Master Jones Goes to Washington

Anyway, since we had some free time on our hands that morning we decided we would have a mock debate from the Podium. Rodney Wilcox, a Republican Page from Pennsylvania would be Richard Nixon, Will Burgess would be Hubert Humphrey and I would be George Wallace (but only because I had the accent down, not due to any ideological parallels). Andre would referee the debate from the Speaker’s Chair on the Rostrum and the other guys would sit in the members’ chairs and watch and judge us to see who did the best impression.

Rodney spoke first at the Podium as Nixon. He spoke with conviction, like they were really his words, but shaking his fist as he spoke, just like Nixon. "I can achieve Peace in Vietnam. Peace with Honor. I will restore the personal, human element in government. Without this restoration, we cannot succeed." He spoke of the need for law and order. Since he was a Republican Page and rich kid, I assumed his sympathies, regardless of the degree of sophistication of those sympathies, were pretty damned close to Tricky Dick’s. The rest of the Pages not working in their Congressman’s office were sitting in the Members’ Chairs, cheering on their candidates and jeering their foes.

Will had his Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Vice President of the United States of America, down pat, with the forceful delivery and populist appeal of the real thing. He was "pleased as punch" at this and that, with a barely discernible Mississippi accent that he was trying to disguise. He called Nixon "Furtive--he’s furtive, I tell you!" (He must have read the same article I did). I wondered then if Humphrey really would weather the political and literal blood stains of that summer’s murders of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy, so indelibly lodged in the fabric of the Johnson Administration by sheer proximity, the Administration of which he was now the torchbearer by default.

I was the last one to speak. I stood at the Podium and looked back at Andre sitting in the Speaker’s Chair at the Speaker’s Desk. He was playing with the coin silver inkstand. It was the oldest surviving relic of the House. The origin of the inkstand is unclear, but it appears in portraits dating from 1821 and is stamped with the mark of J. Leonard, a Georgetown silversmith. The tray contains three crystal inkwells and is adorned on both sides by eagle medallions. The feet of the tray are fasces entwined by a serpent, a classical symbol of wisdom surrounding authority. Richard had told me all about this when he gave me the tour. I hoped Andre didn’t mess with it and break it or something.

I couldn’t play the part of George Wallace with any real sense of empathy, unless I pretended to be my father. I had the natural southern drawl, so to stretch it to an Alabama length was easy for me. You just stretch one-syllable words into two-syllable ones. "Yes" becomes "Yay-ess". And drop the ending "g"’s. Nothin’, everythin’, somethin’. "Ers" become "uhs". "Nevuh. Forevuh. Weathuh". As Wallace, I was "tired of the gova-mint pussyfootin’ around" this bunch of criminals, and "tired of the other candidates pussyfootin’ around" that issue or this, and so on and so on.

Only after I remembered that Andre was sitting right behind me, and that Andre was black, did I remember just in time not to make a fool of myself by getting too close to Wallace’s more racist rhetoric. "I will do away with excessive foreign aid and use the savin’s on domestic programs, such as highway buildin’. And I won’t bow to the know-it-alls that don’t know it all, those newspapuh edituhs that continue to attack me and my followuhs." I stuck to the demagoguery and steered clear of the idiocy, as best I understood such to be.

It wasn’t the speech I was faking that struck me as cool. It was the idea of where I was standing. I was standing where every President since that Chamber was built had delivered his State of the Union Address. Lincoln on the War Between the States. Teddy Roosevelt on the need to make Panama a country. Franklin Roosevelt and his "date that will live in infamy". General Douglas MacArthur and his "Old Soldiers Never Die" speech. John Kennedy and his promises to reach for the stars. Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society.

These were great people and they had been standing right there at that Podium, where I was paying lip service to the freedom for which these and other great men and women gave their lives and livelihoods in war and in peace. And I did it not by championing the virtues of tolerance, liberty, charity and freedom, but by mocking the vanishing vestiges of Southern racism and the last pathetic candidate they could find to lead them on such an unworthy and lost cause.

I was just about finished with my senseless diatribe when I heard a little buzzer, kind of like a doorbell, go off behind me. I didn’t think that much about it at the time and kept on finishing up my pussyfootin’ accusations. All of a sudden, the doors to the upstairs galleries of the Chamber swung open as did the doors on the floor level, on both sides of the dais and from the cloakrooms, too. At least twenty policemen stormed in. And they were all armed with rifles or pistols, weapons drawn and ready. I even saw a machine gun! We were surrounded.

The first thing I noticed was the sound of Andre hitting the floor behind me, knocking the Speaker’s Chair back from the Desk where it sat and up against the back wall and the flag. Whether it was because he was from Detroit and had mastered those reactions in similar situations back there, I’ll never know. But he was unquestionably a good second ahead of the rest of us in hitting the floor.

After the Capitol Police had the Chamber under control, they quickly figured it out. Looked like a bunch of Pages hiding on the floor, scared shitless. One of the Officers went up to Andre. The Officer – his ID badge said Captain Howell - asked him who pushed the button.

"The what?" Andre tried to sound convincing. I had risen and stepped down to the dais level and took a seat with my head down on my crossed arms, which were lying on the dais. The other guys sat motionless in their Members’ chairs.

"Who pushed the Sergeant of Arms button? That one right there," Howell said, pointing to the button that was now about seven inches from Andre’s under-the-desk-hiding head.

"I thought that button would ring down there where the Parliamentarian sits," Andre said, pointing to the lower ring of chairs on the dais and the seat Nick the Page had just so recently vacated with haste and into which I had jumped. Unfortunately for Andre, it wasn’t exactly the right seat. Or the right button.