LITTLE GREEN HOUSE ON K STREET Chapter Two

“I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my God damn friends...they're the ones who keep me walking the floors nights.”

Warren G. Harding.

On the night of 31 October, 1918 crowds jammed 9^th Street in Washington, D,C, which was lined with restaurants and bars, to share a final drink. Then, at midnight, One November, 1918, the District of Columbia went bone dry, by federal fiat.

It had been the pro-prohibition states which had re-elected Democrat Woodrow Wilson as President in November of 1916. The imposition of prohibition in the one place on earth he could dictate it, was his reward for them. Opponents tried to give the local residents a vote on the issue, but Wilson complained, “There is no voting machinery in the District of Columbia. Such a machinery would have to be created.” Still the option of giving democracy a chance inside the district was only defeated because the vote was tied – 43 pro and 43 con - and VP Thomas Marshall refused to cast the deciding vote. That opened the door to the Sheppard Act, sponsored by Senator John Sheppard of Texas, which allowed the politicians to assure their moralistic supporters back home (in places like Texas) that they were being morally pure in far off Washington, D.C. Like bad fish,  the situation reeked with hypocrisy from the head.  

Now, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson vacated the White House in March of 1921, he had the residence's extensive liquor closet (above) shipped to his new private home across town. It was not a behavior which should have inspired confidence in the national prohibition act which would take effect in July. 

- sung to the tune of “My bonnie lies over the ocean” -

My father makes book on the corner,
My mother makes illicit gin.
My sister sells kisses to sailors,
My God how the money rolls in.

(Chorus)

Rolls in , rolls in,
My God how the money rolls in, rolls in.
Rolls in, rolls in,
My God how the money rolls in.

The incoming President, Ohioan Warren G. Harding (above right), ordered his Attorney General, Harry Daugherty (above left), to replace the White House booze supply. And being a practical crook at heart, the new AG simply instructed his newly appointed Prohibition Commissioner,  Roy Asa Haynes, to load Wells Fargo wagons with seized “illegal” booze and transport this forbidden aqua vitae several times a week,  guarded by armed IRS agents, to various locations inside the district for the consumption by privileged public servants. One of those locations was the second floor of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Another was the “little white house” on H Street where Harding himself relaxed with alcohol and female companionship away from the prying eyes of the press and Mrs. Harding. Yet another was the little green house on K street, where something much more carnal than extramarital sex was going on.

My mother asks home politicians
To play in a night full of sin.
My father pops in with a camera.
My God, how the money rolls in!

The tailored Howard Mannington was almost fifty when he arrived in Washington to work with the Harding administration. He was described as “jowly, square-headed, heavy-lidded, thick lipped with a pug nose.” He was a close friend of Attorney General Daugherty, and had been involved in Ohio Republican politics for more than twenty years, making him a charter member of what became known as The Ohio Gang. His partner was Mr. M.P. Kraffmiller, treasurer of the General American Tank Car Company, out of Chicago and Warren, Ohio. General American not only built railroad tank cars, but financed the purchase of them, providing another source of profit. And it was that skill which Kraffmiller brought to the table for the Ohio Gang - managing large sums of cash. He and Mannington started out sharing a room in the Lafayette Hotel, at 16^th and I streets in Washington. But that was too visible a location. As of 1 May, 1921, they signed a lease on the house at 1625 K street. It was perfect for their needs.

My mother's a bawdy house keeper,
Every night when the evening grows dim.
She hangs out a little red lantern,
My God how the money rolls in.

What Federal Agent Gaston Means liked about the house at 1625 K Street was that it had both a front and a rear exit. A gate in the backyard fence gave access to a twisting ally which led directly to the Justice Department, and the offices of both Attorney General Harry Daugherty and his flunky, Jess Smith.  Two blocks south of the house on K Street, and a short walk across Lafayette Park, was the White House.

The first floor front room of the Little Green House (above) was a parlor. Beyond was Howard Mannington's office and conference rooms. On the second floor was a bar and poker rooms, and an office for Mr. Kraffmiller. On the third floor were the bedrooms, both public and private. In the basement, Agent Means had his office, filled with files and maps of ports and highways, used for the distribution of once legal and now illegal liquor. Means' office was adjacent to a dinning room that seated 20, a kitchen with 3 stoves, a bathroom, and a laundry room. And in the back yard was, according to Agent Means,  "the safe".

My sister's a barmaid in Boston,
For a dollar she'll strip to the skin.
She's stripping from morning to midnight,
My God how the money rolls in.

The problem was Gaston Means (above) was a liar and a "con" man. Before joining the FBI in 1921, he had worked as a private detective in New York City, under former Secret Service agent William J. Burns.  Burns recognized Means had a talent for extortion. While working for Burns, Means was assigned to protect Maude King, a wealthy Chicago widow, from a gang of grifters, Means did that, but only while cleaning out Maude's  bank account for himself. Then, in 1917,  Means had taken Maude on a North Carolina duck hunting trip where she accidentally shot herself in the back of the head. The local authorities indicted Means for murder, but he managed to beat the rap, even though, during his trial, it was revealed that Means had sold information to German spies during World War One. It was Burns who recommended Means to Attorney General Daugherty 

Agent Means claimed to have constructed the back yard safe himself. The back gate was “as strong as the door on a bank vault”, Means testified later. “Entering this gate (with a special key), one was then inside a steel cage-confronted by another gate, equally as strong and opened only by another special key.” Beyond, in the very center of the yard, Agent Means claimed he had dug a square, several feet wide. “After getting down a couple of feet or so, I had a wooden platform built...with an open space in the center....I lowered into this...a terracotta pipe about eight inches in diameter....I had a small steel box, which I kept lowered into this pipe by a strong rope."  It is a convincing description, in its details. And yet, I doubt it was actually there.

My father makes rum in the bathtub

My mother make two kinds of Gin

My sister makes love for a living

My God how the money rolls in

In that steel box Howard Mannington claimed he  kept between $50,000 and $5,000,000 in cash. The source for all this was the Withdraw Permits sold by the Ohio Gang.   Two or three times each week Daugherty's sycophant Jess Smith would drop by little green house to meet in private with Mannington in his first floor office, to check the books. Then he would go downstairs to receive a briefcase loaded with the cash, supposedly from the back yard bank. So much money was passing through Gaston Mean's (above) hands every day, he admitted to often humming a tune to himself. The tune was “My God, how the money rolls in”.

I’ve tried making all kinds of whiskey

I’ve tried making all kinds of Gin

I’ve tried making love for a living

My God the condition I’m in

(Chorus)

- 30 -

THE LITTLE GREEN HOUSE ON K STREET Chapter One

I blame the current sorry state of American government on John Dickinson, President of Pennsylvania. On the morning of 20 June, 1783, some 400 long suffering soldiers of the Continental Army surrounded Independence Hall in Philadelphia and refused to let the Congress out, until they had voted to give the soldiers' their back pay. The politicians negotiated their way out of this difficulty without parting with any money. But this effrontery by working stiffs directly petitioning their government so angered Alexander Hamilton that he dispatched a note to Dickinson, demanding that he call out the state militia to arrest the army.  Dickinson refused.

So, like a boarder sneaking out on the rent, overnight, the Continental Congress slipped across the Delaware River to Princeton, New Jersey, just to avoid paying their army. And for the next 13 years the American government wandered the eastern seaboard avoiding debt collectors, both foreign and domestic. And to prevent that from ever happening again, in 1800 they built their own city, where they had to ask no one's permission to arrest people trying to hold them accountable. And thus was born the Federal District of Columbia, and the city of Washington, as a direct of result of the lesson taught by John Dickinson – that government, like many people, provides justice only when forced to – or when it is to their advantage.

There was already a town in the new district, called Funkstown. But that village disappeared after the owner, Jacob Funk, was paid off - unlike those Continental soldiers. Thus Washington D.C. was founded on the principle of payoffs to the land owners, and a cold shoulder to the working stiffs. Pierre L'Enfant designed the nation's capital on the square, ten miles on each side. But geographic reality required that it be balanced for all time on one corner. There were named avenues running North-west to South-East and lettered streets (minus the letter  “J”) running East-to-west, starting with “A” along the Potomac. The entire lopsided place was lorded over by the Capital, perched proudly atop Jenkins Hill.

Oddly, the plan for the city had no space set aside for the sinew and sweaty realities that make all cities possible. In the 18^th century that meant fetid livestock yards, noisome smithies, reeking slaughter houses, putrid tanneries and malodorous glue factories. The 19^th century added the town's rancid gas plant, surrounded by mounds of sooty black coal, fed by belching steam engines puffing clouds of black soot right into the center of town. The reeking vaporous working class neighborhood where all that stink eventually settled was almost a mile from the capital, but a mere two blocks from the White House, which showed how low  the founding fathers placed the chief executive  on the social totem pole.  The constant clouds of vile vapors gave a fitting  nickname to this sorry section of town - Foggy Bottoms.

But the expansion of Washington and its government by the Civil War brought gentrification to Foggy Bottoms, driving the stink further out, into Maryland and Virginia. Thus, after mid century,  the Bottoms' primary artery, K Street, could stretch its golden mile from Washington Circle on the west to Vernon Square on the east, with nary a sniffle or a gag between. And in 1880, along the very center of that route, between 16^th and 17^th streets, adjacent to an alleyway, Mr. J.B. Edmonds, decided to build himself a house.

Edmonds told people he was a retired banker, and he was. But he was also a land developer from Clay County, Iowa. He had been the first mayor of the county seat of Spencer,  Iowa, so he was no stranger to politics, either. Just the year before he had also begun publishing a magazine called “The Owl”, which promoted immigration and farming into western Iowa. All things considered I would say it seems unlikely that the 35 year old Edmonds had moved to Washington to retire, as he claimed. He had been proffered a job in the President Chester A. Arthur administration as one of the three commissioners who ran the district. It was one of those jobs that Dickinson had taught the government it needed for its own protection.  But in truth I suspect Edmonds had come to Washington to pursue an active career as a lobbyist. He just had too much pride to admit such a disingenuous occupation in public.

His brand new three story Victorian house at 1625 K Street (above), complete with servant's quarters in the attic, and faced with a green sandstone, had cost him $17,000, the equivalent of almost half a million dollars today. So it seems that whatever Edmonds' s endeavors in the nation's capital were, they paid very well.  Edmonds lived in his home until his death at the age of 55, in 1901.

His widow, Lydia, held onto the property, but she rented the house out to the newly elected Senator from Maryland, "Fighting" Senator Louis Emery McComas, (above) and his wife. He proved to be an honest politician and thus a one term Senator.  However he had earned the respect of some, and in 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the Washington, D.C., District Court of Appeals. Two years later Senator McComas was dead, and Lydia moved back into the Little Green House on K street.

The City of Washington began the first decade of the 20^th century with 279,000 residents, two thirds of whom were described as “white”. People then still expected to live within walking distance of where they worked. In 1900 there were only some 8,000 automobiles and just 10 miles of paved roads in the entire country. That year there were 96 people killed in automobile accidents nationwide - compared to 115 lynchings. But by 1906 enough automobiles had arrived that the District felt required to establish a top speed limit of 20 miles an hour on city streets. And in 1907 the District of Columbia issued its first license plate. That change was happening became evident in 1910 when there were only 76 lynchings nationwide, compared to some 1,700 deaths in automobile collisions.

By 1910 Washington, D.C. had grown to 331,000 people, still mostly white. Nationwide, over that decade, life expectancy had increased by about a year. Salaries had risen from an average of $670 a year (for a 59 hour work week) to $750 a year. And there were still over 2 million unemployed in America.

And then there came the leap year of 1912. That was the year New Mexico and Arizona became states. It was the year that 30,000 textile workers staged the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It was the year that first lady Helen Taft planted the first cherry tree in Washington. It was the year that the United States Marines pulled off a triple play, invading Honduras, Nicaragua and Cuba. It was the year the Titanic sank off of Newfoundland. And that November Teddy Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote and allowed the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to be elected President. Thirteen days after that election day, on  18 November 1912, Lydia Edmonds died in the little green house on K street. She left behind an estate valued at half a million dollars, equal to $11 million today. It would appear that being a lobbyist paid really well, even in the 19^th century.

In the new century, using that same little green house on K street as a balancing point, lobbyists were going to reach new heights of wealth and influence, on their way to establishing a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists.

- 30 -

CARPE DIEM, CARPE THE DAMN RODENT

I begin by asking why is this day different than all other days. That question,  in Jewish families, is the beginning of the Passover Seder. But if you have Celtic markers on your genomes, it is the beginning of Imm'ulk, the second quarter of the year. The first quarter is of course Sow'en – November through January – followed by Imm'ulk, then Bell'tan – May through July - and Loo'nassa – August through October.  As you might have noticed this is a pagan calendar, the way the ancient Celts marked time, and Imm'ulk was the season the female sheep start to drip milk from their teats. And, no, that is not why a female sheep is called a 'Yew”.

Lactating sheep may seem like a rotten reason to have a holiday, unless you are heavily invested in lamb futures, or, if sheep or goat milk makes up a large part of your children's protein intake. The word Imm'ulk in old Irish means “in the belly”, as in baby lambs, or goat kids. And that brings up the Celtic lady of fertility, Bree-id.  The people of the pre-Christian British Isles, and particularly the center of the Bree-id cult around Kikdare, Ireland, felt the need to invoke a Goddess because the sheep milk drip seemed to always begin about halfway between the Winter Solstice (22 December) and the Spring Equinox (21 March) every year with out fail.  And a thousand years ago that seemed a magical and mystical event.  Today we know its just a little nut of coincidence, the product of the Earth's 365 and ¼ day elliptical orbit around the sun and its 23 degree angle of tilt and a hundred million years of precedent. Change any of those numbers and you get a different coincidence, and different holidays.

On her facebook page - if she had one - Bree-id would have listed her interests as biology, poetry and heavy metal. Believe it or not, that made her a pacifist among the otherwise violent and argumentative Celtic gods, thus her association with fertility and motherhood. When the Romans arrived they recorded her name as Brighid – which seems to be where the word “bride” comes from - again fertility. The Christians faced a harder problem converting the Celts of Scotland, in part because they still had snakes. Their fertility spirit was Cailleach,  a shape shifter, AKA a hag. An ancient Scottish proverb says, “The serpent will come from the hole, On the brown Day of Bride, Though there should be three feet of snow, On the flat surface of the ground.” The Scots would not scan a good poet until Robert Burns in the 18^th century.

The Scots told their children that on the first day of Imm'ulk the hag would go out to gather firewood for the rest of the winter. And since she also controlled the weather, if Caileach made the sun shine that day, it meant she was trying to gather lots of wood, which meant winter was going to last another month and a half or so. But if it was cloudy on the first day of Imm'ulk, then Caileach was planning on an early spring and she would not need extra sunlight for her search. In other words, if the old hag saw her shadow, it would be six more weeks of winter. And if that sounds familiar to you, its because that is the straight line, the set up to a joke retold year after year. Allow me to explain:

The Christians later co-opted the Irish goddess as Saint Brighid, spinning the story that she was the mother of St. Patrick, who drove the snakes out of Ireland. They just made that up of course, and later dropped her as a saint, but then they also made up the part about the snakes and Saint Patrick too. But because the Romans recruited both Irish and Scottish Celt's as soldiers and used them on the Rhine River frontier, the blended legends of Brigid and Caileach became embedded in Germany. And because their German descendents later became coal miners, and because the German miners' descendents  later moved to America, drawn by jobs in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where, for some reason, the Germans were called “Dutchmen”, that is how Irish ewes dripping milk from their teats, and an ugly old Scottish woman scrounging for firewood, combined to produce a local German immigrant festival celebrating the largest rodent in North America – Ground Hog Day.

See, a ground hog is a rodent, but its not a rat. They are much closer to a squirrel in need of weight watchers. And, without the expressive tails. This 4 to 9 pound animal, is actually a marmot. There are marmots living among the rocks and mountains of South Africa, and the Middle East, and central Europe, and along the foothills of the Himalayas. The ones living in North America are actually some of the smallest marmots anywhere, in part because living on flat ground, they are surrounded by foxes, wolves, coyotes, bears and hawks and eagles – all of whom find groundhogs very tasty. On the treeless great plains, they evolved into prairie dogs. And back east, they became groundhogs – grass eaters all. Look at it this way; if God were a rodent, cows would look more like ground hogs.

This plump, furry, generally irritated little beast is known by a number of nom-de-rodents. They sequel when injured and whistle to warn their mates (Ground hogs and Whistle-pigs), and the native Americans called them “wuchak” (woodchucks). They hibernate over winter below the frost line, emerging from their extensive Chateau marmots only in the spring. And since they don't have calendars, they respond to changing temperatures. When their dens warm up, they wake up and go looking for something green to eat. Any brief respite in winter like, say, around the end of January or early February, might draw some of the hungrier ground hogs out to look for take out.  If it is an early spring, they get a jump on their fellows at early mating. If not, if its a normal or late spring, they become fuel, keeping hungry predators alive until real spring finally shows up - thus proving that individuality is an adaptation for the survival of the species, just not necessarily the species your in.

As far back as 1841 a local storekeeper in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania named James Morris had noted in his diary, “Last Tuesday, the 2^nd... The day on which , according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as weather is to be moderate.” Again, that's the set up. The guy who delivered the punch line we are seeking was a local funny boy, a bachelor with a quick wit and the good German name of Clymer H. Freas. Clymer had been raised by his older brother, and after graduating from a local collage, he got a job working at the Punxsutawney Spirit, the only newspaper the town of Punxsutawney has ever had.

For decades, Punxsutawney,  halfway between the Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers, had been a local center of the first great American pastime – guns, beer and shooting things. In this case the “things” were ground hogs, and the beer was referred to as “ground hog punch”. And after shooting the whistle pigs, the celebrants then barbecued and ate them. Surprisingly, spending a cold morning killing a large rodent did not catch on with the Pennsylvania womenfolk, but then I suspect they were not invited. But after the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad began regular service into town in 1883, lots of men from Pittsburgh began to journey the ninety miles to tramp through the woods around Punxsutawney, blasting away at the large non-aquatic beavers, while getting blasted themselves. The town, evidently, needed the attraction, since in the language of the Delaware Indians, Puixsutawney actually means “Town of mosquitoes”.

Young Clymer evidently did not at first participate in these festivities, because in February of 1886, he first mentioned Ground hog Day in the “Spirit” by merely noting, “up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen his shadow."   However, next year the 22 year old Clymer was invited to his first ground hog soiree at the “hunting lodge” up on Gobbler's Knob, about a mile southeast of town. Clymer had so much fun that two years later he was one of the founding fathers of the Groundhog Club, elected Secretary and poet laureate.

As poet he waxed lyrical about the 1907 GHD; “Promptly at 12:22 O'Clock...a rift was riven in the overhanging clouds and B're Groundhog sallied forth, casting a shadow which shot through a shimmering sheen and sent a shaft of effervescent and effulgent rays...”. Clymer went into more depth describing the speeches given later at the barbecue as “eulogizing the flesh of the only Simon-pure vegetarian on this planet, and each, under the subtle influence of partaken woodchuck and assimilated punch, grew eloquent and combed the earth sea and sky with metaphor and simile, couched in the most beautiful phraseology.” That particular celebration continued past one in the morning. Not a bad punchline.

However the ladies and children must have complained, because in 1909, they held what Clymer described as a “Circumgyratory Pageant of the Astrologers, Horocopists, Magicians, Soothsayers and meteorological Attaches”, also known as a parade. It had floats representing the four seasons and because you would have be drunk to stand outside in the dead of winter, they held it in August, and called it “Old Home Week”. But because there was a lot less drinking, and no groundhogs to justify the thing, the parade never caught on and was soon dropped.

By now Clymer was editor of the paper, and the groundhog day celebrations and his joke had begun filling hotel rooms and restaurants. It was now a serious matter, and as editor Clymer was expected to be a civic booster. It was around now that the groundhog became the town's official symbol, and Clymer named him “Punxsutawney Phil,  Seer of Seers,  Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinaire.” They stopped shooting the rodents (officially), and concentrated on the ridicules legend. But they would have to continue without their poet. In the teens, Bachelor Clymer married Miss Moss Rose Wall. And after that, as a man with responsibilities, he decided to put his skills for hyperbole to a job with more financial remuneration than that offered to a newspaperman and poet laureate. He abandoned Puxsutawney and its mid-winter freezing rodent festival, and moved to balmy Florida where he switched to selling swampland around Tampa. He died there in 1942.

But his work was done. The punch line for the joke had been written down, the dirty words removed, the telling civilized so as to render the joke acceptable to women and children. It didn't happen overnight, of course. In 1920, the first year of prohibition, Phil supposedly threatened not to offer another prediction for 60 weeks, unless he was given a drink. He was not, but he went right on predicting. A mere 37% accuracy rate (not much better than sheer chance) has so far failed to kill the joke, but it  now barely elicits a chuckle, but that will not kill it either. Besides, how much chuckle would a woodchuck chuckle, if a woodchuck could chuckle a chuck? That doesn't seem to matter, either.

The little town never had more than 10,000 residents, and after the mines closed, today it has barely 6,000. Still it is held together by this rodent. In the gift shop down at 102 West Mahoning Street, they sell “Gobbler's Knob Hot Chocolate Mix”, which you can drink from your “Amazink Shadow Mug”, featuring a “Punxsy Phil” and his shadow, which disappears when hot water fills the mug You can also buy Punxsy Phil Mardi Gras beads, and "Punxsutawney Phil in a Can." (above). Pull the pop top and a little plush Phil pops out, holding one of two signs predicting 6 more weeks of winter or not. You can even buy a bag of Ground Hog Poop - actually its malted milk balls, but the kids love it.

You can head south on Highway 36, turn right on Woodlawn Avenue for about a mile to the crest of the hill, to Gobblers Knob. If you go there any day of the year other than Groundhog day you will likely find it abandoned, a empty stage set. The star resides year round downtown, in Barlay Square, at the memorial library, in his newly labeled Phil's Den, complete with below ground level window viewing. For the humans. The rodent of unusual size finds humans rather unentertaining.  Human beings travel thousands of miles just  to see a marmot sleep -that is the real joke. And that is funny. Everybody should laugh at themselves, even PETA. And everybody should do it at least once in your life, like going to Mecca or Jerusalem .

Do Ground hogs laugh, I wonder?  I doubt it. Otherwise, they would be getting a much larger share of this largess, than they are.  Just remember. They are cute. But they bite. They always bite. And they have never been noted for their intelligence.  Which is sort of the point of Groundhog Day.

- 30 -

SENATOR WETBACK

I prefer to refer to him as Senator Wetback. His real name was Patrick Anthony McCarran, and this bitter xenophobic, contemptuous narcissistic windbag, represented the very worst in the American character. He  preached fear of the future, fear of our enemies,  fear of our friends and even fear of ourselves. It was Pat McCarran who gave the Health Insurance Industry their anti-trust status, allowing them to collude in setting drug prices.  It was Pat McCarran who fed America’s vile dead end phobia of Mexican immigration.  It was Pat McCarran who first used the Senate of the United States to bully and terrorize loyal American citizens. It was Pat McCarran who turned Joe McCarthy’s bungling histrionics into the best weapon the Communists had in the cold war. In short, it was Pat McCarran who planted the seeds of the poisons politics that Donald Trump would harvest.

Pat McCarran was born the same year that George Custer died on the Little Big Horn; 1876. He was raised on an isolated sheep farm outside of Reno, Nevada, 15 miles from his nearest human playmate. He remained an isolationist his entire life. He attended the University of Nevada Law School, but had to drop out when his father was injured. Pat would later pass the bar, studying on his own.

As a new lawyer Pat McCarran made two big mistakes. The first was in 1907 when Nevada Governor John Sparks offered the thirty year old an appointment as a judge. But Pat’s paranoia drove him to reject the appointment. He later admitted ruefully, “That was the first and only appointment that was ever offered to me.”

His second mistake was when he served as counsel in a divorce case, Wingfield v Wingfield. The husband, George Wingfield, was the Democratic political boss who ran Nevada politics. And by representing the wife, Mae Wingfield, Pat McCarran earned the undying enmity of the Nevada Democratic Party leadership. When he tried to run for the U.S. Senate in 1908 he was black balled. One party leader noted, “His reputation as a double-crosser is too well established throughout the state.” Twenty years later the black ball still denied him a nomination for a Senate run.

Pat McCarran was finally allowed to run for the for U.S. Senate in 1932, at the age of 56, primarily because nobody else wanted what seemed like a useless nomination. The Democrats had been the second party in Nevada since the civil war. But in the general election this “ rotund man with a double chin, wavy hair and a high-pitched voice, who often says "My hide yearns for the alkali dust and the desert"— was swept into Washington on Franklin Roosevelt’s coat tails. Pat then proceeded to spit on those coattails.

The new Junior Senator from Nevada (left - second row) opposed every element of the New Deal. “The innovations of executive power, indulged in by Jackson, promoted by Lincoln, expounded by Garfield, declared righteous by Roosevelt and philosophically promulgated by Wilson, appear to have been but forerunners, rivulets, as it were, contributing to a flood that now sweeps on, submerging the Utopian doctrines and theories of Jefferson and conferring unheard of and unfettered expansion to the executive” That kind of rhetoric got him re-elected in 1938 with 73% of the vote.

Now secure in his seat, McCarran made speech's along side fellow Catholic Charles Lindberg, preaching isolationism. “I think one American boy, the son of an American mother, is worth more than all central Europe.”  He condemned Roosevelt’s supposed “secret plan” to push America into WW II. After Pearl Harbor, it was McCarran's desperate attempts to justify his prewar opposition,   which gave birth to the conspiracy myths that FDR had purposefully ignored Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact it was McCarran's stinginess over military budgets that left the Army and Navy short planes and radar to intercept the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, however, Senator McCarran was certain that Nevada got it’s share of war spending, including the third largest manufacturing facility built during the war, Basic Magnesim’s $140 million plant, built at full government expense, and the town of Henderson, built again at government expense, to house the plant’s 15,000 workers. Pat won re-election in 1944 with 68% of the vote.

The war and time made Pat McCarran one of the nation’s most powerful senators, by making him one of its most senior Senators. By 1945 he had become the new political boss of Nevada, the new George Wingfield. Pat even filled the U.S. capital building with so many graduates from Nevada Universities that they became known as “McCarran’s Boys”. And after a couple of years working in Washington, many of the “boys” became part of the McCarran Machine, back home in Nevada.

Pat McCarran handed out just as many “black balls” as he had been handed. Federal Marshal Les Kofed explained to the Senator that Federal law prevented political appointees like him from making speeches in support of a local politician. Marshal Kofed explained, “Out of a clear blue sky, shortly thereafter,…I received a call from the chief deputy at Carson City, that a new marshal had been appointed, that I had better come in and turn in my keys.”

By 1950 Time magazine had begun describing the 73 year old Pat McCarran as “pompous, vindictive and power-grabbing”. According to the magazine he “staged a one-man committee filibuster against an “Emergency Immigration bill” to admit (250,000) D. P’s to the U.S  The D.P.’s were Displaced Persons, who had survived the Nazi death and work camps, but whose identification papers had been lost or destroyed. They were people without homes or a nation willing to accept them. What concerned Pat McCarran was that many of them were Jews. He argued that the “Emergency Immigration Bill” was supported by a particular “pressure group” with “unlimited money” - code words for Jews.

The DP bill had the support of President Eisenhower. But when it was first introduced into a subcommittee in the spring of 1953, Senator McCarran “demanded” a ten day delay while his wife sought medical treatment. When “Senator Wetback” instead surfaced in Los Angles, holding hearings for his own Senate Security and Intelligence Sub Committee, and asked for three more weeks of delay, the immigration hearings finally began.

Three weeks into the hearings McCarran managed to snooker the Judiciary Committee (parent committee to the subcommittee) into voting to delay any further action by the subcommittee. When most of the Senators realized they had been tricked, fisticuffs almost broke out. It took a week, but the delay was eventually overturned. Still, in the end, McCarran managed to kill the bill. And tens of thousands of desperate people were turned away from America's shores because of one bigott.

In June of 1952 Pat McCarran co-sponsored a rewriting of immigration law, declaring that “…we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated..." More code words for Jews. "Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain… I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.” He could have had the same speech writer as Donald Trump, except McCarran, at least, knew lots of multi-syllable words.

Next came the program which, for me, earned the Senator his nickname, “Operation Wetback.” That  really was its name, and it was launched in 1954 after Senator McCarran’s prodded the bureaucrats of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The program contrasted with the ten year old “Bracero” system, in which Mexican recruiters contracted to supply workers for American farmers and railroads.

By 1954 some 300,000 Mexican citizens were legally working in the United States on temporary “Bracero” visas. Few stayed in the United States at the end of their contracts. However those programs, which protected worker’s rights and wages, were disliked by employers. Racists forces in Texas had prevented that state from participating in the program for five years. But in 1954 this successful program was killed, in favor of mass deportations - the same approach promoted by Donald Trump, and producing the same outcome - rising food prices because of a lack of field workers.

The INS would later claim to have expelled 1.3 million Mexicans (not the 13 million claimed in recent mythology) under Operation Wetback.  But a closer examination of the data shows the service could only prove some 80,000 were expelled. The addition half a million were an estimate of those who left the country out of fear, but the number was more hopeful than accurate.

The U.S. Army successfully resisted joining Operation Wetback, and in an internal report written later carried the notation, "Thank goodness"   The program ended abruptly when seven “illegals” being deported by ship, drowned while trying to swim back to the American shore. The crew of the steamer transporting them, then mutinied against their captain, and against the entire program. In the conservative myth the mutiny may get mentioned but never discussed.

But Pat McCarran’s most powerful weapon was his anti-communism. In this he was merely echoed by Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarran also supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to the point that he was called “The Senator from Madrid.” He was an equally fierce supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek, after Chiang and his supporters were driven out of mainland China and retreated to the island of Taiwan. So rabid was McCarran's defense that it was not until Richard Nixon visited China in the 1970’s that some sanity and common sense return to American Asian policy.

The McCarran’s Internal Security Act (of September 1950) required members of the communist party to register with the Attorney General. So onerous were the details of the act that between 1965 and 1967 almost all of it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Walt Kelly, who drew the popular "Pogo" comic strip, chose to memorialize McCarrain with "Mole J. Macarney", a blind, paranoid creature, who spread tar on everything and everyone he touched.

Pat McCarran died of a heart attack in September of 1954, proving once again that politics is not about being right. It is about being re-elected. To most politicians, nothing else matters.

  - 30 -