Borglum, Humanities

Honoring Borglum

Posted on by christian

BorglumArt and Politics in a Different Time

You can be forgiven if you didn’t know that Idaho has a Hall of Fame. Apparently the group only gets real attention when they decide, as they did in 2007 and again last week, to honor an individual with Idaho connections who has generated controversy.

The last time the group was in the news, they had decided to induct Larry Craig into the Hall while the former senator was still daily enduring the brunt of jokes from late night comedians.

This year its Mt. Rushmore sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum who has generated the headlines because of his 1920’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Borglum, born in Bear Lake County, Idaho Territory in 1867, was a man of enormous talent, even greater ambition and – I know this will be a shock – some serious shortcomings as a person.

As the superb PBS series The American Experience noted when it broadcast a piece on Mt. Rushmore some time back, “Borglum liked to tinker with his own legend, subtracting a few years from his age, changing the story of his parentage. The best archival research has revealed that he was born in 1867 to one of the wives of a Danish Mormon bigamist. When his father decided to conform to societal norms that were pressing westward with the pioneers, he abandoned Gutzon’s mother, and remained married to his first wife, her sister.”

The rest of Borglum’s life was just as confused and, frankly, in keeping with the west of mythology, just as disordered and contradictory. Why else would a elfin-size man consider it possible (not to mention desirable) to carve 60 foot high heads of American presidents on the side of a slab of granite in the Black Hills of South Dakota? Borglum also believed he had the ability and political skill to create a monument to the heros of the Confederacy at Stone Mountain, Georgia. That’s where the Idaho native met up with the Klan.

Carving portraits on the sides of mountains requires some kind of ego, not to mention showmanship, artistic and engineering skill, political connections and impossibly good public relations. Borglum had all that and then some.

I grew up in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, a National Monument about 25 miles from Rapid City. The monument, to my eyes, is one of the most fascinating tourist sites in the United States and draws nearly 3 million visitors every year. Yet, the place is an incredible study in contradiction. At Mt. Rushmore, it requires real effort not to confront all the tension and dissention inherent in the American story.

When the project was dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge in the summer of 1927 he cast Borglum’s breathtakingly complex endeavor in patriotic, nationalistic terms.

“Its location will be significant,” Coolidge said. “Here in the heart of the continent, on the side of a mountain which probably no white man had ever beheld in the days of Washington, in territory which was acquired by the action of Jefferson, which remained an unbroken wilderness beyond the days of Lincoln, which was especially beloved by Roosevelt, the people of the future will see history and art combined to portray the spirit of patriotism.”

Silent Cal lavished praise on the “people of South Dakota” and the four American presidents who would soon take their places on the mountain. He did not deign to mention the Lakota Sioux, the original “people of South Dakota” who considered – still consider – the Black Hills theirs by right of a treaty signed with the United States government in 1868.

So, in the extreme, Borglum’s incredible artistic and engineering accomplishment is a shrine to American democracy and all the best that stands for and a mountain-sized reminder of what the “American” experience has meant for Native Americans.

Borglum story was every bit as much a contradiction as the story of his greatest accomplishment. All the news coverage of Borglum’s induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame prominently mentioned, as it should have, his involvement with the Klan while he was attempting to construct what eventually became the Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia – a monument to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.

The Idaho Statesman’s Kevin Richert and the editorial page of the Idaho State Journal chided the Hall of Fame pickers for, at a minimum, a lack of due diligence in selecting Borglum for any honor.

Here’s my take. The Klan represents a ugly, ugly period in American history, but it is our history and a fair and more complete – not to mention more interesting – reading of that history requires us to struggle with context and motivation. The “perfect” vision afforded by hindsight can blind us to nuance. History, after all, is often about finding a balance; in Borglum’s case human frailty versus great accomplishment.

Borglum, a politician as much as a sculptor, surely felt he needed both the political and financial help of the Klan in Georgia in the early 1920’s if he were to succeed with his Stone Mountain tribute. The three Americans honored there, not to put too fine a point on it, had participated in an effort to violently overthrow the government of the United States. And Stone Mountain isn’t just another hunk of granite. The modern Klan was re-born in a ceremony on top of the mountain in 1915.

Borglum took on the Stone Mountain project for several reasons; for money no doubt, surely for prestige, maybe even for his art. He set out to create an heroic monument to the leaders of the War of Rebellion at the same time he was contemplating a monument to one of the presidents who put down that rebellion. In the process, in the case of Stone Mountain, he made a deal with the Klan. Today we might well say Borglum made a deal with the devil and, yes, you might get an entirely different read on these same details in part of the old Confederacy. That, too, is part of our history.

Consider one more contradiction. Borglum abandoned work on Stone Mountain in 1923 in large part because of financial disagreements with the project’s sponsors. He had also gotten enthused about the prospects of an even more grandiose art project in the Black Hills championed by a very progressive Republican United States Senator named Peter Norbeck. Norbeck, a friend and political supporter of Teddy Roosevelt and his brand of liberal GOP politics, worked – most of the time, anyway – closely with Borglum to push the Mt. Rushmore project and raise money to complete the monument. Norbeck in his politics and priorities was about as far removed from the Klan as South Dakota is from Georgia.

In 1924, to further confound the modern reader of Borglum’s life, the sculptor happily endorsed the presidential aspirations of Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette who ran as a third party candidate on the Progressive ticket. Borglum cast quarter-sized bronze reliefs of the very liberal La Follette and his equally liberal running mate Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana. The likenesses of the two progressives – they supported strong unions, child labor laws and a non-interventionist foreign policy – were used as campaign buttons and you can still occasionally find Borglum’s handsome work in second hand shops or on eBay.

It’s also worth noting that during that 1924 election only the Progressive Party platform condemned the Klan. The Democratic and Republican platforms were silent because, rather than condemn the white sheet crowd, the major parties actually hoped to appeal to Klan members.

As historian Stanley Coben has pointed out, in the 1920’s the Klan “enrolled more members in Connecticut than in Mississippi, more in Oregon than in Louisiana, and more in New Jersey than in Alabama.” In the 1920’s, Klan backed candidates won races for governor in Oregon, Kansas and Colorado.

Shakespeare wrote, “the evil men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Borglum, as is well document, had many flaws, including ego and self aggrandizement and he flirted, and maybe more, with the Klan. We have been recently reminded that as a young, ambitious man, the late, great Sen. Robert Byrd did much the same. Hugo Black, arguably one of the greatest Supreme Court justices in our history, and certainly one of the greatest civil libertarians to ever grace the Court, had to explain his Klan membership in 1937. He spent the rest of his days living it down.

We shouldn’t excuse such errors of judgment, youthful indiscretion or rank opportunism, but a fair reading of history – and in this case Gutzon Borglum’s accomplishments – also requires consideration of the man’s total life. If further proof of Borglum’s artistic achievement it necessary, note that he sculpted two of the 100 statues in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. This guy, born near Paris, Idaho, had some serious talent.

Borglum and the Klan are part of our history; the good and the not so good. So too the mountain he carved on disputed ground in the Black Hills of Lakota territory featuring other worthy – and very human – white men Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. Turns out our history is just as confused and contradictory as Gutzon Borglum’s.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

The Worst Idea in Politics

Posted on by christian

GossettGovernors Appointing Themselves

The recent death of Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia has many, many consequences. For example, until his replacement is decided, Byrd’s seat – the 60th Democratic seat in the Senate – deprives the majority of the vote needed to stop a filibuster. Also, depending on how things play in West Virginia, the “safe” Byrd seat could be a seat Democrats have to protect, particularly if there is a special election in the fall.

Nothing upsets a state’s politics quite like a Senate vacancy, which brings me to the fellow pictured nearby – Governor then Senator Charles Gossett of Idaho.

As I noted in a post a few months back, Gossett is one of two Northwesterners – Montana’s John Erickson being the other – who engineered their own appointments to the U.S. Senate. It is a horrible idea and nearly always fatal to the politician doing the engineering.

Perhaps this is why West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, who reportedly longs for Byrd’s Senate seat, has repeatedly ruled out appointing himself. Maybe that self awareness helps explain the governor’s 70% approval rating in the Mountaineer State. Still, the state’s AFL-CIO, among others, has publicly called for Manchin to reconsider. Bad idea, Governor.

Nine governors have tried the, “gee, I think I’ll appoint myself to the Senate” approach. Eight of them subsequently lost a primary or the very next opportunity to confront the voters, Gossett and Erickson included.

Only one governor has been able to pull off this political slight of hand, Kentucky’s Albert B. “Happy” Chandler in 1939. Chandler went on to win a special election and then a full term and then resigned his Senate seat in 1945 to become Commissioner of Baseball. It says all one needs to know about Chandler’s Senate career that he is best remembered for succeeding Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and approving Jackie Robinson’s major league contract in 1947, but that’s another story.

At least one very promising political career ended when a governor appointed himself to the Senate. In 1977, Minnesota Gov. Wendell Anderson, a rising star in national Democratic politics, decided he was the best choice to replace Walter Mondale who had left his Senate seat vacant when he was elected Vice President.

Anderson, handsome, well-spoken, known to Minnesotans as “Wendy”, had graced the cover of TIME magazine in 1973 while wearing a plaid shirt and holding a big ol’ northern pike. Anderson, it seemed, was a young man with a bright political future. It all ended with the “Minnesota Massacre” of 1978. The Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party – the DFL – suffered a shackling at the polls that year. Anderson lost the Senate election and his former Lt. Governor, Rudy Perpich, who had facilitated Wendy’s Senate aspirations, lost the Governor’s race. The voters took out their resentment on politicians who were seen as too smart by half. Generally speaking, voters hate an inside deal. In the Minnesota case, once they had punished him, voters did give Perpich a second chance. He came back to win and go on to become the state’s longest serving governor.

When a Senate vacancy occurs, it must be tempting for a governor having won a statewide race, having built a political organization, to look in the mirror and think: “there is no one better for this job.”

History says there are better choices – and they include anyone but the governor.

Civil Rights, Film

Political Movies

Posted on by christian

The Best ManPolitics on the Big Screen

It’s been a while since Hollywood produced a really good political film. With the exception of Primary Colors and Frost/Nixon, I’m hard pressed to name another really good recent film with a political theme. I’ve got to go back to the 60’s to begin my “best of the best” list.

So, lets go to the movies and consider politics on the big screen.

Gore Vidal, to the extent he is remembered at all these days, is recalled as a relic of the 60’s thanks to his feuds with Norman Mailer, his lefty politics, etc. Vidal, a really fine writers, deserves much better, not least for his play – and screenplay – for one of the best political movies ever – The Best Man.

The 1964 movie has a superb cast – Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson and Lee Tracy (who won an Academy Award). Order it up on Netflix and revel in the black and white, 1960’s atmosphere of a vicious campaign for the White House. See if you can match up the characters with the real politicos of the time. JFK, Truman and Stevenson, according to some, were Vidal’s inspiration. It is a very good film and good political theater featuring a cameo from the great ABC newsman Howard K. Smith. If Vidal did nothing else in his long, literary life (and he did) this screen play would stand alone as a worthy piece of work, worthy of a great writing career. One of my all-time favorite movies, and a great play, too.

Other favorite “political” movies:

  • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the Frank Capra classic from 1939. Capra had the misfortune to make his great political film in the same year with Gone with the Wind, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Stagecoach and The Wizard of Oz, among others. Still the story of naive, freshman Sen. Jefferson Smith endures. True story, members of the Senate hated – absolutely loathed – Capra’s film. Majority Leader Alben Barkley went to the premier in Washington, D.C, left in a huff and condemned the movie the next day as an outrage. Senators didn’t behave like that, Barkley fumed, and Capra had dishonored the U.S. Senate. Then, as now, the Senators didn’t get it. The public loved Capra’s film. The filibuster scene, Jimmy Stewart in a sweat trying to uphold the honor of the world’s great deliberative body, is a classic of American cinema.

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  • Seven Days in May. The John Frankenheimer film, also from 1964, is a classic story of ambition, honor and respect for the American tradition of civilian control of the military. Kirk Douglas is superb as the Marine colonel who helps thwart a military coup. The authors, Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, reportedly got the idea for their novel after interviewing Air Force Gen. Curtis “bomb them back to the stone age” LeMay. JFK read the book and thought it not all that unthinkable that the kind of military coup depicted in the film could occur in the USA. Great film, cautionary tale

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  • In 1957, Andy Griffith – yes, that Andy Griffith – starred in a terrific movie – A Face in the Crowd. Elia Kazin directed the film as an early cautionary tale about the incredible power of television as a source of personal power and political propaganda. The film has a great cast, including the wonderful Lee Remick in her debut role. As a post-McCarthy piece of Hollywood magic, this is a a great film.

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  • And, number five – so many to chose from – Judgment at Nuremburg, All the President’s Men, Michael Collins, Citizen Kane, but I have to pick All the Kings Men, the original version from 1949 with Broderick Crawford. A not-so-fictionalize account of the career of Huey P. Long, the film was based on the Robert Penn Warren novel of the same name. It won the Best Picture of 1950 and awards for the top actors, too. A great story about political power and the good, and not so good, it can accomplish.

So many films, so little time. If you love politics and the great American story, any of these will be worth a couple of hours. I’m betting you’ll still be thinking and talking about them days after the credits fade. See you at the movies.

 

Civil Rights, Film

The Last Picture Show

Posted on by christian

dorisFalling for Doris…

As a kid growing up in small town South Dakota, I enjoyed one great perk that has stuck with me all these years. My uncle owned the only movie theater in town – the Harney Theater. As a result, I got to attend every movie – every movie – for nothing. I had to pay for the popcorn and soda. The relatives had to eat, after all, but the movies were free.

This is the period when I fell for Doris. Over the course of several years, I think I must have seen all of the Doris Day – Rock Hudson movies at least three times. I confess, I loved her in Pajama Game and, while the Academy Award winning song – Que Sera, Sera – will now be stuck in my head all day, I thought the Man Who Knew Too Much was pretty darn good stuff.

First run movies came to Custer, South Dakota, but only after they had run first everywhere else.

I remember seeing The Longest Day with its fabulous cast and I went from that great film about D-Day to a life-long fascination with the Allied invasion of France in 1944. I saw To Kill a Mockingbird and don’t think I ever missed Gregory Peck in anything else he ever did. Peter O’Toole became T.E. Lawrence for me and Middle East history – at least post World War I history – has never been the same since Lawrence of Arabia.

All these movie memories came rushing back yesterday when I read the New York Times piece about small town theaters in North Dakota and elsewhere that are being revived by volunteers. One of the volunteers, Babe Belzer is 74 and it sounds like she is addicted to movies.

“If you can get a whole living room of kids watching a movie for three bucks, what a deal,” Belzer said. “But at the theater,” she continued, “the phone doesn’t ring, it’s not time to change the clothes from the washer to the dryer, and there isn’t anyone at your door. It’s kind of the heart and soul of our town.” I get it.

With names like the Dakota, the Lyric and the Roxie, the picture palace does help make a town and a small town doesn’t seem so small or isolated when a new, big movie shows up on a Saturday night.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see every nook of the ol’ Harney Theater in Custer. I held hands with my first girl friend there. I loved it when the theater manager unwrapped and unrolled the movie posters that came every week. I think I can even remember that smell – the mohair seats, the butter (or whatever it was) on the popcorn, the cool darkness and the bright screen. Those memories seem a good deal more authentic than the local metroplex.

The Harney made me a movie fan and perhaps these memories contribute to the fact that I still like the movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s the best. And, much to my darling wife’s amazement, I do still love Doris. She seems authentic, too.

Tomorrow…while I’m on a roll, some of my all-time favorite films with political themes.

Cities, Weekend Potpourri

Weekend Potpourri

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flagJuly 4th…Things to Savor and Remember

In no particular order, some items from the weekend papers:

Boisean Tony Doerr has a nice little piece on the Op-Ed page of the Sunday New York Times. Tony searches for morel mushrooms, among other things. Tony’s new book will be out this week.

In Reno this weekend, the locals are remembering the “fight of the century” in 1910 between the first African-American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and the former champ, Jim Jeffries, who some saw as the “great white hope,” able to recapture the title.

Johnson won in 15 rounds on a blistering hot day and Jeffries, a great boxer in his day, is now remembered as the hope that faded away. Johnson was one of the great characters of American sport. He paved the way for many other athletes of color, as recounted in Geoffrey Ward’s fine book Unforgivable Blackness. The PBS film of the same name by Ken Burns is outstanding.

The effort to gain a presidential pardon for Johnson – John McCain is now on board – continues. Johnson was convicted of “white slavery” for allegedly transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” His real crime was that he merely kept company with white women.

Finally, no one disparages more than I the lack of civility in our politics these days, but it is worth remembering on this 234th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that we’ve always – always – had a quarrelsome politics. It is the nature, perhaps, of the beast. A fine little essay by historian Sean Wilentz reminds us that Jefferson was vilified as “a snake in the grass” for his role in the Declaration and John Marshall, the future great Chief Justice, could hardly bring himself to give ol’ Tom credit for the first draft of that famous and essential paper.

The more things change, as they say.

Happy July 4th to you and, yes, I’ll raise a glass today to all the Founders. They didn’t get everything right, but they did their part. What a country!

Baucus, U.S. Senate

Another Icon of the Senate

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JT RobinsonJoseph Taylor Robinson (1872-1937)

Much is being made today – as it should be – of the honors being afforded Robert C. Byrd, the longest serving member ever in the United States Senate. Senators will stop everything – Supreme Court confirmations, Wall Street regulatory reform, maybe even partisan bickering – to honor Byrd whose mortal remains will hold the Senate floor for a final time. It is a great honor and a fitting one.

In another July – 73 years ago – another powerful, beloved Senate leader, a Senator with many of the southern and political instincts that Byrd came to symbolize, received much the same honor Byrd receives today. Joseph Taylor Robinson, when he died of a heart attack during a blistering hot spell in Washington, D.C. on July 14, 1937, was the longest serving majority leader in history. His death shocked the nation’s political establishment and, like Bobby Byrd, it caused the institution to stop and reflect on how special and significant one person can be, even in the rarefied air of the United States Senate.

Robinson, a former Arkansas governor and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1928, was widely admired in the Senate for his work ethic, his fairness and his ability to forge lasting personal relationships.

[Technically, Byrd is lying in repose today, while Robinson’s 1937 ceremony was called a memorial.]

Robinson’s biographer, Cecil Edward Weller, Jr., says he was the most important Arkansas politician in the first half of the 20th Century, and one of the most influential in the south. But even more than that, Robinson, like Byrd, was a creature of the Senate. Ironically, Robinson’s lifetime ambition was a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court and that seemed within his reach in 1937.

It was the worst kept secret in the Capitol that Franklin Roosevelt had promised the first open seat on the Court to Robinson, mostly out of respect for his party loyalty. Robinson had taken on the thankless job of running as the southern balance on the Democratic ticket in 1928 with New York Governor Al Smith. Smith was a Catholic, northeastern, urban, “wet,” while Robinson was a rural, Protestant, southern “dry.” The Smith-Robinson ticket got trounced.

When a Supreme Court opening materialized in the summer of 1937, FDR hesitated in naming Robinson because he was completely embroiled in his controversial plan to enlarge the Court; or “pack” it in the popular phrase of the day. Robinson had been FDR’s loyal lieutenant in advancing the Court plan – and the rest of the New Deal for that matter – even though he was personally skeptical that it was the right policy.

Still, when conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter retired, it looked like Robinson was destined to get his wish. His Senate friends took to calling him “Mr. Justice,” but still FDR withheld the formal offer of a Court appointment. The president wanted his Court plan to pass and knew he needed his majority leader on the job to get it done. As events turned, neither FDR’s bill passed nor did Robinson get to the Court. When Joe T. died on July 14, the Court plan died with him, as did his hope to end his long career on the nation’s high court.

Its all speculation, but had Robinson lived he might well have forced Roosevelt to compromise and accept two or three additional Supreme Court justices rather than the six FDR wanted. Without Robinson pushing and prodding the Senate, the president got nothing. By the same token, had FDR acted quickly to appoint Robinson to the Court, it might well have been the gesture the Senate was looking for – putting a popular Senate leader on the controversial Court – to move the president’s legislation. Proof that timing is often everything in politics.

FDR attended Robinson’s memorial ceremony in the Senate chamber and most members of the Senate and many House members boarded a special train to Little Rock for services prior to Robinson’s burial in Arkansas nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

Basques, Media

Google to the Rescue

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Can Google Save Journalism?

James Fallows, the talented and insightful writer for The Atlantic, has a great piece in the current issue that might – just might – give hope to those of us who worry about the future of “real” journalism. It turns out that Google, thought by many to be helping speed the death of old line journalism, is actually devoting serious time and resources to strategies to help quality reporting survive and thrive when the old business models finally creak to a halt.

“It’s the triple whammy,” Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO told Fallows, that is killing newspapers. “Loss of classifieds, loss of circulation, loss of the value of display ads in print, on a per-ad basis. Online advertising is growing but has not caught up,” Schmidt said.

At the same time the smart guys at Google, clearly much more tech savvy than old-line news folks, realize that the value of the search engine is that it can – and must – supply quality content. Without quality reporting, no quality content.

Here’s Fallows on what Google is up to: “After talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization. Google’s initiatives do not constitute a complete or easy plan for the next phase of serious journalism. But they are more promising than what I’m used to seeing elsewhere, notably in the steady stream of ‘Crisis of the Press’ –style reports. The company’s ultimate ambition is in line with what most of today’s reporters, editors, and publishers are hoping for—which is what, in my view, most citizens should also support.”

I’m the guy who has often joked that I will be the last person in America to buy a newspaper. When everyone else has moved to the iPod or whatever, I’ll still be prowling around an airport or a newsstand looking for ink on newsprint. But even I must concede the old newspaper model is fading fast. Maybe even faster than anyone thinks.

Here’s how one Google strategist describes, not incorrectly, the current newspaper business model: “Grow trees—then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown away? Who would say that made sense?” It doesn’t any more.

“It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort,” Schmidt told Fallows. “Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads.”

That is the key: how to generate the ad revenue – and remember most newspapers have always been a platform to sell ads, the news content was secondary.

Read Fallows piece and see if you don’t agree that Google gets the content piece and may just be smart enough to help the real journalists figure out the business approach, too.

Not everyone agrees, of course, but can anyone doubt that the way journalism is financed, distributed and packaged has already changed in rapid and remarkable fashion. I can’t see ahead to next year let alone ten years, but I’m confident we have only seen the beginning of the transformation. My hope is that the daily, hourly need for quality content will help drive the technological transformation.

You might want to Google that notion while reading your ink on newsprint…while you still can.

2014 Election, Borah, Egan, Idaho Politics

Room for a Borah?

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BorahToo Independent for Today’s GOP

Arguably William Edgar Borah – the Lion of Idaho – is the most famous and influential politician Idaho has ever produced. He served longer in the U.S. Senate than anyone from Idaho ever has, was a genuine international figure and regularly confounded what he called “the old guard” in the GOP because of his independence.

One wonders what Bill Borah would have thought of some planks in the Idaho GOP platform adopted last weekend in Idaho Falls? I wonder how many of the delegates know, or care, that Borah fought hard for, indeed was the floor sponsor of, the Constitutional amendment – the 17th Amendment – that changed the way U.S. Senators are elected. Idaho Republicans are now on record favoring repeal of Borah’s handiwork and returning to the pre-1913 days when state legislators elected Senators.

Borah was never a party regular. A reporter made the observation in the early 1930’s that there were four distinct political factions in the United States – Republicans, Democrats, Progressives and William E. Borah.

While Borah never broke openly with the national party, he did refuse to endorse William Howard Taft in 1912 – Borah was close to Theodore Roosevelt – and he couldn’t bring himself to back Alfred Landon in 1936. Pressed by GOP leaders to make a series of radio talks to help Landon, the Kansas governor, in his uphill fight against Franklin Roosevelt, Borah refused. His biographer, Marian McKenna, wrote that “he warned Republican leaders that if they force him to take a stand publicly…he would let it be known that he preferred Roosevelt.”

Borah might have trouble with the “loyalty oath” Idaho Republicans now say will be required of GOP candidates. I doubt he would have approved of the party’s effort to encourage long-time GOP local official Vern Bisterfeldt to withdraw as the party’s candidate for Ada County Commissioner because of his past support for some Democratic candidates. In 1912 Borah challenged state GOP leaders to read him out of the party if they could. They couldn’t.

As to the 17th Amendment – the direct election of U.S. Senators – I think it not an overstatement to say that Idaho’s most famous Republican would have been appalled that modern day GOP adherents would openly call for its repeal.

McKenna wrote in her 1961 biography about Borah’s leadership on the issue: “It was an excellent public service, but few know or remember Borah’s part in it. The fight had been long, cutting across party lines and pitting conservatives against progressives. Borah found this groping of the electorate toward a truer and more efficient democracy most heartening.”

Asked years later if the change in how Senators are elected had improved the Senate, Borah had no doubt. He trusted the popular will. “What judgment is so swift, so sure and so remorseless,” he said, “as the judgment of the American people?”

There were two principle reasons Borah favored the election reform, one very personal another moral. He knew that his Senate career would likely be a short one if he couldn’t appeal directly to the voters and he was genuinely disgusted by the corruption involved when legislators elected Senators.

One of the most celebrated corruption cases involved William Andrews Clark of Montana, but Borah was more familiar with a corrupt 1909 Illinois election involving William Lorimer. As exposed by the Chicago Tribune, Lorimer won his Senate seat thanks to a $100,000 slush fund gathered by Illinois business interests who used the cash to bribe state legislators. The Senate eventually declared Lorimer’s election invalid and Borah used the case to press for his reform.

In the 1930’s, Borah remained fiercely independent and above his party. He supported much of Roosevelt’s New Deal, made common cause with Democrats – Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, a Progressive Democrat, was a close friend and collaborator – and lamented the GOP drift to the right. In his one rather half-hearted run for the White House in 1936, Borah told a campaign crowd: “If those now in control [of the Republican Party] would wake up some morning and find that I had been nominated for President they would groan, roll over and die.”

McKenna summed up his individualism this way: “He was really an independent with a mystic loyalty to the party which never seemed to live up to the ideals he conceived for it. He was a Republican by inheritance and a Democrat by inclination. He tried to stand for the best in the two parties and was inevitably accused of straddling…it took courage for him to wage an unending battle against the old guard in the party which he really loved.”

Mark Twain once said that, “in religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.”

Perhaps political party platforms should be seen in the same light, and, of course, Democrats come up with crazy notions and put them in their platforms, too. Still, some of the positions Idaho Republicans now endorse ignore some of the the country’s history, not to mention the history of the most famous Republican Idaho ever produced.

2016 Election, Baseball, Baucus, Politics, Supreme Court, U.S. Senate

Byrd, Kagan and the Senate

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byrdA Monday Morning in Senate History

The news that the longest serving member of Congress in the nation’s history, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, had died got me to thinking about all that the silver maned “dean of the Senate” has seen since coming to Washington, D.C. in 1952. Think about it: Korea, McCarthy, the Cold War, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Vietnam, civil rights, Nixon, Watergate, the rise of China, the end of the Soviet Union, radical Islam, Iraq and Afghanistan. What a time and what a career. Byrd was 92 and he loved the Senate.

Byrd, with his courtly demeanor and three piece suits, was a throwback in many ways. Before his declining health, he was one of the Senate’s great theatrical orators. Byrd was also a respecter of tradition and rules, one of the Senate’s champion appropriators – it seems like half of the bridges and buildings in West Virginia carry his name – and a fierce defender of the Senate’s role and responsibility as an institution in our system; particularly the Senate’s role in limiting executive power. His has not been a career free of controversy, either.

In the early 1940’s, Byrd organized a Ku Klux Klan chapter in his hometown, Crab Orchard, and was chosen the chapter’s “Exalted Cyclops.” The Klan connection followed him all the rest of his life. In his memoir, Child of the Appalachian Coal Fields, published in 2005, he called joining the Klan a serious case of “bad judgment” driven by the naivete and ambition of a young man.

“(Klan membership) has emerged throughout my life,” he wrote, “to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one’s life, career, and reputation.” Byrd goes on to note, not without irony, that organizing the Klan chapter in the 1940’s served as his stepping stone to politics.

He was mentioned as a presidential or vice presidential candidate more than once, rose to become Senate Majority Leader and has been a genuine scholar of Senate history. His book – The Senate: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, 1789-1989 – is wonderful reading for a political history buff.

In his day, Byrd could play a pretty fair fiddle. I remember seeing him in action in a stiflingly hot Boise High School auditorium during a campaign event for Sen. Frank Church in the fall of 1980.

Byrd has also been a passionate advocate for better teaching of American history and when the Federation of State Humanities Councils presented him some years back with an award for his advocacy and support, he pulled out tattered copy of a history text he had read as a child in those Appalachian coal fields. The book, now mostly long forgotten, was An American History written by a Columbia University historian, David Saville Muzzey, and first issued in 1911. Muzzey’s work was a standard American history text in the early 20th Century and Byrd praised it to nines; repeatedly referring to “his Muzzey.”

In 2004, Byrd authored another book; a slim and well-reasoned volume entitled Losing America. With the book he lamented the steady rise, during what was then his nearly 60 years in Washington, of the power of an American president to commit our military to action with little if any questioning by the Congress. The book was written in the wake of 9-11 and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq; a action Byrd had courageously and very openly opposed.

He wrote: “The awesome power to commit this nation to war must be taken back from the hands of a single individual – the president of the United States – and returned to the people’s representatives in Congress as the framers intended. No president must ever again be granted such license with our troops or our treasure.”

At a time when there is so much talk about threats to the Constitution from – take your pick – President Obama, the Democratic Congress, a conservative Supreme Court or talk radio it is interesting that those doing the denouncing on both the left and the right hardly ever – OK, Ron Paul is an exception – mention Byrd’s point about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 – “The Congress shall have power…To declare war.”

Bob Byrd knew “his Muzzey” and his Constitution. He has always carried a copy of the founding document in his coat pocket. His Senate career is one for the record books and the history books and the Senate could use his historical perspective as it takes on another Supreme Court confirmation this week.

And Now, Judging Kagan

Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings open today and the Senate’s increasing inability to comprehensively, carefully and civilly carry out the “advise and consent” function may be as much on trial as the nominee.

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were threatening over the weekend to boycott the hearings unless they got access to more Kagan documents. Ranking GOP member Jeff Sessions even suggested a filibuster might be in order.

Almost all of this, along with unbelievable talk about Kagan’s wardrobe and looks, is little more than political theatre. The real questions that need to be asked, and probably won’t be, are much less theatrical and much more important.

Is she competent? Supreme Court clerk, White House Counsel’s Office, Harvard Law dean would argue for a yes. My question: what did she learn from those experiences and how might it apply to the Supreme Court?

Has she done anything in her professional or private life that might disqualify her – or anyone with similar history – from service on the high court? Nothing we know of.

So, ultimately, does she understand the role of a judge? While we’ll hear a good deal about her “judicial temperament” and whether she is an “activist” or a “liberal.” I’d like some member of the Senate committee to ask her who she thinks has most affected American judicial thought since 1789, or in the 20th Century? Does she know anything about Holmes and Brandeis, Marshall and Taney? What opinion of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s does she most admire? What has she read lately? How does she see the job of lawyer to the president? How will she work with Roberts and Scalia? Does she think she has any responsibility to explain herself – and her opinions – if she gots to wear the robe?

You can bet the White House has equipped Kagan with 110 ways to say “I couldn’t possibly comment on that since it is an issue that may well come before the Court.” So, maybe we could have the Senate engage her in a conversation about how she thinks, what she knows about history and the Constitution and how she will apply her experience.

I’m not holding my breath. The nineteen members of the Judiciary Committee – assuming the Republicans show up – will each need plenty of C-SPAN time. Why waste any of those precious moments on a real question that might really tell us something about the nominee when a partisan speech is possible – and expected?

Bob Byrd and Elena Kagan are joined in history this Monday morning; the history of the United States Senate. Let’s hope the current Senate is up to playing something approaching a useful role in writing one more chapter in that history, because with two problematic wars raging, a stagnant economy and millions out of work, the country hardly needs the sideshow of an unproductive fight over who should join the Supreme Court. The White House and the Senate have a stake in making things work, and work better. Why not start today?

In his massive history of the Senate, Byrd wrote lovingly about the great Majority Leader from Montana Mike Mansfield and quotes the Montanan – the longest serving leader in history – as saying: “In moments of crisis, at least, the President and the Congress cannot be adversaries; they must be allies who, together, must delineate the path to guide the nation’s massive machinery of government in a fashion which serves the interests of the people and is acceptable to the people.”

That is the Washington we need right now and can’t seem to get.

Human Rights, Little Bighorn

A Good Day to Die…

Posted on by christian

Sitting BullcusterThe Little Bighorn…a Battle Never Really Over

Sometime in the afternoon of June 25, 1876 – 134 years ago today – George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 troopers of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under his direct command died on the hills and in the ravines along the east side of the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer’s Last Stand, Sitting Bull’s Triumph, whatever it has been called, never seems to be as distant or as “historical” as other even more important moments in American history. A fabulous new book about the battle The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick goes a long way to explain why the lopsided encounter on that hot June afternoon never seems to be ready to move to the back shelves of our history.

Philbrick does a commendable job of telling a balanced story. He doesn’t detest Custer, although there is much to detest, and he doesn’t glorify the mostly Sioux and Cheyenne warriors – particularly Sitting Bull – who messed up the obsessively ambitious Custer’s opportunity, potentially, to win a great victory and position himself for a political career.

It’s fun to speculate about Custer the candidate. He was a shameless self promoter, a passably good writer, articulate – although he spoke very fast and this reportedly made him difficult to understand – and, even though his famous golden hair was thinning by the time he rode into the valley of the Little Bighorn, he was a good looking fellow.

He was also a partisan Democrat when Democrats need an attractive candidate for the White House. Who knows? He could have been a contender. Custer could also be a bully, a prude and, as it suited him, an extraordinarily attentive friend and husband. In other words, he was, well, complicated.

As Salon noted in a review of Philbrick’s extremely well written and researched book: “Today, Custer has long since become an embarrassment to educated white Americans. But the effort we’ve put into debunking him amounts to admitting we’re stuck with him. From the Goldilocks hairdo he’d actually rid himself of before Little Bighorn to the final, almost certainly inaccurate, tableau of The Last White Man Standing as the ‘hostiles’ close in, he’s the horse’s ass we rode in on.”

My own view is that the Custer story continues to generate interest and books – the General, really Lt. Colonel, even has a website and a “re-enacter” – for several reasons.

Even with Philbrick’s fresh retelling, we will never have the final word on the battle. The confusion of the battle – it played out over some distance in difficult terrain – and the selective or flawed memory of those who survived – and none directly with Custer did survive – combine to leave many details impossible to pin down. What really happened will forever remain a mystery.

America, even in 1876, loved a flamboyant character. Custer was all that. He rode into Civil War battles wearing his own specially designed black velvet uniform. He once organized his entire regiment into companies defined by the color of the horses – a black horse company, a grey horse company, etc. He skillfully courted the press. One of the men who died with him in Montana was a newspaperman along to report on his exploits. Custer was a personality. Cable TV would have loved him.

Philbrick makes a compelling case that Custer, had his customary luck held that long ago day, just might have prevailed. He had used similar tactics before to raid Indian villages and had his subordinates – Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen – not hated Custer so much, and been better soldiers, they just might have pulled off the attack they launched against the massive native village. Sitting Bull shared that belief early on that hot afternoon, saying that he thought his warriors might well be routed.

Finally, the Custer of Hollywood and heroic paintingts has survived and thrived because his very best publicist was his handsome wife, Elizabeth or Libby. She lived a long life, dying in 1933 at age 91 and, playing the role of “professional widow,” she pulled out all the stops to burnish he departed husband’s reputation and keep his memory alive. A profile in American Heritage noted that her last letter to Custer ended this way: “My thoughts, my dreams, my prayers, are all for you. God bless and keep my darling. Ever your own Libbie.”

As the Wall Street Journal has noted in its review of Philbrick’s book, the author is generally even-handed and displays, I think, just the right amount of disdain for Custer. Philbrick also continues the historical advance of the Custer story from “tragedy” to “cautionary tale.”

By the summer of 1876, the United States was in transition from a post-Civil War focus – Reconstruction would officially end with the election of 1876 – to a nation with imperial designs. The prevailing political and military sentiment was to contain the “hostiles” on confined reservations in order to advance the nation’s economic development and population expansion.

The Little Bighorn was but a momentary pause in that march for, as the Austin-American Statesman notes: “After the battle, Sitting Bull’s huge village quickly scattered, and virtually every band surrendered to federal authorities within a few months. Reservation life brought only despair and deprivation. ‘This victory, great as it was,’ Philbrick writes of the battle, ‘had simply been the prelude to a crushing and irresistible defeat.'”

For a long time, I thought it strange that we named the battle after the guy who had lost. Why not the Great Sioux and Cheyenne Battle? Or, Sitting Bull’s Battle? Former Montana Congressman Pat Williams answered the question when he told me a while back that during his 18 years in Congress, he caught as much flak for sponsoring the legislation to change the name of the battlefield – from Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn Battlefield – as anything he ever did.

Custer died 134 years ago today, but then again he never really died.