CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SIMON WILLARD was never a member of Congress in the usual sense. Simon Willard of Roxbury, Massachusetts, was a clockmaker early in the nineteenth century and he did it all by hand and by eye.
In cutting his wheel teeth [reads an old account], he did not mark out the spaces on the blank [brass] wheel and cut the teeth to measure, but he cut, rounded up and finished the teeth as he went along, using his eye only in spacing, and always came out even…
It is doubtful if such a feat in mechanics was ever done before, and certainly never since.
The exact date is uncertain, but about 1837, when he was in his eighties, Simon Willard made a most important clock. I will come back to that.
On a June afternoon in 1775, a small boy stood with his mother on a distant knoll, watching the Battle of Bunker Hill. Seven years later, at age fourteen, he was a diplomatic secretary at the court of Russia’s Catherine II; at twenty-eight, minister to the Hague. He was minister plenipotentiary to Russia at the time of Alexander I. He saw Napoleon return from Elba. He was a senator, secretary of state, and finally president. He had seen more, contributed more to the history of his time than almost anyone of his time.
But then, as no former president ever had, John Quincy Adams returned here to the hill to take a seat in the House of Representatives, in the Twenty-second Congress. Adams was thrilled at the prospect. “No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure,” he wrote in his diary. And it was here that this extraordinary American had his finest hours.
He took his seat in the old House—in what is now Statuary Hall—in 1831. Small, fragile, fearing no one, he spoke his mind and his conscience. He championed mechanical “improvements” and scientific inquiry. To no one in Congress are we so indebted for the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution. With Congressman Lincoln of Illinois and Corwin of Ohio, he cried out against the Mexican War, and for eight long years, almost alone, hooted and howled at, he battled the infamous Gag Rule imposed by Southerners to prevent any discussion of petitions against slavery. Adams hated slavery, but was fighting, he said, more for the unlimited right of all citizens to have their petitions heard, whatever their cause. It was a gallant fight and he won. The Gag Rule was permanently removed.
Earlier this year, at the time of the inaugural ceremonies, I heard a television commentator broadcasting from Statuary Hall complain of the resonance and echoes in the room. What resonance! What echoes!
John Quincy Adams is a reminder that giants come in all shapes and sizes and that, at times, they have walked these halls, their voices have been heard, their spirit felt here. Listen, please, to this from his diary, from March 29, 1841:
The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell are arrayed against any man who now in this North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade; and what can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties dropping from me one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head—what can I do for the cause of God and man…. Yet my conscience presses me on; let me but die upon the breach.
And how he loved the House of Representatives:
The forms and proceedings of the House [he writes], this call of the States for petitions, the colossal emblem of the Union over the Speaker’s chair, this historic Muse at the clock, the echoing pillars of the hall, the tripping Mercuries who bear the resolutions and amendments between the members and the chair, the calls of ayes and noes, with the different intonations of the answers, from different voices, the gobbling manner of the clerks in reading over the names, the tone of the Speaker in announcing the vote, and the varied shades of pleasure and pain in the countenances of the members on hearing it, would form a fine subject for a descriptive poem.
Some nights he returned to his lodgings so exhausted he could barely crawl up the stairs. In the winter of 1848, at age eighty, after seventeen years in Congress, Adams collapsed at his desk. A brass plate in the floor of Statuary Hall marks the place.
He was carried to the Speaker’s office and there, two days later, he died. At the end Henry Clay in tears was holding his hand. Congressman Lincoln helped with the funeral arrangements. Daniel Webster wrote the inscription for the casket….
Many splendid books have been written about Congress: Harry McPherson’s A Political Education; Allen Drury’s A Senate Journal; Alvin Josephy’s On the Hill and Kings of the Hill by Representative Richard Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney; Rayburn,a fine recent biography by D. B. Hardeman and Donald Bacon; and The Great Triumvirate, about Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, by Merrill Peterson. Now, in this bicentennial year, comes volume one of Senator Robert Byrd’s monumental history of the Senate.
But a book that does justice to the story of Adams’s years in the House, one of the vivid chapters in our political history, is still waiting to be written, as are so many others.
Our knowledge, our appreciation, of the history of Congress and those who have made history here are curiously, regrettably deficient. The truth is historians and biographers have largely neglected the subject. Two hundred years after the creation of Congress, we have only begun to tell the story of Congress—which, of course, means the opportunity for those who write and who teach could not be greater.
There are no substantial, up-to-date biographies of Justin Morrill of Vermont, author of the Land Grant College Act…or Jimmy Byrnes, considered the most skillful politician of his day…or Joe Robinson, the tenacious Democratic majority leader whose sudden death in an apartment not far from here meant defeat for Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme…or Carl Hayden of Arizona, who served longer in the Senate than anybody, forty-one years.
We have John Garraty’s life of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., but none of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Search the library shelves for a good biography of Alben Barkley or Speaker Joe Martin and you won’t find one. They don’t exist. The only biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg ends in 1945, when his career was just taking off.
The twentieth-century senator who has been written about most is Joe McCarthy. There are a dozen books about McCarthy. Yet there is no biography of the senator who had the backbone to stand up to him first—Margaret Chase Smith.
“I speak as a Republican,” she said on that memorable day in the Senate. “I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American. I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”
We have books on people like Bilbo and Huey Long, but no real biographies of George Aiken or Frank Church.
Richard Russell of Georgia, one of the most highly regarded influential figures to serve in the Senate in this century, used to take home old bound copies of the Congressional Record, to read in the evenings for pleasure. He loved the extended debates and orations of older times and would remark to his staff how strange it made him feel to realize that those who had once counted for so much and so affected the course of American life, even American ideals, were entirely forgotten.
You wonder how many who pour in and out of the Russell Building each day, or the Cannon Building, have any notion who Richard Russell was? Or Joseph Gurney Cannon? There is no adequate biography of either man.
As Speaker of the House and head of the Rules Committee, Uncle Joe Cannon of Danville, Illinois, once wielded power here of a kind unimaginable today. He was tough, shrewd, profane, picturesque, and a terrible stumbling block. It was the new twentieth century. The country wanted change, reform. Uncle Joe did not. “Everything is all right out west and around Danville,” he would say. “The country don’t need any legislation.”
When a bill came up to add a new function to the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, making it the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries and Birds, Cannon protested. He didn’t like adding “and Birds”…“and Birds” was new and different and thus unacceptable.
The insurrection that ended Cannon’s iron rule, a revolt here in this chamber in 1910, was led by George Norris of Red Willow County, Nebraska. There have been few better men in public life than George Norris and few more important turning points in our political history. Yet how few today know anything about it.
How much more we need to know about the first Congress when everything was new and untried.
How much we could learn from a history of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Imagine the book that could be written about the Senate in the momentous years of the New Deal. Think of the changes brought about then. Think of who was in the Senate—Robert Wagner, Burton K. Wheeler, Hugo Black, Alben Barkley, Huey Long, Tom Connally, Vandenberg, Taft, George Norris, Borah of Idaho, and J. Hamilton Lewis, a politician of the old school who still wore wing collars and spats and a pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers.
It was “Ham” Lewis who advised a newly arrived freshman senator named Truman from Missouri, “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”
For some unaccountable reason, there is not even a first-rate history of the Capitol, nothing comparable, say, to William Seale’s history of the White House. This magnificent building grew in stages, as America grew. It is really an assembly of different buildings, representative of different times, different aspirations, and the story should be told that way.
We are all so accustomed to seeing our history measured and defined by the presidency that we forget how much of the story of the country happened here.
Beside Congress, the presidency seems clear, orderly, easy to understand. The protagonists are relatively few in number and they take their turns on stage one at a time.
Congress seems to roll on like a river. Someone said you can never cross the same river twice. Congress is like that—always there and always changing. Individuals come and go, terms overlap. The stage is constantly crowded. The talk and the rumpus go on and on. And there is such a lot of humbug and so much that has been so overwhelmingly boring.
But let no one misunderstand, and least of all you who serve here, we have as much reason to take pride in Congress as in any institution in our system. Congress, for all its faults, has not been the unbroken procession of clowns and thieves and posturing fools so often portrayed. We make sport of Congress, belittle it, bewail its ineptitudes and inefficiency. We have from the beginning, and probably we always will. You do it yourselves, particularly at election time. But what should be spoken of more often, and more widely understood, are the great victories that have been won here, the decisions of courage and vision achieved, the men and women of high purpose and integrity, and, yes, at times genius, who have served here.
It was Congress, after all, that provided the Homestead Act, ended slavery, ended child labor, built the railroads, built the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system. It was Congress that paid for Lewis and Clark and for our own travels to the moon. It was Congress that changed the course of history with Lend Lease and the Marshall Plan, that created Social Security, TVA, the GI Bill, fair employment laws, and the incomparable Library of Congress.
It is not by chance that we Americans have built here on our Capitol Hill, side by side, with the center of government, our greatest library, a free and open repository of all books and ideas in all languages from all parts of the world.
In two hundred years, 11,220 men and women have served in the House and Senate, and while the proportions of black Americans, of women, of Hispanic and Asian Americans, and native Americans have not, and do not now, reflect the country at large, it is nonetheless the place where all our voices are heard. Here, as they say—here as perhaps we cannot say too often—the people rule.
We need to know more about Congress. We need to know more about Congress because we need to know more about leadership. And about human nature.
We may also pick up some ideas.
Considering the way defense spending has been handled in recent years, we might, for example, think of reinstating an investigating committee like the Truman Committee of World War II, which saved billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
If we are unwilling to vote the taxes to pay for the war on drugs, to save our country, why not sell bonds as we did in two world wars?
Above all we need to know more about Congress because we are Americans. We believe in governing ourselves.
The boy should read history, the first John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, about the education of their son, John Quincy. History. History. History. We must all read history, and write and publish and teach history better.
Who were those people in the old bound volumes of the Congressional Record? What moved them? What did they know that we do not?
Our past is not only prologue, it can be bracing. In Emerson’s words, “The world is young: The former great men [and women] call to us affectionately.”
I have decided that the digital watch is the perfect symbol of an imbalance in outlook in our day. It tells us only what time it is now, at this instant, as if that were all anyone would wish or need to know….Which brings me back to Simon Willard.
In the years when the House of Representatives met in Statuary Hall, all deliberations were watched over by the Muse of History, Clio. She is there still over the north doorway. She is riding the winged Car of History, as it is called, keeping note in her book. The idea was that those who sat below would take inspiration from her. They would be reminded that they too were part of history, that their words and actions would face the judgment of history, and that they could count themselves part of an honorable heritage.
There is alas, in this chamber, no such reminder—only the television cameras.
Clio and the Car of History are by the Italian sculptor Carlo Franzoni of Carrara. The clock in the foreground is by Simon Willard. It was, as I said, installed about 1837. Its inner workings, cut freehand by Simon Willard, ticked off the minutes and hours through debate over the Gag Rule, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, tariffs, postal service, the establishment of the Naval Academy, statehood for Arkansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin, matters related to immigration, the Gold Rush, statehood for California, the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the final hours of John Quincy Adams.
It is also a clock with two hands and an old-fashioned face, the kind that shows what time it is now…what time it used to be…and what time it will become.
And it still keeps time.
On we go.