Tales Of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air & Water

Can Congress Again Use Truths That Cut Close To The Bone?

Now and then a broadside of humor gets the point across better than crude acrimony.

Bureau babble has been a butt of public ridicule for ages. A classic case affected clean air, as you will see. The sharpest players in the affair are the former U. S. senator from New Mexico, the Honorable Clinton P. Anderson, and the master skewerer, Mark Twain.

The story begins in earnest, April 1970. I began writing to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the agency then overseeing the notorious Four Corners Power Plant, to question the plant’s air emissions and seek answers. The bureau’s replies were generous with non-information and non-answers. I followed up with more exact questions, which brought still vaguer replies.

About the same time, I began sending separate letters to Sen. Anderson, a senior member of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, informing him of my problems. The good senator quickly took an interest and invariably answered my letters with sympathy and careful thought.

For more than eight months, the correspondence continued with the department as it began, keeping me resupplied with no answers. With each, I relayed the lack of news to the senator. These were the days of typewriters and snail mail.

Finally, one particularly egregious letter from the department arrived just as I was reading a book of short stories by Mark Twain. One of the delights was a bristly bit entitled, “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship.” Human truths, durably bundled.
 
The 1867 story is a series of imagined letters, written by Twain in his job as secretary to his imagined boss, a U.S. senator. For the finale, the senator instructs Twain to answer a letter from constituents who want the post route from Indian Gulch changed partly to the old Mormon trail, but to “leave them a little in the dark” in the matter.

Secretary Twain’s dodgy reply to constituents vividly recalls the Interior Department’s reply to me. To explain my frustration, I sent Twain’s twister in its entirety to Sen. Anderson, as follows:

Gentlemen: It is a delicate question about this Indian trail, but, handled with proper deftness and dubiousness, I doubt not we shall succeed in some measure or otherwise, because the place where the route leaves the Lassen Meadows, over beyond where those two Shawnee chiefs, Dilapidated-Vengeance and Biter-of-the-Clouds, were scalped last winter, this being the favorite direction to some, but others preferring something else in consequence of things, the Mormon trail leaving Mosby’s at three in the morning, and passing through Jawbone Flat to Blucher, and then down by Jug-Handle, the road passing to the right of it, and naturally leaving it on the right, too, and Dawson’s on the left of the trail where it passes to the left of said Dawson’s and onward thence to Tomahawk, thus making the route cheaper, easier of access to all who can get at it, and compassing all the desirable objects so considered by others, and, therefore, conferring the most good upon the greatest number, and, consequently, I am encouraged to hope we shall. However, I shall be ready, and happy, to afford you still further information upon the subject, from time to time, as you may desire it and the Post-office Department be enabled to furnish it to me. –Very truly, etc., Mark Twain, For James W. N**, U.S. Senator

Clearly the letter piqued Anderson’s senatorial interests, and perhaps some from his early career as well, since both Twain and Anderson were once newsmen. Sen. Anderson notably accelerated his efforts in the power plant issue.

To make a long story short, in May of 1971, the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs held five hearings in five states in five days on the subject of “Problems of Electrical Power Production in the Southwest.” Although afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease, Sen. Anderson attended the Albuquerque hearing.

The hearings bolstered our mission for cleaner, less hazy air. Another decade of citizen enterprise reduced Four Corners emissions of fly ash, SO2, and nitrogen oxides by hundreds of tons a day.