884

Unique Senatorially Autographed Copy of "U.S. Senators - 58th Congress", Boston: Boston Budget Co., n.d. [Dec. 1904], folio, in dark blue cloth boards with printed endpapers, the front board gilt-stamped with title and owner's name, containing ninety-two mechanically reproduced photographs, most by George Prince (1847-1929), of all ninety U.S. senators at the third session of the 58th Congress (December 1904-March 1905) and autographed by seventy-four of them, 16-1/4" x 11-1/4". Ex libris: the Honorable Governor and Senator Murphy James Foster (1849-1921) of Louisiana. A detailed list of signatories is available on request. The 1905 edition of Clark's Boston Blue Book contains an advertisement from the Boston Budget Company (a erstwhile vanity press run by brothers Robert, George and William James) announcing that "the United States Senate Number of the Boston Budget will be published in December 1904" and would be "sold by subscription at fifty cents per copy, carriage prepaid". The Budget Company had created a similar photographic catalogue of the Senate (along with President McKinley and his cabinet) in 1901, also in collaboration with native D.C. photographer George Prince, who, until his scandalous divorce in 1907, was one of the premiere photographers of the Washington elite, his clientele including all presidents and first ladies from James A. Garfield to Theodore Roosevelt. This copy of the 1904 record belonged to Senator Murphy J. Foster of Louisiana, who had served as the state's governor from 1892 to 1900 and thereafter was immediately elected to the U.S. Senate. Foster evidently carried his copy of the Senate Number into the chambers, where he painstakingly collected autographs of seventy-four of the ninety senators photographed. Many of these autographs are dated and, of these, the vast majority are in the first two weeks of April 1906. By this time, the 59th Congress had been seated for four months, and of the sixteen senators whose signatures are missing here, nine had either declined or failed their re-election bids, three had died, and one - Arthur P. Gorman (D-MD) - was gravely ill and unable to attend the sessions. Thus, Foster collected signatures of seventy-four of the seventy-seven senators of the 58th Congress who returned to the 59th. The signatories constitute a momentary snapshot of the United States in April 1906, being a collection of western expansionists, northern imperialists and southern segregationists. Among them are Finance Committee Chairman Nelson W. Aldrich (R-NY), whose self-serving fiscal policies were attacked by muckraker David G. Phillips; imperialist Albert J. Beveridge (R-IN), who nonetheless championed the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 in response to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, published only two months prior to Beveridge's signature here; populist Joseph W. Bailey (D-TX), whose angry debates with Beveridge once led to a physical confrontation on the Senate floor; Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), whose progressive views on civil rights for African Americans stood in contrast to his regressive anti-immigrant policies; urbane and witty Boies Penrose (R-PA), known for his quip "Public office is the last refuge of the scoundrel"; rabid racist Benjamin "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman (D-SC), who said that Theodore Roosevelt's White House dinner with Booker T. Washington would "necessitate our killing a thousand n*****s in the South before they learn their place again"; self-made George C. Perkins (R-CA), who grew from a runaway cabin boy to a wealthy San Francisco merchant, unaware while signing this book that the devastating 1906 earthquake was a mere two weeks away; dour and intolerant Furnifold M. Simmons (D-NC), who pedantically corrected the typographical error in his Christian name while signing; and Mormon Reed Smoot (R-UT), the first of his faith to serve in the Senate, whose seat was challenged on the (demonstrably false) accusation that he was a polygamist (prompting the ever-glib Boies Penrose to comment "I would rather have seated beside me in the chamber a polygamist who doesn't polyg than a monogamist who doesn't monog."). Senator Foster was so diligent in collecting these signatures that he did not neglect Charles G. Bennett, the Secretary of the Senate, the only non-Senator in the book and whose photograph concludes it. Foster remained in the Senate until 1913, when he failed to receive his party's nomination. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him Customs Collector in New Orleans, and he died near Franklin, Louisiana on June 12, 1921. His political legacy was continued by his grandson, Murphy J. Foster III, better known as Mike Foster, the 53rd Governor of Louisiana.


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