Carpetbag keys

[calimac]

So the news came down a couple days ago that Alan Keyes has accepted the invitation to replace Jack Ryan as the Republican senatorial candidate in Illinois. Despite the fact that Keyes lives in Maryland.

Some Democrats have been rather skeptical of the appropriateness of this, and Republicans have pointed out that Democrats didn't object to Hillary Clinton running for Senate from New York State.

No, Democrats didn't object to that. But Alan Keyes did. The actual charge is hypocrisy. Keyes's statement at the time, as I've found it on the web, is "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it."

Keyes has been offering various excuses as to why it's OK if Alan Keyes does it. The best of these is that, unlike Hillary, he's not claiming to have anything to do with his adopted state, a real chutzpah of a charge if you ask me.

Keyes also says it's OK if he does it because he was drafted. Actually drafted, in the sense of having no options to refuse, he was not. Earnestly importuned, yes; but so was Hillary.

There have been carpetbagging senators before, of course. Robert Kennedy as senator from New York was a classic example, and unlike Hillary he never paid much attention to the state he supposedly represented.

And then there were the original post-Civil War carpetbaggers. Not many people seem to know that the first Black senator, Hiram R. Rhodes of Mississippi, was a carpetbagger. (How would a slave have obtained enough of the education considered essential for a political career?) He was a minister in Baltimore until he came south as chaplain to a Black regiment.

His white colleague from Mississippi, Adalbert Ames, was at the start of the war a young West Point graduate from Maine. He was assigned to occupation command in Mississippi, and after his service as senator and governor went back north to work in the flour business.

But my favorite carpetbagging story is that of Adonijah S. Welch, who served a few months as a senator from Florida in 1868-9. He spent the war as a normal-school principal in Ypsilanti, Michigan, went south as the war ended, and three years later abandoned Florida to become President of Iowa State.

So far as I can recall, the only senator ever seriously criticized for not being a resident was much earlier than that: Stanley Griswold, who served as senator from Ohio for a couple months in 1809, and who had just hied over to what-would-become Cleveland from Detroit, where he'd been secretary of the territorial government.

This has been your historical-Senate tribute & trivia of the day.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Hadn't known we had that many carpetbaggers. Where'd you find this info?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I am a US Senate history junkie. Have you seen the Senate history pages on my website?

At least half the members of Congress elected from the South during Reconstruction were "carpetbaggers," i.e. Northerners who'd gone south with the military or after the war. (Most of the rest were "scalawags", a term for anti-Confederate southerners; but it was impossible to elect an ex-Confederate until after Reconstruction ended, after which they were elected all the time.) Carpetbaggers were not necessarily malevolent in their motives: people did move around a lot looking for economic opportunity wherever they could find it, and the stricken South, like the West, was a good place. Still, even today in places with lots of internal immigrants, even long-time residents who originally came from elsewhere often have to show assimilation to launch political careers. Is Howard Dean a "real" Vermonter, is GWB a "real" Texan? And so on.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I did not notice. Obviously I have some exploring to do!