Byrd Center director Ray Smock presents Congress Investigates to Pamela Coyle, director of the Martinsburg-Berkeley County Public Library.

On February 16,  Ray Smock gave a talk at the Martinsburg-Berkeley County Public Library on the first Congressional investigation in U. S. history, St. Clair’s Defeat, an all but forgotten chapter in American history from the wars with Indians in the Northwest Territory from 1785 to 1795. President George Washington sent General Arthur St. Clair at the head of a 1400-man army to conquer a confederacy of Indian tribes under the leadership of Miami Chief Little Turtle and Shawnee Chief Blue Coat. It turned out to be the worst disaster in the history of the U.S. Army in terms of the percentage of casualties. St. Clair’s army suffered 1,000 casualties including an incredibly high percentage of dead, with 657 soldiers killed.

The investigation in the House of Representatives, which received the full cooperation of President Washington, established the precedent that the executive branch might consider some papers and records to be so private that they should not be made public. This principle became known as executive privilege, and has been a presidential power since that time.

The story of St. Clair’s defeat and 28 other major congressional investigations can be found in Congress Investigates: A Critical History with Documents, published in 2010 as a Congressional Research Project of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies.

In January 2012, the Byrd Center digitized the newspaper columns, making the entire run widely accessible for the first time.  All of the columns have full-text search capability to facilitate research and can be accessed on the Archive page.  This digital archive groups the issues by year and title for easy browsing.  The Center also has hard copies of the columns in our collection, supplementing our holdings of Senator Byrd’s extensive writing career.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting announced the opening of the archive which you can listen to here.

The Roger R. Trask award is named for the late pioneer federal historian whose long and distinguished scholarly career included service as historian for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Defense, and the General Accounting Office.  Previous recipients of the Trask Award are Roger Lanius, chief curator at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, Richard Baker, Senate Historian Emeritus, and Philip Cantelon, founder and chairman of the board of History Associates.

ALL FILMS BEGIN AT 7 PM:

Tues: 1/31 – Inside Job

Tues: 2/7 – Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Thurs: 2/16 – Default: The Student Loan Documentary

Wed: 2/21 – How to Start A Revolution

Tues: 2/28 – Gasland

Tues: 3/6 – Women, War, & Peace: War Redefined

]]> http://www.byrdcenter.org/index.php/2012/01/19/byrd-center-film-series-recent-political-documentaries/feed/ 0 http://www.byrdcenter.org/index.php/2012/01/03/vaclav-havels-great-speech-before-congress/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=vaclav-havels-great-speech-before-congress http://www.byrdcenter.org/index.php/2012/01/03/vaclav-havels-great-speech-before-congress/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:38:57 +0000 Ray Smock http://www.byrdcenter.org/?p=400 I was on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1990 when the late president of Czechoslovakia gave one of the best speeches I ever heard from a head of state. His recent passing prompted me to look back in the journal I kept when I was Historian of the House, where I recorded my impressions of what I saw as a close-up observer of Congress. Havel was an intellectual, a playwright and poet, who challenged the evils of totalitarian communism and was thrown in jail for it. But as the Soviet empire crumbled Havel emerged as a symbol of opposition to communist rule and was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, and a few years later in what was called the “Velvet Revolution” he became president of the Czech Republic when it peacefully separated from Slovakia.

Havel’s speech before Congress deserves another look. It was, and remains, one of the best critiques I have ever heard on what was lacking in political discourse. Havel said politics must be based on an understanding of morality and human responsibility. Everything else flows from these things. He spoke as an intellectual and was not ashamed to call himself one. He said too many intellectuals abandoned politics and this has been a great mistake. He reminded his American audience that the United States was founded by intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson. His message was not entirely new or original but the historical context in which he delivered the speech it made it a powerful statement.  Just four months earlier he had been in jail. He chose not to attack his jailers but to deliver a higher message.

It has been almost twenty-two years since Havel delivered this speech. I read it again recently after learning that he had died on December 18, 2011. My reading of his 1990 speech had a completely different context this time around. As the 2012 opens the United States begins its year-long presidential campaign that will fill us all with a frenzy of issues and the usual crazy circus that we use to elect presidents. Our troops have come home from the long war in Iraq. We are still fighting in Afghanistan. The United States is suffering from its inability to pay for these wars and deal with monumental effects of a collapsed financial system and chronic unemployment.  American politics is polarized. Far too many politicians are fitted with ideological blinders that offer no practical way to find compromises that could help solve the problems before us.

Our politics focuses on specific problems that are the trees in the forest. But we seldom raise our sites to look at the whole forest. Havel’s speech contained that elevated vision. It is why it still resonates. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could conduct a presidential campaign that focused on morality and human responsibility as the highest goals of any political system? Here is the part of Havel’s speech that I found most compelling.

The specific experience I’m talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.

For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war, or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are in fact far from the final victory.

We are still a long way from that `family of man’; in fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and, if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves, but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us, but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.

In other words, we still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions–if they are to be moral–is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

What follows my journal entry for the day Havel spoke to Congress. It is my first impression of his remarks as I stood along the rail in the House chamber, near the large portrait of George Washington that hangs there. It is from this vantage point that I witnessed many addresses of world leaders and a number of joint sessions of Congress, when presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton addressed the nation. None impressed me more that the words of President Havel.

From Ray Smock’s House Journal

February 21, 1990

Today I was on the floor of the House to hear an address by the President of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel.  Of all the speeches of foreign dignitaries I have had the pleasure of hearing since I have been working for the House, this one, I believe, is the best.  The reasons I liked it are many, but if I had to pick one fundamental factor it is that he spoke from the heart and the mind, not from the gut or the wallet.  Maybe he is too new at the game of politics to be covered with layers of constraints to plain speaking.  I hope for his sake and the world’s that he never does feel constrained from speaking as honestly as he did today.

He said he was new to the role of president, having only recently been freed from prison.  He said he had not been to any school for presidents.  He candidly admitted that he couldn’t believe that he was in the United States speaking before Congress, when so short a time ago he was incarcerated and his country was under a totalitarian regime.

Except for a few opening and closing sentences, which he spoke in good English, the speech was delivered in Czech.  He would read a paragraph and then an English translator would repeat what he said.  The speech took an hour and fifteen minutes to deliver this way.  Everyone in the chamber had a typescript of the speech they could follow.  The members and gathered dignitaries were slow to get into the speech but it was not long before they were applauding regularly and on two occasions he received standing ovations.  His calculated return to English at the end of his remarks, when he spoke of Thomas Jefferson and the revolutionary founders of this country was an emotional high point. The playwright-president had dramatically concluded his speech; and as I looked around the chamber I could see a number of people with tears in their eyes, especially some of the Czechs who were guests in the chamber.

The part of the speech that impressed me the most was near the end when he shifted from a list of particular topics to a broad philosophical approach.  He spoke eloquently about the need for a moral regeneration to politics and to our responsibility to one another. He unabashedly spoke as an intellectual and said that more intellectuals must get directly involved in politics.  He criticized the intelligentsia for believing that they had to stay out of politics to stay independent.  When intellectuals stay out of politics that is the quickest way to lose independence, he said.  He also made a case for the protection of the planet from our greed.  He said we think of mankind as the culmination of nature, not a part of it.  We think everything on the planet is for our benefit and we plunder the planet with such selfish thoughts

He spoke of a higher order to which we are all responsible, above family, above country, above our businesses, and instead of calling it God he called it human consciousness.  We must elevate human consciousness to a high moral plain, we must, and he quoted Lincoln, serve the family of man.  We must put morality above all else in human affairs.  We must be responsible to our fellow man and to the planet of which we are a part.  Politicians seldom talk this way, and when they do it often drips of hypocrisy.  Such was not the case today. This speech has an intense universal message. It will stand as an important document of the incredible changes that are sweeping Europe and the Soviet Union.  History is accelerating, he said.  His life is the personification of that change.  Whatever happens in the future, this speech will be a touchstone of the best aspirations of the Czechs and Slovaks, and the best aspirations of us all. He cut through all the mundane issues that need the attention of governments in every country and pointed to the higher calling of government and the governed, to act in a moral and ethical manner toward one another and the planet we inhabit. If we cannot do this, nothing else is likely to improve the world we live in.

“They always call each other gentlemen there. By the tone they put in the word it would be more appropriate if they come right out and said ‘does the coyote from Maine yield?’ Then the man from Maine says ‘I yield,’ for if he don’t, the other guy keeps on talking anyhow. So the coyote from Maine says ‘I yield to the polecat from Oregon.”

A tall bronze statue of Will Rogers stands outside the chamber of the U. S.  House of Representatives, facing the chamber so, as the story goes, he can keep an eye on the goings on there. Rogers was no social or political scientist but his keen observations of the House and Senate rank him among the best of the many people over the past two centuries, both Americans and foreigners who have tried to figure out this citadel of democracy.

Much has been written in the last thirty years about the decline of civility in Congress, in both the House and Senate, but especially the House, the larger body, the one most closely associated with the views and attitudes of the American people because its members are elected every two years in local districts.  Anyone who follows Congress closely knows that the House and Senate are vastly different bodies, not only in size, but in terms of rules, constitutional functions, and the methods of conducting daily business.

Both bodies are constitutionally designed to be places of deliberation. The Senate has the luxury of unlimited debate, while the House, because of its size, limits the time an individual member may speak on an issue, sometimes to as little as 30 seconds.  Through much of congressional history the common wisdom has held that the Senate tends to cool the passions of the House, the body of raw numbers and raw democracy.

The question of civility is an extremely important matter and has been since the first House and Senate set down their rules of conducting business in 1789.  As Will Rogers observed,  members call themselves gentlemen and gentlewomen, because the alternatives would be to call one another polecats and coyotes, or worse, liars, hypocrites, stupid, dumb, demagogues, socialists, communists,  none of which lend themselves to the deliberative process so important to the governance of the nation.

Has civility declined in recent years?  We can look back in history to the decade before the Civil War, where members wrestled one another or engaged in fist fights on the floor of the House. We often cite the example of House member Preston Brooks of South Carolina who went over to the floor of the Senate one day in 1856 and beat Charles Sumner of Massachusetts senseless with a cane. The extremes of the 1850s, the complete breakdown of the art of compromise, led to war and the loss of more than 600,000 American lives. Compared to the 1850s the climate of 2011 does not seem to be anywhere near the same level of intensity. But this is a false comparison of two vastly different times and cultures. In the past three decades, there have been  plenty of nasty words, an overrated  tie-pulling incident, some pushing and shoving, some expletives deleted, all seemingly minor stuff when compared with the brawls and beatings (or even the occasional duels), from earlier centuries.

Despite the brawls of past history I maintain that the civility in Congress, in both bodies, but especially in the House, is at one of the lowest ebbs in congressional history. It is a crisis that should concern all Americans.  The current Congress has become largely dysfunctional because extreme partisanship and  ideological differences are preventing the deliberative process from completing its most important function which is to be one of the two governing branches of government. In the 1850s we saw the steady breakdown of the ability to compromise on the issue of slavery, but Congress continued to govern through the whole process of secession and through the Civil War. There were no government shutdowns, or threats of shutdowns.

The late Poet Laureate of the United States Howard Nemerov delivered a poem before the joint meeting of Congress in 1989 that commemorated the 200^th anniversary of Congress.  In that poem he called Congress “the fulcrum of us all.”  A fulcrum is the balancing point. Without a fulcrum there is no way to move decisions from the realm of partisan politics to that of government policy and law.  Congress, especially the House, has lost its fulcrum, including a basic respect for the rules and traditions that have been developed over time to make the body function.

We need a new way to measure civility and dysfunction than the limited historical anecdotes of the past or the feeble attempts of social and political scientists to count things, make charts, and declare civility in Congress to be better, worse, or about the same.

A prime example of the latter is a study released on September 28, 2011, by the prestigious Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.  The report, “Civility in Congress (1935-2011) as reflected in the Taking Down process,” was written by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a distinguished scholar and one of the wisest heads  in America when it comes to understanding political campaigns, media, and mass communications.  Yet this report is so obtuse, so unreal, that I offer it as Exhibit A on why we need to completely rethink how we study Congress.

The House of Representatives has a parliamentary procedure, described in the Rules of the House, which is designed to keep members from offending one another or the president of the United States, their most frequent target when they are not zeroing in on one another.  By this device the House can censure members who get out of line by calling one another polecats or coyotes, to use Will Rogers’s examples, or more aptly to keep members from calling one another liars and hypocrites, two of the most common examples of incivility.

If a member objects to inflammatory language, he can ask the Speaker, or the person occupying the chair, to have the offending words “taken down.”  The chair, in consultation with the Parliamentarian, determines if the words are out of bounds and makes a ruling. The offending member may apologize or risk being reprimanded and losing floor privileges for the rest of that day’s session.

Since a record of incidents of words taken down can be found in the Congressional Record, it is possible to tabulate all the cases and attempt to draw conclusions from the numbers. The Annenberg study states that measuring the taking down process is “the most reliable measure of the institution’s own perception of breaches of decorum on the floor.”  It may be the most reliable, from the narrow standpoint of what we can count. But it is hardly the most revealing.

The Annenberg study counts things that tell us nothing about how incivility affects the governing process or legislative outcomes.  My objection to this study is that it is based on the assumption that civility can be measured by the number of times members of the House call one another names.  The definition of civility has to be more substantial than name calling.  Members who call one another names have still been able to work together and do their jobs as legislators. As Jim Leach, a former congressman and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities put it:  “Four-letter words may offend. But some of the politest conversations in public life can be the most uncivil.”

The heat of debate, the pressure of the moment, can get to the most civil of members. On the other hand, as the Annenberg study shows, the numbers of incidents of words taken down have been inflated by certain members  who don’t mind pushing the envelope. The most recent record holder for the number of times his words were taken down is former Pennsylvania congressman Robert Walker, a floor manager for Speaker Newt Gingrich, who took pride in not letting the Democrats get away with anything while he was on the floor.

One of the most famous incidents of words being taken down occurred in 1984 when I was on the Hill serving as House historian.  House proceedings were televised but under House rules the camera was allowed to focus only on the person speaking.  A number of House Republicans made reputations for themselves using “special orders,” a time after regular House business, where members could reserve time to speak from the floor for up to an hour on any topic. Newt Gingrich, Robert Walker, Trent Lott, Vin Weber, and others, often referred to as the “Young Turks” used televised special orders effectively and their success, while slow in coming, was no small part of the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party’s victory in 1994 that gave them the majority of the House for the first time in forty years.

On May 10, 1984, Speaker O’Neill was in his office watching special orders on the House television system. Robert Walker made comments and gestured as if the Democrats he was talking to were in the room.  O’Neill reacted by ordering the camera focused on Walker to pan the House chamber, which was empty. Walker was talking to himself and putting on a good act for television viewers. Speaker O’Neill later admitted he should have notified the Republican leadership in any change of policy on the use of cameras, but Republicans were naturally furious about O’Neill’s unilateral action.

A few days later, with tempers still on edge, Newt Gingrich, speaking on Central America during special orders, implied that Democrats were being disloyal to the country, and he referred specifically to Edward Boland of Massachusetts, O’Neill’s close friend, who was the leader in opposition to President Reagan’s attempts to fund contra rebels in Nicaragua.  Gingrich’s words met no opposition because the chamber was empty. On May 14, O’Neill made reference in the chamber to Gingrich’s characterizations of Democrats as “low” but no one objected. On May 15, Speaker O’Neill still angry, left the chair and spoke from the well of the House. Of Gingrich’s remarks, O’Neill said: “My personal opinion is this: You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people, and you challenged their Americanism, and it is the lowest thing I have ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

Trent Lott, prompted by senior Republican staff member, Billy Pitts, an expert on House rules, immediately objected to the Speaker’s language and demanded his words be taken down. The Parliamentarian determined that the Speaker’s use of “lowest” constituted inappropriate language and his words were taken down. This incident was clearly a case of incivility worthy of note. Gingrich and the Young Turks had bested the Speaker of the House. It put them on the map and moved them up in power and recognition as more than backbench partisans.  But who was being uncivil? Was it the Republican members who were pushing the envelope of decorum through the use of special orders, or was it Tip O’Neill for calling their tactics the lowest thing he had seen in 32 years in Congress? How do you count this if you are counting examples of incivility?  The context is more important than the technical issue of words taken down.

The Annenberg study concluded that for the most part Congress has operated in a civil manner based on the narrow study of counting the number of times words were taken down. The study noted spikes in incivility in the 104^th Congress, when Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the Democrats found themselves in the minority for the first time in their congressional careers. Anyone on the Hill during this transition could tell stories of tension and raw nerves. The Annenberg study notes an increase in incivility in the current 112^th Congress due in part to the fact that Republicans took over the chamber again and anytime there is a turnover of party majority tensions are higher.

It is time to put such studies as this on the shelf and come up with more comprehensive ways of measuring the ability of members of Congress to behave in a civil manner. As my example from Will Rogers suggests it is not just the words but the tone that can describe incivility. How many incidents have occurred where tempers flared, where rhetoric became heated, where members shook fingers at one another, where voices were raised in anger, yet no words were taken down? This kind of thing does not lend itself to easy counting and without a clean data set the political scientist is at a loss.

We need to explore the relationship between incivility and governance. The ability to govern should be the hallmark of how we gauge congressional performance. How well are the members upholding their oath to defend the Constitution and how well are they performing their duties under Article 1 of the Constitution? What happens when we elect members of Congress who are basically anti-government? This has been a trend since President Reagan declared that “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Members from previous generations had respect for Congress as a constitutional institution. They respected its traditions, mores, and rules. Polarized, highly-partisan members today are less interested in learning the rules and traditions. They too often see these as impediments rather than as tools for governing. Members can not only be uncivil to one another but to the very institution of Congress.

Congress can often appear to be dysfunctional if we approach it from a partisan point of view. If our particular agenda is not going through Congress we might conclude Congress is not doing its job. We all get impatient with the inefficiency of Congress. But we should recall that Congress was constitutionally designed to be inefficient even before the rise of our two-party system. Tip O’Neill used to say “If you want efficient government, get yourself a dictatorship.”

Congress becomes dysfunctional when it loses its inability to find ways to compromise on matters of governance and legislation. Filibusters and inaction alone are not necessarily signs of dysfunction. They may simply represent part of the political process. But shutting down the government  or threatening government shut-downs and consistently failing to pass regular appropriations bills is not governance, it is akin to  anarchy—the ultimate expression of  incivility. I put dysfunction at the top of my list of congressional concerns, not whether members are calling one another names more or less often than usual or that they engage in filibusters. Congress is the place where all the voices should be heard even if we don’t like what they are saying.  But at the end of the day, it is a branch of government that needs to govern not for partisan gain alone, not for the sake of some ideology, not to keep a seat in Congress, but to serve the American people, not just some of us, but all of us.

Bob Edgar Lectures at the Byrd Center

The 7th Annual Tom E. Moses Memorial Lecture on the U.S. Constitution, by Bob Edgar, delivered at the Robert C. Byrd Institute for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University.  Sept. 14, 2011, in honor of Constitution Day.
Click on the Audio Arrow below, left, to play.

]]> http://www.byrdcenter.org/index.php/2011/09/22/democracy-at-risk/feed/ 0 http://www.byrdcenter.org/index.php/2011/09/22/richard-dreyfuss-speaks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=richard-dreyfuss-speaks http://www.byrdcenter.org/index.php/2011/09/22/richard-dreyfuss-speaks/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:05:15 +0000 admin@byrdcenter http://www.byrdcenter.org/news/?p=84 Actor Richard Dreyfuss (American Graffiti, Jaws, The Goodbye Girl) spoke at the Byrd Center on the crafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 Philadelphia, and its importance today. Saturday September 17th was Constitution Day, and American History TV was live for this presentation. Richard Dreyfuss and The Dreyfuss Initiative promote civics in American schools.

See the video and learn more at C.SPAN.org