WAYNE L. MORSE (1900-1974)

Wayne Morse came to political life from academe: he had been a professor and dean of the University of Oregon Law School. One of the foremost arbitrators of labor disputes in the country, he had rendered distinguished service on the War Labor Board during World War II, but had resigned in protest over what he deemed an unwarranted preferential award to John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers. Earlier he had breathed in the passion of politics in the Wisconsin of “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, for he had been born near Madison and done his undergraduate work at the University there.

In 1944, despite his New Deal leanings, he was elected to the United State Senate as a Republican from Oregon. He was re-elected as a Republican in 1950, became an Independent in 1952, won re-election as a Democrat in 1956 and 1962, losing at last in 1968 to Republican Bob Packwood. All told, he served 24 years in the Senate without losing an election, a tribute to the constancy of the Oregon electorate and its prizing his independence.

Morse conceived his role to be “as a Senator from Oregon for the Nation.” Indeed, much of his legislative career focused on national and international issues. So varied and important were his contributions during this long career that one can only set forth some of the highlights. “A true liberal can’t limit himself to a few areas,” Morse once declared, “He must be on guard everywhere, ready to pounce on evil whenever it raises its ugly head.”

Opposing Taft-Hartley
Morse’s first major break with the leadership of his party came in 1947. Robert Taft of Ohio, the Senate Majority Leader, had set out to redress the balance of power between labor and employers, which, in his view, the Wagner Act had tipped too far in labor’s favor. Taft’s bill, which eventually emerged from Congress as the Taft-Hartley Labor Management Relations Act, loosened some of the restrictions on employers and outlawed certain union practices, such as jurisdictional strikes and secondary boycotts. Morse, an acknowledged expert in labor law, fought successfully in committee to blunt Taft’s measures, only to see the Leader, having the votes at his command, restore his provisions by amendment when the bill reached the floor. Morse only succeeded in salvaging labor’s right to industry-wide bargaining.

Gung Ho on Korea
On June 27, 1950, President Truman announced to Congress that he had ordered American forces to resist an unprovoked attack by Communist North Korea on South Korea. Although he did not ask for a declaration of war, Congress responded with overwhelming support, authorizing a one-year extension of the draft and call-up of reservists. Truman’s action, taken as commander-in chief of the armed forces, without a Congressional declaration of war, set a precedent that every American president has since followed, and that has become increasingly controversial. Morse, never doubting the need to repel the Communist aggression, enthusiastically supported the president, and that day delivered on the floor a statement that these days would warm the heart of George W. Bush:

Those of us who have studied constitutional law know that the so-called Commander-in-Chief powers of the President of the United States as referred to in the Constitution have yet to be defined fully in the decisions of the Supreme Court. In my opinion, they are very broad powers in time of emergency and national crisis.

He was to amend that opinion some years later, when American involvement in the Vietnam struggle evolved over time, rather than in response to a sudden crisis.

Facing up to McCarthy
The 1950s also saw Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin launch his wild-swinging campaign to rid the Administration, the State Department and the Army of the Communists that he charged had infiltrated them. With most of the country and his fellow Senators cowed into silence by the climate of fear that McCarthy had stirred up, Morse joined Margaret Chase Smith of Maine in being first to boldly challenge his reckless tactics, and to do so in the Senate, the fount and cover of his frightening power. In a powerful speech on the floor in support of her Declaration of Conscience, which he had signed, he thundered, “I’m still waiting for the first case which Senator McCarthy can establish his burden of proof. I want proof – not accusations; I want proof, not smear: I want proof – not character assassination.” That early challenge was to lead over time to Senate censure of McCarthy and to his downfall. Early in his 2005 film, Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney has Murrow’s CBS staffers, in a program conference, note that Morse is to speak on McCarthy in the Senate the next day.

One for the Books
Morse was a believer in filibusters to delay, rather than thwart, action by the Senate, to assure that the public has time to pay attention to important matters and make their thoughts known to their Senators. So, in April 1953, he gave the longest continuous speech in the history of the Senate, 22 hours and 26 minutes, in a futile attempt to prevent passage of a bill, favored by the Republican Administration, to transfer to the coastal states title to their tideland waters. The point was to permit these states, principally California, Texas and Louisiana, to open the waters to offshore oil drilling. Morse opposed giving to the coastal states a resource that he felt belonged to all. But on May 6th, after five weeks of debate, the Senate passed the bill, 56-35, without significant modification.

At the United Nations
In 1960, now a Democrat, Morse was at low ebb politically and temperamentally, having suffered a discouraging response to his intimation that he might seek the presidency. At this low point, President Eisenhower, whom he’d attacked time and again, threw him a lifeline, to the bewilderment of all: appointment as the Democratic Congressional delegate to the United Nations. Morse was now a minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, by custom of seniority in line for the appointment, but Eisenhower could have by-passed him. Morse regarded the appointment as “probably the greatest honor and opportunity for public service that has come to me since I have been in the Senate.” But he soon became disillusioned. He chafed at having to speak and vote as instructed by the State Department, despite reservations that he might harbor. So he sought – unsuccessfully – the right for the UN ambassador to appeal unwelcome instructions directly to the President. Free to write frankly in his final report to the Senate, he set down his reservations about the influence of the military on foreign policy:

Our policy makers in the Pentagon Building are not sufficiently sensitive about the politics and practices of some of the colonial powers in respect to human rights of the indigenous people whom they rule and dominate. In the name of military defense, the United States has spent huge sums of money for bases and military installations in dictator countries, resulting in great economic benefit to colonial powers and dictatorships. It is very doubtful that the over-all effect of many of these military installations has been to strengthen the security of the United States … The Department of State has seemed to lack the necessary disposition either to question the military need for such requirements or to balance their importance properly against other policy objectives. Once the Joint Chiefs of Staff have spoken, that tends to end the discussion.

The report had little impact on the Senators or the Administration of his day, but it is in the records and lies ready to hand to inspire latter-day Senators concerned at the proliferation of American military installations throughout the globe; perhaps the Pentagon still exercises the powerful influence over American foreign policy that troubled Morse so many years ago.

Aiding Education
Morse’s greatest positive achievement was his guiding into law in 1961 the first federal aid to education act since World War II. As chairman of the subcommittee on education of the Senate Committee on Labor and Education, he sheparded the bill through the Senate, deftly turning aside proposed amendments to provide loans to private schools and that would have prevented withholding funds from states that practiced segregation, amendments that could have sunk the bill. The Senate passed the bill 49-34, only to have it stymied by the House Rules Committee, then rescued by President Lyndon Johnson’s intervention with House leaders. Morse received kudos for his role in its passage.

Against the Vietnam War
Morse is, of course, best remembered for his implacable opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. His U.N. experience had made him wary of the United States siding with colonial powers in their relations with their dependent peoples, and as early as 1961 he began to speak against the Administration sending military advisers to the South Vietnamese government that the French, the former colonial power, had abandoned. As U.S. involvement escalated, so did Morse’s vocal opposition. He and Ernest Gruening of Alaska called for the Vietnamese dispute to be referred to the U.N. As American military presence in Southeast Asia increased, Morse, in a July 1964 speech, stated his belief that the Administration would soon need “an incident” to justify that presence. The Gulf of Tonkin incident provided the pretext, if not the justification. The Joint Resolution of August 7, 1964, authorized the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.” Morse and Gruening were the only two Senators to vote against it.

Morse continued to stump the country, condemning our involvement in the war, giving aid and comfort to the growing opposition in the country until the humiliating denouement. Biographer Anna Kasten Nelson has written that “His entire career seemed to have been preparation for his stance in this wrenching turning point in American history.”

Denouement
Morse had no illusions about his role in the Senate: “I know my place in politics. I am a political irritant.” But, as biographer F. Ross Peterson described him, “no muzzle could restrain him from speaking his mind. The mustachioed Morse searched for truth at the expense of his own popularity, guided by an unequivocal conscience and integrity; candor and honesty were the result.” The Nation called him one of history’s great senators, adding that “Few men in public life in our time have served the best interest of the American people with more courage, intelligence, consistency and distinction.”

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ROBERT M. LaFOLLETTE (1855-1925)

LaFollette, a.k.a. “Fighting Bob”, an austere man with an earnest, determined face, a mane of white hair, and a compact powerful body, was first on the scene. Elected to the U. S. Senate in 1905 as a Republican from Wisconsin, he had already established in that state as Governor a regime of cutting-edge progressivism. His progressivism, however, did not endear him to his Republican colleagues. As political scientist Frederic A. Ogg has noted, “he found himself obliged to play a lone hand until, in the course of a few years, he drew round himself a group of eight or ten colleagues willing to be known as ‘progressives’.” Among these was Norris, as soon as he was elected to the Senate.

Promoting Popular Participation
In January 1911, LaFollette and a group of Senators and Representatives of progressive bent, meeting in his home in Washington, associated themselves in a National Progressive Republican League and adopted a Declaration of Principles drafted by him for “the promotion of popular government and progressive legislation.” To open up the electoral and legislative processes to greater popular participation, the League advocated:

1. The election of United States Senators by direct vote of the people.
   
2. Direct primaries for the nomination of elective officials.
   
3. The direct election of delegates to national conventions with opportunity for the voter to express choices for President and Vice-President.
   
4. Amendments to state constitutions providing for the Initiative, Referendum and Recall.
   
5. A thoroughgoing corrupt practices act.

The influence of these objectives on American political life at both the national and state levels has been enormous over the years; whether for good or ill is still the subject of debate. We now vote directly for our U.S. senators without a thought that until 1913 and the ratification of the 17th Amendment it was the state legislators who elected them. Recently, California and the nation witnessed the recall of a sitting governor and his replacement by a political neophyte, Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Opposing World War I
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, surprising and shocking most Americans, the mood of the country was that it was no affair of ours. The Wilson administration declared our neutrality and, indeed, actively sought to bring the warring nations to a peace conference. But the British blockade of the Central Powers and Germany’s retaliations with submarine warfare against shipping heading for Britain and France created diplomatic difficulties for the United States with both sides, but mostly with Germany as the war went on. Public sentiment toward the belligerents, which had been divided in the early years – substantial German and Irish populations here did not favor the Allied Powers – began to swing to those powers as the toll of the U-boat sinking of vessels sailing under the stars-and-stripes began to mount, as did the numbers of Americans drowned in sinkings under diverse flags.

From the start, LaFollette and a small group of Senators, including Norris, viewed the war as a struggle between colonial empires in which the United States had no stake, except, perhaps, as the war went on, the huge loans which our bankers were making to the Allied Powers. They clung to these views even as the mood of the country was swinging angrily against the Central Powers, particularly after Germany in January 1917 announced that it was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships, enemy or neutral, in a broad zone around the Allied countries.

When President Wilson, in 1917, asked Congress to pass a bill for the arming of our merchant ships against the U-boat menace, LaFollette and Norris mounted a filibuster against it as too provocative a measure. The insurgents talked it to death as the Congress reached its mandated end on March 4th. For this act of defiance, Wilson branded them “a little group of willful men”. The sinkings went on, however, and on April 6th, the new Congress, responding to Wilson’s message, declared war on Germany. The “little group of willful men” voted Nay, risking ostracism from their colleagues, vilification in the press and by the public, and loss of their seats. In the event, LaFollette’s constituents re-elected him in 1923.

Tariffs and Trade
LaFollette served during a period when business and industry were powerfully influencing legislation and were particularly hostile to the progressive programs that LaFollette espoused. In consequence, much of his effort in the Senate was expressed in opposition to administration bills. In the administration of William Howard Taft, with Republicans in control of Congress, he fought stubbornly, somewhat inconsistently, and unsuccessfully, first, against the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill as protective (Taft had called a special session to lower rates!), raising rates to benefit big business, and later, against a reciprocal trade agreement with Canada, because he believed that each would unfairly hurt Midwestern farmers. Proclaimed LaFollette, the Canadian treaty “singles out the farmer and forces free trade upon him, but it confers even greater benefits upon a few of the great combinations sheltered behind the Payne-Aldrich tariff.”

He was conspicuously, and successfully, in support of laws curing the excesses of the railroads and banks, ameliorating the burdens borne by labor. He was instrumental in creating the Department of Labor, the Federal Trade Commission and the Farm Loan Administration. An important bill in aid of legislators that he sponsored was the establishment of a legislative reference division of the Library of Congress.

Lifting the Teapot Lid
In 1923 LaFollette introduced the resolution that led to the Senate investigation and exposure of the Teapot Dome scandal, the conviction of a Secretary of the Interior for accepting bribes, and ultimately to the dismissal of an Attorney General. The investigation disclosed that Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall had persuaded President Harding to transfer from the Naval Department to his Department naval oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, which Fall had then leased secretly to oilmen Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny. The investigation disclosed that Sinclair and Doheny had each made a six digit loan to Fall, and that Sinclair had given him a herd of cattle for his ranch. President Coolidge, who had assumed office on Harding’s death, then demanded the resignation of Harry Daugherty, the Attorney General, for having failed to prosecute the miscreants.

For his role in Congress, and particularly in the breaking of the Teapot Dome scandal, LaFollette became a significant character in Gore Vidal’s 1991 novel Hollywood, which, despite its somewhat misleading title, is quite as much about Washington politics of the early 20th century as about the fledgling movie industry.

Progressive Party Campaign
LaFollette so chafed under the domination of the Republican Party during the Harding-Coolidge years that he bolted the Party in 1924 and ran for President on a Progressive Party ticket on a platform that anticipated several measures later to be enacted in FDR’s New Deal. He chose Burton Wheeler, a Democrat, as his running mate. The ticket received over 4,800,000 votes, 16.5% of the popular vote, but won only Wisconsin’s 13 electoral votes. For this heresy, the Republicans banished him from their caucus, depriving him of any significant committee assignments.

Denouement
Exhausted, burned out, and ill, “Fighting Bob” died on June 18, 1925, bringing to an end a 40-year career dedicated to public service. When his portrait was unveiled in the Senate lounge in 1957 (along with those of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Robert A. Taft), then Senator John F. Kennedy described him as “a ceaseless battler for the underprivileged in an age of special privilege, a courageous independent in an age of conformity, who fought memorably against tremendous odds and stifling inertia for the social and economic reforms which ultimately proved essential to American progress in the 20th Century.”

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