Maury Maverick, an unbranded Texan whose grandfather put his family name into the English language as a noun because he refused to sear with a red-hot iron the 453 cattle that came into his reluctant custody in payment of a debt, has achieved in the Congress of the United States what people declared was no longer possible. In half of his first term he made his name known to all thinking and reading Americans. Not by wearing a broad-brimmed Stetson hat and a flowing tie and high boots—he swears no man in his family ever was in the cattle business or ever wore such articles of attire. Not by offering a pension panacea for all our ills nor by demanding that people share their wealth before devising a new and sound economic order. He has fired no pistols on the plaza in front of the Capitol and he has not rushed with clenched fists upon any fellow member to win a first-page position nor has he sought, like one now dead, to stop the machinery of Congress by a one-man filibuster.
His distinction Maury Maverick achieved, in all his Congressional verdancy, because he has deep and passionate feelings, because he is no respecter of personages or musty rules, and because he had something to say and said it. "Too much," many cynical observers have declared; "he is weakening his influence by talking all the time and casting his lot with too many reforms."
To which the answer is that Maverick is stronger today than when he took the oath; but that if he were steadily losing ground it would make no difference to him. He knows what he wants when he wants it, and you cannot be in the House of Representatives and fail to be aware of it. He is brusque, aggressive; some say bull-headed and add something about a china shop. "Roughneck" is another description, and there is something in his appearance to suggest the wide open spaces.
But I prefer to lay that onrushing manner to other causes. He is afraid of no one; he is too deeply impressed with the gravity of the crisis in which the United States finds herself and the darkness of the more distant future; he has not a second to lose in doing his share. And he has four things for which he will fight, bleed, and die, in and out of Congress: peace; preservation of our personal and Constitutional liberties (which means a free press, the right to free assembly, and complete freedom of utterance); conservation and development of our natural resources (such as Boulder Dam, the TVA, and the general soil-erosion, reforestation, and resettlement plans of Secretary Wallace).
And the fourth of these is again peace. For they brought this man into a hospital in France to die, with several German bullets in him, one of which hit his spinal column. They put him in a bed six inches from that of a German, a good part of whose face had remained on the battlefield. But the German could still talk a little, and he mumbled things about old-age pensions and unemployment that Maury Maverick, with that bullet in his spine, never forgot. And the German taught his American enemy something else. Not over one foot away, he died in terrible convulsions. "One can learn," says Maverick—if he speaks of it. One can learn—also one can never forget. You don't forget if for sixteen long years you suffer pain in your spine. You forget less if then you go to the Mayos and they saw off part of five vertebrae—and leave you with much more pain per second than all the time before. Would you be very polite and quiet and unaggressive under these circumstances? Or would you carry on roughly with unfailing courage, amazing vigor and fortitude, and a bit of clatter and clash just to dull things and be oblivious awhile? And wouldn't you be for peace? Especially if you had two youngsters who are likely to be of age about the time the next world war breaks loose?
Why shouldn't Maverick speak out and make a nuisance of himself and go to the White House, as he did last August with a volunteer delegation of nine Congressmen, and tell the President of the United States to his face that whether His Excellency wished it or not they were going to have neutrality legislation with nice, large mandatory provisions in it? "But I don't want mandatory provisions in it," said F. D. R. "But that's precisely what you are going to get," they assured him; and he got it. Naturally Maverick insists on more neutrality legislation, does not want any loans or credits given to any belligerents, and seeks to have Messrs. Morgan & Company and others of their variety muzzled and chained to their offices, so that they won't help again to send young men to give lodging in their spines to machine-gun bullets, by tying us up to somebody else's war machine.
Not that he has become a pacifist. Nothing so dreadful—or so sane—as that. Probably, if the drums were to beat and the troopships were on the tide once more, Maverick would be just inconsistent enough to volunteer again—if that spine permitted. He belongs to that group that thinks that the next big war will about end everything but he will stick with the country if her rulers once more order the citizens out to make something safe—democracy, Christianity, or just plain business loans and prosperity. The fighter in him would not let him stay put if men were being disemboweled in no man's land again; the leader in him would say that his place were at the front.
EARLY LIFE OF A QUEER FISH
It is that leadership in him which, together with his complete divorce from all conventionality, has sent him to the fore in Congress and given us the gratifying assurance that a man of worth and power can be heard in the lower house as soon as he arrives in it. I do not know whether his fearlessness is due to that extremely rare discovery by men in office that courage is the truest road to success or whether it was just born in him. But what an odd fish he is in the Congressional aquarium is certainly proved by his coming out squarely against the Townsend old-age pension when it was not necessary for him to do so. No wonder some of his associates think him crazy. He goes looking for trouble. This is what he said:
Well, this Congressional comet is a true product of Texas. He was the youngest of eleven children, which, he says, is the "reason why the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Manufacturers' Association, and the Liberty League believe in birth control." He solemnly declares that he was "born amid the clashing of thunder, and the heavens were rent asunder" and to make sure that you believe it he adds, "I can remember it as plain as day. The stork and I came in through a big bay window which was open. I crawled down from the window sill, took my clothes off, and went to sleep by the side of my mother."
When he had made his mother's acquaintance in the course of years he found that she was and is the "best cultured and best educated woman I know." She taught him to read instructive books, taught him to get at facts before forming his conclusions and opinions—and she could do so because she was an exceptionally well-informed woman. He is proud of his ancestry and that his forebears were here by 1620; that a Maverick ancestor was one of the first four to spill blood in the Revolution; and that his grandfather, Samuel Maverick, fought at the Alamo, though not in its final siege. Obviously no one disgusted by his "radicalism" and his rapid-fire denunciations can tell him to go back where he came from—just as his wounds and his two medals for valor prevent militarists from impugning his motives or his courage when he exposes military claptrap and love of power.
His father having gone broke and obviously not being a believer in birth control, Maury had to work hard on a farm. When he went to school he did not like his studies much but he still studied all the time. He had excellent advantages and plenty to eat, and his mother saw to it that he read in some of his leisure time. Most of his boyhood traveling was done on horseback; the foundation of his self-confidence was surely laid when at the age of nine he and some eight other boys, the eldest fourteen, rode a hundred miles across country, shifting for themselves and once living off corn meal for three days. This is the nearest he ever came to pioneering, perhaps his nearest approach to the towpath which every budding American statesman is supposed to have trod.
MAVERICK SOUNDS OFF
Probably it is a shock to some New Englanders to learn that not everybody in Texas was once a cowboy and that there are people of ancient lineage and inherited traditions there and that Maverick is one of them. They might not realize it to hear him talk, because of his breeziness, his occasional slang, the accent of the people he serves.
But they would delight to hear him talk nonetheless—they could not help it. He told the House one day about an undesired invitation he had received from the Southern Industrial Council:
Delightful, too, was his suggestion that there should be two new "days" for the House of Representatives. His proposal:
It was his determination to do all within his power to achieve peace that made this yearling Congressman come to the front with the neutrality bill sponsored in the Senate by Senators Nye and Clark and in the house by Mr. Maverick. He gave a year of study to it, and a speaking trip into twenty-four States brought him the conviction, which is shared by others who have been in touch with popular assemblages, that the American people are interested in nothing so much as their preservation from entanglement in the next war—that they value their sons' lives above any number of dollars. As between the Administration bill, which was shelved at least for the present, and the Maverick bill, the writer of this article favors the latter, because Mr. Maverick has sought to make action mandatory upon the President wherever possible. To the undeniably serious criticism that it is impossible to foresee each and every situation, the reply is that risks must be run in any case and that the President can always call an extra session and that the President should not again be subject to the kind of pressure which Mr. Wilson faced from political and business circles by the time that our Eastern industry had, to a large degree, become an integrated part of the British war machine.
Mr. Maverick is especially eager to have a law which makes it mandatory for the President to declare embargoes just as soon as war begins. Asked when modern wars begin, since, as in the cases of China and Japan, and Italy and Ethiopia, they may take place without a declaration of war, the Congressman was necessarily somewhat vague, as everyone must be:
TO LIBERTY'S RESCUE
Naturally a man with Mr. Maverick's devotion to peace, with his family inheritance, with his love of liberty watches with dismay the growing influence of the army and navy lobbies in Washington, the increasing attempts to gag the people and muzzle the press, and the growing denials of civil liberties the Constitution guarantees. He has been especially active in opposing the McSwain bill, to provide penalties for the exertion of "mutinous influence" upon army and navy and one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation ever offered in Congress since the alien and sedition bills. It originated with the Navy Department, which is so uncertain of its enlisted forces as to believe that they yield to the blandishments of communists whever they come into contact with them. A few cases of communists offering handbills and other propaganda have so terrified the Navy Department, despite the fact that no mutinous conduct due to this cause has ever been exposed to public knowledge, that it has drawn a bill as alarming in its provisions as to make it possible under it to arrest the editor of the Atlantic Monthly for printing a recent article by Admiral Sims. For that article declared that the navy's promotion system is bringing to the top incompetent commanding officers—which might certainly incite some sailors to "disaffection" by making them undesirous of serving under incompetent superiors.
Well, here is the way Messrs. Maverick and Kvale reject the measure, in words which no one can misunderstand and which bespeak the true patriotism of the writers:
Oswald Garrison Villard , Forum and Century, June, 1936
His distinction Maury Maverick achieved, in all his Congressional verdancy, because he has deep and passionate feelings, because he is no respecter of personages or musty rules, and because he had something to say and said it. "Too much," many cynical observers have declared; "he is weakening his influence by talking all the time and casting his lot with too many reforms."
To which the answer is that Maverick is stronger today than when he took the oath; but that if he were steadily losing ground it would make no difference to him. He knows what he wants when he wants it, and you cannot be in the House of Representatives and fail to be aware of it. He is brusque, aggressive; some say bull-headed and add something about a china shop. "Roughneck" is another description, and there is something in his appearance to suggest the wide open spaces.
But I prefer to lay that onrushing manner to other causes. He is afraid of no one; he is too deeply impressed with the gravity of the crisis in which the United States finds herself and the darkness of the more distant future; he has not a second to lose in doing his share. And he has four things for which he will fight, bleed, and die, in and out of Congress: peace; preservation of our personal and Constitutional liberties (which means a free press, the right to free assembly, and complete freedom of utterance); conservation and development of our natural resources (such as Boulder Dam, the TVA, and the general soil-erosion, reforestation, and resettlement plans of Secretary Wallace).
And the fourth of these is again peace. For they brought this man into a hospital in France to die, with several German bullets in him, one of which hit his spinal column. They put him in a bed six inches from that of a German, a good part of whose face had remained on the battlefield. But the German could still talk a little, and he mumbled things about old-age pensions and unemployment that Maury Maverick, with that bullet in his spine, never forgot. And the German taught his American enemy something else. Not over one foot away, he died in terrible convulsions. "One can learn," says Maverick—if he speaks of it. One can learn—also one can never forget. You don't forget if for sixteen long years you suffer pain in your spine. You forget less if then you go to the Mayos and they saw off part of five vertebrae—and leave you with much more pain per second than all the time before. Would you be very polite and quiet and unaggressive under these circumstances? Or would you carry on roughly with unfailing courage, amazing vigor and fortitude, and a bit of clatter and clash just to dull things and be oblivious awhile? And wouldn't you be for peace? Especially if you had two youngsters who are likely to be of age about the time the next world war breaks loose?
Why shouldn't Maverick speak out and make a nuisance of himself and go to the White House, as he did last August with a volunteer delegation of nine Congressmen, and tell the President of the United States to his face that whether His Excellency wished it or not they were going to have neutrality legislation with nice, large mandatory provisions in it? "But I don't want mandatory provisions in it," said F. D. R. "But that's precisely what you are going to get," they assured him; and he got it. Naturally Maverick insists on more neutrality legislation, does not want any loans or credits given to any belligerents, and seeks to have Messrs. Morgan & Company and others of their variety muzzled and chained to their offices, so that they won't help again to send young men to give lodging in their spines to machine-gun bullets, by tying us up to somebody else's war machine.
Not that he has become a pacifist. Nothing so dreadful—or so sane—as that. Probably, if the drums were to beat and the troopships were on the tide once more, Maverick would be just inconsistent enough to volunteer again—if that spine permitted. He belongs to that group that thinks that the next big war will about end everything but he will stick with the country if her rulers once more order the citizens out to make something safe—democracy, Christianity, or just plain business loans and prosperity. The fighter in him would not let him stay put if men were being disemboweled in no man's land again; the leader in him would say that his place were at the front.
EARLY LIFE OF A QUEER FISH
It is that leadership in him which, together with his complete divorce from all conventionality, has sent him to the fore in Congress and given us the gratifying assurance that a man of worth and power can be heard in the lower house as soon as he arrives in it. I do not know whether his fearlessness is due to that extremely rare discovery by men in office that courage is the truest road to success or whether it was just born in him. But what an odd fish he is in the Congressional aquarium is certainly proved by his coming out squarely against the Townsend old-age pension when it was not necessary for him to do so. No wonder some of his associates think him crazy. He goes looking for trouble. This is what he said:
The Townsend Plan is the most fantastic proposal, and the most unjust to old people, ever offered in America. . . . The Townsend plan is a brazen, unconscionable, and hopeless demand on the poor people, and merely keeps our nation from getting to our real problems.Nothing pussyfooting there. Nothing stradling or equivocating, but straight from the shoulder, despite the fact that the Townsend Plan was reported to be going strong in Texas. People may quibble over Maury Maverick's manner and style and choice of words and wish he would not shoot so often and be so noisy about it, but no one is ever going to accuse him of straddling. When he is asked why he hits out so hard, he draws himself up and says: "Having died twice in France it isn't worth while to avoid one political death by deing a demagogue."
Well, this Congressional comet is a true product of Texas. He was the youngest of eleven children, which, he says, is the "reason why the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Manufacturers' Association, and the Liberty League believe in birth control." He solemnly declares that he was "born amid the clashing of thunder, and the heavens were rent asunder" and to make sure that you believe it he adds, "I can remember it as plain as day. The stork and I came in through a big bay window which was open. I crawled down from the window sill, took my clothes off, and went to sleep by the side of my mother."
When he had made his mother's acquaintance in the course of years he found that she was and is the "best cultured and best educated woman I know." She taught him to read instructive books, taught him to get at facts before forming his conclusions and opinions—and she could do so because she was an exceptionally well-informed woman. He is proud of his ancestry and that his forebears were here by 1620; that a Maverick ancestor was one of the first four to spill blood in the Revolution; and that his grandfather, Samuel Maverick, fought at the Alamo, though not in its final siege. Obviously no one disgusted by his "radicalism" and his rapid-fire denunciations can tell him to go back where he came from—just as his wounds and his two medals for valor prevent militarists from impugning his motives or his courage when he exposes military claptrap and love of power.
His father having gone broke and obviously not being a believer in birth control, Maury had to work hard on a farm. When he went to school he did not like his studies much but he still studied all the time. He had excellent advantages and plenty to eat, and his mother saw to it that he read in some of his leisure time. Most of his boyhood traveling was done on horseback; the foundation of his self-confidence was surely laid when at the age of nine he and some eight other boys, the eldest fourteen, rode a hundred miles across country, shifting for themselves and once living off corn meal for three days. This is the nearest he ever came to pioneering, perhaps his nearest approach to the towpath which every budding American statesman is supposed to have trod.
MAVERICK SOUNDS OFF
Probably it is a shock to some New Englanders to learn that not everybody in Texas was once a cowboy and that there are people of ancient lineage and inherited traditions there and that Maverick is one of them. They might not realize it to hear him talk, because of his breeziness, his occasional slang, the accent of the people he serves.
But they would delight to hear him talk nonetheless—they could not help it. He told the House one day about an undesired invitation he had received from the Southern Industrial Council:
You know, when a man who does not know me pokes his nose into my cotton patch and talks to me about coming to a free barbecue, I always smell a rat. I wrote back that I'd rather buy my own meal.After the conference was held, he denounced it in these words:
Under the pretext of Southern decency, on which we Southerners pride ourselves, some hundred Congressmen and Senators foregathered to hear the Democratic administration insulted and the President treated derisively. It was absurd, contemptible, vicious, insidious, cowardly. It was an appeal to prejudice of such a type that would isolate the South from the rest of the nation.It is safe to assume that Mr. Maverick has received no more invitations from the Southern Industrial Council.
Delightful, too, was his suggestion that there should be two new "days" for the House of Representatives. His proposal:
Let's have a Quaker Day, when no one will speak except from divine inspiration, and a Murder Day when we'll kill all those who spoke on Quaker Day.Brevity may be the soul of wit; with Maury Maverick it serves other purposes. He frequently writes letters four words long. His reply to a five-page attack upon him by a constituent who opposed the utility bill:
Dear Sir:That constituent was lucky he didn't receive these remarks, to which Mr. Maverick has also resorted:
Ph-f-f-ft.
Very truly yours,
Maury Maverick
The utility bill will break an organization which is more powerful than the government. Once it is broken we can proceed to govern the people. The TVA bill will conserve natural resources and furnish cheap power. The sapheads that yell about the government interfering in business don't know what they're talking about. A company goes in and drains the State for profit—say, did you ever see a utility company plant a tree except in the front yard to attract investors?When it comes to the question of the revision of the Constitution, Mr. Maverick rushes in to let people know where he stands:
Mr. Speaker, in the last few months I suppose more guff and nonsense, not to mention malicious misinformation, has been peddled about on the American Constitution than at any time in our history. The fact that anyone should mention an amendment to the Constitution is cause for spiteful character assassination. Amending the Constitution is certainly constitutional, for amending it is provided in the Constitution itself. This is certainly an elementary statement. We all "revere" our forefathers, most of us at least as much as those who pretentiously blat in the public prints, but we also know that our "forefathers" were practical, intelligent, liberal men, who created this nation by revolting against England, and who thereafter set up a constitutional government, providing for constitutional amendments and changes. The purpose in doing this was to forever make the forcible overthrow of government unnecessary and improper—making the ballot the basis of changes to meet future conditions.FOR PEACE
It was his determination to do all within his power to achieve peace that made this yearling Congressman come to the front with the neutrality bill sponsored in the Senate by Senators Nye and Clark and in the house by Mr. Maverick. He gave a year of study to it, and a speaking trip into twenty-four States brought him the conviction, which is shared by others who have been in touch with popular assemblages, that the American people are interested in nothing so much as their preservation from entanglement in the next war—that they value their sons' lives above any number of dollars. As between the Administration bill, which was shelved at least for the present, and the Maverick bill, the writer of this article favors the latter, because Mr. Maverick has sought to make action mandatory upon the President wherever possible. To the undeniably serious criticism that it is impossible to foresee each and every situation, the reply is that risks must be run in any case and that the President can always call an extra session and that the President should not again be subject to the kind of pressure which Mr. Wilson faced from political and business circles by the time that our Eastern industry had, to a large degree, become an integrated part of the British war machine.
Mr. Maverick is especially eager to have a law which makes it mandatory for the President to declare embargoes just as soon as war begins. Asked when modern wars begin, since, as in the cases of China and Japan, and Italy and Ethiopia, they may take place without a declaration of war, the Congressman was necessarily somewhat vague, as everyone must be:
The status of war, it seems to me, will be determined on the basis of the major activities of those two nations or if troops of one nation are on the soil of a foreign nation.When asked at a hearing whether he would apply the embargoes to his own State, he replied with admirable forthrightness that he had already publicly declared in Houston, the "greatest cotton center in the world," that he
would just as soon close every port in the United States, including Houston and Galveston if it would save the life of one human being.If that seems a sweeping statement, it is most encouraging to note his later assurance:
The reaction I got was to the effect that the people in Houston or Galveston that are in the cotton and oil business would be willing to lose all the money that it was possible to make if they thought it would save human lives and keep us out of war.That Mr. Maverick is wholly against the granting of credit and loans to belligerents naturally follows—not because he underestimates the difficulty of enforcement or the possibility of "rerouting" a loan, let us say to Canada, but because he feels that something must be done and done now before the hysteria of wartime is at hand. He knows that in this neutrality matter all the experts disagree and that there are absolutely no precedents. But he thinks that there is no reason whatever for not attempting some steps, for pioneering in this vital field. Only one other subject—the TVA—arouses him as passionately; for that he stands heart and soul. He has visited it, studied it carefully for days, and poured forth pages and pages about it into the Congressional Record.
TO LIBERTY'S RESCUE
Naturally a man with Mr. Maverick's devotion to peace, with his family inheritance, with his love of liberty watches with dismay the growing influence of the army and navy lobbies in Washington, the increasing attempts to gag the people and muzzle the press, and the growing denials of civil liberties the Constitution guarantees. He has been especially active in opposing the McSwain bill, to provide penalties for the exertion of "mutinous influence" upon army and navy and one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation ever offered in Congress since the alien and sedition bills. It originated with the Navy Department, which is so uncertain of its enlisted forces as to believe that they yield to the blandishments of communists whever they come into contact with them. A few cases of communists offering handbills and other propaganda have so terrified the Navy Department, despite the fact that no mutinous conduct due to this cause has ever been exposed to public knowledge, that it has drawn a bill as alarming in its provisions as to make it possible under it to arrest the editor of the Atlantic Monthly for printing a recent article by Admiral Sims. For that article declared that the navy's promotion system is bringing to the top incompetent commanding officers—which might certainly incite some sailors to "disaffection" by making them undesirous of serving under incompetent superiors.
Well, here is the way Messrs. Maverick and Kvale reject the measure, in words which no one can misunderstand and which bespeak the true patriotism of the writers:
This measure, put forward apparently casually and in as inconspicuous a manner as possible, is a direct, unnecessary, and wanton assault on the freedom of the press and of speech, and on our traditional rights of immunity against unreasonable search and seizure. At the very least, it is a sop designed to cater to the prejudices of those so-called patriotic groups who think that the most becoming garb for the Statue of Liberty is a strait-jacket and that American freedom consists of allowing the liberties of the people to be anaesthetized into complete coma. At worst, it is an underhanded attempt to prevent the American people from criticizing or organizing to oppose the magnificent grabs of the mutinous makers and the other special selfish special interests and to put the whole authority of the United States behind unimpeded appropriations for the relief of the Schwabs, du Ponts, and Morgans, who thrive on battleships and munitions contracts. It is also a snide effort to prevent that free discussion which would help to prevent foolish and unnecessary wars.Here endeth the picture of the Texas Norther who blew into Washington and roared through the halls of Congress. But don't think of him as one lacking in tact or charm or ability. At a dinner of the Economic Club in New York in February of this year he held a large audience of hard-boiled businessmen spellbound. They insisted that the rules of the Club be broken so that he could speak longer than the allotted time—and they made him speak again! There were two other speakers on the program; Maverick stole the show. He told the audience things utterly opposed to its views—and went off with its applause and its friendship. Who shall say how far he may go if his constituents value him as they should in the years to come?
Oswald Garrison Villard , Forum and Century, June, 1936
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