We see from the headlines in a number of newspapers that Governor LePage’s bluntness is infuriating his political foes and upsetting some Republicans. In historical context this is pretty surprising. Mainers used to be known for their bluntness, and many among us carry on the old traditions.
There may be some benefit in recalling those old traditions before they are entirely submerged by the suffocating blob of suburban gentility. I’m thinking in particular of Maine’s greatest statesman, Thomas Brackett Reed. “Czar” Reed was the most powerful Speaker of the House of Representatives in the nation’s history and at his peak was as powerful as the President of the United States. Bluntness was his style and his weapon. He spared no one. Here’s his description of the House of Representatives in 1892: “A gelatinous existence, the scorn of all vertebrate animals”
One of his biographers tells us “He was … highly partisan and used his humor and biting sarcasm for political effect. He was not one who sought to reach out to the opposition party.” He was quite clear about bipartisanship. “The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch, and on general principles I think it best for us to govern and the Democrats watch.” As for reaching across the aisle: “We live in a world of sin and sorrow. Otherwise there would be no Democratic Party.”
As he dealt with groups, so he dealt with individuals. When a pompous long-winded bore objected to a witty put-down he replied: “I will say to the gentleman that if I ever ‘made light’ of his remarks, it is more than he ever made of them himself.” When another grandly declared that he’d rather be right than president, Reed assured him that he was in no danger of ever being either.
Nor did he spare his fellow Republicans, saying of President McKinley, “He has the backbone of a chocolate éclair.” Speaking to Theodore Roosevelt: “If there’s one thing for which I admire you Teddy, it’s your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” Speaking of the high-nosed patrician, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge: “like his native Massachusetts, thin soil, highly cultivated.” When a Republican representative, anxious to dodge a difficult vote, sent him a telegram “Unable to attend, wash out on line,” Reed promptly replied “Buy another shirt and come NOW!”
When war fever gripped the public after the destruction of the Battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, he held off a declaration of war for days almost single-handedly. He had always maintained the supremacy of majority rule, so when the saw he was in the minority on the war issue, he resigned his speaker’s chair and his seat in the House, sending a message to Maine’s governor saying “I have tried, perhaps not always successfully, to make the acts of my public life accord with my conscience and I cannot now do this thing.”
He remained outspoken in private life. When the U.S. decided to annex the Philippines, compensating Spain with a $30,000,000 payment, and found itself facing a nationalist insurrection he had this to say “We have bought ten million Malays at $3 a head unpicked, and nobody knows what it will cost to pick them. Why didn’t we purchase them of Spain F.O.B. with insurance paid?”
These days, it seems, such blunt sharp words would offend our delicate ears, but in his day Maine’s voters agreed with the words concluding his biography in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “… opinions varied as to his conduct in the chair; but he was essentially a man of rugged honesty and power, whose death was a loss to American public life.”
Paul LePage can’t match Reed’s wit, few people can, but he does match his bluntness and many Mainers apparently recoil from it in horror. To my mind, when he calls the mural marchers “idiots” he is raising a serious question requiring serious investigation. Are they idiots or not?
Consider the evidence. They have been living in a state rated the most hostile to business in the nation, a state called “Administrationland by the liberal Brookings Institute, a state with a huge unfunded mandate burden, a state with an irrational tangle of regulations and never said a word. Yet they now grow impassioned about a mural of questionable aesthetic merit which they had never seen before and about which few of them had ever heard. Sounds idiotic to me.
Professor John Frary of Farmington is a former U.S. Congress candidate and retired history professor, a board member of Maine Taxpayers United and an associate editor of the International Military Encyclopedia, and can be reached at: jfrary8070@aol.com
