Part I

THE DAM

1

The Desks of the Senate

THE CHAMBER of the United States Senate was a long, cavernous space—over a hundred feet long. From its upper portion, from the galleries for citizens and journalists which rimmed it, it seemed even longer than it was, in part because it was so gloomy and dim—so dim in 1949, when lights had not yet been added for television and the only illumination came from the ceiling almost forty feet above the floor, that its far end faded away in shadows—and in part because it was so pallid and bare. Its drab tan damask walls, divided into panels by tall columns and pilasters and by seven sets of double doors, were unrelieved by even a single touch of color—no painting, no mural—or, seemingly, by any other ornament. Above those walls, in the galleries, were rows of seats as utilitarian as those of a theater and covered in a dingy gray, and the features of the twenty white marble busts of the country’s first twenty vice presidents, set into niches above the galleries, were shadowy and blurred. The marble of the pilasters and columns was a dull reddish gray in the gloom. The only spots of brightness in the Chamber were the few tangled red and white stripes on the flag that hung limply from a pole on the presiding officer’s dais, and the reflection of the ceiling lights on the tops of the ninety-six mahogany desks arranged in four long half circles around the well below the dais. From the galleries the low red-gray marble dais was plain and unimposing, apparently without decoration. The desks themselves, small and spindly, seemed more like school-children’s desks than the desks of senators of the United States, mightiest of republics.

When a person stood on the floor of the Senate Chamber, however—in the well below the dais—the dais was, suddenly, not plain at all. Up close, its marble was a deep, dark red lushly veined with grays and greens, and set into it, almost invisible from the galleries, but, up close, richly glinting, were two bronze laurel wreaths, like the wreaths that the Senate of Rome bestowed on generals with whom it was pleased, when Rome ruled the known world—and the Senate ruled Rome. From the well, the columns and pilasters behind the dais were, suddenly, tall and stately and topped with scrolls, like the columns of the Roman Senate’s chamber, the columns before which Cato spoke and Caesar fell, and above the columns, carved in cream-colored marble, were eagles, for Rome’s legions marched behind eagles. From the well, there was, embroidered onto each pale damask panel, an ornament in the same pale color and all but invisible from above—a shield—and there were cream-colored marble shields, and swords and arrows, above the doors. And the doors—those seven pairs of double doors, each flanked by its tall columns and pilasters—were tall, too, and their grillwork, hardly noticeable from above, was intricate and made of beaten bronze, and it was framed by heavy, squared bronze coils. The vice presidential busts were, all at once, very high above you; set into deep, arched niches, flanked by massive bronze sconces, their marble faces, thoughtful, stern, encircled the Chamber like a somber evocation of the Republic’s glorious past. And, rising from the well, there were the desks.

The desks of the Senate rise in four shallow tiers, one above the other, in a deep half circle. Small and spindly individually, from the well they blend together so that with their smooth, burnished mahogany tops reflecting even the dim lights in the ceiling so far above them, they form four sweeping, glowing arcs. To stand in the well of the Senate is to stand among these four long arcs that rise around and above you, that stretch away from you, gleaming richly in the gloom: powerful, majestic. To someone standing in the well, the Chamber, in all its cavernous drabness, is only a setting for those desks—for those desks, and for the history that was made at them.

The first forty-eight of those desks—they are of a simple, federal design—were carved in 1819 to replace the desks the British had burned five years before. When, in 1859, the Senate moved into this Chamber, those desks moved with them, and when, as the Union grew, more desks were added, they were carved to the same design. And for decades—for most of the first century of the Republic’s existence, in fact; for the century in which it was transformed from a collection of ragged colonies into an empire—much of its history was hammered out among those desks.

Daniel Webster’s hand rested on one of those desks when, on January 26, 1830, he rose to reply again to Robert Hayne.

Every desk in the domed, colonnaded room that was then the Senate’s Chamber was filled that day—some not with senators but with spectators, for so many visitors, not only from Washington but from Baltimore and New York, had crowded into the Chamber, overflowing the galleries, that some senators had surrendered their seats and were standing against the walls or even among the desks—for the fate of the young nation might hang on that reply. In the South, chafing under the domination of the North and East, there was a new word abroad—secession—and the South’s leading spokesman, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, had, although he was Vice President of the United States, proposed a step that would go a long way toward shattering the Union: that any state unwilling to abide by a law enacted by the national government could nullify it within its borders. In an earlier Senate speech that January of 1830, the South, through the South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, had proposed that the West should join the South in an alliance that could have the most serious implications for the future of the Union. The specific issue Hayne raised was the price of public lands in the West: the West wanted the price kept low to attract settlers from the East and encourage development; the East wanted the price kept high so its people would stay home, and continue to provide cheap labor for northern factories. The East, whose policies had so long ground down the South, was now, Hayne said, trying to do the same thing to the West, and the West should unite with the South against it. And the Senator raised broader issues as well. Why should one section be taxed to construct a public improvement in another? “What interest has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?” And what if Ohio didn’t want it? Why should the national government decide such issues? The sovereignty of the individual states—their rights, their freedom—was being trampled. The reaction of many western senators to Hayne’s proposal of an alliance had been ominously favorable; Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton asked the South to “stretch forth” a “protecting arm” against the East. And to Webster’s first speech in response, Hayne—slight, slender, and aristocratic in bearing although dressed in a “coarse homespun suit that he had substituted for the hated broadcloth manufactured in the North”—had passionately attacked the North’s “meddling statesmen” and abolitionists, and had defended slavery, states’ rights, and nullification in arguments that were considered so unanswerable that the “white, triumphant face” of a smiling Calhoun, presiding over the Senate as Vice President, and the toasts in Washington taverns to Hayne, to the South, and to nullification reflected the general feeling that the South had won. And then two days later, on the 26th, Senator Webster of Massachusetts, with his dark, craggy face, jet-black hair, and jutting black eyebrows—“Black Dan” Webster, with his deep booming voice that “could shake the world,” Webster, Emerson’s “great cannon loaded to the lips”—rose, in blue coat with bright brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and white cravat, rose to answer, and, as he spoke, the smile faded from Calhoun’s face.

He stood erect as he spoke, his left hand resting on his desk, his voice filling the Chamber, and, one by one, he examined and demolished Hayne’s arguments. The claim that a state could decide constitutional questions? The Constitution, Webster said, is the fundamental law of a people—of one people—not of states. “We the People of the United States made this Constitution…. This government came from the people, and is responsible to them.” “He asks me, ‘What interest has South Carolina in a canal to the Ohio?’ The answer to that question expounds the whole diversity of sentiment between that gentleman and me…. According to his doctrine, she has no interest in it. According to his doctrine, Ohio is one country, and South Carolina is another country…. I, sir, take a different view of the whole matter. I look upon Ohio and South Carolina to be parts of one whole—parts of the same country—and that country is my country…. I come here not to consider that I will do this for one distinct part of it, and that for another, but … to legislate for the whole.” And finally Webster turned to a higher idea: the idea—in and of itself—of Union, permanent and enduring. The concept was, as one historian would note, “still something of a novelty in 1830…. Liberty was supposed to depend more on the rights of states than on the powers of the general government.” But to Webster, the ideas were not two ideas but one.

When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining brightly upon my united, free and happy Country. I hope I shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I hope that I may not see the flag of my Country, with its stars separated or obliterated, torn by commotion, smoking with the blood of civil war. I hope I may not see the standard raised of separate State rights, star against star, and stripe against stripe; but that the flag of the Union may keep its stars and its stripes corded and bound together in indissoluble ties. I hope I shall not see written, as its motto, first Liberty, and then Union. I hope I shall see no such delusion and deluded motto on the flag of that Country. I hope to see spread all over it, blazoned in letters of light, and proudly floating over Land and Sea that other sentiment, dear to my heart, “Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

Tears in the crowded Senate gallery; tears on the crowded Senate floor. “Even Calhoun,” it was said, “revealed the emotions he tried so hard to conceal. Love and pride of country—these were things he could understand, too.” Men and women were weeping openly as Daniel Webster finished. Among those men were western senators, ardent nationalists, who had “thrilled to the patriotic fervor of Webster’s final words.” Those words crushed the southern hope for an alliance with the West. They did more. Webster revised the speech before it was published in pamphlet form, trying to convert the spoken words, “embellished as they had been by gestures, modulations of voice, and changes of expression, into words that would be read without these accompaniments but would leave the reader as thrilled and awed as the listening audience had been.” He succeeded. Edition followed edition, and when copies ran out, men and women passed copies from hand to hand; in Tennessee, it was said, each copy “has probably been read by as many as fifty different” persons. “No speech in the English language, perhaps no speech in modern times, had ever been as widely diffused and widely read as Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne,” an historian of the period was to write. That speech “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.” It made the Union, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it, “part of the religion of this people.” And as for the last nine of those words—that ringing final sentence—the only change Webster made in them was to reverse “Union” and “Liberty,” so that the sentence read: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” Those words would be memorized by generations of schoolchildren, they would be chiseled in marble on walls and monuments—those words, spoken among those desks, in the Senate.

THE LONG STRUGGLE of the colonies that were now become states against a King and the King’s representatives—the royal governors and proprietary officials in each colony—had made the colonists distrust and fear the possibilities for tyranny inherent in executive authority. And so, in creating the new nation, its Founding Fathers, the Framers of its Constitution, gave its legislature or Congress not only its own powers, specified and sweeping, powers of the purse (“To lay and collect Taxes… To borrow Money on the credit of the United States … To coin Money”) and powers of the sword (“To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal… To raise and support Armies … To provide and maintain a Navy …”) but also powers designed to make the Congress independent of the President and to restrain and act as a check on his authority: power to approve his appointments, even the appointments he made within his own Administration, even appointments he made to his own Cabinet; power to remove his appointees through impeachment—to remove him through impeachment, should it prove necessary; power to override his vetoes of their Acts. And the most potent of these restraining powers the Framers gave to the Senate. While the House of Representatives was given the “sole power of Impeachment,” the Senate was given the “sole power to try all Impeachments” (“And no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of Two Thirds of the Members present”). The House could accuse; only the Senate could judge, only the Senate convict. The power to approve presidential appointments was given to the Senate alone; a President could nominate and appoint ambassadors, Supreme Court justices, and all other officers of the United States, but only “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” Determined to deny the President the prerogative most European monarchs enjoyed of declaring war, the Framers gave that power to Congress as a whole, to House as well as Senate, but the legislative portion of the power of ending war by treaties, of preventing war by treaties—the power to do everything that can be done by treaties between nations—was vested in the Senate alone; while most European rulers could enter into a treaty on their own authority, an American President could make one only “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was to write:

The Founding Fathers appear to have envisaged the treaty-making process as a genuine exercise in concurrent authority, in which the President and Senate would collaborate at all stages…. One third plus one of the senators … retained the power of life and death over the treaties.

Nor was it only the power of the executive of which the Framers were wary. These creators of a government of the people feared not only the people’s rulers but the people themselves, the people in their numbers, the people in their passions, what the Founding Father Edmund Randolph called “the turbulence and follies of democracy.”

The Framers of the Constitution feared the people’s power because they were, many of them, members of what in America constituted an aristocracy, an aristocracy of the educated, the well-born, and the well-to-do, and they mistrusted those who were not educated or well-born or well-to-do. More specifically, they feared the people’s power because, possessing, and esteeming, property, they wanted the rights of property protected against those who did not possess it. In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would come to outnumber the former. “According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the latter,” he noted. “Symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give notice of the future danger.” But the Framers feared the people’s power also because they hated tyranny, and they knew there could be a tyranny of the people as well as the tyranny of a King, particularly in a system designed so that, in many ways, the majority ruled. “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power,” Madison wrote. These abuses were more likely because the emotions of men in the mass ran high and fast, they were “liable to err … from fickleness and passion,” and “the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”

So the Framers wanted to check and restrain not only the people’s rulers, but the people; they wanted to erect what Madison called “a necessary fence” against the majority will. To create such a fence, they decided that the Congress would have not one house but two, and that while the lower house would be designed to reflect the popular will, that would not be the purpose of the upper house. How, Madison asked, is “the future danger”—the danger of “a leveling spirit”—“to be guarded against on republican principles? How is the danger in all cases of interested coalitions to oppress the minority to be guarded against? Among other means by the establishment of a body in the government sufficiently respectable for its wisdom and virtue, to aid on such emergencies, the preponderance of justice by throwing its weight into that scale.” This body, Madison said, was to be the Senate. Summarizing in the Constitutional Convention the ends that would be served by this proposed upper house of Congress, Madison said they were “first to protect the people against their rulers; secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led.”

“The use of the Senate,” Madison said, “is to consist in its proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” It should, he said, be “an anchor against popular fluctuations.” He drew for parallels on classical history, which, he said, “informs us of no long-lived republic which had not a Senate.” In two of the three “long-lived” republics of antiquity, Sparta and Rome, and probably in the third—Carthage (about whose governmental institutions less was known)—senators served for life. “These examples … when compared with the fugitive and turbulent existence of other ancient republics, [are] very instructive proofs of the necessity of some institution that will blend stability with liberty.” Thomas Jefferson had been in Paris during the Convention, serving as minister to France. When he returned, he asked George Washington over breakfast why the President had agreed to a two-house Congress. According to a story that may be apocryphal, Washington replied with his own question: “Why did you pour your tea into that saucer?” And when Jefferson answered, “To cool it,” Washington said, “Just so. We pour House legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.” The resolution providing for a two-house Congress was agreed to by the Constitutional Convention with almost no debate or dissent.

And to ensure that the Senate could protect the people against themselves, the Framers armored the Senate against the people.

One layer of armor was bolted on to allay the fears of the states with fewer people, that the more populous states would combine to gain a commercial advantage or to control presidential appointments and national policies; the small states were determined that all states should have an equal voice in the Congress, so, in what became known as the “Great Compromise,” it was agreed that while representation in the House would be by population, in the Senate it would be by states; as a result of that provision, a majority of the people could not pass a law; a majority of the states was required as well. But there were other, even stronger, layers. One was size. “Numerous assemblies,” Madison explained, have a propensity “to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.” So the Senate would, in Madison’s phrase, be “less numerous.” Each state, the Framers decided, would be represented by only two senators; the first Senate of the United States consisted of just twenty-six men. Another was the method by which senators would be elected. When one of the Framers, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, suggested that they be elected by the people, not a single member of the Convention rose to support him. “The people should have as little to do as may be about the government,” Roger Sherman declared. “They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.” After Elbridge Gerry said that “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy,” the Framers took steps to guard against such an excess. There would, they decided, be a “filtration” or “refinement” of the people’s will before it reached the Senate: senators would be elected not by the people but by the legislatures of their respective states—a drastic filtration since in 1787 the franchise was so narrow that the legislatures themselves were elected by only a small percentage of the citizenry.

Senators would also be armored against the popular will by the length of their terms, the Framers decided. Frequent elections mean frequent changes in the membership of a body, and, Madison said, from a “change of men must proceed a change of opinions; and from a change of opinions, a change of measures. But a continual change even of good measures is inconsistent with every rule of prudence and every prospect of success.” What good is the rule of law if “no man … can guess what the [law] will be tomorrow?” Guarding against “mutable policy,” he pointed out, requires “the necessity of some stable institution in the government.” Edmund Randolph, as usual, was more blunt. “The object of this second branch is to control the democratic branch,” he said. “If it not be a firm body, the other branch being more numerous and coming immediately from the people, will overwhelm it.” Senators, he said, should “hold their offices for a term sufficient to insure their independency.” The term sufficient, the Framers decided, would be six years. Senators would hold office three times as long as the members of the “democratic branch.” They would hold office longer than the President held office. And around the Senate as a whole there would be an additional, even stronger, layer of armor. Elections for senators would be held every two years, but only for a third of the senators. The other two-thirds would not be required to submit their record to the voters (or, to be more accurate, to their legislatures) at that time. This last piece of armor made the Senate a “stable institution” indeed. As a chronicler of the Senate was to write almost two centuries after its creation: “It was so arranged that while the House of Representatives would be subject to total overturn every two years, and the Presidency every four, the Senate, as a Senate, could never be repudiated. It was fixed, through the staggered-term principle, so that only a third of the total membership would be up for re-election every two years. It is therefore literally not possible for the voters ever to get at anything approaching a majority of the members of the Institution at any one time.” Randolph’s desiderata—“firmness” and “independency”—are picked up repeatedly in the convention’s deliberations; over and over again it is emphasized that the Senate must be firm and independent. And the firmness about which the delegates were talking was firmness and independence against public opinion. That, for example, was Alexander Hamilton’s rationale for vesting in the Senate the power to try impeachments:

Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent? What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people, his accusers! [italics added]

Additional armor was bolted into place. Some of it was to emphasize the difference between members of the Senate and members of the House; because, as Madison explained, “the senatorial trust… requiring greater extent of information and stability of character, required at the same time that the senator should have reached a period of life most likely to supply those advantages.” A man could become a member of the House of Representatives at the age of twenty-five; he could not become a senator until he was at least thirty—and, “as the Senate is to have the power of making treaties and managing our foreign affairs,” and consequently “there is peculiar danger and impropriety in opening it to those who have foreign attachments,” a senator was required to have been a citizen for longer—nine years instead of seven. The coat of constitutional mail bolted around the Senate was sturdy indeed—by design. Under the new Constitution, the power of the executive and the power of the people would be very strong. So to enable the Senate to stand against these powers—to stand against them for centuries to come—the framers of the Constitution made the Senate very strong. Wanting it to protect not only the people against their rulers but the people against themselves, they bolted around it armor so thick they hoped nothing could ever pierce it.

AND FOR MANY YEARS the Senate made use of its great powers. It created much of the federal Judiciary—the Constitution established only the Supreme Court; it was left to Congress to “constitute tribunals inferior,” and it was a three-man Senate committee that wrote the Judiciary Act of 1789, an Act that has been called “almost an appendage to the Constitution.” The Judiciary Act established the system of federal, circuit and district courts, and the jurisdictional lines between them, that endure to this day, and established as well the principle, not mentioned in the Constitution, that state laws were subject to review by federal courts. And when, sixteen years later, this new creation was threatened by a concatenation of the very forces the Framers had feared—presidential power and public opinion—the Senate saved the Judiciary.

The desks (there were thirty-four of them by 1805) had been removed for this occasion, and the Old Senate Chamber had been arranged as if it were a tribunal. In the center of one wall stood the chair of the presiding officer, Vice President Aaron Burr, as if he were the chief judge, and extending on his right and left were high-backed, crimson-covered benches, on which the senators sat, in a long row, judges in a court from which there was no appeal.

Before them, flanked by his lawyers, sat the accused—a tall, bulky, white-haired man with a face so ruddy that he was called “Old Bacon Face,” but with a mind and tongue so keen that he was also called “the Demosthenes of Maryland.” He was Samuel Chase, a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on trial for his opinions.

A President, maneuvering through his allies in the House of Representatives, had brought him there—a President at the zenith of his popularity. In November, 1804, Thomas Jefferson had won re-election by a landslide, taking 162 of 176 electoral votes and leading his Republican Party to overwhelming majorities in both House and Senate. “Rarely was a Presidential election better calculated to turn the head of a President, and never was a President elected who felt more keenly the pleasure of his personal triumph,” wrote Henry Adams, who was of course no admirer. “Such success might have turned the head of any philosopher that ever sat on a throne.” Whether or not Jefferson’s head was indeed turned, the President now focused his attention on the lone branch of government still dominated by the Federalists, resorting, in Schlesinger’s words, “to impeachment as a way of ridding the federal bench of judges whom he considered dangerous to his views.” The Republicans succeeded in removing an alcoholic federal district judge in New Hampshire, and on the same day the New Hampshire verdict was handed down, the Republicans turned to a bigger target—Chase. And if Jefferson hit this target, it was widely believed, he would move to a bigger target yet: Chief Justice John Marshall, whose decisions had been angering the President.

As a young man, Chase had been a fiery leader of the Sons of Liberty, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress. He was a fierce and outspoken Federalist, whose handling of some cases since his appointment to the Supreme Court by George Washington has been called “outrageously high-handed,” but, as the historian Dumas Malone has written, “he towered in the Supreme Court, both physically and intellectually.” He had undoubtedly committed judicial excesses, but these were not the real issue, as was clearly revealed by Jefferson’s key senatorial representative, William Giles of Virginia. Impeachment, Giles contended, was “nothing more than enquiry, by the two Houses of Congress, whether the office of any public man might not be better filled by another”; a conviction for impeachment, Giles said, need imply neither criminality nor corruption but only “a declaration by Congress to this effect: you hold dangerous opinions, and if you are suffered to carry them into effect you will work the destruction of the nation.” Mere error in a judge, he was saying, was sufficient grounds for removal from office. Chase’s conviction would have established a precedent that would have undermined the independence of the courts, and thereby endangered justice itself. Yet few doubted that Chase would indeed be convicted. The move to purge judges possessed of “dangerous opinions” was gathering momentum—in Pennsylvania, for example, the Jeffersonian-dominated lower house of the state legislature had recently impeached three justices of the state’s Supreme Court whose views were too Federalist for the legislature’s taste. And in Congress, the discipline of the Republican majority appeared ironclad—as was demonstrated in the House vote to send the articles for Chase’s impeachment on eight counts to the Senate; the resolution was presented as a strictly party measure, and, in the 73–32 vote, not a Republican voted against it. Two-thirds—twenty-three votes—of the thirty-four in the Senate were necessary for conviction, and twenty-five of the senators were Republicans; even if no Federalist voted against Chase, there would be enough votes to give Jefferson his conviction. A tide of public opinion, backed by presidential power, was sweeping the country.

And then, in the trial of Samuel Chase, that tide reached the Senate.

During the week-long trial, attended by foreign ambassadors and high federal officials while, before the row of thirty-four senators, Chase and his attorneys, among the most distinguished in the nation, sat in one box, the impeachment’s “managers” from the House in another, a lot of words were spoken—the testimony filled over six hundred pages in the Annals of Congress, forerunner of the Congressional Record—and some went to the point. One of Chase’s attorneys, Robert Goodloe Harper, appealed for sympathy for the “aged patriot” who after years of service to his country “is arraigned as an offender…. Placed at the bar of the court, after having sat with honor for sixteen years on the bench, he is doomed to hear the most opprobrious epithets applied to his name, by those whose predecessors were accustomed to look up at him with admiration and respect…. His footsteps are hunted from place to place, to find indiscretions, which may be exaggerated into crimes.” But Harper also appealed to principle, telling the senators that impeachment should not be employed against a judge, or any official, just because he held opinions contrary to those of the party in power. “Justice, ’tho it may be an inconvenient restraint on our power, while we are strong, is the only rampart behind which we can find protection when we become weak,” he said. That principle was of course the one that had been so prominent in motivating the Founding Fathers to create a Senate—that the rights of a minority must be protected against the tyranny of the majority—and that principle was reaffirmed, not just by Federalist senators but by Republican senators, and not by just a handful of Republican senators, either. One Federalist, Uriah Tracy of Connecticut, ill with pneumonia, left his bed and was carried to his seat because Chase’s supporters believed that every vote would be needed. They were wrong—as was shown by the very first vote cast by a Republican senator on the first article of impeachment. The vote, by Stephen Bradley of Vermont, was “Not guilty.” So were the votes of ten other Republicans; the final tally on the first article was 18 to 16 against conviction. For two hours each article of impeachment was read separately, and each senator then voted, and on each count enough Republicans voted “not guilty” to prevent a conviction. Despite the power of a President (all during the trial, senators had filed into the White House for dinner and private conversation), and despite the pressure of a party, and the roar of public opinion (and their own anger at Chase’s partisan words, drummed into their ears over and over that week by the House prosecutors), on not one of the counts were the Republicans able to muster the necessary twenty-three votes.

The man who presided over the trial understood the historic significance of the scene that had been acted out before him. At the time he was presiding, Vice President Burr was under indictment for fatally wounding Alexander Hamilton, and three days after the trial, he would leave Washington for the Southwest, where he would shortly become embroiled in the shadowy intrigues that would becloud his memory. But the Senate seemed to bring out the best in him; attempting before the trial to ensure Burr’s loyalty to the Republican cause, President Jefferson, who had once called him “a crooked gun, or other perverted machine,” offered two of Burr’s relatives and one of his intimate friends choice governmental posts, but even Federalist senators acknowledged the dignity and impartiality with which the Vice President conducted the trial; because of his fairness, one Federalist said, “I could almost forgive Burr for any less crime than the blood of Hamilton.” And Burr ended his time in the Senate with a speech that restated the great ideal on which the body had been founded. The assault on the independence of the judiciary by a powerful President backed by the power of public opinion—and the refusal of the Senate to bow to those powers—were “fresh in his mind” when he spoke (amid, as an historian of Congress has written, “a stillness among both friend and foe”). “This House,” Aaron Burr said, “is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrensy and the silent arts of corruption….” A senator who served almost two centuries later—Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who loved the Senate so much that he wrote a four-volume history of it—would invoke the trial of Samuel Chase as an example of all that the Senate could be, saying that “The Senate exercised in that fine moment of drama the kind of independence, impartiality, fairness and courage that, from time to time over the years, it has brought to bear on the great issues of the country.” In the trial of Samuel Chase, the principle had been proven. The Senate had been created to be independent, to stand against the tyranny of presidential power and the tides of public opinion.

It had stood.

THE SENATE CHAMBER gutted by British troops was restored in 1819. Located in the Capitol’s central section, it was a rather small, semi-circular room. Slender, fluted, gilded columns formed a loggia along the curved wall and supported a narrow gallery, like a theater balcony, with a delicate gilt balustrade. Walls unbroken by recesses and a low-vaulted, domed ceiling made the acoustics excellent, so the Chamber was, as an historian of Congress has written, “ideal for the ringing voices of eloquent men.” And the deep, rich crimson and gold of its carpet and draperies, and of the sweeping canopy, surmounted by a great golden shield of the Republic and a broad-winged gilded eagle, above the presiding officer’s dais, made it an ornate, dramatic background for the forty-eight new mahogany desks—each with its silver-mounted inkwell and small bottle of blotting sand, each with a low-backed mahogany and red leather armchair—that were arranged in four rising arcs.

And for forty years after 1819, among those desks (at which senators studied reports and wrote speeches and letters, since most senators did not have offices of their own), the senators of the United States grappled—as, once, the senators of ancient Rome had grappled—with the concerns of expanding empire: should the borders of the young republic be extended west of the Mississippi, and if so how far west—to the Great Plains, or even further, to the mighty mountain chain of the West and the shore of the great ocean beyond? (Many senators considered this last suggestion ridiculous. When, in 1824, there was a proposal for the erection of a fort on the Pacific shore of the Oregon Territory, Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey said there was no realistic possibility that Oregon, separated from the United States by virtually impassable deserts and mountains, could ever become a state; even if its congressmen managed to cover twenty miles a day, he pointed out, they would need 350 days to get to Washington and back. Benton of Missouri rose at his desk to reply angrily that “Within a century from this day, population, greater than that of the present United States, will exist on the West side of the Rocky Mountains,” but the proposal was defeated.) Among those desks was debated peace and war: whether, once it was decided twenty-five years after the Columbia River Fort was debated that Oregon was worth settling after all, to go to war with England over it (“54–40 or fight!”); whether to march against Mexico or instead negotiate for sovereignty over California and Texas and the vast arid stretches of the Southwest. It was at one of those desks that the first senator from newly annexed Texas, Sam Houston, who usually sat silently, dressed in sombrero and a waistcoat of panther hide with its hair still on, whittling away at small pine sticks, finally rose during a debate on the legal technicalities of the issue to tell the Senate bluntly that Texas was already at war with Mexico and that the United States, in annexing Texas, had inherited that war. Among those desks was debated the great questions involved in the settlement of the vast new territories of the West: would their land go to speculators or to brave and enterprising individual families?—it was in the Senate that Benton proposed the Homestead Act that made him “the father of the cheap land system”; would it be the federal government or the new states and territories who would pay for the roads and canals that would knit them together? And, of course, it was among those desks that, for these forty years, was debated the great problem that overshadowed all questions about the new territories and states: whether they should be slave or free? It was not only Webster’s reply to Hayne that preserved the Union; among those desks, the desks of the Senate, men fought to save it for forty years.

The forty years—1819 to 1859—after the Senate moved back into its elegant domed Chamber would be called the Senate’s “Golden Age.”

In part, the phrase was inspired by the hue of the Chamber itself, by the immense gold eagle atop the dais, by the radiance of the great chandelier, by the gallery’s gilt columns and balustrade. In part, it was inspired by the debates that took place in that Chamber, by oratory as brilliant as the surroundings, and by the men who participated in those debates, particularly the shining figures of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun—the “Great Triumvirate.” And in part those four decades were the Senate’s Golden Age because it was the period in which the Senate came closest to living up to the greatness that the Framers had envisioned for it. During those forty years the Senate held center stage in the great arena of American history, becoming the focus and balance wheel of government—while, true to the principles on which it had been founded and which Washington so pithily summarized to Jefferson, it “cooled” passions, tried to reconcile the unreconcilable. For some decades after the founding of the Republic, the House of Representatives had overshadowed the Senate; Webster and Clay had been members of the lower house then. But now, as the population of the new nation expanded, the House expanded with it—by 1820, it had 213 members and its membership grew faster and faster with each census—and became too unwieldy: rules had to be adopted that inhibited the role of debate, and sheer size worked against calm consideration of delicate issues. And, beginning in 1819, when the Senate twice stood fast against inflammatory House measures and then, in 1820, forged the territorial division known as the Missouri Compromise, it was in the Senate, now the true deliberative body that the Framers had envisioned, that were enacted the great compromises that, for forty years, pulled the Union back from the edge of abyss.

It was at one of those desks that Calhoun sat in 1833 after his return to Washington—a Washington buzzing with whispers that President Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang him if he returned. When Hayne had debated Webster in 1830, he had been speaking for Calhoun, then Vice President, and, as presiding officer of the Senate, not permitted to speak there; Hayne was defending Calhoun’s doctrine of the ultimate sovereignty of the individual states, of a state’s right to nullify a federal law if it felt the law exceeded the power granted to the federal government by the Constitution; and if the government insisted on enforcing the law, to secede. Now, in 1833, Calhoun was a senator, and spoke for himself. Jackson was still proposing a tariff bill the South considered onerous and unconstitutional, and was sending to the Senate a Force bill, authorizing enforcement of the tariff by military force. The South Carolina Legislature authorized the use of the militia to resist; Calhoun continued to publish papers reaffirming the constitutionality of nullification; and Jackson warned that “Disunion by armed force is treason.” “Within three weeks, sir,” the enraged President told a South Carolina delegation—within three weeks after the first blow is struck—“I will place fifty thousand troops in your state.” Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency, and Hayne had resigned his Senate seat, so that Calhoun, named by the South Carolina Legislature to succeed him, could present the South’s case himself, and the South’s greatest orator was seated at his desk, grimly taking notes, as Jackson’s message requesting passage of the Force bill was read.

On the day Calhoun was to deliver his major speech against the measure, there was a heavy snowfall, but carriages jammed the Capitol plaza, carrying people who had come to hear John C. Calhoun speak. While the verbiage of other leading orators of the day was flowery, Calhoun’s was “stripped bare”—down to the bones of a remorseless logic. His sentences were often long and involved, as was the intricate process of his reasoning, and he spoke so fast that journalists considered him the most difficult man to report in the Congress. But, he was a gaunt, unforgettable figure, his eyes burning in a pale face, his great mass of hair rising like a lion’s mane, his voice ringing metallically in every corner of the Chamber. “The commanding eye, the grim earnestness of manner, the utter integrity of sentiment held the galleries in anxious attention,” as one historian wrote. “His voice was harsh, his gestures stiff, like the motions of a pump handle. There was no ease, flexibility, grace or charm in his manner; yet there was something that riveted your attention as with hooks of steel.” As he rose now, the galleries could see how much the fifty-year-old South Carolinian had aged in a few months as he saw his beloved South being forced to the brink. The blazing eyes were sunk deep in his head, the furrows in his cheeks had become gashes, the lion’s mane was gray now. To his opponents, the gaunt figure looked like “the arch traitor … like Satan in Paradise.” To others, he was “a great patriot with his back against the wall, battling fiercely in defense of violated liberties.” Consumed with his feelings, he paced back and forth between the desks “like a caged lion.” The Force bill, he said, exhibited “the impious spectacle of this Government, the creature of the States, making war against the power to which it owes its existence…. We made no such government. South Carolina sanctioned no such government.” The Force bill, he said, “enables him [Jackson] to subject every man in the United States … to martial law … and under the penalty of court-martial to compel him to imbrue his hand in his brother’s blood.”

The Senator from South Carolina paced as he spoke. The Senator from Massachusetts stood immobile beside his desk—as he had done three years before, again wearing his blue coat with the brass buttons and his stiff cravat—as again, in another great speech, he defended the Constitution as the overriding law. The Senator from Kentucky strolled among the desks—as casually as if they had been props in a theater.

When he was a lawyer in Kentucky, it had been said of Henry Clay that he could “hypnotize a jury”; as a national spokesman for the Whig Party, he had attracted crowds so large on a speaking tour that it was said that he “depopulated the fields and forests of the West”; as a dinner party guest he was so charming that “the white gloves kissed by Clay became treasured mementoes.” He charmed the Senate as well. “No lover was ever more ardent, more vehement, more impassioned, or more successful in his appeal than Henry Clay” when he was courting the Senate, an observer wrote, watching him “stepping gracefully, backward and forward and from side to side, flourishing a silk handkerchief,” an actor born to center stage. From time to time, Henry Clay returned to his desk to pick up his snuffbox, and carried it with him for a while, taking a pinch to punctuate an anecdote, tapping it with a forefinger to emphasize a point. Tall, slender, and graceful in a black dress coat and a high white stock, his face was bright, playful, and grinning as he told his wonderful stories, his voice “so penetrating that even in a lower key” it rang through the Chamber “as inspiring as a trumpet.” And when he turned serious, the stamp of his foot and the raising of a tight-clenched fist “made the emotion visible as well as audible,” an historian wrote. “Harry of the West,” “Brave Prince Hal,” “the Gallant Star”—Henry Clay, who had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives the day he arrived in it, leader of the War Hawks in 1812, Henry Clay whose previous triumphs had already earned him the nickname of “the Great Compromiser”—now, in 1833, with North and South on the very brink of civil war, he proposed a compromise tariff bill that he said was not an ordinary piece of legislation but “a treaty of peace and amity”—a true compromise in which each side would sacrifice something for the sake of unity.

The North—President Jackson—“would, in the enforcement act, send forth alone a flaming sword,” Clay said. “We would send that also, but along with it the olive branch, as a messenger of peace. They cry out, ‘The Law! the law! the law! Power! Power! Power!’ … They would hazard a civil commotion, beginning in South Carolina and ending, God only knows where…. We want no war, above all no civil war, no family strife. We want no sacked cities, no desolated fields, no smoking ruins, no streams of American blood by American arms!”

Calhoun rose to respond in a great silence, for spectators and senators alike knew how much hung on his next words, as so much had hung on Webster’s words three years before. When he agreed to Clay’s proposal, “such was the clapping and thundering applause that… the sensation was indescribable,” an observer wrote. As Jackson’s Force bill moved through the Senate and House, Clay’s compromise tariff bill moved in tandem with it. And the moment the tariff bill passed, Calhoun was on the road to South Carolina. He traveled, as the historian Merrill Peterson has written, “day and night over snow-covered and rain-soaked roads, sometimes in open mail carts,” in order to stop a state convention from taking rash action. When he persuaded the convention to repeal the nullification ordinance, the crisis was over. And “the Compromise Act of 1833,” that Act created among the desks of the Senate, “would generally be celebrated as an act of deliverance.”

Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, three men who each longed for the presidency, and never attained it. The mark they made was in the Senate. But it was quite a mark. The battles they fought—sometimes, in opposition to Andrew Jackson, united; often opposed to each other (increasingly, Calhoun isolated from the other two and from most of the Senate)—were battles over the most momentous issues of the age, and the Senate was often the dominant arena in which those issues were decided, for it was not the White House but Capitol Hill that was the epicenter of government then, and the Senate was the dominant house of Congress. As Peterson has written,

Webster, Clay and Calhoun… were the ornaments of American statesmanship in the era between the founding and the Civil War. At home and abroad, making exception for their common enemy, they were the most celebrated Americans of the time; … All across the country their speeches were read as if the fate of the nation hung on them….

Sixteen years later, in 1849, it was again in the Senate that Clay, seventy-two years old now, rose to again urge compromise. He had always been thin, but now he was too thin, and frail—he had had to be helped up the stairs in front of the Capitol—and racked by the cough that his friends suspected was consumption although no one dared even to whisper the dreaded word. He didn’t stroll through the desks this time, didn’t move about much at all, in fact, as if he was trying to conserve his strength during the two days he spoke, standing for the most part at his back-row desk in a far corner of the Chamber, but “he spoke with the musical voice of old, with the same passionate intensity”—and, at crucial points, he still tapped the snuffbox. The spectre of sacked cities and desolated fields was very near now, but he was still fighting against it. Victory in the war with Mexico had brought the United States vast new territories—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California—and the explosive issue of whether these territories should be slave or free was splitting the nation apart, and the dispute was being played out on the floor of the Senate, where for years Calhoun and his followers had successfully blocked admission of the territories as free states, had blocked admission while talk grew of secession, and of civil war. “If any solution to the [problem] … was to be found, it would be up to the Senate to take the lead”—up to the Senate, and to its “Great Compromiser.” For three weeks, Clay had worked and reworked alternate plans, and then, having finally settled on a complicated package of eight separate resolutions, one rainy January evening, haggard and coughing constantly, he had impulsively climbed into a carriage and visited Daniel Webster at Webster’s boardinghouse, and outlined his plan—to which Webster consented. And now, as his biographer wrote, Brave Prince Hal “rose in the Senate chamber and began his last great struggle to save the Union that he loved.”

From his position in the far corner, the long semi-circle of desks stretched below and away from him, and his gaze traveled along the upturned faces of the men sitting at them as he said: “I implore Senators—I entreat them, by all that they expect hereafter, and by all that is dear to them here below, to repress the ardor of these passions, to look at their country in this crisis—to listen to the voice of reason.” Sometimes the physical effort seemed too much for him, and he faltered, but he always went on, for two long days, and one observer wrote, “when in moments of excitement, he stands so firm and proud, with his eyes all agleam, while his voice rings out clear and strong, it almost seems that… the hot blood of youth was still coursing through his veins…. The wonderful old man!” In a stroke, as Peterson puts it, he “seized the initiative from the President, centered it in the Senate…. and set the legislative agenda for the country.” “What a singular spectacle!” wrote the editor of the New York Herald—a newspaper long hostile to Clay. “Of all the leaders of the old parties, of all the aspiring spirits of the new ones, including [the President] and the whole of his cabinet, from head to tail, not a single soul, not a single mind has dared to exhibit the moral courage to come out with any plan for settling the whole except it is Henry Clay … solitary and alone.”

One of the desks below Clay’s had been vacant while he spoke. It was a desk near the center of the Chamber, third from the aisle in the second row on the right—Calhoun’s desk. Calhoun’s boardinghouse was just across from the Capitol, but Calhoun was too ill to attend. When he read Clay’s speech in the newspapers, though, he determined to reply, and his supporters said he would be present on March 4. The galleries again were packed, the walls were lined with spectators, and shortly after noon Calhoun came. “He was emaciated and feeble,” one of his biographers has recounted, “his sallow cheeks sunken, his long hair now almost white, his step short.” He had hoped to deliver his own speech, but he didn’t have the strength. While Senator James Mason of Virginia, standing at his shoulder, read the words Calhoun had written, Calhoun sat at his desk, with a great black coat drawn around him, and a journalist described “his eyes glowing … as he glanced at Senators upon whom he desired to have certain passages make an impression.” And the speech was as defiant as ever. It was on a great theme—“the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the union be preserved?”—and he said the question had a simple answer: Only by adopting measures to assure the southern states that they could remain in the Union “consistently with their honor and safety.” The speech rallied the South—against the compromise—and when, on March 7, 1849, Webster stood to reply to Calhoun, at his desk also near the center of the Chamber, “not since the Reply to Hayne did the fate of the nation seem to hang so fatefully on the wisdom, eloquence and power of one man.” Standing in the same Chamber, on almost the same spot, twenty years before, Black Dan Webster had given a speech that would live in history. Now he began another such speech: “Mr. President, I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States; a body … to which the country looks with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels.” Webster, too, was old, but his voice still pealed through that Chamber like an organ, rolling across the long arc of desks and the crowded galleries as he continued: “I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”

Calhoun had had to be helped from the Chamber after his speech was read; it was expected that he would never return. But he had returned for Webster’s speech. Not seeing his old foe at first, Webster said he regretted his absence. Then another senator shouted: “He is here.” And near the conclusion of Webster’s speech, Calhoun engaged him in a brief, harsh exchange, at the end of which there was an exchange that was less harsh, as if Webster had suddenly realized that it might be the last they would ever have. The “honorable member” had as always refused to cloak his opinions in gentle phrases, Webster said. “He did avow his purpose openly, boldly and manfully; he did not disguise his conduct or his motives.”

MR. CALHOUN.	Never, never.
MR. WEBSTER.	What he means he is very apt to say.
MR. CALHOUN.	Always, always.
MR. WEBSTER.	And I honor him for it.

Those were indeed the last words they ever exchanged. Calhoun’s health deteriorated rapidly. In his boardinghouse room, he said, “If I could have but one hour to speak in the Senate….” He died on March 31; his funeral was held in the Senate, of course.

The great debate was to roll on among those desks all that year and the next: the great speeches coming one after another—Clay fighting for his compromise (despite his poor health he spoke seventy times during the debate), northerners opposing it because, as William Seward put it, slavery was forbidden by “a higher law than the Constitution.” Once Clay’s clashes with Benton grew so fierce that the Senate adjourned to give the tempers of the two old men time to cool. And there was at least one moment of greater drama still, when an enraged Benton left his desk and advanced on diminutive southern Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi during an especially angry exchange, and Foote drew a pistol; the old frontier brawler did not pause but continued striding toward him, shouting, “I have no pistols. Let him fire! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” until finally Senator Dickerson of New Jersey took the pistol out of Foote’s hand. When, after months of debate in the sweltering summer months, most of Clay’s plan was passed, the Union was preserved by what Peterson calls “a truly monumental legislative achievement.”

Within two years of the Compromise of 1850, all of the Great Triumvirate would be dead; when, in 1859 the Senate, grown too numerous for its beautiful Chamber, moved to larger, but drab, quarters in the Capitol’s new north wing, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, in a final address in the Old Chamber, summed up its spirit by evoking “the mighty three, whose names and fame, associated in life, death has not been able to sever”—and by pointing to their desks: “There sat Calhoun, the Senator, inflexible, austere, oppressed…. This was Webster’s seat. His great efforts are associated with this Chamber, whose very air seems yet to vibrate beneath the strokes of his deep tones and mighty words. On the outer circle sat Clay….”

In the end, of course, the triumvirate could be said to have failed. The Civil War came. Ironically, it was in the Senate, scene of the great—and for decades successful—efforts to preserve the Union, that the fuse was lit that did so much to blow it apart. In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, to get a railroad built that would benefit his Illinois constituents, persuaded his Senate Committee on Territories to report out a southern-supported bill—the Kansas-Nebraska Act—that would in effect repeal not only the Compromise of 1850 but the Missouri Compromise as well by allowing the creation of a state—Kansas—under conditions that virtually guaranteed that it would be a slave state. Abolitionists assailed the measure; Douglas was to remark that he could travel all the way from Chicago to Washington by the light of his burning effigy. But southern senators saw the chance to force the nation to accept slavery on their terms or break up the Union; for forty years the Senate had been the center of compromise; now it was the center of conflict; “as was so often the case during those great nineteenth-century debates, it seemed as if the whole population of Washington sought admittance to the Senate galleries,” an historian was to write. It was from one of the Senate desks that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an uncompromising foe of slavery, struggled to rise when, two days after he passionately denounced the “Crime Against Kansas,” a South Carolina congressman entered the Chamber, came up behind him and struck him again and again on his head with a heavy cane, while another South Carolinian, with another cane, faced the other senators to keep them from intervening. It was under his desk that Sumner’s leg became so entangled that he could not rise as the blows rained on his head and blood began pouring from his wounds; after he finally wrenched himself free, it was among the desks that he reeled, “backwards and forwards,” until he fell. (Whereupon southern senators congratulated the assailant.) By the time, three years later, that Sumner was able to return to the Senate, attempts at compromise had ended, and the smoking ruins and the streams of American blood were almost at hand. But did the triumvirate really fail? The compromises fashioned by Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (and by other senators, too, Benton notable among them) might be said to have merely postponed the settlement of the slavery issue, merely postponed the terrible war. But another view is that perhaps nothing could have stopped that war from coming. And if that is the case, then the Senate’s compromises had bought the time that America needed. An infant Union was crumbling; the Senate’s compromises had held it together year after year, decade after decade, had held it together long enough—as if those compromises had been a great delaying action to give the infant time to grow strong enough to win the war and to endure. Writing of the last of the compromises—the Compromise of 1850—and of the senators who had created it, Senator Byrd was to say, “Perhaps the greatest credit we can give them is to note that the Civil War began in 1861 rather than in 1851; for, if the war had broken out during the 1850’s, when … public opinion in the North was still divided over the slavery issue, we might today be two nations rather than one.” During a period of about four decades—a period roughly coinciding with the years, 1819 to 1859, during which the Senate occupied its ideal stage—it played magnificently the role the Founding Fathers had written for it. Its compromises cooled seemingly uncoolable passions, and its resistance to “King Andrew” in the Bank War and James Polk in the Mexican—and in the Oregon dispute—made it the republican tribunate against aggressive executive power, the great bulwark of liberty and self-government against the possibility of executive tyranny, that the Founding Fathers had hoped it would be. And the Senate was more. As Peterson says,

Beginning in comparative seclusion, with a vaguely patrician character, like the Senate in ancient Rome, … its debates at first secret and then for many years barely reported, the Senate had emerged from the shadow of the House of Representatives as the first place of legislative deliberation and leadership…. Whatever the cause of its rising prestige—the triumvirs who graced it, its smallness (only forty-eight members until 1836), its indirect election (which some thought ensured superior wisdom and made the Senate what it ought to be, a congress of ambassadors from sovereign states), perhaps even its superb acoustics under a low-vaulted dome … the Senate fulfilled the … ideal of a great deliberative body, at once solid and brilliant….

Contrasting the Senate with the “vulgar demeanor” of the House of Representatives, de Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that “The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.” De Tocqueville was not the only foreign observer deeply impressed. The Victorian historian Sir Henry Maine said that the Senate was “the only thoroughly successful institution which has been established since the tide of modern democracy began to run.” Prime Minister William Gladstone called it “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.”

ON JANUARY 21, 1861, Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis rose at his desk to end the forty-year Senate effort to preserve the Union by telling his northern colleagues, “It only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.” Then he and four other southerners strode out of the Chamber. In the next weeks all but one of the twenty-two southern senators followed suit, leaving the Senate as their states were leaving the Union. (Only Andrew Johnson of Tennessee elected to remain loyal.) Three months later, with a Confederate force on the south side of the Potomac menacing Washington and breastworks of iron plates braced on the Capitol’s porticoes, rifles were propped among the desks and soldiers sprawled in the red leather armchairs; the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, hurriedly summoned by the newly elected President Lincoln to defend Washington (thirty-one of the regiment had been wounded in a battle en route), was quartered in the Senate Chamber; one soldier angrily hacked at Jefferson Davis’ desk with his bayonet.

Lincoln had insisted that construction on the Capitol go forward (“If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on”), and all through the war the great dome continued to rise above Washington as if to symbolize the growth of a great new nation—and all through that war, in its new Chamber, a Senate freed at last by the departure of the southerners enacted laws that knit together a mighty continent, filled it with people, and educated those people—Acts that spurred the creation of a transcontinental railroad that bound at last the continent’s far Pacific shore to its Atlantic and made possible the development of its Great Plains; that encouraged its settlement by promising a family 160 acres of the public domain for its enterprise and courage in settling it; and that provided for the sale of public lands to fund the creation of colleges. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862; the Homestead Act of 1862; the Land Grant College Act of 1862—it became very clear as these passed the Senate how the South had for so long shackled the Union.

AFTER THE WAR, among those desks in the new Senate Chamber, there was another moment of glory—as phrases in the Constitution (“When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside …”) came to life. Four years of struggle between a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans determined to solidify the equality of races and humble the Confederacy and a President more interested in reconciliation than in revenge—four years in which legislation, of doubtful constitutionality, was passed (over Andrew Johnson’s vetoes) forbidding the President to remove federal officials, or to interfere with General Ulysses S. Grant’s command of the army without the Senate’s consent—was ended when the House, under the leadership of Representative Thaddeus Stevens (“Andrew Johnson must learn … that as Congress shall order he must obey”), voted by an overwhelming margin to impeach the President, and send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial.

On that trial hung great issues. “Johnson’s opponents wanted to save a Reconstruction based on racial justice,” an historian says. “But his supporters had an honorable motive too. They wanted to save the presidency.” At first, conviction seemed all but certain, so overwhelmingly did public opinion in the North demand it. As one observer wrote on the eve of the trial, “The condition of the public mind was not unlike that preceding a great battle. The dominant part of the nation seemed to occupy the position of public prosecutor, and it was scarcely in the mood to brook delay for trial or to hear defense. Washington … swarmed with representatives of every state of the Union, demanding in a practically united voice the deposition of the President.” Representative Stevens had coldly warned both houses: “Let me see the recreant who would vote to let such a criminal escape. Point me to one who will do it and I will show you one who will dare the infamy of posterity.” And the House of Representatives had taken the warning: every Republican had voted for impeachment. In the Senate, with the eleven Confederate states still excluded, there were only fifty-four senators. Thirty-six votes were therefore required for conviction—and forty-two senators were Republicans. As the trial opened with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding and administering to each senator, as he rose at his desk, an oath “to do impartial justice,” Benjamin Wade, president pro tempore of the Senate and therefore next in line for the Presidency, was confident that he would soon be in the White House.

One of the Republicans, however, was Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. Trumbull hated Johnson, and hated Johnson’s stand on Reconstruction; he was, in fact, the author of much of the Reconstruction legislation that the President had vetoed. But now Trumbull said:

The question to be decided is not whether Andrew Johnson is a proper person to fill the Presidential Office, nor whether it is fit that he should remain in it…. Once set, the example of impeaching a President for what, when the excitement of the hour having subsided, will be regarded as insufficient cause, no future President will be safe…. What then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution? … I cannot be an instrument to produce such a result.

Another Republican was William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, known for his “reverence” for the Constitution, and for his independence. “His level gaze, high-bridged nose, and firm lips and chin identified a man who would be intimidated by none,” an historian wrote. Like Trumbull, Fessenden despised Johnson—not long before, he had said of the President: “He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust and must sink from detestation to contempt”—but none of those crimes were among those enumerated in the Constitution to justify impeachment, and now Fessenden wrote a friend that while “The country has so bad an opinion of the President, which he fully deserves, that it expects his condemnation…. I will not decide the question against my own judgment…. Make up your mind, if need be, to hear me denounced a traitor and perhaps hanged in effigy. The public, when roused and excited by passions and prejudices, is little better than a wild beast.”

When it became known that seven Republican senators might be planning to vote against impeachment—the exact number necessary to prevent conviction of the President—the GOP was convulsed by rage. The seven were deluged by what the Philadelphia Press called “a fearful avalanche of telegrams from every section of the country,” representing “a great surge of public opinion.” In Illinois, where for decades Trumbull had been a revered public figure, a Republican convention resolved that “any senator elected by … Republicans, who at this time blenches and betrays, is infamous and should be dishonored and execrated.” James W. Grimes of Iowa was also refusing to go along with impeachment. So vicious were the abuse he was exposed to and the physical threats against him that they were blamed for a stroke he suffered two days before the vote was to be taken on the first article of impeachment. It was expected that he would not be able to attend the vote—or, as one chronicler sneered, “would plead that his illness prevented him from attending to cast the vote that would end his career”—and that the absence of his vote might give victory to the impeachers. On the day of the vote, however, the doors in the rear of the Chamber opened, and four men appeared, carrying Grimes to his seat. (Fessenden grasped his hand and gave him a smile.) Although senators stood to cast their impeachment votes, the Chief Justice said Grimes could vote while sitting, but when his name was reached in the balloting, he struggled to his feet, to say “Not guilty.” The Chief Justice asked each senator individually, “Mr. Senator, how say you?” and seven Republicans voted not guilty, making the vote 35 to 19, one vote short of the necessary two-thirds. Immense pressure was then put on every Republican to vote guilty on the other ten articles. But on each vote, at least seven rose among the desks of the Senate and said “Not guilty.” Sixty-four years before, in the trial of Samuel Chase, the Senate had saved the judiciary. Now it saved the presidency.

In political terms, their “not guilty” votes cost the seven senators dearly. The fate Fessenden had foreseen for himself came true for all of them. All were denounced as traitors, not merely to their party but to their country (“We have had Benedict Arnold, Jefferson Davis, and now we have James W. Grimes,” Horace Greeley sneered in the New York Tribune), all were hung in effigy, and all were renounced by the party organizations of their respective states; not one of them was re-elected. But there were other terms. Shortly before he died, Grimes told a friend, “I shall ever thank God that in that troubled hour of trial, when many privately confessed that they had sacrificed their judgment and their conscience at the behests of party newspapers and party hate, I had the courage to be true to my oath and my conscience.” And he remembered Fessenden’s smile. “I would not today exchange that recollection for the highest distinction of life.” And in broader terms, the votes of those seven senators preserved the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. The removal of a President by Congress solely because of a dispute over policy could have transformed the entire American political system.

The “excitement of the hour”—the “great surge of public opinion”—had demanded a President’s head. But only one house of Congress had bowed to that demand. The other had not. The Founding Fathers had created the Senate to stand against the “excitement of the hour.”

Once again, the Senate had stood.

BUT THAT MOMENT of glory was only a moment. After the Civil War, the Senate’s Golden Age was over, and the institution began to turn into the Senate that Lyndon Johnson was to find when he arrived in it more than three quarters of a century later.

The Senate’s power wasn’t over—far from it. Reconstruction was crafted not in the White House but on Capitol Hill. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law and the Freedmen’s Bureau a fact over presidential vetoes. It was Congress, not the President, that divided the South into military districts as if it had been conquered Gaul and placed over each district a commander with powers as broad as those of a Roman proconsul. And although Reconstruction policy was created by the Senate in tandem with the House of Representatives, and on the Joint House-Senate Committee the dominant figure was Representative Stevens, during the period after Reconstruction, beginning with the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant as President in March, 1869, the power of the House declined, and the power of the Senate grew, and grew again.

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. Occasionally, 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.

They had succeeded.

DURING THE GILDED AGE—the era of its greatest power—the Senate sunk from the heights of public esteem to the depths. Its inertia was a subject of public ridicule—“The Senate does about as much in a week as a set of men in business would do in half an hour,” one newspaper correspondent wrote—as was the corruption that infected it. And it was the subject of public anger.

Once, Senate and senators had been immortalized in paintings, in a classical, heroic style that became famous—George Healy’s glowing Webster Replying to Hayne; Peter Rothermel’s majestic The United States Senate, A.D. 1850; Henry F. Darby’s Henry Clay;Rembrandt Peale’s John C. Calhoun; Francis Alexander’s “Black Dan” portrait of Webster. Now, it was not classicism but caricature with which the Senate was depicted. It was chronicled in cartoons—cartoons so savage and telling that they became famous. One of a hundred brilliant depictions of the Senate that appeared in the pictorial weekly Puck, founded in 1877, was Joseph Keppler’s “The Bosses of the Senate.” The cartoon shows the desks of the Senate, and the senators sitting at them, men drawn small. Behind the desks, looming menacingly over the little senators, stands a row of huge, pot-bellied, top-hatted, arrogant “bosses” labeled “Copper Trust,” “Standard Oil Trust,” “Sugar Trust,” “Tin Trust.” Behind these figures is a sign: “This Is A Senate of the Monopolists, By the Monopolists, and For the Monopolists.” Above, in the gallery, is a “People’s Entrance,” barred with a padlock and marked “Closed.” Once foreign observers had marveled at the Senate as “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.” Now their tone had changed. Writing in 1902, the Russian-born, French-educated political scientist Moisei Ostrogorski would say,

The Senate of the United States no longer has any resemblance to that August assembly which provoked the admiration of the Tocquevilles. It would be no use looking for the foremost men of the nation there; neither statesmen nor orators are to be found in it. [The body is filled] with men of mediocre or no political intelligence, some of whom, extremely wealthy, multi-millionaires, look on the senatorial dignity as a title for ennobling their well or ill gotten riches, [and with] crack wirepullers [and] state bosses [who] find the Senate a convenient base of operations for their intrigues and their designs on the public interest….

DURING THE GILDED AGE, the Senate’s power reached its peak not only in domestic affairs but in foreign. One-third plus one of the Senate had of course been given power to reject treaties by the Constitution, and in 1868 the Senate was given additional power by itself: it revised its standing rules so that treaties could be amended—their text changed—by a simple majority. And throughout three decades, as Schlesinger notes, “the Senate exercised its power in this realm with relish, freely rewriting, amending and rejecting treaties negotiated by the executive.” Rejecting was the operative term: between 1871 and 1898 the Senate did not ratify a single significant treaty. Writing in 1885, Professor Woodrow Wilson said that since a President was forced to deal with the Senate on treaties “as a servant conferring with a master,” its power was unbalancing the whole system of checks and balances. During this era, senators made policy in another way as well: as had in fact been the case during the entire nineteenth century, most secretaries of state were former senators.

Nor did the Senate confine its foreign policy role to treaties. Together with the House (and the yellow press), it pushed a cautious President (“I have been through one war,” McKinley told a friend. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another”) into war with Spain. Only with reluctance was the President finally induced to send the Maine to Havana. After it blew up, McKinley still resisted intervention, but a delegation of senators went to Cuba to make their own investigation, and when, upon their return, they told on the Senate floor of Spanish brutality and mass starvation in the reconcentrado camps, the journalistic clamor was suddenly clothed with authority. The Allison-Aldrich clique came down for war; three days later, McKinley issued an ultimatum to Spain; on April 25, 1898, it was war—war on both sides of the world as the young nation’s cruisers steamed aline into Manila Bay to destroy the fleet of the old.

And when the war ended, after just four months, and the country suddenly had to confront a great decision, it was among the desks of the Senate that that decision was made. As once, three quarters of a century before, the Senate had debated the wisdom of building a fort on the shore of the far-off Pacific, now the Senate debated the question of whether America’s expansion should stop at that shore—or go beyond it; of whether a young nation which had so quickly become a giant power would confine its power to its own continent—or extend it throughout the world; of whether it would still be merely a nation—or an empire. In December, 1898, under a peace treaty hammered out in Paris, Spain relinquished Cuba, and ceded to the United States Puerto Rico, Guam, and, for a token $20 million, the Philippines, an island archipelago seven thousand miles west of the United States.

Subject, of course, to the advice and consent of the American Senate.

The debate in the Senate over ratification of the treaty ending the Spanish-American War was a national soul-searching. It was among the Senate desks—eighty-four of them now—that the imperatives of imperialism confronted other imperatives, imperatives dramatized because even as the debate raged, Filipino nationalists rose in rebellion against American troops, and the debate was conducted against a backdrop of atrocities committed by both sides in a brutal guerrilla war that would last three years and require the commitment of seventy thousand American troops before the independence movement was crushed. Rising for the first time among those desks, thirty-seven-year-old Albert Beveridge of Indiana proved that a single speech in the Senate could still catapult a newly elected senator to national fame. “The Philippines are ours forever,” Beveridge said,

And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either…. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world…. God has marked us as his chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world…. He has made us adept in government that we administer government among savages and senile people.

And it was among those desks that seventy-two-year-old George Hoar of Massachusetts rose to reply—in a voice trembling with anger.

I have listened, delighted, as have, I suppose, all the members of the Senate, to the eloquence of my honorable friend from Indiana…. Yet, Mr. President, as I heard his eloquent description of wealth and commerce and trade, I listened in vain for those words which the American people have been wont to take upon their lips in every crisis…. The words Right, Justice, Duty, Freedom were absent, my friend must permit me to say, from that eloquent speech.

Anti-imperialists said governing a foreign country without its consent was a violation of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence; the United States was “trampling on our own great Charter” in the Philippines, Hoar declared. Henry Cabot Lodge responded that that was not the point, since “the Philippines mean a vast future trade and wealth and power.”

The vote on the treaty was very close. Fifty-six of the eighty-four votes would be necessary for ratification, and the vote, taken in February, 1899, was 57 to 27. That was the vote—a vote in the Senate—that set the stage for the American Century.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Senate had been the dominant entity in the American government for perhaps three quarters of that century. If its glory was gone, its Golden Age vanished long before, its power seemed as great as ever.

BUT THEN CAME the twentieth century.

Suddenly, with that treaty, the United States was no longer merely a nation but an empire—an empire with colonies stretching from the Caribbean to the China Sea. The oceans were no longer broad moats that protected and insulated an infant republic and let it grow strong, but lakes over whose surface sped the Republic’s powerful fleets, lakes on the far side of which were the Republic’s colonies and coaling stations, sources of its raw materials, markets for its industries, lakes dotted with islands—Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, other, smaller Pacific islands—vital to American interests, in some cases garrisoned by American troops. And with the acquisition of colonies came, all at once, new needs—a navy powerful enough to keep open the sea lanes to the colonies, an Isthmian canal so the navy’s squadrons could be shifted rapidly between ocean and ocean, protection for the canal’s Caribbean approaches. Indeed, the acquisition of colonies created problems beyond the immediately obvious: had not America brought peace and stability to Cuba?—was it not only logical then, “for economic, strategic and humanitarian reasons,” to bring peace and stability to the entire region, to supervise much of the Caribbean and Central America? And, as Americans were to discover in the very first years of the “American Century”—in that “revolt” (or “War for Independence”) in the faraway Philippines—conquering a country was easier than governing it. All at once, with American citizens, property, and commercial interests scattered all over the globe, there were decisions to be made: whether or not to send troops to protect them from imminent menace; decisions on how far to go in countering Russian expansion in Manchuria; on how to deal with Santo Domingo’s default on debts to European nations—a default that led France and Italy to threaten immediate intervention in the Western Hemisphere. And these were decisions that couldn’t wait for Senate deliberations; there were threats and maneuvers that might come when the Senate was not in session, and that had to be met immediately.

And suddenly there was a President who was confident that he could make these decisions by himself. Senatorial power had been a coefficient of presidential weakness, and for thirty years, Presidents had been either inexperienced like Grant, or indecisive, or simply cowed by the mighty Senate. But with the crack of the assassin’s gunshot that struck down McKinley, and, to the rage of Senator Mark Hanna, put “that damned cowboy” Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, the era of weak Presidents was over.

The executive agreement—the international covenant devised by the President acting alone—had had its origin almost a century before in certain murky phrases in the Constitution. “Gradually, in a way that neither historians nor legal scholars have made altogether clear”—but largely, it appears, because in the early nineteenth century the Senate accepted the device to spare itself the task of considering a multitude of technical agreements—it obtained the color of usage, but almost entirely for minor matters. But when, in 1901, Roosevelt became President, the executive agreement became almost the order of the day.

When the Senate moved too slowly for Roosevelt’s taste in ratifying a treaty with Santo Domingo to forestall European intervention, Roosevelt, as he himself described it, “put the agreement into effect, and I continued its execution for two years before the Senate acted; and I would have continued it until the end of my term, if necessary, without any action by Congress.” In another executive agreement—one kept so secret that historians would not discover its existence for two decades—Roosevelt agreed to Japan’s imposition of a military protectorate on Korea.

Coupled with the rise of the executive agreement was what Arthur Schlesinger calls a “new presidential exuberance” about the use of armed force “on the pretexts of protecting American citizens and property.” Roosevelt, often without congressional permission, dispatched American regiments to Caribbean countries and installed provisional governments.

What would have been the result had the Senate resisted TR’s expansion of executive authority in foreign affairs cannot be known—because the Senate did not resist. It refused to assert the powers in foreign affairs that the Framers had given it. Time after time, when a senator proposed an amendment limiting the new executive authority—denying appropriations for military forces sent to foreign countries without congressional consent, for example—the Senate’s GOP rulers saw to it that the amendment was voted down. “I say there is no law, and I do not believe there ever was a law to prevent the Commander-in-Chief of … the United States from … giving [American citizens] the protection required by self-respect,” Senator Elihu Root declared. A President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief therefore allowed him to send troops “unless it be for the purpose of making war, which of course he cannot do.” As the trend toward executive action continued during the Taft Administration, protests in the Senate grew louder. But, as Schlesinger summarizes, “whatever the nuances of arguments, limitations were evaporating. The executive was becoming habituated to the unconstrained deployment of American forces around the world, and Congress chose not to say him nay.” As Roosevelt himself was to say, “The biggest matters, such as the Portsmouth peace, the acquisition of Panama, and sending the fleet around the world, I managed without consultation with anyone….” To a considerable extent, TR was only telling the truth. Furthermore, precedents had now been established. Following bloodshed in Tampico in 1914, Woodrow Wilson asked congressional sanction to send troops to protect American citizens in Mexico. There was doubt among senators over whether the provocation justified Wilson’s reaction, but, trapped by what Hamilton had called the “antecedent state of things,” they approved the move. No President—and perhaps no outside force of any type—could have so drastically weakened the Senate’s power in foreign affairs. The Founding Fathers had given the Senate armor that should have prevented that. But the Senate could weaken itself—and it had done so, stripping away much of its own authority over foreign affairs.

BUT NOT ALL OF IT—as, in 1919, Woodrow Wilson discovered.

When the President sailed for Europe to personally represent the United States at the peace conference convening in Paris, warships in New York Harbor fired salutes, a huge throng filled Battery Park to cheer him off on his historic journey, and as his liner passed through the Narrows, his fellow passengers saw, all along the Brooklyn and Staten Island shorelines, children waving flags. When the ship pulled into Brest, posters on the walls of the old slate-roofed stone houses called on all Frenchmen to praise this world herowho had come “to found a new order on the rights of peoples, and to stop forever the return of atrocious war.” The American President’s idealistic aims had captured the imagination of a war-weary world. In isolated villages in Italy, peasants burned candles before his portrait. All over Europe, crowds cheered him as he paraded through the streets, a reception which, as one historian puts it delicately, “tended to increase his sense of mission.” And not only was the peace treaty signed at Versailles in May, 1919, the remarkably moderate treaty that Wilson wanted, but incorporated within the body of the treaty was a Covenant, or Constitution, for a world organization for peace, a “League of Nations,” which he had determined to bring into being, so that the treaty would be “definitely a guarantee of peace.” And the American people were, by a substantial majority, in favor of the proposed League in principle, and newspapers supported it by a margin of four to one.

But it was not the people of the United States who would determine the fate of the League of Nations but the Senate of the United States—and the Majority Leader of the Senate, who commanded from Daniel Webster’s desk, was Henry Cabot Lodge.

Dr. Lodge (Ph.D., Harvard), historian and author, had been known as “the Scholar in Politics” before the advent on the political scene of Dr. Woodrow Wilson (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins), historian and author, who promptly was awarded that title as if Lodge had never held it. The Senator loathed the President. “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel toward Wilson,” he had written a friend some years before; he told other friends that the President was “shifty,” “the most sinister figure that ever crossed the country’s path.” The feeling was reciprocated. The Republican senators, particularly Lodge, were “pygmy-minded—narrow … selfish … poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere,” Wilson said. So strained were relations between the two men that at one ceremony Wilson refused to sit on the same platform with the Senator.

Piled atop the personal considerations were the political. In a wartime truce on politics, Republicans had in many instances supported Wilson’s war program more loyally than Democrats, but just before the 1918 congressional elections, Wilson had suddenly appealed to voters to return Democratic majorities to both houses. Furious Republicans considered the appeal a betrayal, and some of them—none more so than Lodge—saw it as confirmation of what they had long suspected was the President’s unbridled lust for power; Lodge believed that Wilson was planning to run for a third term, in 1920, and, that the President, anxious to be acclaimed as the peacemaker to boost his re-election prospects, was sacrificing the independence of the United States to the League. And when Wilson’s appeal backfired—the Republicans took control of both houses, although by a mere two-vote margin in the Senate—the President’s most bitter enemy was elevated not only to the Senate’s majority leadership but to the chairmanship of its Foreign Relations Committee.

For Lodge, moreover, the personal and political considerations were reinforced by the philosophical. His twenty-six years in the Senate had been twenty-six years of uncompromising advocacy of an assertive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by strong armed forces. He wanted a peace that would strengthen America’s position relative to the European powers. “The thing to do,” he had said during the war, “is to lick Germany and tell her what arrangements we are going to make.” Above all, he believed in the sovereignty and independence of the United States; the international cooperation that was the centerpiece of Wilson’s League he viewed as a menace to America’s need to preserve absolute freedom of action to pursue and protect its own interests.

And he believed in the sovereignty and independence of the Senate of the United States. He revered the Senate, with a reverence grounded in the same philosophy that had inspired the Founding Fathers to create it. As he was to write in 1921,

[it] has never been, legally speaking, reorganized. It has been in continuous and organized existence for 132 years, because two-thirds of the Senate being always in office, there has never been such a thing as the Senate requiring reorganization as is the case with each newly elected House…. There may be no House of Representatives, but merely an unorganized body of members elect; there may be no President duly installed in office. But there is always the organized Senate of the United States.

Never, he felt, had the threat to senatorial sovereignty been greater. A series of strong Presidents had chipped away at it, aiming “at weakening if not breaking down the government as nearly as possible to one which consists of the executive and the voters, the simplest and most rudimentary form of human government which history can show,” he said. And now Wilson was trying to destroy it entirely.

The very symbol and heart of that sovereignty was, to Lodge, the Senate’s power over treaties. “War can be declared without the assent of the Executive, and peace can be made without the assent of the House,” he had once pointed out. “But neither war nor peace can be made without the assent of the Senate.” A treaty, he emphasized, is not a treaty just because a President has entered into it. A treaty is “still inchoate, a mere project for a treaty, until the consent of the Senate has been given to it.” Therefore, he said, “The responsibility of a Senator in dealing with any question of peace is as great in his sphere as that of the President in his.” Personal malice toward Wilson, political scheming—these were elements in Lodge’s motivation. But, as James MacGregor Burns has written, “at the core of the hostility … lay genuine differences of outlook and principle.”

Woodrow Wilson’s “faith in representative democracy, in majority rule, in the ultimate wisdom of the people, went,” as Burns put it, “to the very core of his being”—as did his belief in the superiority of his mental processes to those of “pygmy-minded” senators. This feeling was evident in the makeup of the five-member delegation he selected to accompany him to Paris. While President McKinley had included three senators on the five-member delegation negotiating the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, Wilson took no senators with him; he apparently was resolved to have no opposition in his delegation. His announcement that his chief adviser would be his little-known personal confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, caused distress even on the Democratic side of the Senate. “Who is this Colonel House?” Arizona’s Henry Ashurst demanded. “Whence did he come, what has he accomplished, and where is he headed?” Wilson was unmoved. Returning to the United States for necessary bill-signing work in March, he reported that the treaty and the Covenant were linked—and then sailed again for France. When Lodge fired a warning shot across his bow—rising at his desk to read to the Senate just before it adjourned at midnight, March 3, 1919, a “Round Robin” declaring that the League “in the form now proposed” was unacceptable to the United States, a Round Robin bearing the signatures of thirty-seven Republican senators and senators-elect—Wilson reacted with contempt. “Anyone who opposes me … I’ll crush!” he told the French ambassador. “I shall consent to nothing. The Senate must take its medicine.” He had outsmarted the Senate, he felt. He boasted to the world that when the treaty was brought back, “the gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only tied into it, but so many threads on the treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” He assumed, in the words of one historian, that “The Senate would not dare to kill the peace treaty outright.” It would have no choice but to consent.

Which showed that the onetime constitutional scholar had forgotten some of his lessons. Thirty-seven Republicans, more than the thirty-one necessary to block a treaty, had already declared this treaty unacceptable. Even if every Democrat voted to ratify it (and several Democrats had their own reservations about it), it would not be ratified so long as the Republicans remained united.

And the leader of the Republicans knew how to keep them united; Lodge had, after all, served his apprenticeship under Aldrich and Allison. Now, in 1919, “No one knew better than he the various devices and methods by which a treaty could be killed, nor had anyone more practice in the use of them,” commented the historian W. Stull Holt. More than a dozen Republicans, led by the rigid isolationists Robert La Follette, William E. Borah, and Hiram Johnson, felt even more strongly about the treaty than did Lodge, so strongly that they were dubbed the “irreconcilables.” About a dozen “mild reservationists” approved the League in principle but wanted minor alterations. And a middle bloc of Republicans—“strong reservationists”—were willing to go along with the League only if American sovereignty was guaranteed. In a series of compromises, Lodge bound the three groups together in a solid front behind a series of fourteen reservations (fourteen to match Wilson’s Fourteen Points; newspapermen would dub them the “Lodge Reservations”) so that the Treaty of Versailles could be ratified only if these reservations—which would protect America’s sovereignty and freedom of action (but which would also have made the League a substantially weaker organization than the one Wilson had envisioned)—were added to the treaty. At the height of public enthusiasm for the treaty, Lodge had calmly reassured an ally, “The only people who have votes on the treaty are here in the Senate.” And he, not the President, had the votes.

Moreover, he had the Senate’s inviolable rules under which a proposed treaty had to be considered by the Foreign Relations Committee before it could be considered by the Senate as a whole—and on the committee, he had a solid majority, for its Republican members were either “irreconcilables” or less ideological skeptics like Warren G. Harding of Ohio. By the time the President of the United States returned from Versailles in his glory, the Senate of the United States was arrayed against him in its might. On July 10, 1919, the day following his return, Woodrow Wilson entered the Senate Chamber with a bulky copy of the treaty under his arm and presented it to the Senate in a speech that enunciated the noble ideals behind it—“Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world? … We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision…. America shall in truth show the way….” But hardly had the President finished and left the Chamber when Senator Lodge rose at his desk to utter a single quiet sentence that had as much significance as all Wilson’s eloquence. He wished to move, the Senator said, to refer the treaty to the Foreign Relations Committee.

Woodrow Wilson was now to be reminded of the power of the Senate. The President’s eloquence, as Burns puts it, “reverberated through press and public,” a press and public favorable to the idea of a League of Nations. But Lodge and other opponents of the League believed that if the public was educated to the possible sacrifices of American sovereignty to an international body, public opinion would change. Ample funding from Republican bankers was available to finance this education—a massive public relations campaign—but time was needed for the campaign to accomplish its purpose. And the Founding Fathers had created the Senate to provide such time, to be the “cooler” for public opinion, to “refine and enlarge the public views” and produce “the cool and deliberated sense of the community.”

The proposed treaty was 268 pages long. Lodge began the Foreign Relations Committee hearings by reading the treaty aloud—every page—in a committee room empty except for a single clerk, who took down what he said. That took two weeks. Then the committee called witnesses, scores of witnesses, to testify against the treaty. And while Lodge was thus playing for time, his allies were flooding the country with anti-League advertising and holding anti-League rallies in major cities, rallies at which the speakers were often senators.

The battle was a throwback to the great senatorial debates of the previous century in which long, closely reasoned Senate speeches had been reported fully in the press and discussed, in town meetings and on street corners, across the country. One speech—two hours long, delivered in August in a steaming hot Chamber by Lodge himself—is all but forgotten today, but whatever the validity of its reasoning, it nonetheless expressed that reasoning with the eloquence and power of that earlier age.

You may call me selfish, if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first in an arrangement like this. I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails the best hopes of mankind fail with it. I have never had but one allegiance—I cannot divide it now. I have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a League.

For many of the speeches, the galleries were as packed and attentive as they had been for Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. As one historian has written, if Lodge “had wondered whether the campaign to convert the American people to his views was working, on the day he spoke he received ample and gratifying proof from the galleries”—which were packed, not only with representatives of women’s organizations but with a contingent of Marines who had fought at Chateau-Thierry, and who had, in fact, come to the Senate Chamber directly from a parade in which they had passed in review before President Wilson. When Lodge finished, mothers and Marines stood and cheered him before the ushers could quiet them down. And there was another reminder of the Great Triumvirate: hundreds of thousands of copies of Lodge’s speech were printed and distributed across the country.

Although Wilson fumed at the slow pace of Lodge’s hearings, the President couldn’t persuade the senators to speed up. “Mustering,” in Burns’ words, “all his presidential and personal influence,” he used face-to-face persuasion, “talking to senators individually and in small groups,” writing “private letters” to wavering Republicans. But the Founding Fathers, fearing executive power, had armored the Senate against it. The power of the President may have swept across the country, and indeed across part of Capitol Hill. It came to a halt at the door to the Senate Chamber.

When Wilson summoned Senator James Watson of Indiana to the White House and asked him, “Where am I on this fight?” Watson replied, “Mr. President, you are licked. There is only one way you can take the United States into the League of Nations.” “Which way is that?” “Accept it with the Lodge reservations.” “Lodge reservations? Never! I’ll never consent to any policy with which that impossible name is so prominently identified.” The President decided to rally public opinion behind the League by going on a cross-country speaking tour, to, he said, “appeal to Caesar”—the people. But Wilson had evidently forgotten what happened to Caesar—and who did it.

Wilson’s tour of the country was an epic of eloquence. “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms,” he prophesied. “If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more.” It was an epic of courage and will, as the President fought against mind-numbing headaches that seemed to grow steadily worse until finally he was struck by a premonitory stroke—and even then he tried to fight against returning to Washington, where, after another stroke, he hovered paralyzed and nearly blind for weeks on the edge of death. But eloquence, and the public opinion aroused by it, couldn’t make even a dent in the Senate armor. As Burns summarizes: “By crusading for the League, Wilson had indeed nearly thrown his own life away—yet he had not succeeded in changing a single vote in the Senate.”

Refusing to compromise, the President instructed the Democrats to vote against Lodge’s fourteen amendments, and they were defeated. But Wilson’s proposed treaty was defeated, too. “For decades,” as Burns puts it, “scholars have asked why Wilson allowed the treaty to go down in defeat, why he did not just swallow hard and accept the Lodge reservations as one more necessary concession.” Many have speculated that the reason was physical, that Wilson’s judgment was clouded, his stubbornness increased, by his stroke. But there was a political reason, too—a definitive one in political terms. There was no necessity for the Republican moderates to compromise. Two-thirds plus one of the Senate was required for passage of a treaty, and Wilson didn’t have two-thirds. Wilson’s last hope—his attempt in 1920 to make the upcoming presidential election “a great and solemn referendum” on the issue of the League—was snuffed out by the election of Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that “We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.”

The Senate’s victory over the Treaty of Versailles proved again that the powers given that body by the Founding Fathers were strong enough to stand against the power of the executive and the power of public opinion—strong enough to stand, if necessary, against both at once. “Ultimately,” as Burns has written, “Wilson’s League was not killed by him, by the Senate Democrats who voted as Wilson instructed them, by the irreconcilables, or even by Lodge. It was thwarted by a political system…. Lodge, it is true, manipulated that system brilliantly, but he had only inherited it. In the struggle over the Treaty of Versailles, the American system of checks and balances worked as the Founding Fathers intended that it should.” Woodrow Wilson was defeated by a body he considered both unrepresentative and oligarchical. He was right. The Senate was unrepresentative and oligarchical. But it had the power.

•    •    •

BUT WHAT had the Senate done with that power? “If we do not do this great thing now … the terrible task will have to be done once more,” Woodrow Wilson had warned. Was his analysis correct? Would another world war have come—as it came only twenty years later—if the Senate of the United States had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and the Covenant of Nations?

No one can be certain of the answer. Even if the United States had joined the League, would the country, with an isolationist spirit still heavy on the land, have been willing, when called upon, to meet its obligations? Would the other great powers have been willing? In the event, of course, when they were challenged by aggressor nations, they proved, despite many pledges, to be unwilling. But there is at least a possibility that America’s participation in the League might have heartened the Western democracies when Hitler and Mussolini began to test their will. There is at least a possibility that if all the democracies had been united, history might have been different. The Senate, which in the previous century, during its Golden Age, had kept alive for forty years—forty vital years—the possibility of peace for the Union, in the twentieth century had struck a great, perhaps mortal, blow at the possibility of peace for the world. In the nineteenth century, the Senate had played a significant—for a considerable portion of that century, a dominant—role in America’s foreign policy. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, it had played a much more minor role in foreign affairs. It had made a single significant decision—and that decision had been a tragedy.

AND IN DOMESTIC AFFAIRS, the record was—if possible—worse.

With the dawn of the new century, the public’s demand for an end to trusts and to the high protective tariff that was “the mother of trusts,” the tariff that robbed farmers and gouged consumers, and that had now been in place for almost fifty years—the demand, for legislation to ameliorate the injustices of the Industrial Revolution, that had begun to rise during the Gilded Age, only to be thwarted in part by the Senate—began to rise faster, fed by the books of Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens and Theodore Dreiser and a hundred other authors; by the new mass-circulation magazines, which, in the very first years of the twentieth century, educated America about the manipulations of Standard Oil and stirred its conscience to the horrors of sweatshops and child labor (in 1900, almost two million boys and girls were working, often alongside their mothers, all the daylight hours seven days a week in rooms in which there might not be a single window); and by the Populist and Grange movements, which gave farmers insight into the power that railroads and banks had over their lives, and into their helplessness against them. These feelings now crested in a great wave of humanitarian concern, an outraged, impassioned demand for social justice, that became known as the Progressive Movement. That wave swept over city halls. Long-entrenched boss rule was swept aside by reform mayors in a hundred cities. It swept over statehouses; reform governors pushed through child labor laws and laws increasing protection from, and compensation for, on-the-job injuries. And with McKinley’s assassination, there was suddenly, in Theodore Roosevelt, a President who reformers felt was one of their own—their moral leader, in fact: the very embodiment of the popular will, of the spirit of reform, of Progressivism, was in the White House.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue were the Supreme Court, the House, and the Senate. All were far more conservative than the spirit of the age, but the Court could act only in areas in which it was asked to rule, and while the House was a force against Progressivism during a relatively brief period in which Joseph Cannon reigned as Speaker, the rest of the time that still-growing body—it would reach 435 members in 1910—was in its customary disarray, a force against, or for, nothing.

The Senate was not in disarray. As the Foreign Relations Committee had been its stronghold against the League, against Progressivism the stronghold was the Finance Committee, still dominated by Allison, Aldrich, John Spooner of Wisconsin, and Thomas Platt of New York. The “Senate Four” or the “Big Four,” as they were known, still met in summer at Aldrich’s great castle in Narrangansett, near Newport—four aging men in stiff high white collars and dark suits (Aldrich, being at home, might occasionally unbend to wear a blazer) even on the hottest days, sitting on a colonnaded porch in rockers and wicker chairs deciding Republican policy—a policy that was still based on an unshaken belief in laissez-faire and the protective tariff. And, as the New York Times reported: “The four bosses of the Senate can and do control that body. This means that these four men can block and defeat anything the president or the House may desire.” Aware of this power, the new President was aware too that senators would play a key role in disposing of the presidential renomination he coveted. And while in certain areas he moved against the “trusts” with unprecedented vigor, ordering his Attorney General to initiate suits to protect miners from the strike-breaking tactics of the big coal operators, and although he continually proclaimed the need for “Government” supervision “over business,” the supervision turned out, during his first term, to be limited to “executive actions” he could take on his own authority, without the need for legislation from Congress. When he ventured toward broader moves he always took the Senate into account. His rhetoric was as dramatic as even the most passionate Progressive could have hoped, but in August, 1902, the Big Four, along with several other senatorial elders, including Mark Hanna, the man who made McKinley, traveled to Roosevelt’s home on Long Island for an all-day conference. A month later, there was another conference—and this time it was the President who came to the senators, sailing across Long Island Sound to Narragansett, where the senators were waiting for him at Aldrich’s castle. And thereafter TR’s speeches on the tariff and the monetary system were first submitted to Aldrich for approval; on one occasion, the President wrote the Senator that “I want to be sure to get what I say on these two subjects along lines upon which all of us can agree.” Dynamic in delivery though the speeches continued to be, they were somewhat less so in content; abrupt changes in the tariff would be dangerous, he said; any changes that were made should be managed by experts, working “primarily from the standpoint of business interests.” (“Sound and wise” words, Allison and Spooner said.)

In 1904, the American people’s demand for social justice—a demand now in its fourth decade—carried Roosevelt to election in his own right. “The current he rode was … public opinion,” Josephson says. “In 1904 it ran more swiftly, stronger than ever in the direction of popular reform.” Encouraged, the President turned to what he called the “paramount issue”: the regulation of railroads for which farmers had pleaded for thirty years, while for thirty years, discriminatory freighting charges had kept rising. The country rallied behind TR when he called on Congress to give the Interstate Commerce Commission authority over rates and regulations, and the House, by a majority of 346 to 7, passed a strong bill.

At first glance, prospects in the Senate seemed unprecedentedly favorable. Platt was dying, Allison and Spooner were in their last terms; 1905 marked the arrival in the Senate of a group of independent Republicans such as Borah of Idaho, who took their cue from Wisconsin’s “Little Giant,” the reformer Robert La Follette. Progressives felt their time had come.

Dying though the Old Guard may have been, however, it wasn’t surrendering. When Beveridge spoke for railroad regulation, Aldrich, his suave facade cracking for once, snarled at the young senator, “We’ll get you for this.” When La Follette, fresh from his triumphs in the provinces, rose in the Senate to give his maiden speech, a plea for regulation, one by one the Republican elders stood up at their desks and stalked out of the Chamber. By the time the railroad bill finally emerged from the Senate, and then from a Senate-House conference committee, the strong House measure had been drastically watered down.

Theodore Roosevelt’s subsequent victories in the Progressive cause—protection of the nation’s forests, for example, and regulation of the food and drug industries—were generally victories that did not require Senate concurrence (or, after 1905, when Speaker Joseph Cannon solidified his control of the House, the concurrence of that body). Denouncing “malefactors of great wealth,” the President came out for federal income and inheritance taxes that would begin a leveling of wealth, for broader regulation of corporations, and for reforms in factory working conditions. The Senate’s Old Guard (and the House’s Cannon) decided that reform had gone far enough—and that was as far as reform went. Although as the champion of the American people, TR had campaigned for almost eight years against economic injustice, his victories—at least his domestic victories—were generally achieved by the exercise of his executive authority. He had managed to broaden that authority, but only to the point at which it conflicted with legislative power. When he left office there was still no federal child labor law, no effective federal workmen’s compensation law. The problems posed by trusts and tariffs had not been resolved. And the Senate was the principal reason.

AND WHEN, IN 1909, there was a new President, there was still the Old Guard—as was demonstrated in their first encounter. William Howard Taft had been advocating tariff reduction—a reduction desired by the overwhelming majority of the American people—since he was a young man. The Republican Party platform of 1908 had contained an “unequivocal” pledge for tariff revision, and Taft quickly summoned Congress into special session to pass a tariff bill “drawn in good faith with the [platform’s] promises.” The House of Representatives passed one—a measure that would substantially reduce many duties—but its bill was then sent to the Senate Finance Committee. Allison, Platt, and Spooner were gone, but their places around the green baize committee table were filled by other Old Guard stalwarts, and the committee’s gavel was still in the hand of Nelson Aldrich. Hearings were held behind closed doors, and the bill that was reported out was no longer a bill for tariff reduction but for tariff increases: of 847 amendments on individual items, 600 raised existing rates.

As a “prairie fire” of indignation spread across an outraged nation, editorials denounced Aldrich as “dictator,” “despot,” “tyrant,” but the Founding Fathers had armored the Senate against indignation, and Aldrich did not even attempt to conceal his contempt for the people. His only response was a sneer on the Senate floor. Certainly, the Republican platform had promised tariff “revision,” he said, but “where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward?”

Taft gave in, but ten Progressive Republicans, led by La Follette, decided to fight. Among them were some of the era’s greatest orators, and the battle they made on the Senate floor day after day, all through a long, hot, Washington summer, in a debate out of the Senate’s long-gone Golden Age—a battle against not only a President of their own party but against the mighty Aldrich as well—was the great topic of the hour; reporters crowded the Press Gallery above the presiding officer’s dais; teletypes clattered with news; on the summer-baked streets of cities and towns all across America men and women discussed the arguments made on the floor of America’s Senate, among those four curved rows of mahogany and red leather. And all during that summer of 1909 public outrage against Aldrich and the Old Guard rose.

But the Senate had been created to stand against public opinion. Aldrich’s bill passed easily, and so did the “compromise” Act that emerged from a stacked conference committee—an Act that La Follette branded “the consummation of privilege more reprehensible than had ever found a place in the statutes of the country.” It was quickly signed into law by Taft. When Aldrich had first reported his bill out of committee, and the “prairie fire” had been raging against it, the Senator had predicted calmly that the bill would pass substantially as he had written it. The prediction had proven correct.

DURING THE remaining years of Taft’s presidency, there would be a few victories for reformers to celebrate, but only a few. By March, 1910, Cannon had been ousted as Speaker, and in the elections that November, public indignation removed the GOP from control of the House. But in the Senate, that indignation echoed only faintly, and when, in 1911, Aldrich retired, the Old Guard’s ranks simply closed around the gap, as solidly as ever. And Taft continued to “compromise” with—more accurately, to surrender to—the Senate’s power. At the end of the Taft Administration in 1913, as at the end of the Roosevelt Administration in 1909, a supposedly representative republic had not come to grips with concentrated economic power, or with the impact of that power on the human condition. A tide of concern about the impact of industrial concentration on America had begun rising during the Gilded Age—had begun rising soon after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in fact. At first, the tide had risen slowly, but by the 1880s and ’90s, it was rising fast. But all through the Gilded Age, the Senate had stood against the tide.

At the turn of the century, with the onset of the Progressive Era, the tide became a wave—a great wave of conscience, of anger over injustice, of demand for a cleansing of government and for a mobilization of government to meet the needs of its people. The wave of Progressivism and reform washed across America, through statehouses and city halls, even through the White House. When the wave crashed against the Senate, it broke on the Senate, the waters falling away from it as they had been falling away for half a century. The Senate stood as it had been standing for so long—a mighty dam standing athwart, and stemming, the tides of social justice.