Historically speaking: When politics becomes blood sport
Quarantine has made many people irritable. Well, make that most people. With gyms closed, social media has become more of a boxing ring than normal, and that certainly is the case for what one of your northern neighbors did last month.
Perhaps some of you south of the Pocono regional divide heard that former professional boxer and
State Rep. Marty
Flynn (D-Lackawanna) made multiple threats on
Facebook? No?
Well, let me tell ya.
The first was against businesses purporting to open against the governor’s executive order. To wit:
“Keep talking about how bad we Democrats are and WE will STOP supporting YOUR businesses! You want to make it PERSONAL and we WILL!”
Unsupportive? Yes. But, in phrasing made famous by Ron Popeil of infomercial fame: “Wait! There’s More!”
After being prodded further, bellicosity kicked into high gear, and the mighty Flynn replied to one Facebook post with, “I bet I could kick your fat — up and down the street until you shut your fat mouth.”
Oh, no he didn’t, you say?
But, oh, yes, he did.
It might make one harken back to 1970s Pennsylvania politics. For example, in an oral history project interview with Allegheny County Rep. Edward Early, a Democrat (1971-1974), it was revealed that among fellow Democrats one year a dispute over a vote, “even ended in a fist fight, (laugh) a fist fight, and that came when we passed the income tax.”
If one looks to pugnacious federallevel politics, one might think of the infamous duel between Aaron Burr and
Alexander Hamilton (1804). Or perhaps antebellum violence such as the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks in 1856.
But in Rep. Flynn’s case, a constituent was threatened. At the congressional level, Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge obliged in providing history an example of similar pugilistic tenaciousness. Lodge, who had run for president in 1916 and was seen by many as an elder statesman in Washington, took it to the next level in April 1917.
One loud minor-league baseball player from Boston, Alexander Bannwart, and two other antiwar demonstrators traveled to D.C. to visit their senator. The three men made the trip to protest President Woodrow Wilson’s request for a congressional declaration of war against Germany, one that would eventually lead to American involvement in World War I.
In what we might consider tame insults today, Bannwart and the others loudly called Lodge a coward and liar, shoving ensued and Lodge, in unstatesmanlike fashion, cold cocked Bannwart.
Notably, arrested.
How about fights over civil rights? Any congressional blowups then? Well, funny you should ask.
Texas Sen. Ralph Yarborough was the sole southern senator to vote “yea” on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, arguably the most powerful of the Dixiecrats, ended up tussling with Yarborough over southern honor, or … something.
“Thurmond,” the Senate historian’s
it was Bannwart who got office recalls, “wrestled the increasingly out-of-breath Yarborough to the floor.” Thurmond growled, “Tell me to release you, Ralph, and I will,” but Yarborough wouldn’t cry “uncle.”
After a number of others attempted to stop the two sexagenarians from scuffling, the chairman of the committee to which the combatants on the floor belonged, Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson, “appeared and growled, ‘Come on, you fellows, let’s break this up.’” At that point Yarborough coyly uttered, “I have to yield to the order of my chairman.” That ended that.
President Theodore Roosevelt’s case might prove instructive. Roosevelt started boxing and wrestling as a youth because, he reasoned, mastering blood sport would prevent him from being bullied any more than the awkward, asthmatic boy already had been — and, he certainly had been. In fact, upon receiving his 1910 Nobel prize, Roosevelt marked that, “We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary.”
Roosevelt succeeded in wrestling, jiujitsu, and boxing. What is telling, though, is why Roosevelt eventually stopped entering the ring. These sagacious words from Sagamore Hill are his answer: “It seems rather absurd for a president to appear with a black eye or a swollen nose or a cut lip.”
Sure. There is something to be said about the transference of athletic to political tenacity, something that this fan of Teddy Roosevelt can appreciate. But what are the lines of one’s roughand-ready nature that shouldn’t be crossed?
As Rep. Flynn remarked in an interview for ringtv.com, “the fighter instinct is always there, to my detriment sometimes.” Where that line is — between asset and detriment — that is for the voters to decide.
Christopher Brooks is a professor of history at East Stroudsburg University.