There is no official “list” of politically courageous Senators, and it has not been my intention to suggest one. On the contrary, by retelling some of the most outstanding and dramatic stories of political courage in the Senate, I have attempted to indicate that this is a quality which may be found in any Senator, in any political party and in any era. Many more examples could have been mentioned as illustrative of similar conduct under similar circumstances.
Other Senators, placing their convictions ahead of their careers, have broken with their party in much the same way as John Quincy Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Edmund Ross, Sam Houston and George Norris. The friends of Republican Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana pleaded with him to softpedal his charges against the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act promoted by his party in his campaign for re-election in 1910; but he would not keep silent. “A party can live only by growing,” he said. “Intolerance of ideas [brings its] death.”
An organization that depends upon reproduction only for its votes, son taking the place of the father, is not a political party, but a Chinese tong; not citizens brought together by thought and conscience, but an Indian tribe held together by blood and prejudice.
Disillusioned and discouraged when the opposition of influential segments of his own party accomplished his defeat, he had but one comment on the morning following election: “It is all right, twelve years of hard work, and a clean record; I am content.”
Many of those who courageously break with their party soon find a new home in another organization. But for those who break with their section, as Senators Benton and Houston discovered, the end of their political careers is likely to be more permanent and more unpleasant. On the eve of the 1924 Democratic Convention, the advisers of Senator Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama—a former Presidential candidate (in 1912), a former Democratic floor leader in both the House and the Senate, author of the famous tariff bill which bore his name, and a leading Presidential possibility—urged that he say nothing to offend the Ku Klux Klan—then a rising power, particularly in Southern politics. But Senator Underwood, convinced that the Klan was contrary to all the principles of Jeffersonian democracy in which he believed, denounced it in no uncertain terms, insisted that this was the paramount issue upon which the party would have to take a firm stand, and fought vigorously but unsuccessfully to include an anti-Klan plank in the party platform. The Louisiana delegation and other Southerners publicly repudiated him, and from that moment on his chances for the Presidency were nil. He could not even be re-elected to the Senate, as Frank Kent has written:
for no other reason than the sincerity and honesty of his political utterances. . . . The opposition to him in Alabama, because of the strength and the openness of his convictions, had grown to a point where his renomination was plainly not possible without the kind of fight he felt unwilling to make. . . . Had Senator Underwood played the game in Alabama in accord with the sound political rule of seeming to say something without doing so, there would have been no real opposition to his remaining in the Senate for the balance of his life.
In those troubled days before the Civil War, great courage in opposing sectional pressures—greater perhaps even than that of Webster, Benton and Houston—was demonstrated by Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the bold if tactless fighter who in 1868 was saved from a humiliating ouster from the White House by the single vote of the hapless Edmund Ross. As the Union began to crack in 1860, Benton and Houston were gone from the Senate floor, and only Andrew Johnson, alone among the Southerners, spoke for Union. When his train, as he returned home to Tennessee to fight to keep his state in the Union, stopped at Lynchburg, Virginia, an angry mob dragged the Senator from his car, assaulted and abused him, and decided not to lynch him only at the last minute, with the rope already around his neck, when they agreed that hanging him was the privilege of his own neighbors in Tennessee. Throughout Tennessee, Johnson was hissed, hooted, and hanged in effigy. Confederate leaders were assured that “His power is gone and henceforth there will be nothing left but the stench of the traitor.” Oblivious to the threat of death, Andrew Johnson toured the state, attempting in vain to stem the tide against secession, and finally becoming the only Southern Senator who refused to secede with his state. On his return trip to Washington, greeted by an enthusiastic crowd at the station in Cincinnati, he told them proudly: “I am a citizen of the South and of the state of Tennessee. . . . [But] I am also a citizen of the United States.”
John Quincy Adams was not the only Senator courageously to resign his seat on a matter of principle. When Andrew Jackson’s personal and political popularity brought increased support for Senator Benton’s long-pending measure to expunge from the Senate Journal the resolution censuring Jackson for his unauthorized actions against the Bank of the United States, Senator John Tyler of Virginia, convinced that mutilation of the Journal was unconstitutional and unworthy of the Senate, stood his ground. But the Virginia Legislature, dominated by Jackson’s friends and Tyler’s foes, and influenced by the sentimental feeling that the President should be permitted to retire without this permanent blot on his record, instructed its Senators to support the expunging resolution.
Realizing that his departure from the Senate would give the Jacksonians greater strength on far more fundamental issues, and that his own political career, which already held promise of the Vice Presidential nomination, would be at least temporarily halted, John Tyler courageously followed his conscience and wrote the legislature these memorable words:
I cannot and will not permit myself to remain in the Senate for a moment beyond the time that the accredited organs [of] the people of Virginia shall instruct me that my services are no longer acceptable. . . .
[But] I dare not touch the Journal of the Senate. The Constitution forbids it. In the midst of all the agitations of party, I have heretofore stood by that sacred instrument. The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one set worships, the next destroys. The only object of my political worship shall be the Constitution of my country. . . .
I shall carry with me into retirement the principles which I brought with me into public life, and, by the surrender of the high station to which I was called by the voice of the people of Virginia, I shall set an example to my children which shall teach them to regard as nothing any position or office which must be attained or held at the sacrifice of honor.
In one of the Senate’s first outstanding demonstrations of political courage, the colorful and stormy Senator Humphrey Marshall of Kentucky chose in 1795 to end his career in the Senate by standing with the President in approving the immensely unpopular Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Although even the Federalists of Kentucky found it necessary to oppose President Washington on the issue, Marshall bluntly told his constituents:
In considering the objections to this Treaty, I am frequently ready to exclaim: Ah! men of faction! friends of anarchy! enemies and willful perverters of the Federal Government! how noisy in clamor and abuse, how weak in reason and judgment, appear all your arguments!
Touring the state in defense of his vote, Marshall was shunned and stoned. Late one night a mob dragged him from his home with the avowed intention of ducking him in a nearby river. At the water’s edge, United States Senator Marshall, with great calm and humor, told the raging mob:
My friends, all this is irregular. In the ordinance of immersion as practised in the good old Baptist Church, it is the rule to require the candidate to relate his experience before his baptism is performed. Now, in accordance with established rules and precedents, I desire to give my experience before you proceed to my immersion.
Both amused and awed, the gang of unruly townspeople—few of whom knew what the Jay Treaty was, though all were convinced that Marshall had committed treason by supporting it—placed the Senator upon a stump and ordered him to explain his position. Beginning in the same humorous vein, the Senator warmed to his work and concluded his speech by caustically blistering all of his enemies, including those who stood sheepishly before him and whom he later described as
poor, ignorant beings who were collected on the bank of the river for the very honorable purpose of ducking me for giving an independent opinion. Among this patriotic group, old John Byrnes, the drunken butcher, was one of the most respectable.
The freshman United States Senator from Kentucky was not “immersed”; but his sharp tongue could not prevent his involuntary retirement from the Senate.
Acts of political courage have not, of course, been confined to the floor of the United States Senate. They have been performed with equal valor and vigor by Congressmen, Presidents, Governors, and even private citizens with political ambitions. One or two examples of each are sufficient to show that neither the Senate nor Washington, D.C., has monopolized this quality.
Many years prior to his election to the Senate, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina demonstrated his greatest courage while a Member of the House of Representatives. When, in 1816, Congress raised its own pay from $6 a day to $1500 a year, an astounding wave of condemnation had suddenly engulfed the nation and members from all parties. Comparatively few members even dared to run for re-election. Clay narrowly avoided defeat only by the most intensive campaign of his career. Calhoun’s most faithful supporters urged the young Congressman to issue a public statement promising to vote to repeal the bill if the voters would only forgive and re-elect him. But Calhoun, who once told a friend: “When I have made up my mind, it is not in the power of man to divert me,” would not back down. Indeed, he suggested that perhaps $1500 was too little.
Returning to Congress vindicated by the support he had received (despite the fact that most of his former colleagues from South Carolina had been defeated for re-election), he stood practically alone on the floor of the House as Members, new and old, scrambled to denounce the bill. But not Calhoun:
This House is at liberty to decide on this question according to the dictates of its best judgment. Are we bound in all cases to do what is popular? Have the people of this country snatched the power of deliberation from this body? Let the gentlemen name the time and place at which the people assembled and deliberated on this question. Oh, no! They have no written, no verbal instructions. The law is unpopular, and they are bound to repeal it, in opposition to their conscience and reason. If this be true, how are political errors, once prevalent, ever to be corrected?
The President of the United States is not subject to quite the same test of political courage as a Senator. His constituency is not sectional, his losses in popularity with one group or section may be offset on the same issue by his gains from others and his power and prestige normally command a greater political security than that afforded a Senator. But one example indicates that even the President feels the pressures of constituent and special interests.
President George Washington stood by the Jay Treaty with Great Britain to save our young nation from a war it could not survive, despite his knowledge that it would be immensely unpopular among a people ready to fight. Tom Paine told the President that he was “treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public. . . . The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.” With bitter exasperation, Washington exclaimed: “I would rather be in my grave than in the Presidency”; and to Jefferson he wrote:
I am accused of being the enemy of America, and subject to the influence of a foreign country . . . and every act of my administration is tortured, in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket.
But he stood firm.
It is appropriate, in this book on the Senate, in selecting one example from among those Governors who have displayed political courage, to choose one whose brave deeds as Governor prevented him from realizing his ambition to reach the Senate. After reviewing a tremendous stack of affidavits and court records, Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois was convinced that an unfair trial and insufficient evidence had convicted the three defendants, not yet hanged, of murder in Chicago’s famous Haymarket Square bombing of 1886. Warned by Democratic leaders that he must forget these convicts if he still looked toward the Senate, Altgeld replied, “No man’s ambition has a right to stand in the way of performing a simple act of justice”; and when asked by the Democratic State Chairman if his eighteen-thousand-word pardon document was “good policy,” he thundered, “It is right.”
For his action, the Governor was burned in effigy, excluded from customary ceremonies such as parades and commencements, and assaulted daily in the press with such epithets as “anarchist,” “socialist,” “apologist for murder” and “fomenter of lawlessness.” Defeated for re-election in 1896, denied even the customary right to make a farewell address at his successor’s inaugural (“Illinois has had enough of that anarchist,” the new Governor snorted), John Peter Altgeld returned to private life and a quiet death six years later. He became, in the title of Vachel Lindsay’s famous poem, “The Eagle That Is Forgotten”:
Sleep softly, . . . eagle forgotten, . . .
under the stone,
Time has its way with you there and the
clay has its own.
Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise
man, that kindled the flame—
To live in mankind is far more than to
live in a name,
To live in mankind, far, far more . . .
than to live in a name.
Charles Evans Hughes in 1920 was neither a Congressman nor a Governor—but he was the most prominent lawyer in the country, a former Governor, Supreme Court Justice and Presidential nominee, and under active consideration for further public office. (He was shortly to become Secretary of State and Chief Justice.) But when five Socialists—duly elected members of a legally recognized party—were arbitrarily denied their seats in the New York State Assembly largely on the basis of their unpopular views, Hughes risked his standing and popularity to protest the action as a violation of the public’s right to choose its own representatives. After a classic battle in the New York Bar Association, he succeeded in obtaining a special Association committee, with himself as chairman, to defend the Socialists—whose views he personally abhorred—before the Legislature.
Denied the right to appear in person, Hughes filed a brief insisting that “if a majority can exclude the whole or a part of the minority because it deems the political views entertained by them hurtful, then free government is at an end.” His arguments apparently had little effect on the New York Legislature, which expelled the Socialists and outlawed their party. But many believe that the distinguished voice of Charles Evans Hughes, nearly alone but never afraid, and the courageous vetoes by Governor Al Smith of that Legislature’s measures for controlling radicalism in the schools, were determining factors in arousing the nation to its senses.
To close our stories of American political courage, we would do well to recall an act of courage which preceded the founding of this nation, and which set a standard for all to follow. On the night of March 5, 1770, when an abusive and disorderly mob on State Street in Boston was rashly fired upon by British sentries, John Adams of Massachusetts was already a leader in the protests against British indifference to colonist grievances. He was, moreover, a lawyer of standing in the community and a candidate for the General Court at the next election. Thus, even had he not joined in the sense of shocked outrage with which all of Boston greeted the “Boston Massacre,” he would nevertheless have profited by remaining silent.
But this militant foe of the Crown was asked to serve as counsel for the accused soldiers, and did not even hesitate to accept. The case, he later noted in his autobiography, was one of the “most exhausting and fatiguing cases I ever tried, hazarding a popularity very hardly earned, and incurring popular suspicions and prejudices which are not yet worn out.” Yet the man who would later be a bold President—and father of an independent Senator and President—not only remained as counsel, but acquitted his clients of the murder charge, demonstrating to a packed courtroom that no evidence was at hand to show that the firing was malicious and without provocation:
Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. The law will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imagination and wanton tempers of men. . . .
Gentlemen of the Jury—I am for the prisoners at the bar; and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria: “If I can but be the instrument of preserving one life, his blessings and tears shall be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of mankind!”