Just in time for a Maryland election featuring a serious Republican candidate for U.S. Senate trying to pass himself off as a moderate, a new biography about the last Republican U.S. senator from Maryland, who happened to be an actual moderate – and was maybe even a liberal.
“Mathias of Maryland: Remembering a Lincoln Republican in the Senate,” a look at the life and legacy of the late U.S. Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias (R-Md.), isn’t a standard political biography. It contains some basic biographical info. about the former lawmaker, who served in the Senate from 1969 to 1987 after short stints in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Maryland House of Delegates. But mostly it’s essays about the man from the people who knew him best – former staffers, journalists who covered him, and colleagues who worked with him.
It’s a pretty impressive list of authors that includes U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who holds Mathias’ old seat and served as his staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1980s; former U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who ran against Mathias in 1974, served alongside him as a House member from 1977 to 1987 and then succeeded him; U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.); and U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-5th), who worked with Mathias in a variety of capacities.
Norman J. Ornstein, one of the foremost contemporary scholars of Congress, wrote the foreword. The book features the eulogy delivered at Mathias’ 2010 memorial service by a former Senate colleague named Joe Biden and excerpts from many of Mathias’ speeches.
The collection was edited by Frederic B. Hill, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and editorial writer who later worked for Mathias, and Monica Healy, a former Mathias staffer who later headed the Maryland federal office under former Gov. William Donald Schaefer (D) and worked in the Clinton administration. Both contributed essays of their own.
The Senate of Mathias’ time was dramatically different from the Senate of today. It had several moderate and liberal Republicans and even more moderate or conservative Democrats.
“The contrast between the Mathias era and the Senate of today is stark,” wrote Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The parties, of course, are very different. There are no conservative Democrat ‘Boll Weevils’ – no John Stennises, Richard Russells, Jim Eastlands, etc. The closest is Joe Manchin, but he is just one of 50 senators, not 40 percent or more of the Democratic Caucus.
“On the Republican side, there is no Mathias, [Jacob] Javits, [Mark] Hatfield or [Edward] Brooke, much less a [Howard] Baker or a [Hugh] Scott. The closest thing to a moderate is Maine’s Susan Collins, but she is far from moderate in her overall voting record or rhetoric. In other words, Collins is no Mathias. Nor are any of her colleagues. Over the decades, the Senate has become more polarized, as the parties have sorted into more extreme ideological cohorts.”
As Hill and Healy pointed out in one of their essays, “Mathias’ voting record seemed far more like a Democrat’s than a Republican’s. During his first term in 1973, for example, his rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action was the highest of any Republican. This pattern was consistent throughout Mathias’ Senate career.” Mathias had a lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union of just 11.45% out of a possible 100%.
Biden, at Mathias’ memorial, observed: “You have read a lot since his death about how he reached across the aisle. I never thought of Mac reaching across the aisle, I thought of him as never even recognizing there was an aisle.”
Mathias’ priorities showed why he was he was such an anomaly in the GOP. He vocally opposed the Vietnam War. He fought for civil rights. He was an early and effective champion of Chesapeake Bay health. He marched alongside feminist icons Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug for women’s rights. He pushed his Republican colleagues to embrace sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. He was unafraid to criticize President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal and was at odds with President Ronald Reagan on most every issue.
Among Mathias’ many achievements, he was the biggest congressional supporter for building a Vietnam veterans’ memorial on the National Mall, and was quick to defend the stark black design for the memorial that was not universally admired when it was first unveiled.
The book also examines Mathias the man: How he wound up in the Senate by defeating an old friend, the Democratic incumbent, Daniel Brewster, in 1968, in a race that was remarkably free of rancor (Mathias had in fact been best man at one of Brewster’s weddings). How he delighted in his time at his farm “30 miles west of Frederick” – his description to keep people from knowing that it was in West Virginia, not in Maryland. How he ran his Senate office as if he were “an absent-minded professor” and how friend and foe alike regarded him as gracious and even-keeled.
Just last year, former Baltimore Sun journalist John W. Frece released “Self-Destruction: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of U.S. Senator Daniel B. Brewster.” Read together, the Brewster book and the Mathias book are excellent tutorials on Maryland politics and policy over the last half of the 20th century. Brewster’s son, former Del. Gerry Brewster (D-Baltimore County), told me the other day that he is recommending the Mathias book to anyone who asks.
The Hogan comparison
It’s hard not to read the Mathias book without thinking about former Gov. Larry Hogan, who is attempting this year to become the first Republican to win a Senate race since Mathias won his third term in 1980. By the standards of today’s GOP, Hogan is a moderate Republican. He talks of reaching across the aisle – though the record when he was governor never really matched the rhetoric. He criticizes Donald Trump. He took the pandemic seriously. He’s shown some ideological elasticity in order to appeal to the Maryland electorate.
But Hogan still cites Reagan as a role model and that era as a pinnacle for the GOP. Hogan supported Reagan for president over Gerald Ford in 1976, when Reagan was considered the extremist. Mathias during that election was highly critical of Ford for tow-towing to the right, and was determined to ensure that Reagan wasn’t nominated. When Reagan was elected president in 1980, Mathias became one of his sharpest critics.
It’s speculated that Mathias chose to retire, rather than seek a fourth term in 1986, at the relatively young age of 64, in part because the Reagan wing of the GOP was expected to oppose him in the Republican primary. In the book, Mikulski reports that when she was elected to replace Mathias by defeating Linda Chavez, a conservative Reagan administration official, Mathias told her, “Thank God you won!”
Hogan frequently mentions the political courage of his father, the late Rep. Larry Hogan Sr. (R), for voting for the articles of impeachment against Nixon in the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. That story has become part of the former governor’s political narrative, comparing his criticism of Trump to his dad’s criticism of Nixon.
By the time 2008 rolled around, Mathias endorsed Barack Obama for president, even though he admired the Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, who had served in the House when Mathias was in the Senate. Hogan, for all he cannot stand Trump, cannot bring himself to vote for the Democrats who oppose the former president.
In “Mathias of Maryland,” Randolph Marshall Collins, a former Mathias staffer, recounts asking the senator once why he stuck with the GOP. Mathias answered that his great-grandfather was a Republican politician in the 1860s, shortly after Abraham Lincoln helped launch the GOP. But he also told a story about a farmer and his wife who rode to church in the same horse-drawn wagon every Sunday.
“Over time, the distance between them on the buggy board grew larger,” Collins recounted Mathias saying. “One Sunday, the farmer’s wife asked him why he had moved so far away, to which the farmer replied, ‘Are you sure it is me that has moved?’”
by Josh Kurtz, Maryland Matters
July 8, 2024
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