Bingham: a real Connecticut character

The November day Yale announced it was ending a century-long dispute with Peru and returning artifacts taken from the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, I had been reading an account of the uncovering of those ruins by a Connecticut man described on the book’s jacket as “an explorer, adventurer, extraordinary scholar, U.S. senator and, in the eyes of many, a high-handed thief.â€

Add self-promoter and Hiram Bingham was all of that, except, perhaps, a high-handed thief. High-handed explorer may be more appropriate. Bingham, a Yale and Harvard-educated lecturer in history, not archeology, was “guilty of a patronizing assumption: that Peruvians couldn’t possibly care about their indigenous past†and Yale would be the superior guardian of that nation’s heritage, Latin American scholar Christopher Heaney writes in his recently published “Cradle of Gold.â€

“Of course, we are not going with any idea of hunting buried treasure,†Bingham told The New York Sun as he set out on the Peruvian expedition in 1911. “Should anything be found in that line, it would become the property of the Peruvian government.†But after he found the ruins, he returned in 1912 and paid Peruvian labor to excavate antiquities for Yale, The New York Times reported in 2007. Thousands of skulls, bones and artifacts — but no gold or silver — went to Yale “for study†and stayed 99 years.

After decades of pleas and litigation, Yale announced on Nov. 20 that an agreement had been reached and claimed, quite unbelievably, “it has always been Yale’s desire to reach such an agreement.†As recently as last year, Yale was trying to claim in a Connecticut court that the statute of limitations had run out and a suit to recover the items should be dismissed.

Bingham was 36 when he first saw Machu Picchu and would reinvent himself as a successful author, wartime pilot and politician. As America was about to enter the first World War, the ex-explorer decided he’d learn to fly, and just weeks after the first Americans went to France, with his pilot’s license not quite dry, Bingham was put in charge of the Signal Corps flight training program.

After the Armistice, he became active in Connecticut’s ruling Republican Party and was elected lieutenant governor in 1922. In 1924, he was easily elected governor, but just before the election, Connecticut’s senior senator, Frank Brandegee, committed suicide and a special election was scheduled for December to fill Brandegee’s term.

In those days, governor was only a two-year, part-time job, so Bingham, who was never shy about seeing his opportunities and taking them, ran for senator just a month after being elected governor and won again, becoming governor-elect and senator-elect.

“At his swearing-in as governor in January,†writes Heaney, “he delivered the longest inaugural address in Connecticut state history, hung an enormous portrait of himself in the governors’ gallery and threw a massive ball. He resigned the next morning and took the train to Washington, likely making himself the only U.S. politician to ever be a lieutenant governor, governor and senator in one 24-hour period.â€

He won re-election to a full term by campaigning as “America’s Flying Senator,†once causing quite a commotion by landing a blimp at the foot of the Capitol steps en route to a committee meeting.

But Sen. Bingham was grounded by his colleagues in 1929 when it was revealed he had put a lobbyist from the Connecticut Chamber of Commerce on his payroll and sneaked him into a tariff negotiation of interest to the Chamber as his aide.

When he haughtily characterized criticism as nothing but partisan politics, the Senate took umbrage and then took a censure vote that the partisans won. Only six senators were censured in the 20th century, and Connecticut produced two, Bingham in 1929 and Tom Dodd in 1967.

And if all that weren’t enough, Bingham, who died at 80 in 1956, is also said to have been the model for Indiana Jones, something Indiana’s creator George Lucas has never confirmed or denied. At least they dressed the same, up to and including the wide-brimmed fedora Bingham wore as he explored the wilds of Peru for Old Eli.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.