Since the early nineteenth century, congressional debate has been recorded and distributed for public consumption. Congress initially entrusted this job to journalists working for the National Intelligencer and other newspapers. But in the years around the Civil War, lawmakers professionalized the responsibility, creating the Government Printing Office in 1860—now the Government Publishing Office—and printing speeches near verbatim in the Congressional Record starting in 1873. Debate can take many shapes on the House Floor. Members use their time to demonstrate their positions on legislation or current events. In some cases, they insert into the Congressional Record full speeches or remarks. To liven up their orations, legislators sometimes sprinkle in literary references. Before the internet became ubiquitous, the Congressional Research Service received so many requests for certain quotations from lawmakers that it published a book in 1989 titled Respectfully Quoted, which compiled more than 2,000 of the most frequently cited quotations by Members of Congress. Among the texts most quoted by legislators were the works of William Shakespeare, the famous sixteenth-century poet, playwright, and tormentor of twenty-first century high school students. Quotes from the Bard are often used to illustrate a point during congressional debate or to serve as a vehicle to tell a story. Second only to biblical references, the various works of Shakespeare are some of the most quoted or cited in congressional publications. To quote, or not to quote. That is the question Members of Congress must consider. The following Edition for Educators highlights examples of various works of Shakespeare found in the Congressional Record from debate on the House Floor and in the Extensions of Remarks.Earth Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday On Earth Day 1999, Representative Connie Morella of Maryland noted, I consider environmental protection to be national priority. I pledge to work with my colleagues to ensure the preservation of our natural resources and the protection of the public’s health. And this Earth Week, as we also celebrate the 435th birthday of William Shakespeare, we remember his words, ‘to nature none more bound.’ Today, as we observe Earth Day, let us reaffirm our commitment to a cleaner world. In this instance, Representative Morella is quoting Henry VIII, act 1, scene 2, line 129, when King Henry VIII, amid a discussion on taxation, refers to the Duke of Buckingham and calls for his execution: It grieves many: The gentleman is learn’d, and a most rare speaker; To nature none more bound; his training such, That he may furnish and instruct great teachers. Representative Morella, however, focused on the concept of being obligated to protect nature rather than the context of the play. Read more about Henry VIII from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Yielding the Floor to Shakespeare At the end of a five-minute special order speech titled “Truth in Speaking,” concerning the 1996 Whitewater investigation into President William J. Clinton, the Congressional Record captured an interesting back and forth between two Members. Representative Robert Kenneth Dornan of California yielded time to Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas by referencing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: "Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas, the Portia from the other side of the aisle." Representative Jackson-Lee, however, questioned the reference and replied, "Mr. Speaker, I do not know if I will accept that. I am the gentlewoman from Texas.” The Congresswoman went on to acknowledge that she nevertheless, “appreciate[d] the gentleman from California in his sincerity." Dornan felt he needed to explain. “Just to clear the record,” he said, “for those who were not forced to take 4 years of Shakespeare in school, that Portia, because I well know the gentlewoman’s distinguished name, means a lady lawyer of exceeding skill, as in Portia from the Merchant of Venice, who gave us the great soliloquy: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice bless’d: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. Afterward, Jackson-Lee showcased her own Shakespearian knowledge. Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas: Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, Shakespeare also said: The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. Mr. DORNAN. That was in Henry VI. The barber said that. I do not want any part of that. Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much the gentleman’s compliment. I want it to be acknowledged I am just a humble servant from the 18th Congressional District of Texas. But I appreciate the kindness of the gentleman from California. Jackson-Lee’s quip about the lawyers comes from a brief line in Henry VI that focuses on the struggle for royal control and the British War of the Roses, which was a contest for power between to English families. The scene focuses on a plot against King Henry. Henry VI, part 2, act 4, scene 2, line 75:Dick (the butcher): The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Cade (leader of the Kentish rebellion): Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say, ’tis the beeswax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. Learn more about Henry VI and The Merchant of Venice from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Great Tragedy On April 21, 1936, Representative Ulysses Guyer of Kansas gave a stirring address in the House Chamber during a Memorial Program held in honor of seven lawmakers (two Senators and five Representatives) who had recently passed away. Not constrained by time since the House had recessed for the ceremony, Guyer’s remarks filled nearly two pages of the Congressional Record. In his speech, Guyer quoted excerpts from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, in his tragedy of greatness, puts upon the lips of Marc Antony the naked truth concerning human greatness. Antonius was standing above the body of his assassinated friend and comrade, that ‘piece of bleeding earth’, that pathetic clay that but yesterday was Julius Caesar, ‘whose word might have stood against the world.’ As he gazed upon this prostrate form he exclaimed: ‘0 Mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure? The phrase “piece of bleeding earth” derives from Julius Caesar act 3, scene 1, line 280, when Marc Antony, a close confidante of Ceasar, looks upon his dead compatriot following Ceasar’s murder. In act 3, scene 2, line 130, Marc Antony begins his eulogy of Ceasar: But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world. Now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence.” Guyer’s final quote is from act 3, scene 1, line 164 where Marc Antony meets with Brutus and Cassius following the death of Ceasar:O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils Shrunk to this little measure.If Shakespeare had intended to underline the tragedy and treachery of Ceasar’s death in the play, Guyer’s use of quotations from Julius Caesar was instead intended to honored his deceased colleagues. Learn more about Julius Caesar from the Folger Shakespeare Library.Memorial Day On May 20, 1970, Representative William Bray of Indiana inserted a speech into the Congressional Record in honor of Memorial Day. To commemorate the service members who made the ultimate sacrifice by laying down their lives for their country, Bray cited a large portion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, act 5, scene 8, lines 44 through 63. Said Bray: “Probably nowhere else in the English language is this so movingly described than in the last scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth”: Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt: He only liv’d but ‘til he was a man; The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d In the unshrinking station where he fought, But like a man he died. Then he is dead? Ay, and brought off the field: your cause of sorrow Must not be measur’d by his worth, for then It hath no end. Had he his hurts before? Ay, on the front. Why, then, God’s soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And, so his knell is knoll’d. . . . They say he parted well, and paid his score: And so, God be with him! In this passage, Bray quotes verbatim the characters Siward (commander of the English Army) and Ross (a Scottish Noble) from Macbeth. Bray also cited musical compositions and 11 other authors including, Plato, Herodotus, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Gospel of Mathew, Plutarch, Ecclesiticus, Abraham Lincoln, Allan Seeger, the Sioux leader Low Dog, Sir Edward Creasey, and Robert Ingersoll. Bray closes his tribute repeating the Macbeth line, “They say he parted well, and paid his score: And so, God be with him!” In 1989, the Congressional Research Service noted Respectfully Quoted “will be helpful to Members of Congress in their task of expressing our national purpose and in their debating the public issues.” With more than 38 plays to his name, Shakespeare has provided a very large and quotable body of work with which to illustrate modern events. Sources: Congressional Record, 21 April 1936, congress.gov; Congressional Record, 20 May 1970, congress.gov; Congressional Record, 05 May 1996, congress.gov; Congressional Record, 22 April 1999, congress.gov; Folger Shakespeare Library, https://www.folger.edu/; Suzy Platt, Library Of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989).

U.S. House History Blog

11.04.2025

Objection Day | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

During the 33rd Congress (1853–1855), a Texas man named Joseph Clymer launched what would become a quarter-century effort to petition Congress for financial redress after the U.S. Army broke the terms of a multiyear shipping contract he had signed with the government. A few years earlier in 1851, Clymer had won a bid to transport military supplies from Fort Leavenworth on the Kansas-Missouri border to locations in Texas and New Mexico. Clymer subcontracted part of the job with another shipping outfit, and the Army agreed to pay Clymer and his associates at least $112,908 over two years to move goods and supplies by wagon train during the spring and summer of 1851 and 1852. After successfully making the deliveries in 1851, Clymer received notice from the Army in March 1852 that he would not be required to ship any goods at all that year. By then, Clymer had already prepared 30 wagons and hired three dozen teamsters and hundreds of work animals to transport the goods and materials that the Army had stipulated in his contract. Clymer protested the decision and noted that without the freight “he would lose much, and be put to great stress.”In 1854, Clymer’s case went before an auditor at the U.S. Treasury Department who determined that Clymer had been “greatly damaged, and a heavy loser” after the Army reneged on its contract. Another Treasury official agreed with the auditor’s conclusion and outlined the next steps: “Mr. Clymer, sustained damage and injury by the non-fulfilment of contract on the part of the government, and that in such a case Congress alone can afford redress.”On Friday, February 23, 1855, the House Committee on Military Affairs reported Clymer’s petition seeking that redress as House Joint Resolution 59, “for the relief of Joseph Clymer,” a private bill that dealt solely with his claim; private bills are different from public bills, which concern the country’s general citizenry. The committee, which supported Clymer’s claim, reported the bill with a requirement “authorizing the accounting officers of the treasury to settle the claim upon the principles of equity and justice.” The House placed it on the calendar for the next day’s debate, but the chamber adjourned for lack of a quorum and lawmakers never considered it.Clymer’s petition had been the victim of unlucky timing in 1855. But as a private bill, it faced long odds from the start because it was also subject to a requirement in the legislative calendar called “objection day,” during which opposition from just one lawmaker would kill a bill. From the time the House created objection day in 1839 until Members ended it four decades later, the House had effectively created a legislative veto over private bills. In an institution where the majority would eventually be able to exercise almost unchecked power, House Rules for a time governed the private calendar under the tyranny of the smallest possible minority: one. Clymer’s bill lingered in Congress, off and on, for more than a quarter century. Objection day had not killed his petition in 1855, but it nearly did 26 years later, when, in 1881, timing was finally on Clymer’s side.Private BillsBy the time the House considered Clymer’s petition in 1855, much of the legislation Congress passed came in the form of private bills. In the 33rd Congress, when Clymer first requested help from Congress, lawmakers approved almost twice as many private bills (352) as public bills (188). Before the creation of America’s social safety net in the twentieth century, private bills were the primary way everyday Americans sought help from their government. Private bills often came in the form of relief bills—money that Congress appropriated on a case-by-case basis for widows, wounded veterans, people experiencing hardship, or those like Clymer who had claims against the government. While many Members saw petitions and private bills as an extension of their constituent services, others saw them, in the words of one nineteenth century Georgia congressman, as “mediated robberies” of the federal purse.In 1810, lawmakers began blocking out time in the legislative calendar for the consideration of private bills when the House met in the Committee of the Whole. That year, on the motion of Representative Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, the House reserved Fridays for debate on “reports and bills originating from petition,” giving private bills priority over all other matters in the House’s schedule that day. Sixteen years later, in 1826, as the demands on lawmakers grew, the House approved a new rule submitted by William Leigh Brent of Louisiana, that reserved both Fridays and Saturdays “for the consideration of private bills and private business, in preference to any other.”In early 1839, the House changed its rules again, creating what became known as “objection day.” The House reserved the first and fourth Fridays each month for the private calendar and stipulated that on those days “the calendar of private bills shall be called over, and the bills to the passage of which no objection shall then be made, shall be first considered and disposed of.” Bills that were objected to, however, were sent to the back of the private calendar, buried under a mountain of other legislation.“Vigilance” and “Long Delayed Justice”It’s not clear when the term objection day gained traction, but it is first mentioned in the Congressional Globe on Friday, June 2, 1848—“‘objection day,’ on which bills could be passed that were unobjectionable,” noted the editors of the Globe. Thirty years later, in 1877, the Boston Daily Globe newspaper highlighted perhaps the truer nature of the term. On December 7, the House went into the Committee of the Whole. “As this was what is known as ‘objection day,’ nearly all of the bills on the calendar were objected to.”For at least one reporter, objection day had both costs and benefits. On occasions when the Committee of the Whole cleared a large number of bills on objection day, consideration was “necessarily loose and imperfect,” wrote a New York Tribune correspondent in January 1849 after witnessing the proceedings in the House. “Great reliance must be placed on the vigilance and rectitude of the Committee reporting the bills.” But the author was confident that “seven eights” of the bills on the private calendar “were right, and that much long delayed justice was secured, much undeserved suffering relieved” during objection day proceedings.Reporting on a subsequent objection day, the Tribune was surprised that more private bills “were objected to than allowed to pass, there being a number of particularly hard cases on the Calendar.” The author suspected that some bills that deserved to pass ended up failing but ultimately concluded that objection day was “remarkably well done.” Most of the measures that succeeded “were grants of small pensions to men who lost their health or limbs in the public service, to widows of deceased Revolutionary soldiers, &c. &c.”Deserving though these cases may have been, the Tribune observed that there was always “some Member . . . with a sour stomach” who would object on Fridays and Saturdays, dashing the hopes of a downtrodden petitioner in the process. There were always Members “who grudge the days devoted to” the private calendar and vote to adjourn as soon as possible; always Members “who seem to detest most heartily the lobby influences with which these bills surround Congress and distract the attention of its Members.” The cumulative effect meant that “very dubious claims go through with a rush” one day, while “fair and just” claims get smothered the next day.“I am inclined to think there are a great many unjust claims presented before the Government,” Representative Alexander Stephens of Georgia said during consideration of a House Rules change in December 1852, “but I think there are a great many just ones which have been sleeping here for a half century, perhaps longer.” For Stephens—who would go on to serve as Confederate vice president during the Civil War—the problem wasn’t the type of private legislation the House considered, it was objection day itself. “That is a useless day,” he said. “No discussion is allowed. A claim is taken up, the Clerk reads a long report to the House until he is horse, to which perhaps not more than fifteen Members of the House are listening. Then someone says ‘I object!’ and thus ends the matter for that day.”For many years, Cave Johnson of Tennessee reportedly made it regular practice to oppose legislation on the private calendar, protecting “Uncle Sam’s strong box with the fidelity of a dog and the snarling combativeness of a genuine Cerberus,” the Louisville Daily Courier remembered in 1855, a decade after Johnson left the House. With the Tennessean gone, the role of chief objector fell to John Letcher of Virginia. Letcher “honestly” believed, the Daily Courier said, that “every man who seeks redress at the hands of Congress, or asks to be paid what he (the claimant) considers a just demand upon the government, is a dishonest man; not to say a rascal, and has a deliberate design to defraud the treasury.”Because objection day allowed just one Member to determine the fate of a bill, some observers found the practice, well, objectionable. In 1854, an editorial published under the penname “Jefferson,” critiqued the legislative mechanism as it existed in the House Rules, highlighting objection day as the most egregious example of the how “the rules work most onerously.” Under objection day, “Jefferson” observed, the good faith recommendation of a House committee to approve a private claim could be struck down by one lawmaker without a good faith debate on the floor. “The veto power is conferred by the constitution upon the President of the United States alone, but by the Rules of the House of Representatives each member can exercise this power as effectually as the President.” Some of the claims came from “widows and children imploring justice for years,” the author observed, and deserved to be considered. “An objection on the part of a single member should not be sufficient to defeat a just claim. The character of the country is involved in this matter.”In 1860, the House made a final adjustment to the objection day rule, giving bills that had already been objected to another chance at passage. On March 16 that year, the House approved an amendment that raised the number of objections required to effectively kill a private bill from one to five.The House ended objection day with a major overhaul of the rules in 1880 that, among other reforms, sought to better standardize the House Calendar. In a last-minute attempt to salvage objection day, Harry White of Pennsylvania offered an amendment to keep it on the books. Joseph Blackburn of Kentucky quickly snuffed out his effort. “What reason is there for continuing a practice which allows any bill on the Private Calendar to be passed over because of a single objection, when if by chance or luck it comes upon the next Friday it is not amenable to that objection at all?” he asked. “I would rather have the judgement of one of the standing committees of this House as to the merit or equity of a matter specially committed to it than to have the single unsupported opinion of any member on this floor.” White’s amendment to keep objection day was voted down overwhelmingly.Clymer’s PaydayA year later, in 1881, the House once again resurrected Joseph Clymer’s $18,325 claim against the government for lost revenue after the Army broke its shipping contract with him in 1852. Clymer’s bill had come up so often and been around for so long that in 1878 the House Claims Committee wrote that it was “most remarkable that a claim with so many recognitions of its justice should have been so long delayed of payment.” But some Members remained unwilling to approve Clymer’s claim, and Philip Hayes of Illinois rose to object when it was put to a vote. “It seems to me that bill ought not to be passed,” Hayes said. “If this claim has been running for twenty-five years, I think if there was any justice in it it would have been settled long ago. I wish to ask the Chair whether, under our new rules, there is an objection day, and if this be objection day?”“Under the present rules there is no objection day,” the presiding officer replied.Two other Members rose to defend Clymer’s claim, pointing out that it had already passed the Senate on two separate occasions but always failed in the House “for want of time.” Unable to wield veto power without the authority of objection day, Hayes lost the argument. The private bill compensating Clymer for $18,325 finally became law on March 2, 1881.Sources: House Journal, 11th Cong., 2nd sess. (22 January 1810): 189; House Journal, 19th Cong., 1st sess. (26 January 1826): 197; House Journal, 25th Cong., 3rd sess. (25 January 1839): 374; House Journal, Appendix, Standing Rules and Orders, 37th Cong., 3rd sess. (1863): 639; Annals of Congress, House, 11th Cong., 2nd sess. (19 January 1810): 1247; Annals of Congress, House, 11th Cong., 2nd sess. (22 January 1810): 1253; Congressional Globe, House, 25th Cong., 3rd sess. (25 January 1839): 446; Congressional Globe, House, 46th Cong., 2nd sess. (2 June 1848): 810; Congressional Record, House, 32nd Cong., 2nd sess. (20 December 1852): 98; Congressional Record, House, 46th Cong., 2nd sess. (24 February 1880): 1089; Congressional Record, House, 46th Cong., 3rd sess. (14 January 1881): 635; House Committee on Military Affairs, Joseph Clymer, To Accompany Joint Resolution No. 59, 33rd. Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 110 (1855); House Committee on Claims, Joseph Clymer, 45th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 425 (1878); An Act for the Relief of Joseph Clymer, of Texas, 21 Stat. 637 (1881); Boston Daily Globe, 8 December 1877; Louisville Daily Courier, 12 January 1855; National Intelligencer, 11 January 1854; New York Tribune, 29 January 1848, 5 February 1849, 12 February 1849, 28 December 1858; Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol. 10, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876); Richard S. Beth, “Private Bills: Procedure in the House,” 21 October 2004, Report 98-628, Congressional Research Service; Joseph Cooper and Cheryl D. Young, “Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Institutional Change,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 14, no. 1 (Feb., 1989): 67–105; George B. Galloway, History of the House of Representatives, ed. Sindey Wise (1962; rev. Thomas Y. Crowell Company: New York, 1976).

U.S. House History Blog

29.03.2025

Edition for Educators—Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Since the First Congress opened in 1789, more than 11,000 people have served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Most served capably for a few terms and returned to their communities. But some lawmakers have left towering legacies and are remembered for their legislative prowess, path-breaking careers, and bold personalities. These Members of Congress, including powerful Speakers of the House, strong-willed legislators, trailblazing Representatives, and policy specialists, qualify as “Giants of the House.”As a volunteer nurse and advocate for veterans across the country during and after World War I, Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts won election to the House following the death of her husband, Representative John Jacob Rogers, in 1925 and went on to serve for 35 years in Congress. During her record-setting tenure, Rogers helped shape America’s role in World War II, provided a path for women in military service, and expanded the responsibilities of the federal government to care for veterans and their families.This month’s Edition for Educators highlights the pathbreaking career of Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, one of the longest-tenured women in Congress.The “Widow’s Mandate”HIGHLIGHT—Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of MassachusettsRepresentative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, a renowned advocate for veterans and one of the longest-serving women in House history, was born in Saco, Maine, on March 19, 1881. Following an early career advising and assisting Congressmen and Presidents, she won a special election to succeed her husband, John Jacob Rogers of Massachusetts, following his death in 1925.HISTORICAL DATA—Women Members with Military ServiceThe experience Edith Nourse Rogers gained serving as a nurse during World War I shaped her congressional career and her deep respect for American veterans. Although she was not an official member of America’s armed services as a volunteer nurse, Rogers helped set the stage for women to join and serve in the nation’s armed forces.ESSAY—Widows and Familial ConnectionsMore often than not, the first generation of women in Congress gained experience in public affairs as political confidantes and campaign surrogates for the Congressmen to whom they were married or otherwise related. Ironically, it was personal tragedy rather than a shared interest in reform that provided political entrée for most early women in Congress. Beginning with Representative Mae Nolan of California in 1923, eight of the women who served in Congress between 1917 and 1934 were widows who succeeded their late husbands. None had held previous political office. But in these cases—in which special elections were called quickly to fill the vacancies, leaving little time for campaigning—party leaders believed in the value of having the same familiar last name on the ballot. Several of these women, however, shared much more than a last name with their predecessors: they were among their husbands’ most trusted political advisers, particularly Edith Nourse Rogers and Florence Kahn of California.This essay from the first chapter of Women in Congress discusses the “widow’s mandate,” as it was popularly coined, as well as the expectations political party structures had for women lawmakers and the ways in which women Members like Rogers set their own course as both leaders and legislators.Representative Rogers of MassachusettsPEOPLE PROFILE—Edith Nourse Rogers of MassachusettsDuring her 35-year House career, one of the longest tenures of any woman in American history, Rogers authored legislation that had far-reaching effects on American servicemen and women. Initially relegated to middling committee assignments, Rogers gradually rose within the ranks of the Republican Party. In 1933, she earned a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee and began to address the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazi Germany. As isolationism gripped her party, Rogers voted against the Neutrality Act of 1937 and cosponsored legislation to assist Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Congresswoman Rogers’s crowning legislative achievements came during World War II and in the immediate postwar years, including the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Act and the GI Bill of Rights.ESSAY—Onto the National Stage: Congresswomen in an Age of Crisis, 1935–1954 This second chapter from Women in Congress covers the tumultuous two decades that encompassed the Great Depression, World War II, and the start of the Cold War. Women participated in America’s survival, recovery, and ascent to world power in important and unprecedented ways; they became shapers of the welfare state, workers during wartime, and members of the military. Like their male counterparts, women in Congress legislated to provide economic relief to their constituents, debated the merits of government intervention to help the economy, argued about America’s role in world affairs, and grappled with challenges and opportunities during wartime. As a ranking member and later chair of committees that worked on veterans’ legislation, Rogers held a central role in the nation’s response to World War II and its aftermath.RECORD—Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps BillBefore serving in Congress, Representative Edith Nourse Rogers worked overseas during World War I inspecting field hospitals. In Europe, she saw women who served on a contractual or voluntary basis who received no legal protection or medical care for their essential contributions. When she served in Congress many years later, her experience as a field nurse influenced the legislation Rogers sponsored, including the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps bill. When the bill became law in 1942, it formalized the indispensable role women played in the military during wartime and compensated them for their service and in the event of injury or illness.PathbreakerBLOG—“The Most Gallant Lady from Massachusetts”The portrait of Edith Nourse Rogers as chair of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs was unveiled on July 27, 1950. The artwork had been commissioned by the Massachusetts American Legion, and it still hangs in the Veterans’ Affairs Committee rooms in the Cannon House Office Building. The portrait shows Rogers as she appeared in the later part of her 35-year career—white-haired and dignified, set in a vague, dark, impressionistic space. It closely resembles artist Howard Chandler Christy’s other portraits of House Members, which include two Speakers of the House and two other committee chairs. Contrary to the business-as-usual depiction in her portrait, Rogers was exceptional in many ways. She was only the second woman—after her colleague Mary Norton of New Jersey—to have a portrait commemorating her time leading a committee hung in the House. By the time the portrait was painted, Rogers had served in Congress for a quarter of a century, chalking up major victories on behalf of veterans and military personnel.HISTORICAL DATA—Women with 25 Years or More House Service For more than half a century, Edith Nourse Rogers held the record as the longest-serving woman in Congress. Though her record has since been eclipsed, Rogers’s career remains among the lengthiest tenures for any woman in the U.S. House of Representatives. This chart provides a list of all women who have served in the U.S. House of Representatives for at least 25 years.BLOG—“You Start It and You Like the Work, and You Just Keep On”“The first 30 years are the hardest,” Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts said of her more than three decades in the U.S. House of Representatives. The former Red Cross volunteer nurse compared her tenure in Congress to “taking care of the sick. You start it and you like the work, and you just keep on.” In an institution where long service often yields greater power, many long-tenured Members became some of the House’s most famous and influential people. With her 35 years in office, Rogers is among a select few—less than three percent of all lawmakers—to have served so long in the House.Additional ResourcesThe primary research collection for Edith Nourse Rogers’s congressional career can be found at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in the Schlesinger Library. Additional material, including letters to constituents, is available through the Massachusetts Historical Society.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.

U.S. House History Blog

14.03.2025

Recent Artifacts Online, Spring 2025 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

See what’s fresh for spring with newly donated and newly digitized objects in the House Collection. Over the years, hundreds of people collected congressional treasures and gave them to the House of Representatives. Take a look at a few standouts.Visitors’ Gallery PassThis pass, donated by Daniel P. Smith, gave 10 days’ worth of access to the Visitor’s Gallery in the House. Albert Pearson of Ohio signed it in late July 1894 for aspiring lawyer Custer Snyder. Snyder saw debates on the federal budget, pensions for disabled military veterans, and West Coast shipping ports, among other legislative actions.Plant for More Beautiful Cities Postage StampIn 1969, the U.S. Postal Service released a set of four colorful stamps on the theme of beautifying America. Arranged in a perforated block, the six-cent stamps included illustrations of cheerful flowers and cherry blossoms brightening up parks, streets, and highways. One stamp in the set, donated by Janice and Harris Strizever, “Plant for More Beautiful Cities,” foregrounds pink azaleas and yellow-tinged white tulips. The flowers garner so much attention that the viewer could almost miss the Capitol Building in the background.Hastings Keith Lapel PinCampaign slogan alliteration beats strong in the hearts of many politicians, and Hastings Keith was no exception. This lapel pin, given to the House Collection by Will Plaster, urged the voters to “Keep Keith” in Congress. The Massachusetts native was born in Brockton and represented the district there for 14 years.Visitor’s Gallery PassRepresentative Wells Goodykoontz, who represented a West Virginia district from 1919 to 1923, issued this House Gallery pass, a contribution to the House Collection from Joe Shoemaker, to visitor Warren Bailey in 1919. For much of the early 20th century, gallery passes were decorated with steel engravings and produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. In addition to conveying the information necessary to gain admittance to the House Gallery, the passes include a female personification of Liberty, who gestures toward the House Mace, which she holds by her side. Behind the visitor information, a shield covered in stars and stripes, bracketed by laurel and oak branches, is printed in a lighter shade of gray.William Lacy Clay Jr. Baseball CardThe Congressional Baseball Game’s first trading cards arrived in 1972. In the 21st century, the tradition is still going strong. This William Lacy Clay card from 2011, part of a complete set provided by donor Joe Foley, follows the time-honored tradition of showing the player’s allegiance to a local team, in this case the St. Louis Cardinals.Want something more artful? We have new portraits, too:For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.

U.S. House History Blog

11.03.2025

A “Very Close Division of the Next House”: The Dramatic Majority Flip Heading into the 72nd Congress | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On March 4, 1931, Speaker Nicholas Longworth of Ohio stood on the rostrum, gavel in hand, and adjourned the 71st Congress (1929–1931), ending what had been a remarkably volatile term. The Congress had started two years earlier, in April 1929, when President Herbert Hoover called lawmakers to Washington for a special session to address a painful recession in the country’s agricultural sector. Just six months later, the stock market collapsed, sparking what would quickly become the Great Depression.In November 1930, the midterm elections became a referendum on the country’s economic conditions when voters largely held incumbent Republican lawmakers responsible for the depression. The results were stark. In the 71st Congress, the GOP held 270 seats. In the 1930 midterms, Republicans lost dozens of races but kept their majority heading into the 72nd Congress (1931–1933) with the slimmest possible margin. Out of 435 seats in the House, Republicans had won 218, Democrats captured 216, and the Farmer-Labor Party from Minnesota, which planned to caucus with Democrats, earned one. For all intents and purposes, the House would be 218 to 217.The close party division looked even more precarious during the fall and winter when three lawmakers died between late November 1930 and early March 1931: New York Democrat John F. Quayle died from pneumonia on November 27, 1930. A month later, New York Representative David O’Connell died at a shoeshine stand in midtown Manhattan. And on March 1, 1931, Republican Representative Henry Allen Cooper of Wisconsin, the oldest Member of the House and—with 18 nonconsecutive terms in Congress—the longest serving, died of a heart attack at the age of 80 in his room at a Washington, DC, hotel.When Longworth addressed the House three days after Cooper’s death in the final minutes of the 71st Congress, he acknowledged the sudden uncertainty heading into the next term, which, per the standing practice at the time, was set to open in December that year, a full 13 months after the previous fall’s election. “Perhaps this is the last time I will address you from this rostrum,” Longworth said, eliciting nervous laughter from the chamber. “I do not mean to insinuate that I regard it as a probability, but I must admit it is a possibility. . . . It is only an All-Wise Providence who is going to determine which of the two great political parties will organize the next House of Representatives.”Longworth, however, would not be there to see which party organized the next House. He died a month later, on April 9, 1931, while vacationing in South Carolina. Longworth’s death, along with that of Quayle, O’Connell, and Cooper, was just the beginning. By the time the 72nd Congress opened in December 1931, a total of 14 Members-elect had died. The special elections to fill their vacancies before the new term opened would upend the House majority.The Loss of the SpeakerThe 1930 midterm elections occurred a year after the stock market crashed in October 1929, sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin. Americans lost billions in personal wealth. Businesses across the country failed, plunging millions of people out of work. On top of the financial crisis, the passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff of 1930, which had raised fees on imports, exacerbated the economic hardship. Meanwhile, the continued enforcement of Prohibition, banning the sale of alcohol, grew increasingly unpopular. The combination of those forces led to significant electoral headwinds for House Republicans. The loss of 52 Republican seats heading into the 72nd Congress—and the resulting one seat GOP majority—left legislative plans tenuous. But the sudden deaths of multiple Members after the election—including Speaker Longworth—ushered in a period of remarkable uncertainty.While the deaths of Quayle and O’Connell did not alter the balance of power—both lawmakers represented safe Democratic seats—Cooper’s death posed a much more serious problem for Republicans intent on keeping their majority. Worried members of the Wisconsin delegation told reporters that replacing Cooper would be “titanic.” Wisconsin Republicans hinted that if large numbers of candidates entered the Republican primaries to succeed the late lawmaker, they could split the vote and enable a Democrat to win the seat.As Members returned home after the 71st Congress adjourned, the House suffered an additional blow. On March 16, Democrat James Aswell of Louisiana, the ranking member on the House Committee on Agriculture, died from heart disease. Louisiana was a Democratic stronghold, however, and Aswell was soon replaced by a fellow Democrat, John Overton, in a special election two months later in May.But when Speaker Longworth died suddenly from pneumonia while visiting Aiken, South Carolina, the House was thrown for a loss. The nation grieved as Longworth’s body was transported to Ohio by train. Democratic Leader John Nance Garner of Texas, who hobnobbed and sparred with Longworth for decades, told reporters, “I have lost one of the best friends of a lifetime, the country a good citizen, and the congress a most valued legislator.” President Hoover, who went to Ohio to attend the funeral service, recalled Longworth’s “happy character, his sterling honesty, his courage in public questions.”Longworth, a bon vivant who was just 61 years old when he died, had first won election to Congress in 1902. He lost re-election in 1912 but recaptured his seat in 1914 and served until his death. His final race in 1930 had been a nailbiter: Longworth, who usually won re-election by 10 points or more, defeated his Democratic opponent that year with just 51 percent of the vote. Many wondered if Republicans would be able to hold the seat in 1931 amid worsening economic conditions. For the Wall Street Journal, Longworth’s death raised the probability that a “very close division of the next House . . . may be altered in a special election.”Summertime SadnessBy mid-May 1931, party divisions in the House remained breathtakingly close: 216 Republicans, 216 Democrats, and one Minnesota Farmer-Laborer. That the House had lost five lawmakers between late November 1930 and early April 1931 was difficult enough. But over the next six months, the House would mourn the deaths of nine more Members-elect: four Democrats and five Republicans.On May 26, 1931, Democratic Representative-elect Matthew O’Malley of New York passed away. O’Malley had just won the special election to replace one of the deceased Members-elect, John Quayle. Then, three days later, Democrat Charles A. Mooney of Ohio died.July, however, was perhaps the cruelest month of all. In a little more than three weeks, the House lost Pennsylvania Republican and House Judiciary Committee chairman George S. Graham; Democrat Charles G. Edwards of Georgia; Republican Bird J. Vincent of Michigan; and Democrat Samuel C. Major of Missouri.By midsummer 1931, the House GOP had lost its longest-serving Member in Cooper, its beloved Speaker in Longworth, and a powerful committee leader in Graham. A simple majority required 218 votes, but the deaths of so many Members-elect in such a short amount of time meant the party division by August stood at 214 Republicans, 212 Democrats, and one Farmer-Laborer.Special ElectionsBy late summer, states began holding special elections to fill the House’s many vacancies. On September 9, 1931, Georgia Democrat Homer Parker won election unopposed to replace Democrat Charles Edwards. Three weeks later, Democrat Robert Johnson of Missouri was elected to replace Democrat Samuel Major. And on October 13, Republican Thomas Amlie of Wisconsin won election to Cooper’s former seat. Amlie’s victory meant the party division in the House at mid-autumn stood at 215 Republicans, 214 Democrats, and one Farmer-Laborer.In the span of four days in late October 1931, however, the House was plunged into uncertainty again. On October 18, Republican Ernest Robinson Ackerman of New Jersey died, followed by Republican Fletcher Hale of New Hampshire on October 22. There was such urgency to protect the slim GOP majority in the House, that New Jersey’s Republican governor called the state legislature into session to move the special election for Ackerman’s seat from January 1932 to December 1, 1931, just a week before the 72nd Congress was set to open.New Jersey’s gambit aside, many observers saw the special elections on November 3 as likely to determine the fate of the House majority for the 72nd Congress. It had been two years since the onset of the Great Depression, and on the eve of the special elections the Associated Press observed that, given high voter dissatisfaction with the Hoover administration, “tomorrow’s results will inevitably be interpreted as an expression of the public attitude toward the President.”On Election Day, voters initially seemed ready to uphold the existing party division in the House. In New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio Democratic candidates filled Democratic vacancies, and Republican candidates filled Republican vacancies, including that of former Republican Speaker Longworth.But in Michigan, Democrats picked up their first seat when Michael James Hart, who opposed Prohibition, cruised to victory with 55 percent of the vote, replacing Republican Bird Vincent. In a sign that the electoral landscape had started to shift, Hart’s victory was the first time a Democrat had won the central Michigan district in 32 years. “Democrats viewed the result as a protest against Republican policies,” the Associated Press reported on the Michigan race. “Republicans, still stunned, either blamed their defeat on economic conditions or a failure of the National Committee to take a more active part in the campaign.” By the end of the day on November 3, Democrats headed into the 72nd Congress with 217 seats. Republicans had 215 seats, the Farmer-Labor Party had one, and two seats remained vacant.On November 6, 1931, however, chaos struck again when Republican Representative Harry McLeary Wurzbach of Texas died in San Antonio. To fill the seat before the 72nd Congress, Texas officials scheduled a special election just two weeks later on November 24. After the short campaign, voters elected Democrat Richard Kleberg with 47 percent of the vote in a four-way race. Kleberg’s victory gave Democrats 218 seats heading into the 72nd Congress—an outright majority.All eyes then turned to the upcoming special elections in New Jersey and New Hampshire where economic concerns dominated the campaign. In New Jersey, especially, the New York Times observed that “the Democratic campaigners have held to one issue: That the Hoover Republican Administration, by refusing to face the facts of the depression and by vacillating in taking steps toward recovery, was responsible for the severity of the depression.” Having already secured control of the chamber for the next session, Democrats padded their margin when Percy Hamilton Stewart was elected on December 1 to fill the New Jersey seat previously held by Ackerman. Democrats had 219 seats when the Congress opened but they would soon have 220. In early January, Democrats flipped a fourth GOP seat when New Hampshire Democrat William N. Rogers was elected to replace Republican Fletcher Hale who had died in October.The 72nd CongressThe 72nd Congress convened on December 7, 1931, having undergone a stunning upheaval during the previous year. From November 1930 to November 1931, 14 Members-elect died before they could take their seats: seven Democrats (Representatives-elect Quayle, O’Connell, Aswell, O’Malley, Mooney, Edwards, and Major) and seven Republicans (Representatives-elect Cooper, Longworth, Graham, Vincent, Ackerman, Hale, and Wurzbach). In the special elections that followed, Democrats flipped three Republican seats to capture the House in an unprecedented majority change before anyone had even taken the oath of office for the 72nd Congress.Small though the Democratic majority was, it was enough to ensure the election of Democratic Leader John Nance Garner of Texas as Speaker and install the party’s committee chairs across the House—including Representative Mary Teresa Norton of New Jersey, who became the first Democratic woman, and only the second woman ever, to chair a House committee when she wielded the gavel of the Committee on the District of Columbia. After the House elected its officers and debated the rules on Opening Day of the 72nd Congress, it approved a series of resolutions expressing its “profound sorrow” at the deaths of their former colleagues. Just before 2:30 p.m., Democratic Leader Henry Thomas Rainey of Illinois moved to adjourn “as a further mark of respect to our deceased Members.”The Twentieth AmendmentFor more than 130 years, lawmakers had complained that the 13-month interregnum between an election and the opening of a new Congress was problematic. In times of crisis—during the Civil War, for instance—Presidents were forced to call Congress into session months ahead of schedule to address critical issues. The longstanding requirement that new legislative terms open in December also meant that lawmakers had just three months in which to legislate during the second session before the Congress ended in March. For those Members who had lost re-election, however, it meant they had three months in which to continue working as “lame ducks”—debating bills and passing laws after having lost the support of their constituents.That quirk of America’s legislative calendar did not last for much longer following the chaotic and uncertain period between November 1930 and December 1931. Legislation to set the start date of a new Congress in early January of each odd year—just weeks after the national elections—had been debated on Capitol Hill since the early 1920s. It passed both chambers during the 72nd Congress, was ratified by the states in early 1933, and went into effect as the Twentieth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution two years later.On January 3, 1935, the 74th Congress (1935–1937) convened only eight weeks after Election Day. Although the narrow window between the election and Opening Day made the transition smoother, the House could not fully escape the sands of time: Representative-elect Frederick Landis of Indiana had died on November 15 leaving one vacancy. But for one House Officer, at least, the focus at the start of the new term was about renewal as much as it was about loss. “We are erecting today a new milestone in the annals of the political history of this Nation,” the House Clerk announced before overseeing the election of the Speaker to start the new term. “This is the first time in 146 years that an old Congress dies and a new one is born on the 3rd day of January.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 71st Cong., 3rd sess. (4 March 1931): 7395; Congressional Record, House, 72nd Cong., 1st sess. (7 December 1931): 15; Congressional Record, House, 74th Cong., 1st sess. (3 January 1935): 9; Atlanta Constitution, 10 April 1931; Boston Globe (daily), 10 April, 3 November, 5 November 1931; Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 April 1931; New York Times, 6 July 1930, 1 March, 2 March, 5 March, 10 April, 27 May, 20 October, 23 October, 4 November, 7 November, 14 November, 25 November, 29 November 1931; Wall Street Journal, 4 November 1930, 10 April 1931; Washington Post, 4 November, 14 November 1931; Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990); Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997, The Official Results (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1998); David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Donald A. Ritchie, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, “Election Statistics, 1920 to Present”; Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, “Party Divisions of the House of Representatives, 1789 to Present”; Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, “The Twentieth Amendment.”

U.S. House History Blog

01.03.2025

To Make Democracy Live: The Legislative Legacy of Emmett Till | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On April 29, 1955, the first Black Member of Congress elected from Michigan, Representative Charles Cole Diggs Jr., spoke to an outdoor audience of 12,000 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, more than 800 miles south of his Detroit congressional district. In this all-Black town founded in 1887 by formerly enslaved African Americans, Diggs described his vision for change across the nation, holding onlookers “spellbound” in what the Chicago Defender called “a revival meeting about American democracy.”In his address, Diggs urged listeners to register to vote to destroy the system of segregation that divided the South and to engage in the hard work of building a representative democracy. He recognized “the present uneasy times and seemingly insurmountable odds,” but promised that “if we keep up the fight to make democracy live, we will get the justice espoused by the Almighty God and the Constitution of the United States.”By traveling to the South to speak to the citizens of Mound Bayou, Diggs continued a tradition that began in 1929, when Oscar Stanton De Priest, the first of three Black Representatives elected consecutively to the House from the First District of Illinois, visited several southern states. De Priest, Arthur Wergs Mitchell, and William Levi Dawson each represented a Chicago district with a Black-majority population and were eager to visit southern states to address Black audiences on the challenges facing African Americans across the nation.In August 1955, another Black resident of Chicago, 14-year-old Emmett Till, traveled south to visit relatives in Greenwood, Mississippi. After an alleged dispute with a White woman, Till was brutally murdered and his mutilated body was thrown in the nearby Tallahatchie River. The subsequent trial and acquittal of the two White men accused of this crime became a national and international story.On Capitol Hill, the lynching of Emmett Till quickly became central to the struggle to pass a civil rights bill in the 84th Congress (1955–1957), sparking a decade of legislative achievements on civil rights not seen since Reconstruction. In 1955, three Black Representatives served simultaneously in the House—Diggs, Dawson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York—for the first time since 1891. Each was willing to turn their attention beyond the boundaries of their congressional district to embrace their larger national constituency of Black Americans everywhere—especially those living in the Jim Crow South.Chicago’s Representatives Head SouthThe dispute that led to the murder of Emmett Till occurred in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. The town had been named for former Confederate soldier Hernando De Soto Money, who served on Capitol Hill in both the House and Senate for 14 nonconsecutive Congresses between 1875 and 1911. Hernando Money was one of many across the South who worked to implement the system of Jim Crow segregation at the state and local level, depriving Black citizens of their civil and political rights for decades.Systematically excluded from the ballot and under constant threat of violence, many southern African Americans migrated to northern states seeking a better life. In 1928, Oscar De Priest of Illinois, who had been born in Alabama and settled in Chicago, was elected to the House on the strength of Black voters in the city, many of whom had participated in the Great Migration.As the first Black Member of Congress in nearly three decades, De Priest embraced his role as the only elected Black official in the federal government. De Priest made periodic visits to his native South during his six years in office. “I’m in Washington to serve my race,” De Priest declared in Memphis, Tennessee, only months after taking office. In the summer of 1929, he visited Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, as well as stops in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. “I am going to continue my tours through the South, notwithstanding threats I have received,” he said. “I’m going to try to teach the colored people their rights under the constitution.”In 1934, Democrat Arthur Mitchell defeated De Priest for Illinois’s First District seat. Mitchell also organized tours of the South to study the social and economic conditions of African-American communities. In 1939, he visited nine southern states, returning to Washington ready to inform the House of the need to “render the proper aid, and to give the proper recognition to a group of its citizens who have always been loyal in every sense of the word.”Mitchell’s successor, William Dawson, began his House career in the 1940s by backing bills to ban employment discrimination, lynching, and the poll tax. In 1949, Dawson became the first Black Member to chair a standing House committee and in the early 1950s he regularly visited the South. On May 2, 1952, Dawson addressed an outdoor meeting in Mound Bayou, Mississippi—the first time a sitting Black Member of Congress had visited Mississippi since the nineteenth century. Black schools closed for the day so students could be among the 7,000 in attendance for what residents called “Dawson Day.” The following year Dawson traveled to Birmingham, Alabama; Columbia, South Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia; making the case for voter registration to combat Jim Crow at each stop.“A Lynching of the Statue of Liberty”Diggs’s visit to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the spring of 1955 to rally support for voting rights carried on the tradition of his predecessors. Diggs made his next trip to Mississippi just a few months later to accompany Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, at the September trial of her son’s accused murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. As the sole federal official present in the Tallahatchie County courthouse in the town of Sumner, Diggs felt welcomed by the local Black community, who appreciated that he was “a representative in the Federal Government—one of their own—and he was on the scene with them.” He joined the NAACP in calling for a federal investigation of the crime, especially when the fate of the defendants was placed in the hands of an all-White jury. Because the defendants had been charged with state crimes, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene.During the trial, Diggs used his status as a Member of Congress to secure better seating arrangements for Black reporters in the courtroom, who were segregated from their White counterparts. Diggs also worked with Representative Dawson to assist the witnesses who agreed to testify against Bryant and Milam and were forced to flee Mississippi for their own safety. For his part, Dawson provided financial support behind the scenes. When Till’s mother wanted to bring her son’s body back to Chicago, Dawson intervened to halt Till’s burial in Mississippi and helped cover costs of transporting his remains.Both Diggs and Dawson attended the September 3 funeral in Chicago. Till’s mother decided to have an open casket so that the public could see the terrible violence inflicted on her son’s body. In September, images from the funeral were published in several Black-owned publications, including Jet magazine, the Chicago Defender, and The American Negro: A Magazine of Protest, which was edited and published by future Representative Gus Savage of Illinois, who held a Chicago House seat from 1981 to 1993.On September 23, the jury acquitted Milam and Bryant on all charges. The defense, led by attorney John W. Whitten—the cousin of Mississippi Representative Jamie Lloyd Whitten—asserted that the body found in the river was not Emmett Till. Diggs called the defense’s argument “strictly fictional and sheer nonsense,” and described the trial as “so filled with perjury, illegal and unethical practices of withholding evidence that undoubtedly a democratic nation could not imagine happening in its halls of justice.” The verdict inspired several weeks of protest in cities across the country.Representative Powell had been traveling in Africa and Europe during the trial. When he returned to the United States in October, the Harlem Representative noted that the events in Mississippi undermined the reputation of United States as the standard bearer of democracy around the world. According to Powell, Till’s murder was, in effect, “a lynching of the Statue of Liberty.”In October, two months after the House had adjourned in August, Powell appeared in Manhattan before a crowd of 20,000 to protest the verdict. He called for a boycott of everything “made in Mississippi,” hoping to punish the state with economic sanctions so long as it allowed lynchings to continue with impunity. Powell also demanded President Dwight D. Eisenhower call a special session of Congress to immediately take up civil rights legislation.Both Powell and Diggs threatened to challenge the right of Mississippi’s all-White delegation to their seats in the House, insisting they were only elected because of the exclusion of Black voters from the polls. Speaking at a rally in Detroit that October, Diggs denounced the verdict and the ongoing threat of violence facing African Americans, adding that he would push the House to pass civil rights legislation in the new year. “It is obvious that although I was elected from Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, I also represent every Negro in Mississippi,” Diggs said. Along with his House colleagues Dawson and Powell, Diggs noted that “we represent 15 million Negroes. We intend to do just that.”“A Year Loaded with Political Dynamite”When the House reconvened on January 3, 1956, the Chicago Tribune forecasted “a year loaded with political dynamite” on Capitol Hill. Republican Gordon Canfield of New Jersey, a longtime civil rights advocate in the House, was the first of several Members to introduce a federal antilynching bill following Till’s murder. Since January 20, 1900, when Representative George H. White of North Carolina introduced the first federal antilynching bill, several attempts had been made to enable the federal government to intervene without success.In January, Diggs spoke on the House Floor to urge his colleagues to empower the U.S. Attorney General to “intervene in those cases where individual states refuse to provide equal protection of the law to all citizens.” By March, 26 Representatives—including Diggs and Powell—described by one reporter as the bipartisan “House civil rights bloc” met to coordinate strategy. They appointed a delegation of six Members, led by Republican Hugh Doggett Scott Jr. of Pennsylvania and Democrat Edna Flannery Kelly of New York, to meet with the U.S. Department of Justice, House Judiciary Chair Emanuel Celler of New York, and Thomas Joseph Lane of Massachusetts, the chair of the Judiciary subcommittee on civil rights bills, to discuss how to pass legislation before the end of the session. By June, the House Rules Committee had held a hearing on H.R. 627, which created a national commission to investigate civil rights violations and a new civil rights division within the Justice Department, as well as empowered the U.S. Attorney General to bring civil suits in federal courts to protect individual rights.Southern state delegations mobilized against these efforts. In remarks in the Congressional Record, Elijah Lewis Forrester of Georgia claimed that if the accused men had killed Till, “there was certainly great provocation.” He added that “murders in Chicago are daily occurrences,” yet there was not a call for federal intervention in Illinois.The Mississippi House delegation also defended their state and questioned the role of the federal government in the South. In June, Mississippi lawmakers testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where Representative Whitten backed the integrity of the Mississippi justice system and insisted that the body found in the river was not Emmett Till. Mississippi Representative John Bell Williams denounced the proposal to increase the power of the Justice Department in civil rights matters, which he said would create a federal “police state.” The Supreme Court, Williams said, was trying to “abort the Constitution and take over the prerogatives of the States.” Each Member of the Mississippi delegation joined a group of 83 House Members who signed a statement read into the Record denouncing the civil rights bill on July 13.On July 17, Diggs and Powell spoke on the House Floor to back the pending civil rights bill, demanding voting rights to fortify democracy in the South. Powell accepted that the bill was not perfect but emphasized that it “symbolizes the authority and willingness of the Federal Government to protect certain basic rights of the United States citizenship.” Diggs noted that jury duty was tied to voter registration, and no African Americans were on the jury during the Till murder trial. The bill passed the House on July 23, but the Senate did not take it up before the end of the session.The bipartisan group of legislators advocating for civil rights legislation found more success in the 85th Congress (1957–1959). In debates and committee hearings in the House and Senate, the Till case remained a key part of the push for civil rights legislation on Capitol Hill. The resulting Civil Rights Act of 1957 included the main provisions of the 1956 bill that passed the House, including the proposal to expand the role of the U.S. Attorney General in civil rights cases and the creation of both a civil rights division in the Department of Justice and a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.Although the law did not immediately reverse the system of Jim Crow segregation in the South, it was the first federal civil rights legislation passed since 1875. Within a decade the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 created a robust role for the federal government in protecting the civil and political rights of all Americans.More than half a century later, Black lawmakers who had grown up in the 1950s, including Representative John Lewis of Georgia, often reflected on the significance of the murder of Emmett Till. Inspired by his memory, they eventually secured the passage of a federal antilynching law—a legislative victory more than 120 years in the making.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 July 1956): 12760–12761; Congressional Record, House, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (17 July 1956): 13176–13178, 13181–13182; Congressional Record, Extension of Remarks, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (24 July 1956): A5819; H.R. 4004, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 228, 80th Cong. (1947); H.R. 230, 80th Cong. (1947); H.R. 383, 81st Cong. (1949); H.R. 7879, 84th Cong (1956); H.R. 627, 84th Cong. (1955); Hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Poll Taxes, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (1943); Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, H.R. 627, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (1956); Hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Civil Rights Proposals, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (1956); Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015); Christopher Manning, William L. Dawson and the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi (New York: Penguin Press, 2024); Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), 15 December 1934, 8 October 1955, 3 March 1956; Afro-American Red Star (Washington, DC), 31 January 2003; Atlanta Daily World, 6 November 1953, 17 November 1953, 3 May 1955; Baltimore Sun, 12 October 1955; Boston Globe, 25 September 1955; Call and Post (Cleveland, OH), 16 March 1939, 15 January 1955, 24 September 1955; Chicago Defender, 26 April 1952, 14 May 1955, 27 August 1955, 1 October 1955, 8 October 1955, 28 July 1956; Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 January 1956; Detroit Tribune, 1 October 1955; Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), 14 August 1937; Los Angeles Times, 24 July 1956; Memphis Triangle (TN), 27 July 1929; Michigan Chronicle (Detroit), 8 October 1955, 21 January 1956; New Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), 10 May 1952, 24 January 1953, 1 October 1955; New York Times, 12 October 1955, 13 July 1956, 28 August 2005; Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1955; Wall Street Journal, 15 March 1990; Washington Post, 16 July 1929, 12 January 1956, 3 November 2015; Washington Post Magazine, 27 February 2000.

U.S. House History Blog

19.02.2025

Edition for Educators—Shirley Chisholm of New York | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Since the First Congress opened in 1789, more than 11,000 people have served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Most served capably for a few terms and returned to their communities. But some lawmakers have left towering legacies and are remembered for their legislative prowess, path-breaking careers, and bold personalities. These Members of Congress, including powerful Speakers of the House, strong-willed legislators, trailblazing Representatives, and policy specialists, qualify as “Giants of the House.”Fiercely independent, Shirley Chisholm broke barriers for both women and Black Americans as the Congresswoman from Brooklyn, New York. She entered the House in the 91st Congress (1969–1971) and quickly challenged convention on Capitol Hill. Initially assigned to the Committee on Agriculture, she rejected the seat and appealed to Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and the Democratic Caucus before receiving a new seat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. She also made it a point to employ young women, Black and White, in key leadership positions in her congressional office at a time when many were relegated to secretarial positions with little hope of significant advancement.Throughout her career, Chisholm challenged leadership and spoke out about challenging issues—discrimination, abortion, and war. Chisholm embraced her national profile, “I think my role is to break new ground in Congress.”Chisholm’s boldness unsettled many of her colleagues, some of whom occasionally cautioned the Congresswoman that she risked losing re-election. In her memoir, Chisholm countered, “Sometime [sic] somebody has to start trying to change things, start to say something, do something, be politically expendable.” Despite her own early prediction that she might be in Congress “only six or eight years at most,” Chisholm served seven terms, secured a coveted seat on the Rules Committee, earned a role in party leadership, and made a historic run for the Democratic nomination for President.This month’s Edition for Educators highlights the historic career of Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first Black woman elected to Congress.From the Classroom to the House ChamberPEOPLE PROFILE—Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York The first African-American Congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm represented a U.S. House of Representatives district centered in Brooklyn, New York. First elected in 1968, Chisholm was catapulted into the national limelight by virtue of her race, gender, and an outspoken personality that she balanced with deft skill as a political insider. Four years later, in 1972, she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. From her seat on the powerful Rules Committee, “Fighting Shirley,” as she was known, moved into Democratic leadership and advocated for increased federal spending and expanded programs to help low-income and working-class Americans. “I am the people’s politician,” she once told the New York Times. “If the day should ever come when the people can’t save me, I’ll know I’m finished. That’s when I’ll go back to being a professional educator.”BLOG—Unbought and Unbossed Shirley Chisholm was on the fence about running for Congress when a woman came to her Brooklyn apartment. The visitor, a poor mother, said that she and her friends wanted Chisholm to run. “She gave me a dirty envelope containing $9.62 in nickels, dimes and quarters that they had raised and promised that if I ran they would sponsor fund-raising affairs every Friday night to help finance my campaign,” Chisholm told Ebony. After the woman left, Chisholm sat down, took off her glasses, and cried.It was her first campaign contribution.HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—The First African-American Woman Elected to Congress On this date, at the opening of the 91st Congress (1969–1971), Shirley Anita Chisholm of New York became the first African-American Congresswoman. Trained as a school teacher, Chisholm served two terms in the New York state legislature before winning election in November 1968 to a newly created congressional district in Brooklyn. The only woman among the first-term class of lawmakers in the 91st Congress, Chisholm took the House by storm. “I have no intention of just sitting quietly and observing,” she said. “I intend to focus attention on the nation’s problems.”RECORD—Shirley Chisholm Oath of Office Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York signed this oath of office card on January 21, 1969. Representatives take the verbal oath of office en masse on the first day of each new Congress. Beginning in the 80th Congress (1947–1949), Members have also reaffirmed their commitment by signing oath of office cards. The cards are filed with the Clerk of the House and become House records that are open to the public after 30 years.Representative Chisholm of New YorkESSAY—“To Fight Doubly Hard” This essay from Black Americans in Congress explores the trials and triumphs of the first Black women elected to Congress. The five women profiled in this section (Permanent Interests: 1965–1990) were trailblazers, working to pass significant legislation and rising through the ranks of party and House leadership. Several gained influential committee positions: Shirley Chisholm on Rules, Yvonne Burke on Appropriations, and Barbara Jordan on Judiciary. Burke also chaired the Select Committee on the House Beauty Shop, while Cardiss Collins became the first Black woman to chair a subcommittee when she headed the Manpower and Housing Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations in 1977. Collins later rose to ranking minority member of the same committee, then renamed the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. Both Burke and Collins also were elected to terms as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).Early in her congressional career, Chisholm spoke about the effort it took to make it to Congress. “My rise has been constantly fighting,” she explained. “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.”ORAL HISTORY—Representative Chisholm and the Women’s Rights Movement Muriel Morisey discusses Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s involvement in women’s rights organizations.BLOG—Guts, Stamina, Audacity: Shirley Chisholm’s House Career Shirley Chisholm, the charismatic and outspoken Brooklyn educator and politician, made history when she became the first African-American woman to serve in Congress in 1969. Small in stature, but with a larger-than-life persona, “Fighting Shirley” was a tireless advocate for her constituents, quotable and stylish and unyielding. Chisholm encapsulated the resolve of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and brought national attention to the issues she championed.Beyond the headlines and iconic reputation she built across party lines, the New York Representative had to fight just as hard within the House for the causes she supported. Run by an old guard resistant to change, the House in the late 1960s was not the most welcoming of institutions to new Members. But Chisholm’s political career embodied a spirit of independence and her 1968 campaign slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed,” challenged the status quo. During her initial run for Congress, Chisholm proudly remarked, “I have always spoken out for what I believe: I cannot be controlled.”ORAL HISTORY—“She Empowered Her Staff Enormously” Muriel Morisey recalls the relationship between Representative Shirley Chisholm and her staff.Leadership and OrganizationESSAY—The Rise of the Congressional Black Caucus As the number of African-American lawmakers serving in Congress grew, a long-desired movement to form a more unified organization among Black legislators coalesced. Frustrated that Black Representatives lacked a forum to discuss common concerns and issues, Charles Diggs proposed the organization of the Democratic Select Committee (DSC) at the opening of the 91st Congress (1969–1971). He maintained that the DSC would fill a significant void by fostering the exchange of information among the nine African Americans serving in Congress at the time, as well as between Black Representatives and House leadership. Newcomers Bill Clay, Louis Stokes, and Shirley Chisholm embraced the idea, and the organization grew in the 92nd Congress (1971–1973), when it changed its name to the Congressional Black Caucus. This essay from Black Americans in Congress explores the early days of the CBC and its founding membership.HISTORICAL DATA—Black Americans in Party Leadership Positions In 1977, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to serve as Secretary of the Democratic Caucus after an unsuccessful campaign for the position of caucus chair. This chart provides a list of individuals in caucus and conference positions based on research conducted by the Congressional Research Service.ORAL HISTORY—“Give Your Chair to a Lady” Muriel Morisey recalls Representative Shirley Chisholm’s campaign to become Democratic Caucus chair.Presidential CandidateBLOG—“Catalyst for Change”: The 1972 Presidential Campaign of Representative Shirley Chisholm Since its first publication in 1951, Jet magazine had been on the forefront covering news and issues important to its African-American readership. Widely popular for its commentary on politics, culture, and the lives of everyday people, Jet posed a question in June 1971 that would soon prove prophetic: “Should a Black Politician Run for President?”Six months later, in January 1972, Chisholm formally announced her candidacy for President and worked to forge what she called a “union of the disenfranchised.” With limited funding and a small staff, she used her platform to advocate for federal aid programs, opposed the Vietnam War, and called to empower everyday voters. She developed a strategy to win delegates in key presidential primaries, and, if need be, was ready to continue her quest for the nomination into the July 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami, Florida. But almost immediately, Chisholm faced opposition from other Democratic presidential hopefuls, prominent Black politicians, members of the CBC, and political rivals back home in her Brooklyn congressional district. Throughout the campaign, she dismissed criticism that her candidacy was self-serving or merely symbolic. “I am for real, and I am very serious about what I am doing.”Remembering Shirley ChisholmBLOG—Collection Spotlight: The Portrait of Shirley Chisholm 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. 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.”HOUSE COLLECTION—Featured Objects and ImagesAdditional ResourcesShirley Chisholm authored two books: Unbought and Unbossed in 1970, and The Good Fight in 1973. Her research collections can be found through Rutgers University Library. Brooklyn Colleges hosts a smaller collection on Chisholm’s historic campaign for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination as part of the Shirley Chisholm Project documenting women’s grassroots activism in Brooklyn, New York.In addition, the Library of Congress has compiled a research guide on Shirley Chisholm.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.

U.S. House History Blog

31.01.2025

Edition for Educators—John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts remains the only President elected to the U.S. House of Representatives after his service as chief executive. When Adams took his seat in the House in 1831, he had already enjoyed a long career in some of the federal government’s most powerful posts. The son of the second U.S. President, Adams brought a stubbornness and a lifetime of experience to his job as Representative. Adams served for 17 years in the House, representing his Massachusetts district from 1831 until his death in 1848. From both committee rooms and the House Floor, Adams argued ceaselessly against the expansion of slavery and remained steadfast in upholding the right of the American people to petition their government. Thanks in large part to the voluminous diary entries he left behind, historians enjoy ample access to Adams’s various musings and frustrations during one of the most tumultuous periods in House history.Relying on a wealth of material published on the History, Art and Archives website, this month’s Edition for Educators highlights the life and congressional career of Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts.Son, Senator, Secretary, PresidentPEOPLE PROFILE—John Adams of MassachusettsJohn Adams was one of the most famous men in early America. As a Member of the Continental Congress, Adams proposed George Washington to head the Continental Army and helped write the Declaration of Independence. While his new nation grappled with the Articles of Confederation, Adams represented American interests abroad in France, Holland, and England. He returned to the United States in 1788 to serve as the first Vice President under Washington. When Washington declined to run for a third term in 1796, Adams won election as the second President of the United States. Adams, a Boston lawyer of esteem long before joining the Continental Congress, ensured his children received excellent educations. His oldest son John Quincy Adams was schooled in Europe before following his father’s path through Harvard College and into law in Boston and diplomacy abroad.HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—The House of Representatives Elected John Quincy Adams as President On February 9, 1825, the House of Representatives elected Secretary of State John Quincy Adams as President. Following an inconclusive Electoral College result, in which no candidate won a majority, the House performed its constitutionally prescribed role of deciding the 1824 presidential election. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee had won the popular vote and commanded 99 electoral votes. He was followed in the electoral tally by Adams (84), Treasury Secretary William Crawford (41), and Speaker of the House Henry Clay (37). Despite Jackson’s lead following Election Day, lawmakers in the House elected Adams President on the first ballot.From the White House to the House of RepresentativesHISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—The Election of John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts The 1830 midterm election made Adams the first and only former President to be elected to the House of Representatives. Adams sought a second term as President in 1828 but lost to former Representative and Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Two years later, Adams handily won election to the House to represent a district encompassing southeastern Massachusetts in the 22nd Congress (1831–1833). Prior to the election, Adams reflected on his candidacy for the House in his journal, “no person could be degraded by serving the people as a Representative in Congress . . . [nor] would an ex-President of the United States be degraded by serving as a selectman of his town, if elected thereto by the people.”BLOG—“Planting Laws and Institutions”: The Election of Representative John Quincy Adams On November 6, 1830, former United States President John Quincy Adams spent the day at his family’s farm near Quincy, Massachusetts, planting trees. On the edge of what would become the orchard, he laid out five rows of chestnuts, oaks, and shagbark hickories. Adams ate lunch at home and went back to the farm “to lay out the ground for the Orchard,” all the while debating what else he would plant there. Toward the end of the day, he read the evening newspapers and nonchalantly noted in his diary that the news had “brought the last returns of the Congressional Election for the District of Plymouth. Twenty-two Towns gave 2565 votes, of which 1817 were for John Quincy Adams, 373 for Arad Thompson (Jacksonite), 279 for William Baylies (federal), and 96 scattering votes.” The final line in Adams’s diary that day: “I am a member elect of the twenty-second Congress.”Antislavery CrusaderHISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—The House “Gag Rule” On May 26, 1836, during the 24th Congress (1835–1837), the U.S. House of Representatives instituted the “gag rule,” the first instance of what would become a traditional practice forbidding the House from considering antislavery petitions. Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts raised the first and most impassioned objections to the procedure. Adams shouted during the roll call vote, “I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States.” For the next four Congresses, Adams fervently fought against the gag rule, declaring it a restriction on free speech. Despite his efforts, the House successfully reintroduced the gag rule each Congress until Adams finally mustered enough votes to repeal it on December 3, 1844.HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—A Motion to Censure Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts On February 7, 1842, the House voted 106 to 93 to table a motion censuring Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts for antislavery agitation. Weeks earlier, Adams had masterfully manipulated the public debate over slavery by baiting proslavery Representatives into a prolonged dialogue. Because the House had instituted the “gag rule” in 1836—preventing floor discussion of abolition petitions—Adams manufactured a debate by submitting a petition, allegedly drafted by a group of Georgians, to have Adams removed as Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman. (Historians doubt the authenticity of the petition—some implying that Adams or one of his allies authored it). Through this sleight of hand, Adams used the defense of his chairmanship to hold the floor for days delivering a far-ranging harangue against “slave mongers,” as one observer recalled, “till slaveholding [and] slave trading . . . absolutely quailed and howled under his dissecting knife,” inspiring the effort to censure Adams.“Old Man Eloquent"HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—Congressman and Poet John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts A man of many talents, Congressman John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts was a poet as well as a statesman. During his first term as Representative, Adams penned the epic poem, “Dermot MacMorrogh, or The Conquest of Ireland.” Adams once confessed, “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I should have made myself a great poet.” Another poem, “Fragments From an Unfinished Manuscript: An Epistle To the Muse of History,” captured a poignant moment in his House career. While seated at his desk in the old House Chamber (now National Statuary Hall), Adams wrote the poem honoring Clio, the Greek muse of history. He was inspired by a marble clock, located over the north door of the chamber, depicting Clio riding in the “Winged Car of History” and recording the deeds of Congress.HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—The First Parliamentary Procedure to Limit House Floor Debate On July 7, 1841, the House adopted the first rule intended to limit the time a Representative could speak in debate on the House Floor. Concerns about long speeches impeding House business had dated to at least 1820, when the irascible John Randolph of Virginia held the House Floor for a four-hour speech on the Missouri Compromise bill. This 1841 rule, adopted on the motion of Lott Warren of Georgia, required that “no member shall be allowed to speak more than one hour to any question under debate.” It passed the House by a vote of 111 to 75—with John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts (known as “Old Man Eloquent” by his peers) among those dissenting. Warren’s amendment, however, only temporarily altered the House Rules. According to Hinds’ Precedents the one-hour limit did not become a standing rule of the House until June 1842.BLOG—Father Knows Best Shortly after noon on an unseasonably mild Thursday in late February 1842, a hush fell over the House as the venerable John Quincy Adams creakily arose from his chair. Just weeks earlier, the House had considered censuring the gray-haired Massachusetts Congressman whom many knew as “Old Man Eloquent” to punish him for manufacturing a crippling debate about the evils of slavery. But on this day Adams eulogized North Carolina’s Lewis Williams, whom colleagues revered as the “Father of the House”—the Member with the longest continuous service. The prior afternoon Williams had succumbed to pneumonia. His abrupt passing shocked colleagues and ended an unbroken run of House service reaching back to 1815—far longer than any of his peers in that 27th Congress (1841-1843), Adams included.Mr. ChairmanBLOG—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: Clerk Hugh Garland of the previous Congress, Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts in an entirely invented position, and finally Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, the youngest Speaker of the House ever to hold the office.BLOG—The Apportionment Act of 1842: Legal, When Convenient Throughout his 17-year career in the House, Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts existed in a state of almost perpetual irritation. Whether it was debate over tariff rates or his fight against slavery, the House’s daily business routinely left Adams exasperated but nevertheless resolute that he was right and everyone else was wrong. Adams was in no mood then, when on June 25, 1842, a curious decision by President John Tyler stretched Adams’s already short patience to its breaking point. After failing to convince the House to take up his bill providing back payments to the American victims of French privateers, Adams sat in disbelief as John Tyler Jr., the President’s son and aide, delivered a message to the House from his father explaining his decision to begrudgingly sign the Apportionment Act of 1842.RECORD—Smithsonian Fund Stocks After his death in 1829, British scientist James Smithson left $500,000 to the United States to found an institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. The House Select Committee on the Bequest of James Smithson, chaired by Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, determined what should be done with the windfall. This House record shows how the United States Treasury used these funds while the select committee worked. The Secretary of the Treasury primarily invested the bequest in the states of Arkansas, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, with a rate of interest around six percent. As this record shows, Smithson’s capital temporarily supported the Detroit and Pontiac Railroad Company and canals in Ohio, among other economic and infrastructural projects. In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was officially created by law.Death and LegacyBLOG—The Last Hours of John Quincy Adams The morning of February 21, 1848, was bright and clear. Representative John Quincy Adams left his house on F Street for the Capitol for the last time. Age had made him frail and a little hunched over in the winter air, but still with a piercing gaze. Adams knew he was nearing the end of his career. But he likely did not suspect that his last hours in the Capitol would become a national media event, driven by brand-new technologies and nostalgia that Adams represented.HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHT—The Death of Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts On February 21, 1848, Representative and former President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts suffered a fatal stroke on the House Floor. Members moved the 80-year-old former President to the Rotunda for fresher air and then relocated him to the Speaker's Room (the present-day Lindy Claiborne Boggs Congressional Women’s Reading Room). Adams mustered the strength to thank the Officers of the House for their service. He then lapsed into a coma and died two days later. A funeral to celebrate the life of the great sage took place on February 26, 1848, in the House Chamber which was attended by political friends and foes alike. Until arrangements could be made to move his remains to the family burial grounds in Quincy, Massachusetts, his body was laid to rest in Congressional Cemetery. A cenotaph marker remains in the cemetery to honor the former President.Extra ResourcesLearn more about the career of John Quincy Adams as a Senator from Massachusetts, U.S. Secretary of State, and the sixth President of the United States—the opening acts to his tenure as Congressman from Massachusetts.John Quincy Adams kept a diary for much of his life, which is publicly available online through a number of databases, including the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Library of Congress.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.

U.S. House History Blog

17.01.2025

Development of the Industrial United States and the Emergence of Modern America (1870–1931), Part II: The Records of Progress | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

As the United States expanded, developed, and went to war overseas, Americans and their government responded to the rapid changes happening in the country and abroad. Citizens petitioned Congress for consumer protections, better working conditions, assistance for vulnerable people, voting rights, and conservation of the country’s natural landscapes. The government responded with reforms—both welcome and unwelcome, depending on one’s perspective. Learn more about how the country navigated the shift from the unregulated excess of the Gilded Age to social and political reforms of the Progressive Era 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 country’s workforce change during this period?Identify at least three areas that Americans worked to reform during this period. Are Americans still working to bring about change in these areas today?How did changes in communication, transportation, and industry during this period bring about government reform?What methods did Americans use to advocate for changes for themselves and for others?What connections can you make between this period and today?Is what is considered progress by some always positive for everyone? Why or why not?1890, Give Us Pure Lager Beer PetitionThis petition was sent to the House from citizens of Avon, New York, who supported H.R. 8522, a bill that defined the required ingredients of lager beer. The petitioners warned that “adulterants such as corn, rice, starch, glucose and other substitutes,” when used instead of malt and hops, may affect the purity of beer, as well as the drinker’s health. The petition is an example of the demand for more government regulation of consumer goods that culminated in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.1893, John Muir Yosemite LetterA founding member of the Sierra Club, John Muir served as president from its inception in 1892 until his death in 1914. Muir and his fellow club members petitioned Congress to preserve Yosemite National Park’s boundaries when California Representative Anthony Caminetti proposed opening it up to farming and mining in 1893. The petition includes a four-point list detailing the damage to the park if it were developed, along with a map illustrating the reduced size advocated by the legislation. Congress eventually sided with the conservationists and decided to maintain the original boundaries for the time being.1900, Anti-Lynching PetitionPetitioners from New Jersey protested the lynching of African Americans in the South. The petition was submitted on the House Floor on February 21, 1900, by Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, the only African American in Congress at the time, in support of H.R. 6963, anti-lynching legislation he introduced on January 20, 1900. White left at the end of that Congress, and it was nearly three decades before another African American served in Congress.1902, Letter Supporting Anti-Injunction and Anti-Conspiracy LegislationThe Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, Bradford Lodge No. 288, in McKean County, sent this petition to Congressman Joseph C. Sibley of Pennsylvania in 1902. The union encouraged the consideration of H.R. 11060, which would limit the meaning of the word “conspiracy” and the use of “restraining orders and injunctions.” As a labor union for railroad employees, the group had a vested interest in legislation that protected its right to organize and protest, which had been curtailed by allegations of civil conspiracy and court ordered injunctions against strikes and boycotts.1912, Child Labor PhotographIn 1908, Lewis Wickes Hine began documenting the conditions of young workers in Washington, DC. The notation Hine typed on the back of the photograph observed that the three boys were about 9 years old. One newsboy was a “chronic truent [sic],” and another had already been working as a newsboy since the age of 6. Their work required them to rise early and work long days, until all their papers were sold. Hine’s documentary photographs, often depicting gritty, true-to-life scenes, made their way into the investigative files of the Committee on the District of Columbia to bolster proposed legislation that would ban child labor in the District.1917, Student Resolution for ProhibitionIn 1917, a group of high school students from Flemington, New Jersey, submitted a resolution supporting a bill introduced by Congressman Asbury Lever in support of the prohibition of alcohol to conserve resources for the impending war. H.R. 4961 included the “limitation, regulation, or prohibition of the use of foods, food materials, or feeds in the production of alcohol.” Although the bill became the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act and was signed into law on August 10, 1917, nationwide Prohibition would not take effect until 1920.1919, House Joint Resolution 1 for Women’s SuffrageH.J. Res. 1 proposing an amendment to the Constitution extending voting rights to women was introduced in the House on May 19, 1919, and referred to the House Committee on Woman Suffrage. H.J. Res. 1 passed the House on May 21, 1919, followed by the Senate on June 4. The amendment achieved ratification in three-fourths of the states, and the U.S. Secretary of State certified it as the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on August 26, 1920, allowing women nationwide to head to the polls that November.1927, Funds for a Veterans’ HospitalThis petition, a concurrent resolution from the state legislature of Indiana, urges the U.S. Congress to establish a hospital for veterans within the state. The resolution argues that, “As Indiana is the center of population of the United States, a nucleus of the agricultural and industrial elements, the greatest railroad center of the world, and easily accessible by highways,” a veterans’ hospital would serve the area well. After the creation of the Veterans Administration, a health facility serving veterans opened in Indiana in 1932.Interested in more records from this era?1886, Postcards to Label Oleomargarine1886, Resolution to Create a Bureau of Labor for Women1875, Railway Joint Tariff1879, Letter against the Comstock Actca. 1890, Petition against Obscene Literature1894, Normal and Industrial Schools Billca. 1902, Petition for National Appalachian Forest Reserve1902, Resolution on Enforcement of the 14th Amendment1902, Higher Education for People Who Are Blind1905, Letter to Amend the Interstate Commerce Act1906, Report on Chicago Stock Yards1908, Supporting a Child Labor Bill for DC1910, Letter to Julius Kahn on Establishing a Children’s Bureau1910, Letter in Favor of a Children’s Bureau1911, Support for a National Archives Building1915, Letter Regarding Mount Baker1916, Letter for National Park Service1917, Urging Prohibition During Wartime1917, Letter against Prohibition1918, Maternity and Infancy Hygiene Bill1922, Red Record of Lynching Map1924, Letter against Child Labor AmendmentRead the first part of this blog, “Development of the Industrial United States and the Emergence of Modern America (1870–1931), Part I: The Records of Power,” here.This is part of a blog series about records from different eras of U.S. history.

U.S. House History Blog

31.12.2024

Best of the Blog in 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

In 2024, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art and Archives published 34 blog posts exploring the rich history of the House of Representatives. This year’s submissions covered a range of topics, including deep dives on the portrait of pathbreaking California Representative Dalip Singh Saund, the curious career of Pennsylvania Representative Thomas Forrest, and the history and development of the House Chamber’s electronic voting system.Additionally, the oral history program at the Office of the Historian celebrated its twentieth year of operation with posts looking back at two decades of interviews with remarkable Members of Congress, staff, and family members.House curators and archivists continued to update readers about new additions to the House Collection and Records Search. House historians maintained the long-running Edition for Educators series for teachers and students and provided an annual update for students competing in National History Day. The office also expanded its educational series by offering closer looks at two major events in modern House history: the 1954 shooting in the House Chamber and the first lying-in-honor ceremony in the Capitol. Finally, readers more inclined to statistics over narrative were treated to an updated snapshot of the House by its numbers.As the 118th Congress prepares to adjourn sine die, we’re featuring six of our favorite blog posts from the past year.An Empire or a Gavel: Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed’s Opposition to the Spanish-American WarIn 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. 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.The Records of a Growing Nation: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)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, contended with pro- and antislavery activism, and started to determine what kinds of support and relief the government should provide its citizens. This second entry in an ongoing series about House documents focuses on a few of the most prominent issues facing Congress during the antebellum era. This overview invites readers to learn more about this turbulent period with these records from the House of Representatives.“A Favored Son of America”: the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824 House ReceptionOn December 10, 1824, two dozen U.S. Representatives accompanied a 67-year-old French nobleman named Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier through the streets of Washington, DC, on the way to the U.S. Capitol. The reception scheduled for that day marked the first time the U.S. House had formally hosted a foreign dignitary—hundreds of others, including many heads of state, would follow over the next two centuries. But in that initial instance the guest was not the leader or a representative of any overseas government. In the United States, du Motier was better known as the Marquis de Lafayette, a French volunteer and general in the American Revolution who had served under George Washington in the Continental Army and whose leadership was pivotal to securing America’s independence five decades earlier. An entire lifetime had come and gone since the Revolution. The upstart democracy Lafayette had helped seed in the eighteenth century had, by the third decade of the nineteenth, grown into a force all its own.The House's Plot to Steal a LibraryIn June 1974, as the U.S. House of Representatives opened an impeachment investigation into President Richard M. Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, a construction crew was hard at work on a massive new building for the Library of Congress in the 100 block of Independence Avenue in Southeast, Washington, DC—near the heart of Capitol Hill. Congress had authorized the building in 1965 to help alleviate overcrowding across the library complex. Only steps away, a group of Representatives took stock of the House’s own office space and decided that it was overcrowded as well, packed with thousands of Member, committee, and support staff. Perhaps what the House required was a new office building. And perhaps the new library facility was just the space the House needed.The History of Member Pins“The first day I was here, I was just walking around,” newly minted Representative Roger Marshall reported. “Nobody even noticed me. Then I put this on and all of a sudden, the eyes started trailing me.” Marshall came to Congress in 2017 and quickly learned what gets you noticed on the Hill: the official, Members-only lapel pin. Like a hall pass, the little metal disc has identified Representatives to police, Members, and others in the know for 50 years. But for the previous 180 years, the House saw no need for them. What happened to make Member pins a must-have in Congress?Not Horsing Around: Speaker Sedgwick Attempts to Rein in the PressOn December 22, 1800, the U.S. House of Representatives held a somewhat routine debate on whether to examine the conduct of Mississippi’s territorial governor. As debate dragged on, Democratic Republican William Charles Cole Claiborne of Tennessee declared that he had heard enough, and recommended the House move swiftly to punish the governor, surmising that “a delay of justice is often equal to a denial of it.” Claiborne’s remarks struck a chord with a man named James Lane who watched the proceedings from the gallery. In a show of support, Lane began clapping. Lane’s disruption sparked an immediate rebuke from Speaker Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, who ordered the House Sergeant at Arms to remove Lane from the chamber. The clapping may have lasted a split second, but it set in motion a lengthy series of events that underscored the power of the Speaker and House leadership’s contentious relationship with the press. It also, apparently, caused James Lane to lose his horse.Be sure to follow the blog in 2025 for more House history, art, and records!

U.S. House History Blog

19.12.2024

Recent Artifacts Online, Winter 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Everything old is new again—this season, treasures from 150 years ago take center stage in newly digitized additions to our online collection. Find the furniture in an 1858 print and compare the picture to examples that survive today.The Hall of Representatives in the New Extension of the Capitol at WashingtonThis print showing the details of the newly completed House Chamber, which had opened just months before, is also the earliest image of Pages in the House Collection. Small boys can be seen sitting alongside the lowest level of the three-tiered Speaker’s rostrum. By the late 1850s, Pages had been working in the Capitol for nearly half a century. Note the chairs and desks furnishing the new chamber. Surviving examples of these are also part of the House Collection, included below.Walter DeskIn 1857, the House met in its new chamber, with Representatives sitting at highly decorated desks designed for the room. Carved symbols on the desk’s front illustrate power: a shield with the nation’s stars and stripes anchors the top rail above a globe with “America” emblazoned across it.Walter ChairAs the House of Representatives prepared to occupy its new chamber in 1857, deadlines loomed. More than one company scrambled to build the many formidable oak armchairs needed for the chamber. The Hammitt Desk Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia provided 131 chairs, and Bembe & Kimbel, a New York City firm, supplied another 131. The two versions have slight variations. Look closely: this one, made by the Hammitt Desk Manufacturing Company, has circular decorations around the chair’s seat, with small wooden hemispheres in the center of each circle. The Bembe & Kimbel chairs use a variation on the circular design that marks them as works from that manufacturer.Formal Notice of the Impeachment of Andrew JohnsonThe full-page image on one side of this sheet from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper showed Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and John Bingham of Ohio delivering the formal notice of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson to the Senate. The reverse included five more images, building a narrative of the proceedings. Scenes include a crowd rushing to enter the Chamber to hear the message delivered, people at the Willard Hotel discussing the transpiring events, and a crowd in Baltimore reacting to the “impeachment telegram” being posted on the bulletin. As evidenced by this example, the story was followed in detail by the contemporary press.Our New President—General View of the Inauguration CeremoniesAfter a disputed election, Rutherford Hayes was sworn in as President in March 1877. This Harper’s Weekly print shows a sea of spectators—and two playful dogs—gathered near the East Front of the Capitol for the inauguration. Although the public ceremony took place on March 5, Hayes was sworn in privately at the White House two days earlier.Are you more of a modernist? Check out these 20th-century artifacts, new on the website:For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.

U.S. House History Blog

10.12.2024

“A Favored Son of America”: the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824 House Reception | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On December 10, 1824, two dozen U.S. Representatives accompanied a 67-year-old French nobleman named Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier through the streets of Washington, DC, on the way to the U.S. Capitol. Other than the size of the entourage, little seemed to distinguish the caravan as it traversed the capital city. The Frenchman’s private secretary, Auguste Levasseur, noted that “the cortege was composed of a dozen carriages, but without escort, without pomp and without decorations. Our trip across the City was slow and silent.” Despite the apparent solemnity of the procession, the House and its visitors eagerly awaited the arrival of the French guest for whom they had prepared an official reception, set to begin promptly at 1:00 p.m.The reception scheduled for that day marked the first time the U.S. House had formally hosted a foreign dignitary—hundreds of others, including many heads of state, would follow over the next two centuries. But in that initial instance the guest was not the leader or a representative of any overseas government. In the United States, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier was better known as the Marquis de Lafayette, a French volunteer and general in the American Revolution who had served under George Washington in the Continental Army and whose leadership was pivotal to securing America’s independence five decades earlier.By the time Lafayette stepped foot on America’s shores in 1824, the heroes of 1776 were fading from the scene and the responsibilities of governing—of upholding and propagating the ideals and promises of the American Revolution—had passed to the next generation. The youngest Member of the House in 1824, Kentucky Representative Thomas Patrick Moore, was around 27 years old, and was himself already a veteran of another more recent conflict with the British—the War of 1812—that helped reaffirm America’s independence.An entire lifetime had come and gone since the Revolution. As America’s 50th anniversary approached in 1826, Lafayette’s visit bridged the eras. But, in a sense, the reception the House held in Lafayette’s honor signified a new beginning entirely. The upstart democracy Lafayette had helped seed in the eighteenth century had, by the third decade of the nineteenth, grown into a force all its own.The Nation’s GuestCongress had done almost everything in its power to facilitate Lafayette’s visit. Ten months earlier, in February 1824, after lawmakers learned that Lafayette hoped to visit America, Congress passed a resolution reserving a U.S. ship for his voyage across the Atlantic and directed President James Monroe to communicate to the French war hero “the assurances of grateful and affectionate attachment still cherished for him by the Government and people of the United States.”When Lafayette arrived in New England to begin his grand tour of America in August 1824, the House was out of session. Over the next few months, Lafayette made his way south down the eastern seaboard and when lawmakers gathered in Washington to begin the second session of the 18th Congress (1823–1825) seven months later in December, Members rushed to organize a committee to determine how best to honor and welcome him. After conferring with the Senate—which decided to hold its own meet-and-greet with Lafayette—the House committee recommended that lawmakers invite Lafayette to visit the chamber at 1:00 p.m. on December 10, where he would be feted by remarks from Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky.Lafayette had last visited America in 1784, and in the intervening 40 years much had changed—both for Lafayette and his American compatriots. After defeating the British and returning to France, Lafayette had helped spark the French Revolution in the 1790s and, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, authored the first draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But Lafayette had barely survived the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution and spent years in prison after he fled the country. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, America’s original 13 colonies had transformed into a country on the make: 24 states united under the Constitution, a population of roughly 10 million, and a foothold on the world’s stage.Lafayette’s visit to America in 1824 captured the country’s attention. Newspapers documented his every move and filled column after column with patriotic well wishes. Along the way, Lafayette visited sites and people important to the American Revolution. He reminisced with the 89-year-old John Adams in Boston and later visited Thomas Jefferson at his Virginia home, Monticello. Throughout it all, Lafayette made time to meet everyday Americans and surviving Revolutionary War veterans. During a private event in New York, a man was turned away as he tried to enter. Later, when an opportunity appeared, the man approached Lafayette to ask if the Frenchman remembered him. A reporter covering the event noted that “the General recognized him, called him by name, and extending his hand, said, ‘Yes, you assisted me off the field of battle, when wounded.’”The gravity of Lafayette’s visit was so strong that it even eclipsed the contested presidential election that year between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Newspapers across the country “closed their long columns to the passionate discussions of the parties in order to open them only to the unanimous expression of joy and national gratitude,” Levasseur, Lafayette’s personal secretary, noted.The ReceptionOn December 10, 1824, as Lafayette’s entourage approached the Capitol, Representatives waiting in the chamber extended an invitation to the Senate to join them for the reception. Extra seats were quickly arranged as Senators filed in. With the galleries filled to capacity with guests, additional spectators stood in the spaces and alcoves not already occupied by lawmakers on the floor. Before long, the 24 Members of the House welcoming committee organized to accompany and introduce Lafayette entered the chamber. Everyone in attendance removed their hats and stood. The committee chair, Representative George Mitchell of Maryland, ushered Lafayette in and presented him to Speaker Clay. Speaker Clay, born the same year Lafayette had arrived in America to support the country’s independence, stood and addressed his esteemed guest.“General,” Clay began, “the House of Representatives of the United States, impelled alike by its own feelings, and by those of the whole American People, could not have assigned to me a more gratifying duty than that of being its organ to present to you cordial congratulations upon the occasion of your recent arrival in the United States, in compliance with the wishes of Congress.” Clay acknowledged that while few in attendance that day had fought alongside Lafayette during the Revolution, everyone knew “of the perils, the sufferings, and the sacrifices, which you voluntarily encountered, and the signal services in America and in Europe, which you performed, for an infant, a distant, and an alien, people.”The Speaker celebrated Lafayette’s commitment “to regulated liberty, in all the vicissitudes of a long and arduous life” and commended the French general on his role as the “faithful and fearless champion” of freedom on two continents.Clay concluded by turning his attention to America and its future. Lafayette had been given a rare opportunity to witness the fruit of his revolutionary labors, Clay said. “You are in the midst of posterity!” the Speaker exclaimed. “Every where you must have been struck with the great changes, physical and moral, which have occurred since you left us.” Clay spoke of the “the forests felled, the cities built, the mountains levelled, the canals cut, the highways constructed, the progress of the arts, the advancement of learning, and the increase of population.” When Lafayette was last in America, Washington, DC, did not exist. But by 1824, “even this very city, bearing a venerated name, alike endeared to you and to us, has since emerged from the forest,” Clay said. But regardless of the physical changes America had undergone and would surely undergo in the future, Clay was confident that the nation’s esteem for Lafayette would “be transmitted, with unabated vigor, down the tide of time, through the countless millions who are destined to inhabit this continent, to their last posterity.”Standing in the chamber that afternoon, Levasseur, Lafayette’s assistant, observed that “the profound emotion that had swept over the Speaker, and which had visibly shaken him through his speech, passed rapidly into the hearts of all the audience.”Lafayette spoke next. He expressed his gratitude for the invitation to tour America and for the honor of the reception. “I am proud and happy to share those extraordinary favors with my dear Revolutionary companions,” he said. “My obligations to the United States . . . far exceed any merit I might claim. They date from the time when I have had the happiness to be adopted as a young soldier, a favored son of America. They have been continued to me during almost half a century of constant affection and confidence; and now . . . thanks to your most gratifying invitation, I find myself greeted by a series of welcomes, one hour of which would more than compensate for the public exertions and sufferings of a whole life.”After four decades away, Lafayette exalted “the immense improvements” made in America since his last visit—what he called “all the grandeur and prosperity of these happy United States.” Lafayette found it remarkable that the children of his revolutionary compatriots held him in the same regard as those he had fought alongside in the 1770s and 1780s. All these years later, Lafayette said, “I have the honor, and enjoy the delight, to congratulate the Representatives of the Union . . . upon the almost infinite prospects we can with certainty anticipate,” Lafayette concluded.After the speeches, the House adjourned for the day. Clay descended from the rostrum and saluted Lafayette, a gesture which the other Members emulated as Lafayette left the chamber.An Act Concerning General LafayetteLater that month, lawmakers on Capitol Hill sought to extend Lafayette’s honor by offering the French general a substantial gift. The original bill, drafted by the Select Committee on Services and Sacrifices of General Lafayette, gifted $200,000 to Lafayette for his contributions to America during the Revolution—this at a time when lawmakers earned $8 per day while the House was in session and a pound of coffee cost about 18 cents in New York. The Senate, after considering the bill, decided that Lafayette deserved even more, and added a 24,000-acre plot of land from the government’s public land holdings.When the House received the amended bill, several Members expressed concern over its cost. The House debated the bill for two days. At certain points, lawmakers sought to reduce the size of the compensation to $100,000 then $150,000. But, as debate wore on, fears of seeming ungrateful outweighed the expense, and the House approved the original $200,000 and 24,000 acres of land. The House voted 166 to 26. The bill became law on December 23, 1824.Lafayette was deeply in debt, and when he learned of the gift, he sent a letter to Congress expressing his immense appreciation for the money and land, later confessing his belief “that the American Nation has done far too much for me.”Lafayette’s Legacy in the HouseOne legacy of Lafayette’s visit to the House exists to this day. On the same day the House approved Lafayette’s gift, Clay read a letter from a French artist, Ary Scheffer, dated October 1824. In the letter, Scheffer explained that he had sent a full-length portrait of Lafayette as a gift of gratitude “for the national honors which the free people of the United States are, at this moment, bestowing on the friend and companion in arms of your illustrious Washington, on the man who has been so gloriously received as ‘the Nation’s Guest.’” Scheffer’s portrait arrived at the Capitol in December, having been delayed by headwinds as it left France, and was displayed in the Capitol Rotunda during the remainder of Lafayette’s trip. It was later moved into the House Chamber, where it still hangs.Much like the invitation extended to Lafayette, Congress has often asked foreign leaders to speak to affirm the friendly relations between the United States and the individual or, in more recent decades, the country that person represents. Since 1824, the House has invited 55 foreign dignitaries to address its members; many more international guests have addressed both the House and Senate in Joint Meetings—most of which have been held in the House Chamber. Since the first official address before a Joint Meeting in 1874 by King David Kalakaua of Hawaii, there have been more than 130 addresses by foreign dignitaries and heads of state.It is perhaps fitting that the ally who helped an upstart nation throw off the yoke of British colonialism set the precedent. As much as Lafayette’s reception on December 10, 1824, linked the new republic to its roots in the Revolution and advertised its youthful achievements, it also presaged America’s place as a rising world power and made Congress the place where the world has since come to speak to the American people.Sources: Annals of Congress, House, 18th Cong., 1st sess. (12 January 1824): 988; Annals of Congress, House, 18th Cong., 1st sess. (20 January 1824): 1101–1104; Register of Debates, Appendix, 18th Cong., 1st sess. (4 February 1824): 3279; Register of Debates, House, 18th Cong., 2nd sess. (6 December 1824): 1–4; Register of Debates, House, 18th Cong., 2nd sess. (10 December 1824): 3–5; Register of Debates, House, 18th Cong., 2nd sess. (21 December 1824): 34–35, 45–56; Register of Debates, Senate, 18th Cong., 2nd sess. (3 January 1825): 111; House Journal, 18th Cong., 2nd sess. (23 December 1824): 75–76; An Act concerning General Lafayette, 6 Stat. 320 (1824); Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825: Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. Alan R. Hoffman (Manchester, NH: Lafayette Press, Inc., 2006); American Watchman (Wilmington, DE), 13 August 1824; Washington Intelligencer, 11 December 1824; “Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics,” Michigan bureau of labor and industrial statistics (1 February 1885): 248; Ida A. Brunick, “Salaries of Members of Congress: Recent Actions and Historical Tables,” Report 97-1011, 26 September 2024, Congressional Research Service; Lafayette: A Guide to the Letters, Documents, and Manuscripts in the United States, ed. Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk, Phyllis S. Pestieau, and Linda J. Pike (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); David T. Canon et al., Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789–1946, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002); Lina Mann, “The Nation’s Guest: General Lafayette’s 1824-1825 Tour of the United States,” 30 March 2018, The White House Historical Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-nations-guest.

U.S. House History Blog

27.11.2024

Giving Thanks for the Institution | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Behind the scenes and away from the spotlight, the staff of the U.S. House of Representatives ensure that America’s large and complex legislative institution runs smoothly. On any given day over the years, House employees have performed a myriad of tasks: delivering messages for Members of Congress, keeping track of votes on the House Floor, and assisting with committee hearings.When the Office of the House Historian began conducting oral histories twenty years ago, a major goal of the program was to describe and explain the work of staff. Documenting the responsibilities of staff and how they have changed over time offered a unique look at how the House of Representatives evolved and adapted to new technology and the growing demands on lawmakers. Interviews conducted with longtime employees proved especially useful in learning about the culture, interpersonal dynamics, and day-to-day proceedings of the House.In this final post commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the House’s oral history program, four former staff members, whose collective service covered more than 150 years, described their impressions of the institution and offered advice to a new generation of employees. Themes of gratitude, inspiration, and service emerge in this collection of interviews.Joe Bartlett (1941–1979)Dorsey Joseph Bartlett, better known as Joe to his colleagues on the Hill, was born on August 7, 1926, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Bartlett first came to the House as a Page in 1941 where he enrolled in the Capitol Page School and ran errands for lawmakers. After serving in the Marines during World War II, Bartlett returned to the Capitol, where he served as chief Page, reading clerk, and later as Clerk to the Minority. Bartlett’s career as a House staffer spanned 38 years.Bartlett’s affable personality and skillful storytelling added colorful detail and vitality to his oral history. In one instance, he offered a description of the audition for the coveted job of reading clerk in 1953. More than twenty people traipsed to the House Floor to test their memory and auditory skill, while hoping to display the ability to think and react quickly. “One of the tricks they had—we were not allowed to audition in the presence of the other candidates—but one of the tricks they had was to turn off the microphone,” Bartlett remembered. “And these professionals had no idea what to do when the microphone went off. And so some, in a sense, sort of lost it. I didn’t have enough sense not to continue, and so I just raised my voice a little bit more, which was what they were looking for.” Bartlett’s strategy paid off. The West Virginia native served as House reading clerk for nearly two decades.With ample time in the chamber, Bartlett, who became an astute student of House proceedings, delighted in his interactions with Speakers, rank-and-file Members, and staff. Throughout his oral histories, Bartlett expressed a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to work for the House and to witness historic events including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech on December 8, 1941. “I would say to young people that democracy is worth serving,” Bartlett observed during his oral history. “Representative government is an ideal that has more than justified itself in the last 200 years and to be a participant in it is very enriching. To have an opportunity to work with the elect of that process, there’s just nothing like it.”Pat Kelly (1957–2011)Born on June 5, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, Maura Patricia (Pat) Kelly grew up in a political family. The daughter of Representative Edna Kelly of New York, Pat Kelly came to Washington, DC, in 1957, to work as a researcher for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. After a decade of committee work, she switched gears finding employment as a legislative assistant for three Representatives, including her mother during her final term in Congress from 1967 to 1969. Kelly also worked for the House Committee on Rules before joining the Clerk’s Office where she spent the next 37 years editing the House Daily Digest and the Congressional Record.Kelly’s personal connection to the institution as the daughter of a Representative, in addition to her diverse employment portfolio on the Hill that stretched more than 50 years, offered a unique perspective of the House of Representatives. In her oral history, Kelly outlined her approach to working at the Capitol. She described the value of having a “deep desire” to help people and a commitment to supporting the objectives of the institution. A longtime member of the Congressional Staff Club, Kelly worked to help House employees make lasting connections with colleagues. She flourished in the staff club, organizing events, attending parties, and making an annual trip to New York City. After serving in several leadership positions for the club, Kelly became president in 1976.When asked to advise others who may consider working for Congress, Kelly drew upon her own experiences and deep respect for the House. “You have to be knowledgeable about issues of the world, and about state and local concerns,” she observed. “And think of service to your fellow countrymen in one area or one legislative body, whether it be in the state, in the Congress, or local government, whatever it might be. Think, ‘I wonder if I could really do something to help them do a better job?’ And not just to be picking up a paycheck, but to really say, ‘Well, what can I really do?’ If they have to have the desire to do it, number one, it’s just not a job to go up and apply for. I mean, you have to have a feeling, like I do, about the institution itself.”Donn Anderson (1960–1995)Donnald K. Anderson was born on October 17, 1942, in Sacramento, California. As a teenager, Anderson wrote a letter to his Congressman, John Moss of California, requesting a Page appointment to “see firsthand how our government at the national level conducts the affairs of the people.” Moss, impressed by Anderson’s conviction, extended him an invitation to serve as a House Page in 1960. Anderson thrived during his time as a Page and went on to hold several other positions (elevator operator, for example) before managing the Democratic Cloakroom for 15 years, which kept him in close proximity to lawmakers and the House Floor.An institutionalist at heart, Anderson expressed a genuine respect for the rules and procedures of the House. But he was also open to change if it helped Members improve efficiency without undermining House traditions. He recalled how he led a pilot program for Members to use “beepers” to stay informed of House proceedings while away from their congressional office.From the time he arrived at the Capitol, Anderson knew he wanted to serve as Clerk of the House. Over the years, he developed a deep admiration for the institution. “I’ve often said that being manager of the cloakroom, as far as I was concerned, was the best job there was, as least for me, except being Clerk of the House. When, after a total of 18 years in the cloakroom, I left to become the Clerk of the House, which was the fulfillment of my dreams and my fantasies, I never stopped missing the intimacy and the excitement of working in the cloakroom. It was like being at Mecca. It was the focal point of everything that went on on the House Floor. You knew absolutely everything that was happening.” Anderson served as Clerk for eight years and left his own mark on the institution when he oversaw the establishment of two House offices: Employee Assistance and Fair Employment Practices.Tina Tate (1972–2007)Ruth (Tina) Tate was born on September 5, 1944, in Atlanta, Georgia. The first woman employed by the House Radio-TV Gallery, Tate’s oral history offered a rare look at the office during the 1970s. She described a close-knit staff of four who worked in a small office with space for only three desks. Tate marveled at how, for much of her tenure, she took notes and processed records by hand before the widespread adoption of personal computers in the 1990s.Tate was the first woman and only the third person to hold the position of director of the Radio-TV Gallery, and her oral history offered a comprehensive look at her responsibilities and the mission of the office during her 34-year career on the Hill. From supervising the daily log of House proceedings to coordinating press coverage of Joint Sessions and lying-in-state ceremonies, Tate managed logistics and provided information to radio and TV broadcasters. She spoke about the challenge of balancing the requests of reporters with adhering to House Rules. Tate also routinely expressed a sense of pride in the work of the gallery and of the House, including times where they managed the press coverage of difficult events. After the shooting deaths of two Capitol Police officers in 1998, Tate solemnly recalled the importance and privilege of coordinating coverage of their lying-in-honor ceremony, describing her efforts to honor their memory as the “best work I ever did.”Service to the institution and an awareness of the distinctive nature of her work guided Tate’s career. “Just remember every day that you are privileged to be where you are,” Tate recommended when contemplating advice she would give to prospective employees. “That building and both the press corps that you serve there are the best in the business. And the Members of Congress and their staffs are the best at what they do. It’s a privilege to be there every day that you go there. You are watching history be made.”

U.S. House History Blog

20.11.2024

The History of Member Pins | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

“The first day I was here, I was just walking around,” newly minted Representative Roger Marshall reported. “Nobody even noticed me. Then I put this on and all of a sudden, the eyes started trailing me.” Marshall came to Congress in 2017 and quickly learned what gets you noticed on the Hill: the official, Members-only lapel pin.Like a hall pass, the little metal disc has identified Representatives to police, Members, and others in the know for 50 years. But for the previous 180 years, the House saw no need for them. What happened to make Member pins a must-have in Congress?Pinning Up WatergateIn a word, Watergate—and the massive turnover in Congress that resulted. The fallout from the Watergate scandal resounded across the country and set in motion changes that led to Member pins. After a break-in at the Democratic Party’s offices, congressional investigations implicated President Richard Nixon in widespread misconduct, ultimately driving the President from office in August 1974. Nixon’s resignation and President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the former president changed the political landscape. Democrats saw massive gains in their House majority following the 1974 elections, bringing a new generation into the Capitol.The 86 new Members in 1975 became known as the “Watergate babies,” the largest incoming class since the 1940s. As their nickname implied, the new Members were a young bunch. Many were decades younger than the average age of House Democrats. The freshman class was so youthful that it increased the under-40 representation in the House by more than 50 percent over the previous Congress.Tousle-haired Tom Downey of New York was an example of the new breed of Representative and the press’ poster child for the freshman class. Downey was only 25 on Election Day and looked even younger. In the first weeks of the new Congress, Representative William Barrett, 78 years old, beckoned Downey over to his desk. “Here, take these papers to my office,” Barrett directed. Downey replied with an expletive that he would do no such thing. When Barrett summoned Donn Anderson, the cloakroom supervisor to complain, Anderson had to inform the Congressman that Downey was not, in fact, a Page but was instead one of his new colleagues from New York. Downey later noted that it was far from the only time he was mistaken for a teenager.In addition to salty showdowns on the floor, some Members reported being stopped by the Capitol Police, including, according to one newspaper, “demands to check them for concealed weapons.” The Committee on House Administration fielded complaints and decided to act. At the May 1, 1975, meeting of the committee’s Subcommittee on Personnel and Police, Chairman Frank Annunzio proposed “Members Security Identification Pins,” assuring his colleagues that they would be “neat and in good taste.”The full committee took up the proposal, and although it was clearly destined for approval, a few Members tossed in half-hearted objections. One Member said that pins would be a crutch for Capitol guards, who should have memorized all the Members. Another thought it was ridiculous to have the House pay for the pins, which would cost too much. Lindy Boggs asked that the design be changed so that there was a pin and catch on the back instead of a thick tie tack post. Another comment was that Members would forget their pins, and then where would that leave them?The first Member pin featured a starry blue background with a silver image of the House Mace’s top. Since then, the Committee on House Administration has determined Member pin designs, generally with a different set of colors each Congress. More recently, the pin design has included the eagle and shield of the Great Seal of the United States, along with the Congress number.Pinning Down Member FlairBased on a close look at photographs in the House Collection, it appears that early on, very few Members wore their pins. One image from the 1980 State of the Union shows only four of 59 Members visible in the frame wearing their pins.Similarly, in a photograph of 24 members of the Budget Committee from the 97th Congress (1981–1983), only Norman Mineta of California wears his. Mineta was an early adopter of the Member pin, and he presaged its greater use by women and minorities. Photographs in the House Collection demonstrate the disparity. In 373 headshots from between 1975 and 1985 in the House Collection, women Members and Members of color are two and a half times more likely than White men to wear their pins.There is no written documentation of a relationship between Member pins and racial or gender profiling in those early days, but in the 21st century, some Representatives spoke with frankness about the challenges they faced. Yvette Clarke of New York, after five terms in the House, expressed why it might be, even in the 2010s, that “I can get on an elevator with some of my colleagues and they still ask me who I work for. Sometimes, just coming into the House complex, I have to show my ID and make sure my pin is shown, because people say I have a more youthful look than my age would indicate. The average man on the Hill is a graying white dude, so I’m not given the benefit of the doubt. I have to make it clear why I’m here.” As recently as 2019, one female Member told a reporter that “I still get mistaken—I even went over to the Senate Gallery and [a guard] said, ‘No spouses allowed.’”Member Pin(terest)Specific security changes from the 1990s and 2000s, such as magnetometers, likely speeded up adoption, as Members were able to bypass lines for the increasingly complex security apparatus at entrances to the House with a flash of the pin. Another reason is likely generational. By 2005, when nearly all Members wore them at least some of the time, only nine began their service in a time before pins. That year, Bob Ney, chair of the committee that started the Member pin policy, said “We might have our differences, but the one similarity that we share is that we’ve all got the same pin.”As pins became more common, they also shifted from being solely an ID badge to being also a symbol of office, used in portraits as part of a Member’s self-presentation. Tallying up the pins in committee chair portraits can show how this ceremonial use grew. There is not a single portrait from the 1970s or 1980s that includes a Member pin. Slowly the numbers inched up: three in the 1990s, four in the 2000s, and a whopping 15 in the 2010s. This growth was likely due both to security-driven ubiquity and to the bright-eyed freshmen of 1975 and later who had risen through the ranks to chair committees. Of the 30 pin-sporting chairs with portraits painted between 1980 and 2024, 27 are of legislative leaders who arrived after 1975, knowing only a pinned world on Capitol Hill.In the 2020s, Member pins have become not only a visual reminder of status and ceremony, but part of Hill parlance, too. They have become a substitute for saying that someone has gotten elected to Congress. Newspapers report whether a potential candidate is “pursuing a Member pin.” For those who have won congressional elections, the shiny symbol of legislative service awaits at the start of each Congress.Sources: Committee on House Administration, Subcommittee on Personnel and Police, 1 May 1975; Committee on House Administration, 14 May 1975; John Lawrence, The Class of ’74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Roll Call, 20 September 2019; Roll Call, 19 July 2017; Roll Call, 27 January 2016; Roll Call, 20 September 2019; Washington Post, 3 August 2016; Wall Street Journal, 16 May 1975; Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1975.

U.S. House History Blog

05.11.2024

Edition for Educators – The House by the Numbers in 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Eight years ago, the Office of the Historian published a blog which reviewed several historical statistics regarding the U.S. House of Representatives. Many lawmakers with many different careers have come and gone during that period. How, then, has the House changed since 2016? This Edition to Educators revisits that data, highlights new information on the History, Art & Archives website, and provides an update to important changes in the House’s membership. All numbers are current as of November 4, 2024.House Service & SenioritySince the U.S. Congress convened in 1789, 12,516 individuals have served as Representatives, Senators, or in both capacities—84 percent have served only in the House (10,513). A total of 1,321 Members have served only in the Senate and 682 have served in both chambers. In addition, there have been 146 people who have served exclusively as Territorial Delegates and another 33 as Resident Commissioners from the Philippines or Puerto Rico.Longest Service The Office of the Historian tracks several records of service in the House of Representatives in the following charts and pages:Members with 40 Years or More House Service provides a straightforward chart of Representatives with the longest tenures in the House. The late John Dingell Jr. of Michigan, who retired in 2019, holds the record for longest continuous House service, having served in the House for 59 years, 22 days.Women with 25 Years or More House Service highlights the longest-serving women in the House of Representatives. Although other lawmakers recently surpassed her, Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts held the record of the longest tenure in the House by a woman for many years. She served for 35 years, 2 months, 12 days.Deans/Fathers of the House offers a list of Members who have held this honorary position and discusses how the post itself has evolved over time.First-term Members of the House Outside the First Congress (1789–1791), the largest class of first-term lawmakers to date took their seats in the 54th Congress (1895–1897), when 178 new Members of Congress—nearly half the House’s total—were sworn in between Opening Day and sine die adjournment. A full chart detailing the number of First-Term Members of the House of Representatives in each Congress also breaks down the difference between “pre-convening” and “post-convening” freshmen.Firsts & MilestonesThe youngest person to serve in the House was William Charles Cole Claiborne of Tennessee, who was elected to the 5th Congress (1797–1799) at no more than 22 years old, despite the Constitution requiring Representatives to be 25 years old. Our blog explains how Members younger than 25 were occasionally elected in the nineteenth century.Philip F. Thomas of Maryland holds the record for longest period of nonconsecutive service in the House, with a gap of 34 years between his first term in the 26th Congress (1839–1841) and his second term in the 44th Congress (1875–1877).Three Representatives (William Holman of Indiana, Harold Knutson of Minnesota, and Mary T. Norton of New Jersey) share a record for chairing four different standing committees over the course of their career.The Firsts & Milestones section of the website lists many more notable achievements and interesting outliers in congressional history. The most recent addition to this trivia goldmine is a section on Technological Milestones, a sister page to the exhibit on Electronic Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives.Vacancies & SuccessorsVacancies and Successors tracks mid-Congress vacancies and special elections. These charts now feature data back through the 99th Congress (1985–1987). Since 1985, 178 Representatives have been elected in special elections, and three Representatives have been sworn in under the provisions of state statutes.Congressional ApportionmentThe Constitution provides for proportional representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, meaning that seats in the House are allocated based on state population according to the Census the government conducts every 10 years.A PDF file displays Apportionment by State throughout history, current through the 24th census in 2020.The reapportionment following the 1840 Census is the only time the House has decreased its total membership through the apportionment process.The average population of a congressional district in 1790 was 30,000 people; today, Representatives serve an average of a little more than 761,000 constituents according to the U.S. Census Bureau.The Congressional Apportionment page also features additional sources of data and information.LeadershipSince 1789, 56 individuals have served as Speaker of the House. There have been 16 instances of Speaker elections requiring multiple ballots. The longest vacancy in the office of the Speaker during a session of Congress is 22 days. Sam Rayburn of Texas remains the Speaker of the House with the longest tenure; he held the gavel for 17 years, two months, and two days of nonconsecutive service.Women & Minorities in CongressSince Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana was first elected in 1916, 427 women have served in Congress. Thirty-six percent of women in Congress are current Members and 90 percent have served exclusively in the House.Since Hiram Revels of Mississippi was first appointed to the U.S. Senate in February 1870 (followed closely by Representative Joseph Rainey’s election to the House from South Carolina in December 1870), 190 African Americans have served in Congress; thirty-four percent of African-American Members are currently serving. All but 12 (94 percent) have served exclusively in the House. One Black Senator has served in both chambers (Tim Scott of South Carolina).Since Delegate Joseph Marion Hernández of Florida was elected to the House in 1822, 160 Hispanic Americans have served in Congress; more than one-third of Hispanic Members are currently serving. All but 12 (93 percent) have served exclusively in the House. A total of 37 Hispanic Members have been statutory representatives, serving U.S. territories in Congress—20 Resident Commissioners from Puerto Rico and 17 Delegates from other territories.Since 1900, when Delegate Robert M. Wilcox of Hawaii became the first Asian Pacific American (APA) to serve in Congress, a total of 71 APAs have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, Resident Commissioners, or Senators; thirty-one percent of APA Members are currently serving. All but 8 (89 percent) have served exclusively in the House. A total of 26 APA Members have been statutory representatives, serving U.S. territories in Congress—13 Resident Commissioners from the Philippines and 14 Delegates from other territories.For further data on women and minorities in Congress—including committee assignments, leadership positions, caucus information, and more—please see the Historical Data section for each exhibit: Women in Congress, Black Americans in Congress, Hispanic Americans in Congress, and Asians and Pacific Islanders in Congress.Additional Institutional InformationSessions of Congress As of November 4, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives has spent more than 31,000 days in session. There have been 465 Joint Meetings and Sessions in the history of the United States Congress. Of those, 100 have been in-person annual addresses on the State of the Union. The 101st Congress (1989–1991) holds the record for the most Joint Meetings and Sessions with 14.Political Parties Since the start of the modern party system in 1856, the House has changed majorities a total of 19 times. According to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have represented 47 different political parties or coalitions since 1789; this number does not include the political affiliations of Delegates and Resident Commissioners who have served in the House.Remembrance and Memorialization Since the death of Henry Clay of Kentucky in 1852, 34 individuals have lain in state and eight have lain in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Additionally, three individuals have lain in state in Statuary Hall. Between 1820 and 1940, 32 funerals of Members of Congress were held in the House Chamber.One-hundred and ninety measures have been passed by the U.S. Congress or the Continental Congress issuing Congressional Gold Medals. These medals honor individuals across all walks of life who have made notable sacrifices or contributed to national progress.Presidential Vetoes Since 1789, U.S. Presidents have issued 2,591 vetoes of congressional legislation. Congress has overridden 112 of these vetoes, only four percent of the total.Additional data on the proceedings of Congress can be found in charts, fact sheets, and essays throughout the Institution section of the website. Looking for statistics for a single Congress? Congressional profiles include party divisions, session dates, leadership, committee information, and anecdotes about that Congress, all linked from one page.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.

U.S. House History Blog

25.10.2024

Will the Real Thomas Forrest Please Stand Up | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Since 1859, the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress has compiled life and career information for every lawmaker who has ever served on Capitol Hill. Included among the more than 11,000 congressional biographies in the Directory is a brief entry for Representative Thomas Forrest of Pennsylvania who served in the House in the 16th and 17th Congresses (1819–1823).On the surface, Forrest’s biography is rather conventional. It lists where he was born, where he studied as a young man, his military experience, his career before entering the House, and his service dates in Congress.But left unsaid in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress are details of Forrest’s life that were anything but conventional.Although we do not know the exact day Thomas Forrest was born, we know that he was born in Philadelphia in 1747, meaning that by the time of his first term in Congress, he was 72 years old—making him tied for oldest lawmaker in the House that session. Forrest had lived an entire life before entering politics—but given what he did with his time on Earth, it is perhaps more accurate to say he had lived entire lives.Act One: The DisappointmentLittle is known about Thomas Forrest’s early years. His parents were William and Sarah Forrest, and as a young man he attended local community-funded schools. In 1770, he married a woman named Ann Whitpaine and had at least two children.But around that time, Thomas Forrest wasn’t just Thomas Forrest. He was also, apparently, known by the pseudonym Andrew Barton. Writing as Barton, Forrest authored The Disappointment, or the Force of Credulity, what is believed to be the first comedic operetta created by an American. It was also the first work to include the patriotic tune Yankee Doodle. In the author’s note, Barton stated that he wrote the “local piece . . . originally wrote for my own, and the amusement of a few particular friends.” The operetta gained enough attention that it was set to be performed in Philadelphia in 1767 but was canceled at the last minute due to its biting satire. The jokes reportedly made fun of identifiable, prominent Philadelphians.More than two centuries later, The Disappointment experienced a revival of sorts when it was resurrected for the bicentennial celebration of American independence in 1976. While some scholars have questioned if the Thomas Forrest who served in the House was the same Thomas Forrest who wrote The Disappointment, as of today, there is no other candidate who can claim authorship.In the late 1760s, Forrest’s hijinks extended beyond the page. According to the Annals of Philadelphia—a compendium of “authentic, curious, and highly interesting” stories published by John F. Watson in 1830—around 1768, Forrest played an involved practical joke on a local tailor. While being fitted for a suit, 21-year-old Thomas—described by the Annals as “a youth of much frolic and fun, always well disposed to give time and application to forward a joke”—listened as the tailor mused about one day finding treasure left behind by pirates. After returning home, Forrest concocted a deathbed letter from a fictitious pirate who before being executed had buried loot at Cooper’s Point in New Jersey. Forrest pretended to find this phony letter within his father’s papers and presented it to the superstitious tailor. When the tailor brought in an acquaintance to conjure the spirit of Forrest’s pirate, Forrest went to elaborate lengths to stage a seance where a person dressed as a ghost was lowered from the ceiling. As the ruse continued, Forrest arranged for a treasure hunt to retrieve the pirate’s stash in New Jersey where Forrest had prepared more theatrics. Not only did Forrest bury a fake pot of treasure he hired two men to act as specters to scare the group and arranged for a stunt that involved cats and fireworks. After the group dug up Forrest’s decoy treasure chest, Forrest dropped it into the ocean and staged it as an accident. Thus, the “treasure” was found and then lost again. The tailor went as far as accusing Forrest of keeping the treasure for himself and sued the future Congressman for part of the profit, but the case was eventually dropped.Act Two: RevolutionaryThomas Forrest’s reputation as a jokester seems to have followed him into the 1770s and onto the frontlines of America’s war for independence.Forrest joined the Continental Army in 1775 and was assigned to a Pennsylvania artillery division. He achieved the rank of captain by 1776 and was with General George Washington when the Army struck Trenton, New Jersey, leading two cannon units that became key to the Hessians’ defeat. Because of his leadership, the Army promoted Forrest to major in 1777 and to lieutenant colonel in 1778. In 1779, Brigadier General Henry Knox, wrote to Washington recommending that Forrest’s service be recognized. “Major Forrest is next in rank—Your Excellency knows his zeal and activity—I think he is a proper subject for promotion,” Knox observed. Although Washington seemed supportive of Knox’s endorsement, Army rules meant the promotion went to an older colleague. Forrest left the Army in 1781 and was afterwards known to his family and friends as Colonel Forrest.Even as Forrest worked to secure America’s freedom, he seems to have set aside time for pranks. The winter of 1777 proved to be a harrowing time for Forrest and the rest of Washington’s Army stationed at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Continental forces were short on food and clothing, and in need of troops and personnel. One night, as new recruits arrived from New Jersey, someone posted signs about smallpox infections outside the tents of the recently arrived soldiers. When the men awoke the next day, they promptly left camp. Blame for the prank seems to have been directed at Forrest, who was reportedly later reprimanded by Washington.Act Three: Capitol HillAfter leaving the military in 1781, Forrest held a steady job as a stockbroker in Philadelphia with an office on Market Street. Although details about his life over the next few decades is fleeting, newspapers and print accounts provide some information on the period between the war and his election to Congress.By at least the early 1800s, Forrest had become involved in politics. In 1806, newspapers stated that Forrest served as chairman of the Germantown, Pennsylvania, Democratic Republicans. A year later, Forrest was appointed to a delegation from Philadelphia to correspond with other citizens in the United States. And in 1812, Forrest won election as a constable in Philadelphia.In 1816, Forrest stood for election to the 15th Congress (1817–1819) but lost. Two years later, he ran again and won a seat in the 16th Congress (1819–1821). In his first term, Forrest, who served as a Federalist, was appointed chairman of the House Agriculture Committee—perhaps a curious assignment for a lawmaker who once worked in the financial sector from Philadelphia. But as chairman, Forrest used his economic experience to consider proposed increases to America’s import duties, producing an 11-page report in early February 1821 in which he called the new tariff schedule “one of the most important that has ever been offered to consideration to Congress.” Forrest ultimately concluded that higher duties were “incompatible with the interests of agriculture and of the community in general, and ought not to be adopted.”Forrest lost re-election in 1820, but later won a special election in October 1822 to the 17th Congress (1821–1823) following the resignation of Representative William Milnor. Forrest was defeated for re-election to the 18th Congress (1823–1825).Despite his history of mirth making, there are no recorded complaints about any pranks at the hands of Representative Forrest on Capitol Hill. In the House, Forrest presented himself in the role of elder statesman. Part of what we know about Forrest as a lawmaker comes from then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. In Adams’s diary from November 1820, he described a visit from Forrest:Col. Thomas Forrest, a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania was here this morning; he retains by courtesy his title of colonel which he held during our Revolutionary War, though he is now a Quaker in full communion, wearing the drab-colored suit of broadcloth raiment, and the broad-brimmed hat, never taken off for salutation or civility, and thou and theeing all with whom he converses[.] The humorous contrast in his character is the luxuriant delight with which he glories in his military services, and the indications constantly oozing out from his discourse that he considers personal courage the first of human virtues, united with all the ostensible formalities of Quakerism. He entertained me this day with a long account of the share he had in the passage of the Delaware and capture of the Hessians at Trenton 25th–26th December, 1776. . . . The incidents of those two days have been so rivetted in his memory by its continual recurrence to them through a period of forty-four years, that they are fresh in his mind as if they had happened yesterday. He remembers every person who was there; every word that was said; every look that was cast by General Washington; and every recollection comes with a perfume of fragrance to his soul. This is the most exquisite of human enjoyments—the memory by which one’s own conduct is linked with scenes of deep danger and distress issuing in resplendent glory. The colonel is seventy years of age or more, but has yet much activity and apparent vigor of constitution.In the House, Representative Forrest was adamantly opposed to the expansion of slavery. On February 29, 1820, during debate over the bill to admit Missouri to the Union, Forrest held the floor as he delivered an impassioned plea not to permit slavery in the vast territory west of the Mississippi River; his speech covered five and half columns of text when it was printed in the Annals of Congress.Forrest evoked his service in the Revolution, the Framers’ intent in the Constitution, and his faith as a Quaker. When a Virginia lawmaker expressed his opinion that if Congress restricted slavery it would constitute “the darkest day” in American history, Forrest disagreed. “No; the morning of the 26th day of December 1776 . . . was the darkest time our country ever saw.” Forrest was with Washington at the Battle of Trenton, and he said he would forever remember what Washington said, “That the darkest time of night was just before day.” Forrest eulogized the soldiers he fought with who died at Trenton whose deaths he “regretted as premature and unfortunate, snatched, as I then thought, from a participation in the blessings of an happy independence, in the full enjoyment of every civil and religious liberty.” But 44 years later, now that he was a Member of Congress debating the spread of slavery, Forrest said, “I have occasion to rejoice; yes, rejoice overmuch, that they were not, like me, permitted to live to see posterity outgrow the remembrance of the patriotic virtues of their fathers, by an act for the extension of slavery.” Despite Forrest’s opposition, the Missouri Compromise became law a week later in early March 1820.Forrest died in 1825—exactly 50 years after he had enlisted in the Continental Army—at his home near Germantown, Pennsylvania. He was survived by at least one daughter, her husband Dr. Thomas Benton, and their son, Thomas Forrest Benton. In his obituary, the Norristown Herald wrote simply that Forrest had been “a distinguished Revolutionary officer, and not long since a member of Congress.” Left unsaid, however, was any mention of Forrest’s life of invention and reinvention. He had satirized power and wealth in Philadelphia at a time when America was challenging the power and wealth of England. He had been a soldier at a time when America was at war for its freedom; a lawmaker at a time when America was fully in charge of its own fate; and an anti-slavery proponent at a perilous time in the nation’s history.Sources: Annals of Congress, House, 16th Cong., 1st sess. (29 February 1820): 1559–1564; House Committee on Agriculture, Objections to an Increase of Duties on Imports, 16th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 613 (1821); Thomas Forrest to George Washington, 10 May 1779, in Founders Online, National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0363; Henry Knox to George Washington, 13 May 1779, in Founders Online, National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0408; George Washington to Major Thomas Forrest, 16 May 1779, in Founders Online, National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0446; George Washington to the Board of War, 18 May 1779, in Founders Online, National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0461; Thomas Forrest to George Washington, 2 April 1781, in Founders Online, National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-05274; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., Church Records, 1709–1760, ancestry.com; Andrew Barton (pseudonym of Thomas Forrest), The Disappointment or, the Force of Credulity, ed. David Mays (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1976): 1–37; Benjamin M. Nead, G. Washington, and Thomas Procter, “A Sketch of General Thomas Procter, with Some Account of the First Pennsylvania Artillery in the Revolution,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 4, no. 4 (1880): 454–470; Rev. S. F. Hotchkin, Ancient and Modern Germantown, Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia, PA: P.W. Ziegler & Co., 1889): 181–184; Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848, vol. 5, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott & Co.): 204–205.

U.S. House History Blog

11.10.2024

Founding the Congressional Hispanic Conference | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

“A person’s political agenda is not predisposed based on their skin color. I’m here to prove it,” declared Henry Bonilla, a Mexican-American Republican who represented San Antonio, Texas, in the House, in 2003. Bonilla was speaking for himself. But he was also defending Miguel Estrada, a Honduras-born attorney who had been nominated by Republican President George W. Bush to a seat on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, an assignment that many viewed as a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court. For the better part of two years, Estrada’s nomination had languished amid fierce opposition from Senate Democrats. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which provided legislative support to lawmakers and was composed primarily of congressional Democrats in the House, had come out against Estrada as well, infuriating Hispanic Republicans in Congress. Bonilla had had enough. Given the stakes of Estrada’s nomination, it was “time for the Hispanics of America to have a unbiased voice," Bonilla announced.Strengthened by their growing numbers and frustrated by the opposition to Estrada—a man whom they admired and whose politics and background they shared—Hispanic Republicans in Congress formed the Congressional Hispanic Conference in 2003. In so doing, they created an organization that would serve as a center of Hispanic power within the GOP Conference and would compete with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a variety of liberal organizations to best express the hopes and dreams of America’s largest minority population.Leaving the Hispanic CaucusSince its founding in 1976, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus had been the organized voice of Latino Members of Congress. An overwhelming majority of those members belonged to the Democratic Party, and the posture of the caucus therefore tended to reflect Democratic priorities. While Republicans, including Henry Bonilla who had first been elected in 1992, had in the past joined the group, the calculus for their participation changed after the GOP regained control of the House for the first time in 40 years heading into the 104th Congress (1995–1997). With the majority change in 1995, Republicans suddenly had control over the legislative agenda. Moreover, the new rules package adopted by the House restricted the role of the Hispanic Caucus in the legislative process and cut funding for staff. While the caucus reconstituted itself without public financial support, its path forward had become more complicated.In 1997, two Cuban-American lawmakers from Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, resigned from the caucus after caucus chair Xavier Becerra of California visited Cuba and had an audience with Fidel Castro. The legislators criticized Becerra for not imploring Castro to hold free elections or meeting with political dissidents. At the time, Diaz-Balart had called it “mind-boggling” that his colleagues would fail “to support even the most elemental freedoms for these oppressed people” in Cuba. Within a year, Henry Bonilla also left the caucus, and not a single Republican remained in the group.A Critical Mass of LawmakersIn 2003, almost three decades after the Hispanic Caucus’s founding and six years after the Cuba incident, the fight over Estrada’s nomination to the bench began a new chapter for Hispanic representation on Capitol Hill. In March that year, Bonilla announced the advent of the new Congressional Hispanic Conference and criticized the Hispanic Caucus as an “arm of the extreme left of the Democratic Party” and “the attack dogs of the left.” Ros-Lehtinen was less confrontational, describing the Estrada nomination as having revealed the need to establish another Hispanic group “that represented another more moderate position.”Faced with the creation of a rival organization, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus downplayed the rift. Representative Ciro D. Rodriguez, a Texas Democrat, noted that the two groups were “actually on the same page on a lot of issues.” But in the eyes the Hispanic Conference’s first executive director, the Hispanic Caucus had become “the establishment” and it was up to the conference to offer a new approach.While the Estrada nomination fight was critical to the formation of the conference in 2003, other factors also contributed to the decision. Crucial was the redistricting process that followed the 2000 Census. Population growth in Florida led to the creation of a new seat adjacent to Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart’s Miami district. In 2002, Mario Diaz-Balart, Lincoln’s brother, won election in the new Florida district, and Devin Nunes, a Portuguese-American Representative from California, won a seat from the Central Valley, increasing the number of Hispanic Republicans in Congress to six. By comparison, 20 Hispanic Democrats served in the 108th Congress (2003–2005).Defining Hispanic RepublicanismFor members of the new conference, the Estrada nomination fight not only furnished the legislators with a rationale for organizing, it helped them to explain what it meant to be a Hispanic Republican. Estrada’s resume included an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard. He later clerked for a Supreme Court Justice and then, as an attorney with the Office of the Solicitor General, had argued before the highest court in the land. “So many of us who are the sons and daughters of immigrants,” explained the founders in a Wall Street Journal op-ed marking their group’s debut, saw in Estrada’s hard work building a career all that was right about the country, the realization of the “American promise” to its newcomers.The Hispanic Conference also did not shy away from promoting Estrada as a candidate who would diversify the federal bench, in both his cultural and ideological background. Opposition to his nomination, the founders wrote, reflected “a pervasive and troubling trend whereby the advancement of minorities is only applauded when it reinforces liberal politics.”The rise of the Hispanic Conference and its work on behalf of Estrada’s nomination gave the House rare influence over judicial nominations, an issue ordinarily understood as the domain of the Senate which has the constitutional power to advise and consent on presidential appointments. Per a request from Senate GOP leadership, Mario Diaz-Balart, the chief organizer and “engine” of the conference, championed Estrada’s confirmation cause in the House and managed debate on the House Floor during which GOP Representatives publicly backed Estrada. Diaz-Balart also publicized letters in which he criticized Democratic Senators, calling their effort to stymie a confirmation vote “‘not only an injustice to the courts, but also to the advancement of well-qualified Hispanics.’” Ros-Lehtinen, too, pressured Florida’s U.S. Senators, both Democrats, to end the filibuster against Estrada.On March 4, 2003, Diaz-Balart led a “rally” on the Senate side of the Capitol, delivering remarks and serving as interlocutor for Republican Senators who spoke on behalf of Estrada. The Senators echoed his charge that congressional Democrats were “us[ing] race to try to disqualify Mr. Estrada.” The conference members kept up the campaign for months, but it ultimately proved unsuccessful. When the Bush administration withdrew Estrada’s nomination, Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen were the only Members of the House to join Senate leaders in a press conference to protest the defeat. First in English and then in Spanish, the Miami lawmakers excoriated the opposition for its “partisan” derailment of Estrada’s confirmation. Ros-Lehtinen called it “discriminación total,” all because of Estrada’s conservative beliefs. Diaz-Balart described it in terms apropos of a death in one’s family, saying that when the Senate refused to confirm Estrada, “We lost a brilliant young Hispanic.” “Nosotros, los Hispanos, nunca lo podremos olvidar,” (“We, the Hispanics, will never forget it”) he added. The Estrada nomination had cemented a sense of collective purpose, and given Hispanic Republicans in Congress a chance to develop ways of thinking and communicating what made them unique and important to their party and the nation.Building a New OrganizationAt the organizational level, Ros-Lehtinen, the most senior member of the new conference, was elected chairperson, and Henry Bonilla was named vice chair. Lawmakers tasked Mario Diaz-Balart’s chief of staff, Omar Franco, with hiring the conference’s first executive director. The members wanted to reach beyond the conference’s Cuban-American nucleus to enlist someone of Mexican-American descent for the position. Because the successful applicant still had to demonstrate an ability to represent the diverse constituency, candidates interviewed with each Member office in the conference. In the summer of 2003, the conference hired Octavio Hinojosa Mier, the son of Mexican immigrants who had been raised in the established Mexican-American community of Hutchinson, Kansas, and who later worked for U.S. Representative Jerry Moran. Hinojosa had come of age during the Ronald Reagan presidency, his worldview shaped by the Cold War. But it was Republicans’ embrace of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, and the promise of prosperity for Mexico, that led him to political activism. Hinojosa worked out of a cubicle in Mario Diaz-Balart’s office, a staff of one who learned to rely on the Member’s staff for support, particularly in the legislative process.Early on, the conference worked to build a set of procedures for operating. It held monthly policy meetings, typically in Ros-Lehtinen’s office, that lasted about 30 minutes. Hinojosa would present on a topic and encourage Members and their staffs to adopt a common position on the issue. The conference at times struggled to find a “specific wording” that Members could agree upon. Hinojosa’s successor as executive director, Mario H. Lopez, a former aide in the House Republican Conference office of Representative J.C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma, learned that one of the best ways to create a common “statement” on any given matter was to aggregate quotes from individual lawmakers on the issue, and release them under the same umbrella. This allowed the conference to act collectively, while still preserving the prerogatives of individual Members and their staffs to communicate with their constituents directly.Leading House Republicans at the time largely welcomed the Hispanic Conference. In the mid-1990s, Republican leadership under Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia had taken an adversarial stance toward legislative service organizations such as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. By the early 2000s, recalled Hinojosa, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois and other GOP leaders remained open to the group’s activities, which he attributed to a growing appreciation that Republicans could succeed among Hispanic voters. Not unrelated, the Congressional Hispanic Conference formed at a time when the Republican Party under President Bush was engaged heavily in Hispanic outreach, the Estrada nomination being only one highly visible aspect.The conference also enlisted “associate” members from the House’s rank-and-file who were not themselves Hispanic. The conference’s first two executive directors would comb census records and invite Republicans whose represented districts that had substantial Hispanic populations, and who thus had what Lopez called the “very logical incentive” to join the group.Often, Mario Diaz-Balart would follow up on these invitations, whether in the Republican Cloakroom off the House Floor or elsewhere. Such appeals had additional credibility with some Members because Diaz-Balart belonged to the Republican Study Committee, then the organization of the most conservative House Republicans. By 2006, associate members of the Congressional Hispanic Conference included Bob Beauprez of Colorado, Christopher B. Cannon of Utah, Randy Neugebauer of Texas, and Gerald C. “Jerry” Weller of Illinois.With the formation of the conference in the early 2000s, Hispanic institutional organization in Congress was becoming more complex and more dynamic. But many questions remained. How the Hispanic Conference might relate to a Republican Party itself undergoing changes as the Bush presidency came to a close was unclear. And how the new group might yet work with the Hispanic Caucus remained to be seen. It had been “a troubled divorce,” in the words of Ros-Lehtinen, but there was potential for productive relations between the two, hope in at last arriving, she said, at “a very amiable spot where we agree to disagree.”Sources: Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. to be Chief Justice of the United States, 109th Cong., 1st sess. (2005); Congressional Staff Directory, Fall 2006 (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006); “Octavio Hinojosa Mier Oral History Interview,” Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives (29 August 2023); Mario H. Lopez, email message to the Office of the Historian, September 23, 2024; Austin American Statesman, 21 March 2003; Gannet News Service, 19 March 2003; New York Times, 15 March 2003; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 February 1997; San Antonio Express-News, 19 March 2003; South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 27 April 2003; St. Petersburg Times, 25 February 2003; Wall Street Journal, 17 March 2003; Hispanic Business 26 (2004); Kathryn Jean Lopez, “Power Struggle,” Hispanic 16, no. 7/8 (July/August 2003); “America and the Courts,” press conference, 4 March 2003, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?175408-1/america-courts; “Estrada Withdrawal Reaction,” press conference, 4 September 2003, C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/video/?178038-1/estrada-withdrawal-reaction; Sarah J. Eckman, “Congressional Member Organizations (CMOs) and Informal Member Groups: Their Purpose and Activities, History, and Formation,” Report R40683, 21 March, 2023, Congressional Research Service: 14–15.

U.S. House History Blog

04.10.2024

Development of the Industrial United States and the Emergence of Modern America (1870–1931), Part I: The Records of Power | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Nearly 100 years after its founding, the United States exerted its new power over the nation’s economy, land, people, and increasingly, overseas as it sought strategic global footholds and favorable trade. Learn more about this period of new industries and imperialism with these records from the House of Representatives.Transcriptions and downloadable PDFs of these records are available at the links below.Discussion Questions:Compare and contrast an agricultural economy and an industrial economy.How did railroads impact the development of an industrial economy?Are there parallels between America’s expansion within its borders and its acquisition of territories around the globe? Explain.What connections can you make between this period and today?How can individuals and groups experience power? Do you consider yourself powerful?1870, Transcontinental Railroad Junction PointThis bill, introduced by Representative John Bingham, aimed to designate the “common terminus and point of junction of the Union Pacific Railroad Company and Central Pacific Railroad Company” on the recently completed transcontinental railroad. The land was located northwest of Ogden, Utah Territory, near where the two rail lines joined in Promontory Summit in 1869 to complete the transcontinental railroad. Although this bill did not become law, the point of junction was fixed on May 6, 1870.1884, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins PetitionIn the 19th century, Native American author and activist Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins served as an intermediary between her Paiute community in Nevada and the United States government. She presented a petition to Congress, asking for the Paiute to be restored to Malheur Reservation, “which is well watered and timbered, and large enough to afford homes and support for them all,” in eastern Oregon. In wrenching language, she asked for the return of removed tribal members, writing that “families were ruthlessly separated, and have never ceased to pine for husbands, wives, and children.” Her petition was referred to the House Committee on Indian Affairs.1894, Central Hotel in Round Pond, Oklahoma TerritoryThis photograph from 1894 shows a group of settlers standing in front of the Central Hotel in Round Pond, Oklahoma Territory, a town situated along a rail line. At the time, some railroads used a right of way granted by the government to build railroads through the territory. However, the companies often did not build depots or stations along the lines to board or discharge passengers and freight, to the detriment and frustration of those communities. Legislation enacted in 1894 required “companies operating railroads in the Territories . . . to establish stations and depots at all town sites” along the rail lines.1905, Souvenir of Tulsa, I.T.This House record forms part of the bill file for H.R. 12707, “An Act to enable to the people of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory to form a constitution and State government and be admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States.” Depicting Tulsa, the pamphlet features photographic reproductions that capture images of an area seemingly ready for business, leisure, and statehood. The Oklahoma and Indian Territories formally became the single state of Oklahoma in 1907.1906, Panama Canal Presidential MessageIn February 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt sent this message to Congress detailing his support of a lock-based canal in Panama. For centuries, the isthmus at Panama was recognized as a key location for the construction of a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Congress passed the Panama Canal Act of 1902, which allowed the United States to obtain from France the rights to build the canal, as well as to procure surveys and equipment. In 1904, after payment of $40 million to France and $10 million to Panama, the United States assumed control over roughly 120,000 acres of what became known as the Panama Canal Zone. The early part of the project was devoted to infrastructure projects to house workers and improve sanitary conditions. Excavation and construction of the canal began in earnest in 1907. Work on the locks was completed in 1913 and the following year, on August 15, 1914, the canal officially opened to traffic.1913, Postcard on Discovery of North PoleThis pointed postcard petition was sent to Representative Samuel Beakes by a resident of Jackson, Michigan. In 1909, two men claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole. In 1911, the competing claims prompted the Committee on Naval Affairs to investigate. The postcard expresses concern for the “blot on our Flag” and “slur at our National Honor” resulting from the controversy. The petitioner asks for an investigation that would conclude in “proper recognition” for one or both men as the discoverers of the North Pole. A joint resolution to that effect was introduced in 1914 by Charles Smith and referred to the Committee on Naval Affairs; however, the resolution did not pass and no investigation resulted.Interested in more records from this era?1870, Petition of Settlers on Land Boundaries1874, Map of Oregon1879, Election Credentials of Romualdo Pachecoca. 1881–1883, Remarks on the Hawaii Treaty1888, German Aggression in Samoan Islands1890, Levees on the Mississippi River1894, Hawaiian Self-Government Resolution1906, Alaska Territory Delegates Credentials1917, Organic Act for Puerto Rico1931, Report of Virgin Islands Governor1931, Resolution of Philippine Legislature on Independence1931, Secretary of War Report on Philippine IndependenceLook for the second part of this blog, Development of the Industrial United States and the Emergence of Modern America (1870–1931), Part II: The Records of Progress, in the coming months.This is part of a blog series about records from different eras of U.S. history.

U.S. House History Blog

18.09.2024

Recent Artifacts Online, Fall 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

This fall, newly digitized objects in the House Collection are talking the talk. Four recordings, from 1920 to 1964, step up to the microphone. Take a look and take a listen to congressional women and men from the past.First Ladies of Congress Record AlbumThe Democratic National Committee released First Ladies of Congress, a whirlwind of interviews with eight women Members—Iris Blitch, Edith Green, Martha Griffiths, Maude Elizabeth Kee, Edna Kelly, Coya Knutson, Gracie Pfost, and Leonor K. Sullivan—in 1955. Interviewer Katie Louchheim asks about committee work, legislation, campaigns, and busy schedules. The album ends with Louchheim’s call to women listeners: “Now, I’m sure you understand why they say that a Congresswoman works a 48-hour day. If any of you ladies are contemplating a career in politics, don’t let this discourage you, because I assure you that not one of our Congresswomen would trade her job for any other in the world.”Listen to a clip from the album below, and find other clips here. The Story of “Mr. Sam” Rayburn, 1882-1961, Record Album“Who was this man from the fields and farm?” A 1960s phonographic record uses sound bites from Presidents and interviews with “this man” himself to eulogize the late Speaker Sam Rayburn. The stentorian voice of narrator Marvin Miller weaves the recordings into a triumphal tale. Rayburn journeyed from a farmstead with no running water to become the longest-serving Speaker of the House. When Rayburn died in 1961, this raspy recording was one of many tributes to him. A grateful government unveiled stamps, statuary, and an entire House Office Building in his honor.Listen to a clip from the album below, and find other clips here. Henry Helstoski Campaign Mailer and Audio MessageAmericans of the 1960s were sophisticated consumers. Henry Helstoski responded with equally sophisticated campaign material. The congressional candidate mailed a piece of paper engineering to constituents: the envelope unfolded to reveal both a campaign pitch and a record. Instructions told voters to “punch out hole, tuck in flaps, and play at 33-1/3 r.p.m.” The five-minute recording follows the format of a variety show—comedy routines, singing, and a charming announcer—but mixes in political speeches. Helstoski was successful in his 1964 run for the House and served six terms representing a New Jersey district.Listen to a clip from the album below, and find other clips here.Champ Clark, Ex-Speaker, House of Representatives Record AlbumThis 1920 phonographic record is one of the oldest recordings in the House Collection. One side preserves the voice of Speaker “Champ” Clark, who delivers a party stump speech extolling the achievements of the nation during his House leadership. The other side contains a rendition of the “Missouri Waltz,” a nod to Clark’s home state. The staticky sounding record was part of the Nation’s Forum series. In the pre-radio era of the 1910s, the series brought prominent leaders’ voices into Americans’ homes.Listen to a clip from the album below, and find other clips here.Interested in something a little quieter? Check out more new objects here:For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.

U.S. House History Blog

10.09.2024

National History Day 2025: “Rights and Responsibilities” | 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, “Rights and Responsibilities,” to inspire and assist student researchers with choosing their project. This year’s page collects reference material from across the History, Art & Archives website with a focus on U.S. House of Representatives history. These thematic collections have been organized chronologically and incorporate multiple types of sources. Students are encouraged to pull from a variety of primary and secondary resources, including archival documents, art, photographs, written narratives and oral histories.Slavery and the Right to FreedomAntislavery advocates fought to contain and repeal the practice of slavery on the national stage through oration, legislation, and protest. Southern resistance to these efforts drove the United States into Civil War.Reconstruction and Rights DeniedThe end of the Civil War marked the beginning of another long struggle for civil rights. The first Black Americans elected to Congress strived to advance the cause of justice and fairness for a population long denied both.Civil Rights: The Civil Rights Act of 1964Spurred by a growing grassroots movement during the mid-twentieth century, Congress passed landmark legislation to protect Americans’ civil rights, end discrimination, and ensure access to the ballot.Economic Rights: Fair Labor and Fair HousingIn the twentieth century, Congress passed two transformative pieces of legislation to help secure economic rights: the Fair Labor Standards and Fair Housing Acts.Environmentalism: Clean Air and National ParksThe vast size and natural beauty of the United States has inspired artists and authors to capture the ideals of America and its stunning landscapes. Their works have in turn inspired legislators to create National Parks and to protect precious resources with the Clean Air Act.Japanese Internment and RedressDuring World War II, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent were stripped of their freedom, possessions, and property and imprisoned in government camps. More than 40 years later, Congress passed redress legislation for survivors of these wartime camps.Equality in Education and Title IXAfter World War II, the struggle for integration across racial and gender lines and the right for equality in education rose to the fore in Congress during the 1950s.Human Rights Abroad: Ending ApartheidBetween the 1940s and early 1990s, the nation of South Africa operated under a system of institutionalized racial segregation called apartheid. The Congressional Black Caucus led American opposition to these human rights abuses abroad.Human Rights Abroad: The 1980 Olympic BoycottIn the spring of 1980, the United States government faced a foreign-policy decision with Olympic-sized consequences.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 history of the U.S. House of Representatives. Got questions? Email us at history@mail.house.gov.

U.S. House History Blog

31.08.2024

Design Tells a Story: Oral History and Campaign Buttons | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Campaign buttons have been part of America’s congressional elections since the late nineteenth century. Whether affixed to a coat or a backpack, they advertise a voter’s preferred candidate, policy, or position. Cleverly designed and notable buttons have, at times, even had a lasting influence on America’s political culture. The House Collection contains more than 1,500 lapel pins and tabs, most of which are campaign buttons from candidates who ran for Congress.In a series of interviews conducted by the Office of the Historian, former Congresswomen talked about buttons their campaigns produced at different times during their careers. They described how and why they chose certain layouts, themes, and slogans. As these oral histories show, design tells a story.MotifCandidates often combine color, shape, and typography on campaign buttons to convey messages about their platform. For Representatives Shelley Berkley and Nancy Johnson, the imagery they used both alluded to their home states and symbolized their candidacy.Shelley Berkley of Nevada Nevada Representative Shelley Berkley’s 2000 campaign button features a red, white, and blue color scheme and few words. In block, uppercase white letters against a rectangular blue background, her name takes up most of the space. Between the “K” and “L” of “Berkley,” the shape of Nevada snugly nestles into the typography. As she explained in her oral history, the blue rectangular border was purposeful: “I’m very definite,” she explained. “I’m not wishy-washy.”Nancy Lee Johnson of Connecticut Using blue, gold, and white, Connecticut Representative Nancy Johnson’s campaign button adopted the colors of her state flag. Three white stars underscore Johnson’s name, and a gold star extends past the right edge. The stars, Johnson remembered, were suggested by a political consultant because, she said, she “was seen as quite the star.”NameThe decision to include a candidate’s name is perhaps an obvious choice in campaign button design. But for some lawmakers—like Representatives Sue Myrick and Connie Morella—the name they chose and the way it appeared on the button held significance.Sue Myrick of North Carolina “For Congress SUE Myrick” appears emblazoned in red letters against a white background on this 1994 campaign button. The North Carolina Representative’s first name, “Sue,” is twice the size of the other words and draws the eye. For Myrick, that detail was important. “When we did our advertising, we just always did ‘Sue,’ ” she recalled. She said it was a way for her to remain grounded. “I was Sue before I got elected. If I’m elected, I’ll be Sue in office, and I’ll be Sue when I leave. And if I’m not, I don’t deserve to be here.”Constance A. Morella of Maryland One of Connie Morella’s congressional campaign buttons features just her signature in white lettering against a red background. Key to the design was its simplicity. The Maryland Representative wanted her button to seem friendly and approachable. “It’s a personal element,” she described.SloganIn just a few words, campaign slogans can convey something unique or memorable about candidates. A slogan can help them stand out in a packed special election or invoke a candidate’s personal history, as was the case for slogans selected by Representatives Eva Clayton and Susan Molinari. For Representative Claudine Schneider, however, a campaign slogan came not from the candidate, but from the community the aspiring lawmaker hoped to represent.Eva M. Clayton of North CarolinaEva Clayton’s campaign button includes the number of her North Carolina district, her name, and the slogan: “The Best for the First.” In her special election in 1992, she faced six other candidates. Instead of attacking her opponents, she used her slogan to promote and uplift herself. “We had no apologies for thinking we were the best,” she remembered.Susan Molinari of New York New York Representative Susan Molinari’s rectangular 1990 campaign button used bold text to emphasize her last name and featured the slogan “A New Generation of Leadership.” The slogan called attention to the fact that her father, Representative Guy Molinari, had served in Congress for a decade, while also helping her establish her own identity and perspective.Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island Representative Claudine Schneider’s 1980 campaign pin reads “This Time Claudine” printed in white text against a deep blue background. After losing her first election bid, Schneider spotted “Next Time Claudine” bumper stickers in her community. She adopted that message from her voters to develop this slogan when she ran again two years later.For more about how candidates have used visual elements to appeal to voters, explore our digital exhibition Campaign Collectibles: Running for Congress. And for more oral histories about running for Congress, visit our oral history section.

U.S. House History Blog

23.08.2024

Collection Spotlight: The Portrait of Dalip Saund | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

A portrait can show you what someone looked like, but it can tell a complex story as well. Let’s walk through the details of one such story, as depicted in the portrait of California Representative Dalip Saund.Representative Dalip Saund became the first Asian-American Representative elected to Congress when he won his election in 1956. Saund served his district for three terms, until 1963. This portrait was one of the House Collection of Art and Artifacts’ 21st-century commissions commemorating Representatives who were important to the history of the House or the nation. With only Speakers of the House and committee chairs on the short list of Representatives who typically get portraits, people like Saund, who broke barriers in representation, are part of that group of special commissions. The House chose Jon R. Friedman as the artist, and the portrait became part of the Collection in 2007.Because of his pathbreaking status, Representative Saund had a relatively high public profile during his political career, but his story is not common knowledge today. The portrait takes up the challenge of introducing the viewer to Saund by providing a visual biography, as well as doing the usual work of expressing the subject’s character and appearance.SettingIn this painting, Saund stands in the Cannon House Office Building rotunda. A sharp-eyed news watcher might recognize this space as one of the locations where journalists appear when reporting from the House of Representatives or interviewing Members of Congress. During his service in Congress, Saund made headlines as the first Asian-American Representative elected to Congress and the subsequent role he took in international affairs. He was also a regular, hardworking, showing-up-for-the-district kind of Congressman. His accomplishments as a Member included helping veterans and their families access benefits, securing funding for military facilities in his district, and funding flood control projects and irrigation efforts on Native American land. He also accomplished the bread-and-butter work of a Representative, like opening new post offices and building roads. So, setting his portrait in this grand but highly public space in a House Office Building, rather than a committee room with a view or a Capitol space full of historic furniture and gilded details, clues the viewer in to the overall tenor of his congressional career and priorities.A Visual BiographyThe details of the portrait go further to build a visual story of Saund’s biography and well-developed personal philosophy, which he promoted and thoroughly explained in his own words, in multiple formats.Along the bottom of the painting, we see a trompe l’oeil marble slab—painted so as to appear real, or to “fool the eye”— inscribed with a quote from Saund’s autobiography Congressman from India: “There is no room in the United States of America for second-class citizenship,” in reference to the discriminatory immigration laws he fought against early in his public life.Another illusionistic slab of marble along the right side of the painting illustrates Saund’s biography and personal philosophy. Don’t ignore the faux marble: the distinctive green stone matches the floors of the Longworth House Office Building, where Saund worked when he served in Congress, anchoring this fictive space to his historical environment. The first few objects in this biographical frieze refer to Saund’s early life in India. The ox cart and the map of India—Saund’s home state of Punjab is highlighted—show the agricultural area where his hometown of Chhajjalwaddi is located, and where he attended school in the city of Amritsar. A Khanda, a stylized double-edged sword that is a symbol of Sikhism, the religion Saund adhered to, and India’s flag round out this section.The next group of images refers to Saund’s philosophical influences. Mahatma Gandhi, who emerged as a nationalist leader in India during Saund’s undergraduate years, is his earliest philosophical hero. Gandhi is followed by President Woodrow Wilson and President Abraham Lincoln, both of whom Saund discusses in his campaign booklet, “What America Means to Me.” Saund describes how he came to admire these two American Presidents, who are not typically yoked together in the popular imagination. While he was a student in India during World War I and Wilson’s administration, Saund says that “The great American war-time President was hailed as a Messiah in India. I was deeply touched by the beauty of his slogans— ‘To Make the World Safe for Democracy,’ ‘War to End War,’ ‘Self-Determination for All Peoples.’” This connects back to his admiration of Gandhi. As a young person who supported his country’s autonomy, ideas of self-determination and peace resonated with him and inspired him.The booklet describes how learning about Wilson led him “to the name of another great American War President—Abraham Lincoln. An overnight journey to the University seat of Punjab enabled me to borrow two books about Lincoln. In all my wanderings through the literature of the world, I have yet to come across oratory more eloquent, or an expression of human idealism more sublime, than that contained in the brief address delivered by a tall sad-looking American President at Gettysburg.” Lincoln, Saund declares, “changed the entire course of my life. I said to myself, ‘I must go to The United States of America—come what may!’”The rest of the green marble frieze evokes Saund’s experience in the United States, beginning with his emigration from India. The SS Philadelphia, the ship on which he traveled to the United States, passes behind the Statue of Liberty, illustrating his journey to New York.The California State flag and an image of Saund based on the portrait painted by artist and future brother-in-law Emil Kosa Jr. moves the story to the end of Saund’s immigration journey—California. A slip of paper with a Fourier series differential equation written on it hovers over the seal of University of California, Berkeley, alluding to Saund’s first West Coast milestone, a Ph.D. in mathematics.Saund’s post-education pursuits make up the final section of the biographical frieze. The map of California highlighting Saund’s congressional district anchors the section on his life in the Imperial Valley. A field of crops overlaid with modern farm equipment shows his first profession. Saund pursued farming for about 20 years, before opening a fertilizer business. His journey into public office rounds out the story, with an image of a campaign ribbon for his 1956 congressional campaign that refers to his previous elected position. Saund earned the nickname “Judge” when he won the 1952 election for the position in his community. The U.S. Capitol completes the visual journey through Saund’s past.What Does It Mean?The artist posed Saund looking toward, but beyond, the panel depicting his life story, implying that the sum of his experience served as a foundation for his work in the House, not an end point. This visual biography and portrait for this remarkable pioneer in Congress currently hangs in the busy East Grand Staircase on the House’s side of the U.S. Capitol. The stone that the image is built on serves as a clear reminder of the importance of the foundation of the United States—the idea that all are equal under the law, and there is indeed “no room in the United States of America for second-class citizenship.”Learn More:Explore our publication Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in CongressFor a close look at other artworks in the House Collection, check out our Collection Spotlight blogs

U.S. House History Blog

20.08.2024

Two Decades of Oral Histories in the House of Representatives | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On July 27, 2004, the Office of the Historian traveled to Rockville, Maryland, to interview 92-year-old Irving Swanson, who had served as reading clerk for the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1940s and early 1950s. In the first interview recorded by the Office’s fledgling oral history program, Swanson described his path from his home state of Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, his work on Capitol Hill, and his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He also provided a firsthand account of the events in the House Chamber on December 8, 1941—the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor—when he conducted the roll call vote on the resolution to declare war on Japan. A video interview was recorded in 2005 to supplement the original 2004 audio interview; a clip from the video is embedded below.Although it was the Office’s first foray into oral history, the discussions with Irving Swanson yielded an array of stories that hinted at the potential of future interviews. Swanson detailed his work on the House Floor, his experience during historic moments, and his efforts to develop strong working relationships with Members of Congress. “You got to have their confidence all the way through,” he recalled. “You had to be on your toes.” Swanson provided a window into Capitol Hill in the 1940s, revealing stories that were never included in the House’s official record. Soon after his interview Mr. Swanson donated the gavel Speaker Sam Rayburn gifted to him for reading the President's war messages against Germany and Italy and taking the roll call votes on the December 11, 1941 war resolutions.Two decades later, the Office of the Historian celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the oral history program. Since 2004, the Office has conducted 500 interviews with Members and staff to preserve the history of the institution and better understand the inner workings of the House of Representatives. Casting a wide net, the Office of the Historian has interviewed former Members and staff whose careers spanned nearly a century of House history, from the 1930s to the current decade, using a range of recording formats, including in-person audio and video, telephone calls, and Microsoft Teams meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic.In these interviews, Members of Congress have recalled their professional careers, electoral campaigns, policy priorities, and legislative achievements. Former staff have discussed what drew them to Capitol Hill and have described their work in Member offices, committees, and on the House Floor. Their stories emphasize the many ways Capitol Hill has changed and been changed by policy debates, technological innovations, and shifting political norms. At the same time, common themes emerge in many interviews that transcend the decades, demonstrating the persistence of institutional traditions, the enduring structure of House Rules and precedents, and the importance of personal and professional relationships on Capitol Hill.To make these interviews readily accessible to congressional staff, researchers, students, and the general public, the Office of the Historian has used its website, along with teacher workshops, academic conferences, and staff training, to promote access and interaction with the wealth of material generated by the oral history program. The Office’s website exhibits 10 online oral history projects, featuring 97 published interview transcripts, four video documentaries, and more than 1,000 media clips of audio and video recordings.Visitors to the Oral History page can explore:An extensive catalog of institutional interviews that provide behind-the-scenes descriptions of the way the House operates, including interviews with floor staff, House Parliamentarians, committee staff, and former Clerk of the House Donnald K. Anderson.The ongoing oral history project, A Century of Women in Congress, which compiles transcripts, media clips, and photos from interviews with former Representatives, staff, and family members to highlight the work of women in the House since the election of the first woman in Congress, Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, in 1916.The Long Struggle for Representation: Oral Histories of African Americans in Congress, an ongoing oral history project featuring interviews with former Members and staff to mark the 150th anniversary of the election of the first Black Representative, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina, in 1870.Interview clips focusing on different aspects of the Capitol Hill experience, such as the Congressional Baseball Game; the history of the House Page program; and historical artifacts such as campaign pins, Member portraits, and the stenotype machines used by official reporters in committee hearings and on the House Floor.Online exhibits and documentaries that provide insight into significant events in House history, such as the 1954 shooting in the House Chamber, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, and the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.More than 1,000 media clips from audio and video interviews, compiled in a searchable database.These stories, as told by former Members and staff in their own words, document the valuable contributions of individuals who have dedicated their careers to making the People’s House work. We invite you to discover this powerful reservoir of institutional knowledge to learn more about the history and traditions of the U.S. House of Representatives.

U.S. House History Blog

10.08.2024

Going for the Gold: Uncovering the Lost History of the 1980 Olympics | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

More than four decades ago, Congress made the unprecedented decision to support a national boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Athletes who had trained their whole lives to enter the games soon found themselves unable to compete. To recognize the sacrifice these Olympians made, the 96th Congress (1979–1981) honored them with a Congressional Gold Medal.Congress ordered medals to be minted and distributed to the 650 Team USA athletes and coaches. But for many years, official congressional records did not include this medal alongside the more than 200 other instances in which lawmakers conferred such an honor, dating to the medal George Washington received in 1776. The reason? For 27 years, an administrative quirk had separated gold medals from gold-plated medals. Today, however, thanks to dogged research and the support from a now former U.S. Representative, the gold-plated medal awarded to Team USA in 1980 is recorded alongside every other medal Congress has commissioned.This blog provides a behind-the-scenes look at the method and sources used to restore the 1980 gold-plated medal to its rightful place alongside the hundreds of other Congressional Gold Medals and to help readers learn more about that period in U.S. history. Those sources include congressional hearings, remarks made on the floor, and newspaper and archival research. This blog is intended to inspire and assist aspiring congressional researchers.Congress InvestigatesCommittee hearings help Congress gather information on policy issues, legislation, and oversight needs. These meetings usually focus on current events and feature expert witness testimony before a full committee or subcommittee. Committee hearing transcripts can be located through the Federal Depository Libraries.On January 23, 1980, and February 4, 1980, Clement Zablocki of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, held hearings to “consider the issue of U.S. participation in the 1980 summer Olympic games in Moscow.” The hearings also reviewed additional legislation connected to the boycott: House Concurrent Resolution 249 and House Resolution 547.H. Con. Res. 249 requested that various Olympic governing bodies work with the U.S. President to move the 1980 summer games out of the Soviet Union. The resolution went to committee and returned to the House Floor where lawmakers approved it. H. Con. Res. 249 then passed the Senate after it added its own provisions.H. Res. 547 supported an alternative Olympic games held in the United States if the U.S. athletes did not participate in the Moscow games. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, but no further action was taken.Congress DebatesSince 1873, the Congressional Record has documented debate in the House nearly word-for-word. Unlike the House Journal, which details procedural activity but not debate, the Congressional Record provides a full transcript of legislative activity. The Congressional Record can be located through Congress.gov as well as Government Publishing Office’s GovInfo digital resource database.Leading up to the 1980 games, Congress regularly discussed America’s participation and whether to boycott the summer Olympics. In this example from January 24, 1980, the House of Representatives met to debate H. Res. 534 urging USA Olympics and the International Olympic Committee to consider House Concurrent Resolution 249 to postpone, transfer, or cancel the summer games. During the proceedings, Representative John James Duncan of Tennessee announced his intention to introduce a resolution to give Team USA athletes who would be prevented from participating the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Duncan’s legislation, House Concurrent Resolution 258, gained little traction.Congressional Record Extension of RemarksIn the House, if lawmakers want to revise or make additional comments on a particular topic, House Rules allows them to submit material to the Extension of Remarks section in the Congressional Record. On December 13, 2007, Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas entered into the Extension of Remarks the names of 480 summer Olympians who had been slated to compete in 1980. Representative Tiahrt had earlier been contacted by a constituent named Ron Neugent from Wichita, Kansas, who had been a swimmer on the 1980 team, and who had helped compile the list of athletes. Neugent had also directed Representative Tiahrt’s attention to the fact that Team USA’s 1980 Congressional Gold Medal was not included in the official list of gold medals. Wanting more information, Representative Tiahrt’s office contacted the Office of the Historian within the Office of the Clerk seeking more information on the 1980 Congressional Gold Medal.Public LawsAfter being contacted by Representative Tiahrt’s office, the House Historian’s Office looked through the legislation authorizing Team USA’s gold medal. First introduced by Representative Frank Annunzio of Illinois on June 4, 1980, the gold medal legislation, House Resolution 7482, quickly made its way through the House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs before going up for a vote in the full House on July 1, 1980, where it passed. The Senate approved the measure on July 2, 1980. The title of the bill made clear that it would be unlike a typical Congressional Gold Medal, in that Team USA’s were to be gold-plated rather than solid gold: “To authorize the President of the United States to present on behalf of Congress a specially struck gold-plated medal to the United States Summer Olympic Team of 1980.”The bill became Public Law 96-306 when President Jimmy Carter signed it on July 8, 1980. The Library of Congress’s website, congress.gov, has a large amount of legislation accessible to research, but a Federal Depository Library may also be of assistance.Photographic EvidenceThe House Photography Office (now House Creative Services) photographed the July 30, 1980, ceremony at the Capitol to award Team USA’s gold medals. By the time of the event, Levi Strauss & Company had already prepared the team uniform, and the athletes were encouraged to wear the western-inspired outfit to Capitol Hill.Historical NewspapersHistorical newspapers are a vital research tool. Many libraries, including the Library of Congress, have a periodical room or database subscriptions to assist in research.In the case of the 1980 medal, newspapers covered the initial boycott and a year later, on July 26, 1981, the Washington Post ran a retrospective piece about the boycotted games from the perspectives of the athletes, reminding readers of their sacrifice.Additional ResearchThe Presidential Libraries system of the National Archives and Records Administration, as well as the individual research collections for Members of Congress, can be useful sources of information. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, for instance, has the full speech of President Carter’s address to the Olympic athletes on March 21, 1980.Recently, the Historian’s Office also reached out to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library for additional information on the gold medal ceremony on July 30, 1980. The Carter Library provided a detailed itinerary for President Carter’s attendance at the ceremony, which included information on the President’s escort to the event as well as plans for where the President would stand as he was introduced by Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts.The Carter Library also supplied information about the reception at the White House for the athletes on the same day. Interestingly, the Team USA athletes received a separate medal to honor their achievements from Tiffany & Co.Additional House Research ResourcesThese resources also offer users a chance to explore the history of the House: House Records: Records SearchResearching the House: BibliographiesHistory, Art & Archives Offices PublicationsBlog Posts: Edition for EducatorsDigital Copies of Congressional Publications: GovInfo, Government Publishing OfficeHouse Committee Records: Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records AdministrationResearching Legislation: Congress.gov, Library of CongressCongressional history can encompass a broad range of topics, from foreign relations to sports. Uncovering a story may require detective skills and perseverance. Casting a wide net for resources is crucial since materials related to a topic can be located across a variety of sources.

U.S. House History Blog

31.07.2024

The Cold War, the Olympics, & the Forgotten Congressional Gold Medal | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

In the spring of 1980, the United States government faced a foreign-policy decision with Olympic-sized consequences. The previous fall, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan to expand its sphere of influence. It was a shocking decision, made even more so given that Moscow was slated to host the international community at the 1980 summer Olympic games in July.Following the invasion, lawmakers in Congress questioned whether America should allow its delegation of athletes to compete in Moscow. To allow U.S. athletes to attend the games risked sending a message to the world that the federal government condoned the Soviets’ war. Blocking their participation, however, meant dashing the dreams of hundreds of young Americans who had trained for years to compete in the storied sporting event.For four decades, the Cold War standoff between the American and Soviet superpowers had left the world on edge. Proxy wars and the threat of nuclear conflict had stalked the years after World War II. But it was the pre-World War II Olympics in Nazi Germany’s Berlin in 1936 that legislators suddenly invoked during debate over whether the United States should send a delegation to Moscow.In January 1980, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by chairman Clement Zablocki of Wisconsin, held a hearing with members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) where they discussed the ramifications of the Soviet invasion and whether to send an American delegation to the games. “These are the questions that were asked in 1936, when the Olympics were held in Germany,” Zablocki said. Republican John Buchanan of Alabama extended the questioning: “Would you agree or disagree that when Nazi Germany passed a law stripping Jews of their citizenship just before the games in 1936 and then went on to the Holocaust and all the rest, that that was something more than politics, that that was crime, or is it just politics to be disregarded?”History Repeating Itself?The 1936 Olympics would be remembered in America for stunning athletic achievements in the face of hate and Adolf Hitler’s campaign of White supremacy. Jesse Owens, a 23-year-old Black man from Alabama, won four track and field gold medals that year. And during the men’s 400-meter relay, Owens and his teammates, which included future U.S. Representative Ralph Harold Metcalfe of Illinois, who was also Black, set the world record. “There was talk of boycotting Hitler and his doctrine of Nordic supremacy,” Metcalfe later recalled. “But we thought we would make a contribution. There were more negroes on that team than any previous United States Olympic team. We won and it stuck a pin in the balloon of Hitler’s doctrine.”Congress did consider boycotting the Olympics in 1936. In the leadup to the games, Representative Emanuel Celler of New York introduced two bills he called “weapons to use against Germany” and which he hoped would alert the nation to what he called “the goings-on in Germany we may regard as a definite threat to the security of our own freedom, not merely where religion is concerned, but personal liberty of every kind.” Celler reminded the House that “it is an established fact that hate or prejudice or intolerance never remains limited to a small portion of existence—either it is overthrown completely and liberalism takes its place, or it grows and strengthens its hold until it has choked liberty everywhere and from every possible angle.” Celler’s bills—H. J. Res. 381, which would have boycotted America’s participation in the games by prohibiting the use of funds to send U.S. athletes to Europe, and H. Res. 368, to ensure Americans who held German debt be paid fair value—both expired in committee.Celler wasn’t alone in his opposition. Representative William Citron of Connecticut had noted earlier in August 1935 that he “object[ed] to participating in these games if they are to be held in Germany. I object to sending our youth to Germany. . . . The youth of the world meet to promote good sportsmanship, brotherly feeling between the peoples of various nationalities and races, the fundamental ideals of democracy—equality and justice.”But despite Members like Celler, who later served as Judiciary Chairman, and Citron, who lost re-election in 1938 and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, no formal protest or boycott emerged from the 74th Congress (1935–1937). Just a few months prior to the 1936 games, Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles when it occupied the Rhineland and persecuted Jewish citizens. The United States attended the games in Berlin anyway. Three years later, Adolph Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland setting off World War II.A BoycottIt was that history that informed debate in Congress as the 1980 games in Moscow approached. On January 24, 1980, the House, by a vote of 386 to 12, passed H. Con. Res. 249 urging the U.S. Olympic Committee to implore the IOC to either move the games from the Soviet Union or cancel them altogether. If the games remained in Moscow, Congress called on the United States and its allies to boycott them and instead “conduct alternative games of their own.” The Senate quickly concurred in a vote of 88 to 4.Two months later, on March 21, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the Moscow games. In April, the United States Olympic Committee voted in support of the boycott. Ultimately, more than 60 countries joined the United States in its protest. At home, many of the athletes set to compete in the games expressed frustration with the decision. “My gripes are not against the Soviet athletes, it’s against their government,” said Craig Masback, a favorite in the one-mile track event. John Nonna, a fencing champion, noted, “I’d like to think there are other ways to show our displeasure and put pressure on the Soviets.” A few frustrated Olympians looked for ways to boycott the boycott and sought to compete under the Olympic flag rather than the American flag, but the Carter administration rebuffed that idea.In early June 1980, Representative Frank Annunzio of Illinois, chairman of the House Budget Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, introduced legislation to honor Team USA’s 650 athletes and coaches with a Congressional Gold Medal, one of Congress’s highest civilian honors. “I urge Members of the House, regardless of their personal feelings about the Olympic boycott, to co-sponsor the legislation. This legislation is the least that the Congress can do to recognize our Olympic team, which according to all indications, would have been one of the strongest in our country’s history,” Annunzio said.Annunzio’s bill, H.R. 7482, set aside $50,000 for the medals. To keep costs down, the proposal allowed for the medals to be gold-plated, rather than solid gold. The bill enjoyed widespread bipartisan support and gained 228 co-sponsors in a matter of weeks.The House took up Annunzio’s bill on June 30. “We are here today for one purpose—to honor dedication, sacrifice and, most of all, athletic achievement,” Annunzio said during debate that day. Republican Norman Shumway of California, who served with Annunzio on the Banking Committee, spoke next. “The congressional medals that we will be voting on today can never take the place of a genuine, gold Olympic medal,” he said. “However, it is one small way for our Nation to express gratitude to our Olympic athletes. The 1980 summer Olympics will best be remembered, not by who competed, but rather by who did not. The Congressional Gold Medal will serve to remind us and future generations as well, that we as a nation will never forsake our principles of freedom—not even for the cherished, Olympic gold, silver, and bronze medals.”Annunzio’s measure quickly passed the House and the Senate; President Carter signed the bill into law on July 8. Officials invited the Olympians to a ceremony at the Capitol on July 30, 1980. More than 450 athletes and coaches attended the event. In response, the Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 summer Olympic games held in Los Angeles, California.The Medal that Time ForgotDespite Representative Shumway’s hope that the 1980 Congressional Gold Medal would stand as a reminder of America’s commitment to freedom and democracy, the medal and the story behind it largely disappeared from popular memory.In 2007, the office of Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas contacted the Office of the Historian on behalf of a former Olympian asking about the status of the 1980 medal and its authorizing legislation. After discovering that the medal had, for decades, been omitted from the list of Congressional Gold Medals, historians added the 1980 medal alongside the nearly 200 other gold medals America’s lawmakers have awarded since 1776. Why the medal had been overlooked remains a mystery, but it is likely that earlier generations of recordkeepers saw that the 1980 medal was gold-plated and did not include it with the other solid gold medals.In December 2007, Representative Tiahrt inserted into the Congressional Record the names of 480 Olympic athletes awarded the gold medal in 1980. “This group has waited a long time for this recognition, and I believe that the individual athletes that made up this team deserve to be recognized,” he said.“As we all know, these games occur only once every 4 years,” Representative Tiahrt observed. “The investment of time and effort required of an Olympic caliber athlete is extraordinary. Because of this investment, many of these athletes sacrificed a once in a lifetime dream of competing on this world stage.” But, he pointed out, the sacrifice was not made in vain. “The 1980 Summer U.S. Olympic Team is now officially recognized as a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 74th Cong., 1st sess. (19 August 1935): 13747–13749; Congressional Record, House, 74th Cong., 2nd sess. (3 June 1936): 8991–8992; Congressional Record, House, 96th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 June 1980): 14656; Congressional Record, House, 96th Cong., 2nd sess. (30 June 1980): 17734–17736; Congressional Record, House, Extension of Remarks, 110th Cong., 1st sess. (13 December 2007): HE2579; A Concurrent Resolution Urging the United States Olympic Committee, the International Olympic Committee, and the Olympic Committees of Other Countries to Take Certain Actions with Respect to the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, in Accordance with the Requests of the President, H. Con. Res. 249, 96th Cong. (1980); An Act to Authorize the President of the United States to Present on Behalf of Congress A Specially Struck Gold-Plated Medal to the United States Summer Olympic Team of 1980, Public Law 96-306, 94 Stat. 937; Hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. Participation in the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, 96th Cong., 2nd sess. (1980); New York Times, March 9, 1980; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978–1980,” accessed 18 July 2024, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/soviet-invasion-afghanistan; U.S. Department of State, archive, “The Olympic Boycott, 1980,” accessed 18 July 2024, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/qfp/104481.htm.

U.S. House History Blog

26.07.2024

Looking Back—The First Lying in Honor Ceremony | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On July 24, 1998, on a crowded, muggy Friday afternoon two weeks before the planned August recess, a gunman ignored orders from the Capitol Police, bypassed the metal detector near the gift shop in the U.S. Capitol, and stormed the offices of congressional leadership nearby. Following an exchange of gunfire, one tourist was injured and two Capitol Police officers—Officer Jacob J. Chestnut Jr. and Detective John M. Gibson—were killed. Through the heroic efforts of the Capitol Police, the gunman was subdued and arrested, saving lives in the process.In the wake of the shooting, Congress honored the fallen officers and sought ways to prevent future incidents. “In all the history of the United States, no one had ever been killed defending the Capitol,” Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia said on July 27. “In all the history of the Capitol Police, never before had officers been killed in the line of duty. I believe that it drove home to all of us, certainly to me and those Members I have talked to, to the staffs I have talked to, how real and how serious the process of security is, and how much we are a Capitol Hill family; that the larger family of freedom has within it a smaller family of individuals who work together every day.”The House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions creating a memorial fund for the officers’ families and authorized the Capitol Rotunda to be used for a memorial service. On July 28, Officer Chestnut and Detective Gibson became the first individuals to “lie in honor” in that chamber. Officer Chestnut was also the first Black man to receive such an honor. Congress later placed a plaque in their honor in the U.S. Capitol Building.Three months after the shooting, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill which included $100 million in funding for the construction of a new Capitol Visitor Center (CVC) and an additional $106.7 million in funding for the Capitol Police Board to provide security enhancements across the Capitol complex. House Sergeant at Arms Wilson “Bill” Livingood testified that these improvements “would resolve many of the sensitive security issues that exist in the current security plan.” Plans for the new CVC had been in the works for years, but the attack in 1998 heightened the urgency of improving Capitol safety. The CVC’s new funding passed as an emergency provision under an antiterrorism portion of an omnibus spending bill that year.This is part of a 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 HighlightThe 1998 Shooting of Two Capitol Police Officers On July 24, 1998, two Capitol Police officers, Officer Jacob J. Chestnut Jr., and Detective John M. Gibson, died in the line of duty. An armed assailant stormed past a U.S. Capitol security checkpoint, mortally wounding Officer Chestnut. In the initial crossfire between the gunman and Capitol Police, a gunshot injured a tourist. As congressional aides and Capitol visitors sought cover, the assailant ran toward a door that led to the suites of then–Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas. Detective Gibson, a member of DeLay’s security detail, told aides to seek cover. Gibson and the assailant exchanged gunfire. Although fatally wounded, Gibson’s action enabled other officers to subdue the gunman.Featured Collection ObjectFeatured DataIndividuals Who Have Lain in State or in Honor Beginning with Henry Clay in 1852, the U.S. Capitol has been used as a place to pay tribute to the Nation’s most distinguished citizens. Made available for public viewing in the Capitol, persons who have “lain in state” traditionally have been American officials, judges, and military leaders, including 12 U.S. Presidents. In 1998, to recognize two Capitol Police officers who died in the line of duty, Congress granted use of the Rotunda for their caskets to “lie in honor.”This chart lists all those individuals who have been granted this high honor within the U.S. Capitol.Featured Oral HistoriesLearn more about the lives and careers of U.S. Capitol policewoman Arva Marie Johnson and longtime Office of the Clerk employee Roger Addison in their oral histories.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 105th Cong., 2nd sess. (27 July 1998): 17441; Congressional Record, House, 105th Cong., 2nd sess. (24 September 1998): 21844; Jacob Joseph Chestnut-John Michael Gibson United States Capitol Visitor Center Act of 1998, H.R. 4347, 105th Cong. (1998); Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999, Public Law 105-277, 112 Stat. 2681(1998); Washington Post, 25 July 1998.

U.S. House History Blog

10.07.2024

The Records of a Divided Country: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850–1877) | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

By the mid-19th century, the struggle over slavery reached a boiling point in the United States. The American people, as well as their Representatives and Senators, clashed over slavery for years before the Civil War erupted in 1861. Following the war, during the period known as Reconstruction, Congress attempted to rebuild and reunite the country. Americans tried to recover from the emotional and physical toll of the war and come to terms with a country that had fundamentally changed. Learn more about this contentious period with these records from the House of Representatives.Transcriptions and downloadable PDFs of these records are available at the links below.Discussion Questions:Do you think citizens who sent petitions to Congress in the years before the Civil War influenced their Representatives and Senators? Why or why not?How was Congress a microcosm—or reflection in miniature—of the wider struggles of the United States in the years before and after the Civil War?How did the Civil War and Reconstruction change U.S. citizenship?How do the events of this era impact us today?1854, Petition against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854In 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. Since 1820, the Missouri Compromise outlawed slavery in the territories west of the Mississippi River and north of the 36°30' latitude line. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, proposed allowing citizens of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, both of which existed north of the line, to determine through direct vote whether to legalize slavery.Ultimately, the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law on May 30, 1854. The situation in Kansas grew increasingly volatile and violence often erupted between groups of antislavery and proslavery forces. The series of deadly skirmishes eventually became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”1856, Assault of Senator Charles SumnerThe 1850s saw the House bitterly divided over the issue of slavery, which led to one of the more incendiary and violent events in congressional history. On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate Chamber and repeatedly struck Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts over the head with a cane. The assault was in reaction to a speech in which Sumner criticized slavery and the Senators who supported it, including Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks.The day after the attack, the House passed a resolution to establish a select committee to investigate the incident, and Speaker Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts appointed five Members to look into the matter.1862, Repeal Fugitive Slave LawThis petition created by the citizens of Farmington, Maine, asked Congress to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, as well as confiscate the property of rebels against the government and declare their slaves forever free. The petition was presented by Maine Congressman John Hovey Rice on June 19, 1862.1864, Wade-Davis BillAs the Civil War drew to a close, Congress and the President turned their attention to plans for rebuilding and readmitting Southern states into the Union. President Abraham Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction offered repatriation for Confederate states if 10 percent of eligible voters agreed to an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Union and to abide by the emancipation of enslaved people.Many in Congress, particularly the faction known as Radical Republicans, found Lincoln’s plan too lenient. This group advocated a much harsher approach, treating Confederate states as conquered provinces that had forfeited their civil and political rights. Their response was the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill. It required that 50 percent of eligible voters swear an oath to support the Constitution before state governments were recognized as members of the Union. Passed at the close of the congressional session in July 1864, Lincoln defeated it through use of the pocket veto.1866, A.M.E. Church MemorialMembers of Payne African Chapel, the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Atlanta, Georgia, sent this petition to Congress in 1866. In 1864, their church was destroyed during the campaign led by General William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War. The petitioners expressed their appreciation for their freedom but made the argument that it was not their fault that the church was destroyed. They requested $7,000 from the U.S. Congress to rebuild the church.1866, Memorial of Clara BartonClara Barton, best known as the founder of the American Red Cross, devoted her time following the war to helping locate missing soldiers. In the spring of 1865, Barton began receiving correspondence from the families of the missing, asking for her assistance in finding information on the whereabouts of their loved ones. In response, she established the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army. The office researched, compiled, and distributed lists of the missing in the hope that war survivors with knowledge of the fate of fellow soldiers would report it to Barton and her staff.Barton submitted this petition to Congress in February 1866, asking for an appropriation to continue her work.1868, Reconstruction Acts PetitionApplications such as this were completed by residents of Confederate States after the Civil War. The purpose of the applications was to remove political disabilities imposed by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibited individuals who had been active in the rebellion from eligibility for government employment. The applications were later collected by the Select Committee on Reconstruction, which was established in 1867.1874, Joseph Rainey Election CertificateJoseph Rainey, the first African American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, was sworn in on December 12, 1870. This election certificate confirmed his 1874 election to the 44th Congress (1875–1877) for a third full term and is signed by members of the board of state canvassers for South Carolina.During more than eight years in Congress, Rainey advocated for civil rights legislation, public education, and an active federal government to guarantee the rights of freed people in the South.Interested in more records from this era?1860, Kansas Statehood Bill1862, Government for Arizona Territory1862, West Virginia Statehood1868, Impeachment of Andrew Johnson1874, Memorial for the Civil Rights Act of 1875This is part of a blog series about records from different eras of U.S. history.

U.S. House History Blog

28.06.2024

Edition for Educators—Setting Precedents | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

The legislative process in the U.S. House of Representatives is governed by an ever-evolving set of rules and guidelines known as parliamentary procedure. These legislative standards and instructions for debate originally derived from Britain’s Parliament and were later adopted and modified by England’s colonial governments in North America. In 1787, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution codified some of these procedures in Article I of America’s founding document.But importantly, the Founders also empowered the House to control its own affairs and set its own rules. The Speaker of the House, more than any other individual on Capitol Hill, has been key to that process. In the House, the Speaker—and to a lesser extent, the presiding officers appointed by the Speaker—decides questions of order, germaneness, and parliamentary procedure. The full House can vote to overturn the Speaker’s decision, but that happens only in rare instances. In the 1830s, the House also adopted the recommendations outlined in Jefferson’s Manual, a compendium of legislative practices compiled by Thomas Jefferson in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Over time, the decisions from the Speaker’s chair have formed the basis of the House’s customs, tradition, and, eventually, its rules. Since 1907, these many components of the House’s legislative practice have been compiled by House Parliamentarians in the House Precedents.This Edition for Educators highlights a few of the precedents that have been set since 1789, as well as the people who assemble those precedents into an ongoing body of work that guides the day-to-day work of the U.S. House of Representatives.Featured PeopleParliamentarians of the House The Parliamentarian is a nonpartisan official appointed by the Speaker of the House to render objective assistance on legislative and parliamentary procedure to the House of Representatives. The responsibilities and history of the Parliamentarian’s Office is briefly discussed on this page, presented alongside a list of Parliamentarians and their predecessors in the House of Representatives.Featured Blogs“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.The Parliamentarian’s Scrapbook As debate and voting take place on the House Floor, transcripts are recorded for the Congressional Record. The Parliamentarian reviews and makes notes about this written record, recording decisions and their legal basis. The notes are gathered into scrapbooks. After much analysis and review, the Parliamentarian assembles information from the scrapbooks into volumes of precedents, which are published periodically.Fighting the Filibuster Wednesday, January 3, 1810, seemed like a day that would never end in the House of Representatives, as Barent Gardenier of New York hijacked proceedings to delay action on a resolution he opposed. Gardenier spoke from roughly 10 o’clock at night until nearly four in the morning, thereby imparting a sobering lesson to early Congressmen: if a Member started speaking, there was no way to stop him. Soon enough, clever lawmakers discovered that the framework of the legislative mechanism they needed to stop such curious filibusters was already in the House Rules: the previous question.Who Kicked the Dogs Out? Eccentric and quick-tempered, Virginia Representative John Randolph spent his early House service in a chamber that had quite literally gone to the dogs—his dogs, in fact. Randolph often brought his hunting dogs into the House Chamber, leaving them to lope and lounge about the floor during the session’s proceedings, much to the ire of some of his colleagues . . . especially a new Speaker of the House named Henry Clay of Kentucky.Featured Oral HistoriesFeatured HighlightsThe First House-Contested Election On April 29, 1789, the House Committee on Elections, a panel created on April 13, 1789, to render judgment on disputed elections in the House based on evidence and witness testimony, reported its first contested election case, Ramsay v. Smith from South Carolina. David Ramsay contested the election of William Loughton Smith of South Carolina to the 1st Congress (1789–1791), arguing that Smith had not been not a citizen of the United States for seven years, a requirement set under the Constitution for election to the House.A Breach of Privileges On January 1, 1796, the House met in a rare New Year’s Day session to deliberate the trial of two private citizens for allegedly attempting to bribe Members of Congress. Four days earlier, James Madison of Virginia and several other Representatives had submitted evidence to the House that Robert Randall of Philadelphia and Charles Whitney of Vermont had approached them with promises of future funds or land grants should the Members back a scheme to acquire pre-emption rights in the Northwest Territory. On the order of Speaker Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, Sergeant-at-Arms Joseph Wheaton apprehended the gentlemen at their Philadelphia lodging and held them in his custody as the House debated how to proceed.The First Parliamentary Procedure to Limit House Floor Debate On July 7, 1841, the House adopted the first rule intended to limit the time a Representative could speak in debate on the House Floor. Concerns about long speeches impeding House business had dated to at least 1820, when the irascible John Randolph of Virginia held the House Floor for a four-hour speech on the Missouri Compromise bill. Afterward, lawmakers submitted proposals to limit the time a Member could speak to one hour; but the House did not act on them. In March 1833, Frank E. Plummer of Mississippi “so wearied the House in the last hours of the Congress,” noted Hinds’ Precedents, “that repeated attempts were made to induce him to resume his seat, and the House was frequently in extreme confusion and disorder.”A Motion to Censure Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts On February 7, 1842, the House voted 106 to 93 to table a motion censuring Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts for antislavery agitation. Weeks earlier Adams had masterfully manipulated the public debate over slavery by baiting proslavery Representatives into a prolonged dialogue. Because the House had instituted the “Gag Rule” in 1836—preventing floor discussion of abolition petitions—Adams manufactured a debate by submitting a petition, allegedly drafted by a group of Georgians, to have Adams removed as Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman. (Historians doubt the authenticity of the petition—some implying that Adams or one of his allies authored it). Through this sleight of hand, Adams used the defense of his chairmanship to hold the floor for days delivering a far-ranging harangue against “slave mongers,” as one observer recalled, “till slaveholding [and] slave trading…absolutely quailed and howled under his dissecting knife.”The Resignation of Parliamentarian Asher Hinds On March 3, 1911, Parliamentarian Asher Hinds resigned his position to become a Representative from the state of Maine. The long-time clerk at the Speaker’s table, as the Parliamentarian was then known, served nearly 20 years as an expert advisor on House procedure. The author of the House Rules series known as Hinds’ Precedents, Asher Hinds had begun his service under Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine.Featured Objects from the House CollectionFeatured ExhibitionImpeachment: President Andrew Johnson On February 21, 1868, when the United States House of Representatives met as it usually did at noon, there was no sense that the long-simmering struggle between Congress and President Andrew Johnson was about to tip into a full-blown constitutional crisis.This full-length essay details the precedent-setting events in the first impeachment of an American president.Featured RecordsLetter from Benjamin Brown French After a combined 15 years of service to the U.S. House of Representatives, first as assistant clerk, then as acting Clerk of the House, and eventually as Clerk of the House, Benjamin Brown French asked Congress for another job. In this letter, French requested employment to compile a parliamentary practice manual to help Members, particularly newly elected Representatives, navigate their House service. French believed his House experience made him the ideal candidate. His letter was accompanied by two resolutions describing the scope of the work and French’s recommendations for his compensation. Despite French’s repeated prodding, no committee action was ever taken on his proposal. The House would not begin to compile and publish its precedents until Asher Hinds’ precedents were published in the early twentieth century.Reagan’s First State of the Union President Ronald Reagan delivered his first State of the Union address in a televised prime-time speech on January 26, 1982. One year earlier, Reagan addressed Congress shortly after his inauguration, giving a speech focused on his plans for reviving the economy rather than a report to Congress on the nation. Following the precedent set by Reagan in 1981, speeches delivered in the first year of a presidential administration are, by custom, not considered State of the Union addresses.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.

U.S. House History Blog

21.06.2024

Recent Artifacts Online, Summer 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Just in time for summer, the Office of Art and Archives has added new objects to the digitized House Collection.Committee on the Budget1970s menswear, from white belts to wide ties, was on display at the beginning of Robert Giaimo’s service as chair of the House Budget Committee. The chairman’s early leadership was, according to the Washington Post, “lackluster and sometimes awkward.” But within a few years, Giaimo had “acquired widespread respect as one of the toughest and most effective committee chairmen in Congress.” This photograph shows Giaimo seated on the committee dais behind his nameplate.Managing the Campaign for the House of Representatives PamphletThis nonpartisan booklet describes the significance of volunteers to congressional campaigns. The publication reveals assumptions about gender in the 1960s. The section on women volunteers posits that the candidate’s wife can “work wonders by setting an example of industry and enthusiasm,” but “she will be resented if she doesn’t pitch in and do her share.”The Illustrated American Magazine, Vol. XXII, No. 394In 1897, The Illustrated American published a series of articles by and about Members of Congress. An account of Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed’s tactical feats of strength included an illustration of one famous moment. To prevent Members from leaving, Reed in 1890 directed the House Doorkeeper to bar all exits. Illustrator George Gibbs depicts the moment when Representative Charles O’Ferrall of Virginia shook the locked doors in impotent fury.Congressional Sales Tax DelegationIn 1921, newspaper publisher and former Congressman William Randolph Hearst sponsored a “Congressional Sales Tax Delegation” to Canada. At the time, the United States was considering a federal sales tax instead of, or in addition to, the recently adopted income tax. The wealthy publisher—who stood to benefit from changes to the tax system—arranged for Members to learn about the Canadian sales tax system.Sketches in the Capitol, WashingtonSometimes newspaper artists caught Members of Congress unawares, preserving informal moments in the Capitol. In this Harper’s Weekly roundup of sketches, Representatives gesticulate, whisper, read the papers, and snooze. In one image, the artist looked over the Press Gallery railing and immortalized someone from directly above his head.Looking for more about campaigns, committees, and cartoons? Check these out:For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.

U.S. House History Blog

12.06.2024

The House’s Plot to Steal a Library | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

In June 1974, as the U.S. House of Representatives opened an impeachment investigation into President Richard M. Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, a construction crew was hard at work on a massive new building for the Library of Congress in the 100 block of Independence Avenue in Southeast, Washington, DC. The location—situated just south of the main Thomas Jefferson library building (which opened in 1897), and just to the west, across First Street, from the iconic Cannon House Office Building (which opened in 1908)—placed the new structure near the heart of Capitol Hill.Elsewhere it may have seemed like the lies and deceit of the Watergate scandal threatened the very foundation of the federal system. But in that unit block at least, the foundation of a new and ambitious federal building was starting to take shape.Architects designed the state-of-the-art facility—which was named for James Madison—to protect the library’s precious historical documents. Three of the nine floors were underground, providing special temperature and humidity control. Only the top floor boasted windows; the other floors were sealed off to protect delicate paper material from ultraviolet light.Congress had authorized the building in 1965 to help alleviate overcrowding across the library complex. The “Library Annex” (later, the John Adams building) had opened in 1939, but the library’s collection continued to grow, so much so that it eventually spent $2 million or more on rented storage every year. Manuscripts entrusted to the national library were scattered in piles throughout the two buildings. Academics and other scholars conducted research in inadequate facilities. And temporary offices erected in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building had cluttered the grand space for a decade.During the tumultuous summer of 1974, however, a group of Representatives took stock of the House’s own office space and decided that it was overcrowded as well, packed with thousands of Member, committee, and support staff. Perhaps what the House required was a new office building. And perhaps the new library facility was just the space the House needed.“We’re Hanging People from the Chandeliers”In 1965, the same year Congress authorized the construction of the Madison building for the library, a brand-new, massive House office building named after Speaker Samuel Rayburn of Texas opened just down the hill. As the complexity and demands of the federal government grew in the years after World War II, lawmakers hired specialists and aides to handle the growing requirements of constituent casework and policy making. In just the five years between 1965 and 1970, House staff grew by 48 percent and showed no sign of letting up. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 increased congressional oversight over the federal government, raising the number of committee and other support staff. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created the Congressional Budget Office and established the Budget Committees in both the House and Senate. “We’re hanging people from the chandeliers,” noted Representative Fortney H. (Pete) Stark of California in 1974. “I sit with [sic] one big room and you try to jam seven or eight staff people in one (other) room.” Capitol Hill staff increased by more than 50 percent again by 1975.Facing a shortage of office space in the House, lawmakers started searching for more room. Stark circulated a petition requesting that Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma consider annexing the unfinished Madison building for use by the House. The needs of lawmakers “are far more important than the storage of books,” the petition said, which gathered the signatures of 230 Representatives. Speaker Albert, who served on the House Office Building Commission alongside Democratic Leader Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., of Massachusetts and Republican Leader John Rhodes of Arizona, announced that he would consider Stark’s proposal, and debated whether to use the Madison building temporarily while the House built itself new office space.A Hero for the LibraryFirst-term Republican Representative Joel Pritchard of Washington was hardly in a position of influence when the House threatened to take over the Madison building. Two years earlier, in 1972, Pritchard had narrowly won his suburban Seattle district. But Pritchard was a seasoned state legislator and he arrived on Capitol Hill as a champion of civil rights, environmental protection, and anti-gambling measures. An affable and athletic politician, Pritchard often organized games of pickleball—a game he invented—among his colleagues from both sides of the aisle. One Seattle-based civic leader recalled that Pritchard was “the glue” that held the Washington state delegation together during the tumultuous years of the Watergate scandal.Pritchard was disappointed to learn of the effort to seize the Madison building for office space. “It’s too bad we can’t do anything about it,” he said to Steve Excell, his legislative assistant. But Excell and the rest of Pritchard’s staff had other ideas and contacted several media outlets to spread the word. Their effort yielded results. “Sometimes Congressmen don’t know when to stop,” the Wall Street Journal wrote under the headline “Capitol Hill Land Grab.” The Journal went on: “If the House needs more space then, it should ask for them to set them up in the marble expanse of the Rayburn Building gymnasium.”Pritchard, meanwhile, found himself arrayed against House leadership and 230 colleagues on the issue. “Oh no, I’m in trouble now,” he told Excell. But Pritchard decided to keep pressing the issue. “We ought to try to help,” he said. The whole conflict gained momentum quickly. “It happened a bit like an accidental firing of a gun setting off a war,” Excell recalled more than 20 years later.Round OnePritchard was not alone in his opposition. In the Senate, a handful of lawmakers criticized the effort by Representative Stark and Speaker Albert. Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana, co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Congressional Operations, placed the takeover squarely in the vein of the Watergate scandal. “It is no surprise to any of us that citizens are cynical about the Federal Government,” Metcalf observed. “Any move to take over the Madison Building for congressional office purposes would add to this cynicism.”Amid President Nixon’s resignation in early August and the fallout from Watergate, attention shifted away from the Madison building. But Pritchard still found himself having to speak out. A month later, on August 21, 1974, Pritchard defended the new library building on the House Floor. “I want to go on the record as strongly opposed to this piracy,” he said, adding that Members of Congress simply needed to use their existing space more efficiently.In November, Prichard again noted that “rumors are still floating about the purposed takeover” and lamented that “the building’s fate remains uncertain.” But for the most part, the issue temporarily dropped from congressional consideration.Round TwoDiscussions about the fate of the incomplete Madison Building did not arise again until a year later in the fall of 1975. House leadership pounced on the issue when library officials approached Congress for an additional $33 million supplemental appropriation (beyond the $90 million authorized for the project in 1965) in order to complete building. “The speaker wants the building and he’s tired of taking the heat from both sides,” an anonymous aide to a lawmaker who supported the takeover told the Washington Post. “If the (House) members want the space, let them vote for it.” After returning from the Thanksgiving holiday, Representative Teno Roncalio from Wyoming introduced a bill to acquire the Madison building.This time, however, opposition to the acquisition proved fiercer. “The House should keep its cotton-picking hands off the Library of Congress annex,” the Washington Star wrote. “Congressmen and congressional aides come and go but the books and priceless treasures of Americana housed by the Library of Congress live forever.” The New York Times chimed in a few weeks later: “It would be a travesty of planning and a scandalous waste of funds.” “We hesitate to give Congress any ideas,” the Wall Street Journal joked, “but at the rate it’s going we would suggest that whenever the President plans to be away from the White House for any length of time, he takes steps to lock the door and see that the burglar alarm is turned on.”Academics and other scholars joined the journalists excoriating the plan. “The Library of Congress might be compared to the central nervous system. It is not highly visible outside of Washington, but it is essential to the orderly function of the government and to maintaining scholarly and scientific research,” the Folger Shakespeare Library Director wrote to the Washington Evening Star in defense of his Capitol Hill neighbor. “This is to say that every American has a stake in how well it does its job.” Library officials called the proposed takeover “a calamity, a disaster,” and predicted that losing the building would set them back another 15 years.When a new petition in support of the Madison Building takeover circulated in the House, only 75 lawmakers signed on. Pritchard was again the most proactive opponent; he submitted three bills in December 1975, all with varying cosponsors, that provided the additional $30 million to finish the library building. It helped that in February 1975, the House had relieved some of the immediate need for more office space by acquiring a large building at the base of the Hill (later named the Ford House Office Building) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, just a few blocks from the Rayburn building. In early December, Roncalio floated another plan to fund the remaining construction for the library with the caveat that six to seven percent of the building be set aside for the House. But Roncalio went on to admit that the “building is not the place to put two or three floors of members’ offices now that it’s been built for other purposes.” He never put his plan before the House.The issue was finally laid to rest when Representative Robert E. Jones of Alabama—chairman of the Public Works and Transportation Committee, which had jurisdiction over the Madison Building’s construction—submitted legislation to increase the library building’s funding with no strings attached. “The James Madison Memorial Building must be completed, and promptly, if the Library of Congress is to continue to grow and meet its responsibilities to the Congress, the research and academic communities, and the Nation,” he wrote in his committee’s report favoring his bill. The measure passed the House on February 17, 1976, and became law later that month.The Madison Building officially opened as a research library on May 28, 1980. Efforts to build a fourth House Office Building on Capitol Hill never materialized, though the House of Representatives later acquired the O’Neill House Office Building in Washington’s southwest quadrant in 2017.Pritchard had promised voters back home that he would stay no more than 12 years in Congress, and, good to his word, he retired from the House in 1985. He went on to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Washington. And though Pritchard spearheaded the Madison Building’s defense on the part of the Library of Congress, it was his invention of the sport of pickleball that etched his name in the history books.Sources: Congressional Record, Senate, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (29 July 1974): 25451; Congressional Record, Extension of Remarks, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (21 August 1974): 29747; Congressional Record, House, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (21 November 1974): 36987; An Act to Amend Public Law 89-260 to Authorize Additional Funds for the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building, Public Law 89-260, 84 Stat. 69; To Amend the Act of October 19, 1965, to Provide Additional Authorization for the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building, Public Law 94–219, 90 Stat. 194; A Bill to Provide for an Additional Office Building for the House of Representatives and to Authorize Additional Space for the Library of Congress, H.R. 11000, 94th Cong. (1975); A Bill to Amend Public Law 89-260 to Authorize Funds for the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building, H.R. 11017, H.R. 11116, H.R.11189, 94th Cong. (1975); Committee on Public Works and Transportation, Library of Congress Madison Memorial Building, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 807 (1976); Boston Globe, 6 July 1975; Los Angeles Times, 9 December 1975; New York Times, 18 November 1975; Wall Street Journal, 2 August 1974, 2 December 1975; Washington Evening Star, 24 July 1974, 1 August 1974, 11 August 1974, 27 October 1975, 23 November 1975, 1 December 1975, 3 December 1975; Washington Post, 31 July 1974, 22 November 1975; R. Eric Peterson, “Legislative Branch Staffing, 1954 – 2007,” Report 40056, 15 October 2008, Congressional Research Service, 1–2; “Joel Pritchard: An Oral History,” by Anne Kilgannon, Washington State Oral History Program, Office of the Secretary of State, 2000, The interview transcript is available online at: https://app.leg.wa.gov/oralhistory/pritchard/; John Y. Cole, “On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Buildings of the Library of Congress,” https://www.loc.gov/loc/walls/.

U.S. House History Blog

29.05.2024

Edition for Educators—Dalip Singh (Judge) Saund of California | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

Opening Day of the 85th Congress (1957–1959) brought with it the usual hustle and bustle of a new session. Members and their families mingled on Capitol Hill, making new acquaintances and catching up with old friends. From the rostrum, Texas Representative Sam Rayburn prepared to begin his history-making eighth term as Speaker of the House. Among this excitement, a small swarm of video cameras from the U.S. Information Agency and the Columbia Broadcasting System surrounded a new Congressman from California as he raised his right hand to take the ceremonial oath of office. Dalip Singh “Judge” Saund was the first Asian Pacific American lawmaker to serve in Congress since 1946, and he was the first Asian Pacific American Representative ever elected to Congress with full voting rights.In observation of Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, this Edition for Educators spotlights the life and congressional career of California Representative Dalip Singh Saund.Featured Biographical ProfileDalip Singh (Judge) Saund of California In November 1956, D. S. Saund, who everyone simply called “Judge” after years as an Imperial Valley magistrate, became the first person of Asian descent elected to serve as a United States Representative. He was a tireless champion of his southern California district and the farmers who called it home. But his unique backstory—born in India, naturalized U.S. citizen, successful businessman, county judge—also catapulted him to the international stage. During Saund’s three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, he prioritized agricultural assistance, foreign outreach, and improving infrastructure and economic opportunity within his district. At the height of the Cold War, Saund became something of a transcendent politician who had the singular ability to engage audiences abroad. Although he frequently confronted discrimination during his life in the United States, Saund maintained his belief in the promises of American democracy.Featured ExhibitionsAsian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress Since 1900, when Delegate Robert M. Wilcox of Hawaii became the first Asian Pacific American (APA) to serve in Congress, 70 APAs have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, Resident Commissioners, or Senators. This web exhibit is based on the book Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress, 1900–2017, and lays out the journey of APA representation in Congress up to the present. Like other minority groups who were previously unrepresented or excluded, some APA Members including California Representative Dalip Singh Saund eventually came to see themselves as “surrogate representatives” legislating for APA constituencies nationwide and far beyond the borders of their states, territories, or individual House districts, though this was far from a universal sentiment. And, as their numbers increased, their careers progressed from pioneers to apprentices to power brokers with their own issues caucus. Additionally, the story of APAs in Congress—like the experiences of women, African-American, and Latino Members on Capitol Hill— has been written overwhelmingly in the U.S. House of Representatives.The Bracero Program In the House, Representative Dalip Saund worked to support the agricultural needs of his rural constituents across California’s Imperial Valley. The Bracero Program, authorized by Congress in 1943, created a system for seasonal farm workers from Mexico who could assist in planting, harvesting , and railroad maintenance. Saund touted the program in his election campaign and supported funding for the initiative in Congress. Over time, however, he grew critical of both the program’s implementation and what he viewed as its detrimental effect on domestic farm laborers. Read more about the Bracero Program in this essay from Hispanic Americans in Congress.21st-Century Portrait Commissions In 2002, the House of Representatives began an initiative to identify noteworthy former Members with significant legislative achievements or symbolic importance in House history who did not fall into the limited categories of Representatives who traditionally had portraits painted—namely, Speakers of the House and committee chairs. Over the next decades, portrait commissions resulted in wider representation of historical Members of Congress and of more contemporary approaches to portraiture within the House Collection of Art and Artifacts. Dalip Singh Saund’s portrait, included at the top of this blog, was added to the House Collection in 2007.Featured Objects from the House CollectionFeatured Historical HighlightsRepresentative Dalip Saund of California On April 22, 1973, Representative Dalip Saund of California died in Hollywood, California. Born in Amritsar, India, Saund became the first Asian-American Representative with full voting rights to serve in the House of Representatives in the 85th Congress (1957–1959) in 1957. Saund served a total of three terms in the House. During his campaign for re-election to the 88th Congress (1963–1965), he suffered a stroke on a flight to Washington, DC. He remained hospitalized at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the remainder of his unsuccessful campaign. Saund eventually returned to his home in California, but never fully recovered from his stroke.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.

U.S. House History Blog

21.05.2024

Not Horsing Around: Speaker Sedgwick Attempts to Rein in the Press | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On December 22, 1800, the U.S. House of Representatives held a somewhat routine debate on whether to examine the conduct of Mississippi’s territorial Governor Winthrop Sargent. Sargent, a Revolutionary War veteran from a well-to-do Massachusetts family, had been appointed to the job two years earlier, and during his tenure had been accused of abusing his office. But the House—empowered by the Constitution to open investigations into issues it deemed appropriate—remained divided on whether to explore the matter further.As debate dragged on, Democratic Republican William Charles Cole Claiborne of Tennessee declared that he had heard enough, and recommended the House move swiftly to punish the governor, surmising that “a delay of justice is often equal to a denial of it.” Claiborne’s remarks struck a chord with a man named James Lane who watched the proceedings from the gallery. In a show of support, Lane began clapping.Lane’s disruption sparked an immediate rebuke from Speaker Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, who ordered the House Sergeant at Arms to remove Lane from the chamber. The clapping may have lasted a split second, but it set in motion a lengthy series of events that underscored the power of the Speaker and House leadership’s contentious relationship with the press. It also, apparently, caused James Lane to lose his horse.A New HomeThe fall and winter of 1800 was a transitional period for Congress. The fledgling U.S. government had recently moved from Philadelphia to the banks of the Potomac, and the federal city—population: 3,000—looked more like a regional backwater than the capital of a country which had defeated the British Empire for its freedom. The Capitol Building boasted only one wing—what would become the Senate side—and dense forests surrounded the nearby boarding houses where lawmakers lived while Congress was in session.Because the House Chamber had yet to be built, the 100-odd Representatives of the 6th Congress (1799–1801) met in the library on the second floor above the Senate chamber. The shape and size of the public galleries in the House’s makeshift chamber is unknown, but architectural historians suspect they offered tight quarters.That public galleries existed at all was itself something of a revolution in governance. The Continental Congresses had met behind closed doors to shield their members from persecution and scrutiny. Even after the federal government under the Constitution launched in 1789, the Senate met in secret for half-a-dozen years until 1795 when it finally allowed visitors.The House, which had from its beginning been accessible to the public, required two things of guests who came to the chamber to observe its proceedings: “the most profound attention and perfect decorum.” But the public at times struggled to meet those expectations. At times, visitors clapped or otherwise interrupted proceedings, which some Members believed hindered independent deliberation. When Congress met in Philadelphia, disruptions during debate frequently caused the Sergeant at Arms to clear the galleries and shut the doors to the public. On the other hand, one early Speaker took a different approach, and locked everyone in attendance inside of the House Gallery for a period of time.Not everyone agreed that the solemnity of legislative deliberation required silence from the public. In 1792, the Gazette of the United States, a newspaper with prominent Federalist sentiments, argued that visitors in the gallery were entitled to their opinions, and posited that audience engagement even improved congressional debate. “Who will not prefer this mode of doing business by the House and the gallery in conjunction, to the dull nutcracking, apple-paring, drowsy hum of their ordinary proceedings?” the Gazette asked.But by the time James Lane took his seat in the gallery eight years later, lawmakers and the public were no nearer to resolving the issue.Trading DetainmentsJames Lane’s decision to applaud during debate bothered the one person he couldn’t afford to bother: Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick, the man responsible for interpreting and enforcing the House’s rules of order and decorum.Today, the House relies on a rich history of parliamentary procedure—the requirements and guidelines for the legislative process shaped by years of rulings from the chair. In 1800, however, the House had existed for just 11 years. At the time, it had general rules in place, but lacked a deep catalogue of precedents on which to rely. Often, the Speaker had to decide questions of order and decorum during debate on the spot.As soon as Sedgwick heard Lane clap, the Speaker immediately dispatched the Sergeant at Arms, Joseph Wheaton, to the gallery to “see to that man.” Wheaton removed Lane—later described as “a young man of genteel appearance”—from the chamber and held him in a Capitol office for approximately two hours. Lane later claimed that, after leaving the Capitol, Wheaton tracked him down, took his horse, and brought him back to the House for further confinement. At some point during the day, Lane said his horse simply disappeared.After finally leaving Capitol Hill, Lane made his way to nearby Bladensburg, Maryland—presumably on someone else’s horse—to consult with Richard Forrest, a local magistrate, about his missing horse. According to Forrest, Lane called upon him late in the afternoon on December 22 and presented what he described as a convincing story of false imprisonment by the Sergeant at Arms. The justice of the peace thought that the circumstances, as related to him by Lane, justified issuing a warrant for Wheaton’s arrest. Two days later, on December 24, the Sergeant at Arms found himself in custody before the judge in Maryland. Wheaton spent a few hours in detainment on Christmas Eve until officials released him after Lane failed to appear before the court to pursue his complaint.A Complicated InvestigationThe incident with James Lane in 1800 was such an apparent violation of protocol that the House organized a five-Member Committee of Privileges, dominated by Federalists aligned with the Speaker, to investigate what happened. The committee reported its conclusion to the House a few weeks later. Much of the committee’s findings relied on a written statement from Wheaton about his memory of the event. The committee accused James Lane of being inebriated in the gallery, described his behavior as “indecent and disorderly conduct,” and concluded that Lane had deceived the judge in Maryland. The committee recommended that the House take no further action on the matter, and commended Wheaton for swiftly carrying out the Speaker’s orders.After the report was read on the floor, Democratic Republicans, the opposition party in the House, began to question the committee’s version of events. At one point, John Nicholas of Virginia argued that the committee had not conducted a full enough investigation, which other Members saw as a veiled criticism of Speaker Sedgwick. Federalists rushed to Sedgwick’s defense. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts compared the “outrage” of clapping in the House Chamber to similar incidents in France that “had produced much bloodshed” during the French revolution. Otis went so far as to conclude that clapping in the chamber should be “more feared than open assault on the [M]embers.”Speaker Sedgwick defended his decision, stating that he possessed the power of arrest while the House was in session. He also took the opportunity to criticize the prominent Washington newspaper, the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, which had published a summary of the events on December 22. Sedgwick accused the National Intelligencer, which had Democratic-Republican sympathies, of grossly misrepresenting what had occurred in the House.As partisan lines were drawn, competing versions of the events emerged. Federalists argued that the Speaker and Sergeant at Arms had acted reasonably to preserve order in the House. Democratic Republicans, meanwhile, used the episode to criticize House leadership. Federalist John Rutledge Jr. of South Carolina swore that Lane had escaped from custody before being re-apprehended and taken to a committee room for the rest of the day’s session. Willis Alston of North Carolina, a Democratic Republican, said that he and about a dozen other Members conducted a fireside interview with the Sergeant at Arms on the evening of the incident. Alston believed that Wheaton had initially allowed Lane to go free after being removed from the gallery. Then, encouraged by Members who suggested that it had been improper to release him, Wheaton arrested Lane again after finding him “some distance from the Capitol, upon his horse.”Following the long debate and series of procedural votes on the committee’s report, the House agreed to set the entire ordeal aside. Every Democratic Republican voted against the report, and all but two Federalists voted in support.Fighting for a SeatThat anyone outside the House Chamber knew what happened on December 22 was thanks to Samuel Harrison Smith, the editor of the National Intelligencer, who reported on the House’s activities that day. But Smith’s decision to write about the incident placed him in remarkable conflict with the man who controlled access to the chamber: Speaker Sedgwick. The ramifications of the conflict between the Speaker and the journalist threatened to upend how the press reported on the House, and determine what Americans knew about their government.Smith, the 28-year-old son of Jonathan Bayard Smith, a Delegate to the Continental Congress, had left behind a struggling newspaper in Philadelphia to take up residence in the new capital city in 1800. Smith had taken the advice of his friend Thomas Jefferson and established a paper sympathetic to Democratic-Republican principles in the new federal district.When Congress moved into the unfinished Capitol Building in November of 1800, Smith and others lobbied the House to set aside permanent space for reporters on the floor. When the House put the issue up for consideration, Speaker Sedgwick voted no to break a tie and limit reporters’ access to the chamber. Instead, Smith was required to stand at the back of the chamber when the House was in session. On January 14, 1801, three weeks after Smith reported on the Lane incident, Wheaton gave him a message from the Speaker directing Smith to leave the floor. Smith retreated to the public galleries, but a day later Wheaton told him that Sedgwick had banned him from there as well.The next morning, Smith met with the Speaker to discuss his expulsion. The two disagreed significantly in their politics, but Sedgwick also stated that he had Smith removed because he believed the public did not need a day-by-day account of the House’s proceedings. The American public should only be informed once the House concluded its deliberations. “For instance,” Sedgwick said, “a [M]ember may make a motion that refers to a particular subject. It may be made inadvertently. . . . To publish it in this immature state, before the [H]ouse has decided upon it . . . might essentially injure the respect of the people for the government.” Smith said he disagreed, and believed citizens under a republican government should be kept well-informed of the legislature’s actions. Their meeting ended when Sedgwick confirmed that Smith could at least receive copies of printed congressional documents from the House Clerk.Over the next few weeks, Democratic-Republican lawmakers, including Thomas Terry Davis of Kentucky, attempted to restore Smith’s access to the House. Davis believed that the Speaker had deprived Smith of a Constitutional right. But on February 20, the Federalist majority in the House backed Sedgwick and rejected multiple resolutions that would have limited the Speaker’s power to expel visitors from the galleries or lobby. In fact, Smith remained banned from the floor until Democratic Republicans gained control of the House in 1801.The fallout from the dispute between Sedgwick and Smith lingered for the remainder of the Congress. At the end of the session, Democratic Republicans, frustrated with how Sedgwick managed the House, refused to support the customary vote thanking the Speaker for his service. Sedgwick, meanwhile, seemingly deflated from his stint as Speaker, noted in his farewell address that he not only looked forward to retiring from the House, but from “public councils forever.” Wheaton, the Sergeant at Arms, continued to serve in his same role under Speaker Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina through the 9th Congress (1805–1807), until he was accused of mishandling government funds and lost the support of the House. Whatever happened to James Lane and his horse remains a mystery.Smith stayed in Washington, and eventually entered government service following an appointment to the Treasury Department. He died in 1845. But his push for journalistic access to the House long outlived him. Today, the press has its own gallery—located in the House Chamber directly above the Speaker’s Rostrum.Sources: Annals of Congress, House, 6th Cong., 2nd sess. (9 December 1800): 816; Annals of Congress, House, 6th Cong., 2nd sess. (23 December 1800): 851; Annals of Congress, House, 6th Cong., 2nd sess. (6 January 1801): 881–890; Annals of Congress, House, 6th Cong., 2nd sess. (20 February 1801): 1042; Annals of Congress, House, 6th Cong., 2nd sess. (3 March 1801): 1080; Gazette of the United-States, 22 April 1789, 17 March 1792; National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, 14, 16, 19 January 1801, 7 August 1809; “Closed Sessions of the House,” 14 March 1794, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-15-02-0180; William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2001); William E. Ames, A History of the National Intelligencer, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Glenn Brown, “The United States Capitol in 1800,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 4 (1901); Gaillard Hunt, ed., The First Forty Years of Washington Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906): vi; Calvin Jillson and Rick K. Wilson, Congressional Dynamics: Structure, Coordination & Choice in the First American Congress, 1774–1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Pamela Scott, Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Louisa Thomas, Lousia: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams (New York: Penguin Press, 2016); United States Senate, “The Senate Opens Its Doors,” https://www.senate.gov/about/historic-buildings-spaces/chamber/senate-opens-doors.htm.

U.S. House History Blog

09.05.2024

Behind the Scenes of Electronic Voting | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

When the House of Representatives unveiled its new electronic voting system in late 1972, the New York Times compared its design to a different kind of display: a football scoreboard. Since then, the House has updated the technology of the chamber. The current system still has many innovative elements from the original.Step into the House Chamber and learn how the original electronic voting system worked through artifacts and photographs.The Voting BoardAs you look at the photograph of the House Chamber above, notice that panels with blue and white patterns appear all around the gallery level.Most of the panels, like the one directly above, were made of regular fabric with a pattern of Liberty Bells, liberty caps, oak branches, laurel wreaths, and stars.But when Representatives voted, the four panels at the front of the House Chamber came to life. Members’ names shone through next to colored lights showing how they voted: green for yea, red for nay, and yellow for present. Later, the lights were changed to appear in the shape of the letters Y, N, and P. The photograph of the chamber at the top of this blog shows the panels in action in 2014.This fragment of the voting board came from one of the four front panels. Meant to look like fabric, it was actually three layers of plastic.Set behind the fabric-like design were simple plastic nameplates with each Representative’s last name. These panels were lit from behind.The light shone only through the white letters, not the dark background, so each Representative’s name glowed brightly through the blue and white patterned top layer.When multiple Members had similar last names, state initials were also included. These nameplates were used for Gregorio Camacho Sablan and Allyson Schwartz.In this close-up of the voting board from around 1979, the names are brightly lit and visible through the pattern.The electronic voting system was designed by Frank Ryan, who was the quarterback for the Cleveland Browns before directing the House’s information systems. The Times likened the voting board to the “main scoreboard,” and noted some “small supplemental scoreboards” around the chamber “with time remaining to vote being shown in seconds,” like a countdown of the time left in a football quarter.Voting Stations and Voting CardsTo cast a vote, Members find a voting station, insert their personal card, and push a button. Stations are attached to the backs of seats.The earliest voting stations had white buttons with black text, reading “yea,” “nay,” and “pres” for present. The “open” indicator lit up when a vote was in process.Later voting stations kept the wood veneer but changed to colorful buttons: green “yea,” red “nay,” and yellow “pres.” A blue indicator lit when voting was open. This station dates from around 1985 and was in use until 2017 or 2018. Recent updates to voting stations added Braille and LCD displays.In this photo from 1979 or 1980, a person demonstrates how to use a voting card. Voting cards are specific to each Member. Early voting cards had a photograph of the Representative and a particular pattern of holes that identified the Member to the computer system.If a Representative forgot his or her card, the Times explained in 1972, the Member went “to the console operator and [gave] him the vote, and the operator [could] punch it into the system.”This image shows an operator working behind the scenes in the House Chamber on the electronic voting display in 1978.The first electronic vote, on January 23, 1973, was a roll call vote that took 15 minutes instead of the usual 30 to 45 minutes. Members cheered when the clock counted down to zero. Recent updates in 2023 made the displays brighter and more energy efficient. Despite a few early snags, the new system saved time and even improved attendance when first put into use. Representatives might even have called the voting system a touchdown.Source: New York Times, 19 November 1972.

U.S. House History Blog

23.04.2024

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).

U.S. House History Blog

13.04.2024

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.

U.S. House History Blog

05.04.2024

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.

U.S. House History Blog

29.03.2024

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.

U.S. House History Blog

22.03.2024

“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).

U.S. House History Blog

02.03.2024

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.

U.S. House History Blog

27.02.2024

“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).

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