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The History of Parliamentary Behavior
By William O. Aydelotte PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05242-7
CHAPTER 1
Careers and Committees in the American Congress: The Problem of Structural Change
DOUGLAS PRICE
I Introduction
Over the past two decades a great deal of research has been done on the post-World War II House and Senate. Obviously our understanding is still by no means complete, but we have come a long way. Capitol Hill is no longer a mysterious, virtually unexplored domain. We now have, if not a full-fledged paradigm, at least a more or less consistent set of conclusions about the structure and functioning of the post-New Deal House and Senate. What has remained until very recently mysterious and virtually unexplored is the time dimension: how have these systems changed or evolved, and how did they function in different eras?
A serious concern with the time dimension soon brings one to the question of when, if at all, there have been basic structural changes so sharp as to suggest the emergence of a new system of organization requiring a new analytic paradigm. Put another way, how far back in time can our current set of generalizations about the House and Senate be safely extended? If the features of the House Appropriations Committee as described by Richard Fenno can be traced back to 1925, how about 1905; if Ralph Huitt's Senate majority leader can be found in Woodrow Wilson's presidency, how about McKinley's presidency? If most House districts have been relatively "safe" in the twentieth century, how many were "safe" in the nineteenth century?
Most books dealing with the history of the House and Senate shed little light on such questions; rather they belong to what one might term the parliamentary rules paradigm. My interest in the development of the nineteenth-century House and Senate has centered around the tremendous impact of parties and changes in the party system on Congress. This is not a perspective of prime importance for understanding the functioning of the contemporary Congress. The modern House and Senate are committee-centered, with parties in the background helping to provide a very modest infusion of new members who automatically go to the bottom of the committee seniority lists. But it was not always so. It seems to me that the current view of the House and Senate can be extrapolated back, with rather minor modification, to around 1920. But as one moves further backward in time most of the familiar congressional landmarks drop from sight, one by one, until 1890 when the House and Senate appear as very different structures from their modern counterparts.
Long-run careers and stable committees, the twin pillars of the modern Congress, are largely missing in the pre-1896 House or the pre-1876 Senate. To comprehend how these bodies functioned in their absence requires a major readjustment of ideas and mental habits, as in the case of non-Euclidean geometry (to which Sir Lewis Namier once compared parliamentary politics not based on parties). The purpose of this chapter is to explore, in a comparative House-Senate perspective, the emergence of the long-run congressional career, and its crucial consequences for the subsequent development of strict committee seniority practices.
II Professionalization of Careers: Senate and House
The so-called Clay Congresses (1811–25) mustered at no time more than twenty members who had served five terms each, while from 1789 to 1860 only forty exceeded six terms.
DeAlva S. Alexander
We know that for the modern "professionalized" Senate and House resignations are extremely rare, that efforts at re-election are the norm, and that successful re-election is overwhelmingly the case for the House and quite frequent for the Senate. But what are some of these magnitudes for past periods, and when did they begin to approach modern levels? We shall begin with the Senate.
The distinguished senators of the very first Congress set the early career pattern for that chamber: they fled the capitol, not yet in Washington, almost as fast as was humanly possible. Five of the original 26 hastened to resign even before completing their initial terms, most of which were for only two or four years (they had drawn lots to determine who would serve two-, four-, or six-year terms). One died in office, and 2 who had been selected for short terms had the unusual misfortune to seek re-election and fail. Eight were re-elected, but 6 of these had been on short terms. The remaining 10 managed to serve out their term (or sentence to obscurity), but did not seek another round. By the time the capitol was moved from Philadelphia to the swamps of Washington only 2 of the original 26 senators remained, and in two more years they were gone.
Career data on the early Senate is a morass of resignations, short-term appointments, elective replacements, and more resignations. There are no notable careers in terms of long service. Rather, records are set by the same senator resigning the same seat in the same term twice (by coming back to it for a time after his initial replacement resigned), or by a single man's serving as a state's replacement for each of the state's two senate seats and quitting from each. From 1789 to 1801 the amazing total of 94 individuals (or 95, if one counts Albert Gallatin, who was admitted but then held ineligible) had warmed senatorial seats for varying times.
In its initial decades, of course, the Senate was an honorific nothing. Everyone was for a second chamber in theory, but no one could figure out what, if anything, it should do in actual practice. Some states used their senatorships as a sinecure for defeated House members, and ambitious young politicians — Madison or Clay — were unanimous in their determination to avoid being stuck in the "do-nothing" chamber. How and why this came to change is itself an exciting story, but cannot be pursued here. That it was a long time before it did change, however, is obvious from the careers of successive Senate cohorts.
Senate "cohorts" are a bit more awkward to define than are House "cohorts." There is the problem of the three classes of seats, with one-third coming up for election every two years. And there is the much greater role played by appointive or elective replacements. Many of the appointive replacements did not seek or expect election, and including them with the regularly elected senators tends to confuse the picture. For explanatory purposes I have adopted the simple, though hardly ideal, expedient of taking as a "cohort" all those senators who were on hand at the beginning of a given Congress. I have then pursued their careers through to the end of their current terms, about one-third coming up for election every two years. This should not affect the probability of their seeking re-election or not, but it does somewhat reduce (to an average of about four years) the time in which they might resign from office. The advantage is that most of the very temporary interim appointees are thus eliminated and we can concentrate on more or less "regular" senators. This also means that looking at such a "cohort" for a given Congress gives us data not only on the one-third elected to that Congress but also on those (or their replacements) who were elected to the previous two Congresses. Conversely, data on Congresses less than six years apart include some overlap.
Using the categories of Table 1–1 I have hand tabulated the career patterns of such cohorts for ten different pre-Civil War Congresses. For comparison I present the post-Civil War picture as of the 49th Congress (1885). There is, of course, extensive published material on later senatorial careers in Rothman (1869-1901) and Donald Matthews (1947–1957). My preliminary findings are presented in Table 1–1.
Perhaps the most salient point of the data is that, for most of the pre-Civil War cohorts, almost one-third resigned before their terms were up; another one-third finished their terms but did not seek re-election; while only slightly over one-third finished their terms and sought reelection. This ignores the 10 percent who died in office, with unknown career intentions. (See Figure 1–1.)
The massive level of senatorial resignations — often exceeding the number of senators willing to stand for re-election — is an unexpected finding. There is, however, some shift in the nature and reasons for resigning between the period before 1830 and the one from 1830 to 1850. For the whole period down to the election of Jackson the Senate was barely existing, or was in a sort of political limbo. The galvanizing effects of the organization of the first American party system (Republicans versus Federalists) had worked to magnify the decisionmaking role of the House. The Republicans had made little headway in the Senate during the 1790s, and in 1800 the Federalists threw away their chance to use the Senate as a citadel of Federalism. (John Adams took good Federalists out of the Senate and appointed them to the Judiciary.)
For a generation there was continuing confusion over the intended role of the Senate. Colonial second chambers usually had been "councils" which advised or restrained the governor. The Senate had been grafted onto the proposed Constitution largely as a sop to the small states, but political conflict had not developed on small state versus large state lines. Moreover, the Senate had failed to achieve any effective position as a "council" to the President — this function had rapidly devolved on the cabinet. In Madison's administration the Senate showed some fight over major appointments, and finally in 1816 it set up a system of standing committees. But it was still widely regarded as a rather inconsequential body, substantially inferior to the House. Small wonder that aspiring politicians like Henry Clay spurned it. As Henry Jones Ford put it: "Presidential timber was not grown in the Senate."
The development of the second American party system in the 1830s brought about a virtual revolution in the position of the Senate. As the first American party system was built largely on House opposition to the Federalists, the second American party system was built on Senate opposition to the Jacksonians. Jackson's major appointments could be fought, and sometimes beaten, only in the Senate; routine patronage also could be controlled from the Senate. Public attention was focused on the Senate, and presidential hopefuls were concentrated there (though it was still considered good form to resign one's seat when launching a presidential campaign). As the Senate waxed in importance the attractions of a House career waned; from Jackson to Wilson the traffic from top House positions to the Senate was substantial.
Resignations from the Senate continued to be numerous in the 1830s and 1840s, but now they were more likely to reflect movement into the cabinet, the launching of a presidential campaign, or perhaps refusal to obey "instructions" from a state legislature. The changes in the ratio between senators resigning their seats and those seeking re-election are dramatic. Table 1–2 presents this information for six separate Congresses, in which resignations were roughly as frequent as efforts at re-election. By contrast, the post-Civil War 49th Congress had only 5 resignations from the Senate, while 55 members sought re-election. The shift is from a one-to-one ratio to a one-to-ten ratio.
Up to about 1840 those in each cohort who sought and won an additional term did not behave very differently, in this respect, from the others. Of the 8 senators re-elected from the original 26, no less than 4 (including John Carroll of Carrollton) resigned in the course of their new terms. From the cohort of the 9th Congress (1805) 14 were reelected, but 5 of these resigned. From the 24th Congress (1835) 16 were re-elected but 9 resigned. The Civil War precludes this analysis for the 1850s, but a marked shift was evident in the 1840s. The cohorts of 1841, 1845, and 1849 show with some overlap a total of 35 members reelected, but only 3 of these resigned in their subsequent terms. Here we have a glimmer of hope for the emergence of career senators. Indeed, in the 1850s the dominant Southern Democrats tended to pursue long-run careers in the Senate. As a result even average terms of service show a modest gain.
Prior to the Civil War most senators did not make a long-run "career" out of continuous Senate service. Since no positions in the Senate rested on any form of seniority (in the chamber, or on committees) major political figures drifted in and out of the Senate as convenience dictated. Cabinet posts were a major attraction, luring both Clay and Webster for a time. The less well-known John J. Crittenden served four separate, non-consecutive terms in the Senate between 1817 and 1861, interspersing them by twice serving in the cabinet as Attorney-General, by a term as governor of his state, by an appointment to the Supreme Court (for which his former colleagues refused confirmation), and by some other posts, including membership in the House of Representatives. Lateral movement from Senate to cabinet and then back to the Senate was particularly important in the nineteenth century, but was a practice that could not be combined easily with a strict committee seniority system.
In the twentieth century one can pick almost any year and then turn to the Senate of a decade earlier and find at least one-fourth, sometimes one-third, and recently almost one-half, of the same individual members serving for continuous long-term periods. Put another way, the political "half life" of a Senate cohort over the past decade has been close to ten years. But for the pre-Civil War Senate it is rare to find more than two or three Senators who might be continuously on hand over a ten-year period. Thus Table 1-3 contrasts the number of such ten-year veterans for selected Congresses in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries:
The long-term survivors in the earlier periods do include such historically important figures as Webster (from 21st to 26th), Clay and Calhoun (both from 26th to 31st), and Stephen A. Douglas (31st to 36th). But three of these four served "broken" Senate careers.
After the Civil War and Reconstruction the Senate was at a peak of influence. The executive branch was in a long eclipse, and senators extended their effective control of state party machines (or vice versa). The national government was by then of vital importance in regard to tariff policy, monetary policy, and, for the South, race policy. Senators controlled the allocation of federal patronage, and increasingly lorded it over the House. Thus by the 49th Congress (our 1885 cohort in Table 1-1) resignations were only one-third the number for 1845 though the Senate was larger by 20 members. The ratio of members seeking re-election to those not doing so is no longer half and half, but stands at 55 to 13. By this time most states were predominantly either Democratic or Republican, so that electoral hazards were reduced. By this time, as we shall see, Senate committee chairmanships were being handled quite rigorously in terms of continuous committee service. The Senate was, as Rothman's book makes clear, a good place for a politician to be. And the longer he stayed there, the better it would be. For the Senate, career stability led to irresistible demands for adherence to seniority norms for committees.
But let us turn to the House of Representatives. Richard Morningstar collected data on the careers of all members who left the House in three different periods. The crucial importance of distinguishing between alternative reasons for turnover is evident in Morningstar's comparisons between the periods 1811–1820 and 1887–1896. Both are marked by very high turnover. But for the earlier period only of 465 departures could be attributed to electoral defeat; for the latter period electoral defeat accounted for 309 of 750. What the early House lacked was not safe seats, but a desire and incentive to retain one's seat. In the late nineteenth century the desire for re-election was up somewhat, but re-election had become more risky.
The difference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in regard to House careers has been evident ever since Stuart Rice assembled his materials on first-term members (and on age) in 1929. Recently a trio of political scientists at the University of Rochester has developed a somewhat more refined time series which distinguishes continuous service from prior non-continuous service and also separates out members occupying newly created House seats. In only two of 50 cases (1804 and 1898) do the highest nineteenth-century re-election rates reach the lowest figures for the twentieth century (1932, which combines a presidential landslide with an extensive reapportionment of seats, and 1914).
In a paper in 1964 I argued that changes in the structure of the House career were crucially linked to the massive political realignment of the 1890s. This decade was marked by the emergence of the really solid Democratic South, by the rapid spread of ballot reform and registration systems, but above all by the collapse of the Democrats in the 1896 Bryan campaign. Democratic gains in the silver states and some farming states proved temporary, but massive Democratic losses in the Northeast and Midwest were to last until Al Smith and the Great Depression. As a result, re-election became more probable and more incumbents came to seek re-election. A record for years of prior service in the House was set in 1900, then a higher record in 1904, then a yet higher record in 1906, and that one was broken in 1908. Successive new all-time low records for proportion of new members were set in 1898, again in 1900, again in 1904, and yet again in 1908.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The History of Parliamentary Behavior by William O. Aydelotte. Copyright © 1977 The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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