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An Empire or a Gavel: Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed’s Opposition to the Spanish-American War | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In late March 1898, Republican Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine found himself in an unfamiliar position. Known as “Czar Reed” for his iron-fisted control over the legislative process, Reed now struggled to maintain the direction of the House’s agenda as war loomed on the horizon.For months, lawmakers on Capitol Hill had worried as Spain suppressed a war for independence in Cuba, which Madrid controlled as a territory. By the spring, many in Congress sought to confront the European monarchy over its actions in the Caribbean. But Reed fiercely opposed conflict with Spain, and generally resisted America’s larger imperial ambitions overseas. He had thus far skillfully prevented votes that would have drawn the United States closer to war. As events unfolded, however, and the clamor for congressional action grew louder, Reed—despite his parliamentary prowess and the vast powers he had accumulated in the Speaker’s Office—could no longer prevent the issue from reaching the floor for debate.A loyal Republican and the leader of his party in Congress, Reed felt he had certain obligations to adhere to party orthodoxy, even in the rare event that he disagreed with it. As the drumbeat for war grew louder in the GOP, Reed confronted an issue that pitted his party loyalty against his personal convictions and his duties as Speaker of the House.American InterestsThe island nation of Cuba, situated about 100 miles from Key West, Florida, had long held the interest of Americans. In 1895, Cuban rebels seeking independence from Spain initiated an insurrection against the ruling empire.From the start of the conflict, some Members of Congress had called on the United States to recognize and support the Cuban revolutionaries. Many of their constituents felt similarly and supported going to war with Spain for several reasons, including humanitarian concern for Cubans, economic self-interest, and a growing imperial desire for overseas territorial expansion. Support for Cuban independence only grew louder as the American press published accounts, often exaggerated, of Spanish atrocities. As the war continued, Americans with economic interests in Cuba, especially the island’s vast sugar cane fields, joined the chorus calling on the United States to intervene.On Capitol Hill, Speaker Reed steadfastly opposed American intervention, but he usually kept his opinions to himself. Reed rarely spoke during debate in the House, and only occasionally discussed his beliefs about the conflict elsewhere. In mid-March 1898, newspapers quoted an associate close to Reed who claimed that the Speaker considered war “a relic of barbarism” and that the United States should only fight for “the protection of our national honor.” Reed did not consider Spain’s treatment of Cubans to be a threat to the United States. Reed also opposed imperial expansion because he shared the racist beliefs of the time that the non-White populations of places like Cuba and the Philippines, which Spain also controlled, could not be incorporated into the United States.Majority RuleFor Reed, the irony of finding himself in the minority on these issues was inescapable.Reed believed majority rule was essential to American governance, and he, more than anyone, ensured that the majority controlled the House. In the decades before Reed became Speaker, the House minority often took advantage of dilatory tactics made possible by House Rules to derail the majority’s agenda. When Reed became Speaker in the 51st Congress (1889–1891), House Republicans passed a series of rule reforms that became known as the Reed Rules which empowered the majority and increased the influence of the Speaker and committee chairs.Across three non-consecutive terms as Speaker, Reed had accrued immense power over the House’s legislative machinery. But Reed’s control ultimately rested on the consent of the majority—be it the majority party or a majority of lawmakers working as a bipartisan coalition. And when Reed’s policy preferences ran counter to the majority, his grip on the legislative calendar weakened.Amid the hue and cry of war, Reed sought parliamentary workarounds to avoid the issue. The 55th Congress (1897–1899) opened in March 1897 with a special session to address a separate issue concerning tariff rates. As Speaker, Reed controlled committee assignments in the House. To prevent debate on any legislation other than the tariff, especially Cuban independence, Reed assigned Members to just three committees: the Committees on Rules; Ways and Means; and Mileage. By limiting House debate to the tariff alone, Reed hoped to determine which Republicans would be faithful to his agenda—and thus who would be in the running for plum committee seats later when, or if, a war vote approached. Secondly, when a Member, invariably a Democrat, attempted to file a pro-Cuban resolution, Reed could explain that proper order required the bill to be referred to the Foreign Affairs Committee, which at the time was not organized.Reed’s strategy relied on the support of able party lieutenants and a loyal Republican caucus. On Wednesday July 7, 1897, for example, Democrat Benton McMillin of Tennessee inquired if bills could be passed under a suspension of regular order because it was technically a continuation of the previous Monday’s legislative day. When Reed responded in the affirmative, McMillin immediately made a motion to suspend the rules and pass a Senate resolution to give Cuban revolutionaries access to more resources. As one reporter recalled, “across Mr. Reed’s moon-like face there spread a wave of embarrassment” before he quickly called on fellow Maine Republican and Ways and Means chair Nelson Dingley Jr. who made a motion to adjourn and end debate.After the MaineReed’s efforts to prevent war with Spain became exceedingly difficult after an explosion in February 1898 sunk the U.S.S. Maine just off the coast of Havana, Cuba, killing 268 American sailors. As calls for intervention increased throughout the country, Congress approved a $50 million appropriation for national defense at the behest of the President in early March. Reed did not attempt to prevent the passage of the popular bill, but as the spring season progressed, Reed continued to find himself at odds with many in his party.On March 28, the House Clerk read a message from President William McKinley summarizing the U.S. Navy’s investigation that found that although an underwater mine had destroyed the Maine there was not enough evidence to determine if Spain was responsible. The report and the President’s unwillingness to explicitly confront the Spanish crown angered Members of Congress of both parties.The following day, 56 Republicans, frustrated with McKinley’s and Reed’s approach to the conflict, expressed support for a Democratic resolution calling on the United States to recognize Cuban independence. “We have enough pledges to guarantee the overruling of any chairman the Speaker may select. We are sick and tired of the President’s course. It is no longer tolerable,” explained Republican Jacob Henry Bromwell of Ohio. A Missouri Republican went so far as to threaten Reed’s gavel and claimed that the coalition of Republicans and Democrats had the votes to “vacate the chair, if need be, and put even an outsider in it” as a new Speaker.Reed advised McKinley that he had to provide Congress with concrete steps to quickly respond to the situation in Cuba or else Congress was likely to take matters into its own hands and declare war. As a result, McKinley met with members of the pro-Cuban faction and asked for a few more days to continue negotiations with Spain.Reed Against the MajorityOn March 30, visitors packed the galleries in the House Chamber on the chance that Congress would vote for war. After Speaker Reed gaveled the House into session, Democratic Leader Joseph Weldon Bailey of Texas offered a privileged motion for a resolution that recognized Cuba as a “free and independent state.” Immediately anti-war Maine Representative Charles Addison Boutelle moved to declare Bailey’s resolution out of order. As Bailey pleaded his case, Republican John Albert Tiffin Hull of Iowa, the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs who also supported the Cuban cause, declared his opposition to Bailey’s resolution. Hull sent a clear message that the faction of House Republicans who backed Cuba’s independence would give McKinley a few more days to negotiate with Spain.Two weeks later, on April 11, McKinley asked Congress for the authority to take steps to end hostilities between Spain and Cuba—including the use of military measures if necessary—and to ensure a stable government on the island. But McKinley’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence split House Republicans. For many GOP lawmakers, an independent Cuba was at the heart of the conflict with Spain.Reed, always a loyal Republican, did not want Congress to directly counter the President during an election year. He remained opposed to U.S. intervention, but decided the best option was to influence the language of the resolution. On April 13, the Foreign Affairs Committee dutifully reported a bill that did not include mention of Cuban independence. On the floor, tempers flared during debate. One Member threw a large book at another Member, and a House Page was accidentally punched in the scuffle. After the Sergeant at Arms restored order, the House backed a war resolution that did not recognize an independent Cuban government.During negotiations with the Senate, Reed and his House allies stood firm with McKinley’s demand against recognizing Cuban independence. In the early morning hours of April 19, 1898, following an all-night session, the House and Senate passed a carefully worded joint resolution to appease a majority of both chambers. The resolution stated that the Cubans “are and of right ought to be free and independent” and that Spain had to “relinquish its authority and government” in Cuba. It also directed McKinley to use military force to achieve such aims and promised that the United States would not “exercise sovereignty” over the island.Only six Representatives voted against the resolution. As Speaker, Reed presided over the bill’s consideration and did not vote on the measure, as was customary at the time. But a few days later, Reed told Samuel Walker McCall of Massachusetts—one of the bill’s opponents and Reed’s future biographer—“I envy you the luxury of your vote. I was where I could not do it.” On April 25, the United States officially declared war on Spain.The war lasted ten weeks. The United States defeated Spain in Cuba and the Philippines (a Spanish colony that the United States coveted), and hostilities ended in August 1898. The two nations signed a peace treaty on December 10, 1898. As a result of the war, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico became American colonies and Cuba became an American protectorate until 1902.Reed won election to an eleventh term in the House in November 1898 and was certain to be Speaker for a fourth Congress. Instead on April 19, 1899, just over a month after the momentous 55th Congress ended, Reed announced his resignation from the House to work at a New York City law firm. Reed was intentionally vague about why he retired, but his most recent biographer suggested the former Speaker desired to make more money in the private sector and that he was too at odds with the imperial expansionist policies of his beloved Republican Party.Reed had long believed that the majority must govern. But on this important issue, he was squarely in the opposition. “Had I stayed,” Reed told a friend, “I must have been as Speaker always in a false position aiding and organizing things in which I did not believe or using power against those who gave it to me.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 1st sess. (7 July 1897): 2449; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (28 March 1898): 3285–3286; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd session (30 March 1898): 3379–3382; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (11 April 1898): 3704–3707; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 April 1898): 3810–3821; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (18 April 1898): 4062–4064; Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, “A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House Speakership; Boston Daily Globe; 30 March 1898; Century Magazine, March 1889; Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 March 1898, 14 April 1898; Illustrated American, 4 December 1897; Los Angeles Times, 30 March 1898; Louisville Courier-Journal; 10 July 1897, 19 April 1898; Washington Evening Times, 30 March 1898; Washington Post, 28 May 1897; Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968); Lewis Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1982); Robert J. Klotz, Thomas Brackett Reed: The Gilded Age Speaker Who Made the Rules for American Politics (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press: 2022); Samuel W. McCall, The Life of Thomas Brackett Reed (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914); James l. Offner, “McKinley and the Spanish-American War,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 2004); William A. Robinson, Thomas B. Reed: Parliamentarian (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1930).
Edition for Educators—Portraits in the House Collection | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The House Collection of Art and Artifacts contains thousands of objects which provide glimpses into the history of the institution as well as the rich lives of the tens of thousands of people who have served, worked, and visited the nation’s capital. Painted portraits form the backbone of this collection and represent a long tradition of honoring notable figures in the House’s history. Hundreds of significant individuals—Speakers, committee chairs, and others—are represented in paintings dating back to the 1780s. This month’s Edition for Educators highlights these portraits in the House Collection and the stories surrounding their creation and acquisition.Featured Portrait ExhibitionsPortraits in the House of Representatives This digital exhibition discusses the origins and history of committee chair portraits and other Member portraits the House has commissioned. Although committee chairs make up the largest portion of the portrait collection, additional commissions depicting historically significant figures in House history—including future Presidents, founders, and congressional trailblazers—have continued to expand the House Collection in the twenty-first century.Speaker Portrait Collection The House of Representatives Speaker Portrait Collection is a vital visual record of House history. The Collection is located in the Speaker’s Lobby, just outside the House Chamber, and boasts a significant arrangement of portraits of former Speakers. As noted in the bronze plaque in the lobby, the collection was conceived as a “tribute to their worth to the nation.”Featured Portraits from the House CollectionThis small sample of portraits shows off the range of subjects included in the House Collection. Speakers, committee chairs, and founding fathers share wall space with more recent notable House Members and even foreign dignitaries.More than 300 portraits can be viewed in the Collections Search.Featured HighlightsArtist Gilbert Stuart’s Portraits of George Washington On April 12, 1796, President George Washington posed for artist Gilbert Stuart for the famous Lansdowne portrait that became the basis for two portraits of Washington in the U.S. Capitol. One was painted by John Vanderlyn and the other by an unknown follower of Stuart. Stuart was the foremost portrait painter in the United States at the time, and Washington posed for him for four separate portraits. The resulting paintings became the standard images of Washington.Bay State Day in the House of Representatives On January 19, 1888, the state of Massachusetts presented, with much fanfare, portraits of three former Speakers of the House, transforming the House Chamber into a veritable picture gallery. The three large paintings stood against the Speaker’s rostrum, commemorating Massachusetts Representatives Theodore Sedgwick, Joseph B. Varnum, and Nathaniel P. Banks. They were featured alongside the portrait of Speaker Robert C. Winthrop, which had first been presented in 1882, and was brought out again having been the inspiration for Massachusetts to commission the other three.Speaker Sam Rayburn’s Portrait Leaves the “Board of Education” On January 19, 1962, two months after the death of Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, the House moved the portrait of the late Speaker from its longtime home in an office on the first floor of the Capitol, to the Speaker’s Lobby, just outside the House Chamber. After spending 20 years in the fabled “Board of Education” room, Rayburn’s longtime gathering place, the Texan’s portrait joined the collection of former Speakers of the House. For decades, Rayburn and other House leaders had met in the Board of Education to socialize and plot strategy.Featured Oral HistoryCalifornia Representative Ron Dellums became the first Black member of the Armed Services Committee in 1973; he went on to chair the committee in the 103rd Congress (1993–1995). In the three videos below, Dellums discusses the process of choosing artist Andre White for his committee chairman portrait and recalls the portrait’s unveiling in 1997.Featured BlogsWashington, Schlepped Here A familiar portrait of George Washington hangs in the Rayburn Room of the Capitol, near the House Chamber. Its location seems to make perfect sense: the capital city bears Washington’s name, he laid the building’s cornerstone, and his likeness is repeated hundreds of times around the city. Nonetheless, the Capitol was never intended to be this painting’s home. This portrait of Washington took a curious path to its current resting place, starting with an American citizen abroad in Spain before eventually arriving on Capitol Hill.Adele Fassett, Washington’s Trendsetting Woman Portraitist With the decision to commission a portrait of then Speaker and former Appropriations Committee chairman Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois in 1904, the House Committee on Appropriations began a tradition of honoring the service of committee chairs with artwork. Cannon, however, was not the first Appropriations chair to have a portrait painted. The story of how the Appropriations Committee eventually ended up with two nineteenth-century portraits of its former chairmen is entwined with the career of the woman who created them, Adele Fassett.The Artist Formerly Known as Fox At 10 different portrait unveilings on Capitol Hill, a man named Charles J. Fox was praised as the artist who captured the sitter’s likeness. Fox didn’t immediately fit the image of an artist in mid-century America—an unkempt genius in a beret and paint-splattered smock. Instead, he looked like a prosperous businessman with a well-tailored suit and receding hairline. Nor did he look like a sophisticated aesthete, although a promotional pamphlet described him as “the son of a well-known Austrian artist whose subjects were European royalty and continental society.” The only problem was that Charles J. Fox was not the artist’s true identity.“The Battle of the Portraits” Newspapers called it “the battle of the portraits.” As many as 16 artists submitted portraits of the late Speaker Henry T. Rainey of Illinois, hoping the portrait commission would select their likeness of the man to hang in the House. The winner would receive a $2,500 commission, which was a substantial sum during the height of the Great Depression. It took two years, a House committee, and some well-targeted insults to resolve the matter.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Recent Artifacts Online, Spring 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
What’s new in the House Collection? This round of digitized additions to the House’s treasure trove covers everything from 18th-century Speakers of the House to 20th-century cartoons.Jonathan DaytonThis delicately drawn profile portrait of Jonathan Dayton, Speaker of the House from 1795 to 1799, came to the Capitol sometime after his service. It was one of several portraits on paper depicting Speakers that appeared in the Capitol by the mid-19th century. In 1910, the House decided to commission 19 oil-on-canvas portraits of former Speakers to replace the “crayon or other portraits not in oil, which are now hanging in the lobby of the House of Representatives.” The following year, the House honored Dayton with an oil-on-canvas portrait in this same pose.Craig Anthony WashingtonCraig Washington won a 1989 special election for Representative Mickey Leland’s Houston, Texas, seat. Leland died four months earlier in a plane crash while travelling to a United Nations refugee camp in Ethiopia. Washington adopted the campaign slogan “Pass the torch,” visible in the sign behind him in this photograph, not only to show his respect for and continuity with his predecessor but also to reflect the support his campaign received from Leland’s family. Washington came to the House with a background as a criminal defense attorney and civil rights activist, followed by terms as a state representative and senator.Jeannette Rankin Brigade Lapel Pin“If we had 10,000 women who were willing to make the sacrifices that these boys had given their lives for” the Vietnam War could be ended. With those words at a 1967 gathering, former Member and lifelong peace activist Jeannette Rankin inspired a women’s march the next year, named for her and commemorated in this button. At the 1968 event, Rankin used her privilege as a former Member to enter the House Chamber and deliver the protesters’ petition to the Speaker of the House.Berryman’s Cartoons of the 58th HouseClifford Berryman was the chief cartoonist at the Washington Post in 1903 when he published this handsome 104-page set of caricatures of each Member of the House. Berryman drew the subjects’ features with great fidelity, but the poses, gestures, and settings lampooned the Representatives’ particular characters. When the book first appeared, a local newspaper reported that denizens of the Capitol found the drawings so apt that it “brought forth peals of laughter from those who are personally or otherwise acquainted with their careers.”Interested in seeing what else we have digitized lately? Check these out.
Classroom Ready: New Women’s Suffrage Primary Source Set | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
For more than a century after the founding of the United States, nearly half of the country’s citizens could not vote because of their sex. After repeatedly failing to approve legislation for women’s suffrage, the U.S. Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment in 1919. The law declared that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” For many women, the amendment was the conclusion of decades of activism. For others it marked a new phase in the effort to secure voting rights and full citizenship in the United States.Learn about the long journey to the 19th Amendment and women’s voting rights with this primary source set. Created with teachers and students in mind, this educational tool follows the quest for suffrage using House records, art, and photographs.Analyzing primary sources is a great way to examine historical perspectives and practice critical thinking skills. This women’s suffrage primary source set is accompanied by a brief contextual essay, discussion questions, and activities to facilitate classroom use. Students can also examine the records, art, and photographs with our primary source analysis graphic organizers. These worksheets guide students as they investigate the purpose and significance of the featured primary sources. We encourage educators to download and use these materials in their classrooms. Download a PDF of the entire Primary Source Set: Women’s Suffrage classroom packet here. The primary source set and the graphic organizers can be used online or printed as handouts. Check out another primary source set about Prohibition here.Visit our Education page and read the blog for updates about new classroom-ready materials. If you’d like to be added to our educator email list to receive updates about our new classroom resources, let us know.
“Agony and Ecstasy”: The Fight for the Equal Rights Amendment Extension in Congress | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Over the course of a year, from October 1977 to the fall of 1978, the fight to extend the ratification deadline for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) played out on a public stage in the nation’s capital. From the iconic National Mall to the House Judiciary Committee Room, the debate over the ERA featured passionate pleas from those both for and against the amendment. Intrigue and drama often characterized the lead up to key votes, and lawmakers and activists worked to shape public opinion. Away from the spotlight, women Members, vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts in Congress during the late 1970s, designed a highly effective vote-counting operation to achieve an improbable victory and keep the hopes for ERA alive.The ERA Is BornThe Equal Rights Amendment, drafted by the revolutionary suffrage leader, Alice Paul, had first been introduced by an ally in Congress in 1923 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights. Paul’s original bill stated that “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Over the next 50 years, the bill remained in committee, unable to break free from the obstacles other lawmakers put in its way.In 1970, however, clever maneuvering by Representative Martha Wright Griffiths of Michigan wrested the ERA from the House Judiciary Committee and sent it to the House Floor. Although the amendment passed the House easily on August 10, 1970, the Senate’s addition of a clause exempting women from the military draft doomed the measure in the 91st Congress (1969–1971). Undeterred by the setback, Griffiths led the charge again in the 92nd Congress (1971–1973) and guided the ERA through the House by an overwhelming margin of 354 to 24. The Senate followed suit and passed the ERA on March 22, 1972, by a vote of 84 to 8. Just 32 minutes later, Hawaii became the first state to ratify the ERA. Before the end of the year, 22 of the required 38 states had voted in favor of adding equal rights for women to the Constitution.Momentum for the ERA, however, slowed considerably after the initial surge of support. The amendment had a seven-year window in which it could be ratified and added to the Constitution. By the fall of 1977, 33 states had ratified the amendment, but four states (Idaho, Nebraska, Tennessee and Kentucky) had rescinded their initial approval leaving the fate of the ERA unclear.UnderdogsIn 1972, the same year the ERA passed Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman was crafting her own underdog narrative by challenging New York’s venerable Representative Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for the Democratic nomination from a Brooklyn district. Celler staunchly opposed the ERA and used his position to stifle the measure until Representative Griffiths forced his hand to bring the amendment to the floor for a vote using a discharge petition. Celler described the ERA as a “step backward” and accused his male colleagues of supporting the measure to “get the women out of their hair.”In 1972, Holtzman, a Harvard trained lawyer, used Celler’s vocal criticism of the ERA to help her defeat the chairman in an upset, earning her the nickname, “Liz the Lion Killer.” When Holtzman entered the House in 1973 she received a spot on the Judiciary Committee, and the committee that once served as the ERA’s primary obstacle became a new hope to revive the neglected women’s rights legislation.The Pieces Come TogetherOn April 19, 1977, the Congresswomen’s Caucus, a new legislative service organization in the House that focused on issues important to women across the country, convened its first meeting. Holtzman and Representative Margaret M. Heckler of Massachusetts served as co-chairs of the new organization which boasted 15 members from both sides of the aisle.As the ratification window narrowed, the ERA became a main concern for the new caucus. Holtzman recalled that Eleanor Smeal, then president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), approached her with the idea that Congress could pass a bill to extend the deadline. Holtzman was initially hesitant but she came to like the idea. Holtzman moved methodically to solidify support for an extension, first consulting with the only other woman on the Judiciary Committee, civil rights leader Barbara Charline Jordan of Texas. Holtzman and Jordan approached Chairman Peter Rodino of New Jersey with the plan, and once Rodino pledged his support, Holtzman worked to secure the backing of Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts. With Rodino and O’Neill on board, Holtzman presented the idea to the Congresswomen’s Caucus. Thirteen members of the caucus signed on as cosponsors. Other cosponsors included, Rodino, Don Edwards of California, the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee of Civil and Constitutional Rights, as well as several members of Democratic leadership—Thomas S. Foley of Washington, John Brademas of Indiana, and Jim Wright of Texas. Those signing on to the bill sent an important message to the House about the legislative battle on the horizon.Inside and OutsideOn October 26, 1977, Holtzman introduced H.J. Res. 638, a “Joint Resolution extending the deadline for the ratification of the equal rights amendment.” The bill was vital, Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois said, because the states needed more time to debate what she called “one of the most important human rights issues of the century.”Holtzman and the Congresswomen’s Caucus wasted no time building support for what many—including Holtzman and Democratic leadership—viewed as an uphill battle. The plan featured two parts: a sophisticated internal whip campaign in Congress and a grassroots movement to pressure Members from the outside. “All of us networked to people we knew, particularly those we thought would be the hardest to please about that amendment,” Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio recalled. The caucus employed interns and designed a detailed computer program to manage what was described as a “formidable whip operation” in order to track where the vote stood. Although the lawmakers lacked formal party whip experience, Holtzman proudly observed, “We figured it out. We were all very smart women.”The caucus also worked closely with women’s organizations beyond Congress to add additional pressure. Holtzman managed a massive grassroots mobilization of women intent on winning support by lobbying individual Members of Congress. Holtzman, Heckler, Patricia Scott Schroeder of Colorado, and Barbara Ann Mikulski and Gladys Noon Spellman, both of Maryland, regularly met with outside groups to offer lobbying tactics, plan strategy, and share research.When the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights began hearings on the extension, crowds on both sides of the issue crowded the room. Eleanor Smeal of NOW, who had worked closely with Holtzman and other Congresswomen, warned that rejecting the extension could lead to the demise of the ERA and would set back “the clock of progress for the advancement of the rights of women in this society.” Leading the opposition was chair of the Stop ERA movement, Phyllis Schlafly. “It’s illegal and unfair,” Schlafly said. “It’s like a losing football team demanding that a fifth quarter be played. You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game just because you’re losing.”When the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights held a hearing on the issue in May, members of NOW and Stop ERA packed the room and lined the hallways. Intense lobbying followed the hearing and on June 5, the subcommittee, by a vote of 4 to 3, approved a seven-year extension for the amendment. Harold Lee Volkmer of Missouri observed that while he voted no, he may have been amenable to voting in favor of a shorter extension. “The American people have a right to think about this for as long as it takes,” Robert Frederick Drinan of Massachusetts replied. Don Edwards, the subcommittee chair and vocal supporter of the ERA, expressed confidence that the full Judiciary Committee would pass the resolution despite the close vote.The push to save the ERA intensified in the weeks leading up to the full committee vote. On July 9, 1978, the fight moved from the backrooms of Congress to the National Mall, when tens of thousands of ERA supporters from across the nation, many donned in white to symbolize the work of the suffrage movement, marched on Capitol Hill. Former Congresswomen Patsy Mink of Hawaii and Bella Abzug of New York joined activists Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Members of Congress—including Holtzman, Mikulski, and Heckler—on a hot and hazy day, to lead a peaceful protest demanding more time for states to deliberate the equal rights amendment. “We must be prepared for a very long haul,” Mikulski warned the enthusiastic crowd. “We will work this summer like we have never worked before.” After the speeches, protestors made good on their promise to inundate the Capitol and beseech Representatives to vote for the extension. Patsy Mink best captured the mood of the day when she asserted, “And if they dare to turn us down . . . we will turn them out on the next election day.”Lingering ObstaclesIn Congress, however, opposition to the extension persisted. Shortly after the protest march, Representative Edwards called to postpone the vote in the Judiciary Committee scheduled for July 11 when it became clear that a majority of his colleagues did not support the resolution. Congressman Thomas Fisher Railsback of Illinois led opponents who wanted to tie the extension to a provision allowing states which had previously voted in favor of ERA to rescind their vote. Railsback’s argument became a rallying cry for Phyllis Schlafly who claimed giving states the option to rescind “would take away a little bit from the unfairness of it.”The Judiciary Committee finally voted on Holtzman’s extension bill on July 18, 1978. The day-long proceeding featured passionate debate and detailed arguments about the necessity for an extension, the length of time, and whether states could rescind an earlier vote. So many Members made opening remarks that Representative James David Santini of Nevada likened it to an “oratorial parade.” Spectators once again packed the committee room in anticipation of the historic vote while television cameras broadcast the meeting.To win over reluctant Members, proponents suggested cutting the extension from seven years to 39 months. When the committee voted on the proposal, Harold Sawyer of Michigan, a proponent of the original seven years who did not know about the change ahead of time, voted against the measure. Chairman Rodino recessed the hearing to confer with colleagues as tension mounted. At one point, Congresswoman Millicent Hammond Fenwick of New Jersey sought unsuccessfully to convince Sawyer to change his vote. “There’s nothing like a delicate ego,” Fenwick surmised.After the brief recess, Representative Santini, an opponent of the extension, left the hearing without warning and missed the subsequent vote on the change to shorten the extension. With Santini missing, the shorter extension passed by one vote, 17 to 16. Santini denied he purposely left the hearing, and instead claimed he went to the House Floor to check in on another legislative matter. A slew of amendments followed the first vote, but none, including Railsback’s proposal to allow states that had ratified the ERA an opportunity to rescind their votes, passed the full committee. The room erupted in loud applause when the full committee voted to send the ERA extension of 39 months to the House Floor by a vote of 19 to 15. Pleased by the outcome, Holtzman, nonetheless, knew the battle would continue. “We haven’t done a vote count for the House, but we’re hoping,” she said. “We’ve spent so much time concentrating here, that there just hasn’t been time.”The Day of the VoteThe ERA extension went to the House Floor two weeks later on August 15, 1978. Holtzman and her fellow Congresswomen whipped the vote until the last minute. On their way to the Capitol, Members encountered both enthusiastic supporters and opponents of the ERA lining the hallways. Once on the House Floor, Representatives saw a sea of women in the galleries wearing “ERA NOW” or “Stop ERA” buttons. More than 100 lawmakers spoke during what the press described as “seven spirited hours of debate.” The majority of women Representatives took to the House Floor to build the case for allowing more time for the states to ratify the ERA. “I find it inconceivable that today we are still debating the question of equality for one-half of the population of the United States,” Congresswoman Spellman observed. “I also find it inconceivable that there are those in this House who question the fact women are not yet being given equal status . . . we see it every day in a hundred different ways.”Chester Trent Lott of Mississippi doubted the Senate would take up the issue and questioned why the House should therefore endure the “agony and ecstasy” of debating the extension. Congresswoman Jordan responded. “I would say to the gentleman from Mississippi (Trent Lott) that women have been going through agony and ecstasy all their lives, and we shall continue to do so until the words ‘equal rights under the law shall not be denied because of sex,’ are a part of the Constitution.”The House voted down two measures that threatened to derail the extension—the Railsback amendment allowing states to rescind ratification, and an attempt to require a two-thirds vote for passage of the extension rather a majority—clearing a path for its passage. Although supporters braced for a nail-biting finish, H.J. Res. 638 easily passed the House by a vote of 233 to 189. Cheers erupted in the gallery as the long and hard-fought battle for an ERA extension survived the House. The Senate passed the measure 60 to 36 on October 20, 1978, extending the ERA’s deadline to 1982.At the time, few outside the institution realized how essential the whip operation run by Holtzman and the Congresswomen’s Caucus was to keeping the ERA fight alive. Holtzman acknowledged their formidable opposition. But, she said years later, “we won despite their efforts.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 95th Cong., 2nd sess. (15 August 1978): 26198, 26219, 26225; “The Honorable Elizabeth Holtzman Oral History Interview,” Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives (10 March 2016). The interview transcript is available online. “The Honorable Mary Rose Oakar Oral History Interview,” Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives (2 March 2017). The interview transcript is available online. Atlanta Constitution, 16 August 1978; Baltimore Sun, 19 July 1978; Chicago Tribune, 11 June 1978, 10 July 1978, 16 August 1978; Los Angeles Times, 24 October 1977, 5 June 1978, 8 October 1978; New York Times, 22 March 1972, 19 July 1978; Washington Post, 11 August 1970, 19 May 1978, 10 July 1978, 11 July 1978, 19 July 1978, 16 August 1978; Irwin N. Gertzog, Congressional Women: Their Recruitment, Integration, and Behavior (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989).
Looking Back—The 1954 Shooting | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Seventy years ago, on March 1, 1954, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party snuck handguns into the House Visitors’ Gallery and opened fired on Members in the chamber below. Five Representatives were shot and injured before the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police, and others subdued the assailants.For many of the staff and House Pages who had been on the floor during the attack, the memory of the traumatic event stayed with them for decades. Reflecting on the shooting years later, Metropolitan Police Officer Benjamin Jason declared, “A situation like that in the U.S. Capitol was, I thought just unheard of and shouldn’t happen. But it did and the authorities responded and everybody did their job.”This is the first entry in a new blog series looking back at major events and legislation in House history as told through oral histories, data, written narratives, and multimedia—all available digitally on the History, Art and Archives website.Featured HighlightFour Puerto Rican Nationalists Opened Fire Onto the House Floor Four Puerto Rican nationalists, armed with handguns, opened fire onto the House Floor from the back row of the south gallery. At the time, the House was voting on a measure to re-authorize a program allowing migrant Mexican farm workers to work in the country. Numerous Representatives and staff were in the chamber at the time, as Speaker Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts presided over the roll call. In the fusillade, five Representatives were wounded—Alvin Morell Bentley of Michigan, Benton Franklin Jensen of Iowa, Clifford Davis of Tennessee, George Hyde Fallon of Maryland, and Kenneth Allison Roberts of Alabama. Bentley was critically wounded, but all five lawmakers survived. Visitors in the gallery and police quickly subdued the assailants; later, they were tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Future Representatives Norvell William “Bill” Emerson of Missouri and Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania were among a group of House Pages who helped to evacuate wounded Members on stretchers to waiting ambulances on the East Front.Featured Oral HistoriesWatch/listen to further accounts of the shooting and its aftermath and effects in the Oral History exhibit “1954 Shooting in the House Chamber.”Featured ExhibitionsThe 1954 Shooting This exhibition contains material related to the shooting and its aftermath, including contemporary newsreel footage and oral histories from House Pages, staff, and police who witnessed the event.Hispanic Americans in Congress—Puerto Rico This section from the third essay of Hispanic Americans in Congress explores the shifting political realities of the United States territory of Puerto Rico between 1945 and 1977. The essay provides context for the Nationalist (Nacionalista) movement in the territory and the circumstances leading up to and following the 1954 attack in the House Chamber.Featured DataTimeline of 1954 Shooting Events This chronology features eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports from the time of the shooting and from the days that followed.Featured Objects from the House CollectionFeatured Blogs“Firecrackers” in the House Chamber “It sounded like a package of firecrackers were lit and set off, but with the ricochet, in my mind, it identified it as a shot, so I hit the floor very quickly,” then House Page and future Representative Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania recalled. The shooting began within moments after the House convened on March 1, 1954, and normal House proceedings turned to uncertainty and chaos. Over many years, the Office of the Historian has interviewed eyewitnesses to the shooting to capture the experience of this harrowing event.This blog tells the stories of the young men present in the Chamber that day using their own words.House Pages Shoulder the Weight of History: The Story Behind an Iconic Image Amid the terror of the shooting in the House Chamber in 1954, some lawmakers and House Pages on the floor responded by assisting those wounded in the attack. Photographs taken in the aftermath captured these efforts, including an iconic image of three young Pages carrying a wounded Member down the steps of the Capitol. Perhaps more than any other image, that photo came to embody both the violence and the solemnity of the day.This blog recounts the events captured in the famous photograph.
“Freedom and Democracy in Our Own House”: Black Lawmakers on Capitol Hill during World War II | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Early in the afternoon on December 8, 1941, shortly after Congress met in a Joint Session to receive President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s request to declare war against Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Members from both parties took to the floor to voice support for the U.S. war effort.Representative Arthur W. Mitchell of Illinois, the only African-American Member of the 77th Congress (1941–1943), joined his colleagues that day in support of FDR’s message. Mitchell noted that he represented not only his Chicago district, but all African Americans. He said his constituents everywhere were willing to fight, work, and sacrifice for the cause, and that they expected “the same treatment under our so-called democratic form of government” as any other American. “If he is good enough to die for his country,” Mitchell declared, “he should be given the largest and fullest opportunity to live for his country without any type of racial discrimination.”The House approved the joint resolution declaring war on Japan later that afternoon, but it remained to be seen how or if Congress would address the racial inequality Mitchell had worked tirelessly to correct.World War II and Black AmericaFor Black Americans, the war presented new possibilities for military service, employment, and civil and political rights. Before Pearl Harbor, even as many American factories converted to war production, companies often did not hire Black workers. In January 1941, labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for a large protest in Washington, DC, on July 1, unless President Roosevelt took significant action to address discriminatory practices in defense industries and the military. On June 25, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in federal job training programs and defense production jobs—but not in the military—and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to help implement this directive.Representative Mitchell praised the President’s initiative but warned that ongoing employment discrimination at home was “the weakest point in our fight for world democracy.” For Mitchell, America’s efforts to defend democratic values overseas were imperiled by “our failure to practice these very principles among ourselves, and to extend the proper recognition and justice to the Negro who is an American citizen.” Mitchell’s remarks anticipated the “Double V” campaign pioneered in 1942 by the Pittsburgh Courier and embraced by Black newspapers and activists, which tied victory in the war abroad to the battle for fair employment and democratic rights at home.On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan coalition in the House began to push for legislation to protect the civil and political rights of African Americans and others facing discrimination. In September 1942, for example, Congress approved a bill to protect the voting rights of African Americans and women in the military—including a provision eliminating the poll tax for those serving overseas. Another proposal, designed to ban states from using a poll tax to restrict voting rights at home, passed the House on October 13 but died in the Senate.During the debate on the latter anti-poll tax bill, Mitchell, who was set to retire from Congress just a few months later, accused southern states that maintained poll taxes of undermining the war effort. The Chicago Representative urged his colleagues in both chambers to quickly pass the anti-poll tax bill. “Let us strike with all of our might, as this is a blow for freedom and democracy in our own house.”“Victory Legislation”Mitchell’s successor in the 78th Congress (1943–1945), William L. Dawson, was, like his predecessor, the only Black Member at the time. But he was joined two years later in the 79th Congress (1945–1947) by New York City councilman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem. Both lawmakers were Democratic Party stalwarts who went on to spend more than two decades in the House, rising to influential committee chairmanships. But during the crucial years of 1943 to 1946, as the United States waged war and transitioned to peace, Dawson, first by himself, and then with Powell, championed Mitchell’s call to use the war to push for civil rights legislation.When the 78th Congress opened on January 6, 1943, Representative Vito Anthony Marcantonio of East Harlem, New York, introduced a bill to ban the poll tax. Marcantonio had led the fight against poll taxes in the previous Congress. He insisted the bill would bolster the war effort, strengthening the nation’s position as the standard-bearer of democratic rights around the world. “This,” Marcantonio declared in 1942, “is victory legislation.” Though he was the lone member of the American Labor Party in Congress, Marcantonio’s proposal attracted support from Dawson and other northern Democrats, as well as Republicans like George Harrison Bender of Ohio, who said ending the poll tax would unite Americans and “strengthen our national will to fight to the finish for democratic institutions.”For more than a decade southern Members of Congress had prevented the House from passing antilynching and other civil rights legislation. Opponents insisted that states had the right to implement poll taxes, and that federal legislation outlawing them was unconstitutional and threatened to create social and political divisions during wartime. Marcantonio rejected these claims and pointed out that many White southerners, who could not afford to pay the required fee to vote, were also disenfranchised. To lead in the fight for “democracy all over the world,” he warned, the United States must “extend it now, before the war is over, to everyone within our own borders.”When the House Rules Committee, which decides whether a bill makes it to the floor, refused to act on Marcantonio’s legislation, the New York lawmaker used a discharge petition signed by 218 Members—a majority of the House—to release the bill from Rules and send it to the full House for consideration. On May 25, 1943, Dawson defended Marcantonio’s bill, pointing to his own lived experience. “I know more about what is the real ground of this subject matter,” Dawson declared, “than any man in this assembly.” He reminded the House that southern governments framed the poll tax as a source of revenue for local schools, yet he could not access quality public education during his youth in Georgia. Despite opposition from southern Democrats, the anti-poll tax bill passed the House, 265 to 110.Five months later, Representative Dawson testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the anti-poll tax bill. He reminded the subcommittee that the Constitution directs the federal government to ensure each state had a “republican form of government.” As long as a poll tax existed, Dawson said, “Democracy becomes a byword—our vaunted government of the people, by the people and for the people is a joke to the rest of the world when it appears that our Government is unable to fulfill its guaranty to its citizens in the matter of their sacred right of franchise.” Southern Senators, however, obstructed the progress of the bill, and amid the threat of a filibuster, the bill died.Fair EmploymentShortly after its creation in 1941, the FEPC had started to investigate cases of discrimination in hiring but had little power to broadly enforce the President’s executive order. In March 1944, Dawson introduced a resolution to create a special House committee to “make a full and complete study and investigation of race relations in the United States,” including discrimination in the military and in hiring.Although the House took no action on Dawson’s resolution, the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing later that month on funding for wartime federal agencies. In testimony before the committee, Dawson argued that “the welfare of the minority is inseparably linked to the welfare of the majority,” and insisted that the FEPC had demonstrably improved the lives of African-American workers during the war. In addition to jobs, Dawson explained, the FEPC “has done more to restore confidence in our institutions, hope in the future of our country, and to heighten morale by restoring belief in ultimate participation by all citizens in the benefits for which America now fights than any one Government agency operating at this time.” In May, Dawson, a World War I veteran, cited the sacrifices made by Black soldiers and the contributions of Black workers in war industries as he helped ward off attempts to cut funding for the FEPC.A much longer battle occurred in 1944 to determine the postwar fate of the FEPC, which FDR had only intended to be a temporary agency. In January 1944, Dawson, Democrat Thomas Edward Scanlon of Pennsylvania, and Republican Charles Marion La Follette of Indiana introduced identical bills to prohibit hiring discrimination and establish a permanent agency, known as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, to continue the work of the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee.In June, the House Committee on Labor held hearings on what was known as the Scanlon–Dawson–La Follette bills. Appearing as a witness, Dawson told the committee that the creation of a permanent FEPC would be “a step to assure the American public the consummation of a right, not the infliction of a wrong.” Ending workplace discrimination at home was also key to America’s postwar foreign policy objectives, he argued. Dawson reminded his colleagues that future trade partners, such as U.S. allies in South America, will be surprised to learn that “the fundamental human right of the opportunity to work and earn a livelihood is denied to American citizens because of race or national origin.” Moreover, these contradictions threatened to “destroy the faith and confidence of other nations in the sincerity of the American people.”Six months later, the House Labor Committee issued a report urging the House to adopt Scanlon’s version of the bill. But the 78th Congress ended before lawmakers could act.“Democracy here—now!”While Dawson was carrying the mantle of Black representation on Capitol Hill from 1943 to 1945, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was in New York, aiming to join the Chicago lawmaker in the House. Powell was a well-known minister, activist, and New York City councilman. In the two years leading up to the 1944 election, Powell benefited from the backing of The People’s Voice, the newspaper he owned and operated, which supported the Double V campaign and frequently derided southern segregationists as “American fascists”—allies of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany who needed to be confronted and defeated within the United States. Powell announced his intention to campaign for the new Harlem congressional district under a banner that read “Winning Democracy for the Negro is Winning the War for Democracy.” He easily won election to the 79th Congress in November 1944, becoming the first Black Member of Congress from New York. Powell and Dawson also became the first Black Representatives to serve together since 1891.During the first three months of his congressional career, Powell proposed an expansive legislative agenda designed to democratize immigration laws, voting rights, and access to public space and the workplace. He introduced legislation to provide a path to citizenship for immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, and India, along with bills to ban the poll tax, lynching, and segregation in interstate travel. Powell also drafted the only measure designed to eliminate segregation in the armed forces during World War II.As he had done in the 78th Congress, Marcantonio introduced an anti-poll tax bill in January and once again used a discharge petition to force the Rules Committee to release the bill. On June 12, Dawson and Powell advocated for the legislation on the House Floor. Speaking not long after the surrender of Germany, Powell cited the service of Black soldiers in the war, linking their actions abroad to their expectations for postwar America. “They fought to make the world safe. They intend to have democracy here—now!” The bill passed the House later that day, but languished under a threat of a filibuster in the Senate for the remainder of the 79th Congress.Fair employment legislation encountered similar resistance in the 79th Congress. In January 1945, Dawson and Powell introduced bills designed to ban hiring discrimination and establish a permanent FEPC. Dawson argued that his bill would ensure the war industries had enough labor to maintain production and quicken the pace of victory. “It is our duty to establish this committee now and thereby lay the foundation for fulfillment of the highest ideals of our democracy,” he said. Powell, who served on the House Labor Committee during his first term, joined the majority in recommending the House pass a fair employment bill in February.The FEPC bill stalled in the Rules Committee in the summer of 1945. In July, Dawson and Powell spoke on the floor to defend the role of the FEPC and urged continued funding, but the House only provided the means to sustain the agency through June 30, 1946. The fragile bipartisan coalition that passed anti-poll tax legislation was not strong enough to force a vote on a fair employment bill. On July 1, 1946, the FEPC closed, and the 79th Congress adjourned on August 2, 1946.A month later, in a letter to the head of a veterans’ organization, President Harry S. Truman lamented that the nation was still plagued by discrimination even after “a long and bitter war against intolerance and hatred in other lands.” Truman called Congress’s failure to end the poll tax and promote fair employment “a shameful aftermath of a war in which so many of our young men died so that racism might be put down for all time.” Change was still a long way off. It would be nearly two decades before Congress banned hiring discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and eliminated the poll tax through the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution the same year.During the war, Dawson and Powell recognized the global significance of the struggle for civil and political rights. In 1942, their predecessor, Representative Mitchell, had warned that democracy could only survive if it “shed the garment of hypocrisy.” By championing the war for democracy at home and abroad, America’s Black Representatives used their position to turn a spotlight on racial injustice within the boundaries of the United States.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 77th Cong., 1st sess. (8 December 1941): 9519–9520, 9526, 9537; Congressional Record, Appendix, 77th Cong., 1st sess. (24 July 1941): A3574–A3575; Congressional Record, House, 77th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 October 1942): 8120–8174; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (6 May 1943): 4092–4093; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (24 May 1943): 4807–4813; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (25 May 1943): 4843–4889; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 2nd sess. (26 May 1944): 5059–5060; Congressional Record, House, 79th Cong., 1st sess. (12 June 1945): 5984; Congressional Record, House, 79th Cong., 1st sess. (12 July 1945): 7479, 7485; Hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on H.R. 7, Poll Taxes, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (1943): 1, 69–74; Hearings before the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Deficiencies, National War Agencies Appropriation Bill for 1945, Part 2, 78th Cong., 2nd sess. (1944): 606–607; Hearings before the House Committee on Labor, To Prohibit Discrimination in Employment, 78th Cong., 2nd sess. (1944): 22–23; House Committee on Labor, Prohibiting Discrimination in Employment Because of Race, Etc., 78th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 2016 (1944): 1–9; House Committee on Labor, The Fair Employment Practice Act, 79th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 187 (1945): 5; H.R. 2014, 77th Cong. (1941); H. Res. 472, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 3986, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 4004, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 4005, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 1744, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1746, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1747, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1901, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1925, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 2183, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 2708, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 700, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1743, 79th Cong. (1945); Public law 77-712, 56 Stat. 753 (1942); Public Law 78-372, 58 Stat. 533 (1944); Public Law 79-156, 59 Stat. 473 (1945); Arkansas State Press (Little Rock), 11 August 1944; Atlanta Constitution, 27 May 1944, 13 June 1945, 1 August 1946; Baltimore Sun, 1 July 1946; Chicago Bee, 14 January 1945; Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 September 1942, 27 March 1946; Christian Science Monitor, 13 June 1945; New York Times, 25 May 1943, 26 May 1943, 30 May 1945, 13 June 1945, 5 September 1946; People’s Voice (New York, NY), 20 June 1942, 28 November 1942; Pittsburgh Courier, 6 March 1943; Washington Post, 7 April 1944, 13 June 1945; Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (New York: Viking, 2022); Thomas A. Guglielmo, Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991); Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).
Edition for Educators — “I Can Only Raise My Voice” | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In 1870, Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina became the first African-American lawmaker elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The longest-serving Black Member of Congress during Reconstruction, Rainey advocated for the rights and welfare of Black Americans from his seat in Congress. “I can only raise my voice, and I would do it if it were the last time I ever did it, in defense of my rights and in the interests of my oppressed people,” Rainey declared on the House Floor in 1877.In honor of Black History Month, this Edition for Educators features the words of 15 of the nearly 200 Black men and women who have served in Congress, sharing their perspective regarding the fight to secure civil rights and the effort to commemorate that movement. The quotations below are drawn from the wealth of resources available on the Office of the Historian’s website, including the revised edition of Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2022, the biographical profiles which detail the lives and congressional careers of every former Black Member of Congress, and oral histories conducted by the Office of the Historian.The Fight for Civil Rights“Mr. Speaker, all these people ask is an equal chance in the race of life, and the same privileges and protection meted out to other classes of people in our land. We cannot engage in the industrial pursuits, educate our children, defend our lives and property in the courts, receive the comforts provided in our common conveyances necessary to our wives and little ones if not essentially so to us, and, in short, engage in the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as rational beings, when we are circumscribed within the narrowest possible limits on every hand, disowned, spit upon, and outraged in a thousand ways.”Alonzo J. Ransier of South Carolina, on the state of Black civil rights in 1874“And when every man, woman, and child can feel and know that his, her, and their rights are fully protected by the strong arm of a generous and grateful Republic, then we can all truthfully say that this beautiful land of ours, over which the Star Spangled Banner so triumphantly waves, is, in truth and in fact, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.’”John R. Lynch of Mississippi, during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1875“This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people—rising people, full of potential force.”George Henry White of North Carolina, upon retiring from Congress, 1901“If we allow segregation and the denial of constitutional rights under the Dome of the Capitol, where in God’s name will we get them?”Oscar De Priest of Illinois, on segregation in the House Restaurant, 1934“My rise has been constantly fighting. And I have had to fight doubly hard because I am a woman. I am a very different sort of person than usually emerges on the political scene.”Shirley Chisholm of New York, on her political career, 1969“I just cannot believe that here in 1975 on the floor of the Senate we are ready to say to the American people, black or white, red or brown, ‘You just cannot even be assured the basic right to vote in this country.’”Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, during 1975 Senate debate to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965“We are a people in search of a national community, attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal. . . . We cannot improve on the system of government, handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and to realize our destiny.”Barbara Jordan of Texas, in her keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, 1976“I believe that we should be doing everything in our power to make it easier for eligible American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote.”Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, remarks on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, 2019Audio Clip: “Just Permanent Interests” – William Lacy “Bill” Clay Sr. of MissouriVideo Clip: Women and the Civil Rights Movement – Yvonne Brathwaite BurkeAudio Clip: Bloody Sunday – John Lewis of GeorgiaCommemoration and Remembrance“The legislation before us will act as a national commitment to Dr. King’s vision and determination for an ideal America, which he spoke of the night before his death, where equality will always prevail.”Katie Hall of Indiana, on the establishment of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, 1983“I had a lingering kind of adoration in my own soul for Rosa. I always believed in my heart that it was Rosa who paved the way for me to go to Congress and to other places. I felt like it then became my purpose to give her some honor, to repay her.”Julia May Carson of Indiana, on honoring Rosa Parks in Congress, 1999Audio Clip: “We’re Seekers” – John Lewis of GeorgiaVideo Clip: Answering the Call to Run for Congress – Eva M. Clayton of North CarolinaVideo Clip: African Americans and Congress – Kendrick B. Meek of FloridaThis is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Portraits from the Committee on House Administration | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The Committee on House Administration (CHA) is a 20th-century creation, but many of its principal functions date to the beginnings of Congress. CHA’s duties are vital to keeping the national legislature running: oversight of day-to-day operations of the House, federal elections, and other far-flung responsibilities consolidated under the committee as part of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946.The committee’s chairman portrait tradition dates to 1969, when the painted likeness of its fifth chairman arrived, and continues into the 21st century.Samuel FriedelThe portrait of Chairman Sam Friedel in 1969 was the first painting made for the Committee on House Administration. Friedel represented a Maryland district in the 1950s and 1960s, and chaired the committee for four years, from 1967 through 1970. Portrait artist Henry Cooper, also a Marylander, was born Gregor Kipermann in 1906 and moved from Ukraine to the United States as a little boy. Cooper studied both music and painting in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia. By the 1940s he was working as a portrait artist and successful cantor at synagogues in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Cooper’s move to Maryland in the 1940s led to commissions from Baltimore patrons, including Chairman Friedel. Cooper and Friedel shared a common family background. The Friedel and Kipermann families were both part of the great wave of Eastern European Jews who came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Friedel grew up in Baltimore and served the city for more than 30 years in the statehouse, city council, and ultimately Congress.Charles RoseArtist Jeffrey Martin worked on portraits of two Committee on House Administration chairmen—Charlie Rose and Bill Thomas—at the same time, in 2001. In the portrait of Rose, the artist has placed the chairman in a location that, although not identifiable, is reminiscent of Capitol spaces. The highly polished mahogany dais indicates a committee hearing room. The fluted pilaster that anchors the left side of the painting is a common sight on both the interior and exterior of the Capitol. The verdant background, however, gives the sense of being outdoors. The combination may have been deliberate, reflecting the committee’s involvement in virtually every aspect of House operations, inside and out.Bill ThomasWhen his portrait was unveiled, Chairman Bill Thomas had just left his position on the Committee on House Administration to take up the gavel of the Ways and Means Committee. The ceremony feted Thomas as much for his new role as his former one. Artist Jeffrey Martin showed the chairman in neither committee room. Instead, Thomas stands before a window on the West Front of the Capitol, with the Washington Monument in the distance. Martin, a native of New Jersey, studied at the Art Students League in New York City before settling in Pennsylvania.Vernon EhlersChairman Vernon Ehlers continued the Committee on House Administration’s practice of using portrait settings that are not committee spaces. Here, artist Ron Sherr places Ehlers in a room with a fireplace and paneled walls. Ehlers sits in the foreground in a leather chair, the red upholstery of which reinforces the rosy hues found throughout the painting.Check out historic records and artifacts from the Committee on House Administration:
Edition for Educators—New Perspectives on the Speakership | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Almost nine years ago, the Office of the Historian published an Edition for Educators on the Speakers of the House. In the near decade since, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art and Archives have added an array of new resources, research, and artifacts that have richly informed how the Speakership has evolved since 1789. In this month’s Edition for Educators, we’re featuring some of that considerable new material now available on the History, Art & Archives website.Featured Publications“A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House Speakership The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives was the first federal office created in the Constitution and has been at the forefront of America’s nation-building for more than two centuries. As the head of America’s popularly elected branch of government, the Office of the Speaker has shaped and has been shaped by the democratic forces coursing through the country. It is impossible to separate the Speakership from the people it serves and the history they share.This booklet, downloadable in PDF format, is about the individuals who served as Speaker and the contours and rhythms of their office. It is a story about the constellation of political movements, lawmakers, aides, and everyday people who have shaped the Speakership in myriad ways. In large measure, the history of the Speakership is also a history of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it is ultimately a history of America and its experiment in democratic self-government.Featured Institutional InformationSpeakers of the House in Numerical Order and Speaker Service In an effort to present information on House Speaker service in new and more helpful ways, this chart provides a numerical list of Speakers as well as their length of service in the chair.Speaker Elections Decided by Multiple Ballots The House has elected a Speaker 129 times since 1789. This page provides further information on that election history and a chart delineating the 16 Speaker elections which required multiple ballots.Vacancies in the Office of Speaker of the House This chart lists vacancies in the Speakership that occurred outside the normal transition between individual Congresses. The page also lists further resources regarding vacancies in the Speaker’s Office.Speaker of the House Fast Facts Congressional scholars and trivia enthusiasts alike can find a wealth of information on this page, including “fast facts” and notable outliers in the history of the Speakership.Featured HighlightsThe First Speaker of the House, Frederick A.C. Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania On June 4, 1801, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After serving in the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania state house, Muhlenberg won a seat in the First Congress (1789–1791). On April 1, 1789, Muhlenberg was elected Speaker of the House. Muhlenberg’s election was something of a political compromise that symbolized the sectional balance of the young republic’s new government: President George Washington of Virginia was a southerner; Vice President John Adams of Massachusetts was a New Englander; and Speaker Muhlenberg was from the Mid-Atlantic.The Shortest Period of Service for a Speaker on Record On the final day of the 40th Congress (1867–1869), Theodore Pomeroy of New York became Speaker of the House for one day—the shortest period of service for a Speaker on record. When House Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana resigned to become Vice President in the incoming Ulysses S. Grant administration, the House chose Pomeroy, who was retiring the following day, to succeed Colfax.The Speaker Election of Sam Rayburn of Texas On September 16, 1940, the House of Representatives selected Sam Rayburn of Texas to serve as Speaker for the remainder of the 76th Congress (1939–1941). First elected to the House in 1912, Rayburn rose up through the Democratic ranks to serve as Majority and Minority Leader as well as chairman of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. As the result of the death of Speaker William Bankhead of Alabama, Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts introduced House Resolution 602 to name Rayburn Speaker of the House. With no objection or fanfare, the House agreed to the resolution and Rayburn received the oath of office.Featured Objects from the House CollectionSpeaker Portrait Collection The House of Representatives Speaker Portrait Collection, located in the Speaker’s Lobby off the chamber floor, is a vital visual record of House history. The Speakers of the House have shaped the country in innumerable ways, and the collection, as noted in the bronze plaque hung in the lobby, was conceived as a “tribute to their worth to the nation.” A portrait of the first Speaker of the House, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, anchors the display. Portraits of other Speakers, painted in a range of styles, line the walls of the lobby in all directions, and include the post-modern realist look of Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts by Robert Vickery, and the Impressionist depiction of Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts by Edmund Tarbell.View Speaker Portraits in the House Collection.Featured BlogsHenry Clay’s On-Again, Off-Again Relationship with the House Henry Clay of Kentucky had one of the most superlative political careers in American history. A lawyer by training, Clay served in almost every level of government possible in the nineteenth century. On top of that, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 and ran for President three times over three decades on three different party tickets. Despite being a political journeyman, Clay’s true home, he confessed, was in the House. He served as Speaker—and resigned from the Speakership—on three separate occasions, but the exact timeline of his House career isn’t as straightforward as we might expect from one of America’s foremost statesmen.A Mob in Search of a Speaker During the chaotic first two weeks of the 26th Congress (1839–1841) in December 1839, three separate men presided over the House of Representatives: Hugh Garland, House Clerk during the previous Congress; Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, in a position created specifically for the former President; and finally Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, the youngest Speaker of the House ever to hold the office.“The Speaker Bluffed You” — Joe Cannon and the 1910 Motion to Vacate the Chair Longtime House leader Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois once said he lost and won the Speakership on March 19, 1910. His reversal of fortune had hinged on a daring gamble. A successful vote to remove Cannon as chairman of the Rules Committee earlier in the day dealt a major blow to the Speaker’s aura of invincibility, but he had no intention of folding. Rather than resign, Cannon invoked the House’s procedure to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant and challenged lawmakers to vote him out. Politics was not poker. But that day, facing the highest possible stakes, Cannon called the biggest bluff of his career.A Majority or a Coalition? The Speaker Election of 1917 On April 2, 1917, 428 Members-elect of the 65th Congress (1917–1919) gathered under the looming shadow of global conflict to open the new legislative term. But first, congressional action was bound up with a basic question: who would serve as Speaker in the new Congress, so that the House could be organized and receive the President? The problem was one of simple math. The 65th Congress featured the closest party split in American history. Just one seat separated the two major parties.The Rise of Speaker Longworth: Velvet on Iron On December 3, 1923, just hours into Opening Day of the 68th Congress (1923–1925), Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, the newly installed House Republican Leader, surveyed his fractious majority as it deadlocked over the election of the Speaker. A clash between progressive Republicans and mainline GOP stalwarts had been years in the making and erupted as a major early test of Longworth’s leadership. But for Longworth it was also edifying and set the foundation for a period in House history in which the Speakership grew more powerful than it had in over a decade. Starting in 1923, Longworth set out to ensure that so long as he wielded power, he never lacked the recourse the Speaker needed to control the House.Featured RecordsSpeaker Cannon’s Trunk During a previous era in American history, carpenters at the House of Representatives constructed basic trunks for retiring Members to transport their papers, including the one used by Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois in the early 1900s. But this trunk did not end up in Cannon’s home state of Illinois. Instead, it remained hidden in the attic of the first House Office Building until its discovery by a congressional staffer in 1994.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Velvet on Iron: Longworth Administers Party Discipline | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
This is the second part of a two-part story. The first part discussed Longworth’s rise through party leadership.On December 7, 1925, Opening Day of the 69th Congress (1925–1927), a triumphant Nicholas Longworth of Ohio stood atop the House rostrum to claim the gavel and take the oath of office as Speaker. Longworth, who first won election to the House in 1902, had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday just a month earlier. He had long wanted to run the House and now found himself the thirty-eighth Speaker in large part because he had played the long game on Capitol Hill.For several Congresses, Longworth’s ambitions to move into leadership had been clear. In 1919, he helped install his predecessor, Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts, earning a seat on the Republican Party’s steering committee in the House in the process. In 1923, as the new Republican Leader, Longworth brokered a deal with Insurgent Republicans, mostly progressives from the Upper Midwest, allowing Gillett to keep the Speaker’s gavel for a third term. Longworth then kept the majority functioning at a high clip for two years, despite repeated conflict between the progressive and establishment wings of the party. He cut deals, cajoled holdouts, calmed frayed nerves. In the presidential election year of 1924, Republicans expanded their majority in the House.Still, some questioned if the genial Longworth had the mettle, or even the attention span, to lead the fractious conference. Naysayers dismissed him as a dilettante—urbane in his interests, over-the-top in his attire, and preoccupied with the trappings of haute couture. “In his twenty five years of public service the exercise of no single talent stands out so characteristically as his aptitude with the violin,” sniffed a correspondent in a typical feature story on the Speaker-designate. Would his extracurricular interests eclipse his interest in doing the hard work running the Republican Conference?Almost immediately after taking the gavel, it became apparent that such doubters had erred badly in their estimate of Longworth, who firmly charted a new course—pivoting from peacemaker to party disciplinarian.Insurgents Back “Fighting Bob”The rift in the Republican Conference between progressives and establishment lawmakers that Longworth confronted as Speaker had been simmering for decades by the time he assumed the chair.By 1924, the situation seemed to have reached a tipping point. In a remarkable breakdown in party cohesion, 13 House Republicans supported the presidential campaign of progressive Republican Wisconsin Senator Bob La Follette in his challenge to the incumbent Republican President, Calvin Coolidge. In the election that November, Coolidge won comfortably, and La Follette came in a distant third.But on Capitol Hill the fallout from the election reverberated well into 1925. Senate Republicans purged La Follette from their conference and stripped him of a committee chairmanship. In the House, tensions lingered for months over what to do with the 13 Insurgents (including nearly the entire Wisconsin House delegation), who had cast their lot with La Follette in the presidential election but who had nevertheless won election to the following Congress as Republicans.In late February 1925, roughly a week before the 68th Congress (1923–1925) expired and with the presidential contest still very much on everyone’s mind, the House GOP gathered to pick its nominee for Speaker for 69th Congress. Frederick Gillett had moved on to a seat in the U.S. Senate, leaving the Speakership vacant. Pointedly, the GOP conference prevented the Insurgents who had backed La Follette from participating in the party vote. Longworth topped Appropriations Chairman Martin Madden of Illinois, 140 to 85.Immediately after the election, Republicans debated whether to punish the renegades by stripping them of their committee assignments. But the party meeting adjourned with no clear resolution. With the new Congress not set to convene until early December 1925, it would be months until the fate of the progressives would come into focus.Déjà vuThe Republican Party in the House heading into the 69th Congress looked significantly different than the party which had controlled the House in the previous session. Progressive Republicans had often held the balance of power in 1923. But mainstream Republicans had picked up more than 20 seats in the 1924 elections, enough to erase the influence of the Insurgents.After months of uncertainty, many wondered whether the remaining progressive Republicans would vote for Longworth for Speaker on the floor as the new session approached. The Insurgents quickly relieved any doubt, releasing a defiant statement in which they refused to “concede the right of Mr. Longworth or any other so-called leader to put them on trial for their Republicanism.”The new Congress opened on December 7, 1925. Still stinging from the snub of having been barred from the GOP’s February nomination meeting, the Insurgents struck first by nominating the dean of the Wisconsin delegation, Henry Allen Cooper. Cooper, who had also been nominated for Speaker in 1923, likely seemed an irksome nominee for party leaders. He had played a prominent role at the 1924 GOP National Convention, denouncing President Coolidge and backing La Follette’s renegade candidacy.James Archibald Frear of Wisconsin read from a prepared statement as he placed Cooper’s name into nomination. Frear criticized the February 1925 conference meeting in which Longworth was nominated as having been called without the “authority” of the Members. He likened it to “the old discredited method to bind and gag the Members in secret.” Worse still, after securing the nomination, Longworth had browbeat the progressives for months in private and, most aggravating, in public by telling the press their Republicanism would be measured against a single yardstick: whether they voted for him as Speaker on Opening Day of the 69th Congress.“The Wisconsin delegation in Congress to-day finds itself being challenged by those assuming to be in control of the Republican Party by threats and intimidation on the one hand and by the offer of party recognition and its favors and patronage on the other,” Frear declared on the floor. “We refuse to compromise, or to bargain with Mr. Longworth or with any other Member of the House, on an issue affecting our rights as Representatives in Congress to vote our convictions of duty to our constituents and the country under our official oaths.”Moments later, Longworth won the Speaker contest easily with 229 votes. Cooper tallied 13. Two years earlier, the Insurgents had suffered few consequences for voting against Speaker Gillett. Longworth wanted to convey a different message. The renegades would pay dearly.“I Believe in Responsible Party Government”The bill came due quickly.In his inaugural address as Speaker, Longworth committed himself to “responsible party government” in which the members of the majority party remained “united upon basic principles and policies” and followed the direction set by party leaders.Within days Longworth purged the progressives from every position of power they had once held. Headlines across the country blared the news. “Lop Off Insurgent Heads,” urged the Los Angeles Times. “House Plums of Badger Rebels Are Taken Away,” the Chicago Tribune gleefully declared.Each of the 13 progressives who had broken ranks with the GOP suffered indignities. Some were tossed from committees. Republican leaders stripped others of prominent leadership positions or dispatched them to the bottom rungs of the seniority ladder. John Mandt Nelson of Wisconsin lost his chairmanship of the Committee on Elections and was booted from the Rules Committee. Cooper, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, was demoted to the rank of most junior member on the panel. Other Members of the Wisconsin delegation faced similar fates: Florian Lampert (Patents Committee) and Joseph David Beck (Labor Committee) lost their seats, and for his efforts as Insurgent spokesman James Frear was dumped from the Ways and Means Committee. New York’s Fiorello Henry La Guardia (Post Office and Post Roads) and North Dakota’s James Herbert Sinclair (Agriculture) also were removed from committees important to their urban and rural constituencies.In surveying the carnage, the Tribune found in Longworth’s actions the echoes of an earlier era of Republican rule. “Czar Nicholas they are calling him—this pleasant, witty, urbane, yet forceful speaker, Nicholas Longworth, who now rules from the throne of Czar Reed and Czar Cannon,” the paper’s correspondent wrote approvingly. “So the politicians are dubbing him as the result of this first day’s proceedings in the house of representatives [sic] of the 69th congress—proceedings which reminded the veterans of the way they used to do things in the good old days before the insurgents began to insurge and the uplifters to uplift.”It wasn’t a return to the halcyon days of partisan governance entirely. Longworth had access to fewer pressure points than the GOP czars who ruled the House a generation earlier—Maine’s Thomas Brackett Reed or Illinois’ Joseph G. Cannon—who not only rendered rulings on the floor but structured the very terms of that debate by chairing the Rules Committee. Nor were lawmakers from both parties required to beseech Longworth for a plum committee post, as they did in the Reed–Cannon era when the Speakers doled out all committee assignments in the House, irrespective of party affiliation.Still, Longworth restored the prestige of the Speakership, in part, by holding on to the organizational powers of the floor leader when he assumed the Speaker’s chair. He refused to give up the ex officio post on the GOP's Steering Committee that he had held as Majority Leader, and he insisted that his loyal lieutenants—including the new Majority Leader John Quillin Tilson and Albert Vestal of Indiana—also sit on the steering committee. From there, Longworth all but dictated the work of the GOP’s committee on committees and stacked the Rules Committee with other allies. In such a manner, in ways both overt and subtle, he approximated the influence of the earlier czars of the House. After watching the new Speaker take charge, a local newspaper noted that Longworth was unafraid, “to pull the unseen wires” that often control the work of the House.But Longworth was not just a transactional Speaker. He persuaded and led with charisma and wit that endeared House colleagues. Years later, when he died suddenly in his prime, the Chicago Daily Tribune eulogized Longworth as the rare lawmaker whose reputation did not fully encompass his effectiveness. “In the drawing rooms of Washington he always was the gentleman of faultless dress and manner,” a correspondent wrote. “But none there was more democratic nor who could fraternize in greater good fellowship with the roughest roughnecks of the political highways and byways. He was a prince of good mixers, a wit of renown, whose repartee sparkled in debate on the floor of the house and the best of all story tellers in the recesses of the cloakrooms.”In the first moments of his Speakership, Longworth set clear his expectations for his party and demonstrated to every member of his conference the firmness and resolve that some had once questioned. No one again mistook Longworth’s sparkle and panache for inability.“In a manner [Longworth] is so light and airy that he might be said to have the specific gravity of feathers,” a perceptive observer noted, even as the Insurgents had awaited their Opening Day fate. “In action, when the favorable moment for action has come, he has the weight of a lead shot.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 69th Cong., 1st sess. (7 December 1925): 378–382; William Hard, “Nicholas Longworth,” April 1925, The American Review of Reviews, vol. 71 (no. 423); Donald C. Bacon, “Nicholas Longworth: The Genial Czar,” in Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership over Two Centuries, ed. Roger Davidson et al. (New York: Westview Press, 1998); Richard B. Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney, Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1983); Clara Longworth De Chambrun, The Making of Nicholas Longworth: Annals of an American Family (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933); Ronald M. Peters Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); David Thelen, Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1976); Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob LaFollette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); David Greenberg, “Calvin Coolidge: Campaigns and Elections,” The Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/campaigns-and-elections; “1924 Election Results,” in American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/1924; Baltimore Sun, 7 December 1925 and 10 April 1931; Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 December 1925, 11 December 1925, 10 April 1931; Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1925; New York Times, 28 February 1925; Washington Post, 28 February 1925.
The Records of a Growing Nation: Expansion and Reform (1801–1861) | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
As the United States grew in size and population, it grappled with the challenges of its expansion. Congress began the complicated process of dividing and parceling out land, much of it already inhabited, grappled with pro- and antislavery activism, and started to determine what kinds of support and relief the government should provide its citizens. Learn more about this turbulent foundational period with these records from the House of Representatives.Transcriptions and downloadable PDFs of these records are available at the links below.Discussion Questions:How did the geography of the United States influence the expansion of the nation?How did the growth of the nation’s economy and size influence the movement of citizens?How did expansion positively and negatively affect different groups?How did Congress respond to the challenges of the country’s development?Was the United States living up to its assertion that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?How did events during this period influence later events in the country’s development like the Civil War and the expansion of social welfare programs?1803, Thomas Jefferson’s MessageOn January 18, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent this message, which focused on the expansion of commercial interests to the West, to Congress. Jefferson also proposed a small expedition that might range “even to the Western Ocean,” which became the Lewis and Clark Expedition. During their 8,000-mile journey, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark drew maps of the terrain, identified unknown plants and animals, conferred with Native American inhabitants, and returned with valuable discoveries about the continent.1814, New Madrid Earthquakes ReliefThe area near New Madrid, Missouri, experienced three devastating earthquakes between 1811 and 1812. The cumulative damage prompted state leaders to pen this petition imploring Congress to provide relief. In 1815, Congress compensated victims by authorizing the sale of public lands of “like quantity” to those whose land had been destroyed by the earthquakes, making it the first disaster relief act.1829, Memorial of the CherokeesThe Cherokee Nation, protesting the state of Georgia’s attempt to extend its authority over their lands, wrote this memorial in 1829. Written in both English and Cherokee, this document is a plaintive appeal to Congress to remain on their ancestral lands. On May 26, 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which precipitated the forced relocation of the Cherokee to lands west of the Mississippi River in 1838.1838, Polly Lemon’s Land ClaimSometime before 1828, Polly Lemon settled a homestead in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, on property that the military later seized for the use of Fort Jesup. Determined to continue her life in Louisiana, but with limited options for action as an uneducated woman, Lemon petitioned Congress to grant her a land claim elsewhere in the state. In 1839, Congress passed H.R. 294, granting her 640 acres in the northwestern region of the state.1854, Petition against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854As the nation expanded west and territories petitioned for statehood, lawmakers engineered the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to maintain a balance of power in Congress between free and slave states. But the popular sovereignty clause in the Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to upset the equilibrium on Capitol Hill by potentially creating several new pro-slavery states. In this signed petition, 34 citizens of St. Joseph County, Michigan, voiced their concern that the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 would open the American West to slavery.1856, Bill to Support Cholera ResearchIn 1856, the House referred this bill requesting funds to support research into the causes of cholera, a bacterial infection spread through contaminated water that often ravaged armies and navies, to the Military Affairs Committee. The legislation would have provided $30,000 to support a committee of specialists sponsored by the American Medical Association to use advances in scientific study and equipment to “elucidate as clearly as possible every cause bearing upon the patient to produce the disease; and also to make the most critical examination of those who have become its victims.”Interested in more records from this era?1806, Petition to Relinquish Land1830, Ohio Women on Removal of Native American Tribesca. 1836, Navigation of Mississippi Riverca. 1848–1855, Mexican Boundary Survey Sketch1856, Memorial for a Pacific Railroad
Best of the Blog in 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In 2023, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art and Archives published 34 blog posts examining an array of stories, people, and objects from U.S. House of Representatives. This year, blog authors detailed the inspiration and process behind the portraits of Joseph Rainey of South Carolina and Shirley Chisholm of New York and offered a closer look at new portraits in the House Collection. Blog posts from the office’s curators and archivists also regularly updated readers about other new additions to the House Collection and Records Search.Blogs from the Office of the Historian addressed a wide range of parliamentary functions, legislation, and lawmakers.Teachers and students will find handy reference information in the annual National History Day post, a deep dive on congressional primary sources (in two parts!), and a review of House History publications available online.As the year draws to a close, we’re featuring six of our favorite blog posts from 2023.The “Imperishable Truth”: Early Efforts to Commemorate African-American History in CongressOn March 3, 1879, in the final hours of the 45th Congress (1877–1879), Representative Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina requested permission to print remarks in the Congressional Record that reflected on the course of the Republican-led effort to rebuild the South after the war called Reconstruction. Rainey wasn’t alone in his effort to acknowledge significant moments in African-American history. It is little remembered today, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black Members of Congress regularly followed Rainey’s lead. In congressional debates and legislation, Black lawmakers proposed and often secured funding for historic preservation efforts, public exhibitions, commemorative events, and historical studies to recognize individual and collective achievements by African Americans.Remote Possibilities: The Early History of Videoconferencing Technology in the HouseOn the morning of October 9, 1991—long before the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of Zoom calls and online meetings—George E. Brown of California, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, gaveled his committee to order in what appeared to be a science fiction theater. A large screen, powered by a rear projector, towered at the center of the committee room. A camera, perched atop the screen, focused on the chairman, while two additional cameras on tripods recorded the rest of the dais. Behind the projector stood two black towers, each filled with state-of-the-art computer equipment and outfitted with a television monitor.“¡Unidos!”: Building a Hispanic American Political CoalitionIn October 1971, more than a thousand people from across the country descended upon Washington, DC, on a mission to transform U.S. politics. They were Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and members of other Hispanic-American communities. They had been called to the nation’s capital in part by two visionary lawmakers—Representative Edward Roybal of California and Representative Herman Badillo of New York—with the goal of assembling their political forces into a “National Spanish-Speaking Coalition.”A Tale of Two StudiosWhy does the House Collection have so many photographs of multiple, surprisingly amateurish studio sets? The images are all obviously staged, and each one shows a Member of Congress at a desk in a faux office with an unconvincing view of the Capitol. It turns out that for decades, Members trooped to one of two photography studios in the House. One was for Republicans, and the other for Democrats. They worked in adjacent spaces but reportedly did not share equipment or even pleasantries. Nonetheless, the two backdrops had the same general feel. Each one was dressed to look like a congressional office, with a desk, chair, and window looking out onto a photograph of the Capitol.“The Speaker Bluffed You” — Joe Cannon and the 1910 Motion to Vacate the ChairLongtime House leader Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois once said he lost and won the Speakership on March 19, 1910. His reversal of fortune had hinged on a daring gamble. Cannon didn’t technically lose the Speakership on March 19. But he did lose the Speakership’s main source of power when a coalition of House Democrats and progressive Republicans, known as Insurgents, voted to expand the size of the Rules Committee and remove Cannon as the committee’s chairman. Serving simultaneously as Speaker and chairman had given Cannon near total control over the House’s legislative machinery. The Rules vote dealt a major blow to Cannon’s aura of invincibility, but he had no intention of folding. Rather than resign, Cannon invoked the House’s procedure to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant and challenged the coalition to vote him out. Politics was not poker. But that day, facing the highest possible stakes, Cannon called the biggest bluff of his career.Who Controls the House?: The Discharge Petition and Legislative Power in the New Deal CongressIllinois’s Henry Rainey was known for his independence and had spent the bulk of his political career working to democratize the lawmaking process. But the demands of the Great Depression tested the new Speaker. The question became whether—or how—he could balance his longstanding commitment to decentralized power in the House with his responsibilities as Speaker. Nowhere would this be clearer than in his approach to the discharge petition, the parliamentary maneuver which introduced a motion to discharge committees from further consideration of legislation and force it to the Floor.Follow the blog in 2024 for more House history, art, and records!
The House’s Puzzling Pastime: 23 for 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The Office of the House Historian invites you to put your heads together with your historically-inclined friends to solve our latest crossword puzzle.In what has become an annual tradition for Crossword Puzzle Day on December 21, we are pleased to present 23 Clues for 2023. Each historical trivia clue has a numerical tie-in. You can find all answers on the History, Art & Archives website. You can also download PDF versions of the puzzle and the answer key. Happy puzzling!
Recent Artifacts Online, Winter 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
What’s new on Collections Search? Nineteen postcards, a studio set, and an intern making photocopies, that’s what.Congressional Intern at a Photocopier“In the 1960s and 1970s, congressional interns burned their draft cards outside the Capitol, forged documents to insert their opinions into the Congressional Record and leaked confidential information to congressional committees,” a writer for the Los Angeles Times reminisced in 1982. “But the latest crop of interns,” he mused, “is a tamer lot.” In this 1981 photograph, a congressional intern in a suit jacket and tie serenely makes photocopies.Washington, D.C., the Mall Looking Toward the Capitol PostcardWith the bright white Capitol and brick red Smithsonian Institution Building in front of a distant pink and blue horizon, this postcard highlights the colors of Washington around 1908. The National Mall resembles a green forest at the foot of the Capitol. From left to right across the center of the postcard, a train pulls out of a Baltimore and Potomac railroad station, puffing little white clouds of smoke.Ileana Ros-LehtinenStanding behind a podium with two microphones, pointing with the index finger of her left hand, Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen appears to be making a point or calling on a reporter during a press conference. In the background, a strategically placed window offers an incredible, close-up view of the Capitol. In fact, this photograph, like many other House portraits from the second half of the 20th century, was taken on a studio set with a fake Capitol view.Chester Earl Holifield PostcardIn this campaign postcard, the Capitol dome, official flags, and shelves of law books made Chet Holifield the very picture of a powerful government official. But look closely. The office gewgaws distract from the right edge, where the set’s dressing gives way to a tattered temporary wall.Can’t get enough of our postcards? Here are a few more recently digitized ones.For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.
Edition for Educators—Prohibition | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On January 16, 1919, the requisite three-quarters of the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol. One year later, at midnight on January 17, 1920, the United States officially went dry, but the battle over booze was far from over.Over the next 14 years, the nation would live with Prohibition, debating its merits and questioning its effectiveness. In December 1932, Illinois Representative Henry Rainey offered legislation to repeal the policy, and exactly one year later, on December 5, 1933, Utah became the thirty-sixth and final state necessary to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing Prohibition.In recognition of the ninetieth anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, this month’s Edition for Educators brews up a review of Prohibition and the House of Representatives.Featured Educational MaterialsPrimary Source Set: Prohibition Dive into America’s dry period with this primary source set on Prohibition. This collection of House records and photographs is accompanied by a brief contextual essay, activities, educational videos, and questions to facilitate student discussion and analysis.A Closer Look: The Debate Over ProhibitionFeatured ExhibitionProhibition Dries Up After Prohibition went into effect in 1920, women lawmakers responded to the law’s effects on their constituents. Included as part of “The First Women in Congress” online exhibit, this feature presents the earliest women Representatives’ diverse views on one of the primary legislative issues of the day.Featured HighlightsThe Volstead Act On October 28, 1919, the 66th Congress (1919–1921) overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the National Prohibition Act. Known as the Volstead Act (H.R. 6810), after Judiciary Chairman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, this law implemented a federal enforcement system for the prohibition of alcohol outlined in the Eighteenth Amendment.The Infamous House Bootlegger Known as the “Man in the Green Hat” On October 24, 1930, the Washington Post published the first installment of an expose by the “Man in the Green Hat,” a bootlegger—later identified as George Cassiday—who sold alcohol to Representatives from rooms in the House and Senate office buildings during the 1920s. As an underemployed World War I veteran, Cassiday turned to the illegal alcohol trade during the Prohibition Era. From 1920 to 1925, he sold spirits to House Members in the House Office Building (now Cannon).The Ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment On December 5, 1932, Representative Henry T. Rainey of Illinois introduced H.J. Res. 480 to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol in the United States. Introduced during the second session of the 72nd Congress (1931–1933), Rainey’s joint resolution was the first step in a year-long process to repeal Prohibition in the United States.Featured Objects from the House CollectionFind more objects and images related to Prohibition in our Collections Search.Featured RecordsStudent Resolution for Prohibition In 1917, a group of high school students from Flemington, New Jersey, submitted a resolution to their Representative, Elijah Hutchinson, supporting a bill introduced by Congressman Asbury Lever in support of the prohibition of alcohol to conserve resources on the eve of America’s entry into World War I.California Hop Brewers Telegram The president of the California Hop Brewers Association, George Hewlett, sent this telegram to Representative John E. Raker of California protesting “against threatened action of federal government prohibiting brewing of beer.”Find more House Records related to Prohibition in Records Search.Featured BlogsLegislating the Liquor Law—Prohibition and the House Summers in Washington, DC, are always hot, but the dog days of 1919 were particularly heated as Congress held ongoing debates over how best to enforce a ban on the sale and transportation of alcohol in a sweeping new policy known as Prohibition.House-Brewed Home Brew Representative John Philip Hill of Maryland tried very hard to get arrested by the Commissioner of Prohibition. During Prohibition, Hill made wine and hard cider at his home in Baltimore. He sent a letter to the commissioner informing him of the beverages. Then he threw a huge shindig, inviting the public—and the commissioner—to sample his swill. The Maryland Representative felt that the law was “hypocritical, crooked and marked by two standards,” and he intended to protest it with a party.Unprohibited On February 20, 1933, Speaker John N. Garner of Texas struggled to maintain order on the House Floor as Thomas Blanton, a “dry,” made a final stand in support of Prohibition. Garner impatiently tapped the inkstand on the rostrum as Representatives booed and shouted “Vote, vote!” After the House voted to repeal Prohibition, the galleries and halls overflowed with the applause of spectators. Dismantling the legislative structure of the Eighteenth Amendment took nearly a year.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
James Madison, the First Congress, and the Roots of America’s Direct Elections: “Essential to Every Plan of Free Government” | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On April 1, 1789, the U.S. House of Representatives achieved a working quorum for the first time in New York City’s Federal Hall—a full three weeks after the First Federal Congress had been scheduled to convene on March 4. Travel woes had contributed to the delay. Among the nearly three dozen Representatives who had made it to New York was James Madison, who had arrived on March 14 after completing a 330-mile journey over what he called the “unparalleled badness of the roads” from his home in central Virginia.The sparse attendance in the House stemmed from another consideration as well: some states had yet to even finish holding elections for Congress. New York and New Jersey were still counting votes from their respective elections. North Carolina and Rhode Island did not hold elections until the fall of 1789 and summer of 1790, respectively.Madison, who is widely credited as the architect of America’s system of direct House elections, openly wondered if the new government would succeed given that the states seemed to struggle to elect their lawmakers. “I see on the lists of [incoming] Representatives a very scanty proportion who will share in the drudgery of business,” Madison complained to Edmund Randolph, who became the country’s first Attorney General.Although the House’s system of direct elections is long familiar to Americans living in the twenty-first century, the practice was brand new for many eighteenth-century Americans—including Madison. Prior to the first federal elections, state legislatures had been responsible for selecting Delegates to the Continental Congresses. Following the ratification of the Constitution, America embarked on a new experiment in representational government: the direct election of House Members by the people.The contours of this experiment can be seen in Madison’s own career. His experience helping author the Constitution, running for office, and serving in Congress traced the arc of this important transition in America’s history as a democracy.Origins of Direct ElectionsIn the summer of 1787, 36-year-old James Madison of Virginia attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he became a leading proponent of the creation of a powerful national government. Madison’s proposal, known as the Virginia Plan, provided the general framework for what would become the U.S. federal system. After much compromise, the Delegates to the convention created a new government led by a bicameral legislature that included the House of Representatives and the Senate. The individual state governments would select members of the Senate. But the House was to be populated by lawmakers directly elected by the people, a feature that Madison called “essential to every plan of free government.” Otherwise, he cautioned, “the people would be lost sight of altogether” and the nation’s new democracy would struggle to survive.Madison’s plan built on efforts across the states to expand the voting rolls. Prior to the American Revolution, only White males who held property and were not indentured servants could vote for colonial or state assembly members. In turn, those legislators voted for the Delegates who served in the Continental and Confederation Congresses. But between 1776 and 1787, municipal voting rights in urban areas expanded significantly as states revised their constitutions to include taxpayers, regardless of property ownership status, as voters. The pool of officeholding candidates also expanded beyond landowners to include middle-class and working-class men.After the Constitution went to the states for ratification in the fall of 1787, Madison and two compatriots—John Jay and Alexander Hamilton—described the benefits of the new government in the Federalist, a series of articles that appeared in newspapers between the fall of 1787 and the summer of 1788. Madison focused on direct elections in two essays, in particular. In Federalist 10, he noted that a democracy with a large voting base would help defend against what he called “the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.” Moreover, if those Representatives were “chosen by a greater number of citizens,” Madison reasoned, “the suffrages of the people . . . will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.” In Federalist 52, Madison described the bond between a popularly elected legislature and its constituents as “essential to liberty that the government should have a common interest with people.” Frequent direct elections, he concluded, would enable the government to “have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.”The authors of the Constitution left the procedural details for carrying out the nation’s elections to the individual states, but with the Election Ordinance of 1788 they set “the first Wednesday in March” 1789 as the start date for the First Congress (1789–1791) and in the process ushered in a revolution in voting in America.Election MechanicsMost states passed laws between October and December 1788 to govern the upcoming federal elections, and as Madison predicted, states used a variety of methods to carry out the country’s first federal elections.States implemented the Election Ordinance in three ways. Six states—Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—used the at-large or general ticket system method, which allowed voters to select as many candidates as there were House seats until the winners were declared. Five states—Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York, South Carolina, Virginia—chose the single-Member district method in which states designated a certain number of geographically distinct districts based on estimates of state populations. Within each district, voters made their choice from a slate of candidates unique to that district. (This is the system that is used almost exclusively today, aside from states with populations small enough to warrant just one Representative.) Finally, Georgia and Maryland used a hybrid system in which candidates were nominated from single districts but allowed voters to cast ballots from anywhere in the state.Prior to the American Revolution, small groups of elite gentry had selected candidates for positions and secured their elections with a small number of supporters. As a result of revised state constitutions and the expansion of the candidate pool to include middle-class and working-class men during the Revolutionary era, all candidates eventually had to seek support either directly or through campaign surrogates. By the late 1780s, candidates often publicly declared their intention to serve but would do little campaigning; partisan supporters would work on their behalf to win elections. Finally, although suffrage technically expanded to include free African Americans in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and for a brief period to women in New Jersey, full voting rights remained far out of reach for most Americans until the second half of the twentieth century.Unlike today, voters did not enter a booth and select their preferred candidates in private. Instead, eighteenth-century voters mainly used two rather public methods. Voters in New England and much of the Mid-Atlantic submitted their votes by written ballots to an election judge. In the South, voters called out their choices which were recorded by an election clerk and certified by an election judge. Polling places also varied by region. New England and Mid-Atlantic states used organized polling places at churches or town halls. In southern states, election officials used local courthouses along with taverns and churches for counties with large populations.Madison’s ElectionPerhaps the most consequential race for a seat in the First Congress occurred in Virginia’s Fifth District, where two future presidents—James Madison, the Pro-Administration (or Federalist) candidate, and James Monroe, the Anti-Administration (or Antifederalist) nominee—ran for a U.S. House seat. The district consisted of eight counties in Virginia’s central Piedmont region, including Madison’s home county of Orange, and held about 91,000 people, 30 percent of whom were enslaved African Americans. Madison faced significant headwinds from the opposition, and he acknowledged that he had a fight on his hands. “I am now pressed by some of my friends to repair to Virginia . . . for counteracting the machinations agst. my election into the H. of Reps,” Madison wrote to Edmund Randolph from New York City.Madison confessed that he was “extremely disinclined” to pursue the seat because it would “have an electioneering appearance which I always despised.” Nevertheless, he worked with local allies to develop a campaign strategy, directly interacting with voters and embracing newer election techniques by engaging Monroe in two public debates. Madison also published letters in local newspapers that outlined his views of the new Constitution. During the campaign, Madison told George Washington that he had “visited two counties, Culpeper & Louisa, and publicly contradicted the erroneous reports propagated against me,” refuting claims “that I am dogmatically attached to the Constitution.” Because many constituents expressed concern about the oversight powers of the new federal government, Madison assured them that he would offer a set of amendments that would be added to the new Constitution.On February 2, 1789, 2,280 voters braved subzero temperatures in Virginia’s Fifth District to cast ballots in its first federal election. Madison won election to the House with 57 percent of the vote, 1,308 to 972. Ten of the thirteen states—including Virginia—held elections between December 1788 and March 1789, within the timeline required by the Election Ordinance. Three states—New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island—held elections later that year after delays ratifying the Constitution.“Great Moderation and Liberality”Ultimately, Pro-Administration lawmakers held 37 of 65 seats in the First Federal Congress. But it was the Anti-Administration bloc’s demands for a constitutional Bill of Rights—a promise that Madison had campaigned on as well—that set the session’s legislative agenda.Even as Madison settled into his new job as a U.S. Representative, he remained apprehensive about the success of the new government. “It is not yet possible to ascertain precisely the complexion of the new Congress,” Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson prior to the House achieving a quorum. “I hope and expect that some conciliatory sacrifices will be made,” he said, “in order to extinguish opposition, or at least break the force of it” in order to help the new constitutional government succeed.Thirty-five Members of the new House had previously served in the Continental or Confederation Congresses, experience that surely helped things along. And by May, Madison was able to report that the “proceedings of the new Congress are so far marked with great moderation and liberality.” He also noticed that the “spirit which characterizes the House of Representatives . . . is already extinguishing the honest fears which considered the system as dangerous to Republicanism.”As a nominal floor leader, Madison faced the early challenges of finding consensus and keeping lawmakers united as he offered bills to create sources of revenue for the new nation. He would face greater challenges while submitting a set of amendments that would become the Bill of Rights two months later. But the House of Representatives that he had theorized and nurtured—and whose elections he had designed—was off to a fast start.Sources: House Journal, 1st Cong., 1st sess. (1 April 1789): 6; Annals of Congress, House, 1st Cong., 1st sess. (8 April 1789): 102–104; Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2010); R. B. Bernstein, “A New Matrix for National Politics: The First Federal Elections, 1788–90,” in Inventing Congress: Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Charlene Bangs Bickford and Kenneth R. Bowling, Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789–1791 (Lanham, MD: Madison House Publishers, 1989); Fergus M. Bordewich, The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States, 1776–1789 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Jay K. Dow, Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017); Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1998); Thomas Rogers Hunter, “The First Gerrymander?: Patrick Henry, James Madison, James Monroe, and Virginia’s 1788 Congressional Districting,” Early American Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 2011); Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “’The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (Summer 1992); Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stanley B. Parsons, William W Beach, Dan Hermann, eds., United States Congressional Districts, 1788–1841 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); United States Constitution, art. I, § 4, cl. 1, America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-4; Federalist no. 10, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp; Federalist no. 52, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp; “Resolution of the Congress, of September 13, 1788, Fixing Date for Election of a President, and the Organization of the Government Under the Constitution, in the City of New York,” The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/resolu01.asp; Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/; Philip Lampi, “Electing Members of Congress in the Early Republic: District vs. At-Large Elections,” Mapping Early American Elections, accessed 13 March 2023, https://earlyamericanelections.org/essays/03-lampi-election-methods.html; Virginia Plan (1787), Milestone Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/virginia-plan.
Post Some Bills: 20th Century Campaign Handbills | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
During the 20th century, handbills were campaign workhorses. Larger than palm cards but slighter than multi-page pamphlets, handbills are typically single sheets, printed on one or both sides, sometimes folded. Campaign handbills contain endorsements, catchy taglines, soaring rhetoric, and policy statements. Pick your candidate from a century’s worth of wordy congressional campaign examples from the House Collection.Edith Nourse Rogers’s 1926 handbill is from her first general election. As the flyer says, Rogers was indeed “always on the job.” She advised her husband, Congressman John Rogers, for a dozen years, and won a 1925 special election after he died in office. Long years serving in the political trenches paid off: the handbill reprints letters from President Warren Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge, and no fewer than seven newspaper endorsements. Rogers treads carefully, both touting “her own record of achievements” and noting that she was still “Mrs. John Jacob Rogers.”Franklin Menges was a three-term Representative when the Pennsylvania Republican Party printed this handbill. It is more restrained than most examples of its kind. Inside, a formal essay reminds constituents that their Congressman is the finest Pennsylvania has to offer and lives up “to the highest traditions of the early civilization of his State.” The text on the front and back urges constituents to vote only for Menges and his presumably equally staid fellow candidates.After completing her late husband’s term as Hawaii’s Territorial Delegate, Betty Farrington used this handbill on the campaign trail in 1954. It lauds her support for Hawaii’s statehood, legislative accomplishments, depth of experience as her husband’s “behind-the-scenes partner,” and friendly relationship with President Dwight Eisenhower. Known as one of “Washington’s 10 Most Powerful Women” long before she became a Member of Congress, Farrington, a Republican, won in a year when Democrats surged to power in territorial elections.In November 1956, Dalip Saund of California, nicknamed “Judge” because of his prior service as a county judge, became the first Asian American elected to serve as a U.S. Representative. This 1960 campaign handbill not only promotes Saund’s qualifications but also includes book reviews for his autobiography, Congressman from India. Saund’s activism and electoral success are “plus factors” listed in his handbill. Even more prominent, Saund’s “concrete accomplishments” touts his skill at the bread and butter of any legislator: representing his constituents’ needs.Flo Dwyer of New Jersey distributed this handbill during one of the later campaigns of her 16-year House career. It highlights her remarkable legislative and policy accomplishments. The sheer volume and duration of her work is also noted: “Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon have presented Flo Dwyer with 25 pens used to sign. . . Dwyer-backed bills into law. Flo Dwyer makes a difference!"This handbill for Gus Savage’s first congressional run displays his extensive experience as a journalist, activist, and politico. He listed 29 examples of civic leadership, 7 awards, and a 20-point platform for his campaign. He also managed to fit in an essay that ranges across three of the handbill’s panels. Once elected to represent his Chicago district, Savage’s pace never slackened. He considered congressional service “a vehicle to effect change,” and pressed Congress on civil rights issues during his dozen years in the House.Harold Washington’s handbill promoting his first run for the House in 1980 urges Chicagoans to “send the very best . . . why settle for less?” Thousands of words, arranged in a newspaper-style layout, detail Washington’s achievements in the state legislature and his independence from Chicago’s legendary political machine. Newspaper and union endorsements line up next to instructions on how to vote in the party primary. Washington’s appeal proved persuasive. He easily won election to two terms in the House. He cut his congressional career short, though, to become Chicago’s first African-American mayor in 1983.Check out more platforms, projects, plans, and endorsements in other handbills.
Celebrating American Archives Month | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
October is American Archives Month! This month, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art & Archives hope to inspire researchers and archivists with the stories behind the stories. Some of the best and most unique blogs originate with a curious line in a congressional document or an interesting image that begs for additional context. Members of our staff have drawn upon research experiences using House Records and other congressional documents to share how these rich resources can excite and intrigue.The Not-So-Prompt-and-Ample Relief of Polly LemonIntrigued by an early nineteenth century land claim, one of our archivists started a long journey to uncover the story of Polly Lemon, a woman determined to live near Fort Jessup in western Louisiana in 1833. Through research conducted in House Records and the collections of the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Bureau of Land Management, the archivist pieced together the history behind her land claim. The details of Polly’s plight, the geography of the region, and the role of the House all came together to give a voice to one of Congress’s many petitioners.Dial Main 3120 for MembersHarriott Daley looks into the camera. Her left hand rests on the back of an empty chair. Hired as the first Capitol switchboard operator in 1898, Daley worked connecting calls until 1945. This 1928 photo of Daley, who by then was the director of the Capitol Switchboard, inspired one researcher to explore the history of telephones at the Capitol through archival photographs and historic newspapers. The photograph even inspired the New York Times to publish a belated obituary for Daley.A Marvel among Swindles: The Louisiana State Lottery Company and the Post Office DepartmentAn abiding appreciation for the U.S. Postal Service inspired another researcher to explore a little-known connection between the House and America’s mail system. In the late 1800s, constituent letters sent to the House Committee on Post Office and Post Roads documented the negative effects of the Louisiana state lottery system, which for years had been selling lottery tickets across state lines. The interstate nature of the lottery made it subject to Congress’s oversight and the scandal eventually led to a prohibition on state lotteries for decades. The researcher used published committee reports, legislation, and debate in the Congressional Record to uncover the House’s response while also illuminating differences of opinion among Members about personal liberty and morality. Contemporaneous news stories supplemented the information in the official records.Integrating Dick and JaneThis photograph shows two Dick and Jane readers. Unlike nearly all the other photos in the House Collection, it doesn’t feature a Member of Congress or the Capitol. One researcher wondered, “how is this image related to the House?” The researcher examined other photographs, checked committee assignments, and read transcriptions from committee hearings, which revealed that the Dick and Jane books featured prominently in a congressional hearing about bias, race, and education.The Most Kissed Man in AmericaWhat explains a 35-year delay in receiving the Medal of Honor? The unusual answer to this unusual question was but one of many interesting details in the career of Alabama’s Richmond Pearson Hobson contained in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. As the Office of the Historian regularly checks and updates Member profiles in the Biographical Directory, sometimes a minor addition or curious date can prompt wholesale reassessments of a Member’s life and career. In this case, Hobson’s profile failed to capture the many colorful titles he collected over the years, including “The Most Kissed Man in America” and, years later, “The Father of Prohibition.” All of which demanded further investigation.Gone to SeedA 1920 photograph shows hundreds of mail bags in the basement of the House Office Building, now known as the Cannon House Office Building. The caption explains that the bags contained seeds for Representatives and Senators to distribute to constituents, and that each Member received 17,000 seed packets. The researcher who encountered this photograph was struck by the image but was unfamiliar with the program of congressional seed distribution. The researcher dug through historic photographs, committee reports, newspaper articles from the early 1900s, and even scans of seed packets from the National Archives to uncover the story behind a now nearly forgotten federal agricultural program.The Waste Basket CommitteeCongressional Directories are full of information. And while researchers often use Directories to find biographical information, committee assignments, and office room numbers, less obvious items occasionally stand out. One historian kept happening across a committee from the first half of the twentieth century—first in the Directories, then in committee reports—that sounded oddly passive-aggressive: the Committee on Disposition of Useless Executive Papers. The name alone unlocks curiosities. What papers were considered “useless”? Who decides what is useless? What happened to records deemed useless? What this historian learned in digging into the committee’s history is that, yes, members of this committee were often teased by their colleagues, but that they also served an important role in raising money for the federal coffers and imposing a sense of order on a government that had been growing exponentially.The Man in Black’s Tribute to the Ragged Old FlagWhile searching for images in one of the office’s publications, one researcher ran across a black-and-white photograph of the House Rostrum. Standing in front of Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts was the musician Johnny Cash. Upon closer examination, a young child and a woman in a hat sit nearby at the Clerk’s desk. The image raised a number of burning questions. With no additional clues, the researcher perused the Congressional Record for the famous singer-songwriter, narrowing the timeline to Speaker O’Neill’s tenure, and then to June 14, 1977. It was Flag Day, and the “Man in Black” was joined on the rostrum by his wife, June Carter Cash, and their young son, John Carter Cash, to pay tribute to America’s stars and stripes.For more stories like these, keep an eye on our blog, Whereas: Stories from the People’s House. If you’re looking for inspiration to pursue your own research, check out our Collections Search and Records Search.
The Rise of Speaker Longworth: Velvet on Iron | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On December 3, 1923, just hours into Opening Day of the 68th Congress (1923–1925), Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, the newly installed House Republican Leader, surveyed his fractious majority as it deadlocked over the election of the Speaker.Over the course of four votes that day, a small but determined cohort of progressive Republicans had stifled the party’s leadership, including Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts. Gillett had served as Speaker for the previous two Congresses and now sought a third term in the chair.At 3:46 p.m., however, Longworth interrupted the proceedings and moved to adjourn the House. “It seems entirely evident that no good purpose can be served by having another ballot tonight,” he said. “Our hands are tied; we have no recourse.”The clash between progressive Republicans and mainline GOP stalwarts had been years in the making and erupted as a major early test of Longworth’s leadership. But for Longworth it was also edifying and set the foundation for a period in House history in which the Speakership grew more powerful than it had in over a decade. Starting in 1923, Longworth set out to ensure that so long as he wielded power, he never lacked the recourse that seemed in short supply on that December afternoon.The ProgressivesDuring the first two decades of the twentieth century, GOP progressives had been a small but vocal minority in the House. Known popularly as “Insurgents,” they had channeled elements of the era’s wider progressive movement into a reform crusade on Capitol Hill. Across the country, progressive officials responded to industrialization, large-scale immigration, population growth, and the sudden emergence of urbanized modernity by legislating against what they considered to be the excesses of a capitalist system that empowered wealthy captains of industry at the expense of everyday farmers and laborers.In Congress, Insurgent lawmakers worked in this strain of progressivism to address unemployment and the effects of economic boom-bust cycles; labor strikes and worker protections; immigration; environmental conservation; and food and water quality issues. Progressive reformers also sought “direct democracy”—transferring political power into the hands of the popular majority and away from special interests and entrenched party bosses. Congressional Insurgents—many of whom hailed from the upper Midwest—railed against the old-guard who, they argued, were beholden to the banks, railroads, and corporations.They also sought to democratize Congress’s rules and procedures to speed the passage of reforms. In March 1910, several dozen Insurgents allied with Democrats to remove the autocratic Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois from the chairmanship of the Rules Committee, which determined the guidelines for legislative debate on the floor. That watershed event—known afterward as the “Cannon Revolt”—significantly weakened the Speakership. Within a few years, some of the Speakership’s other exclusive powers—such as legislative agenda setting and committee assignments—devolved to other entities in the House as well.Longworth’s AscendanceNick Longworth, an establishment scion, first entered the House in 1903 and came up in the cauldron of Progressive Era reforms. Though his hail-fellow-well-met demeanor masked it, Longworth had a keen political instinct.Longworth came from a wealthy family and never lacked for opportunity. He was cultured and quick witted, a virtuoso on the violin and a raconteur with expensive tastes. Longworth graduated from Harvard, and later earned a law degree from the Cincinnati School of Law in 1894. He quickly gravitated to politics. With the backing of a local Republican boss, Longworth rose through the local GOP ranks. In 1898, he won a seat on the Cincinnati board of education. A year later he moved to the Ohio house of representatives, and shortly after that to the state senate.In 1902, Longworth was elected to the House from his hometown of Cincinnati. In Congress, Longworth was known as a party stalwart and loyal follower of Uncle Joe Cannon. In 1910, he had a front row seat to Cannon’s downfall, and the experience informed Longworth’s politics going forward.Even as a rank-and-file lawmaker, Longworth enjoyed a national profile. In 1905, he married Alice Roosevelt, daughter of then-President Theodore Roosevelt. The press fawned over the union, but theirs was far from a storybook marriage or, even, political partnership. Longworth did not share Alice’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive inclinations. In 1912, Longworth supported Republican President William H. Taft in his re-election bid against Roosevelt, who had come out of retirement to run on the third-party, progressive Bull Moose ticket. Back home, Longworth also struggled against the progressive tide drawing votes from his Republican candidacy that year. On Election Day, he lost to a Democratic challenger by 101 votes.Longworth reclaimed his House seat two years later, but the 1912 election had nearly ended his marriage. Once back in the House, Longworth reclaimed his seat on the Ways and Means Committee where he became a tariff expert and sharpened his skill for finding consensus and brokering deals.In 1919, when Republicans held the House majority for the first time in a decade, Longworth orchestrated what was then the biggest deal of his career. Ahead of the Speaker election to open the new GOP majority for the 66th Congress (1919–1921), many Republicans balked at the frontrunner: James R. Mann of Illinois, the longtime GOP Leader and former close confidante to Speaker Cannon. Mann was seen as a “reactionary,” who, like Cannon, would seize the legislative process and rule arbitrarily. Although some lawmakers championed Longworth as an alternative for Speaker, Longworth threw his support behind Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts, who was once described as a “docile party elder” palatable to GOP moderates. Behind Longworth’s leadership, Gillett was elected Speaker.For his efforts, Longworth expected to secure the position of Majority Leader. But Mann managed to stack the GOP committee responsible for making party appointments with allies. Longworth received a seat on the GOP Steering Committee, but Mann’s forces anointed 58-year-old Frank Wheeler Mondell of Wyoming as Majority Leader.Revolt ReduxOver the next four years, Longworth worked to solidify support. Republicans kept the House in the 67th Congress (1921–1923), but following the 1922 elections, the GOP’s commanding 302-seat majority collapsed into a slender 225-to-207 seat advantage. The small margin meant the roughly 20 progressive Insurgents heading into the 68th Congress in December 1923 suddenly held the balance of power in the closely divided House.By Opening Day, Republican leadership also looked much different. James Mann had died and Mondell had left the House after an unsuccessful run for the Senate. With Mondell gone, Longworth claimed the Majority Leader’s office on December 1 by a nearly unanimous voice vote in the party conference. But that same day, progressives flexed their political muscle in the conference vote for the party’s nominee for Speaker. Twenty-four Republicans—including the entire Insurgent bloc—voted against the incumbent, Gillett, who was seeking a third term as Speaker. Gillett only needed a majority of the party to win the nomination, but on the House Floor he would need a majority of those in attendance. If 24 Republicans opposed his election on the floor, Gillett would lose the Speakership when the House was set to convene two days later.“We have got the votes and the House will not be organized until our demands are met,” crowed Wisconsin Representative John Nelson, the Insurgents’ leader. “I am very pleased with the situation. It is not hard to see that we hold the balance of power.”From “Blockade” to DealTwo days later, on December 3, the GOP’s long-simmering internal rift spilled into public view on the House Floor. The Republican Conference announced Gillett as its nominee; Democrats nominated Finis Garrett of Tennessee. Two other lawmakers received nominations: Insurgent Henry Allen Cooper of Wisconsin, and Republican Martin Madden of Illinois, who quickly told the House he was not a candidate for Speaker.When the balloting began neither Gillett nor Garrett cobbled together the necessary votes to win. The first ballot resulted in 198 votes for Gillett, 195 for the Garrett, 17 for Cooper, and five for Madden; four Members voted “present.”The entire 11-man Wisconsin delegation (10 Republicans and one Socialist) withheld its support from Gillett: nine voted for Cooper; Cooper and Victor Berger, the Milwaukee Socialist, voted present. Six Minnesotans (four Republicans and two Farmer Laborites) joined the Wisconsin renegades in supporting Cooper, as well as North Dakota Republican James Sinclair, and the only Insurgent from outside the Upper Midwest, New York Republican Fiorello La Guardia.The House held three more votes for Speaker that day, but the bloc stayed intact. After nearly four hours, the House adjourned until noon the following day. The Baltimore Sun noted that the Insurgents “have proved today that they have mastered the art of blockade.” The next day, December 4, saw four more inconclusive votes in a two-and-a-half-hour session.Later that evening, Longworth hosted Representative Nelson in his office for two hours where they brokered a truce. The pair made for an odd couple—the aristocratic Cincinnatian bedecked in formal evening attire, and the sturdy Nelson whom a reporter described as just “one of ‘the boys’” and “an amicable, bald-headed, sandyish man of Scandinavian origin, agreeable of voice and handshake.”In exchange for the Insurgents’ votes, Longworth suggested the House would operate under the old rules from the prior Congress for a 30-day period, during which time rank-and-file Members could offer amendments to the new rules which would be debated and receive a vote on the House Floor. Longworth promised only votes, and there was no guarantee that the progressives would win their desired results. But for Nelson, that was enough.When Nelson announced the deal on the floor the next day, Democrats ridiculed it. John Nance Garner of Texas—one of Longworth’s drinking pals and a future Speaker himself—asked the Majority Leader if Nelson’s summary was correct. “I am in accord with the interpretation,” Longworth replied.Turning to Nelson, Garner asked with mock incredulity if he “willingly submitted to this outrage?”Cooper, the grizzled House veteran, rose from his seat to explain the Insurgents’ objective by recalling when he and other progressives had ousted Cannon from the chairmanship of the Rules Committee. Cooper said the Cannon Revolt occurred “not because any of us had ceased to be Republicans, not because any of us were anarchists, and not because any of us, as some of the papers have been saying, are bandits; not at all, but simply because we wished to give the Representatives of the American people on this floor an opportunity to represent the constituents who honored them by sending them here.”That same spirit, Cooper insisted, lay behind their effort in 1923. “All that we have sought to do was to secure a reasonable and fair opportunity to propose amendments to the rules,” Cooper said, “not to coerce amendments, not to demand amendments, but to present amendments, and to have a reasonable and fair discussion of our proposals in this Chamber. That is all. That is representative government, and anything else is tyranny.”Following Cooper’s remarks, the House proceeded to its ninth ballot for Speaker. The Insurgents rejoined the GOP fold, giving Gillett the votes he needed to win, 215 to 197.An Uneasy AllianceIn the end, both progressive and mainline Republicans seemed placated. The Insurgents would have their shot at amendments. And Nelson won a spot on the Rules Committee, giving him influence over which bills made it to the floor and the terms of debate. Among the rules reforms that soon passed was a modified discharge petition requirement, championed by progressives, that significantly lowered the threshold required to wrest bills out of the hands of obstinate committees and bring them onto the floor for debate by the full House.For his part, Longworth burnished the powers of the Majority Leader’s office. And as House Republicans proceeded to enact their legislative agenda, Longworth boasted that the negotiations among his conference paled in comparison to the situation in the Senate, where Insurgents and regulars would clash for another month. Longworth noted his House majority was ready to act. “We can go ahead in this session and do the business of the people so satisfactorily,” Longworth forecasted, “that it will be admitted from now on that the House is the real medium for the translation into legislation of the hopes and desires of the American people.”When the House began to churn out legislation at a much faster clip than in previous Congresses, the press applauded him for overseeing the House’s transformation into “one of the most efficient legislative machines in contemporary American history.”The deal Longworth cut with the Insurgents had elevated his already considerable public profile. His velvet diplomatic touch had pacified the progressive holdouts. But soon another test—one that revealed his steely resolve—lay ahead.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 68th Cong., 1st sess. (5 December 1923): 5–15; Baltimore Sun, 4 December 1923; Boston Daily Globe, 9 December 1923; New York Times, 2, 5, 16, and 23 December 1923; Washington Post, 4 December 1923; Donald C. Bacon, “Longworth, Nicholas,” in American National Biography 13 (New York: Oxford University Press); Donald C. Bacon, “Nicholas Longworth: The Genial Czar,” in Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership over Two Centuries, ed. Roger H. Davidson, Susan Webb Hammond, and Raymond W. Smock (New York: Westview Press, 1998); David T. Canon et al., Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789–1946, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002); Richard B. Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney, Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1983); Stacey A. Cordery, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (New York: Viking, 2007); Clara Longworth De Chambrun, The Making of Nicholas Longworth: Annals of an American Family (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933); Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1998); Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House, Inc., 2003); Scott William Rager, “Uncle Joe Cannon: The Brakeman of the House of Representatives, 1903–1911,” in Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership over Two Centuries, ed. Roger H. Davidson, Susan Webb Hammond, and Raymond W. Smock (New York: Westview Press, 1998); David Thelen, Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1976); Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob LaFollette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
“¡Unidos!”: Building a Hispanic American Political Coalition | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In October 1971, more than a thousand people from across the country descended upon Washington, DC, on a mission to transform U.S. politics. They were Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and members of other Hispanic-American communities. They had been called to the nation’s capital in part by two visionary lawmakers—Representative Edward Roybal of California and Representative Herman Badillo of New York—with the goal of assembling their political forces into a “National Spanish-Speaking Coalition.”At the “Unidos Conference,” as the event came to be called, Roybal and Badillo helped begin building bridges between diverse constituencies. While it has become commonplace in the twenty-first century to refer to a national “Latino vote,” prior to that weekend in 1971 there had been few efforts to bring the country’s Hispanic Americans under a common electoral umbrella.For Roybal and Badillo, such a “united political front,” as Badillo called it, was an urgent necessity. While the 1960s had ushered in major civil rights changes, Badillo saw the era as a time of dashed optimism. Badillo lamented that the country’s “Spanish-speaking people” faced “continuous deterioration” in their circumstances. But he and Roybal also saw tantalizing possibilities in the growing Hispanic-American populations strategically located in large Electoral College states such as California, Texas, and New York. By joining together, the lawmakers believed, these constituencies could exert significant influence over American politics, and even have the power to pick the president in the upcoming 1972 election. With that kind of clout, came the ability to shake government from what they called its “apathy” and force Washington to address their people’s many persistent needs.Roybal, Badillo, and UnityFor many years, a number of hurdles had prevented an event like the Unidos Conference from taking place. One issue was distance. The main populations of Hispanic national origin groups were concentrated in different regions of the country. Mexican Americans were most populous in the Southwest, and gaining clout in places such as Los Angeles and San Antonio; Puerto Ricans in the Northeast, particularly in New York City; and Cubans in Florida, especially Miami. Physical separation reinforced in these communities vital and distinct identities, rooted not just in their place of residence, but also in their attachment to different homelands and cultures.Another issue was the lack of interest among America’s elected officials. Leaders of major political parties occasionally tried to coordinate their outreach to these varied communities. But until Roybal and Badillo made the effort in 1971, political leaders more often resisted encouraging Hispanic-American collaboration, lest they have another empowered minority group, like African-American voters, to which they would be compelled to answer.Roybal and Badillo, both pathbreaking lawmakers, saw past the hurdles and envisioned what could be. Roybal was then in his fifth term representing Los Angeles, and in 1962 had become the first Mexican American elected to the House from California in the twentieth century. Badillo had just been elected to represent a New York City district in 1970, becoming the first Puerto Rican ever to hold a voting seat in Congress. Having met in the House, the two Democratic politicians began exploring what it would take to forge their distinct communities into a single voting bloc.True national influence, they believed, required a real reckoning within and across the country’s Hispanic-American communities. And as they saw it, such a transformation required a forum like the Unidos Conference for that process to begin to unfold. The Representatives especially wanted Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, the two largest Hispanic-American populations, to discover common political interests, much as they themselves had in the House Chamber.The packed conference opened on Friday, October 22, 1971. Roybal laid down the task before the assembly, stating that the time had come for moving beyond “differences in ideology, status or party affiliation.” He implored his audience, which included activists, educators, public employees, and elected officials, to discard the “envidias [jealousies]” that had left the nation’s Spanish-speaking people politically divided.Participants who had crowded into the conference venue from areas as diverse as the mountains of New Mexico and the streets of Chicago met, most for the first time, and developed new friendships and alliances as they discussed and debated how they could—or if they should—work together. The attendees succeeded in passing resolutions addressing several policies of shared interest: bilingual education, affirmative action, and anti-poverty initiatives, as well as calling for an end to the Vietnam War. Perfect unanimity was impossible, of course, and Roybal and Badillo, seeking to maintain control of the proceedings, tried to limit discussion of potentially controversial subjects. This meant they worked to exclude or defeat proposals on matters such as Puerto Rican independence and the creation of a third political party to challenge Democrats and Republicans. The lawmakers also unsuccessfully resisted a push, coming from the conference’s leftist participants, to exclude Cubans from the coalition on the theory that their priorities and perspectives did not align with those of the combined Mexican-American and Puerto Rican majority.While such disputes revealed the challenges inherent in creating a cohesive “Spanish-speaking” political coalition, many in attendance would have agreed with one participant who observed that “history was made” that weekend. They would have nodded at the words of another, who remarked that “the simple fact that two thousand people, separated ideologically and ethnically came together for a common goal, which was unity, and attained it, marks that occasion as a success.” Indeed, there was no dispelling the broader impulse to unite the country’s Hispanic Americans under a common political standard. Because of the work of Roybal and Badillo and the Unidos Conference of 1971, the idea of a nationwide “Spanish-speaking vote” entered the political lexicon. It has been a defining feature of American democracy ever since.Learn more about the history of Hispanic-American congressional representation in our online exhibit: Hispanic Americans in Congress.Sources: Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1971; New York Times, 30 September 1971; Benjamin Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
Edition for Educators—Congressional Primary Sources 102 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Did you ace our first “course” on congressional primary sources? This blog shows you where to find documents, artwork, and oral histories about Congress for your research. It also gives you a tour of classroom resources, like primary source sets and graphic organizers, to enrich your research experience. Whether you are a teacher, student, researcher, or congressional staff member, these primary sources are available for you to use.Primary Source Sets and Classroom ResourcesPrimary sources are firsthand accounts that provide glimpses into history. By exploring and analyzing primary sources, students can better understand historic events, American culture, perspectives, and the House. Check out our primary source sets and classroom-ready resources, including graphic organizers.Featured Primary Source Set: Westward ExpansionExplore the growth of the United States with this primary source set on westward expansion. This educational resource includes a selection of House records and images, as well as a brief contextual essay, activities, and questions to facilitate student discussion and analysis. We invite you to download these materials for classroom use.A Student’s Guide: Art and Artifacts in the House ChamberThe House Chamber is a place where the House of Representatives meets. This guide, especially for students and teachers, shows the art and artifacts of the chamber. Come take a look around!Records SearchExplore the U.S. House of Representatives through Records Search, a thoughtfully chosen collection of primary sources. Records Search contains a selection of the millions of pages of official archival records of committees and officers that highlight key historical moments and provide institutional and functional context about the House.You can download PDFs of each record and find transcriptions for handwritten documents. If you are interested in specific topics, from agriculture to constitutional amendments to investigations, browse the PDF list of related subjects on the Records and Research home page.Featured Record: National Defense Education ActThe National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed in 1958 in response to Soviet acceleration of the space race with the launch of the satellite Sputnik. The law provided federal funding to “insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.” In addition to fellowships and loans to students, the legislation bolstered education in the areas of science, mathematics, and modern foreign languages.Oral History SearchLearn about the history of the U.S. House of Representatives through the perspectives of those who lived it. The oral history program provides a vivid picture of the inner workings of Congress during some of the most influential times in our country’s modern history. These interviews discuss the people, events, institutions, and objects of the ever-evolving House of Representatives. Audio and video clips and transcriptions of interviews are available.Featured Oral History: A Fast-Growing DistrictThe Honorable Shelley Berkley details the challenges of campaigning in a transient district.Collections SearchExplore the House of Representatives through its collection of art and artifacts—paintings, sculpture, and historic artifacts, dating from the 18th to the 21st centuries.Featured Collection Object: Bill HopperRepresentatives introduce bills by placing them in the bill hopper attached to the side of the Clerk’s desk in the Chamber. The term derives from a funnel-shaped storage bin filled from the top and emptied from the bottom, which is often used to house grain or coal. Bills are retrieved from the hopper and referred to committees with the appropriate jurisdiction. The hopper shown here became part of the House Collection of Art and Artifacts after it was retired in 2003.Primary Source VideosFind educational videos about documents and photographs, newsreel footage of the 1954 shooting in the House Chamber, audio clips from a Page School graduation ceremony, and more on the Multimedia section of our website.Featured Video: A Closer Look: The Debate over ProhibitionExplore how Americans felt about wartime Prohibition by comparing and contrasting two letters sent to Congresspeople in the spring of 1917, when World War I was raging in Europe.BlogsFascinating stories emerge from the analysis of primary sources. Our blog regularly features compelling narratives and behind-the-scenes accounts drawn from research in records, oral histories, photographs, art, and artifacts.Featured Blog: “Somebody Was Going to Be the First”During the 1970s, amid the women’s liberation movement, women across the country fought for equal rights and for a louder voice in the decision-making process on a wide range of domestic and international issues. Capitol Hill also became more diverse, as women of color—Members and staff alike—won election to and took jobs in the House, changing a powerful workplace which had been dominated by White men since its inception.Featured Blog: The “Very Deserving Case” of Harriet TubmanA legendary figure in American history, Harriet Tubman’s story is well-known and widely celebrated. But her struggle, ultimately unsuccessful, to be compensated by the federal government for her service during the Civil War is less well-known. In 1865, after three years of dedicated service to the United States Army as a nurse, spy, and soldier, she started a long quest to secure the compensation she never received from the government.Featured Blog: Southwest from the CapitolIn 1877, when this photograph was taken, most sightseers never visited this part of the city. But behind the scenes, Washington’s smallest quadrant kept the metropolis humming, and its residents fought for recognition. Take a closer look to see what the tourists missed.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
National History Day 2024: “Turning Points” | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The History, Art & Archives team has gathered resources based on this year’s National History Day (NHD) theme to inspire and assist student researchers with choosing their project. The material highlights turning points in American history with a focus on the U.S. House of Representatives.This year’s page organizes resources on the “History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House” website by historical eras—loosely corresponding with the National Archives’ DocsTeach—from the nation’s founding to the contemporary era. It also highlights lawmakers whose elections marked a turning point in representation. Students are encouraged to pull from a variety of primary and secondary resources from across the website.Turning Points in RepresentationAs the country grew and changed, the U.S. House of Representatives expanded beyond its original Membership and came to better represent the nation’s diverse citizenry. From the first Black-American legislator elected to the House in 1870 to the first Hispanic-American woman to join the chamber in 1989, lawmakers from every era brought their unique legislative interests and insights to Capitol Hill.Turning Points by EraNew Nation: 1774–1862 During this formative period, America achieved and defended its independence, established a new government, expanded geographically, and created economic opportunities. But the growth and development which defined this era came at an overwhelming human cost: by 1860, four million enslaved men, women, and children lived in southern states and western territories.Civil War & Reconstruction: 1860–1889 The Civil War era was a significant turning point in American history. Explore the secession of southern states, the legislative actions that shaped Reconstruction, the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, the admission of western states to the Union, or the military service of Harriet Tubman, Sarah Seelye, Clara Barton, or future Representative Robert Smalls of South Carolina.Emergence of Modern America: 1890–1930 At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States fought a war with Spain and acquired territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Constitutional amendments related to women’s suffrage and prohibition marked key moments in the early twentieth century.Great Depression & World War II: 1929–1945 The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 caused financial ruin across America. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act gave rights to workers and outlawed child labor. Then, after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war against Japan. During World War II, the United States incarcerated Japanese Americans in internment camps.Postwar: 1945–1967After World War II, the United States engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, a great power struggle animated by the competing political ideologies of liberal capitalism and communism. At home, everyday Americans advocated and won expanded civil rights. Hawaii achieved statehood in 1959. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy stunned the nation. In in 1964 and 1965, Congress passed landmark legislation to protect the rights of Black Americans.Contemporary: 1970–2001 In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s involvement covering up a break-in at the Democratic National Committee precipitated the Watergate Scandal, leading to an impeachment inquiry and Nixon’s resignation. Following Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, many Americans called for greater accountability and for reforms across the government. Meanwhile, policymakers looked for ways to lower spending and reduce taxes. As the Cold War receded with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil shook the nation and forced it to confront new international threats.Students and teachers are encouraged to use the additional resources listed on our NHD page as a launching point for further primary source research.We hope this year’s NHD inspires students to learn more about the role the U.S. House of Representatives plays in American history. Got questions? Email us at history@mail.house.gov.
Recent Artifacts Online, Fall 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Have a laugh with some newly digitized objects from the House Collection. This season, we are featuring cartoons from the pen of distinguished children’s book illustrator Aurelius Battaglia. Years before his work with Little Golden Books, young Battaglia cut his teeth drawing witty caricatures of politicians, an endeavor he continued for decades.Scott FerrisIn the early days of his career, artist Aurelius Battaglia gained acclaim around his native Washington, DC, as a political caricaturist for the Washington Star newspaper, creating drawings like this example of Representative Scott Ferris of Oklahoma. Battaglia studied at the Corcoran School of Art and drew cartoons for several publications—including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Reporter magazine. However, his career soon took a more whimsical direction. In 1934, Battaglia completed a WPA mural with a circus theme for the Mount Pleasant branch of the DC Public Library. A few years later, Battaglia moved west, working with The Walt Disney Studios on the animated films Dumbo, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. He later became a children’s book illustrator.Jouett ShouseRepresentative Jouett Shouse’s long face and wire-rimmed glasses made this cartoon of him easily recognizable to political enthusiasts in the early 20th century. Battaglia paired Shouse’s broad white expanse of jowls with riots of pattern above and below. A striped shirt, serpentine-patterned tie, and windowpane jacket all fight for supremacy at the bottom of the drawing, while Shouse’s hair and wrinkled brow swoop in opposite directions.CandidacyDemocratic Party Chairman John Raskob pulled a group of political aspirants toward the presidency in this 1932 cartoon. Speaker of the House Jack Garner was among the group depicted in the donkey’s saddle. Here, Battaglia had little room to identify the candidates, but he managed to work in Garner’s bushy eyebrows, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s jutting chin, and Albert Ritchie’s commitment to ending Prohibition, symbolized by the bottle of alcohol he offers the donkey.Edgar HowardEdgar Howard first came to Washington as a secretary for William Jennings Bryan, and he later represented a Nebraska district in the House from 1923 until 1935. Battaglia depicted Howard wearing what newspapers described as his “picturesque” personal style, which included a tailcoat, black bow tie, and shoulder-length hair. Howard served as chair of the Committee on Indian Affairs from 1931 until 1934.There are even more Aurelius Battaglia cartoons to savor here:For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.
Edition for Educators—Introduction to House History Publications | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The History, Art & Archives Offices have produced several publications on the history of the institution and the people who’ve served in its halls. This Edition for Educators provides a brief overview of a selection of publications, as well as unique supplemental resources for each publication available on the History, Art and Archives website.The People’s House: A Guide to Its History, Spaces, and TraditionsA century ago, William Tyler Page, an innovative Clerk with decades of experience in the House, held the first new-Member orientation, what one observer called a “training school” for first-term legislators. Since 1921, the orientation experience has evolved considerably. This booklet, which was debuted during orientation for the 116th Congress (2019–2021), provides a brief overview of the House’s history, its people, geography, artwork, and proceedings; it serves as an ideal place to start learning about the House of Representatives.Web Extra A Student’s Guide: Art and Artifacts in the House Chamber This annotated view of the chamber identifies and explains various items key to the legislative process that are found in the House Chamber. The answers to many commonly asked questions about the House Floor can be found here.“A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House SpeakershipThe Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives was the first federal office created in the Constitution and has been at the forefront of America’s nation-building for more than two centuries. As the head of America’s popularly elected branch of government, the Office of the Speaker has shaped and has been shaped by the democratic forces coursing through the country. It is impossible to separate the Speakership from the people it serves and the history they share.This booklet is about the individuals who served as Speaker and the contours and rhythms of their office. It is a story about the constellation of political movements, lawmakers, aides, and everyday people who have shaped the Speakership in myriad ways. In large measure, the history of the Speakership is also a history of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it is ultimately a history of America and its experiment in democratic self-government.Web Extra Speakers of the House Blog Posts For more than two centuries, the Speaker of the House has wielded significant influence over House proceedings. Interested readers can go deeper into the trials and travails of the Speakership in this series of blogs focused on the House’s constitutional leader. Learn about “Uncle Joe” Cannon’s love of fast cars, Henry Clay’s distaste for dogs on the House Floor, and a cross-party friendship on the rostrum.Women in CongressOn April 2, 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana took the oath of office as a Member of the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to serve in Congress. At the time, women had not yet won a Constitutional right to vote. In the 106 years since, from Rankin’s swearing-in to August 2023, a total of 424 women have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, Resident Commissioners, or Senators.First published as a booklet for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, Women in Congress has since been revised and expanded multiple times to better explore the history of women’s representation in Congress. The most recent edition, published in 2020, features four historical essays arranged chronologically alongside accompanying profiles of contemporary Members of Congress and multiple appendices.Web Extra Oral History: A Century of Women in Congress To commemorate the centennial of Jeannette Rankin's November 1916 election and April 1917 swearing-in as a U.S. Representative, the Office of the House Historian conducted oral histories with former women Members, staff, and family. Drawn from decades of congressional experience, the interviews in this ongoing project convey a larger narrative about the transformative role of women in American politics and their contributions to Congress during the past century. Learn more about this project."Women Must Be Empowered": The U.S. House of Representatives and the Nineteenth AmendmentHouse Joint Resolution 1 was one of more than 1,200 pieces of legislation introduced on Opening Day of the 66th Congress (1919–1921), May 19, 1919. Most were mundane; H.J. Res. 1 was anything but. This booklet (PDF), produced for the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, tells the story of how the U.S. House of Representatives passed the resolution which at long last guaranteed women the right to vote nationwide.Black Americans in CongressOn December 12, 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina was sworn in as the first Black Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Newspapers across the nation announced Rainey’s historic accomplishment. Born enslaved, Rainey was an advocate for Black civil and political rights, a hard-working legislator, and the longest-serving Black Member of Congress in the nineteenth century. To date, a total of 187 African Americans have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, or Senators.Produced shortly after the American bicentennial, the first edition of Black Americans in Congress highlighted the careers of the 45 African-American lawmakers who had served in Congress up to that point in a straightforward résumé-style format. The most recent edition, published earlier this year, continues to build on that foundation with historical essays that expand the story of Black Americans in Congress beyond Capitol Hill, to include a national story of electoral triumphs and occasional setbacks, hard-won victories and long periods of political exclusion in states and towns across the country.Web Extra The Long Struggle for Representation: Oral Histories of African Americans in Congress On December 12, 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina was sworn-in as the first African-American Member elected to the United States House of Representatives. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of this landmark in congressional history, the Office of the Historian has conducted oral histories with African-American Members, staff, and family. The interviews in this ongoing project provide firsthand accounts of the African-American experience on Capitol Hill since the 1950s—a period of dramatic change when Black Members were able to build seniority, shape legislation, and secure leadership positions. Learn more about this project."We Are In Earnest For Our Rights": Representative Joseph H. Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction Joseph Rainey, who became the first African-American Representative in December 1870, navigated a unique path from slave to citizen to Representative. An ardent defender of Black civil and political rights, Rainey directly challenged the calcified traditions of American politics and society. Produced to honor the 150th anniversary of Rainey’s election and arrival in Congress, this booklet (PDF) offers more context on the pioneering legislator and his fellow nineteenth-century Black Representatives’ fight for Reconstruction.Hispanic Americans in CongressOn September 30, 1822, Joseph M. Hernández began his service in the House as Florida’s first Territorial Delegate, becoming the first Hispanic-American to serve in Congress. Many early Latino Representatives had brief careers on Capitol Hill, often of a more diplomatic than legislative nature. But the career trajectories of Hispanic Members have undergone extensive change during the span of nearly two centuries. As of the 118th Congress (2023–2025), 154 Hispanic Americans have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, Resident Commissioners, or Senators. The most recent edition of this book, published in 2014, covers nearly 200 years of Hispanic representation in essays, biographical profiles, and appendices.Web Extra An Oral History with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen After fleeing Cuba’s communist government with her family as a child and settling in Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen went on to become a teacher and principal before serving in the Florida state house and senate. In 1989, she made history as the first Latina elected to Congress. During her 15 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, Ros-Lehtinen focused on international relations and became the first woman to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee. Listen to Representative Ros-Lehtinen discuss her historic career in her own words in the oral history clips below.Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in CongressOn December 15, 1900, two weeks into the second session of the 56th Congress (1899–1901), Delegate Pedro Perea of New Mexico escorted a tall man with a handlebar moustache into the well of the U.S. House of Representatives. Facing the marble rostrum, Robert W. Wilcox, the son of a New England sea captain and a Native-Hawaiian mother, took the oath of office as the first Delegate from the Territory of Hawaii. The history contained in Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress, 1900–2017 begins in Hawaii and the Philippines before expanding to address national growth in Asian and Pacific Islander representation in historical essays, biographical narratives, and selected appendices. As of 2023, a total of 70 Asian and Pacific Americans have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, Resident Commissioners, or Senators.Web Extra Asian-American Member Artifacts in the House Collection History of the House Page ProgramFor more than two centuries, young people served as Pages in the U.S. House of Representatives and enjoyed an unparalleled opportunity to observe and participate in the legislative process in “the People’s House.” The expectations and experiences of House Pages, regardless of when they served, have been linked by certain commonalities—witnessing history, interacting with Representatives, and taking away lifelong inspiration to participate in civic life. This booklet, produced following the end of the House Page program in 2011, recounts the origins and development of the program that provided many American youth a unique glimpse into the national legislature.Web Extra Oral History: House Pages Eyewitnesses to both ordinary proceedings and monumental events, Pages played an important role in the House of Representatives from the earliest Congresses. Learn about the institution through the eyes of the young messengers who ran errands for Members and assisted in floor operations. John David Dingell Jr., who went on to become the longest-serving Member of Congress, described his experience as a House Page in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a unique educational opportunity.Download and/or Request our PublicationsThese and other publications can all be requested or accessed through the History, Art and Archives website. While certain print editions are available only in limited quantities, this page directs interested readers to sources for web or e-versions of each publication.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
The Legacy of a Lie, Part 2: Injuries—Political and Physical | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
This is the second part of a two-part story. The first part discussed the origins of the incident.When William S. Moore, a visitor to the Capitol from Kentucky, fired a gun near the House Chamber doors on April 23, 1844, wounding Capitol Police Officer John L. Wirt, 20 years of conspiracies and resentment over the election of 1824 collided with a culture of political violence that had grown increasingly routine on Capitol Hill.For two decades, the belief that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay had engaged in a “corrupt bargain” to capture the presidency from Andrew Jackson stirred considerable passion in the House. Jackson’s adherents had, for years, alleged that in the disputed presidential election of 1824, then-Speaker Clay cut a quid pro quo deal with then-candidate Adams, tilting the contest that the House decided in Adams’s favor.When Democrats dredged up the accusation in the spring of 1844 to undercut Clay’s candidacy as the Whig presidential nominee, the House descended into fisticuffs when former Speaker John White of Kentucky and George Rathbun of New York punched and shoved one another, leading to a chaotic scene punctuated by a gunshot and bloodshed. The episode altered the course of some participants’ lives. Lawmakers launched an investigation into what happened, but it did little to diffuse the combustible atmosphere of political upheaval in the House in the decades leading up to the Civil War.Aftermath and InquiryFortunately, the gun Moore had pulled from his breast-pocket and fired near the rear doorway from the House Post Office into the chamber was a single-shot pistol. And the quick response by bystanders meant Moore had no time to reload.When Representative William McCauslen of Ohio heard Moore’s gun discharge, he wheeled about from the rear of the chamber and raced through the door. McCauslen tackled Moore to the ground and grabbed him by the throat. Meanwhile, General Henry Dodge, a strapping frontiersman and Wisconsin’s Territorial Delegate, wrested the gun from Moore. A veteran of the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War in 1832, Dodge held back a crowd that “seemed disposed to offer violence to Moore,” until the House Sergeant at Arms, Newton Lane, took him into custody.Officer Wirt, struck by the single round from Moore’s gun as he came through the doorway toward the Post Office, lay collapsed, grasping his upper-right thigh. Wirt was carried off to a surgeon who attended to his grievous wound—the projectile had shattered the policeman’s femur a few inches below the hip. It was the first line-of-duty injury to an officer that anyone could recall in the force’s 17-year history.When proceedings resumed on the House Floor, George C. Dromgoole, a Virginia Democrat, urged the House to direct Sergeant at Arms Lane to arrest former Speaker White and Representative Rathbun and bring them before the bar of the House to explain their actions.White seethed, replying that Dromgoole’s suggestion was “without a precedent” in House history. No Member had ever dared “moved to degrade his fellow members by a proposition to take him into custody.” But after a long back-and-forth between Dromgoole and the former Speaker, White and Rathbun exchanged conciliatory words and shook hands as colleagues applauded. For some lawmakers, including John Quincy Adams, then in his seventh term from Massachusetts, the handshake was enough to settle the issue. But Democrats demanded an investigation. This included Jacob Thompson of Mississippi who not only wanted to examine who precipitated the fight, but how a pistol-wielding visitor reached the House Floor. The injury to the Capitol Police officer, Thompson reminded colleagues, “was the ugliest circumstance connected with the affair.” After all, Thompson intoned, “That two members of the House, in the sudden excitement of feeling, should strike at each other, would not create so much surprise . . . but that an individual admitted into the hall should shoot at one of the members,” well, that was another proposition entirely.The House—after looking to what it had done following previous Member-on-Member altercations—created a select investigatory committee to determine what exactly had transpired. The House assigned three members to the select committee: three Jacksonian Democrats—Dromgoole, Romulus Saunders of North Carolina, and Reuben Chapman of Alabama—and two Whigs—John Quincy Adams and John Hardin of Illinois. The following afternoon, the five legislators met in the Judiciary Committee’s chambers. Adams quickly surmised that Democrats “were intent upon turning this quarrel into a party engine” and predicted that Democrats would try to use the select committee to embarrass White and, by extension, candidate Clay. Wanting no part of the select committee, Adams requested the House remove him from the committee, which it did.Adams dismissed it as a “new-vamped old slander,” a calculated effort at “blowing the coals up to kindle again into a flame to consume Clay’s election hopes and my honest fame.” On May 6, Representative Saunders delivered the select committee’s report to the House that it had compiled from nearly three dozen witness interviews. The Democrats’ majority report could not help but highlight White’s harsh language against Rathbun that he’d uttered in a low voice before the fight broke out: “The committee consider themselves, under this branch of the resolution of the House, as without authority to make any recommendation, or to submit any direct proposition as regards this particular case. But they feel themselves especially constrained to express, in the most decided and explicit terms of reprehension, the use of language on the floor of the House calculated to irritate and provoke, and leading to direct breaches of the peace.”The select committee ultimately decided it lacked the authority to recommend the expulsion or censure for the combatants and resolved only to give Moore over to the custody of the DC police (with the House agreeing to do so). White strenuously objected to the report’s accusation that he’d cursed at Rathbun, leading the House to debate the issue for four hours before exhausted Members demanded to hold the matter over to another day.By May 16, when the select committee’s report formally came up for debate, White seemed content to defend his honor indefinitely, but other lawmakers had wearied of the issue. A New Jersey Democrat, Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus Elmer—believing that the House must act to vindicate its honor in the eyes of the nation—offered a resolution censuring both Rathbun and White. But John B. Weller, an Ohio Democrat, sensing his colleagues’ impatience moved that the House table both the report and Elmer’s censure resolution, which it did in short order, 82 to 73. With that, the House moved on without ever addressing the fight, Officer Wirt’s injury, or chamber security generally.Six months later, in November 1844, Henry Clay narrowly lost the presidency to Democrat James K. Polk. The contest between the two former Speakers was narrow; Polk edged out Clay by a little more than 38,000 votes. But, in carrying the key state of New York, Polk secured a comfortable Electoral College win, 170 to 105. The corrupt bargain charge may have mattered to Jacksonian diehards, but slavery proved to be the thorniest issue for Clay. Whigs questioned the commitment of the slaveholding Kentuckian to stopping slavery’s westward progression; and Clay, who tried to cast himself as an opponent of slavery to reassure doubters, alienated southern voters.Representatives White, Rathbun, and McCauslenWhat happened to the combatants and others ensnared in the 1844 floor fight and its fallout? John White did not seek re-election to the House in 1844, and left the House a month before the 28th Congress (1843–1845) concluded in March 1845. Highly regarded among his Kentucky constituents—according to one account the former Speaker was “cool, determined, self-poised, brave”—White returned home to Richmond, Kentucky, where he had accepted a gubernatorial appointment as a circuit court judge in the state’s nineteenth judicial district. He served in that capacity for a little more than seven months and in that time, noted the editors of the Nashville Republican Banner, “increased his previous reputation by the manner in which he discharged the duties of his judicial station.” But plagued by poor health, and according to news accounts “great depression of spirits,” he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on September 22, 1845.Like White, Democrat William McCauslen did not run for re-election to the 29th Congress (1845–1847), and left the House in March 1845. A little more than a year later, McCauslen was commissioned as a captain in the Ohio Third Infantry Regiment and served as the “commissary of subsistence” (food supply officer) when the unit participated in America’s war with Mexico. His regiment was part of the “Army of the Rio Grande,” under the command of General Zachary Taylor. By one account, it participated in multiple skirmishes and largely protected the main Army’s wagon-train supply routes. Sixty-four of its men were killed in action before it was mustered out of existence in June 1847. McCauslen, who lived to tell about his experiences, never again held public office. He returned to Ohio where he lived into his late-60s, dying in his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, in 1863.George Rathbun served another term in the 29th Congress, in which he chaired the powerful Judiciary Committee. During the 29th Congress, lawmakers declared war on Mexico in May 1846, and Rathbun’s Judiciary Committee helped craft legislation making the Wisconsin Territory a state, as well as another bill admitting the Iowa Territory to the Union. Rathbun did not run for re-election in 1846, and retired the end of the Congress. He returned home to Auburn, New York, recommencing his private law practice for more than two decades. Like so many nineteenth-century citizen-Representatives who served a brief time in the House, Rathbun never again held public office. He died in New York in 1870.William S. MooreWilliam Moore, whom Congress had remanded to the custody of the DC Police, stood trial more than eight months after discharging his weapon in the chamber lobby. He was indicted in the city’s criminal court on two charges: assault with intent to kill Representative McCauslen; and assault on Officer Wirt. The case was held on January 9, 1845. The daylong proceeding included numerous witnesses who testified before a packed court room. The jury began to deliberate late that afternoon and within an hour found Moore guilty of a simple assault on McCauslen but acquitted him on the counts of attempted murder and, inexplicably, on the assault charge on Wirt.After his trial, Moore essentially disappears from the historical record—and it is unclear how much time, if any, he served in prison for his actions.The editors of the Daily Ohio Statesman, criticized the trial, and put its frustration to verse:The history we write, On this fine winter night, Of the innocent spite, With the White House in sight, And the terrible plight, On the left and the right, As they mix’d in the fight Between Rathburn [sic] of York State and Ex-Speaker White.John L. WirtFor one individual, however, the fallout from the floor flight shaped the rest of his life. Officer Wirt survived his wound but was confined to bed for months. On May 15, 1844, on a motion from Democrat John B. Weller of Ohio, the House agreed unanimously to allot $150 to Wirt “for expenses incurred by him in consequence of his receiving a wound while attending to his duties in the Capitol.”But Wirt, the father of three children under the age of six at the time of the shooting, never fully recovered from his wound. Multiple surgeries failed to remove the bullet lodged in his hip, and according to graphic affidavits from doctors, Members, and colleagues, he never healed. Wirt later petitioned the House to provide him a pension because of his injury. The referral went to the Committee on Accounts, which managed the House’s contingent fund and some of the chamber’s administrative functions. The committee reported back to the House “beyond a doubt, that a permanent disability has grown out of the wound received” in the line of duty, “which is wasting away the life of the petitioner.” The Accounts Committee, however, believed it lacked the jurisdiction to grant such a request, and reported the petition adversely to the House. But the committee also reported that its members “cannot refrain from saying that they think the case calls for the attention of Congress, and that the petitioner is worthy of relief.” Still, Congress never approved money or a pension for Wirt. In fact, his children appear to have continued to petition the House for relief until the mid-1880s.After his injury, Wirt remained on the Capitol Police force for more than a decade, as colleagues admired his grit for fulfilling his official duties despite being in constant pain from his wound. He also endured at least two more physical assaults while in uniform in 1851 and 1852. When off duty, Wirt remained active, winning local notoriety for his horticultural pursuits, namely growing apricots that were “blushingly beautiful and peach-like in appearance.” He was also elected to at least one term as an alderman in the city’s fifth ward which encompassed what is now the entire Capitol campus, stretching south from Union Station to the present-day Nationals’ ballpark. For a while, he ran a boardinghouse with his wife, Rebecca, in the 300-block of North Capitol Street. John Wirt died suddenly in mid-November 1857, at age 47. He is buried alongside Rebecca (who died two years later) in Congressional Cemetery in what is now known as Hill East, where Capitol Hill slopes to the west bank of the Anacostia River.Sources: House Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Circumstances of the Rencounter on the Floor of the House of Representatives between Two of Its Members, to wit: Mr. White and Mr. Rathbun, and Other Matters Embraced in the Resolution of the House, Rencounter Between Messrs. White and Rathbun, 28th Cong., 1st sess. (6 May 1844); “Capitol Police,” Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/capitol-police; Congressional Globe, House, 28th Cong., 1st sess. (23 April, 6 May, 15 May, and 16 May 1844); Congressional Record, House 48th Cong, 1st sess. (21 June 1884); House Committee on Accounts, John L. Wirt, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., H. Rept. 29 (19 December 1856); Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, vol. 12 (Philadelphia, PA: J.P. Lippincott & Co, 1874–1877): 16; John C. Pinheiro, “James K. Polk: Campaigns and Elections,” Miller Center, U.S. Presidents Project, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/president/polk/campaigns-and-elections; Daniel J. Ryan, “Ohio in the Mexican War,” Ohio History Journal, https://resources.ohiohistory.org/ohj/search/display.php?page=30&ipp=20&searchterm=Array&vol=21&pages=277–295; New-York Daily Tribune, 30 September 1845; Republican Banner (Nashville, TN), 29 September 1845; Louisville Morning Courier and American Democrat, 20 January 1845; Daily National Intelligencer, 10 January 1845, 5 January 1852; Daily Ohio Statesman, 17 and 24 January 1845; The Republic (Washington, DC), 19 March 1851; The Daily Republic (Washington, DC), 22 July 1853; Evening Star (Washington, DC), 20 November 1857.
The Records of a Young Republic: Revolution and the New Nation (1754–1820s) | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
During this formative period, the young nation achieved and defended its independence, established a new government, expanded geographically, and sought economic prosperity. Explore the foundational years of the United States with these records from the House of Representatives.Transcriptions and downloadable PDFs of these records are available at the links below.Discussion Questions:What issues did the colonists face under British rule?What challenges arose after independence? How did the United States attempt to resolve them?Describe the economy of the young United States. How did Americans make money? What were the strengths and challenges of work and transportation at this time?Why is it important to preserve and study records from this historical period?How do the events of this era impact us today?1774, Declaration of Rights and GrievancesThe First Continental Congress drafted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances in 1774 to express dissatisfaction with British statutes imposed on American colonists. The colonists believed they should be entitled to the same rights as their ancestors in Great Britain, including “life, liberty & property.” The sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Rights and Grievances foreshadowed those of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.1784, The Ordinance of 1784In the Ordinance of 1784, Thomas Jefferson and other Delegates of the Confederation Congress outlined future expansion of the United States. The country looked westward, to the territory situated north and west of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River acquired in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The following year, the Ordinance of 1785 established how the land would be surveyed and divided.1789, House Journal of the 1st CongressOn April 1, 1789, the House finally reached a quorum—the minimum number of people required to meet officially—and began setting up the new system of government envisioned by the founders. The first House Journal documented the election of the House Speaker, oaths of office requirements for Members of Congress, rules for the House, and the selection of a Clerk, Doorkeeper, and Sergeant at Arms.1803, Petition Concerning WhalingIn early 1803, Nantucket, Massachusetts, petitioned the House for funds to carve a channel through the sandbar that blocked access for large ships used in the whaling trade. Whaling was the island’s principal industry, and it supplied the oil used to keep lamps burning in the new nation and around the world.1812, Petition of Eli WhitneyEli Whitney’s cotton gin revolutionized agricultural production in the South. Until the late 18th century, green seed cotton grew throughout inland Georgia, but separating its sticky seeds from the cotton fiber was time-consuming and costly. In 1794, Whitney patented the invention and hoped to make his fortune. However, while use of the cotton gin and similar technologies boomed, his patent was largely ignored. Whitney petitioned Congress to renew his cotton gin patent, but it was not approved.1812, War of 1812 DeclarationWithin just three decades of fighting for independence from Great Britain, the United States again contemplated war with its former adversary. In the intervening period, Great Britain thwarted U.S. trade by commandeering American ships, blockading ports that imported U.S. goods, and forcing thousands of American sailors into service with the British Navy. British actions devastated American commercial interests, dealing a blow to the fledgling nation’s efforts to establish itself as a world power. The House passed a war resolution—the first in its history—against Great Britain on June 4, 1812.Interested in more records from this era?King’s Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and SeditionLand Ordinance of 1785Postmaster General Remarks on 1790 Bill
Collection Spotlight: The Portrait of Shirley Chisholm | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The Shirley Chisholm portrait in the House Collection of Art and Artifacts—the most viewed painting in the House’s online Collections Search—is difficult to miss when you pass it in the Capitol. The subject looms large on the canvas, the background a bright, saturated blue. When former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot saw the portrait on a visit to the Capitol, she noted that the strikingly modern painting “captures [Chisholm’s] essence of tough, a little salty, but also just a real leader.”The House commissioned the portrait by artist Kadir Nelson as part of an initiative started at the turn of the 21st century to commemorate noteworthy former Members with significant legislative achievements or symbolic importance in House history who did not fall into the limited group who traditionally had portraits painted. Representative Chisholm of New York was part of this group—the first Black woman in Congress, taking her seat in 1969. She became nationally famous for her strong principles and willingness to stand up for them, earning the nickname “Fighting Shirley.”How might an artist go about expressing the character of a well-known individual like Chisholm in a portrait? The array of ideas seen in preparatory sketches helps viewers understand how the artistic vision evolved, and what other characteristics and settings were tried out before the artist created this final version of the portrait.Brooklyn—and Representative Chisholm’s neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, in particular—were important influences on her politics and identity. So, it is fitting that possibilities for her portrait incorporated her New York congressional district. From these two preparatory sketches, we see the centrality of the large, dominant figure present in the final work to the portrait’s concept throughout the process. But everything else—setting, clothes, expression, gesture—were all up for consideration. The cityscape of Brooklyn brownstones and jagged chimneys spans the horizon in both sketches of this type. The version with the patterned coat included in the final composition shows Chisholm with a furrowed brow and clasped hands. The pose suggests that she is thoughtfully listening—and perhaps formulating a counterargument—to an unseen interlocutor. A second version shows Chisholm in a more forward-facing pose, her expression set, but with similarly clasped hands before an urban background.The artist also experimented using these elements with variations of the Capitol in the background. One possibility shows a contemplative expression and a three-quarter pose with clasped hands and a graphic-pattern coat with the Capitol dome just peeking over the low horizon. This setting evolved into the final pose. The Capitol gets some more real estate, with the upper floors and the dome emerging from the horizon. Representative Chisholm stands almost in profile, but with her face turned directly toward the viewer, adopting the more confrontational demeanor seen in the portrait. Unique among the sketches, this version introduces a teacherly gesture that Chisholm frequently used while speaking publicly: the upward pointed index finger, palm facing out.In the final oil-on-canvas painting, Representative Chisholm’s figure spans the canvas from top to bottom, clad in a graphic-patterned coat inspired by styles she was photographed wearing around the time she was first elected. Her gesture and expression show confidence and seriousness—as if she is in the process of telling the viewer exactly what she thinks. The subtle gradient of blue sky behind her creates depth in the mostly open space. The Capitol is a bright—although relatively small—beacon in the background on the low horizon line. The final portrait depicts “Fighting Shirley.” Her pose embodies her willingness to stand up and confront issues. The Capitol is important to her story, but not the focus, symbolizing her own words: “I have no intention of just sitting quietly and observing. . . . I intend to focus attention on the nation’s problems.”Learn More:Explore our publications Black Americans in Congress and Women in CongressWatch oral histories with African-American Members, staff, and familyFor a close look at other artworks in the House Collection, check out our Collection Spotlight blogs
Who Controls the House?: The Discharge Petition and Legislative Power in the New Deal Congress | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On March 9, 1933, at the start of the special session of the 73rd Congress (1933–1935), Henry T. Rainey, a lawyer and farmer from southern Illinois, was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. A week earlier, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt had called Congress to Washington to pass much needed legislation to alleviate the devastating effects of the Great Depression, including widespread unemployment, shuttered banks, homes and businesses in foreclosure, and many Americans facing food insecurity. Rainey, a veteran legislator, would need to use every bit of the experience he earned over 14 terms to lead the House response to the nation’s widespread suffering.In his inaugural speech as Speaker, Rainey called on the House of Representatives and all Americans to “proceed now with the readjustments necessary in order to enable us to function in the new era which dawns on us and on all the world.” Over the next few months, a period known as Roosevelt’s First 100 Days, Congress passed a series of bills to address the country’s deep economic crisis, provided jobs and relief to millions of men and women, and reformed the American financial, agricultural, and industrial sectors.Although the House’s large Democratic majority enabled much of Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda to pass easily, Rainey and the rest of his leadership team at times struggled to corral their restless caucus, which included 129 first-term lawmakers. A legislative procedure called the discharge petition, which allowed rank-and-file Members to force bills out of committee if they secured signatures of support from enough colleagues, threatened to make Rainey’s job particularly difficult. During the special session, the Speaker and the White House sought to keep the focus on FDR’s legislative agenda. But the discharge petition—which at the time required only 145 signatures—enabled lawmakers to bypass party leaders and potentially distract from the President’s legislative program.Rainey was known for his independence and had spent the bulk of his political career working to democratize the lawmaking process. But the demands of the Great Depression tested the new Speaker. The question became whether—or how—he could balance his longstanding commitment to decentralized power in the House with his responsibilities as Speaker. Nowhere would this be clearer than in his approach to the discharge petition.Development of a ReformThe ability of Members to introduce a motion to discharge committees from further consideration of legislation had been in effect on and off over the course of House history. By 1867, the House had weakened its influence by ruling that discharge motions were not privileged, meaning they did not take precedence over other legislation. This change effectively ended the practice until 1910, when the House overhauled its procedures to empower rank-and-file lawmakers in response to the autocratic Speakership of Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois.In 1924, a coalition of Democrats and insurgent Republicans again forced the Republican majority to change the rule governing discharge petitions. The House passed a revised motion requiring a discharge petition—which remained in the possession of the House Clerk—to gain 150 signatures from Members before a motion to discharge a committee was placed on the Calendar of Motions to Discharge. In the following Congress, the House, led by Republican Speaker Nicholas Longworth of Ohio who prioritized party government and the larger GOP agenda, raised the signature threshold to 218, making it more difficult to force a bill out of committee.The discharge petition, which could only be used at a specific moment in the legislative process, worked like this: when a lawmaker introduced a bill, the Speaker would refer it to the committee with jurisdiction over its policy. The committee would then decide whether to consider and report the bill to the full House. If the committee decided to sit on the bill—a common way to kill legislation in the House—the Member who sponsored it could start a discharge petition and begin gathering the necessary signatures to force the bill out of committee.When the 72nd Congress (1931–1933) opened on December 7, 1931, Democrats held the majority for the first time in more than a decade and quickly revised the discharge rule, lowering the threshold from 218 signatures to 145. They also made it more difficult for party leaders to prevent a vote on a motion once it received the required signature amount.The 1931 rule was drafted by Representative Charles Robert Crisp of Georgia. Four decades earlier, Crisp had served as the House Parliamentarian during the Speakership of his father, Charles Frederick Crisp of Georgia. With his fluency in House procedure, the younger Crisp formulated the 1931 rule to allow Members to file a discharge petition after legislation had been with a committee for 30 days. Once the petition received 145 signatures, it would be recorded in the House Journal and Congressional Record and entered on the Calendar of Motions to Discharge Committees. On the second or fourth Monday of each month, and after seven legislative days on the discharge calendar, the motion to discharge could be called to consideration on the House Floor as the first legislative order of business. The 145-signature requirement did not automatically bring a bill to the floor for consideration; a majority still had to vote for the motion to discharge. But it did, Crisp explained, “put the House on record.” Under the new rule, the House in the 72nd Congress voted on five discharge motions, although only one succeeded in moving a bill out of committee and onto the floor.Speaker RaineyBy the time he became Speaker, Henry Rainey had spent decades trying to limit the reach of House leadership and empower rank-and-file lawmakers. Rainey had first won election to Congress in November 1902, and he had come up under the often dictatorial Speakership of Joe Cannon. Cannon ruled the House from 1903 to 1911, and he controlled the legislative process to such an extent that his critics called him a “czar.” Rainey, however, believed in giving individual Members more power and supported efforts to reform House Rules.As Speaker, Rainey would have to harmonize—or at least align—his large, often rebellious, majority with the Roosevelt administration’s immediate legislative agenda. A lower signature threshold to enact a discharge petition would make Rainey’s job more difficult. So, while the Speaker had once argued in favor of a rule that only required 100 signatures to discharge legislation from committee, he and his leadership team now considered increasing the signature threshold.“A Millstone About the Neck of the Majority”Less than a month into the emergency session Rainey proposed raising the signature count for a discharge petition from 145 to 218. “We can’t take a chance of any minority group being virtually in charge of the House,” Rainey explained, highlighting the possibility that his caucus could fracture or that certain of his Members could form coalitions with Republicans on issues in conflict with FDR’s New Deal programs. Democratic Leader Joseph W. Byrns of Tennessee insisted that House had to focus on the President’s agenda, telling his colleagues that the House could “not consider anything . . . until we have disposed of the President’s emergency legislation.”First and foremost, Democratic leadership wanted to prevent votes on popular bills that they and the White House deemed inflationary but believed would easily pass the House. On April 12, Democrats held a caucus meeting to vote on a proposal to revise the discharge rule. Leadership hoped to win a two-thirds majority in favor of the revision, a margin which would have then bound the entire caucus to voting in favor of the rule change on the floor. Although Rainey failed to secure that two-thirds vote, a large majority of House Democrats favored changing the rule.Rainey’s effort to revise the discharge rule, however, exacerbated a rift in the party. On April 18, a rump caucus of 59 Democrats—led by Wright Patman of Texas and other western Representatives who supported a pay boost for veterans and advocated for mortgage and financial relief—met to plan a response to leadership. Terry Carpenter, a first-term Member representing western Nebraska, advertised the meeting to Democratic Members who did not want to be “gagged” by the leadership’s rule change. “Adoption of the 218 rules,” Carpenter warned “would mean that control of the House would be with two or three men.”Despite the opposition, several powerful Democrats spoke passionately in support of raising the discharge threshold. During an April 1934 debate, Lindsay Carter Warren of North Carolina, chair of the Committee on Accounts, called the 145-vote requirement the “fool discharge rule” and an “abomination.” John McDuffie of Alabama, who had served as Democratic Whip from 1929 to 1933, called it “a millstone about the neck of the majority charged with the responsibility for legislation.”Although the Rules Committee approved a resolution to raise the signature count to 218, House leadership never brought it to the floor for a vote. Instead, Rainey reached an agreement with opponents whereby the discharge rules would remain in place as long as Democratic lawmakers did not propose motions to discharge while the House considered Roosevelt’s emergency legislative agenda. Speaker Rainey explained that he withheld the rule change because there was “no need now to get the fifty-nine Democrats in a hole.” “We have the votes,” Rainey promised, “but there is no reason for haste and there will be none.”Despite Rainey’s concerns that the discharge petition could be used to slow the passage of FDR’s legislative agenda, Congress passed several landmark pieces of legislation during the emergency session including the Agriculture Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Glass–Steagall Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, and legislation creating the Civilian Conservation Corps.Parliamentary ManeuversWith the opening of the second session of the 73rd Congress and in preparation for the approaching 1934 midterm elections, House leadership gave Democrats more freedom on what bills to support, so long as they did not interfere with Roosevelt’s agenda. Again the discharge petition became a point of contention. On March 12, for instance, the House, under a veto threat from President Roosevelt, discharged a veterans’ bonus bill from the Ways and Means Committee and approved it. The bill later died in the Senate.By late May, other discharge petitions had come close to achieving the 145-signature mark, several of which House leadership strongly opposed. As a result, Rainey and Byrns turned to other parliamentary maneuvers to control the House calendar. On June 1, Rules Committee chair William Bankhead of Alabama proposed a resolution that gave the Majority Leader the power to call a recess at any moment. Bankhead’s plan hinged on the difference between a calendar day, which ended at midnight, and a legislative day, which only ended with an adjournment. Discharge petitions with 145 signatures were required to stay on the Motion to Discharge calendar for seven legislative days before they could be brought to the House Floor for a vote. By calling a recess instead of adjourning outright, the Majority Leader could end a day’s calendar session, but the legislative session would technically continue until the House adjourned. This tactic would prevent a petition with 145 signatures from accruing the necessary time on the Clerk’s desk. The debate over Bankhead’s plan grew contentious, and at one point the Sergeant at Arms had to break up a scuffle between two Members on the floor. Ultimately, Bankhead’s resolution passed, and the House voted on no other discharge petitions for the remainder of the session.In August 1934, just two months after the House had adjourned sine die for the 73rd Congress, Henry Rainey died. With little opposition, Tennessee’s Joseph Byrns became Speaker at the opening of the 74th Congress (1935–1937). Based on their experiences over the previous two years, Byrns and the White House made it a priority to reform the motion to discharge rule at the beginning of the new session in January 1935 to ensure leadership remained in control of the House’s legislative calendar and to limit disruptions of the party’s agenda. To secure the necessary votes, Byrns reportedly promised to send a veterans’ bonus bill to the floor in exchange for support to raise the discharge petition signature requirement to 218 votes. “The majority must function,” John Joseph O’Connor, the new chair of the Rules Committee, said during the debate over the rule change. “And it cannot function,” he added, “without the overwhelming majority of the Democrats of this House, which is easily more than 145.” On Opening Day of the 74th Congress, the rule raising the number of votes required for a discharge petition passed 245 to 166, with a sizable number of Democrats in opposition.The 1935 clause raising the discharge threshold to 218 votes remains a part of the House Rules. It has had its intended effect. According to one scholar, following the changes to the discharge rule in 1935, “less than 4 percent” of petitions have accumulated the necessary 218 signatures.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 72nd Cong., 1st Sess. (8 December 1931): 72–83; Congressional Record, House, 72nd Cong., 1st Sess. (13 June 1932): 1932; Congressional Record, House, 73rd Cong., 1st sess. (9 March 1933): 70; Congressional Record, House, 73rd Cong., 1st sess. (11 March 1933): 198–218; Congressional Record, House, 73rd Cong., 1st sess. (10 April 1933): 1450; Congressional Record, House, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess. (12 March 1934): 4287–4338; Congressional Record, House, 73rd Cong., 1st sess. (12 April 1934): 6489; Congressional Record, House, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess. (1 June 1934): 10239–10243; Congressional Record, House, 74th Cong., 1st sess. (3 January 1935): 14–20; Baltimore Sun, 4 April 1933, 13 April 1933, 18 April 1933, 21 February 1934, 2 June 1934; Boston Globe, 2 June 1934; Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 April 1933; Freeport Journal-Standard (Illinois), 1 August 1934; Knoxville News-Sentinel, 21 November 1931; New York Times, 3 January 1932, 12 March 1933, 4 April 1933, 16 April 1933, 19 April 1933, 19 February 1934, 13 March 1934, 4 January 1935; Washington Evening Star, 18 April 1933; Washington Post, 3 January 1935; Richard S. Beth, “The Discharge Rule in the House of Representatives: Procedure, History, and Statistics,” Report 90-84, 8 February 1990, Congressional Research Service; Sarah A. Binder, Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sarah A. Binder, “Don’t Count on the House Discharge Rule to Raise the Debt Limit,” 9 May 2023, Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/05/09/dont-count-on-the-house-discharge-rule-to-raise-the-debt-limit/; Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013); David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression & The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press: 2008); Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert A. Waller, Rainey of Illinois: A Political Biography, 1903–34 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
Edition for Educators—Congressional Primary Sources 101 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
It can be difficult to know where to start when researching the history of the House of Representatives. After all, Congress produces a lot of documents. So much that we've split this “course” into two sections. This initial Edition for Educators on congressional primary sources provides some background on the abundance of congressional source material while guiding researchers on their scholarly pursuits. In a future Edition for Educators, we'll provide detailed guidance into the archives of the House and the many documents available for researchers and educators through our Records Search and Primary Source Sets.The Proceedings of CongressThe day-to-day business of Congress has been recorded and compiled in a handful of key sources since 1789.The Constitution requires both the House and Senate to maintain a Journal detailing their legislative actions. The Journal—which today is still handwritten in pencil—includes votes, motions, and other parliamentary proceedings. The House’s actual debate is rarely, if ever, included in the Journal, however.Before the Civil War, Congress awarded contracts to independent newspapers affiliated with one political faction or another to record debate in the House. These transcripts often included summaries of what lawmakers said; only rarely were they verbatim. The debates from the earliest Congresses, from 1789 to 1824, were later collected and collated in the Annals of Congress. Similarly, the Register of Debates, covering the years 1824 to 1837, and the Congressional Globe, which documented the period from 1833 to 1873, included summaries of debate. By the early 1850s, the Globe began providing more contemporaneous and gradually more complete and verbatim transcripts of debate. In 1873, Congress formalized the process of recording debate through the Congressional Record, which has made the leap to digital access in recent years.Skip the Record and Go Straight to the Journal Researchers often ignore the House Journal in favor of its more comprehensive cousin, the Congressional Record, which contains a blow-by-blow account of the debate on the House Floor. For narrative color and potent quotations, the Record or one of its predecessors (the Congressional Globe, the Register of Debates, and the Annals of Congress) is a researcher’s best bet. By contrast, the House Journal has—with a few minor formatting adjustments—remained a simple recapitulation of House actions as required by the Constitution. The Journal is, essentially, the SparkNotes version of legislating.The Publication of the Congressional Record On March 5, 1873, the Government Printing Office (GPO) published the first issue of the Congressional Record, detailing House and Senate proceedings from the prior legislative day. Although both chambers kept minutes in their respective Journal, the appearance of an official, full transcript of legislative activity ended an 84-year debate about how best to compile congressional proceedings.The House Journal and the predecessors to the Congressional Record are available through the Library of Congress. Digital editions of the bound Congressional Record can also be found on the Government Printing Office website from 1873 to 2017. The modern Record is available through Congress.gov. All of these documents can also be found through your local federal depository library.Beyond DebatePrimary sources for congressional research go far beyond the proceedings on the House Floor. The primary sources in this section range from supplemental administrative documents of the House to a menu from the House Restaurant.Congressional Profiles Fans of congressional records will particularly appreciate the Legislative Activities section of the Congressional Profiles. Records linked or available to download here (where available in each Congress) include: committee reports, roll call votes, House Calendars, and Résumés of Congressional Activity (which are published in the bound editions of the Congressional Record). The latter two documents provide detailed and quick references, respectively, for the legislative actions in each Congress. More recent Congresses also feature links to individual discharge petitions—attempts to force bills out of committee.Featured Collection ObjectsThe Lives and Times of Members of CongressThe Office of the Historian’s People Search, which includes information in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, provides a biographical sketch of that Member’s life, bibliographical resources, relevant research collections, and a picture where available. Whereas the Biographical Directory is limited to brief biographical sketches, the People Search provides readers with detailed profiles of the life and career of certain lawmakers—including women, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.The Most Important Congressional Source You’ve Never Heard Of Open to the Foreword of the most recent Congressional Directory, and you’ll learn that it’s “one of the oldest working handbooks within the United States Government,” compiled unofficially from 1789 to 1847, and officially by Congress ever since. What it won’t tell you is that the Directory is a rich and multi-layered resource about the House, the Senate, and life on Capitol Hill. They’re yeomanlike and unassuming, but for historians and political scientists they provide a valuable means of studying the first branch of government.Ansel Wold's Biographical Directory of the American Congress On September 3, 1953, Ansel Wold, clerk for the Joint Committee on Printing and chief compiler of the 1928 edition of the Biographical Directory of the American Congress, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since its first publication in 1859, the Biographical Directory has had 16 significant revisions. The most recent print edition lists the biographies of the nearly 12,000 individuals who’ve served from 1774 to 2005, encompassing the federal Congress, as well as the Continental and Articles of Confederation Congresses. The online edition of the Biographical Directory is edited regularly by the professional staff in the Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, and in the Senate Historical Office.People Behind the Primary SourcesParliamentarians One of the greatest primary resources among congressional documents is the House precedents, and the Parliamentarians are the stewards of those volumes. Learn about the evolution of the Parliamentarian position and the people who have filled that role in the House of Representatives.Hanging on Every Word When the House is in session, official reporters record every word. As Members debate and vote, the official reporters, also known as stenographers, transcribe all the proceedings for publication in the Congressional Record the next morning. Official reporters also precisely transcribe committee hearings.Featured Oral HistoriesWhat’s Next?For those who would like access to any of the publications written by the Office of the Historian or the Office of Art and Archives, interested users can find links to download or request any of the publications on our site. Eager scholars and educators can look forward to a guided tour of the House records and Primary Source Sets available on our website.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Remote Possibilities: The Early History of Videoconferencing Technology in the House | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On the morning of October 9, 1991—long before the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of Zoom calls and online meetings—George E. Brown of California, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, gaveled his committee to order in what appeared to be a science fiction theater. A large screen, powered by a rear projector, towered at the center of the committee room. A camera, perched atop the screen, focused on the chairman, while two additional cameras on tripods recorded the rest of the dais. Behind the projector stood two black towers, each filled with state-of-the-art computer equipment and outfitted with a television monitor.The purpose of the committee meeting was to hear testimony from scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Sandia National Laboratory in California—both major hubs of nuclear weapons research sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE)—as Congress began re-examining the role of DOE labs in the post-Cold War era. But it was the format, rather than the subject, of that day’s hearing that drew the attention of onlookers. For the first time, a House committee used videoconferencing technology in a formal hearing to speak with witnesses remotely. Through a combination of landline and satellite connections, the closed-circuit television screens opened a portal to the West Coast through which committee members could speak face-to-face with laboratory personnel as if they were seated at the witness table.But before Brown could begin the hearing, the satellite connection fizzled out, freezing the chairman’s image onscreen. “That looks good,” Brown said, glancing at his likeness. The audience in the room laughed. After a few minutes, the feed reconnected, and the image of Dr. Siegfried Hecker, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, appeared on the numerous screens. “I do very much appreciate the fact that I don't need to travel across the country,” Hecker said. That day, several witnesses gave their insight into the future of America’s science policy from thousands of miles away.Brown launched his videoconferencing demonstration project in the fall of 1991 with the goal of making the technology a permanent tool for the House of Representatives. In a series of hearings from 1991 to 1992, Science Committee members heard from witnesses around the world, from Seattle to Paris to Moscow, without ever leaving the Rayburn House Office Building. “I have long been a fan of this technology,” Brown noted. “I have followed it from its infancy and have wondered when it would truly come of age. That day has now arrived.”Technological AdvancementsAlthough many committee members marveled at the video feed, similar technology had been used on Capitol Hill before. In the 1980s, ABC News and a handful of Members of Congress had won an Emmy for the show Capital to Capital, in which lawmakers conversed with Soviet officials via satellite on live television. Earlier still, a Senate committee held a formal hearing in 1977 with witnesses who participated through a two-way satellite video. But no congressional committee had repeated the experiment since the Senate did 14 years earlier, a gap so long that Representative Norman Y. Mineta of California mistakenly congratulated Chairman Brown in 1991 for having “the first teleconferencing hearing in the history of the Congress.”The slow adoption of videoconferencing technology in the final decades of the twentieth century was largely a matter of cost. In the 1980s, one major carrier charged $2,000 an hour to host a multi-user video call. The price of equipping an entire room with videoconferencing gear could reach six figures.By the 1990s, however, technological advances made data transmission cheaper. Computer programs called CODECS (a portmanteau of “code” and “decode”) could compress audio and video data to reduce the amount of information that needed to be transmitted through telephone lines. The cost of a five-way video call dropped to $1,200 an hour, and a simple two-way connection could cost as little as $30 an hour.As a result, videoconferencing technology became more widespread. Public school districts and universities began to establish “distance learning” programs. Businesses increasingly substituted in-person meetings for video calls. Additionally, an economic recession and terrorism concerns stoked by the Gulf War both led to a drop in air travel, boosting videoconferencing’s appeal as an alternative to in-person meetings.As the technology grew increasingly mainstream, Representative Brown envisioned many potential applications for Congress. Members could have easier access to their constituents through virtual town hall meetings. Capitol Hill staff could hold meetings with district staff. Committees could conduct regular oversight of out-of-town federal agencies. And unlike the Senate’s one-off experiment in 1977, Brown’s efforts resulted in lasting institutional change.“Mr. Science”George Brown first won election to the House in 1962, representing portions of Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernadino Counties. He had studied physics in college and worked as an engineer before entering politics. An activist in his early years, Brown helped desegregate university housing as a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1930s. Brown was also a pacifist and strongly opposed the Vietnam War, once accusing President Lyndon B. Johnson of believing that “the peace of mankind can be won by the slaughter of peasants in Vietnam.” Brown was often the only lawmaker to vote against military spending. “No other Member of Congress, I think, cast more unsafe votes,” his colleague Sam Farr of California observed.Brown, who wore rumpled suits and often puffed on a cigar, was known to prioritize policy over polish. Constance A. Morella of Maryland once recalled an episode where Brown struggled to record a short commemorative video, requiring numerous retakes. “George Brown had difficulty being scripted—in his life, in his political career, and in the way he operated on the Science Committee,” she wrote.Brown served on the Science Committee for all but one term in the House, where he emerged as an advocate for space exploration, environmental protection, and the development of computer technology. Known to his colleagues as “Mr. Science,” Brown held some of the first congressional hearings on climate change in the 1970s, played a key role in the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, and supported funding for the International Space Station.He became Science Committee chair in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union collapsed. With the end of the Cold War, Brown sought to redirect federal funding from nuclear testing to scientific research for energy efficiency, education, public health, and manufacturing. But Brown frequently ran into hurdles, and criticized what he called the government’s “lack of coherent, broad-based, long-range planning” when it came to science and technology policy. “To build the funding of science for the next generation on the basis of the cold war was not well advised,” he later observed. “That implied that science wasn’t important enough to survive without a cold war.”The United States had once been the top producer of consumer electronics and semiconductor chips until Japanese computer companies dethroned American manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s. Hoping to reverse the country’s shrinking market share in technology manufacturing, Brown used his chairmanship to create a new subcommittee called Technology and Competitiveness. In one of his most ambitious bills, Brown sought to establish a new cabinet agency—the Department of Science and Technology—to ensure permanent federal support for scientific research and technological development.An Ambitious ExperimentAs chairman, Brown spotlighted videoconferencing technology, in part, because the equipment it required was still largely manufactured in the United States. After his first videoconferencing hearing in October 1991, Brown held a second hearing on the use of videoconferencing in the corporate world in November that was more technologically ambitious. Instead of using a two-way video to hear from one witness at a time, the committee sought to hear from multiple participants at once. Executives from Boeing and General Electric explained how the new technology improved their companies’ efficiency, while an employee from Sprint walked committee members through the history of telecommunications software. The setup allowed everyone to freely converse with one another as if they were in the same room.Brown’s videoconferencing project went international in March 1992, when the committee held two hearings with a delegation of Russian politicians and scientists. As Cold War tensions thawed, Brown sought to promote videoconferencing as a foreign policy tool that could allow for more frequent engagement with leaders overseas without the need for international travel.Brown’s hearing with the Russians was not without its complications, and the transatlantic video call required extensive preparation. The Russians’ CODEC software was found to be incompatible with the committee’s equipment, so the signals between Moscow and Washington were routed through two telecommunications facilities in New Jersey and Atlanta, where the data could be reconfigured. To overcome the language barrier, the State Department arranged for interpreters and installed soundproof interpretation booths in the hearing room. The day before the first hearing, committee staff attempted a test call, but it failed to connect. It took two hours of troubleshooting before technicians managed to establish a link.When George Brown gaveled the hearing in at 9:00 a.m. the next morning on March 25 (5:00 p.m. Moscow time), everything proceeded smoothly. Committee members spoke with Russian scientists to address the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the scientific community there and to strengthen scientific cooperation between the two countries.The following day, the Science Committee facilitated a discussion with a group of six Russian legislators and federal ministers. The lawmakers discussed Russia’s new economic challenges, the need for humanitarian aid, the future of space research, and nuclear weapons policy. As the panel moved from topic to topic, the discussion took on a lighthearted and conversational tone. At one point, Brown warned about transmission delays, and advised his colleagues that “when you tell a joke, always wait three seconds” for laughter. Lee Herbert Hamilton of Indiana marveled at the meeting. He noted how much things had changed between the two superpowers over his career, pointing out that “20–25 years ago when the meetings between us were very stiff, very formal, speeches which were read back and forth to one another; every country defended its position vigorously, and the discussions just were not very enlightening or helpful,” he remarked. “What a contrast it has been this morning. The discussions have been relaxed, they have been informal, they have been informative, and constructive. I just want to say, Mr. Chairman, how remarkable this marvelous technology is to bring us together as it has.”A Lasting ChangeIn September 1992, Brown proudly announced that House leaders agreed to permanently equip at least six committee rooms with videoconferencing technology. Under his direction, the Science Committee continued to hold hearings with remote participants in the 103rd Congress (1993–1995), including a conference with officials of the European Community (a predecessor to the European Union), and a meeting with members of the Japanese Parliament.Brown died in 1999, but by then he had started a revolution on the Hill. By 2005, half of House committees and dozens of Member offices had purchased videoconferencing systems for hearings, constituent outreach, and staff meetings—realizing Brown’s 1992 prediction that “videoconferencing soon will become a standard feature of the day-to-day business of this institution.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 89th Cong., 1st sess. (5 May 1965): 9533; Congressional Record, House, 89th Cong, 2nd sess. (20 July 1966): 16302; Congressional Record, House, 89th Cong, 2nd sess. (25 August 1966): 20660–20661; Congressional Record, House, 90th Cong, 1st sess. (13 June 1967): 15587–15588; Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, 100th Cong., 1st sess. (23 April 1987): 9693; Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, 106th Cong., 1st sess. (5 August 1999): 20716; Hearings before the House Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on the Environment and the Atmosphere, The National Climate Program Act, 94th Cong., 2nd sess. (1976); Hearings before Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, National Climate Program Act, 95th Cong., 1st sess. (1977); Hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, The Future of the Department of Energy Laboratories, 102nd Cong., 1st sess. (1991); Hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Science and Technology Cooperation with the Russian Federation—Video Conference with Moscow, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess. (1992); Hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Videoteleconference: Exploring the U.S./Russian Relationship in the Post Cold War Era, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess. (1992); Hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Videoconference—Reaching Out to Improve U.S. Competitiveness—Manufacturing Assistance and Industrial Extension, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess. (1992); Hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, United States/European Community Videoconference, 103rd Cong., 1st sess. (1993); Hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Video Conference with Members of the Parliament Of Japan, 103rd Cong., 1st sess. (1993); House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Video Teleconferencing Congressional Demonstration Project, 103rd Cong., Serial G, 1st sess. (1993); House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Summary of Activities, 103rd Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 888 (1995); Department of Science and Technology Act, H.R. 2164, 100th Cong. (1987); Congressional Directory, 93rd Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973); Congressional Directory, 102nd Cong. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991); Associated Press, 8 February 1992; Chicago Tribune, 8 December 1986; Los Angeles Times, 28 August 1990, 25 October 1991, 8 September 1992; 17 July 1999; New York Times, 27 January 1991, 9 March 1999; Press Enterprise (Riverside, CA), 17 July 1999; Roll Call, 9 August 1999, 6 June 2005; San Diego Union-Tribune, 26 November 1989; San Francisco Chronicle, 3 May 1991; Washington Post, 24 January 1991, 7 November 1991; Garrison Nelson, Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1947–1992, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1994).
Black Americans in Congress | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The Office of the Historian has launched a revised web exhibition, Black Americans in Congress, that spans more than 150 years in the history of African Americans in Congress, including individual Member profiles, images, contextual essays, and historical data concerning committee service, leadership positions, significant legislation, and more.The revised exhibition coincides with Juneteenth National Independence Day, a federal holiday commemorating the liberation of enslaved African Americans in Texas in 1865. Generations of African Americans have celebrated this story of emancipation to remember the end of slavery in the United States.Many of the Black Members elected to Congress in the decades following the Civil War had been born enslaved or were the descendants of enslaved people. They had experienced firsthand the effects of emancipation and could not forget its significance.In 1872, for instance, future North Carolina Representative John Adams Hyman wrote a letter to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Hyman, who would win a seat in the House in 1874, thanked Sumner for his lifetime commitment to abolishing slavery and told the Senator of his personal journey from slavery to freedom. A decade earlier, Hyman noted, he was considered “chattel, bought and sold as a brute,” but following emancipation he had been “raised to the dignity of a man and of an American citizen.”For Hyman and millions more, emancipation in 1865 marked a turning point for African Americans and for the nation as a whole. Five years later, in 1870, Senator Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi and Representative Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first Black Members of Congress. In the ensuing decades, Black lawmakers engaged in a long struggle for civil and political rights that began with the promise of Reconstruction, faltered during a period of exile and exclusion, and achieved legislative victories in the second half of the twentieth century.Written for a general audience and researched using primary and secondary sources, Black Americans in Congress follows this story into the twenty-first century, providing the most comprehensive history available of the Black lawmakers who have served on Capitol Hill.Read about:Pioneers such as Representatives Rainey and Robert Brown Elliott of South Carolina, who boldly advocated for Black civil and political rights during Reconstruction.Influential Black Representatives, including William L. Dawson of Illinois and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, who represented northern districts in the twentieth century, reviving the Black legislative tradition after a 30-year period of exile.Legislative giants in the House such as William Gray III of Pennsylvania, who chaired the influential Budget Committee and rose to Majority Whip; Augustus F. “Gus” Hawkins of California, who helped pass equal employment legislation and eventually chaired the Committee on Education and Labor; and Ronald V. Dellums of California, who championed anti-apartheid legislation and chaired the Armed Services Committee.Important contributions of the 52 Black women Members of Congress who have served as of 2022, including Shirley Chisholm of New York, who in 1969 became the first Black woman to serve in Congress; Mia B. Love of Utah, the first Black Republican woman Member; and many others who have chaired committees and served in party leadership.Pathbreaking Representatives such as Barbara Jordan of Texas and Andrew Young of Georgia, who in 1972 became the first Black Representatives elected from southern states since 1898; Mickey Leland of Texas, who worked to alleviate global hunger while representing his Houston constituents in Congress; and John Lewis of Georgia, the venerated civil rights activist who served in the House for more than 30 years.The founding and evolution of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has grown into one of the most influential legislative caucuses on Capitol Hill.A new print edition of Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2022 will be published by the Government Publications Office later this summer.
Recent Artifacts Online, Summer 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
This summer’s newly digitized collection treasures are brought to you by the letter S: seals, statues, subways, and even the Senate.C. E. Moberly, Artist of the U.S. CapitolIn the 1920s, Charles Moberly worked as a resident decorative painter and artistic jack-of-all-trades in the Capitol. Up in his attic studio, Moberly shared space with a gigantic model of the Capitol and worked on dozens of projects, from touching up historic frescos to relining paintings. In this photograph, Moberly poses for the camera with a copy of the New Mexico state seal, destined to become part of the ceiling of the House Chamber.Thomas JeffersonHiram Powers, one of the most successful American sculptors of the 19th century, contracted with the President of the United States to create this statue of Thomas Jefferson and another of Benjamin Franklin in 1859. Both were specified to be eight feet tall and made of marble. Jefferson holds a document in one hand—intended to represent the Declaration of Independence—and backs onto a bollard for support. Jefferson’s pose is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David, with his weight slightly shifted, one hand raised to rest near his shoulder. Early in his career, Powers relocated to Florence, Italy, where the famous masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture was located. Although he drew inspiration from the past, the artist had modern ideas as well, inventing tools to assist in more efficient stonecutting.Next Session of Congress to Be Cool OneLarge, simple clocks proved invaluable to busy Members of Congress. The clock in this photograph—on the wall of a Senate dining room in the Capitol undergoing renovations—clearly displays the time. Even across a crowded hearing room or hallway, Representatives could check an oversized gallery clock to make sure they were on time.Samuel Taliaferro RayburnThe statue of Speaker Sam Rayburn—made for display in the House Office Building bearing his name—shows him striding forward, gavel in hand. It is one of several sculptures of him made by artist Felix Weihs de Weldon: a half-length for the Rayburn Library in Bonham, Texas, this full-length for the Rayburn Building, and a bust retained by the artist. Rayburn posed for Weldon, who was also a friend, in 1955. On January 6, 1965, Lady Bird Johnson—with President Lyndon Johnson in attendance—dedicated the statue, with a speech the press called “nostalgic” and reflective of the Johnsons’ long friendship with Rayburn. In her dedication, Mrs. Johnson hoped that current and future Representatives “like Sam Rayburn . . . will labor under the great white dome of the Capitol with the same faith in the people and the same nobility of purpose.”New Capitol Subway“For years, congressmen looked green at their Senate colleagues’ subway system,” a reporter wrote in early 1965, just before circumstances changed. The House’s rail line, which connects the Rayburn building and the Capitol, was nearly ready to roll out. This photograph shows the Rayburn subway, with a man visible in the distance, working on a track, before it opened for regular rides.Want to see new objects that don’t begin with S? Here are just a few.For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.
Collection Spotlight: The Portrait of Joseph Rainey | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
This stately painting of Representative Joseph Rainey is displayed in the Capitol. Born enslaved, Rainey was the first African American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, the first to preside over the House, and the longest-serving Black lawmaker in Congress during the 19th century.Although the setting and figure may look historic, the painting is relatively new. It was part of a recent initiative to identify noteworthy former Members with significant legislative achievements or symbolic importance in House history who were not yet commemorated by a portrait in the House of Representatives.Painted in 2004 by artist Simmie Knox, the portrait shows Rainey seated in a chair on the second floor of the Capitol. Although the background is different, Rainey’s pose in the oil-on-canvas portrait is identical to a photograph taken by the studio of famous photographer Mathew Brady, now in the Library of Congress collection.In both the painting and the photograph, Rainey sits in a distinctive chair. Thomas Ustick Walter designed the chair for the current House Chamber when it opened in 1857. The Renaissance Revival–style oak armchairs, known as Walter chairs, featured elaborate carvings of oak and laurel leaves with a stars-and-stripes shield. One Walter chair made its way from the House Chamber to Brady’s studio, where Presidents, Representatives—including Joseph Rainey—and other important figures sat for photographic portraits.Look through the window on the right side of the painting. In the distance, beyond the Smithsonian Castle, the half-finished Washington Monument is visible. The obelisk was only partially built when Rainey served in Congress. The photograph to the above right shows how the monument looked in 1879, a few months after Rainey completed his congressional service. Included in Rainey’s portrait, the unfinished Washington Monument sets the scene within history and represents the nation’s incomplete journey toward equality.Learn More:View Joseph Rainey: 150th Anniversary ExhibitionDownload “We Are In Earnest For Our Rights”: Representative Joseph H. Rainey and the Struggle for Reconstruction [PDF]Read blogs about Rainey and his legacyExplore our publication Black Americans in CongressWatch oral histories with African-American Members, staff, and family
New House Speaker Portrait: Paul Ryan | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The House of Representatives unveiled a new portrait of Speaker Paul D. Ryan today. Ryan was elected Speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. The painting joins a collection of historical portraits of former House Speakers.The details, colors, and textures of the House Chamber create a richly patterned scene for the portrait. The oil-on-canvas painting by artist Leslie W. Bowman depicts Ryan standing on the Speaker’s rostrum.Ryan ceremoniously holds a gavel. Gavels with this modern design have been used by House Speakers in the 21st century. The example shown below was used by Ryan’s immediate predecessor, Speaker John Boehner.Ryan stands in front of a high-backed chair on the top tier of the Speaker’s rostrum. The chair behind the Speaker nods to the seat used by Ryan and his predecessors for decades.To the right of the figure, the strong contrast in the veining of the black Italian marble column and the edge of the bronze-relief fasces wrapped in a laurel swag add architectural information about the House Chamber and a complex decorative background to the composition.The painting is now part of the House’s collection of Speaker portraits. You can read more about the collection and find out about its subjects below.Learn more: View more about the Speaker portrait collectionBrowse artifacts from House Speakers preserved in the House CollectionFind out about the House’s other portraits, including committee chairs and official commissionsRead a biography of Speaker Paul Ryan
Edition for Educators—Hawaii: The Long Road to Statehood | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
As part of Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, this Edition for Educators focuses on Hawaii’s journey to statehood and the rich history of the Territorial Delegates who sought to broaden their home’s influence on the American mainland while preserving and expanding the rights of the Islands’ people.Featured ExhibitionHawaii The essay “Exclusion and Empire, 1898–1941,” which begins the book Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress, 1898–2017, focuses on Members of Congress from two locations: the Philippines and Hawaii. It traces Hawaii’s path from independent kingdom, through the “Bayonet Constitution” that forced a republic, to the drive for annexation by large sugar companies operating in Hawaii. It concludes with Hawaii’s admission to the Union as the fiftieth state.Featured PeopleRobert W. Wilcox of Hawaii In 1889, Robert W. Wilcox was charged with treason following an attempt to restore the Hawaiian monarchy. After being found innocent, Wilcox went on to form a powerful home-rule movement and won election as Hawaii’s first Territorial Delegate to Congress in 1900. In the process, he also became the first Asian Pacific American elected to Congress. In the House, Wilcox navigated the complexities of America’s growing empire in the Pacific region. During his two terms on Capitol Hill, Wilcox focused on territorial politics, worked to protect Native-Hawaiian concerns, and pushed for Hawaiian independence.Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole of Hawaii From royal prince to revolutionary to Hawaiian Delegate, Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole traveled a unique route to the United States Congress. Known primarily as “Kuhio,” or by his childhood nickname “Prince Cupid,” he remains the only Member of Congress born into royalty. Both in the nation’s capital and while leading congressional delegations to his Islands, Kuhio worked to ensure advantages for Hawaiians. As the second Delegate from Hawaii, Kuhio won federal funds for infrastructure improvements, arranged the expansion of the Pearl Harbor naval base, and led the effort to pass the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, his final, controversial, and far-reaching legislation.Samuel Wilder King of Hawaii Samuel Wilder King dedicated his life to Hawaiian statehood, but he died shortly before his dream was realized. King had long advocated for his home to become an equal and vital part of the American nation, consistently characterizing the Hawaiian people as quintessential American citizens. A veteran of both World Wars and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, King fought both literally and figuratively for Hawaiians’ democratic freedoms for more than 40 years. In 1953, King was appointed Territorial Governor of Hawaii by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, becoming the first governor of the territory of Native Hawaiian descent.Find the stories of more Hawaiian Delegates through our site’s People Search.Featured HighlightsThe Annexation of Hawaii By an overwhelming vote of 209 to 91, the House approved Senate Joint Resolution 55 on June 15, 1898, providing for the annexation of Hawaii as an American territory. Business interests and naval strategists had long coveted the island kingdom. An alliance of Democrats and anti-imperialist Republicans in the House—including Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine—opposed the annexation treaty negotiated by the William McKinley administration in 1897.The House and the Pacific Telegraph On January 2, 1903, Members of the House of Representatives wired congratulatory messages to the Territory of Hawaii using the newly completed Pacific telegraph cable that stretched thousands of miles from San Francisco, California, to Honolulu. “I congratulate the people of Hawaii as well as the whole country on the completion of the cable to Honolulu,” Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois wrote, his message careening over the continental United States before ricocheting across the Pacific. “It is a necessary incident of the public defense and the extension of the commerce of our common country.”The Declaration of War Against Japan On December 8, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing the nation in a Joint Session in the House Chamber, asked Congress to declare war against Japan in response to the surprise attack against American naval facilities in and around Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a day earlier. With much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet still smoldering, Roosevelt told Members of Congress and the American people, “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.”Featured Objects from the House CollectionFeatured RecordsHawaiian Self-Government Resolution This resolution, introduced by Representative Robert Hitt on June 2, 1894, and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, asserted that the Hawaiian Islands have the right “to establish and maintain their own form of government and domestic polity.” It went on to state that no country, including the United States, should interfere with Hawaii’s government.Memorial of Queen Liliuokalani After surrendering the Hawaiian throne under duress in 1893, Queen Liliuokalani struggled for the next several years to reinstate the monarchy and to restore the rights and customs of native Hawaiians. She petitioned Congress to protest a proposed annexation plan in 1897. When the United States entered the Spanish-American War in early 1898, Congress recognized Hawaii’s value as a naval station and voted to annex the islands by joint resolution. Hawaii was formally annexed in July 1898 and became an official U.S. territory in 1900. This memorial, signed by Queen Liliuokalani on December 19, 1898, was her last attempt to return control of her homeland to native Hawaiians.Model Legislature Resolution for Hawaiian Statehood In 1958, a local chapter of a nationwide youth civics group, the Territorial Hi-Y Model Legislature of Hawaii, sent this petition to Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas asking for immediate statehood. The resolution declared: “We want to hold up our heads and be able to say proudly: ‘We are Americans, first class Americans!’” Hawaii officially entered the Union the next year, on August 21, 1959.Featured BlogsLuaus to Lusitania On the near-cloudless Monday morning of May 3, 1915, the steamer Sierra floated on an untroubled sea off the coast of Honolulu, the lush capital of the Territory of Hawaii. On deck, 125 people outfitted in white linen suits and dresses—among them 48 Members of Congress—polished off breakfast and prepared to disembark for what most hoped would be a tropical vacation. From the harbor, five launches sailed out to meet them, carrying a welcoming committee comprised of the Royal Hawaiian band, lei greeters, the mayor of Honolulu, the leadership of the territorial legislature, and Hawaiian Delegate Jonah “Prince Kuhio” Kalanianaole. Only five days into the planned three-week tour, the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat, and the threat of global conflict transformed a relaxed visit to a frenzy of fortification.Hawaii Four-9 Samuel Wilder King stands tall, looking directly into the camera. The Hawaiian Delegate’s eyes twinkle with pride. His open hand gestures to one star on the U.S. flag behind him—the 49th star. This unofficial flag, made by Hawaiian women in 1935, showed the territory’s aspiration to become a state, including it as a star. In the twentieth century, flags became symbols of Hawaii’s status in the offices of its Territorial Delegates.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
A Tale of Two Studios | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Why does the House Collection have so many photographs of multiple, surprisingly amateurish studio sets? The images are all obviously staged, and each one shows a Member of Congress at a desk in a faux office with an unconvincing view of the Capitol.It turns out that for decades, Members trooped to one of two photography studios in the House. One was for Republicans, and the other for Democrats. They worked in adjacent spaces but reportedly did not share equipment or even pleasantries. Nonetheless, the two backdrops had the same general feel. Each one was dressed to look like a congressional office, with a desk, chair, and window looking out onto a photograph of the Capitol. What’s more, although the photographs from both studios were in color, the view through the window is in black and white.In the 1960s and 1970s, Representatives went to the studios to have official pictures taken. The portraits usually became postcards, printed on the reverse with folksy messages for the voters back home. The images all seem similar, but close scrutiny reveals the differences between the two stage sets. In addition, each studio’s attempt at trendy accessories took slightly different turns. Take a closer look at some of the magnificent mid-century décor.The Republicans’ StudioThe oldest known photograph of the Republicans’ imitation office shows a 1958 symphony in blue. The bookshelves, curtains, upholstery, and desk are blue. John Henderson, nattily attired in a blue suit, matches the decorations perfectly. Close at hand on the desk blotter are a few books, a big glass ashtray tucked in one corner, and a big black telephone. Several of these props show up in later photos, often with the curtains parted to show the false window looking onto a false Capitol.At around the same time, future President Gerald Ford came in for a desk shot. The setup was the same as in John Henderson’s postcard, but in this vertical view, the curtain valance is visible at the top of the frame. Its symmetrical, curving shape was common in interiors that aspired to the well-known, patriotic Colonial Revival feel. It is no surprise that Congress incorporated a similar design, too.The Democrats’ SetMeanwhile in 1960, over in the Democrats’ photo studio, right next door to the Republicans’ shop, the open curtains reveal a massive black-and-white photograph of the Capitol behind the mullioned window. This, the earliest known photograph of the Democrats’ office stage, shows that the shelves and the basic setup were the same as in Henderson’s and Ford’s photos, but the accessories differed. There is a smaller green phone rather than a black one, a brown desk rather than a blue one, and a set of hefty books—Land, a Congressional Directory, Soil, the House Rules, and a Bible, held up by donkey bookends, a symbol of the Democratic Party. Congressman Pat Jennings added the Virginia state flag, and perhaps brought his own messy pile of papers.A few years later, in 1964, photo set desks got more crowded. This postcard sent by Chet Holifield to his constituents is a high-water mark of congressional accessorizing. The green phone, the desk blotter, and the fountain pen remain from earlier photos. Holifield’s also has a nameplate, a desk calendar, eight books, copies of the Congressional Record, a gavel, and sleeker bookends. The office gewgaws help distract from the right side of the image, where the set’s dressing gives way to the tattered temporary wall.Sets did not change much from the earliest postcards in 1958 through the 1960s, beyond the ebb and flow of desktop flotsam. The photographs of the Capitol occasionally changed, most likely an update after the major renovation of the East Front façade. In the 1970s, however, both the Democratic and Republican studios redecorated. Out went the blue, and in came the era’s beloved harvest gold and brown. Leonor Sullivan’s 1976 postcard also shows the newly streamlined window frame and desk, which, along with the tight focus of the camera, makes a more plausible likeness of an office. The element that truly makes Sullivan’s photograph convincing is the Capitol photograph, at long last in color. The Republicans updated their set at about the same time, making similar color and backdrop choices.A Bipartisan Fake OfficeThe House’s two photography outfits combined in the 1980s, knocking down the wall between their offices. The question arose: would both office sets survive? Desk postcards went out of fashion in the 1980s, but photos of two new lawmakers, standing rather than sitting, give some clues to the sets’ fate. In one ca. 1987 photo, John Lewis stands behind the desk. In another, taken around the same time, Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen stands before the same backdrop, but at a lectern instead of a desk.Close examination of the curtains, window frame, and image of the Capitol reveal that they were salvaged from the Democrats’ backdrop, while the chair is from the Republican studio. The Democrats’ set and Republicans’ furniture became the version used for all Members, joining at last both sides of the aisle in one fake office.Sources: “Analysis of House Photography Studio Photographs,” Office files, Office of Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives; House Telephone Directory, 90th Congress; House Telephone Directory, 98th Congress; House Telephone Directory, 99th Congress; House Telephone Directory, 101st Congress.
The Fight for Fair Housing in the House: “To Guarantee a Basic American Right” | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
This is the second part of a story about the Fair Housing Act.On April 5, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a letter to Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts concerning a pending legislative package that outlawed discrimination in the sale or rental of housing nationwide. For years, the Johnson administration had been waging what it called a “War on Poverty” as part of the President’s Great Society agenda. Johnson reminded McCormack that fair housing legislation, one of his key promises designed “to guarantee a basic American right,” had long been obstructed in Congress. But only a day earlier, the fair housing proposal took on sudden urgency on Capitol Hill.On the evening of April 4, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support a labor strike organized by the city’s largely Black workforce of sanitation employees. For King, the sanitation strike was another battleground in his ongoing campaign against poverty and inequality in America, of which fair housing had been a major part. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had planned to take their message to the Capitol in late April through a mass mobilization in Washington, DC, which they called the Poor People’s Campaign.But King’s death changed everything—including the timeline for housing reform in Congress. As cities across the country erupted in civil unrest, violence, and property destruction following King’s murder, the President pushed the House of Representatives to act. The Senate had approved the fair housing provision on March 11 as part of a larger civil rights bill. But in the House, the measure was stuck in the Rules Committee, where Chairman William Myers Colmer of Mississippi continued to block it.In his letter, Johnson denounced King’s murder as a “senseless act of violence” that demanded congressional action. The President urged the Speaker “to renew for all Americans the great promise of opportunity and justice under law” and “bring this bill to a vote” as soon as possible. “The time for action is now,” Johnson declared.A Weekend of Violence and UncertaintyIn the week after King’s murder, more than 100 cities across the nation experienced conflagrations marked by civil unrest. Crowds set fires, destroyed buildings, and smashed storefronts to take food, appliances, and other goods.Just over a month earlier, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner Jr., had released a report on the origins of the crisis facing urban America. Established by President Johnson in 1967 after a summer of violence in cities including Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, the commission identified poverty, inequality, and racial injustice as the underlying conditions for civil unrest. The commission warned that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” and recommended more government spending on antipoverty programs and federal legislation to provide equal access to adequate housing.Johnson’s proposed civil rights legislation presented Congress with a legislative response to the devastating fallout from King’s assassination. Eight months earlier, in August 1967, a version of the bill had passed the House. In the Senate, the legislation underwent significant revisions, before being returned to the House in March 1968. The measure banned violence and intimidation to impede constitutionally protected actions by any individual such as voting, jury service, employment, and accessing public accommodations and education. It also made crossing state lines to participate in a riot a federal crime and barred Native American tribal governments from restricting certain constitutional rights on their lands. Crucially, the bill now contained a fair housing provision, which banned discrimination in the sale or rental of 80 percent of the housing stock in the United States.The House’s Democratic leadership urged its majority in the 90th Congress (1967–1969) to approve the legislative package, but opposition from southern Democrats—including Colmer on the Rules Committee—meant that it would fail without significant Republican support. Representative Charles Goodell of New York was one of many Republicans who backed the bill but were concerned that continued violence in America’s cities may turn Members from both parties against it. “Everything may swing on the events of the next few days,” Goodell predicted.Colmer and the House Rules Committee, which had the power to set the terms of debate for bills sent to the floor for consideration, controlled the fate of the legislation. A staunch segregationist, Colmer opposed new civil rights legislation. He also resisted any effort to simply rubber-stamp the Senate’s amendments. Instead, hoping to further delay the bill, Colmer sought to send the bill to a conference committee, where lawmakers from the House and Senate would discuss modifications—including amendments to weaken the bill—before returning a new version of the legislation to each chamber for approval.But King’s assassination and the civil unrest that followed altered the path of the bill. Escalating violence and property destruction throughout the capital led President Johnson to mobilize about 6,000 troops from the Army and the Marine Corps as well as the District’s National Guard to quell the disturbance. By Friday night, a group of about 70 Marines defended the Capitol with rifles and sheathed bayonets, setting up a machine gun on the building’s West Front.When House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan arrived at the Capitol on Saturday, April 6, he was startled by the sight of Marines sleeping on the stone floors. Later that day, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, William Moore McCulloch of Ohio, and 20 other House Republicans publicly announced their intention to back the Senate-approved measure.“Our Hero”When the House reconvened on April 8, many Members denounced King’s murder and praised his life and career. Augustus “Gus” Hawkins of California, one of six Black Members in the 90th Congress, mourned King and called on the House to pass the bill. Hawkins also blamed the violence plaguing the country on those lawmakers who had repeatedly blocked federal spending on antipoverty efforts, adding that “these same economy-minded, so-called protectors of the Public Treasury oppose civil rights and fair housing legislation which calls for relatively no spending, merely enforcement of basic constitutional rights.” Other lawmakers spoke out in opposition to the civil rights bill. Roy Arthur Taylor of North Carolina, for example, called on his colleagues to demonstrate “that Congress will not be stampeded into passing any legislation which has the earmarks of a payoff to violence.”The next day, on April 9, with more than 80 Members of Congress in Atlanta for King’s funeral, the House Rules Committee met on the third floor of the Capitol as the building remained surrounded by troops. The House had planned to begin a 10-day Easter recess on April 11, but Speaker McCormack promised to postpone the scheduled break until action was taken on the housing bill.Both Colmer and Minority Leader Ford favored sending the bill to a conference committee, as did many others on the Rules Committee. But on April 9, Republican John B. Anderson of Illinois joined seven Democrats in an 8-to-7 vote against sending the bill to conference. Democrat Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts, who served on Rules, called Anderson “our hero,” and proceeded to give him a hearty slap on the back.After voting down the conference, the Rules Committee considered whether to send a special rule, H. Res. 1100, to the House Floor to expedite passage of the bill. H. Res. 1100 functioned as something of a stand-in for the larger civil rights bill. The House would have to pass H. Res. 1100 with a majority vote like any other bill, and in doing so would send the civil rights bill—including the fair housing provision added by the Senate—directly to the White House for the President’s signature without changes. On April 9, the Rules Committee voted 9 to 6 in favor of directing H. Res. 1100 to the House Floor.Voting at a “Crossroad” for AmericaColmer described the committee vote as “a great disappointment to me. I am violently opposed to this kind of legislation.” And he accused House leadership of “legislating under the gun.” On April 10, Colmer and other opponents of the bill from both parties gathered on the House Floor to make a final attempt to send the bill to a conference committee.Many opponents cited King’s death and the ongoing violence across the country as a reason to delay the legislation. Democrat Joseph D. Waggonner of Louisiana claimed that rioters had “blackmailed” the House into considering the bill. “To approve this legislation today means setting aside all orderly procedures,” declared Republican Harold Royce Gross of Iowa. “It means a capitulation to those who have nothing but contempt for law and order.”Representative Anderson, who had cast the pivotal vote in the Rules Committee against sending the bill to conference and who was initially denied time to speak on the House Floor, sought to clarify the timeline of events to “dispel this wholly false illusion” that the civil rights bill was being rushed through the House after King was murdered. Both Anderson and his Republican colleague McCulloch cited the Kerner report as crucial in their decision to vote for the bill. For Anderson, the bill was not a reward to the rioters, whose actions he considered the product of “conditions that for all too long have been left untended in our society.” Instead, this legislation was a just cause for constituents like the Black schoolteacher from his district, who was frequently shut out of neighborhoods when searching for a home for his family.Many Republicans objected to the bill’s procedural path to the floor and accused supporters of giving a “blank check” to the Senate. Elford Albin Cederberg of Michigan blamed the Senate for extended deliberations on the bill, adding that the House should not be forced to act hastily. But others cited the need for action in this moment of crisis. “Our legislative procedure is to serve us,” cautioned New York’s Charles Goodell, “not inexorably to shackle us to failure and ineffectuality.”Opponents also called the bill federal overreach. Republican Albert William Watson of South Carolina decried the intervention of the federal government in what he viewed as a state-level concern. “Today constitutional and representative government are on trial,” Watson said. The fair housing provision will “not grant rights but deny rights, not restore rights but rob citizens of rights.”The bill’s supporters saw things much differently. “The time has come for America to free its soul of hate and begin to rewrite the chapters of our noble history,” declared Patsy Takemoto Mink of Hawaii, “so that human dignity can be the basis of our mode of life and the creed of our country.” Many Members echoed Mink’s plea, calling on their colleagues to act in remembrance of King’s life and work. William Fitts Ryan of New York read a letter from 22 House Democrats calling on Congress to “to guarantee open housing and the free exercise of civil rights” by passing the bill.House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler of New York expounded a lengthy legal argument on the constitutionality of the bill and urged the House to “adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress.” After Colmer made a final, unsuccessful attempt to derail the bill by sending it to committee, cheers erupted from the packed House gallery as H. Res. 1100 passed by a vote of 250 to 172. President Johnson signed the civil rights bill, with the fair housing provision, into law on April 11, 1968.The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was a product of two stories: the legislative battle in the halls of Congress and the simmering tensions in American cities. Members of Congress could not separate their procedural maneuvers and parliamentary debates from the events of April 1968. For Representative Anderson, Congress was at a “crossroad,” and the paths ahead led in one of two directions: either a continued “slide into an endless cycle of riot and disorder,” or “a slow and painful ascent toward that yet distant goal of equality of opportunity for all Americans regardless of race or color.” In the spring of 1968, the tragic death of Martin Luther King pointed the nation in the latter direction. As had happened with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King and a legion of nonviolent protesters and organizers had prodded Congress toward action on the bill that came to be known as the Fair Housing Act.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 90th Cong., 2nd sess. (8 April 1968): 9174, 9166; Congressional Record, House, 90th Cong., 2nd sess. (10 April 1968): 9527, 9529, 9540–9542, 9551, 9556–9564, 9604, 9620–9621; H.R. 2516, 90th Cong. (1967); H. Res. 1100, 90th Cong. (1968); Civil Rights Act of 1968, Public Law 90-284, 87 Stat. 73 (1968); House Committee on Rules, Providing for Agreeing to the Senate Amendment to the Bill (H.R. 2516), 90th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 1289 (1968); Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007); The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968): 1; Baltimore Sun, 7 April 1968; Boston Globe, 6 April 1968; Chicago Tribune, 9 April 1968, 10 April 1968; Los Angeles Times, 5 April 1968, 6 April 1968; New York Times, 12 March 1968, 20 March 1968, 6 April 1968, 7 April 1968, 10 April 1968, 11 April 1968; New York Times Magazine, 31 March 1968; Register Republic (Rockford, IL), 15 April 1968, Washington Post, 6 March 1968; President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Statement by the President on the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,”4 April 1968, American Presidency Project, ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238016; President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Letter to the Speaker of the House Urging Enactment of the Fair Housing Bill,” 5 April 1968, American Presidency Project, ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237944.
“The Speaker Bluffed You” — Joe Cannon and the 1910 Motion to Vacate the Chair | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Longtime House leader Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois once said he lost and won the Speakership on March 19, 1910. His reversal of fortune had hinged on a daring gamble.Cannon, who first entered Congress in 1873, had been around long enough to know the vicissitudes of winning and losing—both as a lawmaker and at the card table. Over the course of his career, Cannon had experienced his share of legislative battles. He had also developed a reputation as a shrewd poker player. Cannon usually played with pocket change, but the tactics remained the same regardless of the stakes. He didn’t win every hand, but he took more than a few opponents.Cannon didn’t technically lose the Speakership on March 19. But he did lose the Speakership’s main source of power when a coalition of House Democrats and progressive Republicans, known as Insurgents, voted to expand the size of the Rules Committee and remove Cannon as the committee’s chairman. Serving simultaneously as Speaker and chairman had given Cannon near total control over the House’s legislative machinery. Ever since he first assumed the Speakership in 1903, Cannon alone often decided which bills made it to the floor for debate. His opponents called him a czar and a tyrant. But without his chairmanship, Cannon’s influence would dissipate.The Rules Committee vote concerned more than just Cannon’s conduct. It also forced questions about the role of the Speaker, party government, and majority rule in the House. What did it mean for a bipartisan coalition to suddenly seize power in the House and transform the lawmaking process? Would the coalition also be willing to take on the burden of governing by removing Cannon and electing a Speaker from its own ranks?The Rules vote dealt a major blow to Cannon’s aura of invincibility, but he had no intention of folding. Rather than resign, Cannon invoked the House’s procedure to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant and challenged the coalition to vote him out. Politics was not poker. But that day, facing the highest possible stakes, Cannon called the biggest bluff of his career.Insurgents and StandpattersBy 1910, the Rules Committee had played a unique and important role in the development of the House. First organized in 1789, Rules met for years as a select committee with the sole purpose of setting the House’s procedures at the start of each legislative session. The Speaker took over the committee as chairman in 1858. After the Civil War, as the demands of governing became more complex, the Rules Committee took on an increasingly prominent portfolio. It finally earned permanent standing committee status in 1880. Over time, Rules became the gatekeeper to the House Floor, deciding which bills would be sent forward for consideration while also setting the parameters for debate.For the majority of Cannon’s career and during his Speakership, the Rules Committee had just five members—the Speaker and two allies from the majority party, alongside two lawmakers from the minority. The three-to-two ratio ensured the Speaker almost always had his way. Cannon once called the committee’s proceedings under his control “perfunctory” and described his average Rules Committee meeting as “a delightful, gossipy visit.”Many of Cannon’s predecessors ran the House similarly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Representatives across the political spectrum resented a system that seemed to function at the whim of one person. It was often the minority party which protested the Speaker’s power. But by the spring of 1910, during Cannon’s fourth term in the chair, the effort to rein in the Speaker’s power included disaffected progressive members of the GOP majority as well.Cannon’s tenure as Speaker occurred amid a rift between progressive Republicans and more conservative, or “standpat,” Republicans over the direction of the country. Progressives sought to overhaul much of American life, advocating for new labor regulations, environmental protections, and democratic reforms. Cannon, meanwhile, was a proud standpatter. The term “standpat” came from the game of poker and described when a player declined to swap cards. In politics, standpatters like Cannon resisted changes to American society and culture. And as Speaker, Cannon used his power to slow the pace of change by preventing progressive bills from reaching the floor.The tension between GOP factions in the House peaked on March 17, 1910, when progressive Republican George William Norris of Nebraska submitted legislation to expand the Rules Committee and remove the Speaker as chairman. Norris’s bill sought to create a legislative process independent of any one party leader while empowering different ideological blocs on the committee. Cannon, however, saw Norris’s bill as an existential threat. Without the ability to control the flow of legislation to the floor, Cannon believed the Speaker would cease “being the political director of his party,” and would instead “become simply the presiding officer.” Cannon also saw Norris’s bill as subverting majority rule in Congress. He later noted that if the new-look Rules Committee reflected the makeup of the Insurgent-Democratic coalition, it would represent the interests of “two opposing minority factions” rather than “a majority of the electorate.”Norris’s bill launched days of negotiations between Cannon’s allies and the Insurgents. Solutions were scarce, in part because Cannon’s opponents did not all share the same commitment to the cause. Prominent among the Insurgents, according to a reporter covering the proceedings, were “the extremists, whom the regulars charge with caring nothing whatever for the ultimate welfare of their party or for the effect of this contest on the legislative programme [sic] for this session.” At the other end of the Insurgent spectrum were “the ‘cold-feet’ ones,” who also wanted to reform the Speakership but who didn’t want a power struggle with Cannon to risk the GOP’s majority in the upcoming midterm elections. Some lawmakers called on Cannon to withdraw from the committee voluntarily. Others wanted him to okay the committee’s expansion but stay on as chairman until the Congress ended. Cannon, however, wanted nothing to do with the discussions, and later confessed he “gave no heed to the suggestions that I resign to save the party which was already split by a handful of Insurgents going over to the Democrats.”“Power and Responsibility”After two days of discussion over the future of the Speakership, Cannon called the House to order at noon on Saturday, March 19, and declared Norris’s bill out of order. The coalition of Insurgents and Democrats immediately overruled the Speaker, declared the measure privileged, and approved the reforms to the Rules Committee, 191 to 156, with 37 not voting. More than 40 Republicans voted against Cannon.Following the vote, Cannon requested three minutes to address the chamber. Cannon said the Rules Committee overhaul had revealed that a new majority “not in harmony” with the Speaker had formed in the House. As a result, Cannon explained he had two options: he could resign, or lawmakers could remove him from the Speakership by approving a motion to vacate the chair. Since the First Congress (1789–1791), the House had gradually given Members more parliamentary flexibility to alter, correct, expunge, or re-do legislative proceedings. The election of the Speaker was no exception.Cannon—who wanted to ensure the GOP’s legislative agenda remained the top priority—declined to resign, arguing that “a resignation is in and of itself a confession of weakness or mistake or an apology for past actions” which he refused to countenance. Instead, he held firm, confident in his belief that the Insurgent-Democratic alliance would fray if it had to cooperate to run the government. “The real truth is that there is no coherent Republican majority in the House of Representatives,” he said. “Therefore, the real majority ought to have the courage of its convictions . . . and logically meet the situation that confronts it.”In poker, as in politics, Cannon was known for playing “close to the chest,” revealing little of his strategy. What he did next shocked many in the chamber: he declared he “would welcome” a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair to ensure that “power and responsibility may rest with the Democratic and insurgent Members.”Almost immediately Democrat Albert Sidney Burleson of Texas submitted a motion to remove Cannon: “Resolved, That the Office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant, and the House of Representatives shall at once proceed to the election of a Speaker.” Following an unsuccessful attempt to adjourn by Insurgents who didn’t want Burleson’s resolution to overshadow their Rules Committee victory, Cannon put the motion to vacate to a vote. It failed 155 to 192, with eight lawmakers voting present and 33 abstaining. Only nine of the Insurgents who had voted to remove Cannon from the Rules Committee also voted to remove him from the Speaker’s chair. Democrat Claude Kitchin of North Carolina recognized immediately what Cannon had done and heckled the Insurgents. “I never saw you fellows over there back down like this before,” Kitchin said. “The Speaker bluffed you, but he couldn’t run any bluff on this side of the House. We called you.” As the clerk announced the results, Cannon resumed his position on the rostrum and adjourned the House.A historian of the Speakership later called Cannon’s gamble “one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the House of Representatives.” For Cannon, it was a pyrrhic and short-lived victory. Just eight months later, in November 1910, Democrats captured the House majority in the midterm elections, ending Cannon’s Speakership. Cannon’s bluff may have enabled him to save face, but by then the larger game was over. The vote to remove the Speaker from the Rules Committee had forever changed the House.To learn more about the history of the Speakership, read “A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House Speakership (PDF).Sources: Congressional Record, House, 61st Cong., 2nd sess. (19 March 1910): 3425–3439; Deschler’s Precedents of the House of Representatives, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994): 4572; Deschler’s Precedents of the House of Representatives, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994): 7332; Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, “A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House Speakership (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2022); Baltimore Sun, 2 January 1921; Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 August 1909; Courier-Journal, 20 March 1910; New York Times, 19 March 1910; San Francisco Chronicle, 20 March 1910; L. White Busbey, Uncle Joe Cannon: The Story of a Pioneer American (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927); Kenneth W. Hechler, Insurgency: Personalities and Politics of the Taft Era (New York: AMS Press, 1940); Herbert F. Margulies, Reconciliation and Revival; James R. Mann and the House Republicans in the Wilson Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); Ronald M. Peters Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
A Portrait by a Lady | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Author’s note: spelling and punctuation in quotations are reproduced from the original sources.Cecilia Beaux’s reputation as a leading American portrait artist was well established in 1912 when Representative John Dalzell engaged her to paint a portrait of New York Representative Sereno Payne, his colleague on the Ways and Means Committee. Because of her status, Beaux’s professional practice and approach to painting were well documented through interviews, memoirs, and archived diaries. This documentation gives us an unusual first-person account of how she worked and how the first Ways and Means committee chair portrait made its way to the House.Born in Philadelphia in 1855, Cecilia Beaux first drew the art community’s attention in 1883, winning the Mary Smith Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’ annual exhibition for her Whistler-inspired portrait of her sister and nephew, Les Derniers Jours d’Enfance. By the end of the 1890s, Beaux’s artistic star had risen, first by painting portraits of the elite of her hometown, and then expanding her clientele to the upper classes of New York, Boston, and Washington, DC. She moved from Philadelphia to New York and established Green Alley, her summer studio and residence, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.Before she worked in summer studios and was praised for “sympathetic images of the aristocratic upper class,” Beaux labored at commercial artistic practices to make ends meet. As an unmarried woman from a genteel but low-income background, paid work was essential. In her memoir, Beaux recounted that during the formative years of her training, she was commissioned to illustrate fossils for a geological survey. In retrospect, Beaux said, “It was not possible to realize at the time what an immense educational opportunity” the fossils presented to an artist just starting out, but “luckily I had the sense . . . [t]o take advantage of” the commission.Beaux recalled illustrating lithograph fossils more fondly than painting china plates, another of her endeavors to make a living. She briefly took lessons from “a French expert, in the ignoble art of over-glaze painting,” and “at once began adapting it to portraiture. A sad confession. The results were, alas, too successful.” Her portraits of children, rendered on plates “that parents nearly wept over,” met with more success than she expected. At one point she said, “my reputation spread. Mothers in the Far West sent with the photograph a bit of ribbon, the color of the boy’s eyes, as well as a lock of hair.” Despite the joy these portraits brought to their audience, Beaux believed, “This was the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art . . . I remember it with gloom and record it with shame.” She hoped that the plates had “worn out their suspending wires and been dashed to pieces.”During this period, when Beaux first seriously pursued painting, women were discouraged from standard art training because of the necessity of nude models and attending classes with male students. Beaux’s education also stalled when her family objected to more serious study. They assumed she would probably just marry soon and quit, and thus waste the effort and expense, let alone have her “be thrown into a rabble of untidy and indiscriminate art students and no one knew what influence.”Cecilia Beaux rose from these humble endeavors of her youth contrary to the expectations of her family. Long after the embarrassing portraits on plates—after years of successfully building her career—she worked from her summer home, Green Alley, on Representative Sereno Payne’s portrait in September 1912. A Boston Herald feature from 1910 creates a vivid picture of the setting, “one of the most beautiful spots on the coast. It has been termed a bit of real Italy, because of the Italian architecture of the house . . . and the beautiful glimpses of water through the white arches.” Entering through a white picket gate, guests encountered a “tangled thicket of green shrubbery” that looked “like the enchanted forest of the fairy book, with the beautiful princess hidden far, far within.”Intriguingly, the article also provided insights into Beaux’s work process and thoughts on being a professional woman, a rarity just after the turn of the 20th century. Some of her views seemed firmly of their time—she did not, for example, believe women should vote. Perhaps reflecting on her experience decades earlier, Beaux believed that the same opportunities existed for women artists as did for men in the early 20th century because they had equal access to training: “There is no reason why a woman cannot become as great an artist as a man.” If a woman has talent “nothing stands in her way. . . . She is admitted to any art school” and free of the old “embarrassment in the mixed classes.”Despite this confident assertion, Beaux separately noted intangible barriers that women artists faced when prioritizing work. Addressing social expectations, Beaux stated, “We encourage them to get started then we demand too much of them. . . . If [a man] has no time for the writing of a note, he leaves it unwritten,” she continued, “and nobody ever dreams of thinking the less of him.” But if a woman “neglects certain of these so-called courtesies of life, her retribution is swift and keen.”To avoid falling prey to the demands placed on most women at the time, Beaux carefully guarded her studio time, preventing disruptions from all quarters so that she could focus entirely on work. “My painting is not work to me now, but pleasure. I work four hours every morning and try to work at white heat. . . . Any hour of the day when I am not tired I want to paint. I do not confine myself to a schedule, though I am always glad when a sitter agrees to come every morning.” Her approach to boundaries between work and life seems strikingly modern. A reporter who appeared at Beaux’s door without an appointment was informed that the housekeeper is “never allowed to speak to Miss Beaux while she is painting” and then turned away.According to her diary, Sereno Payne availed himself of the artist at her Massachusetts studio, as she preferred, for several mornings in September 1912. Earlier that year, Beaux’s diary on July 24 notes that she “was pleased to hear about the letter fr[om] Dalzell about my doing Senator Paine. and wants me to have him here.” Beaux had her initial seating with Payne on September 19, 1912: “Sereno at last. Extraordingary head large and imposing but what a queer frame like a duck. Very genial bu[t] alas deaf. Looked so like my father thtati was startling.”The work went quickly—or perhaps as Beaux would have said, “at white heat.” On September 23, Payne posed in the morning and remained for a “very jolly meal,” along with some talk of the “Panama bond issue” with another of Beaux’s guests. On September 25, “Mr P came promptly and [Beaux] got to work on right eye. Not quite such strong work as the other . . but felt pretty good over it.” On September 28, she noted that she “got at P and finished coar and accessories. Left head till tomorrow.”Just 10 days after their initial meeting, on September 29, Beaux noted “Mr P gone.” The resulting half-length portrait focuses entirely on the figure of Payne, with no extraneous detail. The dignified figure of Representative Payne gazes thoughtfully at the viewer, the light giving shape to his head and fading to blend the figure into the space.Later that year, the Corcoran Gallery displayed the painting at its biennial exhibition. The Evening Star reported that the Payne portrait, along with a second work by Beaux, were hung along with six paintings by John Singer Sargent, with whom Beaux was classed in discussions of portrait artists at the time. This article cited her work as “no less accomplished or impressive” than the Sargent works on display, and described the Payne portrait as “a straight-forward, vigorous piece of work, full of personality and character.”Aside from this journey across town to the Corcoran Gallery, Cecilia Beaux’s portrait of Sereno Payne remained with the Committee on Ways and Means for more than a century. Although the committee’s collection of chair portraits expanded over the years, this first acquisition has a unique story. Beaux’s documentation of her process and generosity with her thoughts provide insight into the journey of Payne’s portrait to the House, illustrating the professional focus and rigorous work ethic it took for Beaux to achieve success as a female artist more than a century ago.Sources: “Cecilia Beaux diary, 1912,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed 18 November 2022, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/cecilia-beaux-diary-16740; Cecilia Beaux, Background with Figures: Autobiography of Cecilia Beaux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930); Sunday Herald (Boston), 25 September 1910.