In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson told the New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg, “I am not for denouncing Congress all the time. I am not like ... you writers who think of congressmen as archaic buffoons with tobacco drool running down their shirts.”
For a long time, few historians of 20th-century America agreed with Johnson. For decades, Congress was a ghost in the historical imagination: usually absent in the best scholarship; when it did appear, it was depicted as retrograde, a reactive body out of touch with modern society. If anything, Johnson’s enormous use of presidential power in conducting the war in Vietnam only intensified scholarly interest in the executive branch—and lack of interest in Congress.
That was a huge mistake. For no matter how dysfunctional Congress has always seemed—and the talk we hear today about the inability of legislators to govern is as American as apple pie—it is difficult to dispute the immense power of those who control Capitol Hill. As President John F. Kennedy pointed out in an interview in December 1962, at a moment when much of his domestic agenda was stalled in Congressional committees, “I think the Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress. But that is because when you are in Congress you are one of a hundred in the Senate or one of 435 in the House, so that the power is so divided. But from here I look at a Congress, and I look at the collective power of the Congress.”
Indeed, the fact that Americans constantly complain about the ability of Congress to block presidential action on key issues is less a sign that the institution is impotent and more clear evidence that legislators retain an enormous hold on Washington. “Dysfunction” might be the wrong word. “Power” is much better.
Recognizing that, in recent years historians and political scientists have begun tackling the history of the U.S. Congress and integrating it into broader narratives about America in the 20th and 21st centuries. That trend has been receiving more attention in recent months as a result of a landmark book by the Columbia University historian and political scientist Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time offers a fresh understanding of the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. By shifting attention away from the White House to Capitol Hill, Katznelson brings together a huge body of work to show that Southern power in the House and Senate allowed the region to build New Deal programs without affecting racial relations. Modern liberalism was constructed through a Faustian bargain over how the nation would treat African-Americans.
Why did it take so long to focus on Congress? During the 1950s and 60s, the heyday of political history, a generation that had come of age when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, and that had seen how federal programs during the New Deal and World War II had saved the American economy, was fascinated with the White House. Historians like Richard Hofstadter, Leuchtenburg, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., seeing the presidency as the primary source of liberal ideas and policies that helped the common man, asked how the office had come to play such a major role in American life. They concurred with Mark Twain’s famous quip, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Congress, the political scientist George B. Galloway wrote in 1946, was an “oxcart in the age of the atom.”
In the 1960s, a group of younger liberals like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein began to attack their predecessors for exaggerating the “progressive” nature of presidents: Behind seemingly enlightened presidential acts, those scholars said, lay efforts to protect corporations and other vested interests. The focus, however, was still on the executive branch. To be sure, there were important exceptions: James T. Patterson’s key history on the origins of the Congressional coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans in the late 1930s, and Robert Griffith’s work on the role of legislators in the anticommunist crusade of the early 1950s.
Following Richard M. Nixon’s abuse of power and resignation, scholarly perceptions of an Imperial Presidency grew only more entrenched. At a moment when public approval for Congress reached an unprecedented level, the fascination with the potential of the executive institution turned into a fascination with its danger.
Congress fared even worse over the next two decades, as the history profession turned away from politics altogether and focused on history from the “bottom up.” Members of the generation that was disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate concluded that the study of political elites did not reflect the experience of most Americans; nor did it explain how power really worked in America. As the profession’s leaders started to write about the history of the United States through local communities, social movements, the workplace, and mass culture, Congress moved farther away from the center of scholarly attention. It was easy to attend conferences of the Organization of American Historians or to read The Journal of American History without learning anything much about legislators.
There were also huge conceptual and physical obstacles to studying Congress. After all, historians privilege narrative above all else, and writing a crisp account of this institution is anything but easy. Congress demands messiness. It has 535 members, all of whom are constantly rotating. The House and Senate have very distinct rules, norms, and leaders. Even the leadership structure is difficult to nail down, with multiple sources of political authority like committee chairs, caucus leaders, and party leaders, all of whom continually change.
Presidential papers are primarily centralized in presidential libraries and the National Archives, which houses executive-branch records. Those repositories are well staffed, and, while considerable material remains classified or unprocessed, researchers can usually see a huge volume of carefully filed and labeled documents. In contrast, Congressional papers are scattered throughout the country, usually donated by members to colleges, universities, and historical archives in their districts and states. Many of those institutions do not have the money or personnel to process the material, which remains inaccessible or time-consuming to wade through.
Also unlike some of the major presidential archives, Congressional archives usually don’t offer research grants to finance trips. Only a handful have digitized material and made it accessible on the Web. To make matters even more complicated, members of Congress often don’t leave behind a substantial written record of their work: Their papers are usually filled with letters to and from constituents.
Despite the obstacles, since the mid-1990s the history of Congress has started to gain new life—not just in history, but also in political science. In seeking new ways to write about political history, scholars are looking more closely at public policy and government institutions—and Congress, with its vital role in the policy-making process, has become more important. Never as insulated as the White House, it has also become an attractive vehicle for scholars to understand the connections between state and society. Given the impact that the Republican-controlled Congress had made on national politics after 1994, moreover, scholars have been living through a period when it is difficult to ignore the power of legislators.
Those interested in race, gender, and ethnicity, for example, have started to find that Congress is a place to start understanding how political leaders and public policy shape social relationships. An early work in political science, Robert C. Lieberman’s Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State looked at the roots of racial conflict over welfare policy in FDR’s compromises in the 1930s with Southern Democrats. In history, Linda Gordon, in Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935, and Alice Kessler Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America examined how legislators inscribed assumptions about gender—namely the single, male wage-earning family—into most domestic programs related to work.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, historians also challenged the notion that legislators were always obstacles to the expansion of government. My own Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975, showed how the Arkansan chair of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974 exerted enormous influence in crafting macroeconomic-policy programs like Social Security, unemployment compensation, and Medicare. Paul Milazzo, in Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945-1972, revealed how Congress—as much as green activists and Earth Day—was integral to the development of environmental policy.
Congress is a place to start understanding how political leaders and public policy shape social relationships.
More recently, James T. Sparrow’s Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government has done much to incorporate Congress into bigger narratives of periods like the 1940s. There have been a number of excellent political biographies that use individuals to craft a history of Congress and explain how it influenced broader historical trends. For example, Joseph Crespino wrote an outstanding book last year, Strom Thurmond’s America, on conservatism since World War II.
In political science, Congress has always been an important subject. During the 1960s, behavioralists examined the dynamics of Congressional leadership through participant observation, but more recently political scientists have become interested in the history of the institution to test theories that had been based primarily on the contemporary institution. Rather than using interviews with existing members, in the 1990s they started to turn to historical data, such as roll-call votes, legislative output, confirmation votes, and the frequency of filibusters.
Building on the work of more-senior scholars, a vibrant cohort of young researchers is giving us fascinating accounts of the House and Senate. Eric Schickler’s Disjointed Pluralism examines the history of Congressional reform, while Jeffrey A. Jenkins and Charles Stewart III, in Fighting for the Speakership, have recently shown how the majority party in the House came to control the speakership, and how the speakership became such a powerful office—revealing that the outcome was far from inevitable. An important new book by Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Political Bubbles: Financial Crisis and the Failure of American Democracy looks at how structural problems in politics, including legislative rules, have prevented elected officials from undertaking effective economic policies and responding to crises.
Also beginning in the 1990s, another group of political scientists, part of a field called American Political Development, has broken with the primacy of rational-choice theory, with its emphasis on formal models of behavior. Focusing on how institutional structures and exiting policies constrain political outcomes, they too have been looking at Congress. In Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917, Elizabeth M. Sanders has argued that Southern congressmen were the driving force behind progressivism in the early 20th century. The forthcoming Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, by Robert Mickey, explains how racism in Dixie has responded to democratic pressures since the 1960s.
The renewed interest in Congress is also being facilitated by burgeoning scholarship on American conservatism. That work has primarily centered on the grass-roots level, looking at how ordinary citizens have helped shape the movement. Rather than seeing the movement as a reaction to the Great Society and a phenomenon of the 1970s, the literature has emphasized the presence of conservatism during the decades of the so-called New Deal Order. Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, for example, deals with business leaders who financed conservative politicians and organizations in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result of this body of work, the conservative elements that dominated the Congressional system have come to seem less aberrational and more in step with public opinion than an earlier generation assumed.
Finally, emerging fields like the history of capitalism in the United States are finding ways to integrate Congress into their studies. Initially, much of the scholarship on capitalism has not been centered on Capitol Hill. It has looked at such topics as the road to the low-cost economy of Walmart or the promotion of pro-business Christian values by corporations.
But more work is about to come out that includes an examination of the connections among policy, capitalism, and Congress—even if that is not the explicit focus of the books. Benjamin C. Waterhouse will be looking at the way the business community mobilized through the Business Roundtable in Washington in the 1970s as it attempted to influence Congress. Meg Jacobs is examining how the continued strength of liberalism in Congress during the 1970s pushed conservatives in the executive branch to find new ways, outside the legislative process, to affect energy policy.
In a sign of just how much the new field has established itself, many of those scholars participate in a floating conference on Congressional history, founded by Gregory Wawro and Katznelson at Columbia University in 2001. It meets annually at different universities and brings together researchers with a variety of methodological perspectives.
There has also been more institutional support for scholars willing to take on the challenge of writing about Congress. A few organizations, like the Dirksen Center for Congressional Research and the Carl Albert Center, have offered grants for research trips, while the Senate Historical Office has been a shining model of what government can do in terms of developing its own historical record, producing first-rate oral histories, and providing important information online. Another source of material has come from online government-documents collections (Congressional hearings, reports, floor debate) as well as digitized editions of Congressional Quarterly.
The reintegration of Congress into the scholarship on 20th-century America is a hugely important development. For Congress is at the heart of our democratic processes, the institution where different societal interests try, many times unsuccessfully, to reach agreement on the big issues of the day and the more mundane issues of governance.
Certainly we see that complexity today. As is often the case, what we are learning about the past can illuminate current conundrums. One lesson is that the political process matters. Unless reformers are able to change the underlying rules and norms of the House and Senate (campaign finance, committee and party power, ethics, lobbying), it is unlikely that the underlying dynamics of Congress, such as the power of party leaders or the relationship between money and politics, will change. The Congressional scandals of the early and mid-1970s, when a number of legislators fell from power for having abused their positions or misused public money, grew out of an era when ethics laws were virtually nonexistent. The huge growth of interest-group power in this decade stemmed from the failure of Congress to create a public-finance system for elections in the way it had for presidential candidates after Watergate. That has left legislators to constantly scramble for private money.
A second lesson is that all Americans should become more sober about how much change to expect after presidential elections. Although the news media and pundits love to present each new presidency as a moment of potential transformation, the fact is that unless there are huge changes in the internal composition of Congress, legislative gains will probably be limited. Even FDR learned that after his landslide 1936 victory. Ours is a system, especially in a filibuster-prone Senate, where a supermajority is needed on almost any bill, where the opposition retains considerable influence regardless of who controls the White House.
A final lesson is the importance of having good policy design when pushing for a new measure. As the political scientist Eric M. Patashnik has argued in Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted, the key test is not whether a reform passes through Congress, but if it lasts over time. History shows that Congress has all sorts of mechanisms to cause trouble for programs, including cutting essential funds or using oversight to shine unwanted attention on the flaws of a program. Patashnik, for example, shows how the loophole-closing tax reform of 1986 gradually fell apart because proponents had not changed the underlying dynamics of how the tax-writing process worked. In contrast, airline deregulation succeeded because powerful economic interests emerged in the industry that lobbied Congress to make sure that the new system remained intact.
The work on Congressional history is only beginning. There are still many books waiting to be written: political biographies of some of the greatest figures who moved the institution, sophisticated accounts of what role Congress played in some of the major crises and events that the nation has lived through, a better understanding of how new social forces such as feminism and civil rights affected the composition of the House and Senate, as well as changes in how Congress functions, be it in electoral politics or policy making.
The good news is that, as Katznelson’s book shows, we have made major progress in understanding Congress. Now it’s up to the next generation of scholars to tell the story of America with Congress, with all of its virtues and vices, at its center.