral artery. That was after the third round of shots had been fired, the first two having missed. “I must have one more shot!” Graves had insisted, to which Cilley responded, “They must thirst mightily for my blood.”

The fatal encounter caused a national uproar. The fallen congressman was just thirty-five and left behind a wife and three children. In the minds of many, Graves killed him in cold blood. The Washington correspondent for the New York
Evening Post
called the duel a “horrid and harrowing spectacle,” and said Cilley had fallen a victim to “a false and bloody code in a wretched quarrel.” Even former president Andrew Jackson, the dean of dueling, registered his horror. “I cannot write on the murderous death of poor Cilley,” he wrote to President Martin Van Buren. “If Congress does not do something to wipe out the stain of the blood of murdered Cilley from its walls, it will raise a flame in the public mind against it, not easily to be quenched. Cilley was sacrificed.” Congress did pass an antidueling act, but to little effect.

 

 

The practice of dueling eventually fell from favor as a means of settling disputes and satisfying honor, but the U.S. Capitol still remained quite a violent place. This was particularly true of the years leading up to the Civil War, when sectional differences over slavery and other issues intensified to a dangerous degree. Legislation was sometimes stalled as “belligerent Southrons glared fiercely at phlegmatic Yankees,” one observer noted, and the House of Representatives “seethed like a boiling caldron.” Congress in those days could have easily been mistaken for a Western saloon. “Every man on the floor of both Houses is armed with a revolver,” reported Senator James Hammond of South Carolina, “some with two revolvers and a Bowie knife.” Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio even carried a sawed-off shotgun. When a pistol concealed in one House member's desk accidentally discharged, there were instantly “fully thirty or forty pistols in the air,” recalled Representative William Holman of Indiana, who was present.

One of the most disturbing episodes that emerged from these troubled times was the brutal beating of Charles Sumner. On May 19, 1856, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts delivered his famous “Crimes Against Kansas” speech in which he decried the efforts of Southerners to force slavery into that territory. Sumner's speech was brimming with overwrought rhetoric and oratorical bombast, with more than a few sharp digs at Andrew Pickens Butler, a proslavery senator from South Carolina. Butler, Sumner declared, “touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error. . . . He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.” As one of slavery's “maddest zealots,” Butler raised himself “to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs.”

And Sumner had even more to say. “The Senator from South Carolina,” he continued, “has read many books of chivalry and believes himself a chivalrous knight. . . . Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this Senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of his wench, Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed.”

Butler might have beaten up Sumner for his pomposity alone, but he wasn't actually present to hear the screed. His kinsman and fellow Carolinian, Representative Preston S. Brooks, was there, however, and he didn't appreciate Sumner's lofty insults one bit. Three days after the speech was delivered, Brooks quietly entered the Senate chamber and found Sumner working at his desk. “I have read your speech twice over carefully,” Brooks announced. “It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler who is a relative of mine.” Without warning, Brooks then started whacking Sumner with a cane until it splintered and his victim fell from his chair in a bloody heap.

Northern reaction to the assault was one of horror. “The crime is not merely against liberty but civilization,” editorialized the Boston
Evening Transcript,
while the Albany
Evening Journal
noted that “For the first time has the extreme discipline of the Plantation been introduced into the Senate of the United States.” In the South, though, Brooks was hailed as a hero. “Sumner was well and elegantly whipped,” gloated the Charleston
Mercury,
“and he richly deserved it.” Southerners sent Brooks commemorative canes, with HIT HIM AGAIN inscribed on them. It was all an ugly preview of the Civil War to come.

Sumner's injuries kept him out of the Senate for three years, and his empty chair became a symbol of the antislavery movement. Several weeks after the attack, a House investigation committee concluded that it was a breach of congressional privilege, and said in a report, “This act cannot be regarded by the committee otherwise than as an aggravated assault upon the inestimable right of freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution . . . and, if carried to its ultimate consequences, must result in anarchy and bring in its train all the evils of a reign of terror.” As debate raged in the House over whether or not to expel Brooks, he decided to resign on his own. His exile was brief, however. He ran for office again, and was sworn in just two weeks after his resignation. Five months later, Brooks was dead of liver disease. Sumner, after his long convalescence, served in the Senate until 1874.

 

 

Of course, not all congressional brawls were physical. There were plenty of lacerating tongues to keep things lively, especially that of Senator John Randolph of Virginia. Though a childhood illness rendered him beardless and impotent, with a high-pitched voice, he was capable of knocking an opponent out cold with words alone. When one congressman, freshly elected to fill the vacancy left by the death of another, attacked Randolph, the senator remained uncharacteristically quiet. Several days later, though, during a discussion on a bill that the deceased congressman had been sponsoring, Randolph had his say: “This bill, Mr. Speaker, lost its ablest advocate in the death of my lamented colleague, whose seat,” he added caustically, “is still vacant.”

Randolph often used his facility with language to withering effect. Andrew Jackson's secretary of state Edward Livingston, he said, “is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.” Randolph's colleagues Robert Wright and John Rae, he remarked, exhibited two anomalies: “A Wright always wrong; and a Rae without light.”

Sexcapades

 

 

 

 

For many congressmen, forbidden sex has been one of the most avidly pursued perks of office, but it's gotten them into heaps of trouble—especially the hypocrites. Representative William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, for one, was as righteous as Moses come down from the mountain (and almost as hammy as Charlton Heston playing him). The congressman from Kentucky liked to play the part of moral crusader, often lecturing on the evils of sex and the virtues of purity. He cautioned one audience of teenage girls to avoid “useless handshaking, promiscuous kissing, needless touching, and all exposures.” To another group of girls he declared, “Chastity is the fountain, the cornerstone of human society. . . . Pure home makes pure government.” But, alas, Breckinridge's lessons seem to have been lost on his teenage mistress. When young Madeline Pollard slapped the father of five with a $50,000 paternity suit in 1893, one observer noted that “The fall of Breckinridge was like that of an archangel.”

Several forces gathered to destroy the congressman, not the least of which was his own stupidity. Breckinridge tried to convince the court that he had no idea Madeline had
three
children by him. Yes, he admitted, they had often had sex, sometimes several times a day. Yes, he had recommended her for a government job and paid her oodles of cash. But kids? Who knew? The jury, not surprisingly, found in Madeline's favor. Breckinridge was wounded, but not yet out of the game. He wanted to be reelected, and in a tearful performance he confessed, “I know the secret sin; I tried to atone for it.” But, he said, “I was entangled by weakness, by passion, by sin, in coils which it was almost impossible to break.”

Unfortunately for him, Breckinridge's redemption was derailed by the emerging feminist movement. Susan B. Anthony and other activists were first testing their political power, and though they didn't yet have the vote, they rallied hard against the wayward congressman. His “exposed and confessed unchastity,” Anthony insisted, rendered Breckinridge unfit for office. He lost by a landslide.

 

 

William Sharon's fling with Althea Hill was not entirely improper, even if he was twice her age. The senator from Nevada was a wealthy widower and free to pursue whomever he pleased. Nevertheless, the affair did have some unpleasant consequences, including assault and murder charges. It also resulted, directly and indirectly, in
three
U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Senator Sharon, then sixty, met Althea Hill in California in 1880. She had blown her small inheritance on bad investments, and the senator graciously offered to give her some financial advice. He also offered her $500 a month to let him “love her.” The money, he later testified, was the standard fee he offered his mistresses. Althea declined, even after the ante was raised to $1,000. According to her testimony, she immediately rose to depart, saying to Sharon, “You are mistaken in your woman. You can get plenty of women that will let you love them for less than that.” Neither Althea nor the senator ever denied that a love affair did eventually commence. It's just that she claimed that it occurred within the confines of a secret marriage. Althea said that Sharon was so smitten that he asked her to marry him after she turned down his lucrative offers to become his mistress. But, she said, he insisted the marriage would have to be secret as he had an ex-mistress in Philadelphia who might make trouble if she heard about it. According to Althea, he told her they could be officially married by simply agreeing in writing to do so. She later produced the signed document in court. He called it a fraud and a forgery.

Althea and the senator set up a household of sorts at two adjoining hotels in San Francisco—she in one; he in the other—connected by a passageway. Back and forth they tiptoed for about a year, apparently in complete harmony. Sharon furnished Althea's room in the style of her choosing and gave her $500 a month spending money (the same amount, incidentally, she would have made as his mistress). For a time they were inseparable. “I used to go everywhere with Mr. Sharon,” Althea later testified. “He scarcely went anywhere that I did not go with him—either riding or driving, or attending to business—that he did not take me with him.” But then things started to sour. Sharon accused Althea of revealing his business secrets, and even of stealing his private papers. Eventually he demanded that she vacate her room at the hotel, underscoring his seriousness by ordering the door taken off its hinges and all the furniture and carpeting removed. After an abortive reconciliation in 1882, Althea Hill and William Sharon were in court.