Joe Cannon was a Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois who survived an overthrow plot more than 100 years before the blunderbuss attack that earlier this month toppled Kevin McCarthy.
Known as “Uncle Joe” Cannon, he dealt in an authoritarian brand of politics that came to be known as “Cannonism.” After one vote he announced: “The ayes make more noise, but the nays have it.” A constituent who asked his congressman for a copy of the congressional rules received a photo of Cannon.
Despite such highhandedness, he was for the most part popular within his party, and was promoted in some quarters for a spot on the presidential ticket in 1904 and during the following election cycle.
Cannon resisted such overtures, knowing the power of the speaker’s position. “The presidential bee is not buzzing in my head and I do not expect to be afflicted by that insect,” the Tribune quoted him as saying in 1906.
A Tribune headline announced: “Cannon Fighting Place on Ticket.”
“He is a wise old owl,” the accompanying story explained. “The speaker has passed the word that the boom for him for the vice presidency must be stamped out forthwith.”
As vice president, Cannon would preside over the Senate, generally a powerless-position. As speaker of the House, he was at the center of the action.
“The speaker of the house has an enormous power over bills,” the Tribune explained. “He cannot pass every bill he wants to, but he can successfully kill those he doesn’t like. His assent is generally necessary before a special rule can be considered or any measure can be taken out of its regular order.”
Before the Civil War, Cannon was a lawyer riding the same circuit of courthouses as Abraham Lincoln. In 1872, he won a seat in Congress and, while losing elections in 1890 in 1912 and sitting out two terms, was still there in 1917, when Woodrow Wilson was president and America entered World War I.
“It was a reform year, the beginning of a decade of ‘reform’ which shook up the virtues as well as the vices,” he noted of his 1872 election in his memoir “Uncle Joe Cannon.” “Nothing was right and nobody was safe from the reformers. They were busy with social, political and religious reform.”
Cannon was instinctively suspicious of do-gooders. He assumed that humans are incurably fallible. When a reporter asked him if those engaged in public affairs could be impartial, Cannon replied: “The only thoroughly impartial man is a dead man.”
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The widow of his longtime secretary ranked things Cannon disdained, presumably in descending order of vehemence: “He had a contempt for a Democrat, a free trader, a professional agitator, a demagogue, or a hypocrite,” she wrote in a foreword to his memoir.
He was equally dismissive of the United Nations’ predecessor, the League of Nations, which was created near the end of his congressional tenure. “It would extend the scope of the aspirations of the men and women who devote a large part of their time and energies to searching for something somewhere in the world calling for an appropriation from Congress,” he wrote.
Cannon preferred tradition to innovation, virtually without exception. Raised in a Quaker household, he became a Methodist after marrying one and refusing a Quaker demand that he say he regretted doing so.
He was born in North Carolina in 1836. Four years later, Cannon’s family joined an exodus of Quakers leaving the state. Quakers opposed slavery, and they didn’t want their children to face equably unacceptable choices: Abjuring the faith or competing with slave labor.
“They carried the Declaration of Independence to its logical concussion,” Cannon wrote of his parents’ decision.
Cannon’s family settled on a farm near Terra Haute, Indiana. When his father died, he went to work in a country store. He seemed fated to remain there, until he testified in a locally notorious trial.
A village gossip denounced a girl simply for being popular with boys. Her father sued for slander and summoned Cannon as a witness because his daughter and Cannon traveled in the same teenage social circles.
He got on the stand trembling but was wowed by the girl’s attorney. John P. Usher made mincemeat of the girl’s accusers, dismissing their claims as hearsay and winning the case. “It opened up a new view of the law to me,” Cannon later wrote.
Impressed by Cannon, Usher gave him access to the shelves of law books in his office. “Reading for the bar exam” was then a common alternative to law school. After a year as Usher’s gofer, Cannon spent six months at the Cincinnati Law School, and at Usher’s suggestion, he went to Illinois. Fewer lawyers on what was then the western frontier meant more opportunities.
After years as a lawyer on a rural circuit and then as a state’s attorney, Cannon arrived in Congress uniquely armed.
“The lawyers who rode the circuit in the West had little time for the preparation of arguments. They had to indulge in the catch as catch can method of argument. That was my practice and it became a habit that clung to me through my legislative career. I have never prepared speeches,” he recalled in his memoir.
Never looking down at a script, Cannon gave the impression of talking to each of his colleagues individually. It also better prepared him for questions than Representatives who read speeches written by staffers. To speak off the cuff accurately, he had to master arguments for and against a proposal.
He might insert a joke or a shaggy-dog story when statistics set eyeballs rolling. It was a trick he borrowed from Lincoln.
When a representative said “the Gentleman from Illinois must have oats in his pocket,” Cannon embraced the put-down.
“I became the ‘Hayseed member from Illinois’ to the metropolitan press and my notoriety spread throughout the country,” he wrote.
A folksy persona allowed Cannon to keep quiet when necessary during the Republican presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a patrician reformer whose progressive policies, embodied by efforts to regulate business, Cannon vigorously opposed.
“I think, if truth be known, that Mr. Roosevelt rather despised trade and failed to understand that without commerce there could have been no civilization,” Cannon wrote.
During his tenure from 1903 to 1911, the speaker of the House’s power reached its apogee.
Yet Cannon’s power was the proverbial double-edged sword. In 1910, a cabal of Democrats and self-proclaimed insurgent Republicans stripped him of his chairmanship of the Rules Committee. Cannon offered to resign so the House could choose another speaker. His offer wasn’t accepted.
“The Insurgents did not dare vote for a Democrat for Speaker, and the Democrats did not dare not to vote for an Insurgent and would not vote for a regular Republican,” Cannon explained in his book.
But his hold on the speaker’s gavel had been weakened, and the power of the Speaker’s office was diminished by new rules. By 1911 his tenure as speaker was over, and a year later, he lost a bid for reelection as Democrats took control of the House.
He had little good to say about what he saw as the diminishment of his former office.
“Nowadays a Speaker is expected to be nothing more than a Sunday School teacher, to pat all the good little boys on the head and turn the other cheek when the bad boys treat him as a target for their bean shooters,” he wrote.
Cannon won back a seat in the House in 1914 and held it until deciding not to run eight years later. Time magazine put his picture on the cover of its first issue, March 3, 1923, which was Uncle Joe Cannon’s last day in Congress. In 1962, the Cannon House Office Building in Washington was named in his honor.
Despite pooh-poohing objectivity, Cannon made a dispassionate self-assessment in the foreword of his memoir.
“I am of the great army of mediocrity which constitutes the majority. I have made little effort to separate myself from that majority, and it has not been difficult for me to keep in sympathy with the average citizen, for I have always belonged to that class, if it is a class.”
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