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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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.
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.
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.
An Empire or a Gavel: Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed’s Opposition to the Spanish-American War | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In late March 1898, Republican Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine found himself in an unfamiliar position. Known as “Czar Reed” for his iron-fisted control over the legislative process, Reed now struggled to maintain the direction of the House’s agenda as war loomed on the horizon.For months, lawmakers on Capitol Hill had worried as Spain suppressed a war for independence in Cuba, which Madrid controlled as a territory. By the spring, many in Congress sought to confront the European monarchy over its actions in the Caribbean. But Reed fiercely opposed conflict with Spain, and generally resisted America’s larger imperial ambitions overseas. He had thus far skillfully prevented votes that would have drawn the United States closer to war. As events unfolded, however, and the clamor for congressional action grew louder, Reed—despite his parliamentary prowess and the vast powers he had accumulated in the Speaker’s Office—could no longer prevent the issue from reaching the floor for debate.A loyal Republican and the leader of his party in Congress, Reed felt he had certain obligations to adhere to party orthodoxy, even in the rare event that he disagreed with it. As the drumbeat for war grew louder in the GOP, Reed confronted an issue that pitted his party loyalty against his personal convictions and his duties as Speaker of the House.American InterestsThe island nation of Cuba, situated about 100 miles from Key West, Florida, had long held the interest of Americans. In 1895, Cuban rebels seeking independence from Spain initiated an insurrection against the ruling empire.From the start of the conflict, some Members of Congress had called on the United States to recognize and support the Cuban revolutionaries. Many of their constituents felt similarly and supported going to war with Spain for several reasons, including humanitarian concern for Cubans, economic self-interest, and a growing imperial desire for overseas territorial expansion. Support for Cuban independence only grew louder as the American press published accounts, often exaggerated, of Spanish atrocities. As the war continued, Americans with economic interests in Cuba, especially the island’s vast sugar cane fields, joined the chorus calling on the United States to intervene.On Capitol Hill, Speaker Reed steadfastly opposed American intervention, but he usually kept his opinions to himself. Reed rarely spoke during debate in the House, and only occasionally discussed his beliefs about the conflict elsewhere. In mid-March 1898, newspapers quoted an associate close to Reed who claimed that the Speaker considered war “a relic of barbarism” and that the United States should only fight for “the protection of our national honor.” Reed did not consider Spain’s treatment of Cubans to be a threat to the United States. Reed also opposed imperial expansion because he shared the racist beliefs of the time that the non-White populations of places like Cuba and the Philippines, which Spain also controlled, could not be incorporated into the United States.Majority RuleFor Reed, the irony of finding himself in the minority on these issues was inescapable.Reed believed majority rule was essential to American governance, and he, more than anyone, ensured that the majority controlled the House. In the decades before Reed became Speaker, the House minority often took advantage of dilatory tactics made possible by House Rules to derail the majority’s agenda. When Reed became Speaker in the 51st Congress (1889–1891), House Republicans passed a series of rule reforms that became known as the Reed Rules which empowered the majority and increased the influence of the Speaker and committee chairs.Across three non-consecutive terms as Speaker, Reed had accrued immense power over the House’s legislative machinery. But Reed’s control ultimately rested on the consent of the majority—be it the majority party or a majority of lawmakers working as a bipartisan coalition. And when Reed’s policy preferences ran counter to the majority, his grip on the legislative calendar weakened.Amid the hue and cry of war, Reed sought parliamentary workarounds to avoid the issue. The 55th Congress (1897–1899) opened in March 1897 with a special session to address a separate issue concerning tariff rates. As Speaker, Reed controlled committee assignments in the House. To prevent debate on any legislation other than the tariff, especially Cuban independence, Reed assigned Members to just three committees: the Committees on Rules; Ways and Means; and Mileage. By limiting House debate to the tariff alone, Reed hoped to determine which Republicans would be faithful to his agenda—and thus who would be in the running for plum committee seats later when, or if, a war vote approached. Secondly, when a Member, invariably a Democrat, attempted to file a pro-Cuban resolution, Reed could explain that proper order required the bill to be referred to the Foreign Affairs Committee, which at the time was not organized.Reed’s strategy relied on the support of able party lieutenants and a loyal Republican caucus. On Wednesday July 7, 1897, for example, Democrat Benton McMillin of Tennessee inquired if bills could be passed under a suspension of regular order because it was technically a continuation of the previous Monday’s legislative day. When Reed responded in the affirmative, McMillin immediately made a motion to suspend the rules and pass a Senate resolution to give Cuban revolutionaries access to more resources. As one reporter recalled, “across Mr. Reed’s moon-like face there spread a wave of embarrassment” before he quickly called on fellow Maine Republican and Ways and Means chair Nelson Dingley Jr. who made a motion to adjourn and end debate.After the MaineReed’s efforts to prevent war with Spain became exceedingly difficult after an explosion in February 1898 sunk the U.S.S. Maine just off the coast of Havana, Cuba, killing 268 American sailors. As calls for intervention increased throughout the country, Congress approved a $50 million appropriation for national defense at the behest of the President in early March. Reed did not attempt to prevent the passage of the popular bill, but as the spring season progressed, Reed continued to find himself at odds with many in his party.On March 28, the House Clerk read a message from President William McKinley summarizing the U.S. Navy’s investigation that found that although an underwater mine had destroyed the Maine there was not enough evidence to determine if Spain was responsible. The report and the President’s unwillingness to explicitly confront the Spanish crown angered Members of Congress of both parties.The following day, 56 Republicans, frustrated with McKinley’s and Reed’s approach to the conflict, expressed support for a Democratic resolution calling on the United States to recognize Cuban independence. “We have enough pledges to guarantee the overruling of any chairman the Speaker may select. We are sick and tired of the President’s course. It is no longer tolerable,” explained Republican Jacob Henry Bromwell of Ohio. A Missouri Republican went so far as to threaten Reed’s gavel and claimed that the coalition of Republicans and Democrats had the votes to “vacate the chair, if need be, and put even an outsider in it” as a new Speaker.Reed advised McKinley that he had to provide Congress with concrete steps to quickly respond to the situation in Cuba or else Congress was likely to take matters into its own hands and declare war. As a result, McKinley met with members of the pro-Cuban faction and asked for a few more days to continue negotiations with Spain.Reed Against the MajorityOn March 30, visitors packed the galleries in the House Chamber on the chance that Congress would vote for war. After Speaker Reed gaveled the House into session, Democratic Leader Joseph Weldon Bailey of Texas offered a privileged motion for a resolution that recognized Cuba as a “free and independent state.” Immediately anti-war Maine Representative Charles Addison Boutelle moved to declare Bailey’s resolution out of order. As Bailey pleaded his case, Republican John Albert Tiffin Hull of Iowa, the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs who also supported the Cuban cause, declared his opposition to Bailey’s resolution. Hull sent a clear message that the faction of House Republicans who backed Cuba’s independence would give McKinley a few more days to negotiate with Spain.Two weeks later, on April 11, McKinley asked Congress for the authority to take steps to end hostilities between Spain and Cuba—including the use of military measures if necessary—and to ensure a stable government on the island. But McKinley’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence split House Republicans. For many GOP lawmakers, an independent Cuba was at the heart of the conflict with Spain.Reed, always a loyal Republican, did not want Congress to directly counter the President during an election year. He remained opposed to U.S. intervention, but decided the best option was to influence the language of the resolution. On April 13, the Foreign Affairs Committee dutifully reported a bill that did not include mention of Cuban independence. On the floor, tempers flared during debate. One Member threw a large book at another Member, and a House Page was accidentally punched in the scuffle. After the Sergeant at Arms restored order, the House backed a war resolution that did not recognize an independent Cuban government.During negotiations with the Senate, Reed and his House allies stood firm with McKinley’s demand against recognizing Cuban independence. In the early morning hours of April 19, 1898, following an all-night session, the House and Senate passed a carefully worded joint resolution to appease a majority of both chambers. The resolution stated that the Cubans “are and of right ought to be free and independent” and that Spain had to “relinquish its authority and government” in Cuba. It also directed McKinley to use military force to achieve such aims and promised that the United States would not “exercise sovereignty” over the island.Only six Representatives voted against the resolution. As Speaker, Reed presided over the bill’s consideration and did not vote on the measure, as was customary at the time. But a few days later, Reed told Samuel Walker McCall of Massachusetts—one of the bill’s opponents and Reed’s future biographer—“I envy you the luxury of your vote. I was where I could not do it.” On April 25, the United States officially declared war on Spain.The war lasted ten weeks. The United States defeated Spain in Cuba and the Philippines (a Spanish colony that the United States coveted), and hostilities ended in August 1898. The two nations signed a peace treaty on December 10, 1898. As a result of the war, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico became American colonies and Cuba became an American protectorate until 1902.Reed won election to an eleventh term in the House in November 1898 and was certain to be Speaker for a fourth Congress. Instead on April 19, 1899, just over a month after the momentous 55th Congress ended, Reed announced his resignation from the House to work at a New York City law firm. Reed was intentionally vague about why he retired, but his most recent biographer suggested the former Speaker desired to make more money in the private sector and that he was too at odds with the imperial expansionist policies of his beloved Republican Party.Reed had long believed that the majority must govern. But on this important issue, he was squarely in the opposition. “Had I stayed,” Reed told a friend, “I must have been as Speaker always in a false position aiding and organizing things in which I did not believe or using power against those who gave it to me.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 1st sess. (7 July 1897): 2449; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (28 March 1898): 3285–3286; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd session (30 March 1898): 3379–3382; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (11 April 1898): 3704–3707; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 April 1898): 3810–3821; Congressional Record, House, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (18 April 1898): 4062–4064; Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, “A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House Speakership; Boston Daily Globe; 30 March 1898; Century Magazine, March 1889; Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 March 1898, 14 April 1898; Illustrated American, 4 December 1897; Los Angeles Times, 30 March 1898; Louisville Courier-Journal; 10 July 1897, 19 April 1898; Washington Evening Times, 30 March 1898; Washington Post, 28 May 1897; Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968); Lewis Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1982); Robert J. Klotz, Thomas Brackett Reed: The Gilded Age Speaker Who Made the Rules for American Politics (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press: 2022); Samuel W. McCall, The Life of Thomas Brackett Reed (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914); James l. Offner, “McKinley and the Spanish-American War,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 2004); William A. Robinson, Thomas B. Reed: Parliamentarian (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1930).
Edition for Educators—Portraits in the House Collection | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The House Collection of Art and Artifacts contains thousands of objects which provide glimpses into the history of the institution as well as the rich lives of the tens of thousands of people who have served, worked, and visited the nation’s capital. Painted portraits form the backbone of this collection and represent a long tradition of honoring notable figures in the House’s history. Hundreds of significant individuals—Speakers, committee chairs, and others—are represented in paintings dating back to the 1780s. This month’s Edition for Educators highlights these portraits in the House Collection and the stories surrounding their creation and acquisition.Featured Portrait ExhibitionsPortraits in the House of Representatives This digital exhibition discusses the origins and history of committee chair portraits and other Member portraits the House has commissioned. Although committee chairs make up the largest portion of the portrait collection, additional commissions depicting historically significant figures in House history—including future Presidents, founders, and congressional trailblazers—have continued to expand the House Collection in the twenty-first century.Speaker Portrait Collection The House of Representatives Speaker Portrait Collection is a vital visual record of House history. The Collection is located in the Speaker’s Lobby, just outside the House Chamber, and boasts a significant arrangement of portraits of former Speakers. As noted in the bronze plaque in the lobby, the collection was conceived as a “tribute to their worth to the nation.”Featured Portraits from the House CollectionThis small sample of portraits shows off the range of subjects included in the House Collection. Speakers, committee chairs, and founding fathers share wall space with more recent notable House Members and even foreign dignitaries.More than 300 portraits can be viewed in the Collections Search.Featured HighlightsArtist Gilbert Stuart’s Portraits of George Washington On April 12, 1796, President George Washington posed for artist Gilbert Stuart for the famous Lansdowne portrait that became the basis for two portraits of Washington in the U.S. Capitol. One was painted by John Vanderlyn and the other by an unknown follower of Stuart. Stuart was the foremost portrait painter in the United States at the time, and Washington posed for him for four separate portraits. The resulting paintings became the standard images of Washington.Bay State Day in the House of Representatives On January 19, 1888, the state of Massachusetts presented, with much fanfare, portraits of three former Speakers of the House, transforming the House Chamber into a veritable picture gallery. The three large paintings stood against the Speaker’s rostrum, commemorating Massachusetts Representatives Theodore Sedgwick, Joseph B. Varnum, and Nathaniel P. Banks. They were featured alongside the portrait of Speaker Robert C. Winthrop, which had first been presented in 1882, and was brought out again having been the inspiration for Massachusetts to commission the other three.Speaker Sam Rayburn’s Portrait Leaves the “Board of Education” On January 19, 1962, two months after the death of Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, the House moved the portrait of the late Speaker from its longtime home in an office on the first floor of the Capitol, to the Speaker’s Lobby, just outside the House Chamber. After spending 20 years in the fabled “Board of Education” room, Rayburn’s longtime gathering place, the Texan’s portrait joined the collection of former Speakers of the House. For decades, Rayburn and other House leaders had met in the Board of Education to socialize and plot strategy.Featured Oral HistoryCalifornia Representative Ron Dellums became the first Black member of the Armed Services Committee in 1973; he went on to chair the committee in the 103rd Congress (1993–1995). In the three videos below, Dellums discusses the process of choosing artist Andre White for his committee chairman portrait and recalls the portrait’s unveiling in 1997.Featured BlogsWashington, Schlepped Here A familiar portrait of George Washington hangs in the Rayburn Room of the Capitol, near the House Chamber. Its location seems to make perfect sense: the capital city bears Washington’s name, he laid the building’s cornerstone, and his likeness is repeated hundreds of times around the city. Nonetheless, the Capitol was never intended to be this painting’s home. This portrait of Washington took a curious path to its current resting place, starting with an American citizen abroad in Spain before eventually arriving on Capitol Hill.Adele Fassett, Washington’s Trendsetting Woman Portraitist With the decision to commission a portrait of then Speaker and former Appropriations Committee chairman Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois in 1904, the House Committee on Appropriations began a tradition of honoring the service of committee chairs with artwork. Cannon, however, was not the first Appropriations chair to have a portrait painted. The story of how the Appropriations Committee eventually ended up with two nineteenth-century portraits of its former chairmen is entwined with the career of the woman who created them, Adele Fassett.The Artist Formerly Known as Fox At 10 different portrait unveilings on Capitol Hill, a man named Charles J. Fox was praised as the artist who captured the sitter’s likeness. Fox didn’t immediately fit the image of an artist in mid-century America—an unkempt genius in a beret and paint-splattered smock. Instead, he looked like a prosperous businessman with a well-tailored suit and receding hairline. Nor did he look like a sophisticated aesthete, although a promotional pamphlet described him as “the son of a well-known Austrian artist whose subjects were European royalty and continental society.” The only problem was that Charles J. Fox was not the artist’s true identity.“The Battle of the Portraits” Newspapers called it “the battle of the portraits.” As many as 16 artists submitted portraits of the late Speaker Henry T. Rainey of Illinois, hoping the portrait commission would select their likeness of the man to hang in the House. The winner would receive a $2,500 commission, which was a substantial sum during the height of the Great Depression. It took two years, a House committee, and some well-targeted insults to resolve the matter.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Recent Artifacts Online, Spring 2024 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
What’s new in the House Collection? This round of digitized additions to the House’s treasure trove covers everything from 18th-century Speakers of the House to 20th-century cartoons.Jonathan DaytonThis delicately drawn profile portrait of Jonathan Dayton, Speaker of the House from 1795 to 1799, came to the Capitol sometime after his service. It was one of several portraits on paper depicting Speakers that appeared in the Capitol by the mid-19th century. In 1910, the House decided to commission 19 oil-on-canvas portraits of former Speakers to replace the “crayon or other portraits not in oil, which are now hanging in the lobby of the House of Representatives.” The following year, the House honored Dayton with an oil-on-canvas portrait in this same pose.Craig Anthony WashingtonCraig Washington won a 1989 special election for Representative Mickey Leland’s Houston, Texas, seat. Leland died four months earlier in a plane crash while travelling to a United Nations refugee camp in Ethiopia. Washington adopted the campaign slogan “Pass the torch,” visible in the sign behind him in this photograph, not only to show his respect for and continuity with his predecessor but also to reflect the support his campaign received from Leland’s family. Washington came to the House with a background as a criminal defense attorney and civil rights activist, followed by terms as a state representative and senator.Jeannette Rankin Brigade Lapel Pin“If we had 10,000 women who were willing to make the sacrifices that these boys had given their lives for” the Vietnam War could be ended. With those words at a 1967 gathering, former Member and lifelong peace activist Jeannette Rankin inspired a women’s march the next year, named for her and commemorated in this button. At the 1968 event, Rankin used her privilege as a former Member to enter the House Chamber and deliver the protesters’ petition to the Speaker of the House.Berryman’s Cartoons of the 58th HouseClifford Berryman was the chief cartoonist at the Washington Post in 1903 when he published this handsome 104-page set of caricatures of each Member of the House. Berryman drew the subjects’ features with great fidelity, but the poses, gestures, and settings lampooned the Representatives’ particular characters. When the book first appeared, a local newspaper reported that denizens of the Capitol found the drawings so apt that it “brought forth peals of laughter from those who are personally or otherwise acquainted with their careers.”Interested in seeing what else we have digitized lately? Check these out.
Classroom Ready: New Women’s Suffrage Primary Source Set | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
For more than a century after the founding of the United States, nearly half of the country’s citizens could not vote because of their sex. After repeatedly failing to approve legislation for women’s suffrage, the U.S. Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment in 1919. The law declared that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” For many women, the amendment was the conclusion of decades of activism. For others it marked a new phase in the effort to secure voting rights and full citizenship in the United States.Learn about the long journey to the 19th Amendment and women’s voting rights with this primary source set. Created with teachers and students in mind, this educational tool follows the quest for suffrage using House records, art, and photographs.Analyzing primary sources is a great way to examine historical perspectives and practice critical thinking skills. This women’s suffrage primary source set is accompanied by a brief contextual essay, discussion questions, and activities to facilitate classroom use. Students can also examine the records, art, and photographs with our primary source analysis graphic organizers. These worksheets guide students as they investigate the purpose and significance of the featured primary sources. We encourage educators to download and use these materials in their classrooms. Download a PDF of the entire Primary Source Set: Women’s Suffrage classroom packet here. The primary source set and the graphic organizers can be used online or printed as handouts. Check out another primary source set about Prohibition here.Visit our Education page and read the blog for updates about new classroom-ready materials. If you’d like to be added to our educator email list to receive updates about our new classroom resources, let us know.
“Agony and Ecstasy”: The Fight for the Equal Rights Amendment Extension in Congress | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Over the course of a year, from October 1977 to the fall of 1978, the fight to extend the ratification deadline for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) played out on a public stage in the nation’s capital. From the iconic National Mall to the House Judiciary Committee Room, the debate over the ERA featured passionate pleas from those both for and against the amendment. Intrigue and drama often characterized the lead up to key votes, and lawmakers and activists worked to shape public opinion. Away from the spotlight, women Members, vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts in Congress during the late 1970s, designed a highly effective vote-counting operation to achieve an improbable victory and keep the hopes for ERA alive.The ERA Is BornThe Equal Rights Amendment, drafted by the revolutionary suffrage leader, Alice Paul, had first been introduced by an ally in Congress in 1923 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights. Paul’s original bill stated that “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Over the next 50 years, the bill remained in committee, unable to break free from the obstacles other lawmakers put in its way.In 1970, however, clever maneuvering by Representative Martha Wright Griffiths of Michigan wrested the ERA from the House Judiciary Committee and sent it to the House Floor. Although the amendment passed the House easily on August 10, 1970, the Senate’s addition of a clause exempting women from the military draft doomed the measure in the 91st Congress (1969–1971). Undeterred by the setback, Griffiths led the charge again in the 92nd Congress (1971–1973) and guided the ERA through the House by an overwhelming margin of 354 to 24. The Senate followed suit and passed the ERA on March 22, 1972, by a vote of 84 to 8. Just 32 minutes later, Hawaii became the first state to ratify the ERA. Before the end of the year, 22 of the required 38 states had voted in favor of adding equal rights for women to the Constitution.Momentum for the ERA, however, slowed considerably after the initial surge of support. The amendment had a seven-year window in which it could be ratified and added to the Constitution. By the fall of 1977, 33 states had ratified the amendment, but four states (Idaho, Nebraska, Tennessee and Kentucky) had rescinded their initial approval leaving the fate of the ERA unclear.UnderdogsIn 1972, the same year the ERA passed Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman was crafting her own underdog narrative by challenging New York’s venerable Representative Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for the Democratic nomination from a Brooklyn district. Celler staunchly opposed the ERA and used his position to stifle the measure until Representative Griffiths forced his hand to bring the amendment to the floor for a vote using a discharge petition. Celler described the ERA as a “step backward” and accused his male colleagues of supporting the measure to “get the women out of their hair.”In 1972, Holtzman, a Harvard trained lawyer, used Celler’s vocal criticism of the ERA to help her defeat the chairman in an upset, earning her the nickname, “Liz the Lion Killer.” When Holtzman entered the House in 1973 she received a spot on the Judiciary Committee, and the committee that once served as the ERA’s primary obstacle became a new hope to revive the neglected women’s rights legislation.The Pieces Come TogetherOn April 19, 1977, the Congresswomen’s Caucus, a new legislative service organization in the House that focused on issues important to women across the country, convened its first meeting. Holtzman and Representative Margaret M. Heckler of Massachusetts served as co-chairs of the new organization which boasted 15 members from both sides of the aisle.As the ratification window narrowed, the ERA became a main concern for the new caucus. Holtzman recalled that Eleanor Smeal, then president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), approached her with the idea that Congress could pass a bill to extend the deadline. Holtzman was initially hesitant but she came to like the idea. Holtzman moved methodically to solidify support for an extension, first consulting with the only other woman on the Judiciary Committee, civil rights leader Barbara Charline Jordan of Texas. Holtzman and Jordan approached Chairman Peter Rodino of New Jersey with the plan, and once Rodino pledged his support, Holtzman worked to secure the backing of Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts. With Rodino and O’Neill on board, Holtzman presented the idea to the Congresswomen’s Caucus. Thirteen members of the caucus signed on as cosponsors. Other cosponsors included, Rodino, Don Edwards of California, the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee of Civil and Constitutional Rights, as well as several members of Democratic leadership—Thomas S. Foley of Washington, John Brademas of Indiana, and Jim Wright of Texas. Those signing on to the bill sent an important message to the House about the legislative battle on the horizon.Inside and OutsideOn October 26, 1977, Holtzman introduced H.J. Res. 638, a “Joint Resolution extending the deadline for the ratification of the equal rights amendment.” The bill was vital, Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois said, because the states needed more time to debate what she called “one of the most important human rights issues of the century.”Holtzman and the Congresswomen’s Caucus wasted no time building support for what many—including Holtzman and Democratic leadership—viewed as an uphill battle. The plan featured two parts: a sophisticated internal whip campaign in Congress and a grassroots movement to pressure Members from the outside. “All of us networked to people we knew, particularly those we thought would be the hardest to please about that amendment,” Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio recalled. The caucus employed interns and designed a detailed computer program to manage what was described as a “formidable whip operation” in order to track where the vote stood. Although the lawmakers lacked formal party whip experience, Holtzman proudly observed, “We figured it out. We were all very smart women.”The caucus also worked closely with women’s organizations beyond Congress to add additional pressure. Holtzman managed a massive grassroots mobilization of women intent on winning support by lobbying individual Members of Congress. Holtzman, Heckler, Patricia Scott Schroeder of Colorado, and Barbara Ann Mikulski and Gladys Noon Spellman, both of Maryland, regularly met with outside groups to offer lobbying tactics, plan strategy, and share research.When the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights began hearings on the extension, crowds on both sides of the issue crowded the room. Eleanor Smeal of NOW, who had worked closely with Holtzman and other Congresswomen, warned that rejecting the extension could lead to the demise of the ERA and would set back “the clock of progress for the advancement of the rights of women in this society.” Leading the opposition was chair of the Stop ERA movement, Phyllis Schlafly. “It’s illegal and unfair,” Schlafly said. “It’s like a losing football team demanding that a fifth quarter be played. You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game just because you’re losing.”When the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights held a hearing on the issue in May, members of NOW and Stop ERA packed the room and lined the hallways. Intense lobbying followed the hearing and on June 5, the subcommittee, by a vote of 4 to 3, approved a seven-year extension for the amendment. Harold Lee Volkmer of Missouri observed that while he voted no, he may have been amenable to voting in favor of a shorter extension. “The American people have a right to think about this for as long as it takes,” Robert Frederick Drinan of Massachusetts replied. Don Edwards, the subcommittee chair and vocal supporter of the ERA, expressed confidence that the full Judiciary Committee would pass the resolution despite the close vote.The push to save the ERA intensified in the weeks leading up to the full committee vote. On July 9, 1978, the fight moved from the backrooms of Congress to the National Mall, when tens of thousands of ERA supporters from across the nation, many donned in white to symbolize the work of the suffrage movement, marched on Capitol Hill. Former Congresswomen Patsy Mink of Hawaii and Bella Abzug of New York joined activists Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Members of Congress—including Holtzman, Mikulski, and Heckler—on a hot and hazy day, to lead a peaceful protest demanding more time for states to deliberate the equal rights amendment. “We must be prepared for a very long haul,” Mikulski warned the enthusiastic crowd. “We will work this summer like we have never worked before.” After the speeches, protestors made good on their promise to inundate the Capitol and beseech Representatives to vote for the extension. Patsy Mink best captured the mood of the day when she asserted, “And if they dare to turn us down . . . we will turn them out on the next election day.”Lingering ObstaclesIn Congress, however, opposition to the extension persisted. Shortly after the protest march, Representative Edwards called to postpone the vote in the Judiciary Committee scheduled for July 11 when it became clear that a majority of his colleagues did not support the resolution. Congressman Thomas Fisher Railsback of Illinois led opponents who wanted to tie the extension to a provision allowing states which had previously voted in favor of ERA to rescind their vote. Railsback’s argument became a rallying cry for Phyllis Schlafly who claimed giving states the option to rescind “would take away a little bit from the unfairness of it.”The Judiciary Committee finally voted on Holtzman’s extension bill on July 18, 1978. The day-long proceeding featured passionate debate and detailed arguments about the necessity for an extension, the length of time, and whether states could rescind an earlier vote. So many Members made opening remarks that Representative James David Santini of Nevada likened it to an “oratorial parade.” Spectators once again packed the committee room in anticipation of the historic vote while television cameras broadcast the meeting.To win over reluctant Members, proponents suggested cutting the extension from seven years to 39 months. When the committee voted on the proposal, Harold Sawyer of Michigan, a proponent of the original seven years who did not know about the change ahead of time, voted against the measure. Chairman Rodino recessed the hearing to confer with colleagues as tension mounted. At one point, Congresswoman Millicent Hammond Fenwick of New Jersey sought unsuccessfully to convince Sawyer to change his vote. “There’s nothing like a delicate ego,” Fenwick surmised.After the brief recess, Representative Santini, an opponent of the extension, left the hearing without warning and missed the subsequent vote on the change to shorten the extension. With Santini missing, the shorter extension passed by one vote, 17 to 16. Santini denied he purposely left the hearing, and instead claimed he went to the House Floor to check in on another legislative matter. A slew of amendments followed the first vote, but none, including Railsback’s proposal to allow states that had ratified the ERA an opportunity to rescind their votes, passed the full committee. The room erupted in loud applause when the full committee voted to send the ERA extension of 39 months to the House Floor by a vote of 19 to 15. Pleased by the outcome, Holtzman, nonetheless, knew the battle would continue. “We haven’t done a vote count for the House, but we’re hoping,” she said. “We’ve spent so much time concentrating here, that there just hasn’t been time.”The Day of the VoteThe ERA extension went to the House Floor two weeks later on August 15, 1978. Holtzman and her fellow Congresswomen whipped the vote until the last minute. On their way to the Capitol, Members encountered both enthusiastic supporters and opponents of the ERA lining the hallways. Once on the House Floor, Representatives saw a sea of women in the galleries wearing “ERA NOW” or “Stop ERA” buttons. More than 100 lawmakers spoke during what the press described as “seven spirited hours of debate.” The majority of women Representatives took to the House Floor to build the case for allowing more time for the states to ratify the ERA. “I find it inconceivable that today we are still debating the question of equality for one-half of the population of the United States,” Congresswoman Spellman observed. “I also find it inconceivable that there are those in this House who question the fact women are not yet being given equal status . . . we see it every day in a hundred different ways.”Chester Trent Lott of Mississippi doubted the Senate would take up the issue and questioned why the House should therefore endure the “agony and ecstasy” of debating the extension. Congresswoman Jordan responded. “I would say to the gentleman from Mississippi (Trent Lott) that women have been going through agony and ecstasy all their lives, and we shall continue to do so until the words ‘equal rights under the law shall not be denied because of sex,’ are a part of the Constitution.”The House voted down two measures that threatened to derail the extension—the Railsback amendment allowing states to rescind ratification, and an attempt to require a two-thirds vote for passage of the extension rather a majority—clearing a path for its passage. Although supporters braced for a nail-biting finish, H.J. Res. 638 easily passed the House by a vote of 233 to 189. Cheers erupted in the gallery as the long and hard-fought battle for an ERA extension survived the House. The Senate passed the measure 60 to 36 on October 20, 1978, extending the ERA’s deadline to 1982.At the time, few outside the institution realized how essential the whip operation run by Holtzman and the Congresswomen’s Caucus was to keeping the ERA fight alive. Holtzman acknowledged their formidable opposition. But, she said years later, “we won despite their efforts.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 95th Cong., 2nd sess. (15 August 1978): 26198, 26219, 26225; “The Honorable Elizabeth Holtzman Oral History Interview,” Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives (10 March 2016). The interview transcript is available online. “The Honorable Mary Rose Oakar Oral History Interview,” Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives (2 March 2017). The interview transcript is available online. Atlanta Constitution, 16 August 1978; Baltimore Sun, 19 July 1978; Chicago Tribune, 11 June 1978, 10 July 1978, 16 August 1978; Los Angeles Times, 24 October 1977, 5 June 1978, 8 October 1978; New York Times, 22 March 1972, 19 July 1978; Washington Post, 11 August 1970, 19 May 1978, 10 July 1978, 11 July 1978, 19 July 1978, 16 August 1978; Irwin N. Gertzog, Congressional Women: Their Recruitment, Integration, and Behavior (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989).
Looking Back—The 1954 Shooting | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Seventy years ago, on March 1, 1954, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party snuck handguns into the House Visitors’ Gallery and opened fired on Members in the chamber below. Five Representatives were shot and injured before the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police, and others subdued the assailants.For many of the staff and House Pages who had been on the floor during the attack, the memory of the traumatic event stayed with them for decades. Reflecting on the shooting years later, Metropolitan Police Officer Benjamin Jason declared, “A situation like that in the U.S. Capitol was, I thought just unheard of and shouldn’t happen. But it did and the authorities responded and everybody did their job.”This is the first entry in a new blog series looking back at major events and legislation in House history as told through oral histories, data, written narratives, and multimedia—all available digitally on the History, Art and Archives website.Featured HighlightFour Puerto Rican Nationalists Opened Fire Onto the House Floor Four Puerto Rican nationalists, armed with handguns, opened fire onto the House Floor from the back row of the south gallery. At the time, the House was voting on a measure to re-authorize a program allowing migrant Mexican farm workers to work in the country. Numerous Representatives and staff were in the chamber at the time, as Speaker Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts presided over the roll call. In the fusillade, five Representatives were wounded—Alvin Morell Bentley of Michigan, Benton Franklin Jensen of Iowa, Clifford Davis of Tennessee, George Hyde Fallon of Maryland, and Kenneth Allison Roberts of Alabama. Bentley was critically wounded, but all five lawmakers survived. Visitors in the gallery and police quickly subdued the assailants; later, they were tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Future Representatives Norvell William “Bill” Emerson of Missouri and Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania were among a group of House Pages who helped to evacuate wounded Members on stretchers to waiting ambulances on the East Front.Featured Oral HistoriesWatch/listen to further accounts of the shooting and its aftermath and effects in the Oral History exhibit “1954 Shooting in the House Chamber.”Featured ExhibitionsThe 1954 Shooting This exhibition contains material related to the shooting and its aftermath, including contemporary newsreel footage and oral histories from House Pages, staff, and police who witnessed the event.Hispanic Americans in Congress—Puerto Rico This section from the third essay of Hispanic Americans in Congress explores the shifting political realities of the United States territory of Puerto Rico between 1945 and 1977. The essay provides context for the Nationalist (Nacionalista) movement in the territory and the circumstances leading up to and following the 1954 attack in the House Chamber.Featured DataTimeline of 1954 Shooting Events This chronology features eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports from the time of the shooting and from the days that followed.Featured Objects from the House CollectionFeatured Blogs“Firecrackers” in the House Chamber “It sounded like a package of firecrackers were lit and set off, but with the ricochet, in my mind, it identified it as a shot, so I hit the floor very quickly,” then House Page and future Representative Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania recalled. The shooting began within moments after the House convened on March 1, 1954, and normal House proceedings turned to uncertainty and chaos. Over many years, the Office of the Historian has interviewed eyewitnesses to the shooting to capture the experience of this harrowing event.This blog tells the stories of the young men present in the Chamber that day using their own words.House Pages Shoulder the Weight of History: The Story Behind an Iconic Image Amid the terror of the shooting in the House Chamber in 1954, some lawmakers and House Pages on the floor responded by assisting those wounded in the attack. Photographs taken in the aftermath captured these efforts, including an iconic image of three young Pages carrying a wounded Member down the steps of the Capitol. Perhaps more than any other image, that photo came to embody both the violence and the solemnity of the day.This blog recounts the events captured in the famous photograph.
“Freedom and Democracy in Our Own House”: Black Lawmakers on Capitol Hill during World War II | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Early in the afternoon on December 8, 1941, shortly after Congress met in a Joint Session to receive President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s request to declare war against Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Members from both parties took to the floor to voice support for the U.S. war effort.Representative Arthur W. Mitchell of Illinois, the only African-American Member of the 77th Congress (1941–1943), joined his colleagues that day in support of FDR’s message. Mitchell noted that he represented not only his Chicago district, but all African Americans. He said his constituents everywhere were willing to fight, work, and sacrifice for the cause, and that they expected “the same treatment under our so-called democratic form of government” as any other American. “If he is good enough to die for his country,” Mitchell declared, “he should be given the largest and fullest opportunity to live for his country without any type of racial discrimination.”The House approved the joint resolution declaring war on Japan later that afternoon, but it remained to be seen how or if Congress would address the racial inequality Mitchell had worked tirelessly to correct.World War II and Black AmericaFor Black Americans, the war presented new possibilities for military service, employment, and civil and political rights. Before Pearl Harbor, even as many American factories converted to war production, companies often did not hire Black workers. In January 1941, labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for a large protest in Washington, DC, on July 1, unless President Roosevelt took significant action to address discriminatory practices in defense industries and the military. On June 25, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in federal job training programs and defense production jobs—but not in the military—and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to help implement this directive.Representative Mitchell praised the President’s initiative but warned that ongoing employment discrimination at home was “the weakest point in our fight for world democracy.” For Mitchell, America’s efforts to defend democratic values overseas were imperiled by “our failure to practice these very principles among ourselves, and to extend the proper recognition and justice to the Negro who is an American citizen.” Mitchell’s remarks anticipated the “Double V” campaign pioneered in 1942 by the Pittsburgh Courier and embraced by Black newspapers and activists, which tied victory in the war abroad to the battle for fair employment and democratic rights at home.On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan coalition in the House began to push for legislation to protect the civil and political rights of African Americans and others facing discrimination. In September 1942, for example, Congress approved a bill to protect the voting rights of African Americans and women in the military—including a provision eliminating the poll tax for those serving overseas. Another proposal, designed to ban states from using a poll tax to restrict voting rights at home, passed the House on October 13 but died in the Senate.During the debate on the latter anti-poll tax bill, Mitchell, who was set to retire from Congress just a few months later, accused southern states that maintained poll taxes of undermining the war effort. The Chicago Representative urged his colleagues in both chambers to quickly pass the anti-poll tax bill. “Let us strike with all of our might, as this is a blow for freedom and democracy in our own house.”“Victory Legislation”Mitchell’s successor in the 78th Congress (1943–1945), William L. Dawson, was, like his predecessor, the only Black Member at the time. But he was joined two years later in the 79th Congress (1945–1947) by New York City councilman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem. Both lawmakers were Democratic Party stalwarts who went on to spend more than two decades in the House, rising to influential committee chairmanships. But during the crucial years of 1943 to 1946, as the United States waged war and transitioned to peace, Dawson, first by himself, and then with Powell, championed Mitchell’s call to use the war to push for civil rights legislation.When the 78th Congress opened on January 6, 1943, Representative Vito Anthony Marcantonio of East Harlem, New York, introduced a bill to ban the poll tax. Marcantonio had led the fight against poll taxes in the previous Congress. He insisted the bill would bolster the war effort, strengthening the nation’s position as the standard-bearer of democratic rights around the world. “This,” Marcantonio declared in 1942, “is victory legislation.” Though he was the lone member of the American Labor Party in Congress, Marcantonio’s proposal attracted support from Dawson and other northern Democrats, as well as Republicans like George Harrison Bender of Ohio, who said ending the poll tax would unite Americans and “strengthen our national will to fight to the finish for democratic institutions.”For more than a decade southern Members of Congress had prevented the House from passing antilynching and other civil rights legislation. Opponents insisted that states had the right to implement poll taxes, and that federal legislation outlawing them was unconstitutional and threatened to create social and political divisions during wartime. Marcantonio rejected these claims and pointed out that many White southerners, who could not afford to pay the required fee to vote, were also disenfranchised. To lead in the fight for “democracy all over the world,” he warned, the United States must “extend it now, before the war is over, to everyone within our own borders.”When the House Rules Committee, which decides whether a bill makes it to the floor, refused to act on Marcantonio’s legislation, the New York lawmaker used a discharge petition signed by 218 Members—a majority of the House—to release the bill from Rules and send it to the full House for consideration. On May 25, 1943, Dawson defended Marcantonio’s bill, pointing to his own lived experience. “I know more about what is the real ground of this subject matter,” Dawson declared, “than any man in this assembly.” He reminded the House that southern governments framed the poll tax as a source of revenue for local schools, yet he could not access quality public education during his youth in Georgia. Despite opposition from southern Democrats, the anti-poll tax bill passed the House, 265 to 110.Five months later, Representative Dawson testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the anti-poll tax bill. He reminded the subcommittee that the Constitution directs the federal government to ensure each state had a “republican form of government.” As long as a poll tax existed, Dawson said, “Democracy becomes a byword—our vaunted government of the people, by the people and for the people is a joke to the rest of the world when it appears that our Government is unable to fulfill its guaranty to its citizens in the matter of their sacred right of franchise.” Southern Senators, however, obstructed the progress of the bill, and amid the threat of a filibuster, the bill died.Fair EmploymentShortly after its creation in 1941, the FEPC had started to investigate cases of discrimination in hiring but had little power to broadly enforce the President’s executive order. In March 1944, Dawson introduced a resolution to create a special House committee to “make a full and complete study and investigation of race relations in the United States,” including discrimination in the military and in hiring.Although the House took no action on Dawson’s resolution, the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing later that month on funding for wartime federal agencies. In testimony before the committee, Dawson argued that “the welfare of the minority is inseparably linked to the welfare of the majority,” and insisted that the FEPC had demonstrably improved the lives of African-American workers during the war. In addition to jobs, Dawson explained, the FEPC “has done more to restore confidence in our institutions, hope in the future of our country, and to heighten morale by restoring belief in ultimate participation by all citizens in the benefits for which America now fights than any one Government agency operating at this time.” In May, Dawson, a World War I veteran, cited the sacrifices made by Black soldiers and the contributions of Black workers in war industries as he helped ward off attempts to cut funding for the FEPC.A much longer battle occurred in 1944 to determine the postwar fate of the FEPC, which FDR had only intended to be a temporary agency. In January 1944, Dawson, Democrat Thomas Edward Scanlon of Pennsylvania, and Republican Charles Marion La Follette of Indiana introduced identical bills to prohibit hiring discrimination and establish a permanent agency, known as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, to continue the work of the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee.In June, the House Committee on Labor held hearings on what was known as the Scanlon–Dawson–La Follette bills. Appearing as a witness, Dawson told the committee that the creation of a permanent FEPC would be “a step to assure the American public the consummation of a right, not the infliction of a wrong.” Ending workplace discrimination at home was also key to America’s postwar foreign policy objectives, he argued. Dawson reminded his colleagues that future trade partners, such as U.S. allies in South America, will be surprised to learn that “the fundamental human right of the opportunity to work and earn a livelihood is denied to American citizens because of race or national origin.” Moreover, these contradictions threatened to “destroy the faith and confidence of other nations in the sincerity of the American people.”Six months later, the House Labor Committee issued a report urging the House to adopt Scanlon’s version of the bill. But the 78th Congress ended before lawmakers could act.“Democracy here—now!”While Dawson was carrying the mantle of Black representation on Capitol Hill from 1943 to 1945, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was in New York, aiming to join the Chicago lawmaker in the House. Powell was a well-known minister, activist, and New York City councilman. In the two years leading up to the 1944 election, Powell benefited from the backing of The People’s Voice, the newspaper he owned and operated, which supported the Double V campaign and frequently derided southern segregationists as “American fascists”—allies of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany who needed to be confronted and defeated within the United States. Powell announced his intention to campaign for the new Harlem congressional district under a banner that read “Winning Democracy for the Negro is Winning the War for Democracy.” He easily won election to the 79th Congress in November 1944, becoming the first Black Member of Congress from New York. Powell and Dawson also became the first Black Representatives to serve together since 1891.During the first three months of his congressional career, Powell proposed an expansive legislative agenda designed to democratize immigration laws, voting rights, and access to public space and the workplace. He introduced legislation to provide a path to citizenship for immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, and India, along with bills to ban the poll tax, lynching, and segregation in interstate travel. Powell also drafted the only measure designed to eliminate segregation in the armed forces during World War II.As he had done in the 78th Congress, Marcantonio introduced an anti-poll tax bill in January and once again used a discharge petition to force the Rules Committee to release the bill. On June 12, Dawson and Powell advocated for the legislation on the House Floor. Speaking not long after the surrender of Germany, Powell cited the service of Black soldiers in the war, linking their actions abroad to their expectations for postwar America. “They fought to make the world safe. They intend to have democracy here—now!” The bill passed the House later that day, but languished under a threat of a filibuster in the Senate for the remainder of the 79th Congress.Fair employment legislation encountered similar resistance in the 79th Congress. In January 1945, Dawson and Powell introduced bills designed to ban hiring discrimination and establish a permanent FEPC. Dawson argued that his bill would ensure the war industries had enough labor to maintain production and quicken the pace of victory. “It is our duty to establish this committee now and thereby lay the foundation for fulfillment of the highest ideals of our democracy,” he said. Powell, who served on the House Labor Committee during his first term, joined the majority in recommending the House pass a fair employment bill in February.The FEPC bill stalled in the Rules Committee in the summer of 1945. In July, Dawson and Powell spoke on the floor to defend the role of the FEPC and urged continued funding, but the House only provided the means to sustain the agency through June 30, 1946. The fragile bipartisan coalition that passed anti-poll tax legislation was not strong enough to force a vote on a fair employment bill. On July 1, 1946, the FEPC closed, and the 79th Congress adjourned on August 2, 1946.A month later, in a letter to the head of a veterans’ organization, President Harry S. Truman lamented that the nation was still plagued by discrimination even after “a long and bitter war against intolerance and hatred in other lands.” Truman called Congress’s failure to end the poll tax and promote fair employment “a shameful aftermath of a war in which so many of our young men died so that racism might be put down for all time.” Change was still a long way off. It would be nearly two decades before Congress banned hiring discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and eliminated the poll tax through the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution the same year.During the war, Dawson and Powell recognized the global significance of the struggle for civil and political rights. In 1942, their predecessor, Representative Mitchell, had warned that democracy could only survive if it “shed the garment of hypocrisy.” By championing the war for democracy at home and abroad, America’s Black Representatives used their position to turn a spotlight on racial injustice within the boundaries of the United States.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 77th Cong., 1st sess. (8 December 1941): 9519–9520, 9526, 9537; Congressional Record, Appendix, 77th Cong., 1st sess. (24 July 1941): A3574–A3575; Congressional Record, House, 77th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 October 1942): 8120–8174; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (6 May 1943): 4092–4093; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (24 May 1943): 4807–4813; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (25 May 1943): 4843–4889; Congressional Record, House, 78th Cong., 2nd sess. (26 May 1944): 5059–5060; Congressional Record, House, 79th Cong., 1st sess. (12 June 1945): 5984; Congressional Record, House, 79th Cong., 1st sess. (12 July 1945): 7479, 7485; Hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on H.R. 7, Poll Taxes, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (1943): 1, 69–74; Hearings before the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Deficiencies, National War Agencies Appropriation Bill for 1945, Part 2, 78th Cong., 2nd sess. (1944): 606–607; Hearings before the House Committee on Labor, To Prohibit Discrimination in Employment, 78th Cong., 2nd sess. (1944): 22–23; House Committee on Labor, Prohibiting Discrimination in Employment Because of Race, Etc., 78th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 2016 (1944): 1–9; House Committee on Labor, The Fair Employment Practice Act, 79th Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 187 (1945): 5; H.R. 2014, 77th Cong. (1941); H. Res. 472, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 3986, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 4004, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 4005, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 1744, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1746, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1747, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1901, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1925, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 2183, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 2708, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 700, 79th Cong. (1945); H.R. 1743, 79th Cong. (1945); Public law 77-712, 56 Stat. 753 (1942); Public Law 78-372, 58 Stat. 533 (1944); Public Law 79-156, 59 Stat. 473 (1945); Arkansas State Press (Little Rock), 11 August 1944; Atlanta Constitution, 27 May 1944, 13 June 1945, 1 August 1946; Baltimore Sun, 1 July 1946; Chicago Bee, 14 January 1945; Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 September 1942, 27 March 1946; Christian Science Monitor, 13 June 1945; New York Times, 25 May 1943, 26 May 1943, 30 May 1945, 13 June 1945, 5 September 1946; People’s Voice (New York, NY), 20 June 1942, 28 November 1942; Pittsburgh Courier, 6 March 1943; Washington Post, 7 April 1944, 13 June 1945; Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (New York: Viking, 2022); Thomas A. Guglielmo, Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991); Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).
Edition for Educators — “I Can Only Raise My Voice” | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In 1870, Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina became the first African-American lawmaker elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The longest-serving Black Member of Congress during Reconstruction, Rainey advocated for the rights and welfare of Black Americans from his seat in Congress. “I can only raise my voice, and I would do it if it were the last time I ever did it, in defense of my rights and in the interests of my oppressed people,” Rainey declared on the House Floor in 1877.In honor of Black History Month, this Edition for Educators features the words of 15 of the nearly 200 Black men and women who have served in Congress, sharing their perspective regarding the fight to secure civil rights and the effort to commemorate that movement. The quotations below are drawn from the wealth of resources available on the Office of the Historian’s website, including the revised edition of Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2022, the biographical profiles which detail the lives and congressional careers of every former Black Member of Congress, and oral histories conducted by the Office of the Historian.The Fight for Civil Rights“Mr. Speaker, all these people ask is an equal chance in the race of life, and the same privileges and protection meted out to other classes of people in our land. We cannot engage in the industrial pursuits, educate our children, defend our lives and property in the courts, receive the comforts provided in our common conveyances necessary to our wives and little ones if not essentially so to us, and, in short, engage in the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as rational beings, when we are circumscribed within the narrowest possible limits on every hand, disowned, spit upon, and outraged in a thousand ways.”Alonzo J. Ransier of South Carolina, on the state of Black civil rights in 1874“And when every man, woman, and child can feel and know that his, her, and their rights are fully protected by the strong arm of a generous and grateful Republic, then we can all truthfully say that this beautiful land of ours, over which the Star Spangled Banner so triumphantly waves, is, in truth and in fact, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.’”John R. Lynch of Mississippi, during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1875“This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people—rising people, full of potential force.”George Henry White of North Carolina, upon retiring from Congress, 1901“If we allow segregation and the denial of constitutional rights under the Dome of the Capitol, where in God’s name will we get them?”Oscar De Priest of Illinois, on segregation in the House Restaurant, 1934“My rise has been constantly fighting. And I have had to fight doubly hard because I am a woman. I am a very different sort of person than usually emerges on the political scene.”Shirley Chisholm of New York, on her political career, 1969“I just cannot believe that here in 1975 on the floor of the Senate we are ready to say to the American people, black or white, red or brown, ‘You just cannot even be assured the basic right to vote in this country.’”Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, during 1975 Senate debate to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965“We are a people in search of a national community, attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal. . . . We cannot improve on the system of government, handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and to realize our destiny.”Barbara Jordan of Texas, in her keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, 1976“I believe that we should be doing everything in our power to make it easier for eligible American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote.”Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, remarks on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, 2019Audio Clip: “Just Permanent Interests” – William Lacy “Bill” Clay Sr. of MissouriVideo Clip: Women and the Civil Rights Movement – Yvonne Brathwaite BurkeAudio Clip: Bloody Sunday – John Lewis of GeorgiaCommemoration and Remembrance“The legislation before us will act as a national commitment to Dr. King’s vision and determination for an ideal America, which he spoke of the night before his death, where equality will always prevail.”Katie Hall of Indiana, on the establishment of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, 1983“I had a lingering kind of adoration in my own soul for Rosa. I always believed in my heart that it was Rosa who paved the way for me to go to Congress and to other places. I felt like it then became my purpose to give her some honor, to repay her.”Julia May Carson of Indiana, on honoring Rosa Parks in Congress, 1999Audio Clip: “We’re Seekers” – John Lewis of GeorgiaVideo Clip: Answering the Call to Run for Congress – Eva M. Clayton of North CarolinaVideo Clip: African Americans and Congress – Kendrick B. Meek of FloridaThis is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Portraits from the Committee on House Administration | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The Committee on House Administration (CHA) is a 20th-century creation, but many of its principal functions date to the beginnings of Congress. CHA’s duties are vital to keeping the national legislature running: oversight of day-to-day operations of the House, federal elections, and other far-flung responsibilities consolidated under the committee as part of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946.The committee’s chairman portrait tradition dates to 1969, when the painted likeness of its fifth chairman arrived, and continues into the 21st century.Samuel FriedelThe portrait of Chairman Sam Friedel in 1969 was the first painting made for the Committee on House Administration. Friedel represented a Maryland district in the 1950s and 1960s, and chaired the committee for four years, from 1967 through 1970. Portrait artist Henry Cooper, also a Marylander, was born Gregor Kipermann in 1906 and moved from Ukraine to the United States as a little boy. Cooper studied both music and painting in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia. By the 1940s he was working as a portrait artist and successful cantor at synagogues in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Cooper’s move to Maryland in the 1940s led to commissions from Baltimore patrons, including Chairman Friedel. Cooper and Friedel shared a common family background. The Friedel and Kipermann families were both part of the great wave of Eastern European Jews who came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Friedel grew up in Baltimore and served the city for more than 30 years in the statehouse, city council, and ultimately Congress.Charles RoseArtist Jeffrey Martin worked on portraits of two Committee on House Administration chairmen—Charlie Rose and Bill Thomas—at the same time, in 2001. In the portrait of Rose, the artist has placed the chairman in a location that, although not identifiable, is reminiscent of Capitol spaces. The highly polished mahogany dais indicates a committee hearing room. The fluted pilaster that anchors the left side of the painting is a common sight on both the interior and exterior of the Capitol. The verdant background, however, gives the sense of being outdoors. The combination may have been deliberate, reflecting the committee’s involvement in virtually every aspect of House operations, inside and out.Bill ThomasWhen his portrait was unveiled, Chairman Bill Thomas had just left his position on the Committee on House Administration to take up the gavel of the Ways and Means Committee. The ceremony feted Thomas as much for his new role as his former one. Artist Jeffrey Martin showed the chairman in neither committee room. Instead, Thomas stands before a window on the West Front of the Capitol, with the Washington Monument in the distance. Martin, a native of New Jersey, studied at the Art Students League in New York City before settling in Pennsylvania.Vernon EhlersChairman Vernon Ehlers continued the Committee on House Administration’s practice of using portrait settings that are not committee spaces. Here, artist Ron Sherr places Ehlers in a room with a fireplace and paneled walls. Ehlers sits in the foreground in a leather chair, the red upholstery of which reinforces the rosy hues found throughout the painting.Check out historic records and artifacts from the Committee on House Administration:
Edition for Educators—New Perspectives on the Speakership | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Almost nine years ago, the Office of the Historian published an Edition for Educators on the Speakers of the House. In the near decade since, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art and Archives have added an array of new resources, research, and artifacts that have richly informed how the Speakership has evolved since 1789. In this month’s Edition for Educators, we’re featuring some of that considerable new material now available on the History, Art & Archives website.Featured Publications“A Chair Made Illustrious”: A Concise History of the U.S. House Speakership The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives was the first federal office created in the Constitution and has been at the forefront of America’s nation-building for more than two centuries. As the head of America’s popularly elected branch of government, the Office of the Speaker has shaped and has been shaped by the democratic forces coursing through the country. It is impossible to separate the Speakership from the people it serves and the history they share.This booklet, downloadable in PDF format, is about the individuals who served as Speaker and the contours and rhythms of their office. It is a story about the constellation of political movements, lawmakers, aides, and everyday people who have shaped the Speakership in myriad ways. In large measure, the history of the Speakership is also a history of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it is ultimately a history of America and its experiment in democratic self-government.Featured Institutional InformationSpeakers of the House in Numerical Order and Speaker Service In an effort to present information on House Speaker service in new and more helpful ways, this chart provides a numerical list of Speakers as well as their length of service in the chair.Speaker Elections Decided by Multiple Ballots The House has elected a Speaker 129 times since 1789. This page provides further information on that election history and a chart delineating the 16 Speaker elections which required multiple ballots.Vacancies in the Office of Speaker of the House This chart lists vacancies in the Speakership that occurred outside the normal transition between individual Congresses. The page also lists further resources regarding vacancies in the Speaker’s Office.Speaker of the House Fast Facts Congressional scholars and trivia enthusiasts alike can find a wealth of information on this page, including “fast facts” and notable outliers in the history of the Speakership.Featured HighlightsThe First Speaker of the House, Frederick A.C. Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania On June 4, 1801, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After serving in the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania state house, Muhlenberg won a seat in the First Congress (1789–1791). On April 1, 1789, Muhlenberg was elected Speaker of the House. Muhlenberg’s election was something of a political compromise that symbolized the sectional balance of the young republic’s new government: President George Washington of Virginia was a southerner; Vice President John Adams of Massachusetts was a New Englander; and Speaker Muhlenberg was from the Mid-Atlantic.The Shortest Period of Service for a Speaker on Record On the final day of the 40th Congress (1867–1869), Theodore Pomeroy of New York became Speaker of the House for one day—the shortest period of service for a Speaker on record. When House Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana resigned to become Vice President in the incoming Ulysses S. Grant administration, the House chose Pomeroy, who was retiring the following day, to succeed Colfax.The Speaker Election of Sam Rayburn of Texas On September 16, 1940, the House of Representatives selected Sam Rayburn of Texas to serve as Speaker for the remainder of the 76th Congress (1939–1941). First elected to the House in 1912, Rayburn rose up through the Democratic ranks to serve as Majority and Minority Leader as well as chairman of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. As the result of the death of Speaker William Bankhead of Alabama, Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts introduced House Resolution 602 to name Rayburn Speaker of the House. With no objection or fanfare, the House agreed to the resolution and Rayburn received the oath of office.Featured Objects from the House CollectionSpeaker Portrait Collection The House of Representatives Speaker Portrait Collection, located in the Speaker’s Lobby off the chamber floor, is a vital visual record of House history. The Speakers of the House have shaped the country in innumerable ways, and the collection, as noted in the bronze plaque hung in the lobby, was conceived as a “tribute to their worth to the nation.” A portrait of the first Speaker of the House, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, anchors the display. Portraits of other Speakers, painted in a range of styles, line the walls of the lobby in all directions, and include the post-modern realist look of Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts by Robert Vickery, and the Impressionist depiction of Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts by Edmund Tarbell.View Speaker Portraits in the House Collection.Featured BlogsHenry Clay’s On-Again, Off-Again Relationship with the House Henry Clay of Kentucky had one of the most superlative political careers in American history. A lawyer by training, Clay served in almost every level of government possible in the nineteenth century. On top of that, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 and ran for President three times over three decades on three different party tickets. Despite being a political journeyman, Clay’s true home, he confessed, was in the House. He served as Speaker—and resigned from the Speakership—on three separate occasions, but the exact timeline of his House career isn’t as straightforward as we might expect from one of America’s foremost statesmen.A Mob in Search of a Speaker During the chaotic first two weeks of the 26th Congress (1839–1841) in December 1839, three separate men presided over the House of Representatives: Hugh Garland, House Clerk during the previous Congress; Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, in a position created specifically for the former President; and finally Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, the youngest Speaker of the House ever to hold the office.“The Speaker Bluffed You” — Joe Cannon and the 1910 Motion to Vacate the Chair Longtime House leader Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois once said he lost and won the Speakership on March 19, 1910. His reversal of fortune had hinged on a daring gamble. A successful vote to remove Cannon as chairman of the Rules Committee earlier in the day dealt a major blow to the Speaker’s aura of invincibility, but he had no intention of folding. Rather than resign, Cannon invoked the House’s procedure to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant and challenged lawmakers to vote him out. Politics was not poker. But that day, facing the highest possible stakes, Cannon called the biggest bluff of his career.A Majority or a Coalition? The Speaker Election of 1917 On April 2, 1917, 428 Members-elect of the 65th Congress (1917–1919) gathered under the looming shadow of global conflict to open the new legislative term. But first, congressional action was bound up with a basic question: who would serve as Speaker in the new Congress, so that the House could be organized and receive the President? The problem was one of simple math. The 65th Congress featured the closest party split in American history. Just one seat separated the two major parties.The Rise of Speaker Longworth: Velvet on Iron On December 3, 1923, just hours into Opening Day of the 68th Congress (1923–1925), Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, the newly installed House Republican Leader, surveyed his fractious majority as it deadlocked over the election of the Speaker. A clash between progressive Republicans and mainline GOP stalwarts had been years in the making and erupted as a major early test of Longworth’s leadership. But for Longworth it was also edifying and set the foundation for a period in House history in which the Speakership grew more powerful than it had in over a decade. Starting in 1923, Longworth set out to ensure that so long as he wielded power, he never lacked the recourse the Speaker needed to control the House.Featured RecordsSpeaker Cannon’s Trunk During a previous era in American history, carpenters at the House of Representatives constructed basic trunks for retiring Members to transport their papers, including the one used by Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois in the early 1900s. But this trunk did not end up in Cannon’s home state of Illinois. Instead, it remained hidden in the attic of the first House Office Building until its discovery by a congressional staffer in 1994.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
Velvet on Iron: Longworth Administers Party Discipline | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
This is the second part of a two-part story. The first part discussed Longworth’s rise through party leadership.On December 7, 1925, Opening Day of the 69th Congress (1925–1927), a triumphant Nicholas Longworth of Ohio stood atop the House rostrum to claim the gavel and take the oath of office as Speaker. Longworth, who first won election to the House in 1902, had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday just a month earlier. He had long wanted to run the House and now found himself the thirty-eighth Speaker in large part because he had played the long game on Capitol Hill.For several Congresses, Longworth’s ambitions to move into leadership had been clear. In 1919, he helped install his predecessor, Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts, earning a seat on the Republican Party’s steering committee in the House in the process. In 1923, as the new Republican Leader, Longworth brokered a deal with Insurgent Republicans, mostly progressives from the Upper Midwest, allowing Gillett to keep the Speaker’s gavel for a third term. Longworth then kept the majority functioning at a high clip for two years, despite repeated conflict between the progressive and establishment wings of the party. He cut deals, cajoled holdouts, calmed frayed nerves. In the presidential election year of 1924, Republicans expanded their majority in the House.Still, some questioned if the genial Longworth had the mettle, or even the attention span, to lead the fractious conference. Naysayers dismissed him as a dilettante—urbane in his interests, over-the-top in his attire, and preoccupied with the trappings of haute couture. “In his twenty five years of public service the exercise of no single talent stands out so characteristically as his aptitude with the violin,” sniffed a correspondent in a typical feature story on the Speaker-designate. Would his extracurricular interests eclipse his interest in doing the hard work running the Republican Conference?Almost immediately after taking the gavel, it became apparent that such doubters had erred badly in their estimate of Longworth, who firmly charted a new course—pivoting from peacemaker to party disciplinarian.Insurgents Back “Fighting Bob”The rift in the Republican Conference between progressives and establishment lawmakers that Longworth confronted as Speaker had been simmering for decades by the time he assumed the chair.By 1924, the situation seemed to have reached a tipping point. In a remarkable breakdown in party cohesion, 13 House Republicans supported the presidential campaign of progressive Republican Wisconsin Senator Bob La Follette in his challenge to the incumbent Republican President, Calvin Coolidge. In the election that November, Coolidge won comfortably, and La Follette came in a distant third.But on Capitol Hill the fallout from the election reverberated well into 1925. Senate Republicans purged La Follette from their conference and stripped him of a committee chairmanship. In the House, tensions lingered for months over what to do with the 13 Insurgents (including nearly the entire Wisconsin House delegation), who had cast their lot with La Follette in the presidential election but who had nevertheless won election to the following Congress as Republicans.In late February 1925, roughly a week before the 68th Congress (1923–1925) expired and with the presidential contest still very much on everyone’s mind, the House GOP gathered to pick its nominee for Speaker for 69th Congress. Frederick Gillett had moved on to a seat in the U.S. Senate, leaving the Speakership vacant. Pointedly, the GOP conference prevented the Insurgents who had backed La Follette from participating in the party vote. Longworth topped Appropriations Chairman Martin Madden of Illinois, 140 to 85.Immediately after the election, Republicans debated whether to punish the renegades by stripping them of their committee assignments. But the party meeting adjourned with no clear resolution. With the new Congress not set to convene until early December 1925, it would be months until the fate of the progressives would come into focus.Déjà vuThe Republican Party in the House heading into the 69th Congress looked significantly different than the party which had controlled the House in the previous session. Progressive Republicans had often held the balance of power in 1923. But mainstream Republicans had picked up more than 20 seats in the 1924 elections, enough to erase the influence of the Insurgents.After months of uncertainty, many wondered whether the remaining progressive Republicans would vote for Longworth for Speaker on the floor as the new session approached. The Insurgents quickly relieved any doubt, releasing a defiant statement in which they refused to “concede the right of Mr. Longworth or any other so-called leader to put them on trial for their Republicanism.”The new Congress opened on December 7, 1925. Still stinging from the snub of having been barred from the GOP’s February nomination meeting, the Insurgents struck first by nominating the dean of the Wisconsin delegation, Henry Allen Cooper. Cooper, who had also been nominated for Speaker in 1923, likely seemed an irksome nominee for party leaders. He had played a prominent role at the 1924 GOP National Convention, denouncing President Coolidge and backing La Follette’s renegade candidacy.James Archibald Frear of Wisconsin read from a prepared statement as he placed Cooper’s name into nomination. Frear criticized the February 1925 conference meeting in which Longworth was nominated as having been called without the “authority” of the Members. He likened it to “the old discredited method to bind and gag the Members in secret.” Worse still, after securing the nomination, Longworth had browbeat the progressives for months in private and, most aggravating, in public by telling the press their Republicanism would be measured against a single yardstick: whether they voted for him as Speaker on Opening Day of the 69th Congress.“The Wisconsin delegation in Congress to-day finds itself being challenged by those assuming to be in control of the Republican Party by threats and intimidation on the one hand and by the offer of party recognition and its favors and patronage on the other,” Frear declared on the floor. “We refuse to compromise, or to bargain with Mr. Longworth or with any other Member of the House, on an issue affecting our rights as Representatives in Congress to vote our convictions of duty to our constituents and the country under our official oaths.”Moments later, Longworth won the Speaker contest easily with 229 votes. Cooper tallied 13. Two years earlier, the Insurgents had suffered few consequences for voting against Speaker Gillett. Longworth wanted to convey a different message. The renegades would pay dearly.“I Believe in Responsible Party Government”The bill came due quickly.In his inaugural address as Speaker, Longworth committed himself to “responsible party government” in which the members of the majority party remained “united upon basic principles and policies” and followed the direction set by party leaders.Within days Longworth purged the progressives from every position of power they had once held. Headlines across the country blared the news. “Lop Off Insurgent Heads,” urged the Los Angeles Times. “House Plums of Badger Rebels Are Taken Away,” the Chicago Tribune gleefully declared.Each of the 13 progressives who had broken ranks with the GOP suffered indignities. Some were tossed from committees. Republican leaders stripped others of prominent leadership positions or dispatched them to the bottom rungs of the seniority ladder. John Mandt Nelson of Wisconsin lost his chairmanship of the Committee on Elections and was booted from the Rules Committee. Cooper, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, was demoted to the rank of most junior member on the panel. Other Members of the Wisconsin delegation faced similar fates: Florian Lampert (Patents Committee) and Joseph David Beck (Labor Committee) lost their seats, and for his efforts as Insurgent spokesman James Frear was dumped from the Ways and Means Committee. New York’s Fiorello Henry La Guardia (Post Office and Post Roads) and North Dakota’s James Herbert Sinclair (Agriculture) also were removed from committees important to their urban and rural constituencies.In surveying the carnage, the Tribune found in Longworth’s actions the echoes of an earlier era of Republican rule. “Czar Nicholas they are calling him—this pleasant, witty, urbane, yet forceful speaker, Nicholas Longworth, who now rules from the throne of Czar Reed and Czar Cannon,” the paper’s correspondent wrote approvingly. “So the politicians are dubbing him as the result of this first day’s proceedings in the house of representatives [sic] of the 69th congress—proceedings which reminded the veterans of the way they used to do things in the good old days before the insurgents began to insurge and the uplifters to uplift.”It wasn’t a return to the halcyon days of partisan governance entirely. Longworth had access to fewer pressure points than the GOP czars who ruled the House a generation earlier—Maine’s Thomas Brackett Reed or Illinois’ Joseph G. Cannon—who not only rendered rulings on the floor but structured the very terms of that debate by chairing the Rules Committee. Nor were lawmakers from both parties required to beseech Longworth for a plum committee post, as they did in the Reed–Cannon era when the Speakers doled out all committee assignments in the House, irrespective of party affiliation.Still, Longworth restored the prestige of the Speakership, in part, by holding on to the organizational powers of the floor leader when he assumed the Speaker’s chair. He refused to give up the ex officio post on the GOP's Steering Committee that he had held as Majority Leader, and he insisted that his loyal lieutenants—including the new Majority Leader John Quillin Tilson and Albert Vestal of Indiana—also sit on the steering committee. From there, Longworth all but dictated the work of the GOP’s committee on committees and stacked the Rules Committee with other allies. In such a manner, in ways both overt and subtle, he approximated the influence of the earlier czars of the House. After watching the new Speaker take charge, a local newspaper noted that Longworth was unafraid, “to pull the unseen wires” that often control the work of the House.But Longworth was not just a transactional Speaker. He persuaded and led with charisma and wit that endeared House colleagues. Years later, when he died suddenly in his prime, the Chicago Daily Tribune eulogized Longworth as the rare lawmaker whose reputation did not fully encompass his effectiveness. “In the drawing rooms of Washington he always was the gentleman of faultless dress and manner,” a correspondent wrote. “But none there was more democratic nor who could fraternize in greater good fellowship with the roughest roughnecks of the political highways and byways. He was a prince of good mixers, a wit of renown, whose repartee sparkled in debate on the floor of the house and the best of all story tellers in the recesses of the cloakrooms.”In the first moments of his Speakership, Longworth set clear his expectations for his party and demonstrated to every member of his conference the firmness and resolve that some had once questioned. No one again mistook Longworth’s sparkle and panache for inability.“In a manner [Longworth] is so light and airy that he might be said to have the specific gravity of feathers,” a perceptive observer noted, even as the Insurgents had awaited their Opening Day fate. “In action, when the favorable moment for action has come, he has the weight of a lead shot.”Sources: Congressional Record, House, 69th Cong., 1st sess. (7 December 1925): 378–382; William Hard, “Nicholas Longworth,” April 1925, The American Review of Reviews, vol. 71 (no. 423); Donald C. Bacon, “Nicholas Longworth: The Genial Czar,” in Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership over Two Centuries, ed. Roger Davidson et al. (New York: Westview Press, 1998); Richard B. Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney, Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1983); Clara Longworth De Chambrun, The Making of Nicholas Longworth: Annals of an American Family (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933); Ronald M. Peters Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); David Thelen, Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1976); Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob LaFollette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003); David Greenberg, “Calvin Coolidge: Campaigns and Elections,” The Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/campaigns-and-elections; “1924 Election Results,” in American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/1924; Baltimore Sun, 7 December 1925 and 10 April 1931; Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 December 1925, 11 December 1925, 10 April 1931; Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1925; New York Times, 28 February 1925; Washington Post, 28 February 1925.
The Records of a Growing Nation: Expansion and Reform (1801–1861) | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
As the United States grew in size and population, it grappled with the challenges of its expansion. Congress began the complicated process of dividing and parceling out land, much of it already inhabited, grappled with pro- and antislavery activism, and started to determine what kinds of support and relief the government should provide its citizens. Learn more about this turbulent foundational period with these records from the House of Representatives.Transcriptions and downloadable PDFs of these records are available at the links below.Discussion Questions:How did the geography of the United States influence the expansion of the nation?How did the growth of the nation’s economy and size influence the movement of citizens?How did expansion positively and negatively affect different groups?How did Congress respond to the challenges of the country’s development?Was the United States living up to its assertion that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?How did events during this period influence later events in the country’s development like the Civil War and the expansion of social welfare programs?1803, Thomas Jefferson’s MessageOn January 18, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent this message, which focused on the expansion of commercial interests to the West, to Congress. Jefferson also proposed a small expedition that might range “even to the Western Ocean,” which became the Lewis and Clark Expedition. During their 8,000-mile journey, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark drew maps of the terrain, identified unknown plants and animals, conferred with Native American inhabitants, and returned with valuable discoveries about the continent.1814, New Madrid Earthquakes ReliefThe area near New Madrid, Missouri, experienced three devastating earthquakes between 1811 and 1812. The cumulative damage prompted state leaders to pen this petition imploring Congress to provide relief. In 1815, Congress compensated victims by authorizing the sale of public lands of “like quantity” to those whose land had been destroyed by the earthquakes, making it the first disaster relief act.1829, Memorial of the CherokeesThe Cherokee Nation, protesting the state of Georgia’s attempt to extend its authority over their lands, wrote this memorial in 1829. Written in both English and Cherokee, this document is a plaintive appeal to Congress to remain on their ancestral lands. On May 26, 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which precipitated the forced relocation of the Cherokee to lands west of the Mississippi River in 1838.1838, Polly Lemon’s Land ClaimSometime before 1828, Polly Lemon settled a homestead in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, on property that the military later seized for the use of Fort Jesup. Determined to continue her life in Louisiana, but with limited options for action as an uneducated woman, Lemon petitioned Congress to grant her a land claim elsewhere in the state. In 1839, Congress passed H.R. 294, granting her 640 acres in the northwestern region of the state.1854, Petition against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854As the nation expanded west and territories petitioned for statehood, lawmakers engineered the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to maintain a balance of power in Congress between free and slave states. But the popular sovereignty clause in the Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to upset the equilibrium on Capitol Hill by potentially creating several new pro-slavery states. In this signed petition, 34 citizens of St. Joseph County, Michigan, voiced their concern that the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 would open the American West to slavery.1856, Bill to Support Cholera ResearchIn 1856, the House referred this bill requesting funds to support research into the causes of cholera, a bacterial infection spread through contaminated water that often ravaged armies and navies, to the Military Affairs Committee. The legislation would have provided $30,000 to support a committee of specialists sponsored by the American Medical Association to use advances in scientific study and equipment to “elucidate as clearly as possible every cause bearing upon the patient to produce the disease; and also to make the most critical examination of those who have become its victims.”Interested in more records from this era?1806, Petition to Relinquish Land1830, Ohio Women on Removal of Native American Tribesca. 1836, Navigation of Mississippi Riverca. 1848–1855, Mexican Boundary Survey Sketch1856, Memorial for a Pacific Railroad
Best of the Blog in 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
In 2023, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art and Archives published 34 blog posts examining an array of stories, people, and objects from U.S. House of Representatives. This year, blog authors detailed the inspiration and process behind the portraits of Joseph Rainey of South Carolina and Shirley Chisholm of New York and offered a closer look at new portraits in the House Collection. Blog posts from the office’s curators and archivists also regularly updated readers about other new additions to the House Collection and Records Search.Blogs from the Office of the Historian addressed a wide range of parliamentary functions, legislation, and lawmakers.Teachers and students will find handy reference information in the annual National History Day post, a deep dive on congressional primary sources (in two parts!), and a review of House History publications available online.As the year draws to a close, we’re featuring six of our favorite blog posts from 2023.The “Imperishable Truth”: Early Efforts to Commemorate African-American History in CongressOn March 3, 1879, in the final hours of the 45th Congress (1877–1879), Representative Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina requested permission to print remarks in the Congressional Record that reflected on the course of the Republican-led effort to rebuild the South after the war called Reconstruction. Rainey wasn’t alone in his effort to acknowledge significant moments in African-American history. It is little remembered today, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black Members of Congress regularly followed Rainey’s lead. In congressional debates and legislation, Black lawmakers proposed and often secured funding for historic preservation efforts, public exhibitions, commemorative events, and historical studies to recognize individual and collective achievements by African Americans.Remote Possibilities: The Early History of Videoconferencing Technology in the HouseOn the morning of October 9, 1991—long before the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of Zoom calls and online meetings—George E. Brown of California, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, gaveled his committee to order in what appeared to be a science fiction theater. A large screen, powered by a rear projector, towered at the center of the committee room. A camera, perched atop the screen, focused on the chairman, while two additional cameras on tripods recorded the rest of the dais. Behind the projector stood two black towers, each filled with state-of-the-art computer equipment and outfitted with a television monitor.“¡Unidos!”: Building a Hispanic American Political CoalitionIn October 1971, more than a thousand people from across the country descended upon Washington, DC, on a mission to transform U.S. politics. They were Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and members of other Hispanic-American communities. They had been called to the nation’s capital in part by two visionary lawmakers—Representative Edward Roybal of California and Representative Herman Badillo of New York—with the goal of assembling their political forces into a “National Spanish-Speaking Coalition.”A Tale of Two StudiosWhy does the House Collection have so many photographs of multiple, surprisingly amateurish studio sets? The images are all obviously staged, and each one shows a Member of Congress at a desk in a faux office with an unconvincing view of the Capitol. It turns out that for decades, Members trooped to one of two photography studios in the House. One was for Republicans, and the other for Democrats. They worked in adjacent spaces but reportedly did not share equipment or even pleasantries. Nonetheless, the two backdrops had the same general feel. Each one was dressed to look like a congressional office, with a desk, chair, and window looking out onto a photograph of the Capitol.“The Speaker Bluffed You” — Joe Cannon and the 1910 Motion to Vacate the ChairLongtime House leader Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois once said he lost and won the Speakership on March 19, 1910. His reversal of fortune had hinged on a daring gamble. Cannon didn’t technically lose the Speakership on March 19. But he did lose the Speakership’s main source of power when a coalition of House Democrats and progressive Republicans, known as Insurgents, voted to expand the size of the Rules Committee and remove Cannon as the committee’s chairman. Serving simultaneously as Speaker and chairman had given Cannon near total control over the House’s legislative machinery. The Rules vote dealt a major blow to Cannon’s aura of invincibility, but he had no intention of folding. Rather than resign, Cannon invoked the House’s procedure to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant and challenged the coalition to vote him out. Politics was not poker. But that day, facing the highest possible stakes, Cannon called the biggest bluff of his career.Who Controls the House?: The Discharge Petition and Legislative Power in the New Deal CongressIllinois’s Henry Rainey was known for his independence and had spent the bulk of his political career working to democratize the lawmaking process. But the demands of the Great Depression tested the new Speaker. The question became whether—or how—he could balance his longstanding commitment to decentralized power in the House with his responsibilities as Speaker. Nowhere would this be clearer than in his approach to the discharge petition, the parliamentary maneuver which introduced a motion to discharge committees from further consideration of legislation and force it to the Floor.Follow the blog in 2024 for more House history, art, and records!
The House’s Puzzling Pastime: 23 for 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
The Office of the House Historian invites you to put your heads together with your historically-inclined friends to solve our latest crossword puzzle.In what has become an annual tradition for Crossword Puzzle Day on December 21, we are pleased to present 23 Clues for 2023. Each historical trivia clue has a numerical tie-in. You can find all answers on the History, Art & Archives website. You can also download PDF versions of the puzzle and the answer key. Happy puzzling!
Recent Artifacts Online, Winter 2023 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
What’s new on Collections Search? Nineteen postcards, a studio set, and an intern making photocopies, that’s what.Congressional Intern at a Photocopier“In the 1960s and 1970s, congressional interns burned their draft cards outside the Capitol, forged documents to insert their opinions into the Congressional Record and leaked confidential information to congressional committees,” a writer for the Los Angeles Times reminisced in 1982. “But the latest crop of interns,” he mused, “is a tamer lot.” In this 1981 photograph, a congressional intern in a suit jacket and tie serenely makes photocopies.Washington, D.C., the Mall Looking Toward the Capitol PostcardWith the bright white Capitol and brick red Smithsonian Institution Building in front of a distant pink and blue horizon, this postcard highlights the colors of Washington around 1908. The National Mall resembles a green forest at the foot of the Capitol. From left to right across the center of the postcard, a train pulls out of a Baltimore and Potomac railroad station, puffing little white clouds of smoke.Ileana Ros-LehtinenStanding behind a podium with two microphones, pointing with the index finger of her left hand, Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen appears to be making a point or calling on a reporter during a press conference. In the background, a strategically placed window offers an incredible, close-up view of the Capitol. In fact, this photograph, like many other House portraits from the second half of the 20th century, was taken on a studio set with a fake Capitol view.Chester Earl Holifield PostcardIn this campaign postcard, the Capitol dome, official flags, and shelves of law books made Chet Holifield the very picture of a powerful government official. But look closely. The office gewgaws distract from the right edge, where the set’s dressing gives way to a tattered temporary wall.Can’t get enough of our postcards? Here are a few more recently digitized ones.For additional new paintings, photographs, and objects on Collections Search, check out other Recent Artifacts Online blogs.
Edition for Educators—Prohibition | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On January 16, 1919, the requisite three-quarters of the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol. One year later, at midnight on January 17, 1920, the United States officially went dry, but the battle over booze was far from over.Over the next 14 years, the nation would live with Prohibition, debating its merits and questioning its effectiveness. In December 1932, Illinois Representative Henry Rainey offered legislation to repeal the policy, and exactly one year later, on December 5, 1933, Utah became the thirty-sixth and final state necessary to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing Prohibition.In recognition of the ninetieth anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, this month’s Edition for Educators brews up a review of Prohibition and the House of Representatives.Featured Educational MaterialsPrimary Source Set: Prohibition Dive into America’s dry period with this primary source set on Prohibition. This collection of House records and photographs is accompanied by a brief contextual essay, activities, educational videos, and questions to facilitate student discussion and analysis.A Closer Look: The Debate Over ProhibitionFeatured ExhibitionProhibition Dries Up After Prohibition went into effect in 1920, women lawmakers responded to the law’s effects on their constituents. Included as part of “The First Women in Congress” online exhibit, this feature presents the earliest women Representatives’ diverse views on one of the primary legislative issues of the day.Featured HighlightsThe Volstead Act On October 28, 1919, the 66th Congress (1919–1921) overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the National Prohibition Act. Known as the Volstead Act (H.R. 6810), after Judiciary Chairman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, this law implemented a federal enforcement system for the prohibition of alcohol outlined in the Eighteenth Amendment.The Infamous House Bootlegger Known as the “Man in the Green Hat” On October 24, 1930, the Washington Post published the first installment of an expose by the “Man in the Green Hat,” a bootlegger—later identified as George Cassiday—who sold alcohol to Representatives from rooms in the House and Senate office buildings during the 1920s. As an underemployed World War I veteran, Cassiday turned to the illegal alcohol trade during the Prohibition Era. From 1920 to 1925, he sold spirits to House Members in the House Office Building (now Cannon).The Ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment On December 5, 1932, Representative Henry T. Rainey of Illinois introduced H.J. Res. 480 to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol in the United States. Introduced during the second session of the 72nd Congress (1931–1933), Rainey’s joint resolution was the first step in a year-long process to repeal Prohibition in the United States.Featured Objects from the House CollectionFind more objects and images related to Prohibition in our Collections Search.Featured RecordsStudent Resolution for Prohibition In 1917, a group of high school students from Flemington, New Jersey, submitted a resolution to their Representative, Elijah Hutchinson, supporting a bill introduced by Congressman Asbury Lever in support of the prohibition of alcohol to conserve resources on the eve of America’s entry into World War I.California Hop Brewers Telegram The president of the California Hop Brewers Association, George Hewlett, sent this telegram to Representative John E. Raker of California protesting “against threatened action of federal government prohibiting brewing of beer.”Find more House Records related to Prohibition in Records Search.Featured BlogsLegislating the Liquor Law—Prohibition and the House Summers in Washington, DC, are always hot, but the dog days of 1919 were particularly heated as Congress held ongoing debates over how best to enforce a ban on the sale and transportation of alcohol in a sweeping new policy known as Prohibition.House-Brewed Home Brew Representative John Philip Hill of Maryland tried very hard to get arrested by the Commissioner of Prohibition. During Prohibition, Hill made wine and hard cider at his home in Baltimore. He sent a letter to the commissioner informing him of the beverages. Then he threw a huge shindig, inviting the public—and the commissioner—to sample his swill. The Maryland Representative felt that the law was “hypocritical, crooked and marked by two standards,” and he intended to protest it with a party.Unprohibited On February 20, 1933, Speaker John N. Garner of Texas struggled to maintain order on the House Floor as Thomas Blanton, a “dry,” made a final stand in support of Prohibition. Garner impatiently tapped the inkstand on the rostrum as Representatives booed and shouted “Vote, vote!” After the House voted to repeal Prohibition, the galleries and halls overflowed with the applause of spectators. Dismantling the legislative structure of the Eighteenth Amendment took nearly a year.This is part of a series of blog posts for educators highlighting the resources available on History, Art & Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives. For lesson plans, fact sheets, glossaries, and other materials for the classroom, see the website's Education section.
James Madison, the First Congress, and the Roots of America’s Direct Elections: “Essential to Every Plan of Free Government” | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On April 1, 1789, the U.S. House of Representatives achieved a working quorum for the first time in New York City’s Federal Hall—a full three weeks after the First Federal Congress had been scheduled to convene on March 4. Travel woes had contributed to the delay. Among the nearly three dozen Representatives who had made it to New York was James Madison, who had arrived on March 14 after completing a 330-mile journey over what he called the “unparalleled badness of the roads” from his home in central Virginia.The sparse attendance in the House stemmed from another consideration as well: some states had yet to even finish holding elections for Congress. New York and New Jersey were still counting votes from their respective elections. North Carolina and Rhode Island did not hold elections until the fall of 1789 and summer of 1790, respectively.Madison, who is widely credited as the architect of America’s system of direct House elections, openly wondered if the new government would succeed given that the states seemed to struggle to elect their lawmakers. “I see on the lists of [incoming] Representatives a very scanty proportion who will share in the drudgery of business,” Madison complained to Edmund Randolph, who became the country’s first Attorney General.Although the House’s system of direct elections is long familiar to Americans living in the twenty-first century, the practice was brand new for many eighteenth-century Americans—including Madison. Prior to the first federal elections, state legislatures had been responsible for selecting Delegates to the Continental Congresses. Following the ratification of the Constitution, America embarked on a new experiment in representational government: the direct election of House Members by the people.The contours of this experiment can be seen in Madison’s own career. His experience helping author the Constitution, running for office, and serving in Congress traced the arc of this important transition in America’s history as a democracy.Origins of Direct ElectionsIn the summer of 1787, 36-year-old James Madison of Virginia attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he became a leading proponent of the creation of a powerful national government. Madison’s proposal, known as the Virginia Plan, provided the general framework for what would become the U.S. federal system. After much compromise, the Delegates to the convention created a new government led by a bicameral legislature that included the House of Representatives and the Senate. The individual state governments would select members of the Senate. But the House was to be populated by lawmakers directly elected by the people, a feature that Madison called “essential to every plan of free government.” Otherwise, he cautioned, “the people would be lost sight of altogether” and the nation’s new democracy would struggle to survive.Madison’s plan built on efforts across the states to expand the voting rolls. Prior to the American Revolution, only White males who held property and were not indentured servants could vote for colonial or state assembly members. In turn, those legislators voted for the Delegates who served in the Continental and Confederation Congresses. But between 1776 and 1787, municipal voting rights in urban areas expanded significantly as states revised their constitutions to include taxpayers, regardless of property ownership status, as voters. The pool of officeholding candidates also expanded beyond landowners to include middle-class and working-class men.After the Constitution went to the states for ratification in the fall of 1787, Madison and two compatriots—John Jay and Alexander Hamilton—described the benefits of the new government in the Federalist, a series of articles that appeared in newspapers between the fall of 1787 and the summer of 1788. Madison focused on direct elections in two essays, in particular. In Federalist 10, he noted that a democracy with a large voting base would help defend against what he called “the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.” Moreover, if those Representatives were “chosen by a greater number of citizens,” Madison reasoned, “the suffrages of the people . . . will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.” In Federalist 52, Madison described the bond between a popularly elected legislature and its constituents as “essential to liberty that the government should have a common interest with people.” Frequent direct elections, he concluded, would enable the government to “have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.”The authors of the Constitution left the procedural details for carrying out the nation’s elections to the individual states, but with the Election Ordinance of 1788 they set “the first Wednesday in March” 1789 as the start date for the First Congress (1789–1791) and in the process ushered in a revolution in voting in America.Election MechanicsMost states passed laws between October and December 1788 to govern the upcoming federal elections, and as Madison predicted, states used a variety of methods to carry out the country’s first federal elections.States implemented the Election Ordinance in three ways. Six states—Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—used the at-large or general ticket system method, which allowed voters to select as many candidates as there were House seats until the winners were declared. Five states—Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York, South Carolina, Virginia—chose the single-Member district method in which states designated a certain number of geographically distinct districts based on estimates of state populations. Within each district, voters made their choice from a slate of candidates unique to that district. (This is the system that is used almost exclusively today, aside from states with populations small enough to warrant just one Representative.) Finally, Georgia and Maryland used a hybrid system in which candidates were nominated from single districts but allowed voters to cast ballots from anywhere in the state.Prior to the American Revolution, small groups of elite gentry had selected candidates for positions and secured their elections with a small number of supporters. As a result of revised state constitutions and the expansion of the candidate pool to include middle-class and working-class men during the Revolutionary era, all candidates eventually had to seek support either directly or through campaign surrogates. By the late 1780s, candidates often publicly declared their intention to serve but would do little campaigning; partisan supporters would work on their behalf to win elections. Finally, although suffrage technically expanded to include free African Americans in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and for a brief period to women in New Jersey, full voting rights remained far out of reach for most Americans until the second half of the twentieth century.Unlike today, voters did not enter a booth and select their preferred candidates in private. Instead, eighteenth-century voters mainly used two rather public methods. Voters in New England and much of the Mid-Atlantic submitted their votes by written ballots to an election judge. In the South, voters called out their choices which were recorded by an election clerk and certified by an election judge. Polling places also varied by region. New England and Mid-Atlantic states used organized polling places at churches or town halls. In southern states, election officials used local courthouses along with taverns and churches for counties with large populations.Madison’s ElectionPerhaps the most consequential race for a seat in the First Congress occurred in Virginia’s Fifth District, where two future presidents—James Madison, the Pro-Administration (or Federalist) candidate, and James Monroe, the Anti-Administration (or Antifederalist) nominee—ran for a U.S. House seat. The district consisted of eight counties in Virginia’s central Piedmont region, including Madison’s home county of Orange, and held about 91,000 people, 30 percent of whom were enslaved African Americans. Madison faced significant headwinds from the opposition, and he acknowledged that he had a fight on his hands. “I am now pressed by some of my friends to repair to Virginia . . . for counteracting the machinations agst. my election into the H. of Reps,” Madison wrote to Edmund Randolph from New York City.Madison confessed that he was “extremely disinclined” to pursue the seat because it would “have an electioneering appearance which I always despised.” Nevertheless, he worked with local allies to develop a campaign strategy, directly interacting with voters and embracing newer election techniques by engaging Monroe in two public debates. Madison also published letters in local newspapers that outlined his views of the new Constitution. During the campaign, Madison told George Washington that he had “visited two counties, Culpeper & Louisa, and publicly contradicted the erroneous reports propagated against me,” refuting claims “that I am dogmatically attached to the Constitution.” Because many constituents expressed concern about the oversight powers of the new federal government, Madison assured them that he would offer a set of amendments that would be added to the new Constitution.On February 2, 1789, 2,280 voters braved subzero temperatures in Virginia’s Fifth District to cast ballots in its first federal election. Madison won election to the House with 57 percent of the vote, 1,308 to 972. Ten of the thirteen states—including Virginia—held elections between December 1788 and March 1789, within the timeline required by the Election Ordinance. Three states—New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island—held elections later that year after delays ratifying the Constitution.“Great Moderation and Liberality”Ultimately, Pro-Administration lawmakers held 37 of 65 seats in the First Federal Congress. But it was the Anti-Administration bloc’s demands for a constitutional Bill of Rights—a promise that Madison had campaigned on as well—that set the session’s legislative agenda.Even as Madison settled into his new job as a U.S. Representative, he remained apprehensive about the success of the new government. “It is not yet possible to ascertain precisely the complexion of the new Congress,” Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson prior to the House achieving a quorum. “I hope and expect that some conciliatory sacrifices will be made,” he said, “in order to extinguish opposition, or at least break the force of it” in order to help the new constitutional government succeed.Thirty-five Members of the new House had previously served in the Continental or Confederation Congresses, experience that surely helped things along. And by May, Madison was able to report that the “proceedings of the new Congress are so far marked with great moderation and liberality.” He also noticed that the “spirit which characterizes the House of Representatives . . . is already extinguishing the honest fears which considered the system as dangerous to Republicanism.”As a nominal floor leader, Madison faced the early challenges of finding consensus and keeping lawmakers united as he offered bills to create sources of revenue for the new nation. He would face greater challenges while submitting a set of amendments that would become the Bill of Rights two months later. But the House of Representatives that he had theorized and nurtured—and whose elections he had designed—was off to a fast start.Sources: House Journal, 1st Cong., 1st sess. (1 April 1789): 6; Annals of Congress, House, 1st Cong., 1st sess. (8 April 1789): 102–104; Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2010); R. B. Bernstein, “A New Matrix for National Politics: The First Federal Elections, 1788–90,” in Inventing Congress: Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Charlene Bangs Bickford and Kenneth R. Bowling, Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789–1791 (Lanham, MD: Madison House Publishers, 1989); Fergus M. Bordewich, The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States, 1776–1789 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Jay K. Dow, Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017); Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1998); Thomas Rogers Hunter, “The First Gerrymander?: Patrick Henry, James Madison, James Monroe, and Virginia’s 1788 Congressional Districting,” Early American Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 2011); Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “’The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (Summer 1992); Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stanley B. Parsons, William W Beach, Dan Hermann, eds., United States Congressional Districts, 1788–1841 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); United States Constitution, art. I, § 4, cl. 1, America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-4; Federalist no. 10, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp; Federalist no. 52, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp; “Resolution of the Congress, of September 13, 1788, Fixing Date for Election of a President, and the Organization of the Government Under the Constitution, in the City of New York,” The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/resolu01.asp; Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/; Philip Lampi, “Electing Members of Congress in the Early Republic: District vs. At-Large Elections,” Mapping Early American Elections, accessed 13 March 2023, https://earlyamericanelections.org/essays/03-lampi-election-methods.html; Virginia Plan (1787), Milestone Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/virginia-plan.
Post Some Bills: 20th Century Campaign Handbills | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
During the 20th century, handbills were campaign workhorses. Larger than palm cards but slighter than multi-page pamphlets, handbills are typically single sheets, printed on one or both sides, sometimes folded. Campaign handbills contain endorsements, catchy taglines, soaring rhetoric, and policy statements. Pick your candidate from a century’s worth of wordy congressional campaign examples from the House Collection.Edith Nourse Rogers’s 1926 handbill is from her first general election. As the flyer says, Rogers was indeed “always on the job.” She advised her husband, Congressman John Rogers, for a dozen years, and won a 1925 special election after he died in office. Long years serving in the political trenches paid off: the handbill reprints letters from President Warren Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge, and no fewer than seven newspaper endorsements. Rogers treads carefully, both touting “her own record of achievements” and noting that she was still “Mrs. John Jacob Rogers.”Franklin Menges was a three-term Representative when the Pennsylvania Republican Party printed this handbill. It is more restrained than most examples of its kind. Inside, a formal essay reminds constituents that their Congressman is the finest Pennsylvania has to offer and lives up “to the highest traditions of the early civilization of his State.” The text on the front and back urges constituents to vote only for Menges and his presumably equally staid fellow candidates.After completing her late husband’s term as Hawaii’s Territorial Delegate, Betty Farrington used this handbill on the campaign trail in 1954. It lauds her support for Hawaii’s statehood, legislative accomplishments, depth of experience as her husband’s “behind-the-scenes partner,” and friendly relationship with President Dwight Eisenhower. Known as one of “Washington’s 10 Most Powerful Women” long before she became a Member of Congress, Farrington, a Republican, won in a year when Democrats surged to power in territorial elections.In November 1956, Dalip Saund of California, nicknamed “Judge” because of his prior service as a county judge, became the first Asian American elected to serve as a U.S. Representative. This 1960 campaign handbill not only promotes Saund’s qualifications but also includes book reviews for his autobiography, Congressman from India. Saund’s activism and electoral success are “plus factors” listed in his handbill. Even more prominent, Saund’s “concrete accomplishments” touts his skill at the bread and butter of any legislator: representing his constituents’ needs.Flo Dwyer of New Jersey distributed this handbill during one of the later campaigns of her 16-year House career. It highlights her remarkable legislative and policy accomplishments. The sheer volume and duration of her work is also noted: “Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon have presented Flo Dwyer with 25 pens used to sign. . . Dwyer-backed bills into law. Flo Dwyer makes a difference!"This handbill for Gus Savage’s first congressional run displays his extensive experience as a journalist, activist, and politico. He listed 29 examples of civic leadership, 7 awards, and a 20-point platform for his campaign. He also managed to fit in an essay that ranges across three of the handbill’s panels. Once elected to represent his Chicago district, Savage’s pace never slackened. He considered congressional service “a vehicle to effect change,” and pressed Congress on civil rights issues during his dozen years in the House.Harold Washington’s handbill promoting his first run for the House in 1980 urges Chicagoans to “send the very best . . . why settle for less?” Thousands of words, arranged in a newspaper-style layout, detail Washington’s achievements in the state legislature and his independence from Chicago’s legendary political machine. Newspaper and union endorsements line up next to instructions on how to vote in the party primary. Washington’s appeal proved persuasive. He easily won election to two terms in the House. He cut his congressional career short, though, to become Chicago’s first African-American mayor in 1983.Check out more platforms, projects, plans, and endorsements in other handbills.
Celebrating American Archives Month | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
October is American Archives Month! This month, the Office of the Historian and the Office of Art & Archives hope to inspire researchers and archivists with the stories behind the stories. Some of the best and most unique blogs originate with a curious line in a congressional document or an interesting image that begs for additional context. Members of our staff have drawn upon research experiences using House Records and other congressional documents to share how these rich resources can excite and intrigue.The Not-So-Prompt-and-Ample Relief of Polly LemonIntrigued by an early nineteenth century land claim, one of our archivists started a long journey to uncover the story of Polly Lemon, a woman determined to live near Fort Jessup in western Louisiana in 1833. Through research conducted in House Records and the collections of the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Bureau of Land Management, the archivist pieced together the history behind her land claim. The details of Polly’s plight, the geography of the region, and the role of the House all came together to give a voice to one of Congress’s many petitioners.Dial Main 3120 for MembersHarriott Daley looks into the camera. Her left hand rests on the back of an empty chair. Hired as the first Capitol switchboard operator in 1898, Daley worked connecting calls until 1945. This 1928 photo of Daley, who by then was the director of the Capitol Switchboard, inspired one researcher to explore the history of telephones at the Capitol through archival photographs and historic newspapers. The photograph even inspired the New York Times to publish a belated obituary for Daley.A Marvel among Swindles: The Louisiana State Lottery Company and the Post Office DepartmentAn abiding appreciation for the U.S. Postal Service inspired another researcher to explore a little-known connection between the House and America’s mail system. In the late 1800s, constituent letters sent to the House Committee on Post Office and Post Roads documented the negative effects of the Louisiana state lottery system, which for years had been selling lottery tickets across state lines. The interstate nature of the lottery made it subject to Congress’s oversight and the scandal eventually led to a prohibition on state lotteries for decades. The researcher used published committee reports, legislation, and debate in the Congressional Record to uncover the House’s response while also illuminating differences of opinion among Members about personal liberty and morality. Contemporaneous news stories supplemented the information in the official records.Integrating Dick and JaneThis photograph shows two Dick and Jane readers. Unlike nearly all the other photos in the House Collection, it doesn’t feature a Member of Congress or the Capitol. One researcher wondered, “how is this image related to the House?” The researcher examined other photographs, checked committee assignments, and read transcriptions from committee hearings, which revealed that the Dick and Jane books featured prominently in a congressional hearing about bias, race, and education.The Most Kissed Man in AmericaWhat explains a 35-year delay in receiving the Medal of Honor? The unusual answer to this unusual question was but one of many interesting details in the career of Alabama’s Richmond Pearson Hobson contained in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. As the Office of the Historian regularly checks and updates Member profiles in the Biographical Directory, sometimes a minor addition or curious date can prompt wholesale reassessments of a Member’s life and career. In this case, Hobson’s profile failed to capture the many colorful titles he collected over the years, including “The Most Kissed Man in America” and, years later, “The Father of Prohibition.” All of which demanded further investigation.Gone to SeedA 1920 photograph shows hundreds of mail bags in the basement of the House Office Building, now known as the Cannon House Office Building. The caption explains that the bags contained seeds for Representatives and Senators to distribute to constituents, and that each Member received 17,000 seed packets. The researcher who encountered this photograph was struck by the image but was unfamiliar with the program of congressional seed distribution. The researcher dug through historic photographs, committee reports, newspaper articles from the early 1900s, and even scans of seed packets from the National Archives to uncover the story behind a now nearly forgotten federal agricultural program.The Waste Basket CommitteeCongressional Directories are full of information. And while researchers often use Directories to find biographical information, committee assignments, and office room numbers, less obvious items occasionally stand out. One historian kept happening across a committee from the first half of the twentieth century—first in the Directories, then in committee reports—that sounded oddly passive-aggressive: the Committee on Disposition of Useless Executive Papers. The name alone unlocks curiosities. What papers were considered “useless”? Who decides what is useless? What happened to records deemed useless? What this historian learned in digging into the committee’s history is that, yes, members of this committee were often teased by their colleagues, but that they also served an important role in raising money for the federal coffers and imposing a sense of order on a government that had been growing exponentially.The Man in Black’s Tribute to the Ragged Old FlagWhile searching for images in one of the office’s publications, one researcher ran across a black-and-white photograph of the House Rostrum. Standing in front of Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts was the musician Johnny Cash. Upon closer examination, a young child and a woman in a hat sit nearby at the Clerk’s desk. The image raised a number of burning questions. With no additional clues, the researcher perused the Congressional Record for the famous singer-songwriter, narrowing the timeline to Speaker O’Neill’s tenure, and then to June 14, 1977. It was Flag Day, and the “Man in Black” was joined on the rostrum by his wife, June Carter Cash, and their young son, John Carter Cash, to pay tribute to America’s stars and stripes.For more stories like these, keep an eye on our blog, Whereas: Stories from the People’s House. If you’re looking for inspiration to pursue your own research, check out our Collections Search and Records Search.
The Rise of Speaker Longworth: Velvet on Iron | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
On December 3, 1923, just hours into Opening Day of the 68th Congress (1923–1925), Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, the newly installed House Republican Leader, surveyed his fractious majority as it deadlocked over the election of the Speaker.Over the course of four votes that day, a small but determined cohort of progressive Republicans had stifled the party’s leadership, including Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts. Gillett had served as Speaker for the previous two Congresses and now sought a third term in the chair.At 3:46 p.m., however, Longworth interrupted the proceedings and moved to adjourn the House. “It seems entirely evident that no good purpose can be served by having another ballot tonight,” he said. “Our hands are tied; we have no recourse.”The clash between progressive Republicans and mainline GOP stalwarts had been years in the making and erupted as a major early test of Longworth’s leadership. But for Longworth it was also edifying and set the foundation for a period in House history in which the Speakership grew more powerful than it had in over a decade. Starting in 1923, Longworth set out to ensure that so long as he wielded power, he never lacked the recourse that seemed in short supply on that December afternoon.The ProgressivesDuring the first two decades of the twentieth century, GOP progressives had been a small but vocal minority in the House. Known popularly as “Insurgents,” they had channeled elements of the era’s wider progressive movement into a reform crusade on Capitol Hill. Across the country, progressive officials responded to industrialization, large-scale immigration, population growth, and the sudden emergence of urbanized modernity by legislating against what they considered to be the excesses of a capitalist system that empowered wealthy captains of industry at the expense of everyday farmers and laborers.In Congress, Insurgent lawmakers worked in this strain of progressivism to address unemployment and the effects of economic boom-bust cycles; labor strikes and worker protections; immigration; environmental conservation; and food and water quality issues. Progressive reformers also sought “direct democracy”—transferring political power into the hands of the popular majority and away from special interests and entrenched party bosses. Congressional Insurgents—many of whom hailed from the upper Midwest—railed against the old-guard who, they argued, were beholden to the banks, railroads, and corporations.They also sought to democratize Congress’s rules and procedures to speed the passage of reforms. In March 1910, several dozen Insurgents allied with Democrats to remove the autocratic Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois from the chairmanship of the Rules Committee, which determined the guidelines for legislative debate on the floor. That watershed event—known afterward as the “Cannon Revolt”—significantly weakened the Speakership. Within a few years, some of the Speakership’s other exclusive powers—such as legislative agenda setting and committee assignments—devolved to other entities in the House as well.Longworth’s AscendanceNick Longworth, an establishment scion, first entered the House in 1903 and came up in the cauldron of Progressive Era reforms. Though his hail-fellow-well-met demeanor masked it, Longworth had a keen political instinct.Longworth came from a wealthy family and never lacked for opportunity. He was cultured and quick witted, a virtuoso on the violin and a raconteur with expensive tastes. Longworth graduated from Harvard, and later earned a law degree from the Cincinnati School of Law in 1894. He quickly gravitated to politics. With the backing of a local Republican boss, Longworth rose through the local GOP ranks. In 1898, he won a seat on the Cincinnati board of education. A year later he moved to the Ohio house of representatives, and shortly after that to the state senate.In 1902, Longworth was elected to the House from his hometown of Cincinnati. In Congress, Longworth was known as a party stalwart and loyal follower of Uncle Joe Cannon. In 1910, he had a front row seat to Cannon’s downfall, and the experience informed Longworth’s politics going forward.Even as a rank-and-file lawmaker, Longworth enjoyed a national profile. In 1905, he married Alice Roosevelt, daughter of then-President Theodore Roosevelt. The press fawned over the union, but theirs was far from a storybook marriage or, even, political partnership. Longworth did not share Alice’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive inclinations. In 1912, Longworth supported Republican President William H. Taft in his re-election bid against Roosevelt, who had come out of retirement to run on the third-party, progressive Bull Moose ticket. Back home, Longworth also struggled against the progressive tide drawing votes from his Republican candidacy that year. On Election Day, he lost to a Democratic challenger by 101 votes.Longworth reclaimed his House seat two years later, but the 1912 election had nearly ended his marriage. Once back in the House, Longworth reclaimed his seat on the Ways and Means Committee where he became a tariff expert and sharpened his skill for finding consensus and brokering deals.In 1919, when Republicans held the House majority for the first time in a decade, Longworth orchestrated what was then the biggest deal of his career. Ahead of the Speaker election to open the new GOP majority for the 66th Congress (1919–1921), many Republicans balked at the frontrunner: James R. Mann of Illinois, the longtime GOP Leader and former close confidante to Speaker Cannon. Mann was seen as a “reactionary,” who, like Cannon, would seize the legislative process and rule arbitrarily. Although some lawmakers championed Longworth as an alternative for Speaker, Longworth threw his support behind Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts, who was once described as a “docile party elder” palatable to GOP moderates. Behind Longworth’s leadership, Gillett was elected Speaker.For his efforts, Longworth expected to secure the position of Majority Leader. But Mann managed to stack the GOP committee responsible for making party appointments with allies. Longworth received a seat on the GOP Steering Committee, but Mann’s forces anointed 58-year-old Frank Wheeler Mondell of Wyoming as Majority Leader.Revolt ReduxOver the next four years, Longworth worked to solidify support. Republicans kept the House in the 67th Congress (1921–1923), but following the 1922 elections, the GOP’s commanding 302-seat majority collapsed into a slender 225-to-207 seat advantage. The small margin meant the roughly 20 progressive Insurgents heading into the 68th Congress in December 1923 suddenly held the balance of power in the closely divided House.By Opening Day, Republican leadership also looked much different. James Mann had died and Mondell had left the House after an unsuccessful run for the Senate. With Mondell gone, Longworth claimed the Majority Leader’s office on December 1 by a nearly unanimous voice vote in the party conference. But that same day, progressives flexed their political muscle in the conference vote for the party’s nominee for Speaker. Twenty-four Republicans—including the entire Insurgent bloc—voted against the incumbent, Gillett, who was seeking a third term as Speaker. Gillett only needed a majority of the party to win the nomination, but on the House Floor he would need a majority of those in attendance. If 24 Republicans opposed his election on the floor, Gillett would lose the Speakership when the House was set to convene two days later.“We have got the votes and the House will not be organized until our demands are met,” crowed Wisconsin Representative John Nelson, the Insurgents’ leader. “I am very pleased with the situation. It is not hard to see that we hold the balance of power.”From “Blockade” to DealTwo days later, on December 3, the GOP’s long-simmering internal rift spilled into public view on the House Floor. The Republican Conference announced Gillett as its nominee; Democrats nominated Finis Garrett of Tennessee. Two other lawmakers received nominations: Insurgent Henry Allen Cooper of Wisconsin, and Republican Martin Madden of Illinois, who quickly told the House he was not a candidate for Speaker.When the balloting began neither Gillett nor Garrett cobbled together the necessary votes to win. The first ballot resulted in 198 votes for Gillett, 195 for the Garrett, 17 for Cooper, and five for Madden; four Members voted “present.”The entire 11-man Wisconsin delegation (10 Republicans and one Socialist) withheld its support from Gillett: nine voted for Cooper; Cooper and Victor Berger, the Milwaukee Socialist, voted present. Six Minnesotans (four Republicans and two Farmer Laborites) joined the Wisconsin renegades in supporting Cooper, as well as North Dakota Republican James Sinclair, and the only Insurgent from outside the Upper Midwest, New York Republican Fiorello La Guardia.The House held three more votes for Speaker that day, but the bloc stayed intact. After nearly four hours, the House adjourned until noon the following day. The Baltimore Sun noted that the Insurgents “have proved today that they have mastered the art of blockade.” The next day, December 4, saw four more inconclusive votes in a two-and-a-half-hour session.Later that evening, Longworth hosted Representative Nelson in his office for two hours where they brokered a truce. The pair made for an odd couple—the aristocratic Cincinnatian bedecked in formal evening attire, and the sturdy Nelson whom a reporter described as just “one of ‘the boys’” and “an amicable, bald-headed, sandyish man of Scandinavian origin, agreeable of voice and handshake.”In exchange for the Insurgents’ votes, Longworth suggested the House would operate under the old rules from the prior Congress for a 30-day period, during which time rank-and-file Members could offer amendments to the new rules which would be debated and receive a vote on the House Floor. Longworth promised only votes, and there was no guarantee that the progressives would win their desired results. But for Nelson, that was enough.When Nelson announced the deal on the floor the next day, Democrats ridiculed it. John Nance Garner of Texas—one of Longworth’s drinking pals and a future Speaker himself—asked the Majority Leader if Nelson’s summary was correct. “I am in accord with the interpretation,” Longworth replied.Turning to Nelson, Garner asked with mock incredulity if he “willingly submitted to this outrage?”Cooper, the grizzled House veteran, rose from his seat to explain the Insurgents’ objective by recalling when he and other progressives had ousted Cannon from the chairmanship of the Rules Committee. Cooper said the Cannon Revolt occurred “not because any of us had ceased to be Republicans, not because any of us were anarchists, and not because any of us, as some of the papers have been saying, are bandits; not at all, but simply because we wished to give the Representatives of the American people on this floor an opportunity to represent the constituents who honored them by sending them here.”That same spirit, Cooper insisted, lay behind their effort in 1923. “All that we have sought to do was to secure a reasonable and fair opportunity to propose amendments to the rules,” Cooper said, “not to coerce amendments, not to demand amendments, but to present amendments, and to have a reasonable and fair discussion of our proposals in this Chamber. That is all. That is representative government, and anything else is tyranny.”Following Cooper’s remarks, the House proceeded to its ninth ballot for Speaker. The Insurgents rejoined the GOP fold, giving Gillett the votes he needed to win, 215 to 197.An Uneasy AllianceIn the end, both progressive and mainline Republicans seemed placated. The Insurgents would have their shot at amendments. And Nelson won a spot on the Rules Committee, giving him influence over which bills made it to the floor and the terms of debate. Among the rules reforms that soon passed was a modified discharge petition requirement, championed by progressives, that significantly lowered the threshold required to wrest bills out of the hands of obstinate committees and bring them onto the floor for debate by the full House.For his part, Longworth burnished the powers of the Majority Leader’s office. And as House Republicans proceeded to enact their legislative agenda, Longworth boasted that the negotiations among his conference paled in comparison to the situation in the Senate, where Insurgents and regulars would clash for another month. Longworth noted his House majority was ready to act. “We can go ahead in this session and do the business of the people so satisfactorily,” Longworth forecasted, “that it will be admitted from now on that the House is the real medium for the translation into legislation of the hopes and desires of the American people.”When the House began to churn out legislation at a much faster clip than in previous Congresses, the press applauded him for overseeing the House’s transformation into “one of the most efficient legislative machines in contemporary American history.”The deal Longworth cut with the Insurgents had elevated his already considerable public profile. His velvet diplomatic touch had pacified the progressive holdouts. But soon another test—one that revealed his steely resolve—lay ahead.Sources: Congressional Record, House, 68th Cong., 1st sess. (5 December 1923): 5–15; Baltimore Sun, 4 December 1923; Boston Daily Globe, 9 December 1923; New York Times, 2, 5, 16, and 23 December 1923; Washington Post, 4 December 1923; Donald C. Bacon, “Longworth, Nicholas,” in American National Biography 13 (New York: Oxford University Press); Donald C. Bacon, “Nicholas Longworth: The Genial Czar,” in Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership over Two Centuries, ed. Roger H. Davidson, Susan Webb Hammond, and Raymond W. Smock (New York: Westview Press, 1998); David T. Canon et al., Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789–1946, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002); Richard B. Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney, Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1983); Stacey A. Cordery, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (New York: Viking, 2007); Clara Longworth De Chambrun, The Making of Nicholas Longworth: Annals of an American Family (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933); Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1998); Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House, Inc., 2003); Scott William Rager, “Uncle Joe Cannon: The Brakeman of the House of Representatives, 1903–1911,” in Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership over Two Centuries, ed. Roger H. Davidson, Susan Webb Hammond, and Raymond W. Smock (New York: Westview Press, 1998); David Thelen, Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1976); Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob LaFollette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).