History of the United States Senate
Categories: History of the United States Congress | United States Senate
Contents |
Constitutional creation
The Senate, named after the ancient Roman Senate, was designed as a more deliberative body than the House of Representatives. Edmund Randolph called for its members to be "less than the House of Commons [sic] . .. to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy." According to James Madison, "The use of the Senate is to consist in proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch." Instead of two year terms as in the House, Senators serve six year terms, giving them more authority to ignore mass sentiment in favor of the country's broad interests. The smaller number of members and staggered terms also give the Senate a greater sense of community.
Many of the Founding Fathers greatly admired the British government. At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton called "the British government the best in the world," and said "he doubted whether anything short of it would do in America." In his "Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States," Adams said "the English Constitution is, in theory, both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations, the most stupendous fabric of human invention." In the minds of many of the Founding Fathers, the US Senate would be an American kind of House of Lords. John Dickinson said the Senate should "consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearning as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible." (Harpers, May 2004, 42)
The Senate was also intended to give states with smaller populations equal standing with larger states, which are given more Representation in the House. (See "Connecticut Compromise")
The apportionment scheme of the U.S. Senate was controversial at the Constitutional Convention. Hamilton, who was joined in opposition to equal suffrage by Madison, said equal representation despite population differences "shocks too much the ideas of justice and every human feeling." Referring to those who demanded equal representation, Madison called for the Convention to "to renounce a principle which was confessedly unjust."
The delegates representing a majority of Americans might have carried the day, but at the Constitutional Convention, each state had an equal vote, and any issue could be brought up again if a state desired it. In fact, the state delegations originally voted 6-5 for proportional representation, but small states without claims of western lands reopened the issue and eventually turned the tide towards equality. On the final vote, the five states that favored equal apportionment in the Senate--Delaware, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut--actually only represented one third of the nation's population. The four states that voted against the proposal--Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia--actually represented more people than the proponents. Convention delegate James Wilson wrote "Our Constituents, had they voted as their representatives did, would have stood as 2/3 against equality, and 1/3 only in favor of it." (Harpers Magazine, May 2004, 36) One reason the large states accepted the Connecticut Compromise was a fear that the small states would either refuse to join the Union, or, as Gunning Bedford, Jr. of Delaware threatened, "the small ones w[ould] find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice." (New Republic, August 7, 2002)
In Federalist No. 62, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” openly admitted that the equal suffrage in the Senate was a compromise, a “lesser evil,” and not born out of any political theory. “[I]t is superfluous to try, by the standard of theory, a part of the Constitution which is allowed on all hands to be the result, not of theory, but ‘of a spirit of amity, and that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.’ “
Even Gunning Bedford of Delaware admitted that he only favored equal representation because it benefitted his own state. "Can it be expected that the small states will act from pure disinterestedness? Are we to act with greater purity than the rest of mankind?" (Sizing Up the Senate, 33)
Since 1789, the Senate has become much more malaportioned. At the time of the Connecticut Compromise, the largest state, Virginia, had only twelve times the population of the smallest state, Delaware. Today, the largest state, California, has a population that is seventy times greater than the population of the smallest state, Wyoming. In 1790, it would take a theoretical 30% of the population to elect a majority of the Senate, today it would take 17%. Today there are seven states with only one Congressman; at no time in the past has there been as high a proportion of one-Congressmen states.
Early Senate
The Senate originally met, virtually in secret, on the second floor of Federal Hall in New York City in a room that allowed no spectators. For five years, no notes were published on Senate proceedings.
A procedural issue of the early Senate was what role should the vice president, the President of the Senate have? At first, the first vice president was allowed to craft legislation and participate in debates, but those rights were taken away relatively quickly. Later vice presidents made Senate attendance a rarity, but John Adams seldom missed a session. However, Adams’ regal clothing, love of ceremony and titles, and tendency to lecture made him somewhat of a laughingstock. Interestingly, although the Founders intended the Senate to be the slower legislative body, in the early years of the Republic, it was the House that took its time passing legislation. Both Hamilton’s Bank of the United States and Assumption Bill easily passed the Senate, only to meet opposition from the House.
Thomas Jefferson began the vice presidential tradition of only attending Senate sessions on special occasions. Despite his frequent absences, Jefferson did make his mark on the body in the form of the Senate book of parliamentary procedure, the one that is still used to this day.
The Antebellum Senate
The decades before the Civil War are thought of as the "Golden Age" of the Senate. The Founding Fathers had intended the Senate to be a dam against the whims of public opinion, and they certainly reached their goal. Backed by public opinion and President Jefferson, in 1804, the House voted to impeach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase 73-32. At the Senate, the president’s power and public opinion met their match, on twenty-three counts of impeachment, the Republican-dominated Senate voted against conviction 18-16.
The Senate seemed to bring out the best in Aaron Burr, who as vice president presided over the impeachment trial. At the conclusion of the trial Burr said:
- This House is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here-–in this exalted refuge; here if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrensy and the silent arts of corruption.” (Master of the Senate, 14)
Even Burr's many critics onceded that he handled himself with great dignity, and the trial with fairness.
Over the next few decades the Senate rose in reputation in the United States and the world. John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Stephen A. Douglas, and Henry Clay overshadowed several presidents. Sir Henry Maine called the Senate "the only thoroughly successful institution which has been established since the tide of modern democracy began to run." William Gladstone said the Senate was "the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics." (Ibid, 23)
During the pre-Civil War decades, the nation had two contentious arguments over the North-South balance in the Senate. Since the banning of slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line around the turn of the 19th century, there had always been equal numbers of slave and free states. In 1820 and 1850, respectively, political warfare broke out between slave and free states when Missouri and California asked to join the union as slave and free states, respectively. Both cases were resolved by compromises; in 1820 Maine was admitted to the Union as a free state to counterbalance Missouri (see Missouri Compromise) and in 1850 the North agreed to several provisions, one of which was a stronger Fugitive Slave Law (see Compromise of 1850).
The Senate has always been about giving political minorities the power to block unwanted legislation, and during the Civil War, when the South had no representation in the Senate, it became apparent how the South’s had shackled the nation. Only with the absence of Southern Senators could the Senate pass legislation allowing a transcontinental railroad, encouraging Western settlement, and establishing public colleges from the proceeds of the sale of public lands.
The Gilded Age
The post-Civil War Senate fell into a period of irrelevancy and corruption. At a time when Senators were chosen by state legislatures, many of the greatest millionaires of the day decided to polish their names a little by buying a Senate seat. Leland Stanford of California, James G. Fair of Nevada, John Fairfield Dryden of New Jersey, and Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin. The Senate's unofficial leader was Nelson Aldrich, the "Boss of America", a Rhode Island millionaire whose daughter Abby was married to John D. Rockefeller's only son.
From 1871 to 1898, the Senate approved not a single treaty. The Senate scuttled a long series of reciprocal trade agreements, blocked deals to annex the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgin Islands, defeated an arbitration deal with Britain, and forced the renegotiation of the pact to build the Panama Canal. Finally, in 1898, the Senate nearly refused to ratify the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War. Surely other accords never made it past the negotiating table due to fears of Senate recalcitrance.
The Senate in the post-Civil War years consistently defeated labor reforms and tariff-reductions. The money supply was kept tight. "The legislative pages of [the Gilded Age]," Robert Caro wrote in Master of the Senate "are sparse indeed if one searches them for laws that would help farmers, labor, minorities, consumers, or the crowded poor in the wretched slums of the great new cities..."
- In creating a Senate for the new nation, its Founding Fathers had tried to create within the government an institution that would speak for the educated, the well-born, the well-to-do, that would protect the rights of property, that would not function as an embodiment of the people’s will but would stand--‘firmly’–-as a great bulwark against that will. They had succeeded.
Henry Adams thus described America as "of the people, by the people, and for the Senate." (From the Old Diplomacy to the New, pg 4).
The Progressive Era
The Senate underwent several significant changes during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the most profound of which was the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for popular vote of the Senators.
Another change that occurred during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson was the limitation of the filibuster via the cloture vote. The filibuster was first used in the early Republic, but it was seldom used for most of the 19th century. The filibuster was finally limited as a response to the filibuster of the arming of merchant ships in World War I. At that time, the public, the House, the great majority of the Senate, and the president wanted merchant ships armed, but less than twenty Senators, led by William Jennings Bryan fought to keep United States ships unarmed. Wilson denounced the group as a "group of willful men".
The post of Senate Majority Leader was also created during the Wilson presidency. Before this time, a “senate leader” was usually a committee chairman, or a person of great eloquence, seniority, or wealth, such as Daniel Webster and Nelson Aldrich. However, despite this new, formal leadership structure, the Senate leader initially had virtually no power, other have priority of recognition from the presiding officer. Since the Democrats were fatally divided into northern liberal and southern conservative blocs, the Democratic leader had even less power than his title suggested.
The Interwar Years
Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, the Democratic leader for many years, saw it as his responsibility not to lead the Democrats, but to work the Senate for the president’s benefit, no matter who the president was. When Coolidge and Hoover were president, he assisted them in passing Republican legislation. Robinson helped end government operation of Muscle Shoals, helped pass the Hoover Tariff, and stymied a Senate investigation of the Power Trust. Robinson switched his own position on a drought relief program for farmers when Hoover made a proposal for a more modest measure. Alben Barkley called Robinson’s cave-in “the most humiliating spectacle that could be brought about in an intelligent legislative body.”
When Franklin Roosevelt became president, Robinson followed the new president as loyally as he had followed Coolidge and Hoover. Robinson passed bills in the Hundred Days so quickly that Will Rogers joked “Congress doesn’t pass legislation any more, they just wave at the bills as they go by.” (Master of the Senate, 354-5)
In the late 1930s the Senate continued its traditional role as an institution that slows or blocks legislation. The Senate opposed Roosevelt's "court packing" plan and successful called for reduced deficits.
In foreign policy, the Senate's behavior in the face of military aggression in Europe and Asia blackened the reputation of this body. A small group of isolationist Midwestern Senators who refused to see Adolf Hitler as a threat to the United States delayed Lend-Lease by several weeks and delayed efforts to enlarge and better equip the military. Out of shame, the Senate was highly deferential to the president in foreign affairs after World War II.
The Modern Senate: 1945-2000
The greatest drama of the early 1950s was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations. After years of unquestioned power, McCarthy finally fell as a result of overreaching in Senate hearings against the United States Army. McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died in obscurity in 1957.
Prior to World War II, Senate leaders had few powers, but by the 1940’s, it was the custom for the Senate leader to be the only person with the power to call bills off the calendar.
During Lyndon Baines Johnson’s tenure as Senate leader, the leader gained new powers over committee assignments.
Other notable events
- February 11, 1794: The first session of Senate to be open to the public.
- November 21, 1922: Rebecca Latimer Felton became the first woman to serve as a Senator when she was appointed for one day to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Thomas E. Watson.
- January 12, 1932: Hattie Caraway became the first female Senator elected to office.
- January 3, 1949: Margaret Chase Smith became the first woman to serve terms in both the House and the Senate.
- February 27, 1986: The Senate allowed its debates to be televised on a trial basis (which was later made permanent).
 Warren G. Harding (R-OH) |
Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI) |
 Hiram Rhoades Revels (R-MS) |
Edward Brooke (R-MA) |
 Blanche Bruce (R-MS) |
Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) |
Rebecca L. Felton (D-GA) |
 Hattie Caraway (D-AR) |
Charles Curtis (R-KS) |
 Hiram Fong (R-HI) |
Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) |
Octaviano Larrazolo (R-NM) |
 David Levy Yulee (D-FL) |