Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 4
On January 27, 1871, a forty-year-old congressman from Kentucky sought recognition on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Upon being recognized by the Speaker, the Honorable James G. Blame, the congressman expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of time he had been allotted on past occasions and so requested, and was granted, one full, uninterrupted half hour to speak his mind. The congressman was a Democrat, an able lawyer, ambitious, learned in the classics, and generally well liked by his colleagues. He also had a name that seemed designed especially for being chiselled in stone or signed with a flourish on documents of state. His name was J. Proctor Knott.
Still, despite all this, J. Proctor Knott was little known outside Kentucky’s Fourth District or the cloakrooms on Capitol Hill. In the next half hour, however, addressing himself to an obscure bill then before the House, he would change that. He would take up the question of whether federal lands ought to be given to the St. Croix and Lake Superior Railroad m order to build a new line that would run from Hudson, Wisconsin, on the St. Croix River to Superior, Wisconsin, located at the western end of Lake Superior and, as it happened, close by a scraggly Minnesota village of some three thousand people, called Duluth. Congressman Knott’s speech would be filled with faulty facts and bad logic. But no matter. In an age of elaborate and energetic oratory it would be talked about, printed and reprinted, quoted and misquoted, for years to come.
According to the Congressional Globe , Knott was interrupted by “laughter,” “great laughter,” “roars of laughter,” and “shouts of laughter” a total of sixty-two times. Once he had finished, the bill for the railroad was as dead as it could be, and he had made famous, by mistake, little Duluth, which the railroad never meant to put on the map in the first place. The speech immediately appeared in newspapers the country over and was published separately numerous times by private individuals. For several years it was handed out as a memento in the dining cars of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the l8()0’s, by which time Duluth had become a city of thirty thousand people, the chamber of commerce published the speech to show that what had once been said “in ridicule and derision” had turned out to be facts “in reality.” By the turn of the century the speech had appeared in at least three anthologies of American oratory.
As for J. (for James) Proctor Knott, he served two more terms in the House, later became governor of Kentucky, and spent his last years teaching economics and law at Centre College in Danville. Once he went to Duluth, to be received at a banquet in his honor. There were no hard feelings in “the J^enith City of the Unsalted Seas,” as it was known by then. But never again did Knott reach the oratorical heights of the