275. [In the United States the Hon. is applied to all public officials of any apparent respectability, and with some show of official sanction, but it is questionable whether this application has any actual legal standing, same perhaps in the case of certain judges.] Nevertheless, the Style Manual of the Department of State, which is the highest American authority upon epistolary etiquette,1 grants it to a long list of functionaries,2 as follows:
American ambassadors.
American and foreign ministers plenipotentiary.
Ministers resident.3
Governors of States, Territories and island possessions of the United States.
High commissioners.
Cabinet officers.
Senators.
Members of Congress.
The secretary to the President, and his assistant secretaries.
Under and assistant secretaries of executive departments.
Judges.4
Heads of independent Federal boards, commissions and other establishments.5
State senators and representatives.
The secretary of the United States Senate.
The clerk of the House of Representatives.
The commissioners of the District of Columbia.
The mayors of large cities.6
In addition, the Style Manual grants the Hon., if not by precept then at least by example, to various other persons, including the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (p. 33), the archivist of the United States (p. 35), the director-general of the Pan-American Union (p. 48), all members of international commissions (who apparently rank as diplomats; pp. 47 and 48), and the acting heads of boards, commissions and other such bodies whose actual heads are entitled to it (p. 35).1 But it is denied, inter alia, to all diplomatic officers under the rank of minister (p. 27), to consuls (p. 27), to the librarian of Congress (p. 31), and to the president of the American Federation of Labor (p. 38). All these puissant men are merely Es-quires. Congress is very much more liberal with the Hon. It is bestowed in the Congressional Record upon a vast and miscellaneous congeries of dignitaries, and to the examples given in AL4, p. 276, n. 1, may be added the following from more recent issues:
Thomas J. Curran, chairman of the New York Republican County Committee, Dec. 9, 1943, p. A5791.2
Joseph P. Tumulty, secretary to President Woodrow Wilson (1913–21), April 2, 1940, p. 6126.3
M. H. McLean, “attorney at law, of Covington, Ky.,” Dec. 14, 1943, p. A5880.
Augustus E. Giegengack, public printer, Dec. 18, 1943, p. A5996.
Guy T. Helvering, commissioner of internal revenue, Dec. 18, 1943, p. A5996.
Alfred H. Stone, editor of the Staple Cotton Review, Dec. 17, 1943, p. A5954.
Sumner Welles, former Under Secretary of State, Dec. 17, 1943, p. A5963.
Leander H. Perez, district attorney for the parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines, La., Dec. 21, 1943, p. A6063.
Alfred M. Landon, of Kansas, Jan. 14, 1944, p. A175; Jan. 11, 1944, p. A58.
J. B. McLaughlin, commissioner of agriculture for West Virginia, Jan. 12, 1944, p. A143.
G. Mason Owlett, Republican national committeeman from Pennsylvania, Jan. 13, 1944, p. A161.
Sergio Osmeña, vice-president of the Philippines, Jan. 17, 1944, p. A203.
M. J. Caldwell, member of the Parliament of Canada, Jan. 24, 1944, p. A364.
Harold N. Graves, acting commissioner of internal revenue, Jan. 26, 1944, p. A422.
Charles E. Dierker, United States district attorney for the western district of Oklahoma, Jan. 31, 1944, p. A507.
Peter Zimmerman, “of Yamhill, Ore.,” Feb. 3, 1944, p. A591.
Thomas E. Lyons, executive secretary of the Foreign Trade Zones Board, Feb. 7, 1944, p. A657.
G. Seals Aiken, “a practising attorney of the capital city of Atlanta,” Ga., Feb. 7, 1944, p. A652.
George P. Money, editor of the Gulfport-Biloxi (Miss.) Daily Herald, Feb. 7, 1944, p. A665.
Roland J. Steinle, “the great jurist of Wisconsin,” Feb. 17, 1944, p. A839.
Chauncey Tramutolo, special assistant to the Postmaster General, March 14, 1944, p. A1391.
W. M. Garrad, general manager of the Staple Cotton Cooperative Association, March 14, 1944, p. 2604.
Paul Scharrenberg, director of the California state department of industrial relations, March 14, 1944, p. A1393.
Mike Holm, secretary of state of Minnesota, March 22, 1944, p. A1545.
Charles M. Hay, general counsel for the War Manpower Commission, April 24, 1944, p. A2082.
Thomas C. Buchanan, public utilities commissioner in Pennsylvania, April 27, 1944, p. A2150.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, May 2, 1944, p. A2241.
Marion E. Martin, assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, May 8, 1944, p. A2365.
Peter V. Cacchione, city councilman in Brooklyn, May 19, 1944, p. 4777.
David Diamond, former Supreme Court justice in New York, May 19, 1944, p. 4777.
Richard P. Freeman, “who represented the second congressional district of Connecticut [in the House of Representatives] from 1914 to 1932,” Aug. 17, 1944, p. 7121.
Ezequiel Padilla, Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Aug. 18, 1944, p. A3934.
J. C. Nance, “an able legislator and one of the leading newspaper men of Oklahoma,” Sept. 1, 1944, p. A4146.
Edward N. Scheiberling, national commander of the American Legion, Nov. 16, 1944, p. A4757.
Maurice F. Lyons, “secretary to William F. McCombs during the 1911–12 prenomination and presidential campaigns,” Nov. 16, 1944, p. A4756.
Helen Gahagan Douglas, “national committeewoman from the State of California,” Nov. 22, 1944, p. A4815.
James E. Chinn, a Washington Post reporter, Nov. 24, 1944, p. A4835.
In the Congressional Record proper, which is devoted mainly to a stenographic report of the previous day’s debates in the two Houses, all members are designated Mr., including even Senators, but excluding, of course, females, who are Miss or Mrs., as the case may be.1 Even members lawfully bearing other titles, e.g., Dr., Col. or Bishop,2 are denied them. But in the Appendix to the Record, wherein members embalm speeches that they have made elsewhere and reprint all sorts of other memorabilia, they are called Hon., without a preceding the, and in writing about themselves in state papers they often use the term, even in the first person.1 In recent years, however, there has been some faltering in this department, chiefly as a result of a war upon Hon. launched by the Hon. Jerry Voorhis, M.A., Representative of the Twelfth California district.2 When he began his first term in 1937 he asked the reporters for the Record to cease calling him Hon. in its Appendix, but they resisted him stoutly, apparently on the ground of ancient custom, and it was not until October 28, 1940 that they finally yielded. Since then he has been plain Jerry Voorhis. No other congressman followed him until the Spring of 1944, when the Hon. Clare E. Hoffman induced the reporters for the Record to drop the Hon. from in front of his name also. Mr. Voorhis is a violent New Dealer, and Mr. Hoffman is perhaps the most earnest enemy the New Deal has ever had, so his imitation of so radical an opponent was not without its piquancy. Now and then the reporters put one over on Mr. Voorhis, as for instance on May 31, 1944, when they described him as Hon. in the programme of the memorial service in honor of dead members, holden that day.3 No congressman save Mr. Hoffman has ventured to jump aboard his bandwagon, and the lady members also hold aloof. But there has been visible, since he began his revolution, a certain wobbling in usage. Even such austere dignitaries as the Hon. Josephus Daniels, Sidney Hillman, Mayor LaGuardia of New York, the late Wendell Willkie and Bernard M. Baruch have appeared in the Record as non-Hons.1 Moreover, there has been irresolution in other cases. The eminent O.P.A. administrator, the Hon. Chester Bowles, B.Sc. (Yale), was mentioned in the Record during 1944 as Hon.,2 as the Honorable,3 and as plain Mr.4 the Hon. James A. Farley has appeared as the Hon.,5 as the Honorable,6 and as plain James A. Farley, without even Mr.;7
and the Hon. James F. Byrnes, director of war mobilization and reconversion and “assistant President,” has been both the Hon.8 and James F. Byrnes unadorned.9 There even seems to be some uncertainty about the Vice-President, who, as we have seen, appears in the actual proceedings of the Senate without the Hon. In the Appendix to the Record, during 1944, he was listed as the Honorable,10 as Mr.11 and as Vice-President of the United States, without any mention of his name.12 State Governors are sometimes Hons.,13 but more often mere Govs., always abbreviated.14
Most American newspapers refrain from calling a politico the Hon., even when writing about him formally and favorably: when the term appears in them at all, it is usually used satirically.15 When, in 1935, I printed a magazine article16 making fun of its overuse by all sorts of dubious persons, a number of newspapers printed editorials in agreement.17 But many other American publications tend to be more tolerant of the pretensions of bogus Hons., and I have some curious specimens of their misuse of the honorific in my collectanea.1
During the colonial era in America it seems to have been in rather restricted use, probably following the English pattern. The DAE shows that it was sometimes added to the titles of men in high office, as in the Honble. Governor Winthrop (1704), and also used to dignify the names of official bodies, as in the right Honble. Counsell [i.e., Council] for New England (1640) and the Honourable House (1721) Hugh Jones, writing in 1724, recorded that the Honourable the Council was then in use in Virginia,2 and the inference is that each member was also the Honourable, but this is by no means clear. By the time of the Revolution, however, the honorific was being applied to the members of at least some of the colonial legislatures. William Maclay, who served in the first Federal Senate as one of the two Senators from Pennsylvania, noted in his spicy journal3 that the members debated, in 1789, the question whether they should be styled the Hon. in their minutes. What the result of this discussion was he doesn’t say, but despite the qualms of those Senators who argued for the negative the issue was already decided, for members had been called the Hon. in the journals of the Continental Congress (1777). In 1791, as the DAE shows, the honorific was used in a post-mortem panegyric on James Bowdoin the elder (1726–90), who had been Governor of Massachusetts and a member of the Constitutional Convention.4 A number of English travelers of the first part of the Nineteenth Century noted its wide use. Henry Bradshaw Fearon, in 1818,5 Quoted with proper British horror the following news item printed in the Boston Sentinel in August, 1817:
Dinner to Mr. Adams. — Yesterday a public dinner was given to the Hon. John Q. Adams, in the Exchange Coffee-House, by his fellow-citizens of Boston. The Hon. Wm. Gray presided, assisted by the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, George Blake, Esq., and the Hon. Jonathan Mason, vice-president. Of the guests were the Hon. Mr. Adams, late president of the United States, his Excellency Governor Brooks, his Honour Lt. Gov. Phillips,1 Chief Justice Parker, Judge Story, President Kirkland, Gen. Dearborn, Com. Hull, Gen. Miller, several of the reverend clergy, and many public officers, and strangers of eminence.
Sixteen years later, in 1833, another British traveler, Thomas Hamilton, said in his “Men and Manners in America”:2
The members of the Federal Senate are addressed generally in the Northern States with the prefixture of Honorable, but the New Englanders go further and extend the same distinction to the whole body of representatives, a practise followed in no other part of the Union.
But this was bad reporting, for the real stamping-ground of the Hon. was in the South and West. There were, indeed, few politicos beyond the Alleghanies or below the Potomac, after the beginning of the Jacksonian Century of the Common Man, who did not wear it proudly, and it was there that the custom arose of bestowing it indiscriminately upon all notables lacking other titles, whether real or imaginary. On March 24 and August 22, 1862, for example, Abraham Lincoln, whose English, despite its mellifluousness, always showed frontier influences, sent letters to Horace Greeley which addressed him as Hon. Lincoln, in fact, was very fond of the prefix, and not infrequently used it without a name, as in Hon. Secretary of the Treasury. It was also applied, in that genteel era, to distinguished foreigners. Bartlett, in the second edition of his Glossary, 1859, noted that Americans who had once attained to the Hon. by office-holding retained the honorific after they had been retired to private life, for “once an honorable, always an honorable.” This, as I have recorded, is still the American rule.
The English are much more careful in the use of the Hon. The title belongs as of right, in the British Isles, only to the younger sons of earls, to all the sons and daughters of viscounts and barons, to the wives of these sons, to justices of the High Court, if not ranked as peers, during their terms of office, and to the Scotch Lords of Session. If the son of a peer entitled to bear it happens to be made a baronet in his own right he becomes the Hon. Sir John Smith, Bt., and his wife becomes the Hon. Lady. The chief English authority, “Titles and Forms of Address,”1 notes that “it is never used in speech, even by a servant,” nor “in letter-writing, excepting on the envelope.” The English prefer the Honble. to the Hon. A maid of honor must be addressed as the Honble. Miss (or Mrs.) So-and-So, and that is the rule also for addressing a female Honble. whose title comes from her husband, but if she is an Honble. in her own right the Miss or Mrs. is to be omitted. The daughter of a peer, however, on marrying a man of no title, becomes the Honble. Mrs. A judge of the High Court is the Honble. Mr. Justice —, but a judge of a county court is only His Honor Judge —.2 In the case of the former, Mr. Justice may be omitted on the envelopes of personal letters, making the recipient simply the Honble. John Smith. All peers from baron up to and including earl are Right Honble., and so are all members of the Privy Council, the Lord Chief Justice and various other higher judges, and the Lord Mayors of London, Manchester, Nor wick, York, Belfast, Dublin, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and with them their wives.3 A marquis is Most Honble. and so is his marchioness. A member of the Cabinet is not Right Hon. as such, but only because he is a member of the Privy Council. His wife does not share his title, but he keeps it himself for life. An ordinary member of Parliament is neither Right Hon. nor Hon., but simply Esq., with M.P. following the Esq.4
On the floor of the House of Commons, however, every member is at least the honorable member (or gentleman), and may be much more. If he is a legal officer —say, Attorney-General or Solicitor-General —, or a practising lawyer he is the honorable and learned gentleman,1 if he holds a commission in the armed forces he is the honorable and gallant gentleman, and if he is a member of the Privy Council he is the right honorable gentleman. “Technically speaking,” said Paul Ward, London correspondent of the Baltimore Sun in a dispatch to his paper in 1939,2 “if a member is a privy councillor, a barrister and a commissioned officer all rolled into one he should be the right honorable, learned and gallant gentleman, but that is too much of a mouthful for even M.P.’s and is not used.”3 Mr. Ward noted that, when the member spoken of happens to be a member of the party of the member speaking, it is usual to substitute friend for gentleman, and that when he is not it is permissible to substitute member, adding or not adding for — (the name of his constituency). If he happens to hold a courtesy title or is an Irish or Scotch peer without a seat in the House of Lords he is the noble gentleman. In the case of a female member lady is substituted for gentleman.4 But when she asks a question and the answer is a simple yes or no it takes the form of Yes, sir, or No, sir, for in theory all remarks are addressed to the Speaker, who is always male. In the American Senate a Senator refers to another as the Senator from —, whether male or female, or simply as the Senator. In the case of a Senator from his own State he may use my colleague. Sometimes he refers to himself as the Senator from —. In the House a member mentioned in debate is the gentleman from —, or simply the gentleman. When the first female representatives appeared the lady from — was used in referring to them, but after a while (apparently at the suggestion of the sportive Nicholas Longworth, then Speaker) t
his was changed to the gentlewoman. Neither word was a snug fit for some of the stateswomen who have adorned the House.
The British dominions and colonies follow, in general, the usage of the Motherland, but with extensions suggested by their more democratic way of life. The following “Table of Titles to be Used in Canada” is official:
1. The Governor-General of Canada to be styled His Excellency and his wife Her Excellency.
2. The Lieutenant Governors of the Provinces to be styled His Honour.
3. Privy Councillors of Canada1 to be styled Honourable, and for life.
4. The Solicitor General to be styled Honourable while in office.
5. Senators of Canada to be styled Honourable, but only during office and the title not to be continued afterwards.
6. The Speaker of the House of Commons to be styled Honourable during tenure of office.
7. The Chief Justice of Canada, the Judges of the Supreme and Exchequer Courts of Canada, and the Chief Justices and Judges of the undermentioned Courts in the several Provinces of Canada: —
Ontario. — The Supreme Court of Ontario;
Quebec. — The Court of King’s Bench, the Superior Court and the Circuit Court of the District of Montreal;
Nova Scotia. — The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia;
New Brunswick. — The Supreme Court of New Brunswick;
Manitoba. — The Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Appeal;
British Columbia. — The Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of British Columbia;
American Language Supplement 1 Page 75