THE PROFESSIONAL - Politics Is Not a Hobby

I hate the five dollar bill profile of Lincoln that most Americans hold. Abraham Lincoln saved the Union and ended slavery not because he was a saint but because he was the greatest politician who has ever occupied the White House. And to those who despise “professional politicians”, my response is they have probably never seen a real professional in action. Such Pols don’t come along often, but when they do, they make the puny impersonations that must usually suffice seem like clowns.

And Lincoln’s professionalism was best displayed in his handling of the biggest clown in his cabinet, a man you have probably never heard of but whose best work you see every day of your life, Salmon Portland Chase. If Chase had been half as smart as he was ambitious, he would have been President instead of Lincoln. That to his dying day he continued to think he deserved to be so, shows what a clown he really was.

Doris Kerns Goodwin has called Lincoln’s cabinet “A Team of Rivals”, but I think of it more as an obtuse triangle. At the apex was Lincoln. He was the pretty girl at the party. His suitors didn’t really want to know him, but they all wanted to have him. On the inside track was the brilliant, obsequious William Seward - the Secretary of State who thought of himself as Lincoln’s puppet master. And the right angle was Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, born to money and brilliant,  but with a stick up his alimentary canal. And on Tuesday, 16 December, 1862 , the competition between these two paramours of Old Abe's banged heads in the head of Senator Charles Sumner, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and leading Senatorial Cassandra.

Sumner had come into procession of a letter written by Seward to the American Ambassador to France. In the letter Seward complained that “…the extreme advocates for African slavery and its most vehement opponents are acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war, the former by making the most desperate attempts to overthrow the federal Union; the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation as a lawful and necessary if not, as they say, the only legitimate way of saving the Union.” To Sumner this passage was proof that behind the scenes Seward was not fully committed to destroying slavery and the Confederacy. And it confirmed what he already heard from Chase.

Stephen Oates writes in “With Malice Toward None”, “Chase in particular felt snubbed and resentful…what bothered Chase the most was the intimacy between Lincoln and Seward…In talks with his liberal Congressional friends, Chase intimated that Seward was a malignant influence on the President...that it was (Seward) who was responsible for the administration’s bungling...Seward became a scapegoat for Republican discontent.” (pp 355-356)

Sumner convened what I call "The Magnificent Seven", the Republican Senate caucus. Once the Seward letter was read out loud to them, Senator Ira Harris from New York recorded the reaction. “Silence ensued for several moments, when (Senator Morton Wilkinson of Minnesota) said that in his opinion the country was ruined and the cause was lost…” Senator William Fessenden from Maine added his two cents worth. He had been told by a member of the cabinet there was “…a secret backstairs influence which often controlled the apparent conclusions of the cabinet itself. Measures must be taken”, Fessenden concluded, “to make the cabinet a unity and to remove from it anyone who does not coincide heartily with our views in relation to the war.”

It is sad to say there was not a first rate mind in that room. There might have been, but arrogance drops a smart person’s I.Q. by forty points or more. It can drop the average mind to zero. Not one of the seven seems to have suspected they were being manipulated by Chase, that it was Chase who had whispered Fesseneden's ear, and Wilkinsen' s ear as well. But each was convinced that they and they alone held the solution as to how to conclude the Civil War and end slavery. It is startling to think that men who used an outhouse every day, could be that arrogant.

They skewered up their courage for two days before saddling up and calling on the President at 7 P.M. on Thursday, 19 December, 1862.  For three hours they harangued poor Mr. Lincoln on the dangers of Seward. Lincoln remained agreeable but noncommittal, and proposed that they meet again the next night. And the amazing thing was that throughout the meeting Lincoln actually had William Seward’s resignation in his coat pocket.

Understand, Seward had not offered his resignation out of nobility. He was a politician. After hearing of the intentions of the Seven, Seward had a flunky deliver his resignation in private, as a back door demand that Lincoln pick Seward over Chase, the genial New Yorker over the prig from Ohio. Of course, the loss of support from New York would poke a fatal hole in Lincoln’s ship of state. So Seward was not expecting Lincoln to pick the prig for the poke

Lincoln’s problem was he also needed the prig. Chase’s handling of the Treasury  was brilliant. He was financing the entire war. It was Chase who had begun issuing official U.S. government backed paper currency, greenbacks. That had not been done since the American Revolution. It was Chase who had put the words “In God We Trust” on every bill, and it's still there today. Of course, Chase had also put his own face on every $1 bill, as a form of political advertising, but Lincoln was willing to tolerate that because Chase was honest in his job, and because without Ohio, the Union would lose the war.

The other factor was that the whispers about Seward’s “backstairs influence” were false. By December of 1862 it was dawning even on Seward that Lincoln was thinking for himself. When Lincoln had first heard about the Magnificent Seven’s deliberations (from Senator Preston King, the flunky who had delivered Seward’s resignation), the President had exploded. “Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not impose upon a child, and cling to it, and repeat it, and cling to it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary?” Lincoln was beset by arrogance and delusion from all sides. It seemed that everybody in Washington thought they were smarter than Lincoln. But the skinny lawyer from Illinois was about to prove them all wrong.

At ten the next morning Lincoln told his cabinet about the previous night’s meeting. He made no accusations, but Chase immediately blubbered that this was the first he had heard about any of this matter. The President, who had mentioned no names and made no allegations, asked them all, except Seward, to return that night to meet with the Seven. Seward felt the ground giving way under his feet. He had never expected Lincoln might pick Chase. At the same time, Chase was not entirely certain he had won.

That night the Seven were now an audience, along with the cabinet sans Seward,  to a bravo performance. Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy (then a cabinet office) recorded the festivities. The President “…spoke of the unity of his Cabinet, and how although they could not be expected to think and speak alike on all subjects, all had acquiesced in measures when once decided. ...Secretary Chase endorsed the President's statement fully and entirely…” There were hours more of talking but right there, when Chase agreed with Lincoln, that was the end of Chase's mutiny. As the Magnificent Seven were leaving the White House a stunned Senator Browning of Illinois asked one the leaders of the mutiny how Chase could tell them that the cabinet was harmonious, after all his talk to them about back stairs influence. Sumner's reply was simple and bitter; “He lied.” Chase was done as a malignant political influence in the cabinet. No Republican was going to believe anything he ever said again.

The next morning Lincoln called both Seward and Chase to the White House. Welles was again present, I suspect as a witness for Lincoln. Wrote Welles,  “Chase said he had been painfully affected by the meeting last evening, which was a total surprise to him, and…informed the President he had prepared his resignation…“Where is it?” asked the President quickly, his eye lighting up in a moment."

“I brought it with me,” said Chase, taking the paper from his pocket…”Let me have it,” said the President, reaching his long arm and fingers towards Chase, who held on, seemingly reluctant…but the President was eager and…took and hastily opened the letter. “This," said he, looking towards me with a triumphal laugh, “cuts the Gordian knot.” An air of satisfaction spread over his countenance such as I have not seen for some time. “You may go to your Departments,” said the President;…(This) “is all I want…I will detain neither of you longer.”

Both Seward and Chase spent a nervous night, not certain as to what Lincoln would do. They had both just been reminded who was in charge of this game. And it was not until a few days later that Lincoln sent a message to both Chase and Seward, saying that the nation could not afford to lose either of their talents. And it did not. Seward never tried to pull Lincoln's strings again. Chase petulantly continued to resign annually until late 1864, when Lincoln could finally afford to take him up on the offer. But never a man to waste talent, Lincoln appointed the clown to the Supreme Court, where Chase’s firm stance for racial equality would have the best influence on America’s future.

And that is what it looks like when a professional is on the job.

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BIRTH OF THE BOYCOTT

 

I can describe the exact moment of conception. On the evening of 22 September, 1880,  Father John O’Malley was sharing a meal with American journalist James Redpath. At some point during dinner the priest noticed that the American had stopped eating. 

When queried, Redpath (above)  explained, “I am bothered about a word. When a people ostracize a land grabber..." Redpath then struggled for a moment, before explaining, "But ostracism won't do" 

Father O'Malley (above, center) then,  according to Redpath, "...tapped his big forehead, and said, 'How would it do to call it "to boycott him?” , “Redpath wrote later, "He was the first man who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.” (Talks About Ireland, 1881) And thus was born another contribution to the English language. Of course the importance of this invention requires a little explanation.

Freed from its incubator in the central highlands of  Mexico, 'Phytophthora infestans' -  the Potato Blight - arrived in Ireland in the 1830’s. By then the humble potato had become the primary food for the 8 million people of Ireland. It could be grown almost year round. It produced so much protein per square foot that a family could be supported on a quarter of an acre of land. But because of this dependence, in the decades after 1845, the blight created "The Starving Time". Each year more and more of the crop was consumed by the moldy blight.  And because it did its work underground, unseen, its ravages would not be realized until the crop was harvested.  Within the next ten years, by 1855,  20% of the population of Ireland had starved to death, and another 20% had emigrated.

The British government struggled to respond to the disaster with church based relief, but politics then compounded the human misery.  Potatoes were molding away in the fields. But wheat, which was growing healthy and abundant in Ireland, was too expensive for the starving Irish to buy,  thanks to the Corn Laws. 

These were duties (taxes) charged on grain imported into any part of the British Empire. This was done to protect the Irish and English landowners from having to compete with cheap American or European wheat.  But by 1880, of the four million souls still surviving on the emerald isle, fewer than 2,000 owned 70% of the land. The three million tenant farmers owned nothing, not even their own homes, and over the two previous years their rents had been increased by 30%, and many were being thrown out of the their ancestral rented homes (above).  And to be expelled meant starvation. The very life was being squeezed out of the people of Ireland.  Law and order demanded it.

Meanwhile, most of the largest, wealthiest landowners, those benefiting from the Corn Law duties, were absentee landlords, Englishmen and women who hired local farmers to manage their Irish estates. “Captain" Charles Cunningham Boycott was one of these local farm owners/managers.  Those tenants who could not pay their higher rent were evicted by the managers. Those who were evicted usually died (above). To argue it was not intended as “genocide” misses the point. Intended or not, it was mass murder. Ireland was teetering on the edge of a social disaster.

On Tuesday, 3 July, 1880, outside the quaint village of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, three men emptied their revolvers into the head and face of twenty-nine year old David Feerick,  an agent for an absentee landlord.  No one was ever charged with that murder.  In early September, outside of the same village, “Captain” Charles Boycott, called on the tenants to harvest the oat crop of absent landlord Lord Erne. 

“Captain” Boycott (above) would be described by the New York Times (in 1881) as 49 years old; "a red faced fellow, five feet eight inches tall, the son of a Protestant minister who had served in the British Army." He earned his title of Captain not in the military but for his daring attitude in sport. Besides managing Lord Erne's property, Boycott owned 4,000 acres of Irish farmland for himself, farmed by his own tenant farmers.  The day he called Lord Erne's tenants back to work, Boycott also informed the tenants that their wages were being cut by almost half.  The tenants simply refused to work at those starvation wages.

The Boycott family and servants by themselves struggled for half a day to cut and harvest the oats (above) before admitting defeat. Mrs. Boycott then appealed to the tenants personally. They responded to her by bringing in the oat crop before the winter rains ruined it.

On Sunday, 19 September 1880,  Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnell (above), addressed a mass meeting in the town of Ennis.  Parnell called on the crowd to shun any who took over the property of an evicted tenant. 

“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone — putting him into a kind of moral Coventry — isolating him from his kind like the leper of old.”  

It was the birth of the modern non-violent protest. Unstated, was the reality that this was a religious war, the Catholic south of Ireland against the Protestant controlled north and England.

On Tuesday, 22 September, 1880, a local process server, under orders from "Captain Boycott",  and accompanied by police, issued eviction notices to eleven of Lord Erne's tenants.  The tenants were not surprised. Speaking of Boycott, one tenant told a local newspaper, “He treated his cattle better than he did us.”  

The server would have issued even more eviction notices, but a crowd of women began to throw mud and manure and the agent and his police escort (above) had to retreat into the Boycott home. That night, in the house of Father O'Mally, the word "Boycott", as a verb, was invented.  It was put to immediate use.

The next morning, Wednesday, 23 September, a large crowd from Ballinrobe (above) marched to the Boycott home and urged the servants to leave. By evening the Boycotts and a young niece living with them, were alone in the house.

A letter written by “Captain” Boycott was published in the London Times. It made no mention of the raising of rents, only of the refusal to pay those rents. It made no mention of the cutting of salaries, only of the refusal to work. 

It did detail the travails of Captain Boycott and his family (above). His mail was not being delivered. He was followed and mocked whenever he left his farm, and had to travel with an armed escort. “The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed…”

Harper's Weekly Illustrated News for 18 December, 1880,  reported what happened next. “A newspaper correspondent first started the idea of sending assistance to Captain Boycott…one person alone promised to get together 30,000 volunteers.  Mister Forester, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at once vetoed the project of an armed invasion…

"It was accordingly decided to pick out some fifty or sixty from the great number of Orange (Protestants) from northern Ireland who were anxious to volunteer. Under military protection (of 1,000 troops) these men harvested Captain Boycott’s crops… The cost of this singular expedition was about ten thousand pounds…” (over $200,000, today).

It took two weeks under military guard for the inexperienced Ulster men to bring in the crop of turnips, wheat and potatoes, valued by Boycott as worth about three hundred and fifty pounds ($8,000).  Mr. Parnell estimated the harvest had cost the English government “one shilling for every turnip.”

Boycott left Ireland with his family on Wednesday, the first of December, 1880,  shrouded in the back of a military ambulance (above) and escorted by soldiers.  His exit had been achieved by nonviolence. He never returned to Ireland. Someone described his exile as the “death of feudalism in Europe".   Or perhaps, with more hope, the birth of modern Ireland.

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NEVER SAY DIE

 

There are two versions of how James "Farmer Jim" Ferguson passed the Texas state bar exam in 1897.  In the first story, the chairman of bar exam committee was an old family friend. In the second version Jim bought a bottle of whiskey for the man who actually administered the test.  One or both could have been true, since Ferguson told both versions for the rest of his life. 

Two years after becoming a lawyer, the 28 year old married Miriam Wallace (above). Considering the couple's subsequent behavior, the New Year's Eve nuptials were obviously timed for tax purposes.

How he became Governor of Texas in 1914 is another disputed tale. In what I call the “Virgin Mary” version, “Farmer Jim” (above) rejected nomination by the anti-prohibition party, but all the other candidates withdrew, thrusting greatness upon him. The only problem is that Ferguson had been a political manager for ten years, and had even directed the election campaign of the previous Governor. All things considered, I don't think he was entitled to wear white to this wedding.

In his day job he was a successful banker, even though it was the farmers who elected him. “Farmer Jim” had “considerable native ability and...a captivating personality. As a political speaker he had few equals.” And his election, well funded by the liquor industry, was just part of the 1914 anti-prohibition backlash. 

The laws he introduced to limit farm land rents were declared unconstitutional, but in politics its usually the thought that counts. Not unexpectedly, he did not achieve much in his first two year term. Being Governor of Texas is a little like being a “fluffer” in a porn movie. In 1916 James was elected to a second term by a comfortable 60,000 vote margin. But then rumors began to emerge he had been using state funds to buy personal groceries. Suddenly Jim was in trouble.

His instincts were to attack. So he began to boast that he was no "city slicker" nor a "college dude", and had not "suffered the damages" of a college education,  And since the professors at the University of Texas were close at hand, and easy targets, he described them as taking three years to learn "You couldn't grow wool on an armadillo." He described graduates as returning from 3 years of in Austin  with just "a mandolin and liver damage".  

Jim Ferguson demanded that the University fire the "lazy and corrupt history Professor Eugene Campbell Barker (above).  Barker had just written a biography of Texas patriot Stephan Austin, and Jim found a number of the books revelations insulting. When UT President Robert Vinson asked for evidence of Barker's frauds, Governor Jim” feigned outrage. “I don't have to give any reasons, I am governor of the State of Texas!” When that response was met with laughter, Ferguson vetoed the Universities next budget.  

At the same time Farmer Jim announced a five member search committee, which he chaired, had chosen to build a new campus for the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical college in Abilene, instead of in Austin.. However, Speaker of the Texas House, Franklin Oliver Fuller, who was a prohibitionist  and also a committee member, then signed an affidavit that he had not voted to move the new school to Abilene.

And when Lt. Governor William Pettus Hobby (above) submitted a similar affidavit, Fuller charged the governor was moving the school to Abilene in exchange for a bribe from the east Texas businessmen. 

Ferguson then submitted his own affidavit insisting he had not voted for Abilene either - meaning that Abilene had won the new campus despite no one who was willing to admit having voted for it. 

On 23 July, 1917, Speaker Fuller (above) called for a special session of the Texas legislature, to consider impeaching the Governor for trying to fix the election to choose the universities' new campus,

Now, only the Governor could call a special session in the state house in Austin (above), and Fuller's move would have come to nothing had Governor Ferguson not been indicted shortly thereafter by a Travis County grand jury for embezzlement of pubic funds. Jim Ferguson had no trouble making the $13,000 bail, but he was now desperate to change the subject. 

First the Governor (above) announced his re-election campaign for a third term, and then he called for a special session of the state legislature to reconsider a budget for the University of Texas. The legislature did meet that August, but they spent all their time removing Governor Ferguson from office.

Ferguson went down insisting his impeachment by this “kangaroo Court” was unconstitutional because he had not called the legislature for that purpose. Nobody in Austin (above) seemed to care. 

Seeking to avoid the worst, “Farmer Jim” resigned from office the day before the final vote. Again, nobody seemed to care. The State Senate voted 25 to 3 to toss him out of office, and added the proviso that James Ferguson was henceforth bared from holding any elective office in the state of Texas. In 1918 he tried again for the governorship, but was defeated in the primary by Acting Governor Hobby. And in 1922, when the state Supreme Court affirmed the lifetime bans, it seemed his criminal career....ah, political career, had been cut short.

But “Farmer Jim” (above)  followed a motto from a 1922 newspaper poem. “Never say “die”—say “damn.” In short, anybody who thought that James Ferguson was finished, did not truly know James “Farmer Jim” Ferguson. Or his wife, Miriam

On the 1924 campaign trail she became “Ma”, and she hated that name. But it worked so well as in the slogan - “Me for Ma, and I Ain't Got a Durned Thing Against Pa” - that it stuck. She began every stump speech by assuring voters that with her they would get “two governors for the price of one”, and then she would introduce her husband, one time Governor but now James “Pa” Ferguson.  

Ma and Pa won the election with 57% of the vote. When they pulled up in front of the Governor's mansion in Austin, Miriam crowed, “We departed in disgrace; we now return in glory.”

The one thing Miriam did not say, during her tenure was “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” Although this was  often attributed to Miriam, the quote goes back to at least 1881. 

But in her January 1925 state-of-the-state address to the legislature, “Ma” Ferguson did point out Texas' prisons were so overcrowded, she had to decided to “adopt a most liberal policy in the matter of pardons.” She then proceeded to hand out, on average, 100 pardons a month. 

Some were granted even before the convicted prisoner had reached the prison. The joke around Austin was that a visitor met Governor Ferguson at the Capital's front door. As he stepped aside to let the lady enter first, he said, “Pardon me.” To which Miriam replied, “Sure. Come on in. It'll only take a minute or two to do the paperwork.”

But it wasn't only the number that bothered people, it was the methodology. Most of “Ma's”  (above center) pardons were granted on the sole recommendation of “Pa” (above, to her right).

In one interview, it was alleged, a father, begging for a pardon for his son, was exasperated because the ex-governor kept trying to sell him a horse for $5,000. Finally the father demanded, “What on earth would I want with a $5,000 horse.” “Farmer Jim” replied, “Well, I figure your son might ride him home from the penitentiary if you bought him.” Said an insider, “Jim's the governor; Ma signs the papers."

In 1926, Attorney General Dan Moody (above right) decided to run against the corrupt “Ferguson-ism”, and Miriam and James (above left) lost by 150,00 votes in the Democratic primary, which was tantamount to general defeat in the one-party state of Texas. In 1928, for the first time in 12 years, there were no Ferguson on the ballot in Texas. 

In 1930, the couple tried again, but again failed in the primary. Then, in 1932, with the depression ravaging the nation, Texans were desperate enough to give Ferguson-ism another try, and Ma was elected to a another two year term. 

This time there were immediate rumors of kickbacks in the highway department, but nothing could be proven, and in any case, even Texas was not big enough to overcome the world-wide depression. Miriam lost her re-election bid in 1934, and a year later, just to be sure, the voters passed an amendment to the state Constitution which took the power to pardon out of the governor's hands..

James and Miriam (above, center) tried one more time in 1940, for old time's sake. But “Farmer Jim” was getting frail, forgetful as to who he was angry with. His stump speeches were few and not as powerful as they once were. And “Ma” had never been that interested in politics. The dynamic duo went down to ignominious defeat. 

In September of 1944, “One of the most colorful and divisive...figures ever in Texas politics”, James “Farmer Jim” “Pa” Ferguson died of a stroke. Miriam, the second woman governor in United States history, lived for another 17 years, and never said another political thing in her life. She died of heart failure, at the age of 86, in 1961. And other than a modicum of entertainment, it is hard to find any thing  either of them did which made the lives of the average residents any easier. 

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