Gingrich, Blaine alike> House leaders shared flair for controversy

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Addressing what he called a “firestorm” in the House over which he presides, Newt Gingrich last week cited one of his parliamentary heroes. A ruling to stifle criticism of a House speaker “is based upon an 1897 ruling of Speaker Thomas Reed,” Gingrich said.

Thomas Brackett Reed, whose bronze statue stands on a hillside in Portland, Maine, served three terms as speaker a century ago. Called a czar and a tyrant, he has remained a role model for strong speakers because he ended dilatory tactics.

But The Book Deal That Will Not Go Away is luring Gingrich down the path of another speaker from Maine. In 1876, James G. Blaine’s House career ended in charges of corruption and histrionic denials. Blaine’s “Mulligan letters” were debated as hotly then as Gingrich’s “Murdoch meeting” is today.

Blaine’s intellect, energy and eloquence captivated millions. He later became a U.S. senator, secretary of state for two presidents and a three-time presidential candidate himself, winning the GOP nomination in 1884. Yet his obtuseness about his personal finances has eclipsed his reputation in history.

In the 19th century, the “information highway” was the network of railroads then being built, with as much taxpayer treasure as railroad barons could wheedle out of Congress. Today, telecommunications is a big Capitol Hill presence.

In the 1870s, Boston was the capital of capital formation, and its financiers helped Blaine get favorable deals on railroad stocks. In the late 20th century, Rupert Murdoch, potential publisher and post-election supplicant to Gingrich, reigns over a worldwide media kingdom based in Australia.

Like Gingrich, Blaine stood on legality, not propriety. Both loved to talk and both abandoned their innate political savvy. Gingrich, who rose to power with a laserlike lust for media attention, pushed himself off-message and used his toes for target practice Thursday, reaching in his pocket for a symbol for reporters and, worse yet, photographers.

“I am taking one dollar,” Gingrich said, holding up a buck. “It has nothing to do with legislation. I am going to write a book. I think I have a right to write a book.”

If he exercises his right, he will tighten his new business partner in a deadly embrace. The media mogul Murdoch cannot afford favors from a Gingrich-led Congress; the speaker, unless he jettisons his literary career, will find his sales more scrutinized than his prose.

Unlike Gingrich, James Gillespie Blaine lived grandly; two of his mansions stand today, one on Washington’s Dupont Circle and the other in Augusta, the Maine governor’s mansion.

Like Gingrich, Blaine was born in humble circumstances in Pennsylvania. Gingrich taught at West Georgia College. Blaine taught at Western Military Institute in Kentucky. In 1854, after moving to Maine, Blaine purchased The Kennebec Journal and Portland Advertiser. His editorials favoring the new Republican Party helped elect him to the Legislature and later to the speakership in Augusta. In 1862, Blaine was elected to Congress. After the 1868 elections, which swept in President Grant, Blaine became speaker.

” On June 29, 1869, four months after he was elected speaker, Blaine wrote to Warren Fisher Jr. of India Street in Boston, “Your offer to admit me to a participation in the new railroad enterprise is in every respect as generous as I could expect or desire.”

In the speakership, Blaine prospered and so did the railroads. His hopes for the presidency heightened when Democrats won the House in 1874 because, in the minority, he was free to speak.

He carefully courted sentiment among Republicans against the late Confederacy, the “McGovernik counterculture” of its day. In 1875, a bill granted total amnesty to all in the South who fought the Union. Blaine offered an amendment to exclude former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, “a man who by the wink of his eye, by the wave of his hand, by the nod of his head, could have stopped the atrocity at Andersonville,” a notorious prison camp for Union soldiers.

The speech gave Blaine nationwide fame and, according to one biographer, “made inevitable his nomination by the next Republican convention.” But in 1876, an Indianapolis newspaper published charges about Blaine’s Arkansas enterprise; the Democratic majority ordered an investigation of the former speaker. Called to Washington were the Boston financier Fisher and his bookkeeper, James Mulligan, who had copies of the Blaine-Fisher letters.

The night before Mulligan was to testify, Blaine visited him and asked for the letters. When Mulligan, who had worked once for Blaine’s brother-in-law, refused, Blaine pleaded through tears for his family and, Mulligan testified, “even contemplated suicide.” Mulligan gave him the letters.

The committee then asked Blaine for the correspondence, but he refused. With advice from his two lawyers, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, he said they were private, even though they had been subpoenaed by the House.

On June 5, 1876, Blaine took the House floor for an emotional gavotte not to be equaled until 1952 and Richard Nixon’s “Checkers speech.”

Mulligan “came here for a sensation,” Blaine said. “I have defied the power of the House to compel me to produce those letters,” Blaine bellowed. “I say this House has no more power to order what shall be done or not done with my private correspondence than it has with what I shall do in the nurture and education of my children.”

To his audience’s transfixed attention, he lifted aloft a batch of papers from his desk, like Gingrich flipping a dollar bill. “I am not afraid to show the letters. Thank God Almighty, I am not afraid to show them! There they are,” he said. “I invite the confidence of 44 millions of my countrymen while I read those letters from this desk.”

He read selectively from a few, then challenged the committee to drop its investigation. “Mr. Blaine’s triumph was complete,” The Baltimore American wrote, “and all the more glorious for him because it was won in the open light of day.” The Philadelphia Inquirer agreed, saying “The whirlwind of scandal has left him unharmed.” Amid the acclaim, the governor of Maine appointed Blaine to the Senate.

At the Republican convention in Cincinnati, Robert Ingersoll nominated him with a lasting label, “an armed warrior, like a plumed knight.” The plume’s feathers looked dusty to the delegates, and Blaine lost on the seventh ballot to Rutherford B. Hayes.

In 1880, Blaine tried again, but lost to James A. Garfield, who appointed him secretary of state. Blaine’s service there produced lasting effects. He helped begin the Pan American Union, which later became the Organization of American States.

After Garfield’s assassination, Blaine resigned and signed a book contract. “Twenty Years in Congress” earned more than $100,000 in royalties in the first few months after its publication. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100,000 then would be $1,531,000 today.

Blaine’s popularity was so strong he won the nomination in 1884. Then he learned that in scandals, dribs and drabs are painful and that a cover-up can be worse than the original blunder.

In a less-than-edifying campaign, Democrats nominated the governor of New York, Grover Cleveland. In July, “The Terrible Tale” headlined a story in The Buffalo Telegraph about Cleveland, a bachelor, fathering an illegitimate child. He admitted it. In the summer, partisan bands in street parades, chanted: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?”

Democrats answered the Republican taunt gamely: “Gone to the White House — Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Blaine seemed at last destined for the presidency, but on Sept. 15, more Mulligan letters were discovered in Boston, including the most damaging one of all, written eight years earlier.

Blaine had sent a suggested draft for Fisher that would clear him before the committee. “Regard this letter as strictly confidential,” Blaine wrote. “Kind regards to Mrs. Fisher. Burn this letter.”

Democratic street chants had a new tune, rebaptizing Blaine with the name of the biggest rail baron: “Blaine! Blaine! Jay Gould Blaine, the Continental Liar from the state of Maine! Burn this letter!”

Harry Thurston Peck, a contemporary chronicler, wrote of Blaine: “Like a dank mist which rises at nightfall over marshy ground, there rose a vague, impalpable belief that in his public life he had not had a high regard for his own honor.”

The election was close, but Blaine lost. To the end, he protested his innocence. One of his biographers, David S. Muzzey, agrees, calling all of the evidence circumstantial.

Newt Gingrich says he did not know Murdoch owned HarperCollins until he read it in the newspapers, an utterly credible claim. Murdoch’s empire is so vast that maybe he, too, was unaware he owned the publishing house. But in politics, appearances of impropriety leave lasting impressions.

“I saw Blaine the other day and he is a broken and used-up man,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in November 1892. Three months later, the “plumed knight” died at 63.

In 1931, James Morgan of The Boston Globe reported from Blaine’s gravesite in Augusta that “monumental honors were proposed for the most renowned citizen of this state at the time of his death.” But “Blaine men, or Blaineacs, as they were sometimes called,” donated “only a pitiable total — somewhere around $150.”

“The Blaine family was more generous in giving their historic homestead to the state for housing governors,” Morgan wrote. “But nowhere, from Kittery to Calais, has one stone been laid upon another in memory of `the man from Maine.”‘

(Martin F. Nolan is an associate editor of the Boston Globe.)