By Paul Mills
We live in an era when both our federal and many of our state governments seem immobilized. There’s thus some nostalgia for occasionally more decisive eras of action. The movie Selma, for example, harkened up a memory of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other “Great Society” enactments of just 50-years ago at this time. The tax cut legislation of the Reagan Era, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” Congress of 1995, and the “New Deal” sessions of the 1930’s were other occasions of perceived dramatic legislative achievement.
Ours is by no means the only time, however, when it seems that law makers have trouble getting something done. Just a century ago at this time, for example, our own Maine legislature was experiencing a dose of stagnation so pronounced that it almost prevented the election of the state’s leading constitutional officers.
As with the Maine legislature of 2015, its counterpart from just a century ago had a split partisan personality: the GOP controlled the senate; the Democrats the House. The legislature then, as now, also had four Representatives who were not members of either of the two major parties. (Back then, all four were members of the Progressive party.)
The initial seating of the 1915 legislature was so close that voting on election to the Governor’s Council, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Treasurer was tied up at 91 to 91 between the Republican and Democratic candidates. The 91 Democrats were at an impasse against the united opposition of the 87 Republicans and the four Progressives.
It took nearly two weeks and 11 ballots to elect Democrat John Bunker of Bar Harbor Secretary of State (Bunker’s counterpart today is Matt Dunlap. Dunlap himself was originally from Bar Harbor.) Election of the other positions was facilitated by a House vote on contested ballots in the previous year’s election of the Van Buren seat in the legislature. The outgoing Republican Secretary of State had interpreted the election results to seat the GOP candidate. The Democratic controlled House several days into the session, however, replaced him on a party line vote that awarded the seat to Fortunat O. Michaud, a Democrat. This gave the Democrats a 92 to 90 upper hand over the GOP-Progressive coalition in the combined Senate/House convention that elected many key positions in Maine government.
The governor himself, Portland Democrat Oakley Curtis, remained on the sidelines during the gridlocked period. The position was, after all, a part-time one. His salary: $3,000. (That’s compared to the $70,000 the job pays now.) His emoluments did not yet include a place to live. That would have to await the gift to the State of the Blaine House four years later. By contrast, the highest paid positions in Maine government at the time were the Chair of the Public Utilities Commission and the eight justices of the Maine Supreme Court. Each of them was paid $5,000. They were all dwarfed, however, by the salaries paid to such federal officials as the members of the Maine Congressional delegation, who each made $7,500, not to mention President Woodrow Wilson himself, whose annual salary in 1915 was $75,000.
But when the legislature was able after the initial stalemate over the election of officers to get down to further business, it was an issue of employee wages rather than public salaries that captured its attention. The Maine legislature just 100-years ago this month enacted the state’s first Workers Compensation Act. The proposed law was designed to provide a uniform system to compensate employees injured in the work place. A consensus had emerged that the existing remedies were uncertain and unfair to both employers and employees. This was in part because employers could not predict when and at what level they might be hit by a lawsuit by an aggrieved worker who could sometimes get juries to award such damages as pain and suffering on top of both lost wages and medical costs. Employees on the other hand had to bear both the initial expense of bringing such suits and were often deprived any redress at all if either the employee or any fellow worker was in any way even partially at fault.
The backdrop to the 1915 Workers Comp Act was the 1913 session when the legislature first took up the issue. Even by then, 15 other states including Massachusetts and New Hampshire had recently enacted a system that took such cases out of the courts and provided a streamlined remedy to employees hurt on the job. The workers compensation law was – after extensive debate and discussion – on the brink of passage when Wilton State Representative, well known shoe manufacturer G.H. Bass, successfully sponsored in a close vote an amendment that allowed employers to deduct half the workers comp insurance premiums from employee wages. This in the eyes of the principal sponsors of the original legislation so gutted the proposed system that they prevailed upon the Maine House to kill the entire measure.
Despite going down the tubes in the 1913 session, workers comp breathed new life when the 1915 legislature convened. The law was passed without Bass’s amendment and created a fast track no fault system of paying injured workers through a commission. This advantage to workers was offset by provisions that capped benefits at 50-percent of wages subject to a minimum of $4 a week and a ceiling of $10 a week. (Those figures today: the minimum: two-thirds of a worker’s wages; the maximum about $750 per week.) The employee could also be paid medical costs, but could no longer sue the employer for either pain or suffering. The only part of the proposal drawing floor debate this time was whether businesses with fewer than five employees should be exempt. Ultimately, the law, now with overwhelming support from all three political parties, went on the books with such an exemption at that time, one that has since been repealed.
Despite the relative harmony among the parties in enacting the state’s first workers compensation law in 1915 it would in later decades become an issue that defined their identities. The most notable episode of such cleavage occurred in 1991 when an impasse between the major parties over how much they should curtail a 1970’s expansion of the system led to a 17-day shutdown of state government.
Besides what it did in workers comp, the 1915 Maine legislature was – like many of its other 20th century counterparts – also noted for what it did not do. Though the House voted 88 to 59 in favor of giving women the right to vote, it failed to achieve the two thirds majority required for a state constitutional amendment.
Rejecting a measure to provide a state system of aid to families with dependent children, thus leaving such assistance still in the hands of local municipalities, churches and other private charities was also an instance where the legislature decided to stand back from significant pro-activity. Another was its refusal to provide any more than $20,000 to help build the “Million Dollar” Bridge between Portland and South Portland. (Its modern day counterpart was built largely with federal funding.)
How the 21st century descendants of the 1915 legislators a hundred years later in 2015 will be remembered nevertheless remains to be seen.
We shall see.
Paul H. Mills, is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.
