Political Hell-Raiser: The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana
504
Political Hell-Raiser: The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana
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Overview
Wheeler came of political age amid antiwar and labor unrest in Butte, Montana, during World War I. As a crusading United States attorney, he battled Montana’s powerful economic interests, championed farmers and miners, and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. There he made his name as one of the “Montana scandalmongers,” uncovering corruption in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Drawing on extensive research and new archival sources, Marc C. Johnson follows Wheeler from his early backing of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ardent support of the New Deal to his forceful opposition to Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Supreme Court and, in a move widely viewed as political suicide, his emergence as the most prominent spokesman against U.S. involvement in World War II right up to three days before Pearl Harbor.
Johnson provides the most thorough telling of Wheeler’s entire career, including all its accomplishments and contradictions, as well as the political storms that the senator both encouraged and endured. The book convincingly establishes the place and importance of this principled hell-raiser in American political history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806163765 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 504 |
| Sales rank: | 760,790 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE BLACK HEART OF MONTANA
Butte is the black heart of Montana, feared and distrusted.
— JOSEPH KINSEY HOWARD
Not every politician is able to identify an event, a singular moment, that has defined one's entire career and shaped a political philosophy. Burton K. Wheeler experienced such an event in the summer of 1917 when he was thirty-five and the U.S. attorney in Butte, Montana. The event was the sadistic, politically motivated murder of a labor organizer in Butte.
The labor organizer was Frank Little, the executive chairman of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW (or Wobblies, as they were known) advocated class struggle spurred by "One Big Union" that was intended, in the words of one historian, to "transform American workers into a revolutionary vanguard."
Little had come to Butte, the rough, often violent copper-mining town high in the Rocky Mountains, to agitate against what he considered a capitalist-inspired European war fought by the working class for the benefit of kings and tycoons. His fiery speeches, condemning President Woodrow Wilson, capitalism, imperialism, the draft, and U.S. involvement in World War I, prompted intense, sustained demands for Little's arrest for sedition. B. K. Wheeler stood against the public frenzy and refused to arrest a man for opposing a war.
A group of vigilantes kidnapped and executed Little, touching off a sustained period of hysteria in the state — "Montana's Agony," historian Arnon Gutfeld has called it — that was virtually unprecedented in American history. Protections for free speech virtually disappeared. Books were banned and the German language outlawed. Hundreds were arrested and many imprisoned. The entire state fell into an orgy of patriotic excess and political unrest. Many politicians not only accepted the chaos but even encouraged the assault on civil liberties, seeing an opportunity to consolidate personal power and punish enemies real and imagined. Wheeler was one of the few who stood against the excesses and kept his head amid months of violence, fear, and political reprisals. Rejecting the prevailing sentiment and defending dissenters eventually cost Wheeler his job as U.S. attorney, and it appeared that a promising political career had been ruined. Yet Wheeler doggedly fought back and improbably prevailed, eventually winning four terms in the U.S. Senate.
Having seen in 1917 how war-induced hysteria and patriotic excess can overwhelm free speech and common sense, Wheeler fiercely opposed all forms of concentrated power and for the remainder of his life stood against war. He came to value independence more than political party, and he embraced, even welcomed, controversy, which became a fixture of his career. That career began when the young New Englander arrived in Montana, a place resident author Joseph Kinsey Howard called "a state of few people, entirely surrounded by space."
* * *
It is a long way — geographically, culturally, industrially, and politically — from Hudson, Massachusetts, to Butte, Montana. Wheeler made that long journey in 1905 at the age of twenty-three. Both sides of Wheeler's family traced their New England roots to the mid-seventeenth century, with some of Wheeler's Quaker ancestors settling in Massachusetts to avoid religious persecution in England. One of Wheeler's earliest known ancestors, Obadiah Wheeler, was a founder of Concord, Massachusetts. The youngest of ten children, Burton Kendall was born on February 27, 1882, in Hudson, an industrial town fifteen miles southwest of Concord. By his latter recollection, his early years "passed in a pleasant if somewhat austere atmosphere." His father, Asa Leonard Wheeler, from the Quaker side of the family, was a cobbler, an easygoing and tolerant head of his large family. Wheeler's mother, Mary Elizabeth, who died while Wheeler was still in high school, was reserved and very religious; she was clearly the stronger parent, encouraging her youngest to get as much education as possible. His mother may have been the first to suggest that B. K. study law.
Wheeler family politics leaned Republican, although Wheeler would later often repeat a story of how, as a high school debater, he had defended the free silver, low-tariff policies of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. That experience may have influenced Wheeler's eventual decision to identify with, if not always embrace, the Democratic Party. Following graduation from high school, Wheeler headed west, convinced that he could work his way through law school at the University of Michigan. The 130-pound six-footer, by this time afflicted with the asthma that would plague him all his life, landed a job working in the Dean's Office and further supplemented meager savings by waiting tables in a student boardinghouse. Wheeler's academic career was workmanlike, his course work rated on a pass-fail scale. All that can be known from the surviving records is that he successfully completed the work to obtain a law degree.
Wheeler met his future wife in Illinois during a summer away from law school and while selling Dr. Chase's Recipe Book, a volume containing recipes, tips for midwives, and advice for treating almost every known ailment — and many imaginary ones. "I can't honestly say that it was love at first sight, [but] it was clearly the loveliest sight Illinois had displayed thus far," Wheeler would recall. Lulu White, a prim, religiously devout, no-nonsense midwesterner, would become her husband's chief political supporter and advisor and play a significant role in his career. The couple agreed there would be no wedding until the young attorney was established and able to provide for them both. Rejecting advice from his law school dean that he seek work with a large eastern law firm, Wheeler instead went west, looking for adventure, opportunity, and a climate to ease his asthma. The Yankee found what he was looking for in Butte, one of the west's most colorful and politically raucous mining towns. After two years of work in a small law office handling real estate matters, criminal defense, the claims of injured workers, and even a bit of legislative lobbying, B. K. married Lulu. The couple bought a modest brick home in a working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood on Second Street.
"Like the frontier itself," historian Mike Malone writes, "Butte was rich, unabashedly exploited, turbulent — and endlessly fascinating," a place that promised spectacular wealth for some and reasonably good jobs for thousands. Butte also featured a political culture poisoned by labor-management controversy, involving frequent shocking violence and stunning levels of corruption. "Butte was born of violence, bred in it, and lives it," Joseph Kinsey Howard wrote in his classic Montana: High, Wide and Handsome. Howard quoted a onetime Butte police chief as saying his town was "an island of easy money surrounded by whisky." The novelist Dashiell Hammett worked for a time as a Pinkerton detective in Butte during an early twentieth-century strike and drew upon his experience for his first novel — Red Harvest. Hammett called his imaginary town Poisonville, but his inspiration was Butte. "The city wasn't pretty," Hammett wrote. "Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellowed-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks."
Butte's mines were the world's greatest producers of copper, responsible for a third of all the red metal produced in the United States. Butte's multicultural workforce consisted of first-generation Irish, Cornish, Italian, German, Polish, Swedish, Slovak, and Finnish immigrants. The miners were tough, abused, sentimental, and fearless, their work brutally hard. "You could never understand how hot, how really hot and humid, it would be in some of those places," one miner recalled. "You work in your yard and the sweat might roll down your face. Well, down in the mine, it was nothing to take off your mine undershirt and ring it out ... or you took off your boots and dumped the water out." Butte's mines were also exceedingly dangerous. In the four years before 1913, 162 local miners died in mine accidents, and more than 5,200 sustained injuries serious enough to require medical attention.
The physical toll and daily danger were offset, at least some of the time, by reasonably good wages. The monthly payroll in Butte often topped $1.5 million, but job security was nonexistent, and the town was a difficult place to raise a family. "Sometimes I think that the women had it tougher than the men," one miner recalled. "The men just did the work, and that was it. But the women, they had to take care of the kids, do the wash and the cooking, see their husbands off to work." Frequently those husbands came home late or occasionally not at all. There were many distractions, principally drink and female companionship at places named the Bucket of Blood and the Cesspool. Only New Orleans and perhaps San Francisco boasted more "ladies of the line." One miner remembered, "You could get a shot and a beer for a dime. You'd have 50 cents, and you wouldn't even get out of Finntown [a neighborhood on the east side of Butte and home to many miners]. Hell, by the time you got down to Park Street, you were smashed." The hatchet-waving, anti-alcohol crusader Carry Nation came to Butte in 1910, determined to deal with the taverns and the prostitutes. She showed up one evening at the ABC Dance Hall on South Wyoming Street to deliver one of her famous sermons. After listening for a few moments, the bartender simply said, "For God's sake, woman, get out of here." She did, and Butte carried on.
Yet Butte had another side: a cultured, even sophisticated city of music, drama, and art. Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt performed there. Teddy Roosevelt dined at the luxurious Silver Bow Club, and the mayor once gave the key to the city to Éamon de Valera, the president of the Provisional Irish Republic, who left town with $12,000 to support the Irish Freedom Fund.
Butte's politics bent toward the radical. Eugene V. Debs, Socialist Party candidate for president, garnered nearly 30 percent of the vote in Butte in 1912, when the city had a Socialist mayor in office. The best election campaign venue for a politician was a saloon, and there were 275 of them in which to buy a drink and often a vote.
The elegant Hennessey Building at the corner of Granite and Main Street was home to a first-class department store where miners and their families could shop for the latest fashions on the first five floors. Montana politicians got their orders and the state's political strings were pulled on the sixth floor, where the Anaconda Copper Mining Company had its headquarters.
By the time Wheeler arrived in Butte in 1905, Anaconda was very much in its ascendancy and "the company," as Montanans called it, would only grow bigger and more influential over the next half century. By one estimate, three-quarters of all wage earners in Montana directly or indirectly owed their livelihood to Anaconda. The company owned most of the mines in Butte as well as copper and zinc concentrators, a leaching plant, a sulfuric acid plant, smelters in Great Falls, Butte, and the town of Anaconda, refineries and zinc works in Utah and Arizona, and various facilities in New Jersey and Chicago. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the company's mining properties, water rights, and real estate had an estimated value of $75 million (nearly $2 billion today). The company's timberlands were worth another $5 million, and by the beginning of World War I the value of the metal Anaconda had on hand was $37 million.
In 1912, the Great Falls Power Company and a number of smaller electric utilities consolidated, and the resulting Montana Power Company became, as locals said, a "twin" of Anaconda, owned by those who owned the mining company. By the early 1920s, after completing the largest merger deal in the history of Wall Street, Anaconda became the fourth-largest company in the world and controlled the world's greatest copper reserves. The New York Evening Post noted, "Anaconda Copper is rapidly assuming a position in the American industrial kingdom second only to the gigantic United States Steel." Montana became in many ways a corporate colony, with local workers extracting the state's abundant natural resources, while the resulting wealth flowed to absentee shareholders of a vast multinational corporation. Anaconda, in turn, assured its dominance in Montana by extending its economic and political tentacles to every corner of the state and every level of government.
Two Irishmen, John D. Ryan and Cornelius F. "Con" Kelley, guided the rise of Anaconda, and both climbed from the bottom to the top of the corporate ladder. Ryan expanded the Anaconda empire by creating Montana Power. Kelley, Ryan's protégé, began his career working in the mines but eventually became company president and then chairman of the board. After Kelley died in 1957 his New York Times obituary required two long paragraphs just to list his corporate directorships.
Anaconda exerted influence in Montana in a variety of ways, not least through a stable of newspapers owned or somehow controlled by the company. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, Anaconda owned the Anaconda Standard, the Butte Daily Post, the Missoula Sentinel, the Billings Gazette, the Helena Independent, the Livingston Enterprise, and the paper that Wheeler is reported to have said he did not need to read because he could smell it, the Missoulian. From time to time other papers — daily and weekly — were owned or controlled by the company, their editorial positions influenced from the sixth floor of the Hennessey Building in Butte. Montana had many small independent newspapers, but it was a rare small-town editor who did not find it expedient to simply go along with Montana's prevailing economic and political sentiment, more often than not dictated by Anaconda. Historian Bradley Snow writes that the "chief hallmarks of the Company's seemingly timeless political orientation include: defense of 'its prerogatives' in the state, the maintenance of low corporate and individual taxation rates, keeping government regulation of business to a minimum, the protection of private property rights, and a general opposition to 'liberal' or 'progressive' or overly 'independent' political candidates."
Long after his elective political career was over, B. K. Wheeler would say, "If you wanted to be nominated for dog catcher in Butte, Montana in those days, you had to go up to the sixth floor of the Hennessey Building where Anaconda Copper offices were located and take off your hat and say, 'Please can I run for dog catcher?'" In 1910 Wheeler received support from the company and was elected as a Democrat to the Montana legislature. He was twenty-eight, the youngest man in the House of Representatives. Ruggedly good looking, usually with a smile on his face, and "with his omnipresent cigar and his dented Stetson," as one observer noted, "he looked the part of a politician."
"It sounds incredible now," Wheeler wrote in his memoirs, "but when I went to Helena for the opening of the Legislature in January 1911, I was naïve enough to believe I would be allowed to act as a free agent." Democrats controlled the Montana House of Representatives, while Republicans held a majority in the senate, but in reality the Anaconda ran the legislature. Wheeler's first major clash with Anaconda came when he bucked the company on the major issue facing the legislature — the election of a U.S. senator.
Before adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, it was state legislatures that elected U.S. senators by majority vote of all the members. With Democrats holding fifty-six of the legislature's 101 seats in 1911, it was a foregone conclusion that Montana lawmakers would select a Democrat for the Senate, but the party was nearly evenly split over which Democrat that would be. The company's preferred candidate was W. G. Conrad, a banker from Great Falls, while Wheeler and more progressive legislators favored Helena attorney Thomas J. Walsh. Wheeler did not know Walsh well, but he considered the reserved, dignified attorney the "much better man" for the office. Wheeler may also have been motivated to support Walsh because of Anaconda's dislike of Walsh. "He had tried and won mining and personal injury suits against" Anaconda, Wheeler said, and Walsh "had defended labor leaders, another unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Company."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Preface,
1. The Black Heart of Montana,
2. Boxcar Burt Becomes Senator Wheeler,
3. The Investigation and the Frame-Up,
4. The Progressive Campaign,
5. A Son of the Wild Jackass,
6. A Long and Bumpy Relationship,
7. New Deal Irregular,
8. Defeating the Power Trust,
9. Nine Old Men and Wheeler,
10. Purge,
11. Mr. Wheeler Goes for the White House,
12. America First,
13. Big Screen, Big Leak,
14. War and Decline,
15. Defeat,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,