David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  And how he loved the House of Representatives:

  The forms and proceedings of the House [he writes], this call of the States for petitions, the colossal emblem of the Union over the Speaker’s chair, this historic Muse at the clock, the echoing pillars of the hall, the tripping Mercuries who bear the resolutions and amendments between the members and the chair, the calls of ayes and noes, with the different intonations of the answers, from different voices, the gobbling manner of the clerks in reading over the names, the tone of the Speaker in announcing the vote, and the varied shades of pleasure and pain in the countenances of the members on hearing it, would form a fine subject for a descriptive poem.

  Some nights he returned to his lodgings so exhausted he could barely crawl up the stairs. In the winter of 1848, at age eighty, after seventeen years in Congress, Adams collapsed at his desk. A brass plate in the floor of Statuary Hall marks the place.

  He was carried to the Speaker’s office and there, two days later, he died. At the end Henry Clay in tears was holding his hand. Congressman Lincoln helped with the funeral arrangements. Daniel Webster wrote the inscription for the casket….

  Many splendid books have been written about Congress: Harry McPherson’s A Political Education; Allen Drury’s A Senate Journal; Alvin Josephy’s On the Hill and Kings of the Hill by Representative Richard Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney; Rayburn, a fine recent biography by D. B. Hardeman and Donald Bacon; and The Great Triumvirate, about Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, by Merrill Peterson. Now, in this bicentennial year, comes volume one of Senator Robert Byrd’s monumental history of the Senate.

  But a book that does justice to the story of Adams’s years in the House, one of the vivid chapters in our political history, is still waiting to be written, as are so many others.

  Our knowledge, our appreciation, of the history of Congress and those who have made history here are curiously, regrettably deficient. The truth is historians and biographers have largely neglected the subject. Two hundred years after the creation of Congress, we have only begun to tell the story of Congress—which, of course, means the opportunity for those who write and who teach could not be greater.

  There are no substantial, up-to-date biographies of Justin Morrill of Vermont, author of the Land Grant College Act…or Jimmy Byrnes, considered the most skillful politician of his day…or Joe Robinson, the tenacious Democratic majority leader whose sudden death in an apartment not far from here meant defeat for Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme…or Carl Hayden of Arizona, who served longer in the Senate than anybody, forty-one years.

  We have John Garraty’s life of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., but none of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Search the library shelves for a good biography of Alben Barkley or Speaker Joe Martin and you won’t find one. They don’t exist. The only biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg ends in 1945, when his career was just taking off.

  The twentieth-century senator who has been written about most is Joe McCarthy. There are a dozen books about McCarthy. Yet there is no biography of the senator who had the backbone to stand up to him first—Margaret Chase Smith.

  “I speak as a Republican,” she said on that memorable day in the Senate. “I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American. I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”

  We have books on people like Bilbo and Huey Long, but no real biographies of George Aiken or Frank Church.

  Richard Russell of Georgia, one of the most highly regarded influential figures to serve in the Senate in this century, used to take home old bound copies of the Congressional Record, to read in the evenings for pleasure. He loved the extended debates and orations of older times and would remark to his staff how strange it made him feel to realize that those who had once counted for so much and so affected the course of American life, even American ideals, were entirely forgotten.

  You wonder how many who pour in and out of the Russell Building each day, or the Cannon Building, have any notion who Richard Russell was? Or Joseph Gurney Cannon? There is no adequate biography of either man.

  As Speaker of the House and head of the Rules Committee, Uncle Joe Cannon of Danville, Illinois, once wielded power here of a kind unimaginable today. He was tough, shrewd, profane, picturesque, and a terrible stumbling block. It was the new twentieth century. The country wanted change, reform. Uncle Joe did not. “Everything is all right out west and around Danville,” he would say. “The country don’t need any legislation.”

  When a bill came up to add a new function to the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, making it the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries and Birds, Cannon protested. He didn’t like adding “and Birds”…“and Birds” was new and different and thus unacceptable.

  The insurrection that ended Cannon’s iron rule, a revolt here in this chamber in 1910, was led by George Norris of Red Willow County, Nebraska. There have been few better men in public life than George Norris and few more important turning points in our political history. Yet how few today know anything about it.

  How much more we need to know about the first Congress when everything was new and untried.

  How much we could learn from a history of the Foreign Relations Committee.

  Imagine the book that could be written about the Senate in the momentous years of the New Deal. Think of the changes brought about then. Think of who was in the Senate—Robert Wagner, Burton K. Wheeler, Hugo Black, Alben Barkley, Huey Long, Tom Connally, Vandenberg, Taft, George Norris, Borah of Idaho, and J. Hamilton Lewis, a politician of the old school who still wore wing collars and spats and a pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers.

  It was “Ham” Lewis who advised a newly arrived freshman senator named Truman from Missouri, “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”

  For some unaccountable reason, there is not even a first-rate history of the Capitol, nothing comparable, say, to William Seale’s history of the White House. This magnificent building grew in stages, as America grew. It is really an assembly of different buildings, representative of different times, different aspirations, and the story should be told that way.

  We are all so accustomed to seeing our history measured and defined by the presidency that we forget how much of the story of the country happened here.

  Beside Congress, the presidency seems clear, orderly, easy to understand. The protagonists are relatively few in number and they take their turns on stage one at a time.

  Congress seems to roll on like a river. Someone said you can never cross the same river twice. Congress is like that—always there and always changing. Individuals come and go, terms overlap. The stage is constantly crowded. The talk and the rumpus go on and on. And there is such a lot of humbug and so much that has been so overwhelmingly boring.

  But let no one misunderstand, and least of all you who serve here, we have as much reason to take pride in Congress as in any institution in our system. Congress, for all its faults, has not been the unbroken procession of clowns and thieves and posturing fools so often portrayed. We make sport of Congress, belittle it, bewail its ineptitudes and inefficiency. We have from the beginning, and probably we always will. You do it yourselves, particularly at election time. But what should be spoken of more often, and more widely understood, are the great victories that have been won here, the decisions of courage and vision achieved, the men and women of high purpose and integrity, and, yes, at times genius, who have served here.

  It was Congress, after all, that provided the Homestead Act, ended slavery, ended child labor, built the railroads, built the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system. It was Congress that paid for Lewis and Clark and for our own travels to the moon. It was Congress that changed the course of history with Lend Lease and the Marshall Plan, that created Social Se
curity, TVA, the GI Bill, fair employment laws, and the incomparable Library of Congress.

  It is not by chance that we Americans have built here on our Capitol Hill, side by side, with the center of government, our greatest library, a free and open repository of all books and ideas in all languages from all parts of the world.

  In two hundred years, 11,220 men and women have served in the House and Senate, and while the proportions of black Americans, of women, of Hispanic and Asian Americans, and native Americans have not, and do not now, reflect the country at large, it is nonetheless the place where all our voices are heard. Here, as they say—here as perhaps we cannot say too often—the people rule.

  We need to know more about Congress. We need to know more about Congress because we need to know more about leadership. And about human nature.

  We may also pick up some ideas.

  Considering the way defense spending has been handled in recent years, we might, for example, think of reinstating an investigating committee like the Truman Committee of World War II, which saved billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

  If we are unwilling to vote the taxes to pay for the war on drugs, to save our country, why not sell bonds as we did in two world wars?

  Above all we need to know more about Congress because we are Americans. We believe in governing ourselves.

  The boy should read history, the first John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, about the education of their son, John Quincy. History. History. History. We must all read history, and write and publish and teach history better.

  Who were those people in the old bound volumes of the Congressional Record? What moved them? What did they know that we do not?

  Our past is not only prologue, it can be bracing. In Emerson’s words, “The world is young: The former great men [and women] call to us affectionately.”

  I have decided that the digital watch is the perfect symbol of an imbalance in outlook in our day. It tells us only what time it is now, at this instant, as if that were all anyone would wish or need to know….Which brings me back to Simon Willard.

  In the years when the House of Representatives met in Statuary Hall, all deliberations were watched over by the Muse of History, Clio. She is there still over the north doorway. She is riding the winged Car of History, as it is called, keeping note in her book. The idea was that those who sat below would take inspiration from her. They would be reminded that they too were part of history, that their words and actions would face the judgment of history, and that they could count themselves part of an honorable heritage.

  There is alas, in this chamber, no such reminder—only the television cameras.

  Clio and the Car of History are by the Italian sculptor Carlo Franzoni of Carrara. The clock in the foreground is by Simon Willard. It was, as I said, installed about 1837. Its inner workings, cut freehand by Simon Willard, ticked off the minutes and hours through debate over the Gag Rule, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, tariffs, postal service, the establishment of the Naval Academy, statehood for Arkansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin, matters related to immigration, the Gold Rush, statehood for California, the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the final hours of John Quincy Adams.

  It is also a clock with two hands and an old-fashioned face, the kind that shows what time it is now…what time it used to be…and what time it will become.

  And it still keeps time.

  On we go.

  Index

  Abramson, Rudy

  Adams, Henry

  Adams, John Quincy

  Adamson, Edward

  Advise and Consent (book)

  Agassiz, Alexander

  Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary

  Agassiz, Louis

  Aiken, George

  Air and Space Museum

  Albers, Joseph

  Almost to the Presidency (book)

  Amador, Dr. Manuel

  America First Committee

  American Mining Congress

  American Museum of National History

  American Naturalist magazine

  Anderson Cottage, Washington, D.C.

  Antietam, Md.

  Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People

  Applewhite

  Arango, Clemencia

  The Aristocrat (book)

  Armstrong, Neil

  Army-McCarthy hearings

  Arthur, President Chester A.

  Aspinwall, William Henry

  Atget, Eugene

  Audobon, John James

  Audobon magazine

  Autobiography of Values (book)

  Aviators and aviation writing

  The Awakening Land (book)

  Bachman, John

  Backus, Edward

  Baldwin, James L.,

  Balfour, Arthur James

  Balfour Declaration of

  Bancroft, Frederic

  Barnett, Vernon

  Barnum, P. T.

  Barton, Clara

  Bartram, William

  Beecher, Catherine

  Beecher, Henry Ward

  Beecher, Lyman

  The Beef Bonanza; or How to Get Rich on the Plains (book)

  Bell, Alexander Graham

  Benton, Thomas Hart

  Berry, Wendell

  Bethell, Tom

  Bethlehem Steel

  Bickmore, Albert S.

  Bidlack, Benjamin

  Bidlack Treaty of

  Bigelow, Poultney

  Bimbaum, Bernard

  The Birth of Venus (painting)

  Black, Tom

  Blaine, Senator James G.

  Blair, Francis P., Sr.

  Blair House

  Blake, Thomas

  Blixen, Baron Bror von

  Bohr, Niels

  Bolivar, Simon

  Bonpland, Aime

  Boorstin, Daniel J.

  Borglum, Gutzon

  Botticelli

  Bridges: The Spans of North America (book)

  Bridgewater, Mavis

  Bringing Home the New Cook (painting)

  Bromfield, Louis

  Brooklyn Bridge

  drawings of

  Brooklyn Museum

  Brooks, Van Wyck

  Brown, Mrs. Siller

  Buck, Eliza

  Bunker, Ellsworth

  Burwell, William

  Butler, George P.

  Butterflies

  Byron, Lord

  Canal del Dique

  Cannon, Joseph Gurney

  Carlyle, Thomas

  Caro, Robert A.

  Carter, Jimmy

  Carson, Rachel

  Cary, Elizabeth Cabot

  Caten, Eva

  Cather, Willa

  Catherwood, Frederick

  Catton, Bruce

  Caudill, Anne

  Caudill, Cro Carr

  Caudill, Harry

  Caudill, James

  Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains in (painting)

  Century Illustrated Magazine

  Century magazine

  Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill (painting)

  Chargres, Panama

  Charles

  Chauncy, Henry

  Childs, Marquis

  Churchill, Winston

  Civil rights movement

  Clark, William

  Clay, Henry

  Cleveland, Grover

  Coffelt, Leslie

  Cold War

  Collier’s magazine

  Collingwood, Francis

  Colón, Panama

  Columbia Historical Society

  Columbus, Christopher

  Commonplace (book)

  Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique

  Congress

  Consolidation Coal Company

  Continental Divide

  Continental Oil Company

  Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (book)

  Corcoran, Tom

  Cornett, Lilly

  A Country of Strangers (boo
k)

  Courier-Journal (newspaper)

  Culebra Cut

  Cushing, Cardinal

  Custer, George Armstrong

  Custis-Lee Mansion, Washington, D.C.

  Cuvier, Georges de

  Dana, James Wright

  Dark Hills to the Westward (book)

  Darwin, Charles

  Davis, Richard Harding

  Dear Lord Rothschild (book)

  Delacroix

  Democracy (book)

  Democratic National Convention

  Denning, August

  The Diary of a Young Girl (book)

  Dillinger, John

  Dinesen, Isak

  The Discoverers (book)

  Douglas, Justice William O.

  Douglass, Frederick

  Douglass, Thomas

  Drifting before the Storm (painting)

  Drummond, Henry

  Drury, Allen

  Earhart, Amelia

  Edward VII

  Edwards, Owen

  Einstein, Albert

  Eisele, Albert

  Eisenhower, Dwight D.

  Eliot, Charles W.

  Elliot, George

  Emancipation Proclamation

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo

  Engineer’s Pocket Book

  Enigma project

  Essay on Classification (book)

  Etudes sur les Glaciers (book)

  Evans, Walker

  Evening on a Canadian Lake (painting)

  A Farewell to Steam (book)

  Farrington, E. F

  Fermi, Enrico

  The Fields (book)

  Fifty Years at Panama (book)

  Finch-Hatton, Denys

  Fired On (painting)

  Fleas

  Fleas, Flukes & Cuckoos (book)

  Floor of the Sky (book)

  The Folger Shakespeare Library

  Foote, Roxana

  Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C.

  Frank, Anne

  Franzoni, Carlo

  Frémont, John Charles, General

  French, Daniel Chester

  French, John

  Freud, Sigmund

  Fugitive Slave Bill

  Fuson, Tom