The Great Standpatter

TYRANT FROM ILLINOIS (248 pp.)--Blair Bolles--Norton ($4.50).

There was always a cuspidor planted on his library rug, and he could make it chime like a bell. Ladies covered their ears at his "hells" and "damns," but everybody agreed he was a stout old character. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives and his full name was John Joseph Gurney Cannon, but Americans called him "Uncle Joe."

Uncle Joe came up the hard way, and the country respected him for it. As a boy he sold calico and plowshares to support his widowed mother. Later he read law in a Terre Haute law office, slept on a wooden bench in the office. When he started practice, in Shelbyville, Ill., he was glad to trudge 20 miles to earn a $5 fee. He did not have to trudge long. A Congressman at 36, Uncle Joe spent 23 terms in the House, four of them as Speaker. But somewhere along the line, Uncle Joe got out of step.

Rather, as Uncle Joe saw it, the U.S. got out of step. McKinleyism suited him fine, but Teddy Roosevelt's "Square Deal" was a devil's brew. Beginning in 1906, when he was already a man of 70, Joe Cannon set himself to use every power of the Speaker's office to stifle the reforms demanded by younger men. From liberals of that time he earned a new and bitter nickname: "Cannon the Strangler." The debatable thesis of Blair Bolles's Tyrant from Illinois is that Cannon was the conservative grit that irritated a goodly part of the next generation into "progressive" politics and produced the first pearly concepts of the welfare state.

Why Tamper? Uncle Joe did not see himself as grit. He thought others, e.g., fellow Republicans T.R., "Old Bob" La Follette and George Norris, were deadly wrong when they roared against the trusts and the tariffs. America is a hell of a success, Uncle Joe insisted, and why tamper with it? With the single-minded devotion of the pure in heart, he stacked the membership of the House's 60-odd committees, awarded key chairmanships to his cohorts to make sure that nobody did tamper.

For the rest, he ruled by bottleneck. Reform bills were killed or emasculated in committee. So many died in the Judiciary Committee that it came to be known as "the Morgue." Immigration control, income tax, tariff revision and currency reform were strangled or mangled beyond recognition. "Not one cent for scenery," snorted Cannon when his own party proposed forest conservation.

The Speaker Yields. "You must lay down on Uncle Joe," Teddy Roosevelt was advised. "It will be a good deal like laying down on a hedgehog," grinned T.R. One day in 1910, nonetheless, the opposition did lay down on Uncle Joe for keeps. With some of Cannon's standpatters absent on a long weekend, Republican George Norris introduced a resolution shearing the Speaker of most of his vast powers. For three days, Cannon fought the inevitable, then yielded. His four-year "experiment with personal power," as Author Bolles calls it, was over.

Bolles, a newspaper man who now heads the Washington bureau of the Foreign Policy Association, gives most of his space to a valuable study of Cannon's four-year legislative dictatorship, only briefly summarizes the epilogue. Uncle Joe stayed on in Congress. He grumbled at change, but his good nature and blunt sincerity restored him to national affection. Visitors to the Capitol begged their guides for a peek at the Old Man.

At 86, he decided to retire (TIME'S first Cover, March 3, 1923). He told friends he was going home to die. But even death had to wait three more years to unseat Uncle Joe Cannon.

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