"Uncle Joe" Cannon, Speaker of the House
November 16, 2010 at 5:05 pm | Posted in George W. Norris, John Boehner, Joseph G. Cannon, Nancy Pelosi, Progressive Movement, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft | Leave a commentThese days, watching Nancy Pelosi and her bloodied, defeated Democrats in the US Congress prepare to surrender power to presumptive Speaker John Boehner and his new Republican majority, I can’t help but think of Joseph G. Cannon.
Joe Cannon (R-Illinois) — everyone called him “Uncle Joe” — presided as Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911, the height of Theodore Roosevelt’s era. When he left Congress in March 1923, he had served almost fifty years and been elected twenty-two times, a record back then. Time Magazine that month put his face on the cover of its first-ever edition. Tall, lanky, and outgoing, always a cigar in his teeth, quick with an off-color joke, a back-slapping poker player, Cannon received 58 votes for president of the United States at the 1908 Republican Convention and had his picture on two different brands of chewing tobacco. Above is a newspaper sketch of him from his glory days.
In most history books, Cannon is cast usually as villain, the arch-conservative on Capitol Hill who routinely blocked TR’s progressive ideas, “the vulgar old man who rules the National house” by one Chicago newspaper.
But Joe Cannon, the most autocratic leader ever to assume a chokehold over the National Legislature, also has the distinction of being the only House Speaker ever to be overthrown by his own members in open revolt, to his face, in public session. It was a rare public rebuke, and a signature victory for the then-rising Progressive Movement. Their anti-Cannon revolt, launched in March 1910 and led by young Nebraska congressman and future senator George W. Norris, played out in full public view, an unprecedented spectacle on the floor of Congress, a three-day parliamentary seige during which Cannon had to filibuster from the Speaker’s chair just to be heard. In the end, Norris and his Progressives succeeded in bringing down not just Cannon but also Republican President Willam Howard Taft and a generation of Washington oligarchs. (The snapshot below shows Cannon and Taft, in top hat, shortly before their respective defeats.)
The lesson for Nancy Pelosi and company, however, is not in Cannon’s defeat, but in his comeback. Joe Cannon was 74 years old at the time he was outsted from the Speaker’s chair in 1910. But rather then stewing in bitterness or self-doubt, he jumped right back into action. Cannon’s Illinois neighbors voted him back into Congress in 1914 where Cannon quickly rebuilt his friendships and reputation. He reinvented himself as elder statesman. And when time came for Congress to put names on its three House Office Buildings in Washington, D.C., they picked Cannon’s immediately.
So don’t fret, Democrats. Yes, there are second acts in American life, thanks in part to Uncle Joe. The pendulum will swing back. There will be another day.
A different view of FDR
February 21, 2009 at 2:56 pm | Posted in Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, Woodrow Wilson | Leave a commentLouis Brandeis on "Too Big to Fail"
February 18, 2009 at 3:17 pm | Posted in Chrysler, General Motors, J.P. Morgan, Louis Brandeis, Theodore Roosevelt | Leave a commentBefore joining the Supreme Court in 1916, Louis Brandeis, one of the true great minds of Twentieth Century America, wrote a wonderful rant against the big money powers of his time called Other People’s Money: And How the Bankers Use It. In it, Brandeis described what he called the “Curse of Bigness,” which was his way of describing the big monopolistic banks, railroads, and steel companies that threw their muscle around back then to intimidate Washington, Main Street, and the public. “Size, we are told, is not a crime,” Brandeis wrote. “But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it is attained or the uses to which it is put.”
Brandeis’s book became a big seller in 1913. It earned him the lasting hatred of Wall Street tycoons like J. P. Morgan, but it also helped create public demand for a Federal Reserve System. Brandeis’s political hero was Theodore Roosevelt, who as President happily used the new Antitrust Laws to fight “bigness” by busting trusts when he saw fit.
Today, in our modern fiscal collapse, Brandeis’s “curse of bigness” has come back to haunt us under the guise of a new doctrine: Too Big to Fail. We now see a dizzying, growing list of malefactors hiding behind its skirts:
Wall Street banks are too big to fail;
Main Street banks are too big to fail;
Detroit automakers are too big to fail;
The $700 billion bailout package was too big to fail;
The drug-taking third baseman for the Yankees is too big to fail.
Who’s next? What’s next? What kind of monster have we created?
Louis Brandeis got it right back in 1913. Bigness can be a curse, and we are paying for it now. What ever happened to the Antitrust laws? They made perfect sense to Theodore Roosevelt. Maybe it’s time to bring them back.
Repeal TARP !!
January 30, 2009 at 2:35 am | Posted in Banks, Henry Paulsen, TARP, Theodore Roosevelt, Troubled Asset Relief Program | Leave a comment
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