Thomas Lindsay Blanton (October 25, 1872 – August 11, 1957) was a

United States Representative The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they ...

from

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

from 1917 to 1929, then again from 1930 to 1937. He was a member of the

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."Blanton Censured, Falls Later In Faint"
''New York Times'', October 28, 1921. Fetched from URL on 4 Aug 2010.

Biography

Born in Houston, Texas, Blanton was educated in the public schools. He graduated from the law department of the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...

in 1897, with three years in the academic department. He was

admitted to the bar An admission to practice law is acquired when a lawyer receives a license to practice law. In jurisdictions with two types of lawyer, as with barristers and solicitors, barristers must gain admission to the bar whereas for solicitors there are dist ...

in 1897 and commenced practice in Cleburne. He moved to Albany, Texas, and continued the practice of law until 1908, when he was elected judge of the 42nd Judicial District of Texas. He was reelected in 1912 and served in that capacity until he was elected to Congress in 1916. Blanton was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-fifth and to the five succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1917 – March 3, 1929).

Censure

While a member of the House of Representatives of the Sixty-seventh Congress, Blanton inserted into the Congressional Record a letter purporting to have been written by one Millard French, a non-union printer, to "George H. Carter,

Public Printer The Public Printer of the United States was the head of the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO). Pursuant to , this officer was nominated by the President of the United States and approved by the United States Senate. In December 2014, ...

"; the letter recited a conversation reported to have occurred between French and a printer named Levi Huber who belonged to the union. The letter was said to contain language that was "unspeakable, vile, foul, filthy, profane, blasphemous and obscene", in the words of Representative Franklin Mondell, and the House voted to expunge the letter from the Congressional Record, on a vote of 313 to 1."Blanton Expulsion from House Asked"
''New York Times'', 26 August 1921. Fetched from URL on 4 Aug 2010. The letter itself was an affidavit sent by an employee of the Public Printer on September 3, 1921, and relates to the Government Printing Office. A selection of the letter, which relates what Levi Huber, the corrector of revises, said to the employee:

G__d D___n your black heart, you ought to have it torn out of you, you u____ s_____ of a b_____. You and the Public Printer has no sense. You k_____ his a____ and he is a d_____d fool for letting you do it.Underscores are in the original, and mirror the lengths in the reproduced version. Grammatical errors in the original. Quoted in Robert D. Stevens, "But is the record complete? A case of censorship of the ''Congressional Record''," ''Government Publications Review'' 9 (1982), 75-80.

Robert D. Stevens of the University of Hawaii at Manoa wrote in a 1982 article that the offending remarks "were not all that offensive by today's standards," and only took up half a column of the Record, and furthermore contained only 32 "obscene" words, which were already censored in the form of removing most of the letters and replacing them with underscores. A motion to expel Blanton failed by only eight votes, and he was unanimously

censure A censure is an expression of strong disapproval or harsh criticism. In parliamentary procedure, it is a debatable main motion that could be adopted by a majority vote. Among the forms that it can take are a stern rebuke by a legislature, a spi ...

d by the House of Representatives on October 27, 1921, for "abuse of leave to print." Mondell, the author of the expulsion resolution, claimed on the floor of the House of Representatives that "There is not a member who will not say that it is the vilest thing he has ever seen in print", and that "Any one speaking the words contained in the Congressional Record would be subject to fine and imprisonment under the laws of the land." Representative Finis Garrett, defending Blanton, insisted Blanton had "no intention of being indecent but merely ada desire to show a condition existing between organized and non-organized labor in the printing office."

Subsequent events

The censure motion did not appear to harm Blanton's reputation with his constituents and he was re-elected to the House in 1922, 1924, and 1926. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1928 but was an unsuccessful candidate for nomination to the

United States Senate The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and pow ...

Return to Congress

Blanton was subsequently elected on May 20, 1930, to the

Seventy-first Congress The 71st United States Congress was a meeting of the legislature of the United States federal government, consisting of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D.C. from March 4, 1929, to Ma ...

to fill the vacancy caused by the death of his House successor, Robert Q. Lee, who died little more than a year after taking office. He was re-elected to the Seventy-second, Seventy-third, and Seventy-fourth Congresses and served from May 20, 1930, to January 3, 1937. He was an unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1936. He engaged in the practice of law in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

, in 1937 and 1938. He returned to Albany, Texas, in 1938, and continued practicing law. He also engaged in the raising of

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. He died in Albany in 1957 and is interred there at Albany Cemetery. He was a brother of Annie Webb Blanton (1870-1945), a two-term Texas state superintendent of public instruction and a former president of the Texas State Teachers Association, who lived most of her adult years in Denton.

References

Sources