John C. Spooner

At a moment when, partly because of the retirement from public life of some of our strongest statesmen and partly by the hand of death, the United States Senate has seemed to the people to be groping helplessly without a leader, it is fitting that the Century should pay special tribute to a really great senator of our time. John Coit Spooner was a loyal party man, a strong and convincing speaker, a careful investigator of whatever measures came before him; but he was, above all, a statesman of lucid common sense. It was Senator Spooner’s personal achievement, when the country was changing from a Continental Power to a World Power, to see to it that, from the huge mass of new legislative proposals, not only should the foolish measures and resolutions be eliminated but the ill-drawn measures with a useful purpose be so re-drawn as to ensure the accomplishment of that purpose in the face of subsequent litigation.

Mr. Spooner’s judgment on public questions was not only sound, but was so firmly rooted in constitutional knowledge and legal experience that his entry into a confused debate would usually brush away obscurities and settle the Senate’s attitude. He despised the political and legislative trivialities which have lately claimed a place as statesmanship. He did not hesitate even at wounding the official susceptibilities of his fellow-members, if that was unavoidable in dispelling illusions over constitutional powers. Those who have listened to him from the Senate gallery will not forget the erect pose, the squaring of the shoulders as if to meet and repel attack, the calm survey of an antagonist in debate, which marked him out in the discussion. It was thus, one may imagine, that he bore himself in the famous debate of 1906 on the Panama and San Domingo treaties, when he unhorsed successively each opponent to his argument that the Senate had no right to participate in treaty negotiation, and answered a senatorial query as to “What is the relation between the President and the Foreign Relations Committee; do those men never advise?” “The relation of members of the Foreign Relations Committee to the Executive,” Mr. Spooner promptly responded, “is precisely the relation which the Senator and his colleagues sustain. The Committee is but the servant of the Senate, as all other committees are.”

It was an evidence of Mr. Spooner’s place in our public life that, although he rarely introduced a measure of his own, his revisions and alterations of other men’s measures were almost invariably accepted. Our one living ex-president [William Howard Taft] has said of him that “every great act of Congressional legislation in the sixteen years of his service has been made better and more lucid and more clearly within the constitutional authority by amendments and suggestions of his which do not bear his name.”

Senator Spooner was as good a patriot as a legislator. Before his graduation from college in 1864 he enlisted in the Wisconsin infantry, with which he served up to and after the close of the Civil War. Unsparing of his own time and energy in Congressional duties, he refused, in days when those were matter-of-fact perquisites of public service, to use a railway pass or a telegraph frank. He rejected the most lucrative retainers for private litigation, when acceptance of them seemed to him incompatible with the time or freedom of judgment which belonged to his public responsibilities. Nor did his skillful handiwork in perfecting legislative bills infatuate him in the least with law-making for the sake of law-making. His own verdict, publicly expressed on retiring from the Senate, was that “we are being governed to death.” The Century, which cordially opened the door of its membership to Mr. Spooner when he came to New York after leaving public life in 1907, and where he always found congenial companionship, will give its full measure of appreciation to a career of so paramount usefulness in days like these.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1920 Century Association Yearbook