Home Affairs: Dakota’s Gentleman

Not since Indiana’s Jesse David Bright was expelled in 1862 for treason has a U.S. Senator been found unfit to sit in the Senate. Last week after twelve months’ study the Senate Privileges & Elections Committee recommended that North Dakota’s beady-eyed Senator William Langer should be denied a seat in the Senate, on grounds of moral turpitude.

Around Bismarck, whence he came, Bill Langer has a stanch following of voters who feel that he is just as good as the next man. They twice elected him Governor. When he was tried on a charge of conspiracy to defraud the Federal Government in administering relief, one jury convicted him, another disagreed, a third set him free. But when his people sent him to the Senate last year, a group of North Dakota citizens protested.

The Senate seated Bill Langer “without prejudice,” reserved the right to unseat him later. A pair of sleuths went out to North Dakota, turned over Langer’s 30-year record with a fine-tooth muckrake. On the basis of their report, the committee summoned Langer to testify at a public hearing. The Senate wanted the answers to such questions as these, raised by the testimony:

> Why a tax lawyer for the Great Northern Railway paid Langer $25,000 for stock in some Mexican lands (which had already been expropriated), after Great Northern’s taxes were cut $150,000 a year.

> Why baldish Attorney Gregory Brunk, after profiting mightily in North Dakota county bonds, paid Langer $56,800 for dust-bowl lands he had never seen.

> About the means by which Langer managed to escape conviction when tried for perjury in a Federal court.

Out of Deadwood, S.D. came Gale B. Wyman to explain about $525 he got while his father, Federal Judge A. Lee Wyman, was presiding over the perjury trial. Wyman first denied, then admitted that he was paid the money so that he would influence his father “to get the result they wanted in the case.”

When the committee finally cast its vote last week, not one of Bill Langer’s Republican colleagues cared to defend him. Three Democrats—”Cotton Ed”; Smith, Tom Connally, Abe Murdock—cast dissenting votes, on the grounds that, whatever Bill Langer had done, the people of North Dakota had chosen him for their Senator.

The committee’s report will be taken up on the floor of the Senate after the holidays. Defiant Bill Langer is not yet ready to admit he is licked. Said he: “I’m going to write myself one hell of a speech, and deliver it when this comes up in the Senate. I’ve been in a lot worse jams than this, and came out all right. . . .”