Jack, Daniel, Frank

"Jack," said famed Samuel Johnson, "has great variety of talk. Jack is a scholar, Jack has the manners of a gentleman." Jack (John Wilkes, 1727-1797) was also a rowdy, a beerhouse brawler, a blasphemer, a fornicator, a publisher of lewd and libelous literature. He was expelled from the House of Commons, outlawed, deported and cast into prison when, upon his return, King George III refused to pardon him. . . . But Whigs, great, rich, respected, thronged his prison cell, for Jack was a Hero. The freeholders of Middlesex had four times elected him to Parliament and four times the Commons had denied him a seat. One of the severest crises in the history of the Mother of Parliaments was summarized in the slogan "Jack and Liberty." In the end, Jack won. He became M. P., Lord Mayor of London, retained to the end his interest in the classics, profanity and his father's distillery. . . .

Last week, in the high-vaulted room of the U. S. Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, a premier constitutional lawyer named Jack's name. Onetime Solicitor General James M. Beck,* on behalf of Col. Frank L. Smith, Senator-designate from Illinois, did so to remind the learned Senators that a Democracy should, by most any definition, permit the people to elect a reprobate their representative. Mr. Beck had many another famed precedent. Said he:

"Daniel Webster was sent to the Senate from Massachusetts until he died. He was loose, drank habitually to excess, did not pay his debts, but Massachusetts had a right to send him. And one could multiply such instances a hundredfold.

"In 140 years of history, with party passions running mountain high, with the Senate aisle at times the pathway to the dueling field, never was there a suggestion before the instant case that the door of the Senate could be closed in the face of a Senator-designate because something he had done was not liked.

"You could propose a 20th amendment to the Constitution today to provide that Senators could not be elected except by and with the consent of the Senate, and not a single State in the Union would ratify it."

Mr. Beck was far from saying that Colonel Smith is a reprobate, either personally or politically. He pointed out that Colonel Smith, as Public Utilities Commissioner, had never raised a utility rate, and that, by a lowering of rates, one company had lost $40,000,000, and that Company was run by Samuel Insull, his chief backer. Lawyer Beck concluded his case as follows:

"It virtually amounts to a punishment for life. You are asked to do what is well known as a bill of attainder, and the Constitution of the United States forbids the passage of such bills by the Congress. . . . What is sought is punitive vengeance of the cruelest kind.

"Frank Smith would rather die than suffer this stigma. The Senate has been his life ambition, and to say that he shall be disqualified because of an act that was not illegal, has never been illegal and is not illegal today, is incomprehensible.

"If it is illegal for rich men to contribute to campaigns, I would like to know how many Senators have been thus aided in these past 50 years. Also it would leave every President I can recall in an invidious position."

The Senate a fortnight ago refused Colonel Smith his seat, referring his case to Committee. It became increasingly clear last week that, in doing so, they set a precedent which, if not soon repudiated, may alter the entire theory of U. S. Government.

Colonel Smith went back to Chicago, when 48 Senators refused to admit him to their crew. Last week he was afflicted with serious ear trouble and, less seriously, with a sty on the inside of an eyelid. Arriving again in Washington last week, he said: "Two physicians told me I would be a fit subject for Senate indictment for lack of common sense if I came to Washington, but I felt I ought to come."

*Author of The Constitution of the United States.