Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (15 page)

Rayburn was informed by the city fathers that an old Apache Indian living up in the hills
was married to three wives. Polygamy was not only illegal, it was immoral; and Rayburn was
therefore ordered to confront the old man and resolve the problem. He was also informed that the old man could speak English, but the old women could not.

Rayburn mounted his horse and road off into the hills. Eventually he found the old man
and his women sitting around a campfire outside their teepee. They were four aged, wizened people, wrapped in blankets, sitting cross-legged on the ground. Rayburn dismounted, approached them, identified himself, and explained to them the precise nature of their
immoral, illegal behavior. He concluded by telling the old man, "You have to tell two of these
women that you are not married to them, that they are not your wives."

The old Indian looked over at the three old women who had shared their lives with him,
with whom he had shared his life, the women who had borne his children, cooked his meals, and
treated his wounds. He then turned to Rayburn and said,
"You
tell 'em!"

 

Question: How can you tell if a politician is lying?

Answer: His lips are moving.

Huey Long was both governor of and senator from Louisiana in the first third of the 20th century
, and one of the unusual qualities of that southern state back then was it contained a large number of Catholics. (The reason for this is obvious. Initial European settlement had been done
by the French, who then transferred control to the Spanish in 1763, until they took it back in
1802, after which Jefferson bought it from Napoleon. The French and the Spanish were, and are, both
overwhelmingly Catholic.)

Anyway, Long had to deal with the ubiquitous tension between Catholics and Protestants in his early campaigns for office. He had to appeal to both without alienating either. With that in mind, his public addresses always contained the words, "Why, when I was a boy, I used to hitch the old horse up to the buggy at six in the morning every Sunday, go pick up my Catholic
grandparents, and take them to Mass. Then, at eleven in the morning, I'd hitch that old horse
back up to the buggy and go pick up my Baptist grandparents and take them to Church."

This always went over well with audiences. But when a supporter said, "Huey, you been
holding back on us. I didn't know you had Catholic grandparents," Long replied, "Don't be a
goddamned fool. I didn't even have a goddamned horse!"

 

Though today it seems bizarre, a politician who belonged to the Catholic religion was regarded with suspicion by a majority of Americans, until the election of Kennedy in 1960 put the issue to rest. In 1928, Al Smith, Irish-American governor of
New York
, received the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and his religion figured prominently in the campaign. If Smith were elected, it was maintained by some firebrand preachers, the Pope would move to
Washington
and would rule the country!

While campaigning in Louisiana, Smith was approached by a woman who said, “I like you very much, Governor, but I could never vote for a Catholic.”

“Well,” Smith asked, “did you vote for Governor Simpson?” (
Oramel
Simpson, governor of Louisiana from 1926 to 1928.)

“Why, of course I did,” the woman replied. “I always vote for the Democratic candidate.”

“Ma'am,” Smith said kindly, “Governor Simpson is a Catholic.”

“Oh, but he is a
Roman
Catholic,” she pointed out. “You are an
Irish
Catholic!”

When the election results came in, Smith learned that he had been soundly defeated by the Republican Herbert Hoover. Smith made a dignified concession speech and then turned to an aide and said in a stage whisper, “Telegraph the Pope. Tell him to unpack.”

 

Edward Koch, three time mayor of
New York City
, was (sorry, your Honor, is) a story
teller and raconteur of the highest rank. His ability to react to almost any situation with an appropriate, pithy, and humorous response made him an icon of the press and an idol of the
public. (Example: an East River/Hudson River tour boat's captain steered his vessel off course
and slammed into a bridge. A section of the bridge collapsed under the impact and crushed a
section of the vessel. When the tour boat's owner tried to argue that the bridge's collapse
indicated a structural weakness and that therefore the City bore an equal responsibility for the
damage, Koch responded simply, "The bridge did not hit the boat.")

Koch had a private meeting with
Menachem
Mendel
Schneerson
, the
Lubavitcher
Rebbe
(or leader of the
Chabad-Lubavitcher
school of Hasidic Judaism), a man whom many of his followers regarded as the messiah. Before being admitted to the
Rebbe's
presence, the dozens of
young students attending upon the
Rebbe
shared with Koch accounts of the many other famous and important people who had been granted private interviews by their teacher. George Steinbrenner, they said, spent a private half hour with the
Rebbe
, and when he emerged from the room he said, "What that man knows about sports ... !" and then shook his head and left, so overwhelmed that he was unable to continue. Leonard Bernstein: "What that man knows about music ... !" Norman Mailer: "What that man knows
about literature ... !" Steven Sondheim: "What that knows about Broadway... !" Etc., etc.,
etc.

At last Koch was admitted to the presence of the
Rebbe
, and try as he might, he could not
engage the religious leader in a conversation. No matter what Koch said, the
Rebbe
responded with a cryptic smile, an ambiguous nod, an affable chuckle, or an amused shrug. He said absolutely nothing. After a half hour of this, Koch bid the
Rebbe
a respectful farewell.

In the anteroom of the
Rebbe's
study, Koch was greeted by dozens of bright, eager, enthusiastic faces, all waiting to hear the words of wisdom with which Koch had just been blessed. In recounting the tale, Koch asked rhetorically, "I mean, what could I say? Could I
disappoint all those young people? Of course not. So I just said, 'What that man knows about
politics... !'"

 

The name Susan B. Anthony will be forever associated with the Women's Suffrage movement. In 1872 she appeared at the voters' registration office in
Rochester
,
N.Y.
, and demanded the right to register on 14
^th
Amendment grounds. (The 14
^th
Amendment, it should be remembered, guarantees to all citizens the equal protection of the laws.) She was allowed to register, voted on Election Day, and was arrested two days later.

Her "trial" was a farce from beginning to end. She was not allowed to testify or produce witnesses; her attorney was denied the right to argue his case on 14
^th
Amendment grounds: the
judge ordered the jury to return a directed verdict of guilty; he refused to comply with the defense motion to have the jury polled; he read her sentence from a statement he had written
before the trial began; and he fined her $100. He did make the mistake of asking her, before he
pronounced sentence, if she had anything to say. She responded with a spirited defense of her
own actions and of women's right to vote, and with an unabashed condemnation of her so-called
trial. When the judge levied the fine, she said, "Your honor, I have no intention of paying one
cent of your unjust fine." And she never did. The negative publicity attendant upon the trial—and
the general sympathy she elicited from the public—led the state government to drop the case.

 

Susan B. Anthony did not live to see the 19
^th
Amendment, which gave women the right
to vote nationally, go into effect in 1920; but many states and territories had already enacted women's suffrage on their own. Most of these places were in the western part of the country, beginning with Wyoming Territory in 1869, and it was the state of Montana that elected the
first woman to Congress a full four years before the 19
^th
Amendment was ratified.

Her name was Jeanette Rankin, Progressive Republican, elected to the House of
Representatives in November of 1916, and taking her seat in January of 1917. She was also a dedicated pacifist, opposed to all wars under all circumstances. She was only four months into her term of office when President Wilson, responding to German submarine attacks upon U.S.
shipping, went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war. Though the resolution for war with Germany was passed by an overwhelming majority, Rankin joined forty-nine other members of the House and the Senate in voting against it.

This seemed to have ended her political career. The Republican leadership tried in vain to pressure her into changing her vote, but she refused. Denied
renomination
to the House in 1918,
she campaigned unsuccessfully to be the Republican nominee for the Senate; and when she ran as an independent Progressive, she finished a very distant third in the general election.

But she continued to be politically active in both progressive, Republican, and pacifist activities, and with the passage of time her 1917 vote was either forgotten or ignored, and she managed to secure the Republican nomination as candidate for the House of Representatives in
1940.
She won, and took her seat in the House in January of 1941.

Thus it was that Jeanette Rankin, pacifist to the end, was in Congress on December 8
^th
, 1941,
to cast the only vote in either house against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Argentine First Lady Eva Duarte Peron ("
Evita
") died an untimely death which was also
an unnecessary one. She was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and was told that a hysterectomy
would save her life. She refused. Reasoning that she was the "mother of her country," and that
one cannot be a mother without a womb, she refused the surgery, and died.

 

The Rev. William Archibald Spooner (d. 1930) was Warden of New College,
Oxford
, but
he is remembered not as a clergyman or an educator. He is remembered for his unfortunate tendency toward
metathesis,
i.e., the transposition of initial sounds of the words in a sentence.
An example of this humor device can be seen in a phrase from a popular song of the 1930s, "No
Bout A Doubt It," meaning "no doubt about it."

Clever, and intentionally amusing. But Rev. Spooner's mistakes, which came to be called spoonerisms, were inadvertent and embarrassed him greatly. Examples:

Spooner arrived late for church one Sunday to find someone sitting in the pew which was
reserved for him. He thereupon said to the usher, "Someone is
occupewing
my pie. Please sew me to another sheet."

To a lazy student who had stopped attending lectures, "You hissed my mystery lecture!
You have tasted an entire worm."

In a sermon based on the old hymn,
Conquering Kings Their Titles Take:
"
Kinkering
congs
their tackles
tite
." In the same sermon he said, "The Lord is a shoving leopard."

At a faculty dinner, proposing a toast to Queen Victoria: "Let us glaze our
rasses
to the
queer old dean."

In another sermon, referring to the murder of Abel by Cain: "He was killed by a
blushing crow."

At a wedding rehearsal: "At this point in the ceremony it is
kisstomary
to cuss the
bride."

"Go and shake a tower" ... "Who has not had in his mind a half-warmed fish?" ... "It
doesn't magnify, but I have lost my signifying glass" ... And so on.

Spooner was very upset by his growing reputation as an inadvertent comedian. On one
occasion, when the crowd that had gathered in his lecture room was unusually large, he said,

"You haven't come here to hear my lecture. You just want me to say one of those ...
things!"

 

Tied for first place in the "Stupidest Things Ever Said" contest are the following:

The Digital Equipment Corp. CEO executive who rejected the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the personal computer industry when he said in 1977 that "No one would
want a computer in his home."

The Decca Records executive who in 1962 declined to sign an unknown rock and roll
band named the Beatles to a recording contract on the grounds that "Guitar groups are on the way out."

(Note: These are not jokes
about
the past. These are jokes
from
the past, jokes told decades, even
centuries ago.)