If you’re going to throw someone out of the Legislature, as happened down in Tennessee, you should make sure it is for something serious, like breaking the rules or personal misconduct, or both.
The removal ouster is rare. In the long history of the Massachusetts Legislature, for instance, only a handful of legislators have been stripped of their duties and expelled from the House or the Senate.
The most recent was the 2014 ouster of state Rep. Carlos Henriques of Dorchester over a domestic violence conviction. Before that Rep. Harry Foster was removed from the House in 2016 over taking money to file legislation.
In the Senate, the late Alan Sisitsky was removed from the state Senate in 1981 for unruly behavior. He was later reinstated.
But the most interesting ouster from the House was over a “sex scandal” that took place in 1855.
That was when, following an extensive committee investigation, the House voted to oust state Rep. Joseph Hiss of Boston, granting him the dubious honor of becoming the first person kicked out of the Massachusetts Legislature.
The Hiss case caught my eye when it came up during Sisitsky’s court proceedings. What did Joe Hiss do?
I delved into the state archives to dig out the committee’s shocking report on its Hiss investigation. The report was written in longhand and stored in the state archives. I wrote a story about it.
The scandal began when Hiss’s six-member of the House Nunnery Committee (Yes, such a committee existed back then), visited the Academy of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Roxbury where Hiss propositioned one of the nuns.
The nun told the committee that investigate Hiss that he asked her if she “wanted to go out in the world.”
“He then wanted to know if I wanted to go to Montreal and I said I would not,” she told the committee.
Hiss, known as a man about town, then hosted a dinner for his committee members at the Norfolk House, an expensive Roxbury restaurant, “where they consumed wine that was paid for by the state,” the investigative report said.
It pompously added, “We by no means approve of the practice of legislative committees making use of intoxicating drinks at the expense of the Commonwealth.” Imagine that.
But the real Hiss scandal did not heat up until his committee went to visit a nunnery in Lowell. The investigating committee noted that Hiss spoke with two strange women when he got off the train.
Upon registering at the Washington House, Hiss added the name of a “Mrs. Patterson” to the list of the six members staying over, telling the hotel clerk ‘to provide her with a good room as she is one of our party.”
Later a “Mrs. Patterson” did arrive and was given Room 12 by the hotel clerk. “Mr. Hiss had the next room, Room 13,” the report noted.
The key witness who did Hiss in was Mrs. Carpenter, the hotel chambermaid. She testified that she saw Mrs. Patterson in her nightgown getting ready for bed at 8 p.m.
However, when she went to make up the beds in Rooms 12 and 13 the next morning, she told the shocked committee that Mrs. Patterson’s bed “had the used appearance of having been occupied by two persons.”
And Hiss’ bed in Room 13 “had no appearance of having been used.”
“She judged that a man and a woman had used the bed that night and she had no doubt that being the case,” the report said. And who should know better than the chambermaid?
“Room Number 12 was occupied by two persons that night,” Hiss and Paterson, the committee concluded.
And adding insult to injury, Hiss paid for Mrs. Patterson’s room with state funds, which came to $1.25.
All in all, Hiss’ Lowell junket cost the state $18.75, which may or not have included what he bestowed on Mrs. Patterson.
And for that, they threw Joe Hiss out of the House proving, if nothing else, that Joe Hiss was no Hunter Biden- philanderer, but a rogue in his own right.
Ah, the good old days.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.