By Edwin Cooney
Of course I was as surprised as the most sophisticated and “in the know” political pundit was last week with the defeat of GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia’s seventh congressional district Republican primary! After all, voters are sometimes fickle and political incumbents are sometimes complacent. Still, surprise, surprise, despite the almost automatic re-election of congressional incumbents, there’s nothing new about the unseating of political “big shots!” There may even be nothing particularly meaningful in the Cantor debacle!
There are generally three reasons why incumbents lose. They are: incumbent complacency, voter fickleness, or changing political districts dictated by shifting doctrinaire politics. Of course everyone is sure that the Cantor loss is due to a shift rightward in political trends, but of course only time will tell. Meanwhile, let’s have a little fun wallowing in history.
Eric Cantor was the GOP House Majority Leader which means he was the second highest-ranking Republican in the House to Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. Although Cantor’s defeat marks the first time a House Majority Leader has been defeated since the position was created in 1899, congressional elections have historically fried “bigger fish.”
Just twenty short years ago, Speaker of the House Tom Foley of Washington lost his seat in the 1994 Republican political landslide. Most analysts concluded that the amiable Foley was a victim of the GOP’s celebrated “Contract with America.” President Clinton however attributed Foley’s loss to Foley’s support of the anti-assault weapons bill. Some of Foley’s constituents reportedly believed that Foley’s opponent would automatically become House Speaker by virtue of his defeat of the incumbent Speaker. Foley was the first Speaker to lose his congressional seat since 1862. In that year incumbent Speaker Galusha Aaron Grow of Pennsylvania lost his House seat. Grow was quite a character! I’ll save part of his story for later as it’s too beautiful to leave out.
In 1980, three Democratic movers and shakers lost their seats—in the Senate no less. The losers that year were Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Frank Church of Idaho, prominent Judiciary subcommittee chairman Birch Bayh of Indiana, and the biggest catch for the Republicans, former Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern of South Dakota. The Republicans captured both the Senate and the White House. Hence the common assessment was that the Reagan victory had political “coattails.” (Note: Birch Bayh’s defeat brought to prominence James Danforth Quayle for the glory of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988!) Was 1980 a trendsetter? Well, perhaps, but it was only a six year “trendsetter.” By the January 1987 opening of the nation’s 100th Congress, both houses of Congress were back in Democratic hands for the next six years.
In 1974, Arkansas Democratic voters retired 30-year Senate veteran J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Father of the Fulbright scholarship, in favor of political novice Dale Bumpers. “In the know” political sophisticates suggested that Fulbright’s loss was primarily due to his having grown too important for his “hillbilly” constituents and too comfortable rubbing shoulders with leftist internationalists. (Note: as “elitist” as Fulbright had supposedly become, he was still a hell-of-a “hoedown” square dance fiddler!)
In 1972, liberal House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler was upset in the Democratic primary by Elizabeth Holtzman, which many considered a generational change more than anything else as Holtzman was more liberal than Celler. (Note: Had Celler not lost to Holtzman, he and not New Jersey’s Peter Rodino would have chaired the House Judiciary Committee during the 1974 impeachment proceedings of President Richard M. Nixon.) Finally, in the 1952 general election, Democratic Majority Leader Ernest McFarland was defeated for re-election to his Senate seat by a young “fire brand” named Barry Morris Goldwater. Was Goldwater elected merely because Ike headed the GOP national ticket, or did Arizona simply fall in love with Barry? In 1958, Arizonans gave Goldwater a much larger victory when Ike wasn’t on the ballot and was in fact down in the polls due to nervousness over the Russians’ launch of Sputnik the autumn before. An even greater puzzle is the fact that “Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater barely won election to the United States Senate during the 1980 Reagan landslide. He was only saved from defeat by Arizona businessman Bill Schulz when absentee votes put him over the top the day after the Reagan victory.
Galusha Aaron Grow (christened Aaron Galusha Grow) was originally a Democrat. The most prominent events of his political career did indeed reflect the time in which he represented Pennsylvania’s 14th district. He switched parties in the mid 1850s when President (Handsome Frank) Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas Nebraska bill. That act, which opened the possibility of slavery advancing into the North through the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” brought many northern anti-slavery Democrats scrambling into the new Republican Party. Even more fascinating is the brawl he helped bring about on the floor of the House of Representatives. The date was Friday, February 5th, 1858. During one of those inevitable debates over “bleeding Kansas” between Northerners and Southerners, Grow was attacked on the floor of the House by South Carolina Representative Laurence M. Keitt when he stepped over onto the Democratic side of the aisle. Called “a black Republican Puppy” by Congressman Keitt, Grow responded that he wasn’t going to be shoved around “by the crack of a Negro slave driver’s whip.” Keitt shouted that he’d choke the life out of Grow, and a fifty-man brawl between northerners and southerners was under way on the floor of the House of Representatives. The brawl ended when Wisconsin GOP Representative Cadwallader Washburn took a swing at Mississippi Democratic Representative William Barksdale knocking his wig to the floor. While hurriedly replacing the wig Barksdale put it on backward causing legislators on both sides of the aisle to break up laughing which ended the donnybrook!
The Grow-Keitt brawl unfortunately did reflect the times. Violence had occurred at least once before in Congress. On Thursday, May 22nd, 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina strolled over to the Senate floor where Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was working at his desk. Brandishing a thick gutta-percha cane with a gold head, Brooks proceeded to brutally beat Senator Sumner in retaliation for an insult made to Brooks’ uncle, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler during an anti-slavery speech made by Sumner two days earlier. With his sight blinded by his own blood, Sumner struggled to his feet proceeding down the Senate floor pursued by Butler who continued to beat him. Sumner finally collapsed and Brooks continued to beat his prostrate body until his cane finally broke. Throughout the beating Brooks was covered by a South Carolina colleague who kept Senators coming to Sumner’s rescue at bay by brandishing a pistol and shouting “Let ‘em be. Let ‘em be.” You guessed it, that man was Laurence M Keitt who attacked Grow two years later. Both Brooks and Keitt would be censured by the House, resign from Congress and be overwhelmingly re-elected by defiant constituents. Brooks would be criminally convicted of the attack and fined $300.00 although not jailed. Brooks would unexpectedly die of the croup on Tuesday, January 27th, 1857. He was only 37 years old. (Both Brooks and Keitt were violent men. Brooks was expelled from the University of South Carolina before graduation for threatening local police with firearms. Keitt would die by violence on Thursday, June 2nd, 1864 at the battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia.)
So, we come full circle to the question of the relationship of elected public officials with their constituents. What does their election or rejection mean? Under what circumstances can we judge the significance of their relationship?
Eric Cantor was vanquished by less than 10 percent of the 760,000 eligible voters of his district. He’s been replaced as GOP Majority Leader by a more moderate conservative Kevin McCarthy of California. Meanwhile, his House seat is expected to be filled by David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph and Macon College, a truer or, if you prefer, a redder Tea Partier than Cantor. (Note: no one at this point gives Brat’s Democratic opponent Jack Trammell, a sociology professor at the same school, much of a chance in that most conservative of congressional districts.)
Still, one just never knows! By all means, let’s keep watching! American history is so very rich with the unpredictable, isn’t it!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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