"Unbridled Enthusiasm" : A speech by Rep. Wiley Mayne to the ACU (August 4, 1972)

The following is a transcript of a brief, but unusually impassioned speech given by House Representative Wiley Mayne (R - Iowa, 6th Congressional District) to the American Conservative Union's annual convention in Des Moines, Iowa on the evening of August 4, 1972:

Good evening and thank you for having me. I'd like to get down to brass tacks and make some central points about the current goings on in Washington, Viet Nam, and regarding the upcoming presidential election.

1. Things are looking up in our nation's great capital! Things are moving, and when things move, so does our culture and society. People are statistically happier and that is due to multiple things, one of which is our wonderful economy.

2. My wife informs me that some people are listening to newer forms of music. Let me tell you, first of all: new music is a perfectly acceptable form of social networking (and let's be honest, as good a way to get girls as hanging out at miniature golf courses). But make no mistake: nothing can replace Roy Harris and Aaron Copland. Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all can take what they have contributed to our collective subconscious. They are what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call "collective geniuses on the wall of American greatness and prosperity."

3. It has come to my attention that the local press has taken some interest in my affair with Mrs. Alice Fairbanks. Can I just set the record straight and suggest that perhaps my affair with Mrs. Fairbanks is my own business, as well as perhaps that of my wife and perhaps even Mr. Fairbanks. But not you. Stop clogging my phone lines. My butler hates you all.

4. Viet Nam. What isn't there that is controversial to say about this terrible and inflated war? We're doing fairly well--don't be fooled by the Leftists who have a saber toothed wedge in the popular media. We're doing what we have to do. People are shorter in Viet Nam, isn't that evidence of their being terrorized by the northern Communists? We must keep in mind, my friends, that William the Conqueror was 6' 2" at a time when it was highly unpopular to be so. But our friends in the press would like to forget these key points and Facts that are lodged truthfully within history.

5. I need your love. Seriously. Washington D.C. is bereft of love in this modern era. The last congressional session I attended, we formed a several hundred-person circle of U.S. Representatives and had ourselves a good cry. A good nonpartisan cry.

6. President Nixon needs your love too--and support. I cannot stress this enough. This may turn out to be a tough election, given the recent unprecedented political response by the untamed youth and illiterate students in this country. I have hope and courage, however, that even a teenage upstart such as George McGovern can keep his hippy paws off the White House. Again, the only way we can win this war is to give Nixon an even stronger vote of confidence than we already have. We all must make sacrifices--I certainly know I have. Energy and money must go towards this noble cause...we will not and must not back down in the face of our foes.

I have unbridled enthusiasm for the future of this country. Let's take back the streets. Will you join me?

When you get to those hoodlum-infested streets, you can stand proud, with American flags waving, and you can tell 'em Wiley sent you. And you can tell 'em I told you to give 'em hell.

A closing thought: where is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the 1970s? Is it here, in this room? Is it in the houses of Congress and in the state legislature buildings across this nation? Is it in our living rooms, next to the television? Where are your children when you go out at night? Do you own a gun?

Thank you, and God bless the state of Iowa and this great nation.

Some Facts About Gerald Ford (1913-2006):

1. Extensions on the latter provisions left the people confused and unaware. Once, when the daylight still was able to bake our faces, there was enough energy in my mind to be able to speak it.

Without wind, the sun cannot leave such sordid impressions so as to present a world full of love and bereft of capitalist darwinism. Do not engage the weather--it is a machine beyond reasoning.

2. When, in our days of youth, we were exposed to the relational manifestations of utter malevolences, there was no reason to further bury your brow.

3. The verdict: total incomprehensible accordances. Songs ring in our ears. Always songs about making love but not much else is being constructed. The realm of social concern has therefore been reduced to copulation. (Post-) Modernist Freudians would search for a social allegory comparison here, but none can be made. The whole notion of societies fucking each other plays into political and social discourse all the same, although any more specific taxonomies regarding this notion are inherently messy and apt to misinterpretation. Most understandable in terms of American social metaphor would be incest, though we might as well go ahead and call it by a more accurate term: cannibalism.

Cannibalism is exactly what proponents of the current social system promote. Any system based on the institutionalized and systematic exploitation of its own members in order to incur a feeling of "success" is doing nothing short of eating those of its own.

4. People are like that.

5. Buildings are like that.

6. Trees can be made to sing, but only if they are first sung to.

7. Every evening the sun performs a ritual of release and then quick decay. Ephemeral as it is, every evening can seem like a little apocalypse.

8. Beams of rays and rays of beams are manifold. The sky shoots information like a camera and the objects of nature are their receptors. Shadows are ignorance; they do not know or even think to know about the sun.

The earth is almost certainly always one astronomical unit distant from the sun. The daytime sky is 3-D. When night falls, we skip backward one dimension.

The Monroe Years: an Era of "Thanks But No Thanks"

Florida: the final frontier. In 1819, Florida was purchased by the Monroe administration from Spain in exchange for the severance of any claims the United States may have held to the Texan territory. Being a pre-industrial era, it was not known at the time the importance of or the extent to which Texas' sweeping amount of coal and uranium could be unearthed in mines and brought to grocery stores.

James Monroe was a quiet man, but a strong man. He notoriously declared bankruptcy in 1780, only to secretly transfer his "lost assets of gold coins and fur pelts" from the National Bank in Philadelphia to a frontier bank several months earlier. Rumors were always the strongest force that existed to prove this, and he obviously denied the account wholeheartedly, most notably in his early campaign speeches of 1816, when he made a point of discrediting any and all rumors.

Daniel D. Tompkins, Monroe's devoted Vice President, in an early speech to the Federalist Society in 1818 said:

"What Jimmy lacks in Believability he makes up for in Integrity. Fur Pelts were a serious Thing back in the Eighties and late Seventies, and if this were even a truthful Account, one cannot Deny the Extent to which many Americans, Veterans of the War of Independence, mind you, felt it Necessary and in fact Essential to their own economic Independence to place their Assets into a Place of Hiding. The National Bank, you see, was already beginning to resemble the tyrant King George and such a Connexion--even in Theory--would have been utterly unbearable, not to mention thoroughly disheartening (after all we had been through).

"Oh! And did I mention his Wife? The three of us were all Alma Maters of the prestigious College of William and Mary. I met Elizabeth before Jimmy, and certainly had my Eye on her for the majority of my Time there, even after they started 'going steady.' She had quite the Vocabulary. A walking Thesaurus. She also wrote Poetry and played the Bassoon. Reed Instruments suited her Complexion, I believe. Of course we all know how she managed to free Madame LaFayette from the Guillotine during the French Revolution. I'd like to think I was the one who offered her such keen Insight into the Beauty and Grace of French Culture and Society. I am, after all, a Tompkins. And most Tompkins don't know this (or agree) but we are descended from Royalty. And thank God we are in a Period of Enlightenment, when I am allowed an Opportunity to assert my own Convictions and cast away my royal Roots."

Elizabeth K. Monroe certainly seemed an asset to Monroe during a time when Monroe alleged to have few. She was married at age seventeen, to a dashing and highly ambitious twenty-seven year old James Monroe. Monroe once told Elizabeth in her confidence, "It is...the Presidency that I seek. I have a Vision, milady, of the golden Waves of the Atlantic bidding good Morning to the saccharine ultramarine blue Waters of the Pacific. A unified Nation, my Buttercup, from Sea to twinkling Sea. This will be my Objective, my Doctrine that shall indeed be known in the Annals of History as The Monroe Doctrine." (1805, from I Traverse the Stria: The Lost Journals of Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, published by Wainwright Books, 1857)

Fast forward several years to Monroe's famous speech of 1823, when he officially declared his Monroe Doctrine as the official presidential prolegomenon to his Era of Good Feelings. A decisive cherry on the top of what was an extremely decadent 19th Century triple-decker chocolate cake. Echoed a century later by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Monroe made what was then the controversial declaration that "despite our Backgrounds, our given religious Credos, or our economic Standings, this is a Time we can all look forward to, as Citizens of God's only United States of America. For this is indeed an Era of Good Feelings!"

But was it truly an Era of Good Feelings? The Missouri Compromise of 1820 helped to widen the gap between slave states and free states, further adding the timbers that would conflagrate in 1861. And his speech declaring the Monroe Doctrine essentially severed all constructive ties between the United States and European nations. This was the strengthening of isolationism in America, a factor that would dictate the next hundred years of American policy-making. But with the United States outside of the realm of world politics, the growing tread of European hegemonic imperialism displayed no borders, no bounds. Theodore Roosevelt added his corollary to Monroe's doctrine, but only to the extent that outside forces hindered the other Americas. Once, when Roosevelt woke up early one morning at the White House, he believed that he had seen a ghost. This ghost was undoubtedly that of Monroe, as it was said to have shouted, "Too little! Too late!" The next morning, Roosevelt went to the presidential physician to ask for advice regarding the encounter. Dr. Edwin Peters, a religious man, told him, "Do not fear the emissaries of Darkness, for at the end of all tunnels, God shines forth his light." He prescribed Roosevelt a copy of the New Testament (King James Version) and told him to read the book of Matthew every evening before bed. He also gave Roosevelt a strong dosage of laudanum once every two days. Laudanum was a very popular drug, especially at administrative parties and balls in Washington at the time. Roosevelt was reported to have said, "If McKinley can take it and live to see another day, then by God, so can I." President McKinley died in office in 1901 from a fatal bullet received by future electric chair laureate Leon Frank Czolgosz.

History still has not placed an adequate verdict on Monroe's real significance as president. Laudanum is still available, but only as a behind-the-counter drug.

"Our federal Union: it must be preserved!"

Andrew Jackson's early years of presidential service were wrought with difficulty and abhorrence; he was leading a vastly growing nation with a virtually unfounded reckless abandon and an indomitable swagger--the latter of which was shared by his predecessor, the Democratic Republican John Quincy Adams, a man of both keen wit and keen baldness. Adams, a straight-cut figure who was born from the loins of noted epistemologist Abagail Adams (née Smith), was far from straight-cut in physical appearance. Adams enjoyed a hearty meal, and an even heartier policy to reinvigorate and vastly improve the national infrastructure (roads, canals) and national education (universities, canals). Jackson continued this work in spirit, but instead of furthering the building of roads, he ordered the displacement and slaughter of thousands of native Americans, and instead of building and upgrading institutions of higher education, he worked to privatize the bank industry. Still 2 out of 10 is nothing to begrudge.

Once, when I was a child, we were told in Ms. Somerfeld's 3rd grade history class to prepare a presentation on our favorite president of the United States. Twelve out of the thirty children in the class chose John F. Kennedy, five chose Ronald "America's Grandpa" Reagan, and the rest chose as follows:
Franklin D. Roosevelt (4)
Abraham Lincoln (3)
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (3)
Jefferson Finis Davis (1)
Alben W. Barkley (1) (Barkley was a Vice President, but the report had still been made)
James Monroe (.5)
James Madison (.5) (the presentations on Madison and Monroe were merged, as the child confused the two Jameses, assuming the same man to have been in office for four terms)

I did not participate, as I was auditing the class.

Needless to say, the most impressive presentation of the day was when I saw John McGuinn start a fight with Harriet Sheridan. Harriet's pig-tails were lopped off by a pair of scissors, and John's glasses were broken beyond repair. This was several days before Thanksgiving, 1985.