Being unable – or rather unwilling – to offer a counterpoint to Senator Hill’s and Senator Eastland’s claims of ignorance as to the damage being daily wrought by the existence of poll taxes in their states, Spessard Holland accordingly remained silent and allowed the two of them to maintain the floor as the Senate debate of March 15th wore onward into the evening. The result was an extended monologue on the part of the ever-persistent Hill that stretches across several pages of the aforementioned Congressional Record. The substance of this monologue is substantially unimportant. The Alabaman was not really trying to use his words to make a particular point. Rather, he was trying to use them simply to take up space. It was a filibuster, in essence, if rather a short one that was doomed to failure. Holland, as noted previously, already had the sixty votes he needed. All that his opponents could really do, in consequence, was try to draw the thing out in the hope of possibly changing a few minds. Holland could have stopped him, of course, by invoking cloture and proceeding to a vote. But for whatever reason, he didn’t. And so Hill spoke, at length, about the history of poll taxes, and about property qualifications, and about how voting was not really a right. And then he segued, somewhat awkwardly, into a needlessly precise recounting of the Philadelphia Convention (1787). The words “sovereign” and “sovereignty” were very much in evidence. He began recounting specific motions. He quoted liberally from various debates. He flashed forward to the 1860s, and the 1910s, and the 1940s. He went on, and on, and on, and on. And in spite of speaking at such great length, he ultimately ended up saying very little.
This should not be taken to mean that certain of the things Hill did say were not revealing in themselves. For example, his invocation, at one stage, of “a right which is the most sacred right, perhaps, possessed by any American citizen-the right to the ballot” rather seemed to fly in the face of his earlier assertion – along with Eastland – that “voting [is] a privilege and not a right, and a privilege which can be restricted or denied [.]” How was it that a right considered to be “the most sacred” could also be restricted or denied? Were the words “right” and privilege” interchangeable in Hill’s mind? In effect, they seemed to be, to the extent that it sometimes suited his purposes to use one to the exclusion of the other. When attempting to justify the levying of poll taxes, voting was privilege that could be granted conditionally or even withheld. And when discussing the sovereign authority which the states supposedly held over the limits and parameters of the franchise, voting was a right of greater value than any an American could claim to possess. Doubtless, this inconsistency was not by design. That is to say, Hill did not intend to draw attention to his erratic use of terminology. Rather, he was simply making a series of discreet rhetorical choices. The effect he sought to achieve dictated the particular word he would ultimately deploy. Evidence, one might argue, of a somewhat less than coherent vision based more on self-interest and persuasion than upholding a particular principle.
What also becomes quite clear as one sifts through Hill’s avalanche of quotations and encomiums is that he, like so many American statesmen before and after him, tended to think about the Founding Generation as though they were infallible demigods whose every word and deed possessed the weight and significance of scripture. It’s a common enough affliction, to be sure, but one which never ceases to be of concern when it makes itself known in those possessed of significant institutional power. In his mind, it seemed, the Framers were not just very wise, or very thoughtful, or very intelligent, or very decisive. On the contrary, they were the most “distinguished lawyers and students of government” and the most “capable political draftsmen” that could have been found “at that time in all the world” or “today or at any other time in all the world [.]” “Where could a more brilliant galaxy of stars in the field of statesmanship be found [,]” he went on to say, “than these great lawyers, students of the philosophy of government, students of human nature, men of commonsense and wisdom […] ?” For someone whose job it is to ensure that the government of which they are an officer continues to function in a way that is responsive to the changing needs and intentions of its constituents, such fawning admiration for the authors of the same would seem liable to result in the formation of a dangerously proscriptive attitude.
At the time that Senator Hill spoke these words, almost two hundred years had transpired since the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and the initial formation of the United States of America. It would be fair to say, in consequence, that the country which existed under that name in 1962 bore only a partial resemblance to that which first coalesced in the 1770s and 1780s. War, economic depression, internal and external migration, and at least two industrial revolutions – among other things – had served to transform nearly every aspect of American society, the priorities of the average citizen far from the least among them. And the government of the United States had remained substantially responsive all the while. Laws changed, the role of government changed, even the Constitution changed. Or rather, they were changed. Generations of American statesmen, in keeping with the needs and desires of their many and various constituents, steadily altered and expanded the essential functions and definitions of the federal government and the state governments. And so it was that even the vaunted Constitution – that most venerable and unchanging of the world’s fundamental governing charters – had been altered, as of the early 1960s, a fully twenty-three times. Was this fact symbolic of some failing on the part of the Framers? Were the men and women responsible guilty of abandoning the wisdom of their forebears? Of course not. People change, both as individuals and as a community, and the governments that serve them must also change in step. This is good and this is natural. This is the way it’s supposed to work.
This is also why the attitude displayed by Senator Hill during his aforementioned monologue was such a fundamentally distressing one. Whether he truly believed it or not – and one can reasonably conclude from his general approach to debate that he tended to believe whatever suited him in the moment – what the Alabaman was essentially saying was that the Framers were not to be questioned, under any circumstances, ever. Might they have come to some potentially uninformed conclusions during the drafting the United States Constitution? Was it possible that certain of their theories had not been borne out by experience? Could the passage of nearly two centuries have simply rendered some of their ideas obsolete? Hill’s answer to these questions, seemingly, was “no,” “no,” and “never.” As far as he was concerned – at least at this moment in time – the framework of government hashed out by the Framers simply wouldn’t tolerate scrutiny. They were perfect, it was perfect, and those who said or thought anything to the contrary were guilty of an unforgiveable betrayal.
It was a patently ridiculous attitude, of course, and one which flew in the face of logic as well as experience. Not only do the powers and dimensions of government need to change periodically in order to prevent them from becoming needlessly and self-destructively restrictive, but the United States government had been changed many times over the course of its lengthy history. The authority of its various branches had waxed and waned in response to the particular needs of the moment while its basic parameters and scope had undertaken a process of slow but steady evolution. Hill had witnessed this himself over the course of his life and career. At the time of his birth in 1894, there were no income taxes at the federal level, no direct election of senators, no federal suffrage for women, and no Electoral Votes for the District of Columbia. The federal government was much less involved in the daily lives of the American people and the office of President of the United States was in something of a trough in terms of its relative power and prestige. But through war and economic uncertainty, generation after generation, he’d seen the United States transformed. Since joining the Senate in the late 1930s, he’d even been a part of its transformation himself. And yet, despite the evidence of his own senses and his own experiences, J. Lister Hill could find it in himself to claim that the Framers had got it right the first time. That change, fundamentally, was bad.
This mindset even seemed to extend, unfortunately, to opinions rendered by certain of the Framers while in the process of accomplishing great deeds. That is to say, it wasn’t just the Constitution as originally drafted to which Hill believed his countrymen ought to bind themselves, but also the various remarks that were made by its authors in the act of drafting. He quoted Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), for example – a delegate from the State of Connecticut – as having avowed during the Philadelphia Convention, that “The states are the best judges of the circumstances and temper of their own people.” As far as Hill was concerned, this simple phrase in itself was the very soul of wisdom. “Note that language [,]” he pointedly remarked.
The States - the people back home,
the people who gather in the State capitals, the people who go to the ballot
boxes back in the hamlets, the communities, and the crossroads - “are the best
judges of the circumstances and temper of their own people.” Would anyone
dispute that today?
Within the larger
context of Hill’s obvious regard for the Framers, that final question seemed
posed as though it was some kind of dare. In effect, he was defying anyone
among his colleagues in the Senate to rise and speak against the wisdom of one
of the hallowed Framers of the Constitution. Ellsworth’s word, in itself, was
not law, of course. He was certainly a wise man, for his time, and a
talented lawyer and jurist, so much so that he eventually became Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court. But he was just a man. Among his fellow delegates
to the Philadelphia Convention, he spoke his opinion, his vote was counted, and
the result was what it was. His words were not special any more than
were those of his colleagues. Oliver Ellsworth said one thing, Maryland’s
Luther Martin (1748-1826) said another, and Pennsylvania’s James Wilson
(1742-1798) yet a third. What if these men – or indeed any group among the
Framers – disagreed with one another on some fundamental point? Whose word is
sacrosanct? All of them? None of them? Or just the one that seems most
agreeable?
The inability of anyone to answer
these questions in a way that doesn’t quickly devolve into an ideological
litmus test is precisely the reason that Hill’s treatment of the Framers makes
so little sense. It is one thing to hold to the letter of the Constitution. It
is, whatever its flaws, the nation’s fundamental governing charter and the
supreme law of the land. And as the product of generations of collective
contemplation and debate, its various clauses should be implemented attentively
and alterations to the same considered carefully. But the words of the Framers,
even when spoken during the process of framing said document, should not –
cannot – be treated with the same strict approbation. Not only do the words of
an individual Framer not represent the collective wisdom of the whole cohort –
least of all those who actively disagreed with him – but they were also never
intended to take on a force and power of their own. The Virginia delegate James
Madison (1751-1836) endeavored to record the Convention debates, not for the
purpose of creating a supplementary set of strictures to which subsequent
generations would hold themselves to account, but for the purpose of allowing
those not present to understand how and why the Constitution
ultimately took the shape that it did. They were supposed to be illuminating,
to provide insight, to broaden perspective. They were not supposed to be thrown
around as though they had the weight of law.
That Senator Hill felt otherwise is
made quite clear from the substance of his lengthy oration of March 15th,
the result of which is a series of assertions that are internally inconsistent
and even nonsensical. At one point, for example, he avowed that,
The men who sat in the Convention,
who engaged in the debates in the Convention, who engaged in the actual
drafting of the Constitution, knew best of all, knew far better than any who
should come after them, what their intent and purposes were in writing the
Constitution.
A reasonable enough
contention in itself, even excepting the existence of Madison’s aforementioned Notes
of Debates in the Federal Convention. But then, later in the same speech,
Hill went on to say – speaking about the various state ratifying conventions –
that,
The meaning of section 2 of article I
was so clear that the question was not even raised in the conventions of Rhode
Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia; and, so far as the reports show, in
New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Maryland no question was raised about the
section. It was so clear that even a fourth grade school child on reading it
would know what it meant.
So which was it,
then? Did the Framers know “best of all […] far better than any who should come
after them, what their intent and purposes were in writing the Constitution” or
was the meaning of the Constitution so obvious that “even a fourth grade school
child on reading it would know what it meant [?]” Was the Constitution
inscribed in the firmament itself by a race of demigods whose motivations were
patently divine and also inscrutable to mere mortals, or was it possible for a
schoolchild to understand its purpose at a glance? Hill did not intend for
anyone listening to try to answer this question, of course. He was not trying
to pose questions. He was trying to establish the veracity of a feeling.
That being, in essence, that the Framers and their works were fundamentally
perfect.
By way of a parting word on the
subject of Hill’s pseudo-filibuster of March 15th – the discussion
of which, though it has admittedly been rather lengthy, still pales in
comparison to the duration of the speech itself – consider the following
assertion as a kind of case in point as to Hill’s position. Speaking, once
again, on the subject of the Framers’ supposed intentions, Hill asked his
fellow senators,
What would it have availed the people
to break the tyranny of the British Crown, had they, themselves, set up here in
Washington a government with central arbitrary power? They were determined,
after all the sacrifices they had made, and all their bitter sufferings, to
reserve the power in their own hands. I repeat that in order to do this, they
knew they had to maintain the sovereignty of the States, because within the
States - and within the States alone - are the citadels of governmental power.
It should be fairly
obvious where this assertion as to the intentions of the Framers falls down. If
the sum total of what that group of statesmen intended to do was “reserve the
power in their own hands” and “maintain the sovereignty of the States [,]” why
is it that their most famous collective achievement was the creation of an
empowered national government? The states, in the 1780s, were already
fully sovereign. The Articles of Confederation bound them together only
loosely, the result being a government quite incapable of asserting what
limited authority it could claim to possess on paper. This being the case – and
the maintenance of state sovereignty being, according to Senator Hill, the primary
objective of the Framers – one is accordingly forced to ask why it was that the
Philadelphia Convention took place at all if not for the purpose of achieving
some other objective?
The reason that Hill’s statement on
the matter doesn’t seem to make sense, of course, is that the senator from
Alabama was not arguing about the intentions of the Framers in good faith. The
Framers became “framers” by coming together and putting quill to
parchment. They understood – if not always in the same way – that there were
some things which their individual states simply could not accomplish and which
their existing national government simply could not achieve. It was for this
reason that they gathered, for this reason that they debated, and for this
reason that they ultimately submitted the product of the efforts to the
scrutiny of their fellow Americans. Were it otherwise – were they truly of the
opinion that “they had to maintain the sovereignty of the States” – they might
have saved themselves a great deal of trouble and simply stayed home. The fact
that they didn’t – the fact that they met, and debated, and ultimately produced
a new government charter – arguably points to what it was Hill was trying to
achieve. He was, after all, a
conservative. And as a conservative, it behooved him to try to paint a
conservative picture of the Framers and the Constitution.
Americans of every generation and every political stripe imaginable have tried to claim that their own political position possesses the sanction of the Founders. They seek to impute the existence of precedent for their own beliefs and to imply that disagreement with the same entails a rejection of what is most sacred. Such is the nature of the nation’s founding mythology. It can be extremely powerful when invoked in the right way. And so it is that everyone wants a piece of it for themselves. J. Lister Hill was no different. He believed – for good reasons or bad – that within the frame of government described by the Constitution, the individual states remained the primary receptacles of sovereign power. Indeed, the states, to his thinking, created the Constitution, and certainly would not have done so if it meant weakening their own authority in the areas of law and policy that mattered most. Like any good American, Hill sought proof of this conviction. And like any good American, he turned to the words and deeds of the Framers. These men, it’d been well recorded, were often deeply suspicious of excessive centralization. Their loyalties lay with their home states more often than with the nation itself, and their attempt to craft a new frame of government for the latter very much carried the stamp of this somewhat parochial turn of mind. So it was that Hill believed he was entirely justified in his various assertions. The Framers had been eager to protect the sovereignty of the various states they called home, both out of a sense of loyalty and as a check against the power of the central government they were seeking to create. They’d also made a point of delimiting the specific powers to be possessed by each, and ensured – if somewhat belatedly – that those not specified fell to the states. Did this not make them, in effect, conservative? Were they not seeking, fundamentally, to preserve the essential sovereignty claimed by each of the states since they’d been founded as colonies under charter from the Crown? Hill, one can be sure, would have answered vehemently in the affirmative.
The problem with this stance, of course, is that it ignores a great deal of contradictory evidence. To be sure, the Framers were deeply suspicious of central authority as a group. But they also met in Philadelphia for the purpose of creating a central government. None of them – with the possible exception of Alexander Hamilton – was desirous of seeing the authority of their home state gradually outpaced by a national government. But they also firmly believed that a national government possessed of some power was increasingly necessary to prevent the gains of the late Revolution from being lost. They were certainly conservative in some aspects of their thinking, and some among them were most certainly more conservative than others. But they were also, without a doubt, some of the most radical thinkers of their age. Many of them had served in the Continental Congress, or the Continental Army, or gone abroad as American diplomats. They’d shed their blood, and risked their lives, and gambled the loss of all they held dear. And in consequence, not only could it be said that they had successfully stared down one of the most powerful empires in the history of the world, but they also dared to imagine a world in which some of the most entrenched precedents imaginable simply no longer applied. They’d all been born, to a man, in a world in which “God Save the King” was the only acceptable toast. And by 1787, they were sitting together to forge a government that recognized no greater authority than that of the people themselves.
This is all to say, in essence, that the Framers defy being easily instrumentalized. Not only were they a diverse group from one individual to another, but there were ambiguities aplenty to be found within the beliefs and experiences of any one of them. And so, in turning their words and deeds into precedent for one’s own beliefs, one must ultimately discard or ignore a great deal of who and what they really were. Human beings, that is to say. More intelligent than most, perhaps. Blessed with insight and imagination. Men of vision, to be sure, but men all the same. In attempting to turn them into something more than this, Senator Hill was ultimately guilty of making them into something less. He was not the first, and he would not be the last, but his attempt was just as foolish and as wrongheaded as all the rest. Because while the Framers, as a group, could agree on very little – a fact which reading the Philadelphia Convention debates should make quite clear – one of the few things that united them was a common belief in the right of human beings to govern themselves. People could be reasonable or unreasonable, compassionate or cruel, insightful or foolish. Every one of them, indeed, had the capacity to save themselves or doom themselves. But nothing, for all their flaws, made them fitter to be subjects than citizens.
The Founding Generation came to embrace this essential conviction over the course of the events that led to the Revolution and spent the decades that immediately followed building a nation upon the same. Power, they believed, could not justify obedience. Only power wrought by consensus was worthy of submission. That this idea rightly underpinned the Founder’s rejection of British authority, the likes of Senator Hill would surely have acknowledged without question. But by unthinkingly raising the Framers to the level of deification, he was essentially spitting in the face of the men he so claimed to revere. The Framers told their fellow Americans not to bow to any power that could not be justified by reason. And what was J. Lister Hill doing but asking his fellow senators to do just that? What were the Framers, as characterized by Hill, but a cohort of ancient tyrants whose words were not to be questioned?
The senator himself, to be sure, would never have asked himself this question. He would almost certainly never have realized that by rigidly invoking the example of the Framers he was showing his ignorance of their greatest lesson. And this is because he was a conservative, a man steeped in tradition and precedent. His world, like that of many conservatives, fitted him like a glove, and he not about to indulge in speculation that this might not ultimately be for the best. Things were as they were because that is how they were meant to be. The Framers had seen to that, he was convinced, and there was simply no cause to think otherwise. Further on in his extended oration, he quoted Andrew Jackson to this same effect. “The destruction of our State governments [,]” said Old Hickory, “or the annihilation of their control over the local concerns of the people would lead directly to revolution and anarchy and finally to despotism and military domination.” This from the man who famously threatened to deploy the United States military against the government of South Carolina in an effort to enforce the collection of a series of taxes. But such – as has been demonstrated – was Hill’s approach all over. He cited what suited him, ignored what didn’t, and dared his fellow senators to raise their voice in opposition. And in the end, no one did.
Eastland, predictably enough, chimed in with encouragement now and then. Hill’s speech, if the senator from Mississippi was to be believed, was “the most logical, most profound, and most statesmanlike [..] ever heard on this question. He has gone to the very vitals of the issue, and […] he has made the best argument on this question that has ever been delivered on the floor of the Senate.” Hill, equally predictably, then finished on a note of sanctimonious triumphalism. “Let us stand united, strong, and resolute in our unity [,]” he declared,
Let us support squarely the rights of
the people of the United States and the rights of the States of the United
States, that our Government may be preserved. Let us stand squarely upon the
Constitution of the United States - rock of freedom, ageless and enduring
foundation of our rights, our hopes, and our democratic faith.
It was at this
point – to the relief of many, no doubt – that the subject of the poll tax was temporarily
dropped. Debate on the matter ceased for a time as the Senate moved on to consider
other business. As the persistence displayed by both Spessard Holland and J.
Lister Hill should make clear, however, the issue could not be described as
having been conclusively settled. Not only did both men have more to say on the
topic of poll taxes, but they’d say a great deal more just on the 15th
of March alone.
