A Pilgrim’s Digression

Whether a person is a Senator, Congressman, Congressional staffer, page, or other federal employee, people come to Washington with high hopes at the prospect of doing rewarding, meaningful work. Especially in regards to the Congressmen, I often wonder at how quickly they pass into obscurity after leaving Washington, despite the vauntedness of their ambitions.

Unless, like Duke Cunningham, one distinguishes one’s term in office with hedonistic scandal involving bribery, prostitutes, and pleasure boats, a Congressman is rarely remembered beyond his date of “separation” from the Government, as it is quaintly termed in HR lingo.

When I first came to work on Capitol Hill, every evening I left work at five and walked to Union Station, and I would hear a carillon tolling the hour somewhere. Usually, it played patriotic tunes, such as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” One day when I was out and about during lunch, I decided to follow the sound of it and figure out where it was coming from. It turned out, it was coming from a small park near the Capitol, which features a memorial tower and carillon dedicated to Senator Robert A. Taft.

As a DC website puts it, “The memorial must be among Washington’s largest least-known monuments…Unless you’re from Ohio, or you’re a huge fan of the Taft-Hartley Act, chances are you’d never think to go looking.”

Indeed. The park is tree-shrouded, and though the monument is near the Capitol, it is not close enough to attract tourists, who tend to stick to fairly well-prescribed perambulatory routes. I find the memorial and the emptiness of the park a bit depressing.

The only person I have ever seen frequenting the park is an insane homeless woman. Many times, I’ve seen her fill a 12 oz. plastic water bottle from the fountain, then sprinkle the water over the shrubbery around the Memorial. I’ve seen her water the shrubs as many as five times before I grow bored and leave.  She is the same woman I once saw just before dawn at Union Station, wearing nothing but a sheer, pink nighty as she swept the sidewalk with a straw broom.  She seems to be drawn to desolate places and Sisyphean tasks.

No matter the good intentions of Taft’s colleagues who appropriated the millions to build his monument, what Senator would want his fellow Senators to raid the public coffers in order to erect a monument which only highlights how completely he is forgotten?

Sad to say, I have an even more depressing story to tell.

Last Thursday, I ate alone in the Rayburn House Office Building cafeteria. It was oddly empty at noon, mostly occupied by staffers probably of my pay grade or a little above me. None of the conspicuously well-tailored suits and surgically implanted cell phones and prosthetic Blackberries that distinguish the upper levels of government.
Upon leaving, I took a different stairwell down to the tunnels beneath the building that take me back to my office. A bit disoriented, I found myself walking around in a circle, then taking a right down a hallway that proved to be a dead end.

Public tours are often led through the tunnels that connect all the buildings of the Capitol complex, so the well-travelled tunnels are kept free of debris and clutter. The dead-end I found myself walking down was not one of these. Along one side were dusty, black leather sofas that had once graced the offices of Congressmen or women; as well as ornate, heavy wooden desks that looked as if they had been carved upon by a group of school boys using the metal edges of rulers as a tool, and pallets of shrink-wrapped, unidentified boxes.

I walked to the end of the hall and saw it was a dead end, then turned around and came back. Then I noticed that the shrink wrap on one of the pallets had been torn away a little. A box on top of the stack was torn open, as well.

Curious, I stopped and looked. The box contained framed, autographed photographs of Senators and Congressmen. I recognized none of them, except Olympia Snowe. The others were all men with hair and big-knotted neckties that indicated the pictures were taken sometime in the eighties. The pictures were yellowing and curled. The autographs looked faded, almost silvery. “To my good friend Floyd, a true southern Gentleman,” one autograph read.

Then I noticed that scattered on the floor around the pallet were several baseball-card size business cards featuring the “Floyd” in question. There were some of these lying loose on the conveyor belt of a nearby, disused X-ray machine, as well, and I picked one up from there. “Floyd D. Spence, R, South Carolina-2,” it said. On the back it listed his office addresses, and stated that it was provided by the National Education Association, copyright 1993. My guess, the items were meant as business cards that the Congressman could give out to visiting students, thus the baseball card-like look.

I looked again at the open box it came from. The box was labeled photos and “Ship to Lexington.” Other boxes on the pallet had similar labels. One said “Awards.” Another said “Correspondence.” It appeared someone had deliberately opened the box labeled photos in order to pilfer through it. After another moment of looking through the Congressman’s photos, with an attendant sense that I was doing something wrong or unethical, my nerves told me to head back to work before someone found me there looking through an open box of a Congressman’s possessions.

When I got home that evening, I sat down and Googled Mr. Floyd Spence. It turns out that sadly, he died in 2001 of brain cancer. According to his Wikipedia article, his one significant claim to fame seems to be that he was the first elected official in South Carolina history to change from the Democratic party to the Republican party, doing so in 1962. This prompted me to wonder why so many Republican politicians have started out as Democrats (Reagan chief among them)…but that is a topic for another post, perhaps.

Sad as it is that Spence died four years ago, I find it sadder still that apparently, his personal effects from his Congressional office are still in the basement of Rayburn, being stolen, piecemeal, by passersby. There is something almost demoralizing about it.

Most people recognize how insignificant an imprint one human life makes upon the Earth. How transient and vainglorious is our existence! Yet who would think that someone near the pinnacle of power, sitting in a prime seat in the Legislative branch of the United States Government, should find himself so forgotten and disregarded in death.

Why hasn’t the Lexington County library inquired after his possessions, which are supposed to be shipped there? Why hasn’t his family made inquiries?

Finally, to me this merely proves once again the utter vanity of human endeavour. Whatever thoughts of making an impact upon his nation, even a Congressman ultimately comes to the same end as the rest of us, neither memorialized nor much remembered.

Perhaps now I will be deluged with emails from South Carolinians who will profess deep affection for the memory of Floyd Spence, in which case I will have to eat my words. However, barring such a circumstance, Spence’s story is a sad commentary on life.