Last week, we looked at the use and misuse of the old chamber of the House of Representatives after those gentlemen departed to their new chamber in the south wing of the Capitol. Today will be about the results of this abuse.
On April 19, 1964, Representative Justin Morrill, whose main claim to fame is his bill creating the land grant universities throughout the country, would describe the state of the old House chamber: “The old hall of the House of Representatives, empty and deserted, remains an unappropriated waste and as it now appears – draped in cobwebs and carpeted with dust, tobacco, and apple pomace – a conspicuous nuisance.”
It was not just neglect that stripped the chamber of its finery. Enterprising citizens who had jumped in to take advantage of the vacancy did their part as well. Two months after Morrill’s speech, Ohio Representative Robert C. Schenck elaborated a bit more in a speech on the House floor, adding some poetic imagery to his peroration:
I never pass through the old hall of the House of Representative without feeling myself reproached by the spirits that haunt that place. I look around to see where the venerable John Quincy Adams trembled in his seat and voted and I see a huckster woman selling gingerbread. I look to see where Calhoun sat – for there was a time when we might speak with reverence even of him – I look to see where he sat and where Clay sat and I find a woman selling oranges and root beer. I look around the floor where these men stood and uttered their patriotic sentiments in the day when patriotic sentiments were heard with reverence everywhere and by every man, and I see a floor rotting and trembling under my tread.
The following year, Samuel Wyeth, in his book The Federal City, echoed Schenck:
Two cake-women, with tables, were now the occupants of the floor of this magnificent chamber. The room was without a carpet; the windows were bare of drapery; and the walls discolored. Cobwebs waved backwards and forwards up near the ceiling. The chandelier, once regarded as a triumph of artistic elegance, was covered with dust, and the sky-light was so obscured with smoke and accumulated dirt that it admitted little light, Foot-falls, of passers in and out of the room, and along the corridors that lead to it, fell faintly, and monotonously, on the hearing, and, gradually, I became lost in reverie.
By this time, the bill creating the National Statuary Collection had passed. It declared that each state could send two statues to the Capitol, to be displayed in the old House of Representatives chamber. Between the passing of a bill and its implementation was quite a gap; the first statue was not placed until 1870, and so matters did not improve immediately. Mary Clemmer Ames describes the visit to the old House Chamber in this period of time by a “solitary lady” in her mid-twenties: “Now, if this maiden can keep on holding her head up, with looks perpetually ‘commercing with the skies’ so that it will be impossible for her to see all the tobacco-juice and apple-cores beneath and round her, it will conduce greatly to her peace of mind.”
She continues:
I am sorry that ‘the Pantheon of America’ is not a cleaner looking place. It’s a pity, as we have a Pantheon, that its shabbiness and dirt should flourish to a degree that is absolutely melancholy. I am sure it was in obedience to the law of fitness that the committee of the Congressional Library or some other committee, brought the Goddess of Melancoly here, to hold her eyes and nose aloft, and to stand supreme queen, regnant of dust and gloom and American ‘expectoration.’
In short, a vast difference to the care with which it is kept up today. Next week we will look at other spaces in the Capitol that suffered similar indignities.