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    Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment
    Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment
    Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment
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    Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment

    By Wendy J. Schiller and Charles Stewart

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    How U.S. senators were chosen prior to the Seventeenth Amendment—and the consequences of Constitutional reform

    From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. Electing the Senate investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. Wendy Schiller and Charles Stewart find that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure.

    Electing the Senate uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship—played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners—that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. Electing the Senate raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 21, 2014
    ISBN9781400852680
    Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment

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      Electing the Senate - Wendy J. Schiller

      Senate

      CHAPTER 1

      Introduction

      U.S. SENATORS HAVE NOT always been elected by the public. The popular stage on which U.S. senators walk, and their place in modern plebiscitary politics, makes it easy to forget that for the first half of the Senate’s history, senators did not derive their electoral mandates from the people—at least not directly—but instead from state governments, acting through their state legislatures. The founders chose to elect members of the upper chamber of the people’s branch indirectly. This suggests that they considered indirect election to be noble, functional, and practical. A century and a quarter later, in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified to provide for election by the public, which indicates that the public, acting through its legislators in Washington, D.C., and back home, eventually concluded that the indirect mode of election was unsavory, unworkable, and ineffective.

      The journey of the Senate from exemplary protector of states’ rights to corrupt seat of special interests during a period when senators were not directly elected by the public raises a number of interesting questions about U.S. political development—questions that have rarely been raised by political scientists or historians since the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted. In this book, we are interested fundamentally in the dynamics of indirect elections, but at the same time we seek to assess the consequences of the switch to direct elections with the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment. Measuring those consequences is not easy; given how much the federal government has expanded, and with it the responsibilities of a U.S. senator, it is nearly impossible to construct an absolute comparison between the indirect and direct elections eras. In the broadest terms, however, we aim to assess the extent to which the goals of the Seventeenth Amendment—empowering voters in the choice of U.S. senators, and reducing the corrosive effects of money and party machine power—have been met. In doing so, we provide a new opportunity to understand electoral design, legislatures, parties, and political ambition.

      In particular, we examine the election of U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 based on where those elections occurred: the state legislatures. We have created a data set of these elections by searching the journals of the forty-eight state legislatures that were part of the Union as of 1913 in order to reconstruct the roll call history at the microlevel of nearly every Senate election during this period. This account, which surprisingly has never been told before, helps to ground empirical and normative judgments about the quality of representation in the Senate under indirect election.

      The account we give is significant for four reasons. First, we are empirical political scientists who recognize a huge hole in our understanding of U.S. electoral history when we see it. There has never been a systematic account of how the upper chamber of Congress was actually elected in the fortyplus years before the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment.¹ Evidence of the hole in our knowledge about these elections includes the fact that we do not know things such as the candidates who ran for the Senate before popular election, how candidates were identified and nominated, and what role factors like party played in these elections. Absent such basic facts as building blocks, it is simply impossible to grapple with the larger set of normative questions about the functioning of representative institutions in the United States across its long history.

      Second, studying indirect elections reveals a tremendous amount about the role and power of political parties in shaping competition and policy choices through the indirect election process. Focusing on an era when both scholarly and public discourse was dominated by polarization and party government, we use our unique data set on the voting patterns in indirect Senate elections to show what happens to democratic processes when parties succeed in coordinating the rank and file behind a particular choice, and what happens when they fail. On a broader level, by providing a heretofore-unavailable basis for comparing the indirect to the direct elections process, we can demonstrate how the macro forces inherent in U.S. politics, such as regionalism, single-member district-based elections, elite ambition, and economic power, dominate electoral outcomes regardless of whether there are intermediaries or voters choose the electoral winner for themselves.

      In locating the choice for U.S. senator in state legislatures, the founders expected, or at best hoped, that state legislatures would be filled with educated, diligent men who would choose senators and hold them accountable for serving the state as well as national interest. The founders did not want political parties to coordinate this choice, nor did they anticipate a decline in the education and experience of state legislators. Yet the end result of their choice to put Senate elections in the hands of state legislatures was to increase the power of state party organizations in that process and make Senate seats the focal point of partisan power struggles. Party factionalism along with the personal corruption exhibited in the buying and selling of votes for Senate spots by candidates and state legislators both exemplify the type of pernicious influence that the founders hoped to avoid in the U.S. democracy.

      Third, in a related vein, our study provides us with a clear-eyed view of how elections are conducted in the United States when they are held away from the popular eye and dominated by elite institutions. Whether or not motivated by the general legal movement called originalism, some political commentators, politicians, judges, and members of the public have adopted a view of nineteenth-century politics that characterizes it as purer and less corrupt than the politics of today—precisely because they were more closely governed by the words that the framers agreed to in Philadelphia during summer 1787.²

      This perspective too readily equates election by the state legislatures with election by the state, as if the will of a state is as unified as the will of an individual. Although some legal scholars argue that indirect elections were put in place to guarantee a voice for the states as units in the federal system, our work shows the ways in which partisanship overwhelmed the notion of state interest as the chief consideration in the choice of U.S. senators under this system. In other words, state legislators battled over who would control the choice and ultimate occupant of the seat, and the fights were centered within and across political parties. By providing a richer empirical account of how Senate elections worked under the Framer’s Constitution, uncorrupted by the progressive championed Seventeenth Amendment, we intend to throw cold water on these benighted ideas. At the very least, we offer new evidence that we hope will prompt modern readers to reconsider the normative issues that faced reformers at the turn of the twentieth century when they took stock of the health of the system that elected U.S. senators.

      Fourth, changing the Constitution to improve democracy is no small matter. Promises made by advocates of direct elections about their capacity to produce a more participatory Senate, led by the Progressives, remain unfulfilled. Constitutional amendments should not be taken lightly; if in fact such actions do not substantively improve Senate responsiveness, such a finding may discourage other changes in the Constitution for the intended purpose of enhancing democratic representation. Although the other studies we cite in this chapter concentrate on broad indicators of Senate behavior after the Seventeenth Amendment, none of them go into sufficient detail about the dynamics underlying the indirect elections process.

      The major contribution of this book lies in unveiling the indirect elections process, but we also pay close attention to the extent to which the Senate is markedly different in its responsiveness to constituents in the direct election era. We take the opportunity to reflect on how much of the actual electoral mechanism for legislative office can overcome the powerful macro forces that exert influence over policymaking in U.S. politics.

      WHY THE SENATE, AND WHY 1871–1913?

      Despite the fact that the federal government cast a shorter shadow on national life in the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century, it could still act in ways that affected all Americans, with the Senate as a highly visible participant in those actions. The relatively small size of the U.S. Senate, allotment of two senators from every state regardless of population size, and power of individual senators to advance or block legislation all contributed to make the U.S. Senate central to federal policymaking. Although we tend to center our attention more on the impact of the Senate nationally, the legislative body also provided representation for various economic and political interests at the state level. The Senate was—and continues to be—the only institution in the national government that gives voice to constituents as defined by the geographic unit of the state they live in, even if arriving at consensus about what defines state interests has proven consistently difficult over time. As such, the election of senators was of paramount importance to the nature and scope of our federal system of government.

      We focus on the years spanning 1871 to 1913 because the balance of power between the federal and state governments began to shift dramatically during that time. The power to elect U.S. senators elevated the significance of state legislatures because they were pivotal in determining the composition of the U.S. Senate. Because there were periods when a narrow partisan majority controlled the U.S. Senate and both parties were riddled with sectional tensions, observers of national politics had to follow state elections in states that had upcoming Senate elections. This was particularly true in the sixty years following the Civil War, as Congress wrestled with issues such as civil rights, economic regulation, western expansion, and foreign policy. This was also the period when the role of the federal government started to expand in the aftermath of the military defeat of the strongest states’ rights claims, which had emanated from the South. Moreover, it marks the first year after the beginning of a regulated process governing Senate elections in state legislatures mandated by an 1866 Act of Congress, and after post–Civil War disputes about the legitimacy of state legislatures elected under Reconstruction had been mostly, but not entirely, resolved.³ Given that all states had to follow the same procedure to elect senators after 1866, we believe that the variation we uncover can be explained by variables that span states and time rather than being a function of idiosyncratic state electoral procedures.

      To understand this process, we must take a brief journey back to the founding era.

      FROM CONSTITUTION TO AMENDMENT: THE EVOLVING MODE OF SENATE ELECTION

      As stated above, the indirect election of senators was the original design under the Constitution of 1787. But the Constitution had almost nothing to say about how these elections would actually be carried out, so from 1789 to 1866, states were inconsistent in their timing and methods of electing senators. This resulted in numerous election controversies, which periodically spilled on to the floor of the U.S. Senate itself. Over time, state legislatures were viewed as so inept at choosing their U.S. senators in a timely fashion that Congress eventually enacted a law to streamline the process of indirect elections across all states.

      The Movement to Regulate Indirect Elections

      The movement to crack down on the state legislatures was building in Congress in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Momentum to enact a uniform standard for U.S. Senate elections reached a critical level in 1857, when there were two especially egregious cases of controversy over Senate elections in Indiana and Pennsylvania. These elections provided the catalyst for a bill to enact a uniform procedure for electing U.S. senators in state legislatures.⁴ The secession crisis and subsequent war caused reform efforts to be put aside. Once the Civil War emergency gave way to a new era of normal politics, the election of senators reemerged as a concern in Washington, D.C.

      The postbellum tipping point occurred in 1865 with the election of John P. Stockton (D-NJ), which came about after the New Jersey state legislature changed its rules regarding the definition of a quorum. Prior practice in New Jersey had required a majority vote in each chamber to elect a U.S. senator, but in this case the legislature had adopted new rules that allowed Stockton to be elected by a plurality in both houses. Republicans in the U.S. Senate wanted to block Stockton in order to increase their capacity to override presidential vetoes, especially in relation to post–Civil War civil rights issues.

      In January 1866, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee upheld Stockton’s election, but the debate on Senate election practices was only just beginning. In March of the same year, the Senate considered the arguments made by Senator Daniel Clark (R-NH) that because the Constitution did not dictate specific election practices in state legislatures, precedent should be the guide; Clark argued that since the Stockton election contradicted prior practices in New Jersey, he should not be seated.

      Despite Clark’s contention, the Senate voted twenty-two to twenty-one in favor of seating Stockton. This would have probably led to the immediate, if controversial, seating of Stockton but for one important detail: Stockton had voted to seat himself.⁵ Seizing on this act of parliamentary indiscretion, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) demanded another vote on the grounds that it was improper for Stockton to vote on his own case. This time, the Senate voted twenty-three to twenty against seating Stockton.⁶ The New Jersey Senate seat was subsequently left empty until September 1866, when a replacement was elected to complete the term. Stockton himself was elected to the Senate in 1869 and served one term.⁷

      In defending his own election, Stockton prepared a long description of the varied practices governing the election of U.S. senators among state legislatures. This report, coupled with frustration over the time and resources devoted to resolving contested election cases, led to broader action to enact a bill that would regularize these elections.

      Ultimately, seventy-seven years after the ratification of the Constitution, in July 1866, Congress passed An Act to Regulate the Times and Manner of Holding Elections for Senators in Congress (14 Stat. 243), instituting a set of proceedings in state legislatures to elect U.S. senators.⁸ First, each chamber was to meet separately at noon on the second Tuesday after the state legislature had organized to vote separately for senator. On the following day at noon, the two chambers would meet in joint assembly to count the votes.⁹ If a majority of the members of each chamber favored the same candidate, that person would be declared elected. If no candidate secured a majority of the joint assembly, House and Senate members were required to meet together, and ballot at least once a day until a senator was chosen or their legislative session adjourned sine die. If the legislature failed to elect a senator before adjourning sine die, the governor could appoint someone to fill the vacancy until the next time the legislature met. Until 1893 the U.S. Senate would typically agree to seat these appointed senators, but in that year the Senate changed its rules, establishing a precedent that if the state legislature was unable to name a senator by its final adjournment, anyone appointed by the governor to fill the vacancy would be denied the seat. The impetus for the change was political: there were appointed senators from states that were opposed to the Senate majority’s preferred policies, so the Senate voted not to seat them.

      An important feature of the Act of 1866 was the requirement that legislators vote viva voce—that is, out loud in a public roll call vote—and that the votes be recorded in the journals of the state legislatures.¹⁰ Given this, it established a formal framework that makes the comprehensive study of Senate elections within the state legislatures possible. Without such requirements, there would be a thin and inconsistent empirical basis on which to study these elections.¹¹ The 1866 act also required a majority to approve the choice for U.S. senator in each chamber separately, or a majority of all legislators to approve the choice in joint session together. The majority rule requirement becomes a critical factor in the resolution of indirect elections.

      The Movement for Direct Election

      The standardization of U.S. Senate election practices in state legislatures failed to solve the problems associated with indirect Senate elections. One prominent complaint about the indirect election system was that it resulted in vacant Senate seats when state legislatures deadlocked. Deadlocks happened at least fourteen times in the decade and a half starting in 1891.¹² As we will explain in later chapters, these stalemates were the product of fierce competition over Senate seats both between the parties and within sameparty factions.

      The media at the time wrote scornful and disapproving pieces about the failure of state legislatures to fulfill this basic constitutional task. For example, on March 15, 1899, the New York Times detailed the prospect of Senate seats going empty as a result of unresolved conflicts in state legislatures:

      Pennsylvania, it is believed, will not elect a Senator. Its legislature is to adjourn April 20, and the expectation is that Senator [Matthew] Quay will not have a chance to secure re-election before another meeting of the Legislatures. California is hopelessly broken up and promises to adjourn with a dead-lock preventing an election, so tenacious are the partisans of different candidates and so reluctant are they to unite upon a man not yet named as a candidate. The Republicans have 51 Senators and might have had 54 but for the fights in Pennsylvania, California, and Delaware…. The Senate has declared against the seating of Senators appointed where State Legislatures have neglected or refused to elect, so that neither Delaware nor Utah will be represented next December, and California and Pennsylvania are likely to be in the same fix.¹³

      Harper’s Weekly wrote that the framers had intended to make sure that each state was fully represented by two senators at all times by giving governors the power to fill vacancies when they occurred while the legislature was in recess. The article goes on to bemoan the fact that even when legislatures were in session, they would leave Senate seats empty: During the past six years five States in the Union have each had one of their two Senatorial seats unoccupied for nearly one-third of the six year term. The reason in every instance was that the Legislature which should have elected a Senator failed to discharge its duty.¹⁴

      An equal, if not stronger, complaint about indirect Senate elections was that they were plagued by significant corruption to a point that undermined the very legitimacy of the election process and the U.S. senators who were elected by it. As we note above, the years 1871 to 1913 saw important changes in the federal government’s role in regulating the burgeoning industrial sector. The rising centrality of the federal government in a wide range of economic matters—banking, transportation, trade, and imperialism, among others—made influence over the federal government a top priority for the leaders of the nation’s largest businesses, and of course, the political parties aligned with those businesses.

      In this Gilded Age, it was common for business interests and wealthy individuals to pursue their private ends through bribery, or the use of money in ways that looked like bribery. One might question why bribery and corruption were so prevalent in electing senators but not in electing members of the House of Representatives. We would answer that because members of the U.S. House were elected popularly, it was impractical for those wishing to use bribery to influence the selection of representatives to do so on any large scale. The same holds true for the presidency: the de facto popular election of presidents similarly made widespread bribery in those cases an inefficient proposition.

      Engaging in bribery to win a Senate seat was in comparison a relatively efficient use of money. While the number of state legislators was large—over sixty-five hundred in the year 1912, for instance—it was a knowable quantity in each state. Furthermore, political or economic actors intent on using bribery to influence Senate elections could easily identify the set of state legislators who would be casting ballots. Once moneyed interests had a significant stake in who was elected to the Senate, the process became easily corruptible, as we will show in later chapters. Ironically, the founders often viewed the Senate as a potential bulwark against corruption. The extent of corruption under this system cannot be overstated—something that is woefully underacknowledged by those in the current era who argue for a return to indirect elections.¹⁵

      Numerous newspaper and magazine articles of the day observed that the Senate electoral process was so corrupt that it produced an unresponsive and unrepresentative Senate. In 1896, for example, Goldwin Smith, a political columnist and historian, wrote in the Saturday Review that

      wealth has its weight in senatorial elections, as it has in elections generally, and in all countries. That senatorships are directly bought those who ought to know do not believe. That they are indirectly bought by contributions to party funds and other outlays morally corrupt seems to be generally admitted…. In most cases, no doubt, there is a great deal of intrigue. In one State the other day, a rich man openly alleged that he had purchased the election by his contributions to the party fund, and insisted that the goods should be delivered, though, happily, in vain.¹⁶

      Not all commentary, however, was in support of adopting direct elections as a solution to the issues of deadlock and corruption. William Everett, a former U.S. House member and scholar, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1906 that corruption was a major problem in the election of U.S. senators generally.

      One hears a great deal of amending the Constitution so as to have senators chosen directly by the people. I have no belief in any such scheme. It is in the power of the people of any state to let their legislatures know in half a dozen ways whom they want for senators and to enforce their will, if they so choose. A stream can rise no higher than its fountain. It is said the senators are chosen by corrupt legislatures; but by whom were the corrupt legislatures chosen? The fault is the people of the states and in them only.¹⁷

      Everett’s lament can be tied right back to James Madison’s claim that it would not be possible to corrupt a sufficient number of state legislatures simultaneously to produce a majority of corrupt U.S. senators.

      Thus, corruption and electoral instability resulting in conflict and deadlock were strong forces leading to the replacement of the indirect election of senators by direct election. The Oregon plan for direct primaries is the best known of these efforts. Briefly, the plan was adopted in 1904 by Oregon to institute direct primaries as a means of nominating candidates for state and local elected office, including for U.S. Senate. Consequently, the plan allowed for Senate candidates to be included on the ballot in statewide elections, and the voters’ choice was intended to serve as a popular referendum as to who should be chosen as a senator by the state legislature. The sticking point in implementing the direct primary plan was what it meant for party nominating conventions. Proponents argued that it should wholly replace nominating conventions, but opponents asserted that such conventions could effectively guide voters in primary elections.

      In the years immediately following 1904 in Oregon, a hybrid system existed with informal gatherings known as assemblies, which would endorse candidates in the upcoming primary.¹⁸ These party gatherings were the initial way in which party organizations adapted to the movement for direct elections. Later in the book, in chapter 4, we discuss the role of parties in Senate nominations during this period, and suggest that the major parties ultimately realized that direct elections would enable them to knockout minor parties more easily in the contest for Senate seats, thus giving them an incentive to support the change to direct elections. With the rise of direct elections, Senate elections became a different beast.

      The Impact of Electoral Reform on the U.S. Senate.

      The ratification process for the Seventeenth Amendment was a relatively short one by U.S. history standards. The House of Representatives had been passing a version of the Seventeenth Amendment repeatedly since 1894, but the Senate did not seriously consider the measure until June 12, 1911, when it passed the amendment by a vote of 64 to 24. The House wrangled a bit, though finally passed the Senate’s version on May 13, 1912, by a vote of 238 to 39. The states took one year to ratify the amendment; on May 31, 1913, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, presided over a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in which he recognized the ratification.¹⁹

      One might have expected major changes in the behavior of U.S. senators elected after the Seventeenth Amendment and even transformations in the nature of the Senate itself. But political scientists have come to the conclusion that in fact, while there were some changes, they were relatively minor. After the direct election system was instituted, the partisan composition of the Senate gradually shifted toward the Democratic Party after a long period of Republican dominance. Some institutional patterns changed as well. Senators had slightly longer average tenures in office, and incumbent senators were more likely to moderate their roll call voting behavior to appeal to the median state voter rather than to the majority party in the state legislature.²⁰

      Nevertheless, traditional career-building activities such as bill sponsorship and committee work did not change much; U.S. senators used these tools to build constituent support in the indirect and direct election periods. With respect to shifts in internal Senate rules and the use of filibuster, scholars Greg Wawro and Eric Schickler find no direct correlation between the switch to direct elections and adoption of the cloture rule in the Senate in 1917, but they do see an increase in filibuster activity in the post–Seventeenth Amendment period.²¹ The cry to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment began less than two decades after its ratification and continues to this day, though typically out of the mainstream of U.S. politics. On December 11, 1933, for instance, a letter writer to the New York Times urged Congress to keep up the momentum leading to the repeal of Prohibition by repealing the Sixteenth Amendment (income tax), after which the next step is to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, … that we may get rid of the sons of wild jackasses and their like; that we may have dignity, intelligence and decorum in that erstwhile august body.²² Repeal was lurking around the fringes of political respectability in 1976 when the American Independent Party, on the occasion of nominating the Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox for president, turned back an effort to add the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to its party’s platform.²³

      Present-day opponents of the Seventeenth Amendment, who include incumbents (senators Mike Lee [R-UT], Ted Cruz [R-TX], and Rand Paul [R-KY]), legal scholars, and historians, argue that this change in the election of U.S. senators has expanded federal power at the expense of the states.²⁴ They reason that by giving the power to select U.S. senators back to state legislatures, senators would be more accountable to states as entities, and thereby more sensitive to federal encroachment on state sovereignty as well as mandates (funded and unfunded) to carry out federal policy.²⁵ In particular, the legal scholarship on this issue indicts the amendment for its negative impact on federalism and advocates—implicitly or explicitly—for the amendment’s repeal as restorative.²⁶

      One does not have to believe that we will actually repeal or even modify the Seventeenth Amendment to acknowledge that having a deeper understanding of the effects of constitutional change on U.S. democracy is a worthwhile endeavor. Indeed, the stakes are high for rethinking the representative relationship between states and the federal government. A quick snapshot of the share of the federal budget that flows to states helps to illustrate just how intertwined these sets of governments are in the modern United States. In fiscal year 2010, 35 percent of the $3.3 trillion federal budget ($1.15 trillion) went to states: $332.3 billion went to state and local governments directly for programs such as education, housing, child nutrition, and infrastructure; $297.9 billion was distributed for entitlement programs administered by the states such as Medicaid and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families; and $516.7 billion flowed to states in the form of federal procurement (64 percent, or $331.2 billion, of those funds were defense related).²⁷ Clearly, states incur serious budgetary impacts every time a funding formula or the eligibility requirement for a federal program is altered, and the Senate remains the vehicle for states to register their dissatisfaction with these changes.

      But the link between federal and state governments is far more complex than mere money; with federal aid comes federal mandates, requirements, and regulations. Opponents to the Seventeenth Amendment contend that over the past century, the federal government has usurped state powers and overrun state laws, most notably under the auspices of the Commerce Clause and power of taxation.²⁸ The rhetoric used to describe President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, passed in March 2010, reflects this deep concern about the overreach of federal sovereignty at the states’ expense. The act made sweeping changes in the provision of health care, and forced states to either implement parts of the law themselves or have the federal government come into the state and implement it directly. Given that twenty-seven states refused to

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