A Treasury of Great American Scandals (19 page)

 

 

Some congressmen of the twentieth century apparently learned little from the travails of their nineteenth-century predecessors. In the case of Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, too much booze and a stripper named Fanne made for some sensational headlines and led to the downfall of the once mighty chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

It all started in the early morning hours of October 7, 1974, when Mills and four companions were pulled over near Washington's Tidal Basin by U.S. Park Police for speeding with no lights on. Just as the car was stopped, one of the occupants leapt out and jumped off a bridge into the murky water below. Her name was Anabell Battistella, better known as the stripper Fanne Foxe. Mills, clearly intoxicated, was bleeding from the nose and had scratch marks on his face. He later said the injuries were a result of his trying to restrain Ms. Foxe. The news linking one of the most powerful men in Congress with the bridge-leaping stripper caused an immediate sensation. It was soon revealed that Mills and his wife, Polly, lived in the same apartment building as Foxe, billed as “the Argentine Firecracker,” and her husband. Mills and Foxe were reported to have been frequent companions, though he initially denied even being at the scene when she took her famous dive.

Scandalous as the story was, it didn't seem to bother Arkansas voters that much. The following month, Mills was reelected to another term, and the story faded from the front pages. But then in December came another strange twist when Mills appeared on stage with Foxe—now billed as the “Tidal Basin Bombshell”—during one of her appearances in Boston. “I told him not to,” the stripper said in an interview with the
Washington Post.
“But I am sure he wanted the audience to see him. . . . He was saying, ‘I have nothing to hide.' ” To others, however, the message was that Mills had a serious booze problem and exercised very poor judgment. Speaker of the House Carl Albert called him “a sick man,” and insisted he step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The
Arkansas Gazette,
once a supporter of Mills, now editorialized against him: “If Mr. Mills cannot forgo his public indiscretions and if he prefers the life of show business to the life on Capitol Hill, then let him select the former and resign his seat in Congress to devote full time to his new line of work. Whichever course Mills prefers it is past time that he made a choice.”

Mills was hospitalized after his bizarre appearance on stage in Boston, and later claimed to have “absolutely no memory” of the spectacle. He returned to Congress and served out his term, although in a much diminished capacity after being stripped of his chairmanship. Fanne Foxe, like so many others propelled to notoriety by scandal, tried to make it in Hollywood. As it turned out, the only splash she ever made was in the Tidal Basin.

 

 

Less than two years after the Mills debacle, the long career of Representative Wayne Hays of Ohio collapsed when one of his staffers revealed why he had put her on the federal payroll—and it was not because of her secretarial skills. “I can't type. I can't file. I can't even answer the phone,” Elizabeth Ray proclaimed to the world in May 1976, explaining her actual job description. Her timing could not have been more inopportune for Hays, seeing as he had just married his legislative assistant, Pat Peak. But it was this marriage, Hays's second, that apparently set Elizabeth Ray off in the first place. When she confronted Hays about her future after his nuptials, he reportedly answered, “Well, I guess that'll make you mistress No. 1.” Wrong answer! Ray threw such a tantrum that Hays had to have the police escort her off the Capitol grounds. Immediately afterward she called the
Washington Post
with her scoop.

Hays at first dismissed the report as the rantings of “a very sick young woman,” but the FBI nevertheless launched an investigation into the charge that Ray had been given her $14,000-a-year job in exchange for sex. After two days of denials—“Hell's fire! I'm a very happily married man”—Hays finally admitted that there had been a “personal relationship” with Elizabeth Ray, but insisted she could and did type, file, and answer the phone. “I stand by my previous denial of Miss Ray's allegation that she was hired to be my mistress,” he said in an address before the House of Representatives. “I further stand by my statement that Miss Ray is a seriously disturbed young lady, and I deeply regret that our relationship, and its termination, has apparently greatly aggravated both her emotional and psychological problems. I am now sixty-five years old, and I have been privileged to serve in this House for twenty-eight years. I know my days on earth are numbered, and my service to this body may well be also . . . but I stand here before you today . . . with my conscience now clear.”

Several weeks later, Hays took an overdose of sleeping pills. Although he recovered, his career did not. He resigned that September. Elizabeth Ray went on to write an exposé of her dalliances with Hays and other congressmen, and pursued an acting career (unsuccessfully). The only winners in the whole sordid mess were the street hawkers selling I CAN TYPE T-shirts.

Cruel Campaigns

 

Abraham Lincoln would probably have loved the irony. The president so grandly memorialized in marble today was savagely maligned in his own time. During the 1864 presidential campaign,
Harper's Weekly
compiled a list of slurs used against Honest Abe by supporters of his Democratic opponent (and former subordinate) George B. McClellan: Filthy Story-Teller, Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, Usurper, Monster, Ignoramus Abe, Old Scoundrel, Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Fiend, Butcher. And those were just the insults from the North. The rebellious South, literally at war with Lincoln, had its own arsenal. Brutal as the anti-Lincoln crusade may have been, it was fairly typical of the time. For all the complaints about how negative recent presidential campaigns have been, they are nowhere near as nasty as they were in the good old days.

“One Continued Tempest of Malignant Passions”

 

 

 

The United States had barely taken its baby steps as a new nation when warring political factions emerged within it. By the end of George Washington's two-term presidency, what he lamentably called the “spirit of party” was in full swing, and not even the revered father of the country was immune to its venomous sting. “If ever a nation has been debauched by a man,” wrote Benjamin Franklin Bache, Ben Franklin's grandson, “the American nation has been debauched by Washington.” It was the dawn of a virulent American tradition.

George-bashing by Bache and others was an inevitable result of the new factionalism represented by Washington's heir-apparent, Vice President John Adams, and Adams's opponent in the presidential contest, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's Republican followers believed that Adams and his Federalist cronies were elitists still attached to Mother England who sought to usurp states' rights and center all power in themselves. Adams's backers saw their ideological enemies as upstart anarchists who reveled in the murderous French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror.

“The first real presidential contest in American history turned out to be exuberantly venomous,” writes Paul F. Boller Jr. Jefferson's Republicans mocked Adams and labeled him “an avowed friend of monarchy”—a highly toxic charge at a time when the U.S. experiment in democracy was still in its infancy. The Federalists called Jefferson an atheist, demagogue, coward, mountebank, trickster, and Franco-maniac. His followers, they said, were “cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amidst filth and vermin.”

This was a relatively pleasant exchange, given the rematch between President Adams and Vice President Jefferson in 1800. In an era when it was considered unseemly for candidates to campaign actively for office, Adams and Jefferson refrained from slinging mud themselves, at least in public.
¹⁷
Their partisans, on the other hand, were happy to get down and dirty. Once again, Adams was caricatured by the Republicans as a licentious fool and criminal tyrant. His presidency, one enemy wrote, was “one continued tempest of
malignant
passions.” The Jefferson campaign spread a story that Adams planned to marry one of his sons to a daughter of King George III, start an American dynasty, and reunite with Britain. It was only George Washington's threat to run him through with a sword, the story went, that made Adams abandon the plan. Another tale had President Adams sending Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to England to procure four young mistresses, two for Adams and two for Pinckney. Adams was somewhat amused when he heard the story. “I do declare upon my honor,” he chuckled, “if this be true, General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two.”

For their own part, the Federalists went after Jefferson with unrestrained fury. “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and proclaimed,” warned the Connecticut
Courant,
a pro-Federalist newspaper. “The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.” The invective against the author of the Declaration of Independence in Federalist pamphlets and newspapers included charges that Jefferson was a coward during the Revolutionary War, an infidel of dubious parentage, and a thief who once robbed a widow of an estate worth $10,000. One Federalist leaflet posed this question: “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected, and the Jacobins [a name given French radicals] get into authority, that those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin—which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence—defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”

Federalist sniping was aimed not only at Jefferson, but at their own man Adams as well. Adams's fellow Federalist and inveterate foe, Alexander Hamilton, concluded that even Jefferson or another Republican would be a better choice for president than Adams. “If we must have an enemy at the head of government,” Hamilton exclaimed, “let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.” Hamilton wrote a blistering attack on President Adams, hoping to turn other Federalist leaders against him. “I should be deficient in candor,” he wrote, “were I to conceal the conviction, that he does not possess the talents adapted to the
Administration
of Government, and that there are great and intrinsic defects in his character which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate.” Among these flaws, Hamilton wrote, were a character “infected with some visionary notions,” an “imagination sublimated and eccentric,” “a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.”

Hamilton's “Thunderbolt,” as James Madison called it, was not meant for public consumption, but it was leaked and gave the Republicans plenty of ammunition. Adams, who most certainly did not appreciate Hamilton's blindside, reacted by calling him “an intriguant, the greatest intriguant in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard.” Ever the loyal wife, Abigail Adams went even further: “Oh, I have read [Hamilton's] heart in his wicked eyes many a time. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself, or I have no skill in physiognomy.”

The contest of 1800, which Thomas Jefferson ultimately won to become the nation's third president, was so bitterly fought that Abigail Adams remarked sadly that “enough abuse and scandal” was unleashed “to ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world.” Yet it was only just beginning.

“May God Almighty Forgive Her Murderers”

 

 

 

The presidential campaign of 1828 was a rematch of the contest four years earlier between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. That election had been settled in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Adams prevailing. According to Jackson's supporters, Speaker of the House Henry Clay had used undue influence to get Adams elected, and their suspicions of a “corrupt bargain” struck between Adams and Clay only intensified when Adams appointed Clay secretary of state. “So you see,” Jackson said at the time, “the Judas of the west [Clay] has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same. Was there ever such a bare faced corruption in any country before?”

Jackson's supporters, determined not to have victory snatched away from them again, launched a populist crusade designed to show Adams as an elitist who, like his father, would be delighted to have a monarchy established in the United States. “King John the Second,” they called him, a despiser of the people and of the popular will. “His habits and principles are not congenial with the spirit of our institutions and the notions of a democratic people,” declared one Jacksonian. Adams, it was said, lived in “kingly pomp and splendor,” in his “presidential palace.” Old Hickory, on the other hand, was presented as a man of the people, and it was to the ordinary folks that his campaign was directed. Parades, barbecues, and street rallies were organized across the country by Jackson's “Hurra Boys,” as his campaign workers were called, while hickory brooms, hickory sticks, and hickory canes became popular gimmicks.