229 THE “PAGES” OF HISTORY READ DIFFERENTLY THEN AND NOW

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Jan. 23, 2007
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081

Congressional Page-Turned-Professor Reacts as Post-Foley Reforms are Passed

(MURFREESBORO) – Of all the issues tackled by the 110th Congress in its first “100 hours,” one measure received relatively scant media attention. On Jan. 19, the House voted 416-0 to overhaul the board that supervises the Congressional page program. A House Ethics Committee report issued in December acknowledged that the leaders of the 109th Congress were negligent in failing to protect pages from improper advances.
Once upon a time in America, things were very, very different.
Frank Essex began his work as a Congressional page to Rep. W.F. Norrell on Jan. 10, 1944. In a Jan. 20 letter to his mother in Stuttgart, Ark., young Frank wrote, “Mr. Norrell wasn’t there, but his secretary fixed me up and got me over to the Capitol. And then I made out with the assistance of the other pages.”
The expressions “fixed me up” and “made out” had much more innocuous meanings in 1944, especially in this context.
When Republican Mark Foley resigned his seat as the representative of Florida’s 16th District in September after it was revealed that Foley had sent suggestive messages to one or more male pages, Essex could only shake his head.
“Being negligent, as they had to have been to let that kind of thing unfold, is just unconscionable,” says the former MTSU political science professor.
By contrast, Essex has only golden memories of an era in which he walked among and served the giants of American politics and rambled freely on foot throughout the District of Columbia without fear of either mugging or molestation.
He earned $150 a month as a page, spending $40 a month for room and board, which included two meals a day except for Sunday. He managed to save $50 every month, a fortune to a poor country boy in a nation that was pouring all its resources into the war effort.
A day on the job could include taking old copies of the Congressional Record out of an enormous book to make room for the new ones, answering telephones in the cloakroom, and sending documents to constituents. Additional duties could include stuffing and addressing envelopes and stamping farm bulletins.
Rep. Norrell, as an example, had only two secretaries, and pages did much of the work done today by dozens of salaried staffers. Federal civil service merit tests were not implemented until the 1950s.

“Virtually every job that was not because of public election at the Capitol was a patronage job, and you got it through a Congressman or a Senator,” Essex says.
There was a box at the back of the House chamber with rows of buttons identified with seat numbers. Whenever a member wanted a page to run an errand, he pushed a button at his seat that would cause a corresponding button on the box to light up.
Lean and lanky John McCormack, described by Essex as a “cigar-chomping Irish Catholic from South Boston” with “a lot of gold teeth” was the House majority leader. The masterful Sam Rayburn from Texas wielded the speaker’s gavel. Essex remembers Rayburn’s expedient sense of hearing on voice votes, declaring the “ayes” or the “nays” victorious on the basis of what he wanted to happen and avoiding roll call tallies. Lyndon Johnson, a mere freshman, did “Mr. Sam’s” bidding and cagily observed the arm-twisting techniques he would hone to a fine art in the years to come.
“The South virtually controlled chairmanships of all committees because of the seniority,” Essex says. “Almost every seat in the South was a safe seat, and … some [chairmen] were really old.”
The elegant marble halls were supplied with cuspidors for the convenience of members who needed to spit without excusing themselves to the men’s room. Essex says the pages, fortunately, did not have to empty the expectorated tobacco juice.
When duty did not call, Essex spent some of his free time downtown in the ornate movie houses owned by Loew’s and RKO and decorated with humongous drapes which sometimes parted between films to reveal a live vaudeville act. At other times, Essex and his friends would jump, jive and wail to the tunes of all the hottest swing bands. For variety, the pages would go to the amusement park in Glen Echo, Md., riding a bumpy, speeding streetcar which felt like an amusement park ride all its own.
When he wasn’t performing the rudimentary tasks that kept the legislative branch functioning or enjoying his free time with a tourist’s wide-eyed wonder, young Essex was paying attention to the issues at stake with a maturity beyond his years. The legislation that was most important to him was the “Soldiers Vote” bill, a measure that would enable all military members to cast ballots in federal elections.
Essex fervently wanted the bill to pass because he believed that if soldiers were old enough to fight and die, they were old enough to exercise the franchise that they were fighting to preserve. After considerable opposition from those who considered young soldiers too immature for such important decisions and Southerners who feared how African American soldiers might vote, a compromise bill became law without President Roosevelt’s signature.
Frank Essex dutifully documented it all for his mother with his most prized possession, a classy Schaeffer pen with a bladder he filled from an inkwell. His collection of letters, a journal, a black-and-white picture book with numerous autographs, and a page school yearbook, complete with a group photo at the White House dinner Eleanor Roosevelt hosted for the pages, make up a fascinating collection of personal memories and American history through the eyes of an Arkansas youngster.
Yet, Essex can’t say that his experience as a page definitely led him to an academic career. After his undergraduate work at Vanderbilt, he pursued the family business by attending embalming school. After four years in the Air Force during the
Korean War, his interests changed. From 1967 to 1993, he taught at MTSU, serving as interim chair of the political science department for one semester and chairing the Faculty Senate in 1978.
Lest you think that Essex’s idyllic childhood experience on Capitol Hill blinded him to the rough-and-tumble of the political world, consider his assessment of the November 2006 midterm elections.
“It’s easy to … get a feeling that it’s more mudslinging than normal,” Essex admits. “But, then, when you reflect back, not only in one’s own observation over the years, but in what you read from historians and journalists and other long-time observers, it’s really not all that different.”
Even so, Essex expresses a certain wistfulness upon realizing that the America of his youth, an America in which a sense of community and shared sacrifice translated to a concern for doing the right thing, is more of a memory than a modern-day imperative.


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ATTENTION, MEDIA: A color jpeg photo of Dr. Frank Essex perusing the memorabilia of his experience as a Congressional page is available by contacting Gina Logue in the Office of News and Public Affairs at 615-898-5081 or gklogue@mtsu.edu.