H.R. Gross worked alongside Ronald Reagan at radio station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1930s. Reagan did sports. Gross did news. But Gross’s tie to Reagan isn’t his claim to fame.
In 1948, Gross was elected to the House from Iowa after ousting a fellow Republican in the primary. Not much was expected of him. At 5-foot-6 and 135 pounds, he was not an imposing figure. He had a perpetually puckered expression and a receding hairline.
When he was preparing to give his maiden speech in the House, he asked a senior Republican from Michigan, Claire Hoffman, for advice. Gross should interrupt him during a speech on the House floor to ask a question, Hoffman said, and he would answer it. Gross did so, only to have Hoffman reply, “What possessed the gentleman from Iowa to ask such a stupid question?”
Gross had been sandbagged for the first and last time. He was a fast learner. And in the early 1950s, he emerged as a congressman to reckon with. He was clever, knowledgeable, focused, and tireless in ways no other congressman could match or even tried to. Gross adopted a single goal: cut spending from every piece of legislation that crossed the House floor. And he used all the tools a lone Republican could muster in a Democratic House.
His tactics set him apart. He was always on the floor when the House was in session. The notion that the important work of Congress took place in committees was lost on Gross. He read every bill that would be taken up on the floor. No one else did. He was willing to do things that not only slowed bills from being voted on but would drive his colleagues crazy. He didn’t mind inconveniencing them. He rejected Speaker Sam Rayburn’s advice “to get along, go along.” Gross didn’t go along.
And that’s how he became well-known and admired by grassroots conservatives. Two traits helped him. He had a big voice and was fearless. He never liked John F. Kennedy and wife Jacqueline and was unfazed by their popularity. He criticized their “high living” at the White House. He and wife Hazel didn’t socialize after dark in Washington. She didn’t own a ball gown, he noted. After President Kennedy was assassinated, he opposed giving his widow a pension. “She certainly didn’t need it,” Gross said.
Then came what was later called “the single most curmudgeonly act in the history of Congress.” He argued against an “eternal flame” at JFK’s gravesite because the gas to keep it burning would cost too much. When the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was planned, he challenged its price tag as lowballing. The Washington newspapers—three at the time—denounced him furiously. But he was right: It cost more than advertised.
He was also witty. He didn’t like NASA or the space program. “Well,” he said, “even if we don’t get to the moon first, we’ll be there first with foreign aid.” A national aquarium would be a “glorified fish pond.” He referred to an overseas trip by President Truman as “a lush travel orgy.” His scorn was bipartisan. He sought to slash spending in measures favored by Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon.
In 1984, a decade after Gross retired from Congress, President Reagan stopped by WHO radio and reminisced with him. Did Gross think Reagan had the qualities of a president as a young man? “No,” Gross said. “He was a Democrat. He belonged to the wrong party.” Reagan responded that he “outgrew that.” Yes, Gross said, “he outgrew it.”
One could go on. When former senator Jon Kyl of Arizona worked in his father’s House office one summer—Rep. John Henry Kyl was an Iowa colleague of Gross’s—he would go to the House gallery to watch the man in action. “I was a big fan,” Kyl says. Gross would spot union officials in the audience and make fun of them, Kyl recalls. “He didn’t compromise.” There’s a role “for such people. The problem is you have to combine it with something that’s practical.”
About once a decade, there’s a call for a new H. R. Gross in the House. In 2009, Republican consultant Ed Rollins remembered Gross and quoted him. “May his soul inspire his fellow Republicans” to protect “those taxpayers H. R. so loved and ‘save the taxpayers from bankruptcy.’ ”
In a scholarly paper entitled “The Power of Prickliness: Iowa’s H. R. Gross in the U.S. House of Representatives,” David Schwieder of Susquehanna University and Dorothy Schwieder of Iowa State investigated how much Gross saved in federal spending. “Some evidence suggests that spending bills were trimmed, revised, or even killed in anticipation of Gross’s response,” they wrote. “This hidden exercise of power” can be powerful “but difficult to detect, measure, or study.”
The Schwieders conclude: “A Congress filled with men like Gross would be unworkable, but Congress nonetheless needs one man like H. R. Gross.” There are two problems with this advice. First, what’s wrong with “unworkable” if it puts the clamps on spending from time to time? Second, why not two, three, many more H. R. Gross acolytes? There would be plenty for them to do.
The biggest problem in Washington is the emergence of a fourth branch of government, the administrative state. And Congress is responsible for allowing it to become a powerful, unelected, and very liberal force. A new H. R. on the floor could concentrate on starving the spending that keeps so many bureaucrats on paid duty.
But the more important work would be aimed at reducing their power. Another Gross, maybe two or three, could be assigned to read every bill to find the instances of giving the administrators the job of writing the rules and regulations that determine what the bill actually does. There will be a multitude of these.
House speaker Paul Ryan touches on this in his plan for restoring constitutional government. That cannot be achieved without dramatically reducing the power of the administrative state. It’s a task H. R. Gross would have loved.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
