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President
J.F. Kennedy meets with Montana's majority leader.
(Photo courtesy of UM's Mansfield Archives.)
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Montana
statesman Mike Mansfield,
1903-2001
Mike
Mansfield, Montana's most revered statesman, died Oct. 5
in Washington, D.C. He was 98.
Mansfield
left on undeniable mark on Montana, the nation and the world.
Encouraged by the love of his life, Maureen, he rose from
the Butte copper mines to seek an education at The University
of Montana in Missoula.
He
and Maureen earned UM master's degrees -- his in history,
hers in English. Thereafter he worked as a UM history professor
until Maureen prompted him to run for the U.S. House in
1942, launching a remarkable political career.
Mansfield
served as a U.S. representative during 1942-51, as a U.S.
Senator during 1952-77 and a U.S. ambassador to Japan during
1977-88. He was Senate majority leader from 1961 to 1977
-- longer than any other -- helping guide the country through
the tumult of the '60s and the Vietnam War.
Mansfield kept working his entire life, even after Maureen
passed away Sept. 20, 2000, at the age of 95. Their lives
and legacies will be long remembered at UM, where their
names grace the library, a foundation, two centers and a
campus mall. A statue of the Mansfields was erected on campus
in May 2000.
Mike
Mansfield was famous for his short, to-the-point answers
to questions, but he also could be eloquent and articulate
when called upon. He gave the following speech at the UM
Foundation Washington Dinner, held Aug. 24, 1967, at the
Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. The speech makes
clear his thoughts about UM and the state he represented.
It also announces UM's prestigious Mansfield Lectures that
continue today.
"In
a Montana Mood"
It
has been said that the two great loves of
my life are the University and the study of
foreign affairs. I readily acknowledge a lasting liaison
with the first and a deep absorption in the second.
The
University and foreign affairs are indeed great loves. But,
there is another which is greater and comes before both.
That is the state of Montana and its people.
For
a quarter of a century, Montanans have trusted me, as one
of them, to represent their concerns, first in the House
and then in the Senate of the United States. I have tried
to sustain that trust by following the basic principle:
If I do not forget the people of Montana, they will not
forget me.
So
for a quarter of a century, Montana's people, regardless
of politics, position or power of profession, have come
first with me. That is as it always has been. That is as
it always will be.
That
bond that ties me to Montana is woven of many strands. But
before all else, it involves my personal feelings, as a
citizen of the state, for its beauty, history and people.
For you who are not of Montana, let me try to tell you why
the bond is inseparable, insofar as I am concerned. Let
me try to explain to you why Montanans who are outside of
Montana are always homesick for Montana.
To me, Montana is a symphony.
It
is a symphony of color. It is painted by a thousand different
plants and shrubs which set the hills ablaze -- each with
its own kind of inner fire -- during spring and summer.
Montana
is the intense blue of the Big Sky reflected in the deep
blue of mountain lakes and the ice-blue of the tumbling
streams. It is the solid white of billowing clouds and the
haze-white of snow on a hundred mountain peaks. It is the
infinite themes of green in mile after mile on farm-rich
valleys and in millions of acres of forests.
We,
who are of Montana, know the color-harmony of a springtime
of millions of wild flowers -- the orange poppies, purple
heather, yellow columbines, red Indian paintbrush, beargrass
and purple asters in the mountains; the tiger lilies, dogtooth
violets, Mariposa lilies, bitterroot and kinnikinnick in
the foothills; the shooting stars, daisies, larkspur, yellow
bells and sand lilies in the plains.
And
in the long winter, we know the muted music of the snows
which blanket the state. A theme of hope runs through these
snows because they are the principal storehouse of the state's
great natural resource of water. In one year the amount
which will flow out of the mountains and rush down the hills
is enough to fill Montana from boundary to boundary to a
depth of 6 inches. And bear in mind that Montana's 94 million
acres make the state as large as the entire nation of Japan
with its 100 million people.
Montana
is a symphony. It is a symphony of sounds. Listen to them
for a moment, in the names of places. There are mountain
ranges called the Beaverhead, the Sapphire, the Ruby, the
Bear Paws, the Highwoods, the Snowies, the Beartooths, the
Judiths, the Crazies and the Big Belts. And, incidentally,
there are also the Little Belts as well.
There
are streams whose names sing: the Silver Bow, the Flathead,
the Kootenai, and the Sun; the Jefferson, the Madison, the
Gallatin and the Musselshell; the Milk, the Yellowstone,
the Tongue, the Powder, the Blackfoot, and the Boulder.
And
when the roll of Montana's cities and towns is called, you
hear: Eureka, Chinook, Whitefish, Cut Bank; Circle, Hungry
Horse, Absarokee, Butte, Wolf Point and Great Falls. And
you hear Lodge Grass, Lame Deer, Deer Lodge, Crow Agency,
Bigfork, and Twodot.
These and a hundred others like them are strains in the
history in the state. Each has a story and, together, they
sing the story of Montana.
It
began in a mist of time, with Indians -- with the Crows,
the Blackfeet, the Assiniboine, the Flatheads, the Chippewa-Crees,
the Sioux and the Northern Cheyennes. Then came Lewis and
Clark and the great fur-trading companies. When the boom
in pelts died, the gold rush began. At Grasshopper Creek
in 1862, the find was so rich, it was said that miners could
pull up sagebrush and shake a dollar's worth of dust out
of the roots. The town of Confederate Gulch grew on gold.
In six years the population jumped from zero to 10,000 people.
In the seventh, the gold was gone and only 64 lonely souls
remained.
Indians,
fur and gold echo in the overture to Montana's history,
and throughout runs the beat of the famous and infamous,
the hunted, the haunted, the violent and the pacific and
the politic. There was, for example, the notorious Henry
Plummer who, as sheriff of Bannack, engineered the bushwacking
murders of 102 of the citizens he was supposed to protect
before he was hung by the Vigilantes.
But
there was also the Methodist minister Wesley Van Orsdel
-- Brother Van -- who got off a steamer at Fort Benton in
1872 and went directly to the Four Deuces saloon to preach
his first sermon; the saloon closed, respectfully, for one
hour for the service. And there is Jeannette Rankin, a distinguished
lady of Montana, the first woman member of Congress whose
abhorrence of violence in every form was so deeply felt
that she was compelled to vote her conscience against the
nation's entry into World War I and World War II.
And
there were such political "greats" as Thomas J.
Walsh, Burton K. Wheeler, James Murray, Joe Dixon and others
in the Congress.
Silver came after gold. It was struck rich in places like
Argenta, Butte, Granite, Castle, Elkhorn, Monarch and Neihart.
But, when Congress discontinued the purchase of silver in
1892, the silver camps were added to the ghost towns which
dotted the lonely gold trails.
Then
it was copper's turn, at Butte and Anaconda in western Montana.
The struggle for copper was of such proportions that it
set off political and economic reverberations which are
felt even today not only in the state, but in the nation
and throughout the world.
While
some dug into Montana's earth for wealth, others sought
it from what grew out of the earth. Stockmen filled the
rolling grass-covered high plains of Central and Eastern
Montana with cattle and sheep. In scarcely 10 years, the
cattle population rose from a few thousand to over a million.
Then the cruel winter of 1886-87 froze 90 percent of them
into grotesque ice sculptures of the plains and another
Montana "boom" went "bust."
Beginning
in the 19th century, railroads run through the symphony
of Montana. Sledges in the gnarled hands of a hundred thousand
immigrants pounded down the parallel steel ribbons, mile
upon mile. The iron horses came rushing out across a continent.
The Great Northern advertised free government land in a
region of "milk and honey" to lure settlers to
its line. They came in eager droves from Scandinavia, Germany,
Poland, Yugoslavia, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom,
Ireland and a score of other countries. They made agriculture,
mining and lumbering the state's chief industries. But the
great drought of 1917 took away the milk and honey and left
only a parched and stricken land and a hurt and wiser people.
Montanans
drove, tumbled and stumbled into the 20th century. The state
has picked itself up and started over again many times.
Its history is of a people drawn from many sources, headed
toward the glowing promise of the Western frontier. It is
of a people who have known the collapse of hope and the
renewal of hope. It is of a people who have lived in intimacy
with fear as well as courage and with cruelty as well as
compassion. It is of a people who have known not only the
favor but the fury of a bountiful and brooding Nature. The
history of Montana is the song of a people who, repeatedly
shattered, have held together, persevered and, at last,
taken enduring root.
Now
the 20th century moves on towards the 21st and the ups and
downs of the past yield to the more stable present. The
state has grown out of a dependency upon a single extractive
industry. The old threat of spring flooding and summer drought
grows dimmer as Yellowtail, Canyon Ferry, Hungry Horse and
other dams -- great and small, public and private -- have
risen to discipline the rushing waters. The cold temperatures
- a reading of 70 below zero has been recorded at Rogers
Pass - have yielded to modern heating. And the hot temperatures
-- it once reached 117 above in Glendive -- are tempered
in Montana as elsewhere by air conditioning to match its
cool nights. Plane travel cuts the huge distances and the
immense isolation. Indeed, the virtues of Montana's space,
clean air and clean water, scenery and unparalleled recreation
opportunities are becoming better known and look ever more
inviting to the rest of the nation.
Modern
transition notwithstanding, something remains in the state
that is durably unique and uniquely durable. It is to be
found in the character in the people. Montanans are formed
by the vastness of a state whose mountains rise to 12,000
feet in granite massives, piled one upon another as though
by some giant hand. To drive across the state is to journey,
in distances, from Washington, D.C., north to Toronto, or
south to Florida. In area, we can accommodate Virginia,
Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New York, and still
have room for the District of Columbia.
Yet,
in all this vastness, we are far less than a million people.
In short, Montanans have room to live, to breathe and, above
all, to think - to think with a breadth of view which goes
to the far horizon and beyond. Vast and empty space and
high mountains may isolate a population, but they open the
minds of a people. The minds of Montanans dwell not only
upon community and state, but upon the nation and the world
and on the essential unity of all. And this sense of unity
is buttressed by the harsh uncertainties of an all-powerful
environment which has taught us to draw together in a mutual
concern for one another and to be hospitable to all who
come from afar.
So
in a sense, a lecture series on international relations
which is proposed to be initiated at The University of Montana
will be doing what comes naturally to Montanans, because
it promises to open up new channels of understanding between
us and our unseen neighbors on this globe. The series will
stimulate, I am sure, deeper insights and greater comprehension
of the nation's relationships with the people who live on
all of its horizons.
I
need not tell you that the realization that this process
will be taking place under the aegis of my name fills my
heart to the full. It is far more than I ever expected when
I came to Washington to represent Montana in the Congress
a quarter of a century ago. It is far more than I deserve.
Indeed,
I should like this honor to go where it is most due -- to
the woman who set out with me from Butte so long ago and
who has remained a wise counselor and steadfast inspiration
through all these years. Without her, I would not be in
the Congress of the United States. Indeed, I should not
have reached The University of Montana or for that matter
even received a high school certificate. A more appropriate
title for the lecture series, therefore, would be "The
Maureen and Mike Mansfield Lectures."
May
I suggest, too, that if the response to the effort on which
you have embarked is a good one, a modest maximum should
be established for the capital of the fund for the lectures
on international affairs. If any additional monies should
become available beyond that maximum, I should like to see
the excess go into scholarships for the children of Montanans
-- and the nation's first Americans, who have not always
had benefit in equal measure with the rest of us from Montana's
development and the nation's progress. I refer to my friends
and brothers -- the Northern Cheyennes, the Crows, the Flatheads,
the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Chippewa-Cree, the
Landless and all the others who live with us in Montana.
I
suggest this procedure because the lecture series by its
very nature turns our attention to the world beyond our
borders and to the promise of a fruitful future for Montanans
and all Americans. It is good that our attention is so directed
provided we are also prepared to look inward and backward
and so, remember what it is that we are building upon: And
so, try to fill the gaps and to heal the hurts which may
have been opened in the process of arriving at where we
are today. In that way, we shall better tie the past into
the present and open wider the horizons of the future. In
that way, we shall better bind together, into a greater
nation, all who live in a great state and in a blessed land.
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