Bizarre History (8 page)

On January 30, 1798, two congressmen who didn’t care for each other, Matthew Lyon (a Republican from Vermont) and Roger Griswold (a Federalist from Connecticut), started shouting at each other. (Nothing new there.) Then things took a turn for the worse when Lyon spat tobacco in Griswold’s face after Griswold called him a coward. The Federalists moved to expel Lyon, and the House spent two long weeks debating it. Lyon apologized and the House fell short of the number of votes needed for expulsion.

The next day, Griswold, who was obviously not happy with the apology or the vote, decided to settle the matter himself. He rushed across the House floor and, with his brand-new hickory walking stick, began beating on Lyon. Here is Griswold’s account: “I gave him the first blow—I call’d him a scoundrel and struck him with my cane, and pursued him with more than twenty blows on his head and back until he got possession of a pair of tongues [i.e. tongs], when I threw him down and after giving him several blows with my fist, I was taken off by his friends.”

Here’s an even better account from Representative George Thatcher of Massachusetts: “I was suddenly, and unexpectedly interrupted by the sound of a violent blow. I raised my head, and directly before me stood Mr. Griswald [sic] laying on blows with all his might upon Mr. Lyon, who seemed to be in the act of rising out of his seat. Lyon made an attempt to catch his cane, but failed—he pressed towards Griswald and endeavored to close with him, but Griswald fell back and continued his blows on the head, shoulder, and arms of Lyon [who] protecting his head and face as well as he could then turned and made for the fire place and took up the [fire] tongs. Griswald dropped his stick and seized the tongs with one hand, and the collar of Lyon by the other, in which position they struggled for an instant when Griswald tripped Lyon and threw him on the floor and gave him one or two blows in the face.”

One House member said Congress had been reduced to “an assembly of gladiators.” Griswold, not content to leave things alone, got in the last word: “I might perhaps have given him a second beating but the House was called to order.”

Even thought it was outlawed, by the late 1700s dueling had become an accepted (if idiotic) form of resolving political disagreements and preserving honor. Even Abraham Lincoln was once challenged to a duel. Lincoln chose swords as the weapon, and thankfully all was resolved before the duel. Nevertheless, there were dozens of duels from the 1700s until around the end of the Civil War, when dueling finally fell out of favor. Politicians killed in duels included the governor of Georgia in 1789, Alexander Hamilton (1804), Senator Armistead Mason of Virginia (1819), US District Attorney Joshua Barton (1823), North Carolina Congressman Robert Vance (1827), and more!

The threat of violence during congressional sessions was so real that by 1835, Vice President Martin Van Buren wore a brace of pistols when presiding over the Senate.

John Fox Potter, Republican congressman from Wisconsin just prior to the Civil War, had a nickname. He was called “Bowie Knife” Potter due to an incident during the spring of 1860. Basically he offered to fight Roger Pryor, congressman from Virginia on the following terms: “Bowie-knives and a dark room, and one of us to die.” The duel never took place, but Potter received several Bowie knives as gifts from sympathizers (including a four-pound, six-and-a-half–foot folding knife) as well as a nifty new nickname.

In one of the last physically violent episodes in US politics, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Ralph Yarborough of Texas wrestled for more than ten minutes outside a Senate hearing room over the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Both were sixty-one years old at the time, but Thurmond, who was quite physically fit, pinned Yarborough at least twice.

Dick Tuck has been a political consultant for American politicians for more than fifty years. And although he has worked on political campaigns for Adlai Stevenson, John and Robert Kennedy, and many others, he is best known as a political prankster and Richard Nixon’s arch nemesis. Many historians called Nixon’s administration paranoid, and if that were indeed the case, Dick Tuck had a hand in making it that way. Here’s a list of some of Tuck’s Nixon pranks.

In 1950, while Nixon was running for California senator, Tuck, who was working for Nixon’s opponent, got himself hired as a Nixon campaign worker. Tuck was put in charge of organizing campaign rallies. At one such rally at UC Santa Barbara, Tuck booked an extremely large auditorium (a capacity of four thousand), yet did very little to promote the event. Fewer than fifty people attended. When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, “Dick Tuck, you’ve made your last advance.”

In 1956, during the Republican National Convention where Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower’s vice president, Tuck hired garbage trucks to drive by the convention center with signs that read “Dump Nixon.”

After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman to don Nixon buttons and approach Nixon as he got off the plane. While TV cameras were rolling, the woman hugged him and said, “Don’t worry, son! He beat you last night, but you’ll get him next time.”

During the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon went on a whistle-stop tour of California. While giving a speech on the caboose, Tuck allegedly disguised himself as a railway employee and waved the train out of the station while Nixon was still talking.