Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Read online

  The expansion of senatorial power was to some extent a coefficient of the House’s weakness. There were 293 representatives in 1870, 332 in 1880—and the House, without strong leaders after Stevens’ death in 1868, became the place of din and confusion that was to be described as “one of the most disorderly and inefficient legislative bodies in the world.” With the majority switching back and forth between Democrats and Republicans virtually every two years, it seemed to be in a continuous state of reorganization, symbolized by the bitter, time-consuming biennial battles over selection of the Speaker and committee chairmen and members. In the Senate, however, the two parties had agreed in December, 1845, on a new procedure for choosing committee chairmen and members. No longer would they be elected by secret ballot of the whole Senate—a method which had given senators considerable independence from party control. Henceforth, they would be nominated in party conferences, or caucuses; the Senate as a whole would vote on the nominees, and since the vote would almost always follow party lines, it would simply ratify the majority party’s selections. This gave party leadership new power, enabling it to impose a degree of party discipline, and discipline was also increased—and Senate proceedings made more efficient—because party “steering committees” were given more power over the flow of legislation to the floor. In addition, the Senate was armored against the shifts in public opinion that led to continual transfers of power in the House, and senators were still chosen by state legislatures often dominated by Republicans; the GOP controlled the Senate in fourteen of the sixteen Congresses between 1869 and 1901. Senate committee chairmen stayed in their posts—building up, year after year, power that made them figures to be reckoned with in Washington. Also increasing the Senate’s power in relation to the House was another development: the hardening of the custom under which the Senate would not consent to a presidential nomination if either senator from the nominee’s home state objected. This “senatorial courtesy” gave a senator almost a veto power over patronage.

  The expansion of the Senate’s power was a coefficient also of the weakness of Presidents. The three decades between 1869 and the end of the century were a Republican era in the White House as well as in the Senate. Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison—all were Republicans. The Republican philosophy—that Congress should be stronger than the President, and the Senate stronger than the House—ruled. The Presidents were almost all weak, and, as congressional historian Alvin Josephy puts it, “after its experience with Johnson, the Congress by and large kept them weak.” When, immediately after his inauguration, the war hero Grant, a political naïf, began filling Cabinet posts without consultation with the Senate, the Senate taught him a lesson. Blocking one Cabinet appointment, it forced the President to nominate the man it chose; it let other Grant nominees know that the same fate was in store for them, and several withdrew. Having refused to consent, the Senate now advised; traveling by coach the two miles of Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, a senatorial delegation laid down the law; when Grant “agreed to ‘harmony,’” says Josephy, “by his capitulation [he] confirmed, in his first month in office, control by the Senate Republicans over patronage and the government”—control that would last, with rare exceptions, for the rest of the nineteenth century.

  But mostly the power of the Senate grew because of the changes in America. At the close of the Civil War, the nation that sent senators to Washington was still primarily an agricultural country, its young manufacturing and industrial plant a child alongside that of a Great Britain or a Germany. But although the soldiers of the Blue and Gray went back to the farm when they laid down their rifles, many of them would later move to the city, or their children would move to the city—to old cities into which, at the same time, European immigrants were flooding by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, or to the new cities that were springing up across the continent. Railroads were knitting that continent together; its gold and silver and iron ore was being hauled out of the earth in the West, its black gold was being pumped out of the earth in Pennsylvania and Texas—America was in the midst of a gigantic industrial expansion; by the end of the century, from a child among nations of the earth it had become a colossus.

  The great industrialists of the post-Civil War era—the robber barons of these “Middle Ages of American industry”—needed government, needed it for franchises and land grants for their railroads, for legislative sanctions that would allow them to loot the new nation’s oil and iron, for subsidies for the monopolies they were creating. So they moved into government, pouring money into political campaigns—and into politicians; the Standard Oil Company, it was said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania State Legislature except refine it—with unhappily predictable results: by 1920, America’s elected representatives had turned over to the railroad barons as much land as the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin combined. At the same time that business was going into politics, politics was becoming more businesslike. State political machines, fueled by businessmen’s contributions, grew stronger, better organized. And with government necessarily taking on more functions in a steadily more complex society, tens of thousands of new federal jobs were being created, and control over this burgeoning patronage was solidified in the state machines, whose leaders became great political bosses. Finding that they had an identity of interest, barons and bosses forged what Josephy calls an “unspoken alliance”—

  In return for their contributions to the machines and favors to the leaders, the railroad builders, oil and steel men, pork packers, mining and timber interests and scores of other corporate groups got public lands, rights of way, charters, subsidies, franchises and other legislative advantages.

  And the stronghold of that alliance was the Senate. Some of the captains of finance and industry who ruled this era—Leland Stanford, founder of the Central Pacific Railroad; James G. (Bonanza) Fair of Nevada, who extracted $30 million from the Comstock Lode; Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin, a onetime lumberjack who made a fortune in timber, and who was so illiterate that he could not spell his first name but so powerful that he bought men “as he bought saw logs”—decided to go to Capitol Hill, and of course it was to the Senate, elected by the legislatures, that they went, rather than the House, since why would men who controlled legislatures submit their fate to the people? During this era, the Senate numbered men rich not only in cash but in political currency as well. Gaunt, horse-faced Zach Chandler dispensed thousands of state and federal jobs in Michigan while he entertained like a king in his Washington mansion. Golden-bearded Roscoe Conkling of New York, “the chief ornament of a gaudy era’s public life,” swaggered among the Senate desks, conspicuous among his soberly clad colleagues in a costume that might consist of green trousers, a scarlet coat with gold lace, and yellow shoes. His vast army of ward heelers included the thousand employees of the notorious New York Customs House. During these thirty years, the Senate was the “fount of political power” not only within the national Republican Party, which, as Josephy puts it, “was more like an organized confederacy of many individual senator-bosses,” but within the government. An historian calls these decades the era of the “Senate Supreme.”

  But supremacy did not mean glory. Mark Twain’s bitter name for the era was the “Gilded Age”—gilt atop brass; dazzling on the surface, base metal below; brazen and tawdry, as the frantic rush to wealth, coupled with a morality suddenly loosened after the tension of war, spawned corruption in business and in all levels of government: the historian Vernon L. Parrington called the era the “Great Barbecue,” because the rush for a share of the national pie reminded him of hungry picnickers crowding around a savory roast. And sometimes it seemed as if the Senate was leading the rush.

  It was the age of “Crédit Mobilier,” the scheme in which millions in bribes were distributed in Washington by the promoters of the Union Pacific Railroad. The House of Representatives at least made a gesture at censuring its members who were involved; the Senate would not
deign to make even a gesture. Credit Mobilier came to light in 1872; it was only a harbinger of the scandals to come, of graft and plunder “unequaled before or since in the history of the country,” and in these scandals senators were often leading figures. In his novel Democracy, published in 1880, Henry Adams called the United States “a government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators.”

  THERE WERE STILL MOMENTS in which the Senate grappled, as the Founders had intended it to grapple, with the fundamental issues facing the nation.

  Outside government, concern about new problems was rising. As industry became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the old laissez-faire belief faded before fears that the huge new industrial combinations were destroying America’s cherished freedom of opportunity, making it harder for men to rise through their own efforts; that the country’s natural resources were being cornered and squandered by the few; that city slums were growing and farmers becoming a forgotten class.

  Americans confronting forces too big for them to fight alone asked for help in fighting them, from the only force big enough to fight them: the government—their government. It seemed logical to them that government should help. Government was, after all, a basic cause of the problems. It was government that, through its mineral concessions and subsidies, had made the mine owners powerful, so that the men who worked in mines worked their cruelly long hours in danger, and lived as near serfs in company towns. Should not now government protect the miners, or at least make it possible for them to organize, so that they could protect themselves? It was government whose unconscionable subsidies of land had made the railroads powerful, and it was railroads whose freighting charges were strangling the farmer; should now government not stretch forth its hand to farmers by regulating railroads? It was government whose high tariffs had shielded manufacturers—at the expense of the poor and of the farmers, keeping the prices of shoes high while forcing low the price of steer hides that farmers sold to shoe manufacturers. Should not government now revise the tariff system? It was government whose policies had nurtured the growth of the giant corporations that kept wages low and hours long, and made women and children work in sweatshops and live in slums; should not government now intercede on behalf of women and children?

  At times during these gilt decades government did help, or at least try to: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 established the first regulatory commission with power over a segment of industry; the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, named for Senator John Sherman, “the Ohio Icicle,” made a gesture at restoring competition to American business life. But such moments were rare.

  The Senate’s leaders during these decades—Republicans all—were men like spade-bearded William Allison of Iowa, trusted friend of the railroads and the banks, who sat in the Senate for thirty-five years, and Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, the son of an impoverished farmer, who made one fortune in business, married another, sat in the Senate for thirty years, and thought of “sugar” or “steel” as “a social and political entity” as deserving of representation in Congress as any state or group of citizens.

  Allison and Aldrich were members of the “Philosophy Club,” a group of wealthy senators who met regularly for dinner and poker. Their doctrine was the survival of the fittest—not surprisingly, since, as Senator George Hearst of California assured his colleagues, “The members of the Senate are the survival of the fittest.” These robber-baron senators felt that “the best government was the least government—unless they could mold it as a weapon and tool to help the strongest have their way over the weak.” The response of the Senate—and of the House, too—to public concern was, in Josephy’s words, “to keep hands off of—or to help—the [industrial] development, but certainly not to get in its way.”

  Before the Civil War, the Senate had been the forum for great debates, for thoughtful deliberation on the floor, that the Founding Fathers had designed it to be. During the decades after the war—the decades of the Gilded Age—it was, as the historian Matthew Josephson reported, “behind closed doors that the real work of Congress is done. Moving noiselessly through committee rooms, parliamentary leaders perfected the process … known as ‘invisible government.’” Aldrich, it was said, had “but to whisper in the committee rooms” to pass or kill a bill. Since debate mattered less and less, senators spent less and less time on the Senate floor.

  The Philosophy Club ran the Senate as if it were a club, too. For more than thirty years, except for a two-year Democratic interlude, one or both of the key Appropriations and Finance Committees was chaired by Allison and Aldrich, as was the Republican caucus, whose decisions now became binding, and the party’s Committee on Committees, which determined Republican committee assignments. The initial assignments of newly elected senators to committees had become the entree to power. Not long after the agreement in 1845 to allow parties to select committee members and chairmen, there had been an additional development. Since the agreement’s aim was to reduce intra-party squabbling, it seemed only logical that the assignment of senators to committees and, within committees, their elevation to the chairmanship should no longer be a matter of discussion but rather should be subject to some arbitrary, objective principle—and what principle more objective than simple length of service? The seniority system had thus been introduced in the Senate, and during the intervening decades, the unwritten “seniority rule” had acquired almost the force of law: with rare exceptions, once a man was on a committee, he stayed on it. The effect of this had been to negate the original aim of establishing the system, which was to increase party discipline and loyalty. Since, once a senator was on a committee, he couldn’t be removed from it by his party except in the most extraordinary circumstances—in three quarters of a century only three senators were removed—the party lost control of him. So great care was taken in making those initial assignments. The most coveted committee seats went to men whom Aldrich and Allison regarded as “safe.” “Dissidents,” as Byrd says, were ruthlessly “excluded from influence.” (Even before the Civil War, some of seniority’s implications had become apparent; since the system made length of incumbency rather than ability the crucial determinant for advancement within a committee, the senators who advanced would in general be senators from “safe” states—states in which voters routinely re-elected incumbents. The safest of states, of course, were “one-party” states, and during the decade before Fort Sumter the South had become more and more one-party—Democratic—so the system had worked to give a disproportionate share of power to that single section of the country. By 1859, a northern senator was complaining that the seniority system had “operated to give to senators from slaveholding states the chairmanship of every single committee that controls the public business of this government. There is not one exception.”)

  BY CONTROLLING THE SENATE, the Senate “philosophers” were, of course, not merely exercising the Senate’s power, but were enjoying as well the protection of the armor that the Founding Fathers had bolted around that institution with so much care—the armor that insulated the Senate against the power of the people.

  That armor was as strong as ever. The Coinage Act of 1873 pleased bondholders and bankers, the well-to-do, by making gold the monetary standard, completely eliminating silver as a standard. But farmers and working people, debtors of all types—“those who labor under all the hardships of life,” in Madison’s words—were infuriated by the “Crime of ’73,” and this was a majority that in a democracy theoretically exercised political power. In 1874, public feeling did indeed sweep over one wing of the Capitol: the Republicans were removed from power in the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War. But only one-third of the Senate was subject to public feeling; there the Republicans remained, by far, in the majority. The Coinage Act was a major element in plunging the nation into one of the longest depressions in American history, and for the next quarter of a century there would be debate after debate over easing the gold standard. Occas
ionally, a President would make a move—or the House pass legislation—in that direction. Not the Senate. The same pattern prevailed on the tariff. In 1890, the Democratic President Grover Cleveland proposed tariff reform, and the House, with an eye to the imminent November elections, passed it. The Senate didn’t. Year after year, all through the Gilded Age, its power kept the tariff in place.

  That pattern prevailed on other major issues. House procedures gradually became more orderly after the election of “Czar” Thomas Reed as Speaker, but senators—particularly those committee chairmen who had held their positions for years—were still the balance wheel of the federal government. A law to authorize federal action against the renewed disenfranchisement of black voters in the South was passed in the House but blocked in the Senate. So was a law that would have banned violence against strikers by private police forces. The Gilded Age, as Josephy says, “was not a day for the weak, the unorganized or the powerless”; the legislative pages of that age are sparse indeed if one searches them for laws that would help farmers, labor, minorities, consumers, or the crowded poor in the wretched slums of the great new cities. All during this time, Americans asked their government for help, but, except for scattered moments like the Sherman Act, help was not forthcoming. Congress, summed up one observer, “does not solve the problems, the solutions of which is demanded by the life of the nation.” And for this the Senate must bear a large part of the blame. To a degree perhaps unequaled in any other period of American history, the Gilded Age was the era in which the Senate was the preeminent force in the government of the United States—the “Senate Supreme” indeed. And it was during this era that the government was, as the historian John Garraty puts it, “singularly divorced from what now seem the meaningful issues of the day”—divorced to a degree perhaps unequaled in any other period of American history. Between 1874, when Charles Sumner died, and 1900, not a single figure comparable to Clay, Calhoun, or Webster—or to Benton, or to Seward or to Douglas or to any of a score of other senators of the Senate’s Golden Age—sat in that tiered semi-circle of desks. In creating a Senate for the new nation, its Founding Fathers had tried to create within the government an institution that would speak for the educated, the well-born, the well-to-do, that would protect the rights of property, that would not function as an embodiment of the people’s will but would rather stand—“firmly”—as a great bulwark against that will.