The Senate

For 180 Years, the American people have struggled forward with their Congress. They struggled through the corrupt days of Daniel Webster--when the great orator was so drunk that he had to hold onto his desk to speak. They struggled through those bitter days when Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode over to the Senate floor and so severely beat up Senator Charles. Sumner of Massachusetts, the abolitionist, that it took him three years to recover; the time when Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee pulled a pocketknife on Senator Royal S. Copeland of New York; the period of the 1870s and 1880s, when lobbyist generosity made sure that almost every Senator had a bottle of whiskey in his desk; and we struggle now, as the sergeant at arms presides over an informal bar just off the Senate floor.

The Senate has also seen a little band of irreconcilables, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, grandfather of the present diplomat, filibuster the League of Nations to death. And Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a rubber receptacle strapped to his thigh, once outlasted the calls of nature and the demands of sleep to keep a sleepless Senate in session for 24 hours and 18 minutes, all for the purpose of denying one tenth of the population their right of full citizenship. It has seen moments of piety, as when newly elected Senator William Vare of Pennsylvania was denied his seat for spending $200,000 in his primary campaign, and moments of complacency, as when it looked the other way after Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York spent $3,000,000 on his primaries.

It has seen a boisterous Republican Senator from Wisconsin terrorize witnesses, disrupt the Army and intimidate the other Senators; watched a doleful Democratic Senator from Connecticut grovel for forgiveness for his use of campaign funds for personal gain; and listened to the studied sanctimony of the [late] Minority Leader from Illinois, only to see him vote right down the line for the interests of his law firm back in Peoria.

Yes, we have struggled. But we have survived. Little by little, we have even inched forward. But can we survive further in a day when the procedures of the Senate are as out of date as the inscribed shaving mugs that stand in the Senate barbershop and are never used, in this era of electric razors and instant shaving cream? In this computer age, can we afford an "After you, Alphonse" attitude that permits a committee chairman to bottle up an important bill for weeks, purely because of personal whim? Can we, when we are putting men on the moon, afford a horseand-buggy legislative system whereby a half-dozen men can tie up Senate machinery for weeks with "discussion at some length"--the polite name for a filibuster?

Is not the President of the United States entitled to more than a one- or two-year honeymoon before Congress in general and the Senate in particular turns against him? Must he coax, wheedle and deal to get his programs passed? Should we not change the system whereby a handful of elderly men, usually from rural, southern America, are able to put cotton, tobacco, rice and cattle ahead of schools, hospitals, housing, transportation and people? Should we not set aside campaign funds from the public treasury, so that candidates from the big urban areas of the North can compete with candidates from the rural areas of the South and West without hocking future votes either to big business or to big labor? Should not the Constitution be revamped in order to give the Executive more power to govern, the Congress less power to obstruct? The answer, if left to a majority of the Congress, would definitely be no.

Furthermore, if you were to tell Southern Senators, most of them charming and chivalrous, that they were responsible for the soaring crime rate, for the race riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit and Washington and for the school upheaval in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill--Brownsville, they would counter with vigor and conviction that the Supreme Court was responsible. Or some who are not so chivalrous would put the blame on the "nigger-loving policies of Northern do-gooders."

When you examine the structure of Congress and compare it with the results, however, the conclusion is inescapable that our creaking, old-fashioned legislative machinery is geared and greased in favor of the farms, as against the big cities. It has been so since the beginning. And this is the real reason for crime in the streets, restlessness on the campus, revolt in the ghettos and our bulging relief rolls.

To illustrate: One of the most powerful members of the Senate is James Oliver Eastland of Doddsville, Mississippi. Eastland is part of the rural America that controls Congress. He was born in Doddsville, which has a population of 190, and he owns 5800 acres of good cottonland around the town. He has served in the Senate for almost three decades. Now 65, he will continue to serve the rest of his life: It is inconceivable that any rival politician in Mississippi would dare run against the big, genial, cigar-chomping Senator from the cotton belt--or, if so, that he could unseat him. As a cotton-plantation owner, Big Jim Eastland and his family were paid $211,364 by the Federal Government in 1967 for taking approximately 1700 acres of cotton out of production. This meant that about 20 farm hands were laid off, plus other hands displaced by the mechanical cotton picker. These displaced Negroes, unskilled and uneducated, probably joined the rest of the army of displaced workers from other Mississippi plantations and took the Illinois Central north to Chicago. There they might well have found themselves without family, church, neighbors or the stabilizing ties of home. The women might engage in the world's oldest profession. Their illegitimate children would help swell the welfare rolls. The males, if unable to get work, might take to crime.

Thanks to a Congress where the legislative cards are stacked against the city, this system continues. On September 24, 1968, the Senate voted to violate the six-billion-dollar budget cutback that Congress itself had imposed on President Johnson, in order to increase farm subsidies by one billion dollars. It then turned around and voted not to violate the ceiling by the $600,000,000 necessary to increase welfare rolls in the big cities. All this on one day in September.

Also in that miserable autumn, the Senate voted to slash food stamps, trim low-income housing and chop $200,000,000 in Medicaid funds that were desperately needed by the elderly to meet their medical bills. Simultaneously, Senators looked the other way regarding tax loopholes, went along with the House of Representatives on permitting individual farm subsidies to exceed $20,000--some individual farmers get as much as $2,000,000 annually--and gave preliminary approval to the anti--ballistic missile system.

The current Congress has addressed itself to moderate tax reform, and the Senate in particular vigorously debated the Nixon Administration's ABM proposal--before accepting it by a tie vote--but the Congressional favoritism for rural and military America over the cities and the poor remains. It had been studiously developed by the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition, pushed by the lobbies and protected by the seniority system. The Senator from rural America gets re-elected without much opposition, and continuity in office elevates him to a position of power.

This is why, with more than half of our population living in cities and our farm population reduced to about 4.5 percent, the Department of Agriculture employs a vast bureaucracy of 86,000, the Department of Housing and Urban Renewal only 16,000. This is why every cow on American farms must be tested every year for tuberculosis, while American children are not; why $21,500,000 is appropriated annually to fight Bang's disease in cows; why $26,900,000 comes out of the treasury for weed control, $3,200,000 additional to eliminate witch-weed, $6,700,000 more to keep water hyacinths out of Southern waterways--a grand total of $36,800,000 spent on rooting out weeds, considerably more than the Federal Government spends to root out juvenile delinquency. This is why $76,300,000 is drawn from the Federal treasury annually to help farm families with problems of marketing, home living, home economics and 4-H clubs; yet up until recently, there was no equivalent program for the cities.

Thanks to seniority on the Senate Agriculture Committee, a cabal of four elderly Southerners makes sure these programs continue. Each is guardian of a special commodity. Louisiana's Allen Ellender, 79, chairman of the committee, is the protector of sugar. Spessard Holland of Florida, 77, is the protector of citrus fruit. Big Jim Eastland is the protector of King Cotton. B. Everett Jordan of North Carolina, 73, is the guardian of tobacco. They have been running the Agriculture Committee for years. They are secure politically. They cannot be defeated. Together with Representative Bob Poage of Texas, their counterpart in the House, and the two chairmen of the appropriations subcommittees on agriculture, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia and Representative Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, they--not the Secretary to Agriculture--dominate American farm policy. They are so powerful that in 196-1 all the funds for the Agriculture Department were held up for seven months while Senator Russell and Representative Whitten argued over a $1,500,000 peanut laboratory in Dawson, Georgia. Finally, as the year drew to a close, they compromised by putting a food-research lab in Athens, Georgia, at a cost of $9,500,000, and a $1,500,000 cottonweed-control laboratory in Stoneville, Mississippi. You guessed it--Stoneville is in Whitten's district.

With power goes audacity. Chairman Ellender is so secure and so brassy that he takes an annual trip around the world, with a convenient call on his tailor in Hong Kong, later submitting to his fellow Senators an account of whom he sat beside at dinner from Hong Kong to Rome and what each dinner partner told him--all neatly printed at Government expense. The gentleman from Louisiana is so audacious that he permitted two lobbyists, Robert Shields of the American Sugar Beet Industry Policy Committee and Josiah Ferris of the American Sugar Cane League, to sit in on the closed-door sessions of his Agriculture Committee at a time when the committee was marking up the sugar-quota bill, an act so unethical that the late Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut, a power in the Republican Party, was censured by the Senate fordoing the same thing with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Not Ellender, however. He is too powerful--and Senate ethics have sunk too low.

The refusal of Senators to investigate and discipline a member of the club unless under compelling pressure from the press and the public is one reason for the stench of putrefying ethics that hangs over the Capitol today. It is not merely the rural Senators who are able to obstruct progress in the rest of the nation; other Congressional cliques do the same. They throw their influence behind the munitions makers, the truckers, the oil-and-gas cabal, the lords of the shipping industry, the real-estate (continued on page 267)The Senate(continued from page 120) operators. Sometimes they do so for hire, sometimes because of conviction. More often, it is because of campaign contributions. Yet they are never investigated. Not only will they not investigate themselves, they seldom investigate the lobbies that contribute to their campaign funds and to their law firms, supply company planes for trips home and, on occasion, raise personal expense funds.

If I were to put my finger on the most corrupting factor in the lives of Senators, I would, without hesitation, point to campaign contributions. When a Senator has to pass the hat for increasingly large amounts of money to get re-elected every six years, he becomes obligated. There are campaign contributors who expect nothing more in return than lunch in the Senate restaurant or a couple of tickets to the Army-Navy game. But they are rare. Most of those who kick in with really large wads of dough expect votes for the banks, for higher-priced drugs, against public housing, against labor, and so on. And they are hardly reticent about reminding the recipient Senator of what they want.

Yet not since 1924--when the Corrupt Practices Act established a code to regulate campaign funds--has there been any significant new legislation dealing with the way elections are financed. But there have been some attempts at reform. One halfhearted attempt, sponsored by Senator Lyndon Johnson in 1956, brazenly avoided the necessity of recording primary campaign contributions, even though victory in the primary in the South has long been the equivalent of victory in November. The Senator from Texas was determined to bolster the Southern establishment by saving his Southern colleagues from disclosing the oil, cotton, tobacco and textile tycoons who financed their primaries. Ironically, it was the Southern establishment that adroitly and relentlessly knifed Lyndon after he became President.

More recently, there was the 1966 proposal of Senator Russell Long of Louisiana that each taxpayer check a space in his income-tax return if he wanted to contribute one dollar from his taxes toward a national campaign kitty for Presidential candidates. Senator Long, from his vantage point as Democratic Whip, pushed his plan so persistently and so disagreeably that he managed to antagonize many of his colleagues. But his plan failed chiefly because the rural aristocracy that doesn't have to worry about raising money to get re-elected foresaw the day when the simplicity of the Long system would spread from Presidential to Congressional elections, thereby making it easy for any upstart candidate to challenge the establishment. The Corrupt Practices Act remains unreformed, the expenses of campaigns continue to soar and Senators continue to look the other way when it comes to enforcement.

It was not always so. When I first came to Washington, during the Coolidge Administration, the Senate was seething over the 1926 Vare scandal I noted earlier. In the Pennsylvania Republican primary of that year, Philadelphia's Republican boss, William Vare, spent $200,000 to defeat George Wharton Pepper. Cries of shame echoed from the Union League to the Main Life. Boss Vare was thrown out of the Senate on his ear. There was also the purging of Frank Smith, another Republican, elected to the Senate from Illinois. The issue here was not the amount of money but the fact that $100,000 of it came from one man, Samuel Insull, the Midwest utility magnate.

Those were the days of great moral indignation that followed the Teapot Dome scandal. The public was hell-bent for cleanup. That day has now been replaced by a television morality that operates on the theory that people have short memories, that the public secretly admires a crook--provided he's a successful crook--and that if you can polish up a transgression so it looks right on the idiot box, God bless you. No Senator has been denied his seat in the past four decades because he spent too much money getting elected.

The Senate has even broadened--or lowered--its ethical standards so that its 1968 code of ethics sanctions the private expense fund. This is an amazing right about-face that has generally escaped the attention of the public. Yet the American people had serious doubts about Richard Nixon's qualifications to run for Vice-President after it was discovered that $18,200 had been contributed secretly by Southern California businessmen to pay his personal and business expenses while he was supposedly representing all the people of California as a Senator in Washington.

The fact that the Senate in 1968 bowed to the Nixon precedent and declared ethical what it considered unethical in 1952 still does not make private funds ethical. To the contrary, such a fund directly violates the cardinal principle of American representative government; namely, that any obscure voter contributing through taxes to a Senator's salary is entitled to just as much of his time and energy as a handful of San Remo suburbanites who can afford to tip him on the side.

If you look over the voting record of Senator Nixon and compare it with the economic philosophy of those who put up the $18,200, you can appreciate the wisdom of the founding fathers. One of the larger groups contributing to the Nixon fund were real-estate men, 11 in all, interested in removing wartime rent controls and blocking public housing. The young Senator from California could not have been unaware of this when he voted on June 20, 1951, to cut public housing from 50,000 to 500 units; or on June 4, 1952, to shorten rent controls by four months; or on June 5, to remove all national authority to enforce rent control; or when, on June 12, he introduced an amendment to the defense bill to sidetrack all public housing. The Senator's votes on other issues followed the identical philosophy of those who contributed to his fund.

Under the Senate's new standard of conduct, all such private funds, believe it or not, are now ethical. In most respects, the Senate is more ethical, more progressive, less influenced by lobbyists than is the House of Representatives. But regarding private expense funds, it has slid back. Perhaps the Senate was influenced by the Nixon precedent; after all, he not only managed to get away with his fund but went on to bigger and more glamorous goals.

In recent years, the Senate has moved slowly, inexorably toward reform. It still has a long way to go. but it has moved faster than the House. The bad guys remain, but at last a large number of the good guys have decided to stand up and be counted. However, it still has nowhere nearly approached the righteous indignation of the days when the Bob La Follettes, the George Norrises and the Tom Walshes tracked down all evil.

Generally speaking, Senators do not behave as flagrantly as Representatives when they junket abroad. They do not make public spectacles of themselves--as did Representative Mike Feighan of Cleveland, who, when attending the 1965 International Labor Office meeting in Geneva, called President Kennedy a "nigger lover" and President Roosevelt "pro-Communist." Nor do Senators bring 40 cases of Scotch into the United States by military plane, as did Representative Mendel Rivers of South Carolina at the end of one "inspection" trip. But they do embark on some totally unnecessary "surveys," such as those taken by Senator Edward V. Long of Missouri and Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, Democrats, after both were defeated last year. Here is the confidential cable the Army sent to military posts instructing them to roll out the red carpet for the Senator from Missouri, who had lost his primary campaign:

Request Local Escort Officer be Assigned in each area to Meet and Assist. Local Escort Should Present Senator Long With In-country Itinerary each stop for his Approval.... Request Military Sedan be made available where possible.... Request military Aircraft be Provided from Istanbul, Turkey, 30 October Till Arrival London 12 November. Request This office be Informed of Type Military Aircraft and Flying Times.

Tongue in cheek, the officer who prepared the cable added: "Primary Purpose of Visit is to Get Firsthand Information on Foreign-aid And Military-Assistance Programs."

The Senate still has as much power as the House to obstruct and confuse, and sometimes uses it more effectively. Jim Eastland of Mississippi not only sends Negroes north to glut the big cities, as a result of his cotton-cutback program, but, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, makes it difficult for Negroes to obtain their civil rights. He accomplishes this not only by blocking bills guaranteeing Negroes' voting rights but by delaying confirmation of judges likely to give a liberal interpretation to the laws. For a year and one week, he blocked Senate confirmation of a Jewish judge, Simon Sobeloff, who was known to be favorable to civil rights. And he blocked a vote on the first Negro ever appointed to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall, for a year, meanwhile rushing the confirmation of his old University of Mississippi buddy William Cox as a United States District Court judge in the record time of seven days. Judge Cox later justified Eastland's confidence by referring in open court to "a bunch of niggers," and comparing Negroes to "chimpanzees."

How--when the abuses arise from so many sources and take such varied and subtle forms--can we clean up the Senate and persuade its members to keep its conduct on a level that will ensure public respect? Here are a few modest proposals, all of which would go a long way toward cleaning up both houses of Congress.

1. No Congressman shall practice law before any Federal court or Federal agency.

2. No Congressman shall serve as a director or official of any corporation or partnership doing business with the Federal Government.

3. No Congressman who serves as a member of the Armed Forces Reserve shall accept promotion while in Congress.

4. Every member of Congress shall file his assets and all sources of income with the General Accounting Office every year.

5. The names of all relatives on a member's payroll shall be filed with the clerks of the House and Senate and shall be published periodically.

6. No member shall use on his staff any person not paid by him except students.

7. Members shall disclose any pecuniary interest they may have in a bill on which they vote.

8. A commission of five members, two from each house of Congress and with a chairman representing the public appointed by the President, shall serve as a body to enforce these rules.

9. Chairmen of committees shall rotate every six years.

10. No committee chairman shall have the power to block any piece of legislation when 100 members of the House and 30 members of the Senate sign a petition requesting that it be released.

These proposals are modest only because of practical politics. If they were any more drastic, they would have not even a smell of passing. There would be little chance, for instance, of adopting rules similar to those of the British House of Commons, from which we inherited our parliamentary procedure. John Foster, Conservative, and a veteran member of the British House of Lords, described these rules as follows:

"No member of Parliament can filibuster," he explained. "If you are repetitive or stray from your subject, you are gaveled down.

"We have no seniority. Membership on committees is selected by each party, and there is only a chairman and a vice-chairman. Beyond that, any other member of Commons can attend. A committee is behind each important bill and they are introduced by the party in power. Individual members may not introduce legislation of any importance. They can introduce only courtesy legislation which doesn't pass."

Regarding campaign funds, Foster said that no member is permitted to raise money for his campaign. He gets ten cents for every voter in his district and no more. "Every farthing is receipted," he said, "and we are very careful about it. Discipline is strict and a member is expelled if there is any infraction of the rules. If you are an attorney for a bank or a firm affected by certain legislation, you get up and say so on the floor. If you didn't do this, your firm would object and you would be fired."

"I'm afraid you'd never get the American Congress to be that moral," I told my British friend.

"The United States has done pretty well for a big country," he replied. "You've got a geographic spread which--if placed on the map of Europe--would extend all the way from the North Sea to Portugal and from the English Channel to Romania. I wouldn't be too discouraged."

But Americans who must live under an unresponsive and often uncaring Congress can not help being discouraged. Advocates of the "new politics" predict that the impact of their movement will be felt by 1972 and that millions of new voters will sweep in a whole new generation of political leaders, dedicated to honesty and justice. But the most realistic of the new breed admit, at least privately, that it will be years before the Senatorial oligarchs are turned out of their black-leather swivel chairs. It is a fact of politics that Senators, like members of the House, usually get re-elected on the strength of their accomplishments for their states or districts, not because of their positions on the greater issues of our day.

In the small towns of Mississippi and Georgia, and the other states that have sent the political barons to Washington, the "new politics" is considered subversive. A freshman Senator may have ideals, but he doesn't have seniority. Until drastic reforms change both the ways Senators finance their elections and delegate power among themselves once they are elected, we will continue to find legislators more interested in cottonweed-control laboratories than in their consciences.