Thomas Lindsay Blanton

Thomas Lindsay Blanton (October 25, 1872 – August 11, 1957) was a United States Representative from Texas. He was a member of the Democratic Party.

Born in Houston, Texas, Blanton was educated in the public schools. He graduated from the law department of the University of Texas at Austin in 1897, with three years in the academic department. He was admitted to the bar in 1897 and commenced practice in Cleburne. He moved to Albany, Texas, and continued the practice of law until 1908, when he was elected judge of the 42nd Judicial District of Texas. He was reelected in 1912 and served in that capacity until he was elected to Congress in 1916.

Blanton was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-fifth and to the five succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1917 – March 3, 1929).

While a member of the House of Representatives of the Sixty-seventh Congress, Blanton inserted into the Congressional Record a letter purporting to have been written by one Millard French, a non-union printer, to "George H. Carter, Public Printer"; the letter recited a conversation reported to have occurred between French and a printer named Levi Huber who belonged to the union. The letter was said to contain language that was "unspeakable, vile, foul, filthy, profane, blasphemous and obscene", in the words of Representative Franklin Mondell, and the House voted to expunge the letter from the Congressional Record, on a vote of 313 to 1.

The letter itself was an affidavit sent by an employee of the Public Printer on September 3, 1921, and relates to the Government Printing Office. A selection of the letter, which relates what Levi Huber, the corrector of revises, said to the employee:

Robert D. Stevens of the University of Hawaii at Manoa wrote in a 1982 article that the offending remarks "were not all that offensive by today's standards," and only took up half a column of the Record, and furthermore contained only 32 "obscene" words, which were already censored in the form of removing most of the letters and replacing them with underscores.

...
Wikipedia