Category Archives: legislature

Vote for the boats

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Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist George Bernard Shaw said it in his play Back to Methuselah in 1949: “You see things; and you say “Why?”  But I dream things that never were; and I say “why not?”

I awoke one morning a few months ago thinking about a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, a museum that emphasizes the role of Missouri River steamboats as the lifelines to the American West.   It was a little while after our meeting in Kansas City at the Steamboat Arabia Museum where we talked about the museum’s future and its move to a new location where it can become a National Steamboat Museum.

There once had been some uneasiness about applying the “national” name to the museum— how a museum alongside the Missouri River could assume the “national” title for a creation that had such a profound impact on almost all of the nation’s navigable streams for most of the Nineteenth Century.  But that uneasiness went away when I remembered the Shaw’s remark about dreaming things that never were and asking “Why not?”

And that’s why we’re willing to buck some politically-influential big nay-sayers and the reason we hope members of the legislature will join us in a venture that requires some courage to make something great materialize for our city and for our state.

Why not put our National Steamboat Museum along the nation’s longest river system?  Why not put the museum on a hill overlooking the most challenging river that steamboats ever faced?  Why not display a boat or boats exhumed from their watery graves of a century and a half ago and more?  Why not a museum that represents the importance of steamboats to this nation’s greatest adventure—the expansion of our country from ocean to ocean?

Others have not been reluctant to use the “national” designation in connection with steam boating.  Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, has the National Steamboat Monument, a sixty-ton replica of the original paddle wheel from the “American Queen” (a modern tourist boat built in 1995) that towers forty feet off the ground, with a series of twenty-four metal smokestacks to symbolize the importance of steam in early river travel and the importance of riverboats to Cincinnati’s history.

Jeffersonville, Indiana—across the Ohio River from Louisville—has the Howard National Steamboat Museum in the 1894 mansion of steamboat captain James Howard (a museum that, appropriately, has survived a 1971 fire caused by an explosion of its steam heating plant).

Marietta, Ohio has the Ohio River Museum that includes a twenty-four foot long model of the sternwheeler “The Pioneer,” and a collection of artifacts from steamboats in three buildings.

The Clifton Steamboat Museum in Beaumont, Texas is a 24,000 square foot museum that includes steamboat history as well as artifacts from various wars in which Texans have participated.

Irvington, Virginia’s Steamboat Era Museum includes the pilot house from the steamer “Potomac,” built in 1894 and disassembled in 1938.

And Marion, Arkansas has The Sultana Museum that commemorates the disaster that struck the steamboat Sultana in 1865, an explosion of boilers and fire on a 367-passenger capacity boat packed with 2,300 passengers, mostly paroled Union soldiers just released from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prison camps. Only five-hundred of those passengers survived.

But nowhere is there a museum that honors the steamboats that fought the nation’s most dangerous river, a river on which the average lifespan of a steamboat was only three years. And in honoring those boats and those who built and operated them, wouldn’t we be honoring steamboat history in general?

The dream is for a museum that houses at least one exhumed steamboat. The whole thing. But maybe more. We’ll know when we dig down to others. The museum also would provide a window on the people we were in the early days of the frontier through the years until railroads had so penetrated the West that steamboats were no longer essential to the survival of frontier communities and the movement of the frontier toward the Pacific Ocean.

Some parts of the museum already exist; the steam engine from the “Missouri Packet,” the first of about 400 boats to sink in the Missouri River when it went under in 1820, the two-hundred tons of cargo recovered from the exhumed “Arabia,” and soon, the cargo of and perhaps the entire “Malta,” due for recovery this winter if fund-raising can be completed.

Introductory displays of the earlier history of steamboats on the Hudson, Potomac, and Ohio Rivers—among others—can provide the context for the main displays in the National Steamboat Museum which will take nothing away from the importance of existing collections and monuments but will instead bring the importance of steamboats and their era into sharp and dramatic focus complementing other facilities that highlight this often overlooked but vitally important part of the development of our nation.

Why the Missouri River?  Writer and epic poet John G. Neihardt, who canoed downriver from Fort Benton, Montana in 1908 wrote:

“The Missouri is unique among rivers.  I think God wished to teach the beauty of a virile soul fighting its way toward peace—and his precept was the Missouri.  To me, the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”

I have come to realize we can call it The National Steamboat Museum because—while focusing on Missouri River steamboats—it will be a tribute to all of the rivers, all of the boats that challenged them and won or lost, all of the people who invented, built, and operated those boats—and those who died in their disasters—and all of the people who rode them into uncertain futures that are our national history.

Their descendants not only will have a unique glimpse of their real-people ancestors. They might draw courage by knowing that progress is not achieved by sitting on a riverbank and watching the water flow by but instead is often achieved by having the courage to go against the current in search of better things.

Those of us who want to create the National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City do not lack the courage to face the heavy opposition of our casino industry to provide the funding for that museum as well as for a State Museum building and the transformation of the present state museum space into a visitor center that focuses on the history of the capitol and of state government, a place to learn about being a Missouri citizen. The casino industry, which has capitalized on (some say “has taken advantage of”) our steamboat heritage for more than twenty-five years, appears not to care about leaving funds in Missouri to accomplish great goals that will benefit all Missourians. The legislature can decide if its best to keep some of the casino’s annual windfall here for future generations rather than let it flow to casino corporate offices in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

A National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, Missouri?

Why not?

Join us in making what never has been—-

be.

Tea party politics, 1860

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One in ten people living in Missouri in 1860 was a slave.  A total of 24,302 slaveholders owned 114, 931 slaves.  Thirteen percent of Missouri families had at least one slave.  The division within the state on the issue of slavery played out in different ways.  The situation was serious enough that national news correspondents came here to witness it.

A seeming innocent request by a church congregation to borrow the Senate Chamber for a few hours turned into an example of the conflict within Missouri and among Missourians as the nation trembled at the precipice of a Civil War. It began because a church wanted to hold a tea party.

The Senate Journal for March 5, 1860 is the usual dry record of procedures.  “On motion of Mr. Scott;

Resolved, That the use of the Senate Chamber be granted to the Methodist Episcopal Church on Tuesday evening, the 13th inst., for the purpose of giving a tea party for the benefit of the church.”  The motion was approved with only two or three barely audible “no” votes.

But some people started thinking about that resolution overnight and the next morning “Mr. Thompson moved reconsideration of the vote granting the use of the Senate Chamber to the Methodist Episcopal Church on Tuesday, the 13th inst; Which motion was decided in the affirmative…”

A correspondent for the New York Tribune watched what the journal does not record:

This morning, Senator Thompson of Clay moved a reconsideration on the ground that the Methodist Episcopal Church is Anti-Slavery, and an enemy to “the institutions” of the state. This brought out Senator Scott, in one of the finest vindications of political and religious freedom it has been my fortune to listen to in the State. It is more valuable, coming as it did from a most decided advocate of Slavery. It is impossible to do it justice in a hasty sketch.

He said he hoped the resolution would not be reconsidered. He remembered no instance in which the chamber had been refused any other denomination. It was true the Methodist Episcopal Church was thoroughly Anti-Slavery. They had the constitutional right to be so, as much as he had to be Pro-Slavery. His right to be Pro-Slavery and theirs to be Anti-Slavery, had a common origin in the inalienable rights of man beyond the just control of human governments. He believed Slavery to be a moral, social and political blessing—best for the white man and best for the negro—and he was not afraid of Anti-Slavery sentiments or Anti-Slavery arguments in the churches or out of them. If Slavery was right, it would be maintained. There was no danger in error, when truth was left free to combat it.  He asked for himself the common rights of a citizen, of a freeman, and was willing to grant them to all others. Was Slavery so weak that it must be maintained by proscription? by a violation of the constitutional rights of our citizens? The denial of freedom of thought and religion? If so it was time it was out of the State. He was not willing to make the admission, and was sorry that anybody else was. Proscription would defeat its own purposes. The freedom of thought and discussion could not be crushed out by it. The Christian Religion had reached us through the proscription of ages, standing the test of infidel oppression, and arguments supported by local tyrannies and temporal persecutions. The Reformation swept over Europe like a tornado, unappalled by the terrors of the Inquisition. Even Mormonism flourished as long as it was animated by the fires of proscription. Driven into the Wilderness, a desert state astonished the world at the base of the mountains. Another example was the proscription of the Catholics by the Know Nothings. The charge of proscription broke up the organization. Many who were in it were now proscribing the Methodists.  Were the lessons of experience lost upon them? Would they never learn them? The Methodist Episcopal Church was one of the oldest and most numerous denominations in the country. Founded by the great Wesley, thoroughly Anti-Slavery, its discipline had undergone no change for three quarters of a century. It was now what it had  been before the division of the Church, when its members from all parts of the Union worshipped at the same Anti-Slavery alter [sic].  He was willing that they should worship God as of yore, according to the dictates of their own consciences, unmolested by the hard hand of proscription. He believed them to be obedient to the Constitution and the law. If not, he did not doubt the power of the State to bring them to punishment. To exclude them from the Senate Chamber for their religious opinions, learned from Wesley, the founder of Methodism and steadily maintained through the long history of the Church, was indiscriminately granted to all other denominations, was an attempt in violation of the Constitution of the United States, to prohibit the free exercise of religion, and in violation of the Constitution of this State, a denial that all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; an attempt, by human authorities to control and interfere with the rights of conscience, and to give preference to sects and modes of worship. He was sorry that such a wrong should become by anybody, but not surprised that it should be asked in e name of Democracy, which had long since lost its original meaning, and become synonymous with despotism.

Senator Parsons, a determined advocate of Slavery, rose to reply. He is a great, big, stalwart, black-featured specimen of humanity, whose contour and manner irresistibly suggest “Border Ruffian.”  There were some strange things in his speech. He astonished the Senate with the statement that, ‘Bishop Andrews “was driven out of the church because he wouldn’t sell a slave girl he had got by his wife to a stranger.” Whether the statement was intended to carry with it the idea that the Bishop inherited the slave girl was left to inference. But with or without inference it was a rare item of intelligence, and could only have been dug out of the voluminous church controversy by the most laborious and profound research. It has established the Senator’s character as a well-informed man, and hereafter his statements will be received with universal credence.

Senator Halliburton followed on the same side. He, too, had made a discovery. The Senate listened in breathlessness. The Senator read from a scrapbook he held in his hand the astounding intelligence the Methodist-Episcopal Church was Anti-Slavery. He seemed to have just discovered it in some concealed book of church history, and put it in his scrapbook, that the world might not lose it. Where in the world he got the information, whether in the Discipline, or whether he stumbled upon it in some profound research into church history, I do not know; but that he has it, and in a way that the world can never lose it, there can be no doubt. The fact is, I heard it myself, and the Church need no longer deny it. The Senator stoutly insisted the Anti-Slavery sentiments of the church were not religious, but political, and on that account, they ought to be excluded from the chamber.

Senator Scott said if this were so, it was nonetheless proscription. Under the Constitution and laws of the State, there were two modes of emancipation—one, to emancipate on compensation to the owners, as had been done in the West Indies; the other to amend the Constitution, and pass a gradual emancipation act. Anti-Slavery citizens had the same right to insist on the measure as he had to oppose them. It was simply a question of freedom of opinion and discussion, and he was sorry to see any advocate of Slavery to defend by proscription of any kind, religious or political. It was the worst possible defense for Slavery, and would do more to break it up than anything else.

The discussion shows the character of Slavery. It originated in wrong, and must be maintained in the same way. It cannot bear discussion, and hence, its advocates want to suppress it. I need hardly add that the resolution was reconsidered and laid on the table. This is the institution which the Constitution totes into the Territories under the Dred Scott decision; and if it cannot be toted out again, no Christian denomination can have a tea-party there without indorsing [sic] Slavery.

About three weeks later, the March 28 journal recorded:

“Mr. Goodlett offered the following resolution: Resolved, That Mr. Wm. E. Dunscomb, Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government, be and is hereby authorized to grant to the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the use of the Senate chamber on the evening of the 10th of April next, for a charitable purpose.”  The Senate passed the resolution a few hours later.

The Methodist Episcopal Church South favored slavery.

The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist Churches split—the Presbyterians in 1838, the Methodist Episcopals in 1844, and the Baptists in 1845 with the Southern Baptist Convention being formed and later becoming the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

And who were these men whose actions in March of 1860 reflected the growing divide in our country?

Senator John Scott was from Buchanan County. He was elected to the Senate to replace Robert M. Stewart when Stewart was elected governor.

Senator James T.V. Thompson probably was one of the first 75 residents of Liberty.  He was part of the Confederate Senate that met in Neosho and passed an act of secession. He called himself a “an old-fashioned states’ rights Jackson Democrat” who donated the ground on which William Jewell College was built.

Senator Wesley Halliburton moved to Randolph County from Tennessee in 1823. He helped write the state constitution of 1875, which lasted for seventy years until it was replaced by a constitution that his grandson, Senator Allen McReynolds, helped write. He was one of the incorporators of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railway Company, the only railroad that did not go bankrupt in the early days.  His southern sympathies led to his arrest by federal troops at the start of the Civil War. He was one of the first men arrested in northeast Missouri and was imprisoned in Quincy, Illinois until he was ordered released. He founded the first newspaper in Milan.

Senator Mosby Monroe Parsons was a Jefferson City lawyer who commanded a Confederate brigade in Sterling Price’s army.  He was among the rebels who refused to surrender at the war’s end and went to Mexico where he was among a half-dozen American Confederate soldiers killed by Mexican troops in August, 1865. His family home at 105 Jackson Street is one of the homes the city has taken over under a widespread eminent domain action so it can be made habitable again. It’s one of the city’s oldest homes.

Senator M. C. Goodlett, whose resolution allowing an event by the slavery supporting branch of the Methodist church, was a slave owning Warrensburg lawyer.  He went south with Governor Jackson.  On October 12, 1861, Goodlett introduced the bill in Missouri’s rebel senate to “dissolve” Missouri’s ties to the Union.  He apparently moved to Nashville, Tennessee after the war where his wife became a co-founder of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The Methodist Church, South returned to the fold in 1939 to form the Methodist Church although some congregations held out and formed the Southern Methodist Church.  The main Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968, which is why you’re most likely to have a United Methodist Church in your town.

A church tea party that never was, was much more than the Senate Journal tells us. But the names recorded in that dry journal record come to life in a reporter’s observations and in the historical records that tell us something of what we were and who we were as the people as a terrible war was about to engulf our state.

How long?

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Missouri has a new law that allows some people convicted of some crimes to regain voting rights by having their criminal record expunged.  A bill passed by the legislature in 2016 went into effect January 1 allowing people convicted of non-Class A felonies to go to court and ask that their slates be wiped clean.  There are limits.  Only one felony and two misdemeanor criminal records can be expunged.  A person cannot file for expungement for three years after completion of a misdemeanor sentence. A convicted felon has to wait seven years.  The law is more complicated than this explanation but that’s the general idea. It applies only to state crimes.

At the heart of this new law is an important question: How long must a person face punishment AFTER that person has “paid his/her debt to society?”  The new law does not grant this mercy to people involved in violent offenses, sex crimes, and other more serious crimes. They cannot regain their civil rights, ever.  But the new law offers new opportunities for many.

We want to focus on one person today, a circumstance brought about by a recent podcast we did for the Missouri Bar about this new law and a conversation we recently had with a fellow lobbyist about a former major political figure who was convicted in federal, not state, court.

Many folks can forgive others for some crimes eventually. But when a public official violates the public trust, there often is no sympathy shown long after they have completed their prison term.  Their crime probably did not result in physical harm to anyone. No blood was spilled. No violence occurred except the breaching of public trust.   But the breaching of public trust is so abhorrent in our society that it seems to be unforgivable, a violation that wipes out memory or acknowledgement of long years of accomplishments.

Case in point: Bob F. Griffin, the man who was Speaker of the House for fifteen years, far longer than anyone else before and far longer than we will ever see as long as term limits exist.

We bring this up because we’re nearing the end of writing the next book about the history of our Capitol, and we are struggling with how to describe one of the most historical figures in the history of the Missouri legislature.  He resigned before his final term as Speaker expired and three years later was sent to federal prison for mail fraud and bribery, offenses connected to his role as Speaker of the House. President Clinton commuted his sentence in 2001.  Griffin is 83 now. It soon will be twenty years after his release from prison.  We have not spoken directly to him for a long time but friends say he maintains he pleaded guilty only to keep other friends from being punished as harshly as he was.

At the State Historical Society in Columbia we have dozens, hundreds, or oral history interviews, many of them with former legislators.

One of them, a Democrat as was Griffin, recalled: “Bob Griffin did a lot for the State of Missouri and I always thought he was fair. Now I’m sure there are others who will tell you that — but that kind of works both ways. I thought he did a good job. Good political person. He had a way about himself of communicating with you. He was never intimidating or belligerent…He never once asked me to pass a bill out of committee.”

Another, also a Democrat, said, “I think that he brought progress to the Missouri House. I think that he is a responsible, through his leadership, for the passage — through his chairman or through other legislators — for very progressive legislation and laws.”

A former Republican floor leader remembered, “I became good friends with Bob Griffin after that, because of working together with him…I think that Bob did a very good job. Bob was fair. He was fair to all concerned, and he was not “blind in the right eye” where he would [not] recognize Republicans.”  Republicans, in the minority then, occupied only a few rows of the House to the right of the Speaker’s dais.

But Griffin did have his contemporary critics.  One Republican commented, “Bob was as big a crook as there was in the country. He got caught and he got by with this for a long, long time, but that was the way we—that philosophy is why the Republicans got control.”

And a fellow Democrat: “I had trouble with Bob Griffin. I was too independent for him. Bob was a very strong leader. An effective leader. I remember him calling me into his office when I was a freshman to vote for something. And I told him I wouldn’t do it. You know, there was a price I paid for that. I didn’t get a chairmanship as early as other people in my class.”

It was Griffin who broke up a large appropriations committee into five smaller appropriations committees focusing on specific issues that forwarded their recommendations to the House Budget Committee that drafted the final House version of the budget—a system that remained in one form or another until 2017 when a single 35-member appropriations committee was created with members serving on smaller subcommittees. Some women representatives interviewed recalled Griffin elevated women’s role in the house leadership. Certainly, his home town of Cameron profited from his term in the speakership.  It got two new state prisons.

Griffin’s lasting legacy in the capitol—other than the House Budget Committees—is the Hall of Famous Missourians.  After a group of legislative wives raised money to install the first four busts, the project languished until Griffin began holding fund-raising golf tournaments to place more busts there.  Speakers since have honored other Missourians but no speaker has honored more than Bob Griffin.

And that brings us to this:  While Griffin was speaker, some of his friends—we are told—raised money to have a bust made of Griffin. But that bust has never been placed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There are some people enshrined there who are not 100% pure and at least one who is hardly a Missourian.  But it’s unlikely we will see the bust of Missouri’s longest-serving Speaker of the House in the Hall of Famous Missourians.  A suggestion has been made that it be installed in a corner of a side gallery in the House, near the photographs of previous speakers (Griffin’s picture is on the wall with the others), or perhaps put in the Speaker’s office.  But Griffin was a Democrat who, in the end, brought disgrace to the office of Speaker, and it is the end rather than the years preceding it that make the bust such a problem. Republicans are firmly in control of the legislature now, making public honoring of a Democratic politician a stretch. And a Republican Speaker surely would face severe questions from his caucus about honoring a Democrat, particularly one who, in the end, cast a lingering shadow on the office.

Expunging the record is far easier than expunging political memory.  Maybe someday the bust will find a home—maybe in the Cameron City Library, a city where Bob Griffin Road runs under Highway 36.

Bob Griffin was no saint.  But, on balance, was he such a sinner that nothing else matters?  Or is breaking the public trust one of the ultimate crimes for which there can be no expungement, no forgiveness?  Ever.

Perhaps he is proof of the truth of Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Or should the words of American writer and historian James Truslow Adams prevail:

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”

?

 

 

 

 

I am a lobbyist

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I don’t think I have violated any laws, present or proposed. I’ve been out of the legislature for four years (actually I was never a legislator but I was inside the doors for four decades as a watchful presence at the press table or in the press gallery), which is beyond most legislator-lobbyist regulation proposals. It’s rare that reporters put on this hat although there have been a few who’ve done some special work for short periods of time.

For most of January some people, most notably the remaining members of the press corps from my days among them, have tried to figure out what I was up to.  But now that the steamboat museum bill has been introduced, that mystery has been cleared up.

I have become one of “them.”

No pay is involved.  This is a matter of passion and a desire to see something great happen to my city, the city where most of the important lobbyists live and have their work.

The public perception of lobbyists is that they are the manipulative shadows behind government, twisting the will of elected officials for their own purposes, sometimes lubricating the process with booze, broads, and secretly-given big bucks.

I think I always have recognized the persuasive power of good lobbyists; the rest of the negative stereotypes I don’t know about.  I have been too busy reporting on the actions of the lobbied and have had no time to look into the ways the lobbying is done.

Long ago, in the old Missourinet blog, I wrote that lobbyists don’t represent some malevolent power so much as they represent you and me.  Just about every organization you and I belong to, any business that we patronize—even our insurance policies, our barbers and hairdressers, whatever,  are represented in the halls of government.  Old person?  AARP has someone.  Concerned about justice for yourself and others?  The ACLU is there.  Want good education in Missouri?  Teachers’ organizations, superintendents’ organizations, higher education institutions all have lobbyists. Roads gone bad; bridges caving in?  Transportation interests have lobbyists.

Against something?  There are lobbyists for that, too.

They represent the competition of ideas. Some are good at it. Some, like me, are just going around doing what seems to be the right thing to do to get one thing accomplished and we’re doing it without sophistication and political muscle.  There is room in the hallway for the little guy.  It’s kind of intimidating to be one.  But on the other hand, I’m having a good time back in that world, albeit on the other side of the chamber doors, meeting and talking to people, chatting with folks I remember before my 2014 retirement.

I’ve worn my coat and tie more in the last month, I think, than I have in the last four years.  And it has taken no time at all to begin to chafe at the idea that once again I am living by someone else’s clock.  It’s also getting in the way of doing the final edit on the new Capitol history book that I want to get to the publishers before the first spring training baseball game.

But getting this steamboat museum funding bill passed is important enough to make me do this.

I have wondered about the ethics of lobbying.  ARE THERE ethics in lobbying?   Well, of course there are.  The National Conference of State Legislatures published an article in its magazine in May, 2013.

It turns out there is an American League of Lobbyists.  And as with every professional organization of which I have been a part, the ALL has its ethics code, published in the magazine.

A lobbyist shall:

  • Conduct lobbying activities with honesty and integrity.
  • Comply fully with all laws, regulations and rules applicable to the lobbyist.
  • Conduct lobbying activities in a fair and professional manner.
  • Avoid all representations that may create conflicts of interest.
  • Vigorously and diligently advance the client’s or employer’s interests.
  • Have a written agreement with the client regarding terms and conditions of services.
  • Maintain appropriate confidentiality of client or employer information.
  • Ensure better public understanding and appreciation of the nature, legitimacy and necessity of lobbying in our democratic governmental process.
  • Fulfill duties and responsibilities to the client or employer.
  • Exhibit proper respect for the governmental institutions before which the lobbyists represent and advocate clients’ interest.

As with many professional ethics codes, enforcement is difficult.  Lobbying, after all, is strongly aligned with the First Amendment. And that is why efforts to restrict legislators from becoming lobbyists is problematic.  Freedom of speech is protected. The right of people to peacefully assemble is protected. Petitioning government for a redress of grievances is protected. The protection of the free exercise of religion applies to lobbyists for the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Catholic Conference and other faith-based operations.  Maybe this is why legislation limiting legislators from becoming lobbyists carries no penalties.

I’m not sure what the ethics are when a lobbying firm has clients with differing viewpoints on an issue.  I don’t recall (but my brain is not as elastic as it was years ago) ever seeing the same lobbyist testify both for and against a bill because his or her clients differ.  I don’t even know if a lobbyist has an ethical obligation to notify clients with opposing views.  Maybe one of the folks I now share the hallways with will educate me.

Not that it matters to me, really.  I don’t have multiple clients, I have only one interest.   I do know that I sometimes wonder if I am a David among a bunch of Goliaths.

So, anyway, I have become a lobbyist.  Didn’t want to.  But in light of recent court decisions and the climate created by the adoption of the Clean Missouri proposition last November, I decided I needed to register so I could go around and talk to people about the steamboat museum.

I have to file my first monthly expenditure report.  Zero.

But I’m in trouble.   I can’t remember my password that will let me fill out the form that tells the Missouri Ethics Commission I haven’t bought a darned thing, let along bought a legislator.

Bob Priddy, Lobbyist.  Never in my wildest dreams…..

 

A chance to do something extraordinary

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And a chance to BE something extraordinary.

Legislation has been introduced at the capitol that will save a major part of the history of Missouri and the American push west.

If passed, the legislation will establish the funding to build a new home in Jefferson City for the Arabia Steamboat Museum, opening after the museum’s lease runs out on the Kansas City-owned building that has been its home since 1991.

It is essential that this legislation passes if one of America’s unique museums is to stay in Missouri.

A museum in Pennsylvania has offered to buy the Arabia artifacts and move them there.  If somebody doesn’t act, Missouri will give away an irreplaceable resource.  Jefferson City is acting.

The development could change the way Jefferson City sees itself and the way the state and nation see Jefferson City.  Accepting it means accepting an incredible opportunity.  And a major challenge.

We should not underestimate that challenge.  Nor should we underestimate this incredible opportunity.

We know opposition to our plan is likely to be powerful because we are asking the casino industry to finance this program by adding to the “admission fees” paid by the casino industry to the state.

There is more than a steamboat museum in this funding package.  It also would finance construction of a new state museum building.  Every curator of the state museum since it opened in the early 1920s has said the space in the capitol is not adequate for the telling of the story of Missouri, its people, and its resources.

This proposal also would finance the creation of a special Capitol Museum and visitor center in the vacated capitol space that will detail the history of the Capitol and what happens in it and in state government.

This is a huge venture, the biggest thing our city has tackled, perhaps, since the construction of the present capitol.  The message has to be sent to the decision-makers: MISSOURI CANNOT FAIL to keep our history in our state.

You are looking at a display of some of the startling things recovered from the wreckage of the Arabia, which sank north of Kansas City in 1856—so quickly that everybody but a mule got off the boat safely but they left everything behind.

If you have ever been to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, you recognize that display of items most of us never thought people on the western frontier were using five years before the civil war.  We hope in seeing that picture that you immediately understand why the opportunity to have that collection in a spectacular building on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River a few blocks downstream from the Missouri Capitol is such an amazing opportunity.  If you have seen the greatest single collection of pre-Civil War artifacts anywhere in America, you know why moving that collection here could be a transformative event for Jefferson City.

A small volunteer group of private citizens, city and state officials has been working with leaders of the museum to develop this proposal.  There is an urgency in arranging the financing for the new museum.  We can tell you that, because no movement for a greater museum has been shown in Kansas City, the museum leaders want to move the collection to the state’s capital city if we can find the funding. Owners of an outstanding site have assured us it will be available.

We are asking the legislature to pass a bill adding a dollar to the casino boarding fees they pay the state.  We expect the casino industry to strongly resist. But we are asking our lawmakers to determine what is better for the people of Missouri—spending those millions to create these museums or sending them to the home cities of the five corporations that own the state’s thirteen casinos.

This is an important point:  We can do all of this without tapping the state’s limited general revenue funds.  We can do all of this without a general tax increase.

Our proposal is even more significant because—

It includes the financing for another steamboat excavation, later this year, of a boat that sank fifteen years before the Arabia went under in 1856.   It is the Malta, which was headed toward a much earlier frontier with much different cargo when it sank near the present community of Malta Bend in 1841.

Why are these boats so special?  And why is a potential national steamboat museum for Jefferson City so special? Because nowhere else in this entire country will we be able to understand the humanity of the people who left so much behind, who risked so much of their lives, to go west.  Our state is the “Mother of the West,” and our Missouri River is the liquid highway that carried explorers, developers, statesmen and scalawags to the frontier.  We cannot come closer to them than we can when we see, with this cargo, how they really lived. 

From 1856 until 1988, when the Hawley family of Independence and some friends dug fifty feet down in a Kansas farm field (the river channel had changed a lot in the interim), the Arabia and its cargo had been sealed off from the deteriorating effects of light and air.  The same is true of the Malta, which rests 35-50 feet down in a farm field near the Saline County Community of Malta Bend.

The diggers of 1988 recovered two-hundred tons of merchandise that has been properly cared for so that visitors to the museum are looking at clothing, tools, food, household items, and other things that are as new today as they were when they were loaded on the Arabia in St. Louis a few days before the boat sailed past Jefferson City to its ultimate fate north of early Kansas City. That includes jars of canned fruit and alcoholic beverages bound for the two-year old community of Omaha City, population 1,500. The diggers opened a bottle of Champagne and found it still bubbly and tasty.  Digger Jerry Mackey tasted an 1856 sweet pickle and various canned fruits and pronounced them as good as they were when the lid was screwed on the bottle or jar in 1856.

The rushing waters of the Missouri River damaged the boat so extensively that only the boilers, the steam engines, paddle wheel mechanism, and part of the stern could be recovered from the boat itself. The cargo was mostly in the cargo hold. But several artifacts were still on deck.

The  Malta passed our town in 1841, a few days after Missourians of 178 years ago finished loading it with about 100 tons of cargo, some of which was to be offloaded at Westport Landing (now Kansas City) and sent by wagon to outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. The rest was bound for Indian trading posts and military forts upstream on the Missouri.

David Hawley, the Arabia museum president located the Malta a few years ago. It wasn’t easy. He talked to a school group.

And he thinks test borings that have confirmed the location of the Malta indicate it might be structurally complete.  If that is the case, he plans to lift the entire boat from that farm field near Malta Bend and preserve an entire 1841 Missouri River steamboat.

If it is raised it will be the centerpiece of the steamboat museum proposed for Jefferson City.

Can you understand the incredible opportunity that is ours for the taking if we are able to convince the legislature to pass this bill?  Can you understand what the construction of a Missouri Steamboat Museum—especially one that could develop into a NATIONAL steamboat museum could mean to Jefferson City and to our state?

David Hawley a few weeks ago created a speculative drawing of what the museum could look like. What finally materializes is likely to be much different but we have to start somewhere.  The brown object in the middle of the drawing is the Malta, which is 142 feet long.

David is a dreamer.  Ultimately he wants a national museum that would house cargo and six other boats that capture the great riverboat history of the Missouri River.  That history spanned 1820-1880.  By 1880, railroads had reached the frontier towns that had relied on steamboats until then.

The year 2026 will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson City being the capital city of Missouri, the year that state government moved here from its temporary home in St. Charles.  It is also the year that the Arabia museum in Kansas City will close.  The lease runs out then. The city has offered no new location for the museum that already has outgrown its current quarters and will far outgrow them with the addition of the Malta. 

We—Jefferson City or some other city in Missouri, and the state of Missouri—cannot allow this incredible part of our history, the frontier’s history, America’s history to leave Missouri. We just can’t.

The calendar marks the time Missouri has to secure the contents of that museum and build a museum that will hold them—and more. The proposed legislation designates Jefferson City as the location.

2019-2026. It’s not much time.

Jefferson City is a city with a steamboat on its city seal.  It is a town with one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining Missouri River riverboat landing building still in use. It is a town that was sustained by steamboats until the railroad began regular operations thirty-seven years after the first steamboats passed this site.

Our area lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills—Rep. Dave Griffith and Senator Mike Bernskoetter and others from mid-Missouri—will be working to get the legislation passed.  But we, as a community, must help them.  Many people in Jefferson City rent rooms, apartments, or homes to our lawmakers.  Many more are their staff members at the capitol. Many of our citizens wait on them in our dining and drinking establishments or check them in and out of their motel rooms.  It is up to all of us to impress on our legislators how important this museum will be to our city and to us as a people.

We have only one registered lobbyist at the capitol. But we can have tens of thousands of lobbyists in the homes and businesses of Jefferson City who need to encourage lawmakers from throughout the state to “Vote for the Boats.”

We can do this. We can save this important heritage for our city, for our state, and for history. And for generations we will not know.

We must do this.

(photo credits: All pictures by Bob Priddy except the Malta, the YEP Malta Mural 2011 by Waymark)

Convening the session

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Almost 200 men and women you and I have chosen to represent us in writing the laws that govern our lives begin their work today at the Capitol.  Some are rookies with high ideals and others are weather-beaten veterans facing the last of their eight or sixteen years making those decisions.

Governor John S. Phelps speaking to the General Assembly on February 8, 1877, said: “I trust we are assembled, not as partisans, but as patriots, with a sincere determination to support the right and to condemn the wrong. We are assembled not to carry out our own wishes, but to respect and speak the voice of the people, restrained within constitutional limits. For a time the destinies of the people of this State have been confided in us, and it is to be hoped our deliberations will be characterized by wisdom, patriotism and justice.”

It would be interesting for this year’s rookies to write down their goals and ambitions, their ethical standards that they hope to carry into their service, and their thoughts about who they represent and seal them into an envelope that will not be opened for, say, twenty years.

Then, as they start their final year in the capitol—whether it be their eighth or their sixteenth—they write their accomplishments, the ethical standards they have at the end and the challengers to them they have faced and the alterations in them they are brave enough to acknowledge, and who they really represented in the end.  Those statements should be sealed in an envelope and not opened until they open the first envelope, enough time having passed that they have a perspective on their years in office that they might have lacked when they closed that second envelope.

We have a lot of documents at the State Historical Society of Missouri.  It would be interesting for future generations of Missourians wanting to study Missouri’s political system to read the contents of those two envelopes.

A year ago a young State Representative facing his last year in the House and with no plans to try to move to the Senate did something like that and what he wrote, published in his constituent newsletter is worth saving. And it’s worth reading every two years by rookies.

Ten years ago, a former State Senator who was seen as a rising star in his party wrote of how his political ambition cost him a career.

We offer these two reflections for consideration by those who begin the 100th session of the General Assembly of the state of Missouri.

Representative Jay Barnes of Jefferson City will be most remembered as the chairman of the committee that investigated the machinations of Governor Eric Greitens and his earlier investigation of the Mamtech scandal in Moberly.  In his newsletter of January 5, 2018, he wrote, in part:

There have been great moments of satisfaction from feeling of a job well done – and moments of gloom from failure. Such is life. Sometimes when I think of the things I’ve learned over these eight years, I think of Bob Seger – “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

As I reflect on my eight years, I noticed something on the House website that puts things in perspective – this week we are beginning the second regular session of the 99th General Assembly. It is the 198th time in our state’s history that this has happened. For those nearly 200 years, our statehouse has been filled with men and women of goodwill – and also a fair share of opportunists, con men, and people whose ambition you could see through a brick wall.

 …Governments are inherently prone to corruption — both the criminal kind and the softer corruption that settles in over time. Soft corruption happens when a legislator sponsors a piece of legislation just because a lobbyist asked, without knowing anything about the subject or asking any questions. It happens when a legislator grows lazy and makes decisions about votes without reading the actual bill or considering what it does, but just asking who’s for it and against it.  

It also happens when their heart or head tells them a vote is wrong, but they do it anyway because of pressure, inertia, an unwillingness to stick their neck out, or for some favor to be traded later. Instead of doing what is right, the path of convenience and personal advantage is taken instead.  Of course, it’s human nature to avoid confrontation and to have ambition. The question is not whether it will happen, but how often and whether it will happen on votes that have serious impact on the lives of people beyond the Capitol’s marble halls.  

A colleague once explained the “favor to be named later” idea to me when he tried to flip my vote on a bill. “I disagree with your no vote, but even you can’t say this is a huge deal,” he said. “And, you know, you may have a bill that comes along where someone else might be on the fence, and you’re gonna need their vote. Why don’t you just throw a vote here, and then when your bill comes up, the favor will get returned?”

This is legislative utilitarianism: the idea that good ends justify bad means to get there. It may help clear a legislator’s conscience if they don’t think too hard about it, but it’s just as flawed as utilitarianism anywhere else. Doing something you believe to be wrong (even if it’s just a little wrong) under the belief that it will have a good result on an unrelated issue can justify nearly anything so long as you are an optimist about that potential good result in the future. And it’s addictive. Once you do it once, it’s all the more difficult to resist the logic the next time around.  I feel that I have resisted the temptation more than most, but I speak from experience: these trades are not worth it. Not even the little ones. They whittle away at your soul, and, as Jesus said in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

There’s no legislative cure for human nature. So, what is to be done? I think the answer for the individual legislator is no different from the answer in the real world: when delusions of grandeur tempt, where ambition or fear of political consequences threaten, it’s time to take a step back and consider the larger picture. Individually, we are insignificant. Legislators do not have legacies. (Nor do governors for that matter.) As a general rule, people do not remember politicians other than the president. The realization of one’s own insignificance and the humility that emanates is a better antidote to corruption than any law ever passed. Instead of serving oneself and ambition, better to serve the Lord, our families, and our communities.

In my eight years, I’ve seen the worst and the best aspects of human nature: greed, pride, vanity, laziness, and vindictiveness are here every day. And so are diligence, humility, sacrifice, charity, and compassion. The Missouri state legislature, is a place where, in spite of our human weaknesses, when things go right — paraphrasing Gov. Nixon —people of goodwill can work together in service to make great differences in the lives of people who will never meet, who will never know our name, and who will never know we ever did anything to help them.

The second document is from another young lawmaker who entered office with high ideals but who found his career far shorter than he thought it would be—-because he failed his own principles. The Post-Dispatch ran an op-ed piece on September 8, 2009 from former State Senator Jeff Smith under the headline “I was stupid and wrong.”   It complements Jay Barnes’ reflection. And it’s from someone who buckled to political utilitarianism.

I once held a position of public trust. I write today as a felon, having broken that trust, and I don’t want anyone to make the terrible mistakes I made.

I thought I could get away with it. If anyone learned of what happened, it would be my word and the word of my friends and staffers against that of a loner with a shady past.

It was easy to think this way. I had arrived on the political scene.

When I decided to run for Congress in 2004, I was a nobody. It was a familiar role. As a boy I was the smallest kid on the court, scrappy and hypercompetitive, and I tried to overcome my political weaknesses with the same drive. Eventually I went from a non-entity to a contender.

As Election Day drew near, I authorized a close friend and two aides to help an outside consultant send out a mailer about my opponent but without disclosing my campaign’s connection.

Fiercely competitive, I was seeking any advantage I could get. I knew that hiding my campaign’s involvement was against the law. I was raised better than that, but I thought the ends justified the means. I was stupid and wrong.

When my opponent filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against me, I wanted to preserve my political future and concealed the misconduct. Instead of taking the hit, I stonewalled, assuming the FEC would not connect the dots.

I was elected to the Missouri Senate in 2006 and was honored to serve my constituents. My dream was fulfilled, and I had a platform to effect social change and fight for the city I love.

In 2007, the FEC cleared my campaign of wrongdoing. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened to me.

Because the lesson I took wasn’t that “I got lucky. What I did was reckless, illegal, and wrong. I won’t break the law again.” My takeaway was, “Whew. I’m home free.”

Wrong again.

In 2009, the FBI obtained new information indicating a cover-up of the original misconduct. They approached me, and I stuck with my earlier account. It was easier for me to lie than to face the scrutiny and embarrassment that would come with accepting responsibility.

I was terrified of admitting anything. My nightmare was for all this to come out: my betrayal of what I thought I stood for and wanted to achieve; my betrayal of supporters and constituents; my parents’ embarrassment reading about my actions in the newspaper, and their shame as friends and neighbors searched for what to say to them and how to say it.

Well, it all came out, and it is worse than I had feared.

I’ve lost what I loved most: serving my district and teaching political science. I have lost the respect of others I cherished and my self-respect — even the ability to look strangers in the eye. And I haven’t even been sentenced yet.

I apologize to my constituents, my Senate colleagues, my family and friends and to anyone who has lost faith in government because of my actions. Telling the truth is the basis of public trust: the minimum I owed my constituents, my family and myself. I am a reminder of the obligation to always be truthful, particularly for those honored to serve the public.

(Jeff Smith resigned from the Missouri Senate effective August 25, 2009 and was sentenced to one year and a day of prison. He also was fined $50,000. Smith was sent to the federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky. He was released early in November, 2010.

Since his release, he’s written a couple of books, lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York, and co-founded Confluence Academies, an organization of charter schools in the St. Louis area.  And he’s done a lot of other stuff.

Jay Barnes has been promoted to private citizenship (as Harry Truman once said after his presidency) and is a lawyer in Jefferson City.  He said in last weekend’s Jefferson City newspaper that he has no interest in returning to politics.

It might be useful every now and then for those who will sit behind the century-old desks the lawmakers first sat behind in January, 1919 to re-read these two reflections, especially toward the session’s end when the challenges are greatest—and think about how the four-and-a-half months they are starting today will have changed them.

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Christmas: Just another working day

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Merry Christmas from the Missouri Capitol.
Governor Mike Parson’s office is fully involved in the Christmas season. We don’t recall anything like this in all the years we have covered the capitol. Don’t expect to see him at his desk on Christmas day, however, although there were many times when a lot of people were at their capitol desks at Christmas.
The governor’s office often has been on display during this Christmas season because of something else Governor Parson has done that we’ve never seen done before. The double doors between the capitol hallway and the big oval office are open often with a glass barrier that people can walk up to and look into the office. The doors are closed when he’s doing governor business but at other times they’ve been opened so the visiting public can see the office and its Christmas decorations.
We’ve often thought it’s a shame that capitol visitors don’t get to see that magnificent room.
History tells us that Christmas has been through a lot of changes through the decades. For decades, it was just another day. Not until Victorian times did it begin to assume the secular commercial bonanza it is.
When the state legislature moved from its temporary home in St. Charles to the City of Jefferson, the fourth session of the General Assembly convened on Monday, November 20. Christmas day was just another regular business day, as was New Year’s Day. A reading of the House Journal for December 25, 1826 sounds similar to the House Journals today. It is—as it is now—pretty dry stuff.

MONDAY MORING, DECEMBER 25, 1826
The house met pursuant to adjournment.
Mr. Speaker appointed Messrs., O’Bryan, Grant, Thornton, Jewell, Canole, Bollinger, Nash, Johnson, Bruer, Brinker and Brock as a select committee on an engrossed bill from the senate, entitled an act supplementary to an act to organize, govern and, discipline the militia, approved 11th Feb. l825.
Mr. Grant of the committee of ways and means introduced bill appropriating money for defraying the expenses of government, which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading. On motion of Mr. Watkins, the rules of this house requiring a bill to be read three several times [sic] on-three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on to-day.
On motion, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house. Mr. Harris of the select committee to whom was referred the petition of sundry inhabitants of the counties of Chariton and Ralls, praying for the formation of a new county, reported a bill to establish the new county of Marion which was read a first time and ordered to a second reading.
On motion of Mr. Burckhartt, the rules of this house requiring bills to be read three several times on three different days was dispensed with, two thirds of the members present concurring therein, and said bill was read a second time on jo-day,
On motion of Mr. Cook, said bill was committed to a committee of the whole house.

The journal continues for several more paragraphs of routine business before the House adjourned until the next day. Representative Jewell, by the way as Dr. William Jewell of Boone County, a founder of Columbia for whom William Jewell College was named. Bollinger was George F. Bollinger, who represented Cape Girardeau in the territorial and state legislatures from 1812 until 1840. When a new county was formed of Cape Girardeau County, it was named for him.
Working on Christmas was not all that unusual in those times. It was seventeen years yet before Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published or that Sir Henry Cole, an Englishman, printed a couple thousand Christmas cards that sold for a shilling each. Christmas would not be declared a federal holiday for forty-four more years.
In 1828, the second general assembly to meet in Jefferson City took December 25 off but was back at work the next day. The practice was common for several years. In 1840, the House took the day off but the Senate did meet on Christmas day, a Friday, and on Saturday the 26th but adjourned both days because it could not achieve a quorum. Business as usual resumed in both chambers on Tuesday the 29th.
The House met on Saturday, December 21, 1844 and transacted business before adjourning until Monday the 23rd. But not enough people showed up to make a quorum again until the afternoon of December 30. The Senate met on Christmas day but only five members answered the roll call. It tried to meet each day after that but didn’t get enough members in the chamber to do official business until the 30th.
Then we get to this entry:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, At the First Session of the Fifteenth General Assembly, begun and held at the City of Jefferson, on Monday, the Twenty-Fifth day of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight.
The Senate was called to order by the Hon. JAMES YOUNG, Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate, and FALKLAND H. Martin, Esq., acted as Secretary pro tem.

That’s right. The 1848 legislative session began on Christmas Day. And it happened again just six years later:

JOURNAL OF THE SENATE OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, AT THE FIRST SESSION, BEING THE REGULAR SESSION, OF THE EIGHTEENTH GENERAI ASSEMBLY, BEGUN AND HELD AT THE CITY OF JEFFERSON, ON MONDAY THE 25TH DAY OF DECEMBER, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR, THAT BEING THE DAY FIXED BY LAW FOR THE MEETING OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI.

The Senators were called to order at 11 o’clock, A. M., by the Hon. Wilson Brown, Lieutenant Governor, and President of the Senate.

Lt. Governor Brown was one of about thirty people killed in the Gasconade bridge disaster on Nov. 1, 1855, the day the first passenger train was to have arrived from St. Louis.


In this building, long ago, Christmas was just another day for many years. There were times, though, when it appears some members of the general assembly left town for a few days, leaving the House and Senate without enough members to transact business although a few members who lived too far from home in those pre-highway, pre-bridge, pre-railroad days when the rivers were too icy to travel by boat stayed in Jefferson City, a town of no paved streets, few amenities, and fewer than three-thousand people before 1860.
The new Missouri Constitution adopted in 1865 established the January start date for the legislature, ending the winter sessions. Although the observance of Christmas had been slowly building, it was not until the Reconstruction years that December became the biggest month of the year for retail sales.
In a couple of weeks, today’s legislators will start a new session in today’s capitol. By then the Christmas decorations will be gone and the present capitol will feel, as the old one undoubtedly felt, the quickening pulse within it. Christmas and the old year are gone. A new year and new careers soon will begin to take shape. And so will the new journals that somebody else might read 170 years hence.

The value of a vote

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Newly-elected members of the Missouri legislature have been going to “legislator school” for a few days, trying to absorb what all those departments, divisions, and institutions look like and are all about;  how to make a speech; how to cast a vote; what cubbyhole office they’ll get (especially on the House side); where the bathrooms are, and so forth.  

 This is only a brief brush with the real world they wanted to join.  The pressure-cooker that is a legislative session will become all too real early next month. We imagine that most of these newbies think they are starting a career.  They are, indeed, doing that.  But they also are starting to create their legacy.  And what will that legacy be after the next two to sixteen years? 

We have come across an old poem that makes that point.

Back on September 13, 1856, the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger printed an unsigned poem in the weeks leading to that year’s general election.  Those who are in legislator school might want to read it in the context of their life to-be:

They knew that I was poor,

And they thought that I was base.

They thought I would endure

To be covered with disgrace—

They thought me of their tribe

Who in filthy lucre dote.

So they offered me a bribe

For my vote, boys, for my vote.

O, shame upon my betters

Who would my conscience buy!

But I’ll not wear their fetters

Not I, indeed, not I!

My vote!  It is not mine

To do with what I will;

To cast like pearl to swine

To these wallows in ill.

It is my country’s due,

And I’ll give it while I can,

To the honest and the true,

Like a man!  Like a man!

O, shame upon my betters

Who would my conscience buy,

But I’ll not wear their fetters,

Not I, indeed, not I!

No, no, I’ll hold my vote

As a treasure and a trust.

My dishonor none shall quote

When I’m mingled with dust;

And my children when I’m gone

Shall be strengthened by the thought

That their father was not one

To be bought! To be bought!

O, Shame upon my betters

Who would my conscience buy.

But I will not wear their fetters. Not I, indeed, not I!

The language is old but the sentiment remains current. Thenewbies will wrap up legislator school later this week.  The real world will await them less thanthree weeks later.   It’s always interesting to watch what happens to them.    

Grasping to retain power, regardless

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We’re watching with interest efforts in Wisconsin by Republicans to limit the power of a newly-elected Democratic governor who will replace Scott Walker.                The New York Times reported yesterday:

“The long list of proposals Republicans want to consider also includes wide efforts to shore up their strength before Tony Evers, the Democrat who beat Gov. Scott Walker last month, takes office: new limits on early voting, a shift in the timing of the 2020 presidential primary in Wisconsin, and new authority for lawmakers on state litigation. The Republican plan would also slash the power of the incoming attorney general, who is also a Democrat…In recent years, single parties have come to dominate state legislatures, allowing lawmakers to make significant policy changes in states even as Washington wrestled with gridlock. But in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats regained governor’s offices in capitals that Republicans fully controlled for years, Republicans are making last-minute efforts to weaken their powers…It is a model pioneered in North Carolina, where Republican lawmakers in 2016 tried to restrict the power of the governor after a Democrat was narrowly elected to the post. That set off a bitter court battle that continues to this day.”

There is nothing new in this.  In fact one of the most egregious examples happened here in Missouri. Only then it was Democrats who had controlled the state government including the legislature during the depression in a way that could make today’s two-thirds Republican legislature jealous. The state constitution then in effect required the Speaker of the House to make the official announcement of the election results at the start of the next legislative session so the winners could be inaugurated a few days later.

Governor Lloyd Stark, who had broken with the political boss in Kansas City, Tom Pendergast, could not succeed himself but in the process of what happened after the election he became the longest-serving single-term governor in Missouri history. With the demise of the statewide Pendergast machine, the organization run by St. Louis Mayor Bernard Dickmann became the dominant machine power within the Democratic Party.

Forrest c. Donnell (whose name was pronounced as if it was “Donald” without the “d”) campaigned heavily against Democrat machine politics and beat Lawrence McDaniel, his former Sunday School pupil, by 3,613 votes, the second-closest margin in state history. Democrats retained the other statewide offices.

Two weeks later, Democratic State Committee chairman C. Marion Hulen of Mexico proclaimed there was “an imposing array of reports, evidence of illegal use of large sums of money and of vote buying, of irregular voting and of alleged frauds.”  Another committee member claimed there was enough evidence to show McDaniel had won by 7,500 votes.

When the House convened on January 8, 1941, it passed a resolution barring Speaker Morris Osburn from announcing the results until a ten-member committee (of which six were Democrats) examined the ballots. Attorney General Roy McKittrick, one of those re-elected in November, held such an action was legal.

The committee recommended that Osburn certify the re-election of all of the Democratic candidates but it said Donnell should not be certified because of mistakes and fraudulent voting in the governor’s race.  The Republican committee members called the report a fraud and noted nobody had presented the committee with any evidence of fraud.

Inauguration day was January 13.  But there was no parade, no big event in the rotunda (inaugurations were indoors then), no inaugural ball.  Secretary of State Dwight Brown, Auditor Forrest Smith, and Attorney General McKittrick were sworn in for their third terms at the Supreme Court.  Lieutenant Governor Frank Harris, also a third-termer, took his oath in the state senate chamber because he constitutionally was the President of the Senate. Wilson Bell was sworn in as treasurer for his first term.

Donnell could have been sworn in by a Justice of the Peace (an office later replaced by magistrate judges who were even later replaced by associate circuit judges on the government charts) or some other qualified officer but he rejected the suggestion, saying he wanted to avoid further chaos.  Instead, he went to Jefferson City and asked the Supreme Court to order Osburn to announce him as the winner.

With those actions, Lloyd Stark could not leave office. He was to serve until his successor had been elected and qualified to take over. He was, to put it politely, urinarily agitated.

In what was to have been his final State of the State speech he announced he had vetoed the joint resolution seeking an investigation and said he would not approve spending any money for any such thing. He called for Donnell to be seated as governor and for any dispute about the results to “proceed in a legal and proper manner.”

His fellow democrats, not happy with his position, started an “absolutely bipartisan” recount anyway.  In mid-February the Supreme Court ordered the legislature to declare Donnell governor.  Osborn read the official document on February 20 declaring Donnell the winner.  The Senate majority leader immediately announced that McDaniel would file a declaration contesting the results.

Newspaper editorial writers from both sides of the aisle flayed the Democrats, the Joplin Globe saying “thousands of Democrats” had been “nauseated from the stench from the original office-stealing effort.”

Donnell finally was sworn in on February 26, in the rotunda. Stark, who said he had been “living in a suitcase since January thirteenth,” quickly headed back to St. Louis and his private law practice.

McDaniel’s 226-page election contest petition claimed that a complete recount would show him the winner by 30,000 votes.  State Republican Chairman Charles Ferguson laughed, particularly at the claim that hundreds of non-residents had voted for Donnell in Newton County in southwest Missouri: “It stands to reason that five or six hundred strangers could not show up to vote in a town as small as Neosho and get away with it.”  Neosho’s population that year was 5,318.

Donnell’s response was fifty-thousand words long and accused Democrats of the things they had said his campaign did.

The chairman of the recount committee, Senator Phil M. Donnelly of Lebanon, said the recount would not start until mid-April.   When it did, it was a disaster for McDaniel and the Democrats. By late May reports indicated recounts in eighty-one counties and St. Louis City had ADDED four-thousand votes to Donnell’s total. McDaniel met with Donnelly and agreed to file a letter withdrawing his request for a recount.  He did so without consulting party leaders who had pushed him to demand the recount and who had cooked up the claims of massive Republican vote fraud. McDaniel’s statement later seemed to be a slap at Hulen and his party allies when McDaniel said he had been “misled” by those who claimed he should be declared the winner.

The House and Senate met in joint session and in ten minutes declared the recount over with Donnell the winner.  Because the recount was never completed, his official victory margin remains 3,613 votes.

Democrats paid a heavy price for this escapade.  Several saw the writing on the wall and did not run again in 1942.  Several who did run lost their primary elections and many of those who got through the primaries were whipped in November as Republicans regained control of the House and pulled into a tie in the Senate.

Donnell was succeeded by Senator Donnelly, the senator who led the aborted recount effort. Donnelly later became the first governor to serve two full terms although he had to serve them separately because he was barred from succeeding himself but not prohibited from being governor again.

While Donnell was governor, a constitutional convention was called.  The new constitution, approved after he left office, prevents another effort to “steal” the governor’s election.  It says the Secretary of State, not the Speaker of the House, will certify the winners.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The loyal opposition

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The makeup of our congressional and legislative representation was defined yesterday.  Come January, a new political chemistry will be brewed in Washington and in Jefferson City because of the decisions made in thousands of ballot boxes.

Your respectful observer wants to talk about a loser today and what that loser said many years ago about the role of the losing side.

Lynne Olson’s book, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 triggered this interest that was increased by a Kansas City Star editorial found while researching the 1940 election in Missouri.

The loser was Wendell Willkie, a name that rings only faint bells is the minds of most political observers today other than those who know he lost the presidency to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won his third term.

A week after the election, Willke went on the radio for a nationwide address. In his speech he borrowed from a phrase created in Britain in 1826—the loyal opposition—and defined it for Americans.

That speech is worth considering in these times because of what opposition has become.

Willkie’s grandson, Wendell Willkie II, wrote of his grandfather in The Atlantic earlier this year that some people have compared his grandfather’s Republican nomination for president to Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016. Both had been Democrats. Both were/are prominent business executives. Neither had held public office. “Each substantially challenged and redefined then-prevailing Republican Party doctrine,” he wrote.  But after that, the two men have profoundly different worldviews:

Willkie is remembered for his optimistic, inspiring vision of America. A thoughtful student of history and economics, he powerfully articulated classically liberal ideals of political and economic freedom.  For all of our nation’s faults, he passionately believed in American exceptionalism. He took on unpopular causes, and battled discrimination and intolerance. But he also believed the world would be a far more dangerous place without American leadership.

Willke was a Republican who fought the New Deal while favoring America’s active support of Britain against Germany—at a time when American isolationism, with Charles Lindbergh as its most prominent advocate and presidential contenders Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft speaking for it, was powerful.

His position in the Republican Party rose when Germany invaded France and other countries and isolationism began to lose public favor. He was nominated on the sixth ballot of the GOP convention.

Republicans were split on intervention in Europe with the America First movement strongly involved with the party.  As Willkie’s grandson put it, “Today, many politicians insist they put country over party, but do little to prove their ultimate loyalties. Willkie was different.”

Britain was in desperate condition and Roosevelt faced stern public opposition to sending military aid to the island and laws forbidding sending military vessels built for Britain’s defense. But this country had some old destroyers not built for that reason that could be transferred.

The plan gained public support but Roosevelt knew it could become a problem for him in the campaign. So he asked Willkie to do something extraordinary.

Olson recounts that Roosevelt sent emissaries to ask Willkie to forego making the destroyer deal a part of his campaign. Willke said he could not make a public statement of support that would deepen splits within his own party but he promised he would not attack the deal after Roosevelt announced it.  “It was astonishing thing to ask of an opponent—to turn his back on a controversial issue that almost certainly would help him politically,” says Olson.

But that’s not all.  The nation was divided despite the obviously growing threat of war on whether the draft should be re-instituted. If Willkie opposed it, isolationist Democrats would join Republicans to block it.   But in August, 1940, Willke announced support for “some form of selective service.”   He later said he would continue to support the draft even if it cost him the election.

Roosevelt won with 27.3 million votes. Willkie had 22.3 million. The Electoral College numbers made the race look like a runaway.  Sam Pryor, Willkie’s Eastern campaign manager, told him afterward, “You could have been president if you had worked with the party organization.”

The Kansas City Star said a day after his Armistice Day radio address a week after the election that it  contained “no bitterness…no narrow partisanship…The main principle that Mr. Willkie desired to impress upon his audience was the high function of a loyal opposition in the American system…It showed…the quality of constructive criticism that the President, as a patriotic American, would do well to take into account in meeting the difficult problems that confront the nation.”

The Star characterized the speech as “an appeal to reason, not to emotion.” We offer his speech to you in these much different times with little hope that recalling it will change the daily rhetorical tragedies that now befall our system, but with some hope that it might mean something useful to somebody, a sad observation of how far our leaders have sunk.

Cooperation but Loyal Opposition

DISCORD AND DISUNITY WILL ARISE IF OPPOSITION IS SUPPRESSED

By WENDELL L. WILLKIE, Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 1940

Delivered over the radio, November 11, 1940

Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol VII, pp. 103-106

PEOPLE of America: Twenty-two years ago today a great conflict raging on the battlefields of Europe came to an end. The guns were silent. A new era of peace began and for that era the people of our Western World—our democratic world—held the highest hopes.

Those hopes have not been fulfilled. The democratic way of life did not become stronger—it became weaker. The spirit of constitutional government flickered like a dying lamp. And within the last year or so the light from that lamp has disappeared entirely upon the Continent of Europe.

We in America watched darkness fall upon Europe. And as we watched there approached an important time for us—the national election of 1940.

In that election, and in our attitudes after that election, the rest of the world would see an example of democracy in action, an example of a great people faithful to their Constitution and to their elected representatives.

The campaign preceding this election stirred us deeply. Millions upon millions of us who had never been active in politics took part in it. The people flocked to the polling places in greater numbers than ever before in history.

Nearly fifty million people exercised on November 5 the right of the franchise—the precious right which we inherited from our forefathers, and which we must cherish and pass on to future generations.

Thus it came about that although constitutional government had been blotted out elsewhere, here in America men and women kept it triumphantly alive.

No matter which side you were on, on that day, remember that this great, free expression of our faith in the free system of government must have given hope to millions upon millions of others—on the heroic island of Britain—in the ruined cities of France and Belgium—yes, perhaps even to people in Germany and Italy. It has given hope wherever man hopes to be free.

In the campaign preceding this election serious issues were at stake. People became bitter. Many things were said which, in calmer moments, might have been left unsaid or might have been worded more thoughtfully.

But we Americans know that the bitterness is a distortion, not a true reflection, of what is in our hearts. I can truthfully say that there is no bitterness in mine. I hope there is none in yours.

We have elected Franklin Roosevelt President. He is your President. He is my President. We all of us owe him the respect due to his high office. We give him that respect. We will support him with our best efforts for our country. And we pray that God may guide his hand during the next four years in the supreme task of administering the affairs of the people.

It is a fundamental principle of the democratic system that the majority rules. The function of the minority, however, is equally fundamental. It is about the function of that minority—22,000,000 people, nearly half of our electorate— that I wish to talk to you tonight.

A vital element in the balanced operation of democracy is a strong, alert and watchful opposition. That is our task for the next four years. We must constitute ourselves a vigorous, loyal and public-spirited opposition party.

It has been suggested that in order to present a united front to a threatening world the minority should now surrender its convictions and join the majority. This would mean that in the United States of America there would be only one dominant party—only one economic philosophy—only one political philosophy of life. This is a totalitarian idea—it is a slave idea—it must be rejected utterly.

The British people are unified with a unity almost unexampled in history for its endurance and its valor. Yet that unity coexists with an unimpaired freedom of criticism and of suggestion.

In the continual debates of the House of Commons and the House of Lords all of the government’s policies, its taxation, its expenditures, its military and naval policies, its basic economic policies are brought under steady, friendly, loyal critical review. Britain survives free. Let us Americans choose no lesser freedom.

In Britain some opposition party leaders are members of the government and some say that a similar device should be adopted here. That is a false conception of our government. When a leader of the British Liberal party or a member of the British Labor party becomes a member of the Churchill Cabinet he becomes—from the British parliamentary point of view—an equal of Mr. Churchill’s.

This is because the British Cabinet is a committee of the House of Parliament. It is a committee of equals, wherein the Prime Minister is chairman, a lofty chairman indeed and yet but a chairman. The other members are his colleagues.

With us the situation, as you well know, is different. Our executive branch is not a committee of our legislative branch. Our President is independent of our Congress. The members of his Cabinet are not his colleagues. They are his administrative subordinates. They are subject to his orders.

An American President could fill his whole Cabinet with leaders of the opposition party and still our administration would not be a two-party administration. It would be an administration of a majority President giving orders to minority representatives of his own choosing. These representatives must concur in the President’s convictions. If they do not they have no alternative except to resign.

Clearly no such device as this can give us in this country any self-respecting agreement between majority and minority for concerted effort toward the national welfare. Such a plan for us would be but the shadow—not the substance—of unity.

Our American unity cannot be made with words or with gestures. It must be forged between the ideas of the opposition and the practices and policies of the Administration. Ours is a government of principles, and not one merely of men. Any member of the minority party, though willing to die for his country, still retains the right to criticize the policies of the government. This right is imbedded in our constitutional system.

We, who stand ready to serve our country behind our Commander-in-Chief, nevertheless retain the right, and I will say the duty, to debate the course of our government. Ours is a two-party system. Should we ever permit one party to dominate our lives entirely, democracy would collapse and we would have dictatorship.

Therefore, to you who have so sincerely given yourselves to this cause, which you chose me to lead, I say: “Your function during the next four years is that of the loyal opposition.” You believe deeply in the principles that we stood for in the recent election. And principles are not like foot-ball suits to be put on in order to play a game and then taken off when the game is over.

It is your Constitutional duty to debate the policies of this or any other administration and to express yourselves freely and openly to those who represent you in your State and national government.

Let me raise a single warning. Ours is a very powerful opposition. On November 5 we were a minority by only a few million votes. Let us not, therefore, fall into the partisan error of opposing things just for the sake of opposition. Ours must not be an opposition against—it must be an opposition for—an opposition for a strong America, a productive America. For only the productive can be strong and only the strong can be free.

Now let me however remind you of some of the principles for which we fought and which we hold as sincerely today as we did yesterday.

We do not believe in unlimited spending of borrowed money by the Federal government—the piling up of bureaucracy—the control of our electorate by political machines, however successful—the usurpation of powers reserved to Congress—the subjugation of the courts—the concentration of enormous authority in the hands of the Executive—the discouragement of enterprise—and the continuance of economic dependence for millions of our citizens upon government. Nor do we believe in verbal provocation to war.

On the other hand we stand for a free America—an America of opportunity created by the enterprise and imagination of its citizens. We believe that this is the only kind of an America in which democracy can in the long run exist. This is the only kind of an America that offers hope for our youth and expanding life for all our people.

Under our philosophy, the primary purpose of government is to serve its people and to keep them from hurting one another. For this reason our Federal Government has regulatory laws and commissions.

For this reason we must fight for the rights of labor, for assistance to the farmer, and for protection for the unemployed, the aged and the physically handicapped.

But while our government must thus regulate and protect us, it must not dominate our lives. We, the people, are the masters. We, the people, must build this country. And we, the people, must hold our elected representatives responsible to us for the care they take of our national credit, our democratic institutions and the fundamental laws of our land.

It is in the light of these principles, and not of petty partisan politics, that our opposition must be conducted. Itis in the light of these principles that we must join in debate, without selfishness and without fear.

Let me take as an example the danger that threatens us through our national debt.

Two days after the election, this Administration recommended that the national debt limit be increased from $49,000,000,000 to $65,000,000,000.

Immediately after that announcement, prices on the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges jumped sharply upward. This was not a sign of health, but a sign of fever. Those who are familiar with these things agree unanimously that the announcement of the Treasury indicated a danger —sooner or later—of inflation.

Now you all know what inflation means. You have lately watched its poisonous course in Europe. It means a rapid decline in the purchasing power of money—a decline in what the dollar will buy. Stated the other way round, inflation means a rise in the price of everything—food, rent, clothing, amusements, automobiles—necessities and luxuries. Invariably these prices rise faster than wages, with the result that the workers suffer and the standard of living declines.

Nor no man is wise enough to say exactly how big the national debt can become, before causing serious inflation. But some sort of limit certainly exists, beyond which lies financial chaos. Such chaos would inevitably mean the loss of our social gains, the destruction of our savings, the ruin of every little property owner, and the creation of vast unemployment and hardships. It would mean, finally, the rise of dictatorship. Those have been the results of financial collapse in every country in the history of the world. The only way that we can avoid them is to remain sound and solvent.

It is not incumbent upon any American to remain silent concerning such a danger. I shall not be silent and I hope you will not be. This is one of your functions as a member of the minority. But in fulfilling our duties as an opposition party we must be careful to be constructive. We must help to show the way.

Thus, in order to counteract the threat of inflation and to correct some of our economic errors, I see five steps for our government to take immediately.

First, all Federal expenditures except those for national defense and necessary relief ought to be cut to the bone and below the bone. Work relief, obviously, has to be maintained, but every effort should be made to substitute for relief productive jobs.

Second, the building of new plants and new machinery for the defense program should be accomplished as far as possible by private capital. There should be no nationalization under the guise of defense of any American industry with a consequent outlay of Federal funds.

Third, taxes should be levied so as to approach as nearly as possible the pay-as-you-go plan. Obviously, we cannot hope to pay for all the defense program as we go. But we must do our best. That is part of the sacrifice that we must make to defend this democracy.

Fourth—Taxes and government restrictions should be adjusted to take the brakes off private enterprise so as to give it freedom under wise regulation, to release new investments and new energies and thus to increase the national income. I do not believe we can hope to bear the debt and taxes arising out of this defense program with a national income of less than one hundred billion-dollars—our present national income is only $70,000,000,000—unless we lower the standard of living of every man and woman who works. But if we can increase our national income to $100,000,000,000 we can pay for this defense program out of the increase produced if we free private enterprise—not for profiteering but for natural development.

Fifth, and finally, our government must change its punitive attitude toward both little and big businessmen. Regulations there must be—we of the opposition have consistently recommended that. But the day of witch hunting must be over.

If this administration has the unity of America really at heart it must consider without prejudice and with an open mind such recommendations of the opposition.

National unity can only be achieved by recognizing and giving serious weight to the viewpoint of the opposition. Such a policy can come only from the administration itself. It will be from the suppression of the opposition that discord and disunity will arise. The administration has the ultimate power to force us apart or to bind us together.

And now a word about the most important immediate task that confronts this nation. On this, all Americans are of one purpose. There is no disagreement among us about the defense of America. We stand united behind the defense program. But here particularly, as a minority party, our role is an important one. It is to be constantly watchful to see that America is effectively safeguarded and that the vast expenditure of funds which we have voted for that purpose is not wasted.

And in so far as I have the privilege to speak to you, I express once more the hope that we help to maintain the rim of freedom in Britain and elsewhere by supplying those defenders with materials and equipment. This should be done to the limit of our ability but with due regard to our own defense.

On this point, I think I can say without boast, that never in the history of American Presidential campaigns has a candidate gone further than I did in attempting to create a united front.

However, I believe that our aid should be given by constitutional methods and with the approval, accord and ratification of Congress. Only thus can the people determine from time to time the course they wish to take and the hazards they wish to run.

Mr. Roosevelt and I both promised the people in the course of the campaign that if we were elected we would keep this country out of war unless attacked. Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected and this solemn pledge for him I know will be fulfilled, and I know the American people desire him to keep it sacred.

Since November 5 I have received thousands and thousands of letters—tens of thousands of them. I have personally read a great portion of these communications. I am profoundly touched. They come from all parts of our country and from all kinds of people. They come from Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Christians, colored people and white people. They come from workers and farmers and clerks and businessmen—men and women of all the occupations that make up our American life.

All of these letters and telegrams, almost without exception, urge that the cause that we have been fighting for be carried on.

In your enthusiasm for our cause you founded thousands of organizations. They are your own organizations, financed by you and directed by you. It is appropriate for you to continue them if you feel so inclined. I hope you do continue them. It is not, however, appropriate to continue these organizations in my name. I do not want this great cause to be weakened by even a semblance of any personal advantage to any individual. I feel too deeply about it for that; 1944 will take care of itself. It is of the very essence of my belief that democracy is fruitful of leadership.

I want to see all of us dedicate ourselves to the principles for which we fought. My fight for those principles has just begun. I shall advocate them in the future as ardently and as confidently as I have in the past. As Woodrow Wilson once said: “I would rather lose in a cause that I know someday will triumph than to triumph in a cause that I know some day will fail.”

Whatever I may undertake in the coming years, I shall be working shoulder to shoulder with you for the defense of our free way of life, for the better understanding of our economic system and for the development of that new America whose vision lies within every one of us.

Meanwhile, let us be proud, let us be happy in the fight that we have made. We have brought our cause to the attention of the world. Millions have welcomed it. As time goes on millions more will find in it the hope that they are looking for. We can go on from here with the words of Abraham Lincoln in our hearts:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds. . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Good night. And God bless and keep every one of you.

(Photo credit: TheAtlantic.com)