The Argentine Firecracker

ED: And now, the story of a personal scandal that led to major reforms in Congress, the Tidal Basin Scandal of 1974.

BRIAN: To understand this story, you’ve just got to know how Congress worked. For most of the 20th century, the most powerful congressmen were committee chairs, usually Southern Democrats. They benefited from a seniority system. And because the Southern Democrats had safe seats, they tended to rise to the top of the chain in that seniority system.

ED: But in the early 1970s, a new generation of democratic lawmakers felt that the Southern committee leaders were too powerful and too resistant to issues like civil rights. The reformers were looking for an opportunity to revamp the seniority system.

BRIAN: That opportunity came in the form of a scandal involving the chair of the influential Ways and Means Committee in Congress. His name was Wilbur Mills. And he was one of the most powerful people in Congress. Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton, says that Mills was a guy known for being a button-down fiscal conservative.

JULIAN ZELIZER: And he was someone also known for not having much of a life, someone who didn’t really enjoy the social circles of Washington.

BRIAN: He’s the guy they say slept with the tax code under his pillow, right?

JULIAN ZELIZER: Yeah, that was the rumor about him and his friends and associates who worked with him. Even if that wasn’t true, it was kind of true. So when you come to October, 1974, there was few people you would expect to be involved in shenanigans near the Tidal Basin in Washington as Wilbur Mills.

BRIAN: And what happened at the Tidal Basin?

JULIAN ZELIZER: Well, on October 7, 1974, at about at 2:00 in the morning, the US Park Police pull over a car, a Lincoln Continental that was speeding right near there. And the car is stopped. And a woman runs out of the car. And she jumps into the Tidal Basin. And the police arrest her. And they arrest the people who are in the car.

And one of the people in the car turned out to be Wilbur Mills. And the woman was known as Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker. She was a local stripper in Washington, DC. Her actual name was Annabelle Battistella. And she was 38 years old and, it would turn out, was having a relationship with Wilbur Mills.

BRIAN: How old was Mills at the time, Julian?

JULIAN ZELIZER: He was in the 60s. He was a senior member and married to his high school sweetheart named Polly. At the time, people who him knew something was wrong with him. He had grown his hair uncharacteristically long. And he was not part of the Age of Aquarius. And he also had a few moments where he was seen slurring his words.

So the story breaks out. And Wilbur Mills, at first, his administrative assistant denies that he was on the scene. But quickly that’s impossible to do.

So Mills, within the next few days, admits that he is having problems, that he’s drinking too much, and that he’s become addicted to painkillers that he had been taking for back pain that he had for a while. He says he was just friends with Fanne Foxe. And he’ll actually go and speak to his constituents in the second district of Arkansas on October 17. And he’ll apologize to them and his family.

And rarely did Mills ever worry about reelection. He had a safe seat. He was loved by his constituents. But instantly, there’s speculation. How will this harm him in his reelection bid? But in fact, the appeal worked. And in November, they reelected him with about 60% of the vote. And one month after the scandal first broke, it looked like he was going to stay in this position of power.

BRIAN: So what happens next?

JULIAN ZELIZER: Well, then the story only gets worse. So that election is very significant in political history. It’s the election of the Watergate Babies, legislators like Gary Hart and Henry Waxman, who come into office and they are determined to clean up the way that the president does his business. And they also want to reform Congress. They want to take on all the old bulls of Congress, the Southern senior committee chairs.

And Wilbur Mills was one of the main targets. And they had never really been able to get to Mills because he had so much power. So that’s the atmosphere.

And then in early December, the story takes a very unusual turn. Fanne Foxe, the stripper, has become a celebrity of sort. And she has her first public performance. And it takes place in Boston in a place called the Silver Slipper.

BRIAN: You couldn’t possibly know this, Julian, but I literally used to work across the street from the Silver Slipper.

JULIAN ZELIZER: That is really funny.

BRIAN: My first job in the Massachusetts Welfare Department. And my girlfriend at the time– and don’t draw any wrong conclusions from this– literally worked above the Silver Slipper.

JULIAN ZELIZER: Well, it was something of an institution in Boston. And because she was performing, the place was absolutely packed. And the press was there just to cover this event. And she comes out. And seconds after she walks out, to the surprise of everyone in the room, Wilbur Mills stumbles onto the stage–

PETER: Wow.

JULIAN ZELIZER: –clearly drunk, and starts to pull her off the stage. They’re taking pictures covering every minute of this. And the following day, newspapers around the country have pictures of a drunken Mills walking on and off the stage with this stripper. And from that moment on, it was pretty clear that his career is hurt.

He initially tells reporters, this won’t ruin me. Nothing can ruin me. But most people disagreed. And literally the day after this happens, a lot of the younger Democrats are saying, that’s it. It’s time for him to step down. They put pressure on Mills to step down, which he does.

And the Democrats actually reform the Ways and Means Committee as well. Days after the second part of the scandal breaks, they strip the Ways and Means Committee of some of its powers that it had used for decades to assert authority over other parts of the House.

BRIAN: Yeah, it sounds like, in this case, what was a personal scandal really ended up being a stimulus for some major structural changes.

JULIAN ZELIZER: Yeah, there are many reforms that pass in early 1975. The Democrats remove several other senior committee chairmen from their positions of power. Congress passes other kinds of reforms, sunshine reforms that make more of the legislative process open to public scrutiny. They’ll also institute new ethics rules.

So there’s several reforms. They’re not all directly related to Mills. But Mills’ scandal is a real shock to the system and created more of an opportunity for the new reformers, the Watergate Babies, to move forward.

BRIAN: Do you think that scandal is kind of crucial to getting the public vested in this, interested in it?

JULIAN ZELIZER: It’s absolutely crucial. So when reformers wanted to reform the Ways and Means Committee before the Wilbur Mills scandal, part of the reason they had so much trouble, it wasn’t an issue that a lot of people cared about. It’s hard for a voter to understand the procedural power of the House Ways and Means Committee and why that makes a difference. But when you’re talking about a powerful chairman who is involved in sexual escapades and who’s not taking his job seriously, it becomes something that interests Americans much more.

One of the most important parts of the ’70s was there was a real movement focused on reform. You had all these groups like Common Cause, like Ralph Nader. You had many Democrats and moderate Republicans who spent a lot of time trying to push for reforms in politics. So when these scandals broke, they basically had a proposal on the table.

And that’s what was special in some ways about the ’70s period. We are not in that period anymore. And the danger is that as Americans keep learning about scandal, they think that much less about their political leaders. But we don’t follow through with reforms that will revitalize their confidence in government.

BRIAN: Julian Zelizer is a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of Governing America, the Revival of Political History.

ED: Well, I have to admit I’ve not really thought about Wilbur Mills since the time of Wilbur Mills. And I didn’t think about it that much then. That was a very bizarre thing for a young person to watch faintly.

PETER: Well, the Tidal Basin has never been the same since.

ED: Well, now that I have thought about Wilbur Mills, it makes me think of a deeper thought, which is, as any listener of BackStory knows, there’s certainly no shortage of failure and scandal and personal meltdowns earlier in American history. So what I’d like to know is, why did it take until Wilbur Mills’ particular meltdown that a scandal became a real catalyst for reform? So, Peter, why didn’t scandal lead to political change in the early period?

PETER: Well, it’s not that we don’t have bad actors in the early period. There is– bad or worse than we are. They drank a lot more. And they did all kinds of nasty stuff.

But their miraculous work at Philadelphia created a constitution which was like a perfect machine. It was going to produce good results. It was the system that mattered.

And even if the human material is faulty, even if they’re all sinners– because we know we’re all sinners in the 18th century– that’s why it’s a miraculous system. It must be God-given because it’s enabled sinners to govern themselves freely.

BRIAN: So, for fallible humans to get in and start reforming it would be a terrible mistake.

PETER: Exactly. And it’s the confidence in the system that’s crucial. And I think that’s what we got in the Wilbur Mills scandal, is a constitutional crisis.

ED: You’re talking about Watergate.

PETER: Yeah.. And that’s the context now for a loss of confidence in those formerly semi-sacred office holders who got a free pass, effectively, because they were our office holders.

BRIAN: OK, Peter, I buy your point. But that is not the impression I get of Gilded Age politics.

PETER: No no, no.

BRIAN: And that’s not the impression I get of what happens during the Civil War when the Constitution, in essence, is ripped to shreds.

ED: No, you’re right. I don’t think that people can have the same faith in the pristine perfection of the Founders that they did before the Civil War tore things apart. But they found something else to put in its place. And strangely enough, it was the political party.

The machine was working so tightly that you had to be a real scandal for your party to turn against you. And so I think you had a really closing of the ranks, Brian, that kept the party press from saying anything against the candidate. And I think that kind of discipline really kept the consequences of scandal under control.

BRIAN: Yeah, and I would only add one thing in terms of explaining, well, why poor Wilbur? Peter’s already put his finger on one element. That’s a true constitutional crisis in Watergate.

But the other is what’s often known as the Fourth Estate. There’s media which is not quite into the 24/7 news cycle, but is just super-sized and energized by something called investigative reporting that does really come out of Watergate. Where do we get 60 Minutes from? How do we start going undercover to investigate auto mechanic fraud? Well, it all goes back to Watergate. Poor Wilbur stumbles into that buzz saw of a surgeon–

ED: Yeah, they didn’t have to investigate him. He was onstage.

BRIAN: An emerging feeding frenzy, as one political scientist has called it, of investigative reporting. And these things just get repeated.

PETER: Well, and we say, power corrupts. And that’s become the mantra of our understanding of modern politics. Any time somebody’s got a chance, he’s going to abuse that power.

BRIAN: And I do think that Julian put his finger on a brief moment where we understood that power corrupts. But we also believe this is the remnants of that idealism of the ’60s. We believe that we could–

PETER: Yeah, I think that’s right.

BRIAN: –make these reforms that would return us to that moment when the Constitution protected us against the fallibility of man. It’s time for another short break. But don’t go away. When we get back, a 1793 murder trial hangs on one simple question, how much can you trust slaves and women?

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.