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“Great Things Are Underway!”

IN 1913, Woodrow Wilson, who had been swept into the White House by the wave, was inaugurated—and the gates of the dam swung open at last.

In his inaugural address, Wilson said that “We have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost … of our industrial achievements…. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.” And he knew the cure: presidential leadership; the President, who had the people behind him, must, to meet “conditions that menace our civilization,” formulate a comprehensive legislative program and push it through to passage.

For a century—ever since Thomas Jefferson, to emphasize the separation between executive and legislative branches, had ended the practice—no President had appeared in person before Congress. But in April, 1913, Wilson did so, announcing to a joint session the first bill he wanted Congress to take up: a new tariff reduction measure. (The revenue lost was to be made up by instituting a graduated income tax.) For the first time in a quarter of a century, there were Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and many of the new Democrats in the Senate shared Wilson’s philosophy, and were willing, at least during the first year of his Administration, to accept his direction, as was the Leader they selected, John Worth Kern of Indiana, who had been in the Senate only two years. The Republican ranks had been broken at last—by death and retirement and new additions to La Follette’s insurgent Republican bloc. And Wilson kept attacking. The day after his address, he was in the Capitol again, meeting privately with Democratic leaders.

A tariff reduction bill passed the House, but the House had passed such bills before, and always the reductions had become increases in the Senate, or had died there, and reformers who had cursed the protective tariff for decades had come to believe that tariff reform would always die in the Senate. But this time, Wilson went to the people with a dramatic appeal against the lobbyists’ power, saying that “only public opinion can check and destroy it.” And the Senate bill, passed 44 to 37, contained rates even lower than those the House had approved, as well as the momentous income tax that marked the beginning of the democratization of the federal financial structure. “Think of it—a tariff reduction downwards after all,” wrote Agriculture Secretary David Houston. “Lower in the Senate than in the House! … A progressive income tax! I did not much think we should live to see these things.”

Even while Congress was still debating the tariff bill, Wilson had summoned it into a second joint session, at which he called for the creation of a system of regional banks controlled by a Federal Reserve Board (its seven members would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate) that would end Wall Street’s control of money and credit. His private sessions on Capitol Hill were also continuing; sitting in the ornate President’s Room just off the Senate Chamber, he conferred with—and brought the powers of the presidency to bear upon—individual senators. He installed a private telephone line between the White House and the Capitol. So successful were Wilson’s methods that not a single Democratic senator voted against the Federal Reserve Act. And as soon as it passed, Wilson was back, again appearing before Congress to ask for laws—the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act—to investigate and police trusts and monopolies (and to protect organized labor from injunctions). And these passed, too. The President held Congress in session for a year and a half, the longest session in history, and during it transformed the balance of power between executive and legislature in America’s government, pushing through Congress social laws that Progressives had all but given up hope of seeing passed in their lifetime.

The Senate’s “Golden Age” had begun in 1819, and although those days of Senate glory had lasted only about forty years, the days of Senate power had lasted another fifty and more. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Senate had still been the “Senate Supreme.” And while, during the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft presidencies at the beginning of the twentieth century, senatorial power had diminished in foreign affairs, it had remained intact—if anything, it had increased—in domestic affairs. For better and for worse, the institution had stood firm against both executive and popular tyranny for almost a century. The year 1913 (a year which also saw the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, which mandated the popular election of senators that reformers had long believed would make the Senate more responsive to the will of the people) marked the first substantial break in that power.

And then the gates of the dam swung shut again.

By the summer of 1914, in fact, the first signs of reaction were already perceptible. And that was the year of the guns of August, and thereafter Woodrow Wilson’s energies were increasingly focused on international affairs, and over his relationship with the Senate there crept, year by year, deeper and deeper shadows. The tariff reduction bill was the signpost of the beginning of Wilson’s relationship with the Senate; the signpost at the end was the Treaty of Versailles.

AND AFTER WILSON came the “return to normalcy.” Most of the men puffing the big cigars in the legendary smoke-filled room at the 1920 Republican convention were senators—someone remarked that the room looked like a Senate in miniature with Henry Cabot Lodge biting off brief comments while the others ruffled through possible presidential candidates “like a deck of soiled cards”—and, determined to reassert the Senate’s authority, they wanted a pliable President who, in Lodge’s job description, “will not try to be an autocrat but will do his best to carry on the Government in the old and accepted Constitutional ways.” Who better than one of their own to fill this role?—and the Old Guard’s Warren G. Harding was elevated directly from his Senate desk to the White House, in his ears his colleagues’ admonition to “sign whatever bills the Senate sent him and not send bills for the Senate to pass.” Under Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, this “normalcy” was to last for almost a decade—a decade during which, slowly but steadily, the tariff began to rise again, and federal spending to fall; federal regulations on business were relaxed; and the tax burden was shifted from the rich to the middle class and the poor. The Twenties were, of course, a decade in which a prosperous America was content to rely on big business rather than government for leadership, and little of that commodity came from the White House, or from either of the two chambers on Capitol Hill. The Senate’s philosophy was a philosophy that favored free enterprise over social reform. Tighter Republican control of the House enabled it to rise to equality with the Senate—but that only meant that the two bodies, squabbling continually over details, spent the decade “bouncing bills back and forth.”

And when, on Black Friday, 1929, normalcy abruptly ended, the Senate had little to contribute to solving the crisis. While it had once been the deliberative body the Framers had envisioned—one among whose desks fundamental policies had been debated, in debates that educated a nation—that educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors. Once it had been a place of leaders, men who conceived daring solutions to daunting problems, and then persuaded public and colleagues to support those solutions. Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to. So that when in 1929 crisis came, and with the last of those passive presidents still in office, leadership was so desperately needed, the Senate had as little to offer as the House.

The President and the leadership of Congress—that leadership that was still staunchly conservative in both houses—clung to their belief that the best cure for the business crisis was business as usual. Business as usual meant raising the tariff, and, during the months following the Crash, that was the priority on Capitol Hill. The bill drawn by ardent protectionists Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Congressman Willis C. Hawley of Oregon raised duties to prohibitive levels. Senator La Follette called the bill “the product of a series of deals, conceived in secret, but executed in public with a brazen effrontery that is without parallels in the annals of the Senate” (a remark that revealed his ignorance of Senate annals). When, in June, 1930, President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, using six solid gold pens, one historian wrote that Nelson Aldrich’s ghost “no doubt smiled down in approval.”

National concern over the deepening Depression gave the Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 1930 for the first time since 1919, and while the GOP clung to a 48–47 plurality in the Senate, the margin was meaningless, since La Follette’s insurgent Republicans were not inclined to follow President Hoover’s policies. And when Congress convened in December, 1931, the month in which twenty-three-year-old Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington as secretary to one of the newly elected Democratic congressmen, it did so in the midst of a nationwide demand for action. The mail sacks that the staffs of senators and representatives opened each morning were filled with desperation now, as a nation’s people begged their government for help.

But little help came from the White House. President Hoover’s solution to the Depression was still largely to maintain that it was over, and that proposals for direct federal aid for relief, or for increased spending on public works, were as unnecessary as debt relief for farmers—although thousands of American families were losing their farms, relief funds had run out for states and municipalities, and every day the soup kitchen lines grew longer.

And little help came from Capitol Hill. The House was even more confused and disorganized than usual; a columnist called it “the Monkey House,” and his sentiment was echoed by some of the congressmen themselves; declared John McDuffie of Alabama: “Representative government is dead.” In the other wing of the Capitol, some senators—the younger La Follette, New York’s Robert F. Wagner, George W. Norris of Nebraska, Hugo Black of Alabama—sought to rise to the crisis, with proposals for a federal public works program, a federal system of unemployment insurance, direct federal relief. But there was little agreement among these senators, and little leadership. Many senators seemed to doubt whether Congress could do anything in the crisis. Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma was probably expressing the general sentiment when he said dourly that you could no more relieve the Depression by legislation “than you can pass a resolution to prevent disease.” When, after months of wrangling over details, a relief and public works bill finally passed Congress, Hoover vetoed it, and there was never a realistic chance that the Senate would override the veto. And that was the high point of congressional action to fight the Depression; in the midst of one of the nation’s gravest crises, Congress failed to meet for nine months—adjourning in March, 1931, it did not reconvene until January, 1932.

By the time it reconvened, there were between 15 million and 17 million unemployed men in America, many of whom represented an entire family in want. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were all over Washington—“Bonus Marchers,” twenty-five thousand penniless World War veterans, paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue in May and then pitched tents in parks, so that “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state.” But for Congress, 1932 was seven months of wrangling and delay, and the measures it passed were so inadequate as to be all but meaningless; under its relief bill, passed after months of haggling, the average stipend for a family of four was fifty cents per day. When vital tax and tariff reforms were introduced, special interest groups and states traded tariff proposals back and forth until, in May, one senator shouted, “Have we gone mad? Have we no idea that if we carry this period of unrest from one week to another, a panic will break loose, which all the tariffs under heaven will not stem? Yet we sit here to take care of some little interest in this state or that…. ‘My state! My state!’ My God! Let’s hear ‘My country!’ What good is your state if your country sinks into the quagmire of ruin!” For months, Forum magazine said, “the country [has] been looking on, with something like anguish, at the spectacle of the inability of the national legislature for dealing with the crucial problem of national finance.”

Congress adjourned in July, 1932. By the time it reconvened in December, 158 of its members had been defeated in the election, as had President Hoover. But the congressmen—and Hoover—were still going to be in office until March.

The winter ahead was a winter of despair. When the lame-duck Congress convened, crowded around the Capitol steps were more than twenty-five hundred men, women, and children chanting, “Feed the hungry! Tax the rich!” Heavily armed police herded the “hunger marchers” into a “detention camp” on New York Avenue, where, denied food or water, they spent a freezing night sleeping on the pavement, taunted by their guards. Thereafter, when Congress was in session a double line of rifle-carrying police blocked the Capitol steps. And behind these bodyguards, Congress spent yet more months posturing and procrastinating, angrily deadlocking over conflicting relief bills, while arguing interminably over whether to legalize beer. As for the “President-reject,” as Timecalled him, he spent those months trying to commit his successor to a continuation of his discredited policies. As, that winter, farmers began to march in what might have been the prelude to revolution, as the nation’s great banks began to close, Washington still did nothing substantive. A great nation was collapsing, and its government, of which the Senate had once been a pillar, seemed paralyzed, utterly unable to prevent the collapse. Senators came to the Chamber wearing money belts as the safest place to keep their cash. The institution which had once excited the admiration of great statesmen now aroused only contempt.

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THEN, AT HIS INAUGURATION on March 4, 1933, the new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declaring that “This nation asks for action, and action now,” summoned Congress into special session. If there was a single moment in America’s history in which the slow slide of power—now in its fourth decade—from Capitol Hill to the White House suddenly became an avalanche, so that, for decades thereafter, governmental initiative came overwhelmingly from the Executive Branch, with the legislature only reacting to that initiative, it was that session—the session that lasted a hundred days, and was so significant a landmark in the nation’s history that it became enshrined as the Hundred Days, the session in which a President proposed, and proposed, and proposed again, in which he proposed the most far-reaching of measures—a session in which Congress scampered in panic to approve those proposals as fast as it could.

Should Congress fail to provide immediate action, the second Roosevelt said, “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage war against the emergency.” When Congress convened on March 9, he had waiting for it an Emergency Banking Relief Act that included sweeping presidential authority over the Federal Reserve System. The bill had not yet been printed—only one typed copy was available—and it was read to the House, which limited debate to forty minutes; even before that time expired, representatives were shouting, “Vote! Vote!” and the vote was by a unanimous shout. The Senate was in a similar rush. When Huey Long of Louisiana proposed an amendment, he was shouted down, and the bill—a bill few senators had even seen—was passed, 73 to 7. Roosevelt signed the legislation into law on the same day, less than eight hours after he had sent it to Capitol Hill. An hour later, he was outlining to congressional leaders—long habituated to deference to the powerful veterans’ lobby—an economy program that included a reduction of veterans’ pensions, to be accomplished through delegation of sweeping authority to the President. Four days later, the House having passed the bill, the Senate voted for it, 62 to 13, and on the same day voted to amend the Volstead Act to allow the sale of beer and light wine, thereby defying the Prohibitionist lobby, as powerful as the veterans.

“COME AT ONCE TO WASHINGTON,” the second La Follette telegraphed Donald Richberg, an old Theodore Roosevelt Progressive, “GREAT THINGS ARE UNDERWAY!” Said Will Rogers: “They know they got a man in there who is wise to Congress, wise to our so-called big men. The whole country is with him, just so he does something. If he burned down the capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’” Even conservatives cheered. And before Congress adjourned on June 15, Roosevelt had sent a total of fifteen measures to Capitol Hill, fifteen measures that resulted in fifteen major legislative Acts that would transform forever the relationship between America’s government and its people—that would extend at last to that people, battered by forces too big for them to fight alone, the helping hand of government for which they had been asking not only during the three years of the Depression but for many decades before. These Acts embodied concepts expounded by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, concepts that had headed the Progressive agenda for decades but that for decades had perished on Capitol Hill, so often among the desks of the Senate. During the Hundred Days, the chairmanships of many major Senate committees were, thanks to seniority, in the hands of conservative southern Democrats. But the Senate—like the House—passed the fifteen bills with so little debate that one might have thought there had never been any resistance to the philosophy behind them. Congressmen and senators often had little idea of what they were voting on, or how it would affect America, but the new bills were enthusiastically rushed to passage.

Following adjournment, when Capitol Hill had time to reflect, some of the enthusiasm faded. “Roosevelt had gone far beyond any other President in asserting executive authority, not only asking for legislation but sending over a brief message and a detailed draft of each bill he had wanted passed, and many Congressmen resented the feeling of being ‘lackeys’ or ‘rubber stamps’ of a chief executive who had taken over the legislative function,” Alvin Josephy says. “A number of southerners, particularly, were concerned about the extension of federal power at the expense of the states.” Enthusiasm faded in both House and Senate, but some senators were uncomfortably aware that the Senate was supposed to be the principal bulwark against executive authority; after a century and a half of fulfilling that responsibility, during the Hundred Days the Senate had abdicated it. Nonetheless, there were heavy House and Senate majorities behind the New Deal in 1934 and 1935, years which saw passage of a Social Security Act which set up a national system of old-age insurance, and of laws to break the power of private utilities and make possible the electrification of rural America, and to raise the taxes of the wealthy. And the New Deal was ratified by the Democratic landslide of 1934. In 1936, Roosevelt declared, “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” And the ensuing Roosevelt landslide gave his party unprecedented majorities on Capitol Hill; when Congress reconvened in January, 1937, there would be only eighty-nine Republicans left in the House, and in the Senate there were so many Democrats—seventy-six—that they could not all be seated on the right side of the Chamber, as was traditional; twelve freshmen Democrats, along with four minority-party senators, were placed in the last row on the left side, behind the sixteen Republicans, all that was left of the once-invincible GOP majority.

DURING THE NEW DEAL, there were isolated reminders of what individual senators could still accomplish. The Tennessee Valley Authority is generally listed by historians as a creation of the Roosevelt Administration, and indeed Roosevelt saw the need and the promise in a plan to revitalize the impoverished Tennessee River Basin by using the huge Woodrow Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, idle since the First World War, and constructing a network of other dams, in a vast program of flood control, soil conservation, rural electrification, and diversification of industry. And Roosevelt pushed that plan to reality in 1933. But on the day FDR decided to push it, he said to a man standing looking down at Muscle Shoals with him, “This should be a happy day for you, George,” and Senator George Norris of Nebraska replied, “It is, Mr. President. I see my dreams come true.” All through the 1920s, businessmen had lobbied Congress to turn the dam over to them and let them operate it strictly for profit, and all through the Twenties, in the face of that decade’s pro-private business attitude, and of the determination of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover to privatize the dam, Norris had fought to keep it under government ownership. His power as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee had enabled him to do so. If a single senator had not, through the administrations of three antagonistic Presidents, succeeded in preserving from private hands the power generated by the river’s waters, that power would not still have been available for public development when a friendly President arrived on the scene. Similarly, the great National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the “Magna Carta for Labor,” which at last placed between the power of mighty corporations and the masses of their workers the shield of government protection, was the creation of Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, who pushed it through the Senate after Roosevelt had promised southern Democrats, adamantly opposed to the measure, to remain neutral. Roosevelt “never lifted a finger” in its behalf, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was to say. The TVA, the National Labor Relations Board, and other accomplishments of the 1930s often lumped together with accomplishments of the Roosevelt Administration, are actually monuments to senators. And when, in a single vivid historical moment, the need for the powers bestowed on the Senate by the Founding Fathers was suddenly made blindingly clear, the Senate as a whole demonstrated that it still possessed those powers—and could use them.

Not only had the 1936 Roosevelt landslide given his party overwhelming legislative majorities, the leaders of those majorities—House Speaker John Bankhead and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson—had, as one account put it, demonstrated “an all but unblemished record of perfect subservience to the White House.” FDR’s control of two branches of the American government seemed as firm as Thomas Jefferson’s had seemed after his landslide victory in 1804.

About the 1804 election Henry Adams had commented that “the sunshine of popularity and power” had “turned the head of a President.” After the 1936 election, perceptive observers had the same concern. Watching FDR’s triumphant return to Washington after the election, “the smiling President in his open car,” the cheering mobs who “turned out in tens of thousands to receive him as a conquering hero,” Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge were reminded of a Roman triumph and wondered “whether the President possessed an inner censor, to take the place of the ribald slave who stood in each triumphing general’s chariot to remind him that, after all, he was no more than mortal.” Their concern would soon prove justified. After his landslide, Jefferson, in control of two branches of government, had turned his attention to the lone branch still dominated by the other party—the judiciary—moving, in the impeachment of Samuel Chase, to curb its independence. Now Roosevelt, too, moved against the judiciary’s independence. The Supreme Court had declared crucial New Deal measures unconstitutional. The President drafted a plan to enlarge the Court by appointing as many as six new justices whose philosophy agreed with his. And he made his move, as Alsop and Catledge were to write inThe 168 Days, their colorful study of the Court-packing fight, in a way that showed that his triumph at the polls had filled him with “such an overconfidence as must come to any man after four years of glittering, uninterrupted success in great matters.”

Having had the Court plan prepared in strict secrecy, he didn’t bother to discuss it with his party’s congressional leaders, as if such discussion was no longer necessary. When he summoned them to the White House on February 5, 1937, they had not the slightest inkling of what the meeting would be about. When they arrived, headed by the white-haired, ruddy-faced Vice President Garner, a conservative Texan who, beloved and respected on Capitol Hill, not only presided over the Senate but wielded almost as much influence in it as Robinson (but who had also been kept completely in the dark), and had all been seated in the Cabinet Room, a secretary came in with mimeographed copies of the bill, already drawn up in final form, and of the President’s accompanying message, and distributed them around the table. As they began reading these documents, the President summarized their contents—cursorily. He had very little time, he explained; he was holding a press conference to announce the Court plan in a few minutes. And with that, he wheeled himself out of the room.

The congressional leaders’ first reaction was a stunned silence. Then, in the car driving them back to the Capitol, Hatton Sumners of Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said, “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips.” And when, in the long lobby behind the Senate Chamber, senators clustered around Garner asking his opinion of the President’s bill, the Vice President told them—in pantomime: holding his nose with one hand, with the other, he made a Roman thumbs-down gesture. But Roosevelt was unconcerned. When, a few days later, the congressional leaders returned to the White House to discuss compromise, Roosevelt made clear that compromise would not be necessary. Congress would approve the bill as he had dictated it, he said. “The people are with me.” And Roosevelt’s confidence was understandable. Who could stand before such a President, at the very zenith of his popularity and power?

But America’s Founding Fathers had created the Senate to stand against just such a President—to stand against the President and the people, to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In 1805, in a battle to preserve the independence of the judiciary, it had stood firm. And now, in 1937, in another such battle, it was, all at once, standing firm again. Roosevelt wanted his bill to be taken up first in the House, “because,” as the journalist Leonard Baker explains in a study of the Court-packing fight, “all House members run for reelection every two years” and the Administration therefore “believed that FDR’s political coattails had most impact on that side of the Capitol”; the bill, having passed the House, would then arrive in the Senate with momentum behind it. But Sumners, equally aware of those considerations, refused to call the measure up in his House Judiciary Committee so that the Senate would take up the measure first. And suddenly, as Alsop and Catledge wrote, “the shabby comedy of national politics, with its all-pervading motive, self-interest, its dreary dialogue of public oratory and its depressing scenery of patronage and projects, was elevated to a grand, even a tragic plane.”

The President fought with a President’s weapons—with eloquence, matchless eloquence. In a March 4 speech at a triumphal victory dinner of his party—to thirteen hundred of the top Democratic federal jobholders at the Mayflower Hotel—he reminded them of why they held their jobs: because their party, in its New Deal, embodied the majority desires for meaningful social legislation. He reminded them of how the Supreme Court had “vetoed” New Deal legislation. And he warned them that if the party permitted the Supreme Court to thwart the people’s will, the people would turn away from the party. “Here is one-third of a nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed—now! Here are thousands upon thousands of farmers wondering whether next year’s prices will meet their mortgage interest—now! Here are thousands upon thousands of men and women laboring for long hours in factories for inadequate pay—now! If we would keep faith with these who had faith in us, if we would make Democracy succeed, I say we must act—now!” Five days after the speech came an even more effective weapon: the chat. Out of ten million radios on March 9 came the warm, rich voice, simply asking his followers to trust him:

You who know me can have no fear that I would tolerate the destruction by any branch of the government of any part of our heritage of freedom…. You who know me will accept my solemn assurance that in a world in which democracy is under attack I seek to make American democracy work….

And he fought with a President’s private weapons—which he likewise wielded with matchless skill. As it became apparent that opposition to judiciary “reform” was more widespread than he had anticipated, presidential aides began to sound out individual senators more carefully, and there were surprises. One senator of whose vote the White House had been certain—regardless of his views on the particular issue—was Joseph C. O’Mahoney of Wyoming. Not only had he been a loyal assistant to Postmaster General James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s political major domo, but, as the representative of a beet-sugar state, he “was also heavily obligated to the administration on sugar bills, and would need more help in the future.” Now it was reported that O’Mahoney was calling the bill “undemocratic,” and Farley contacted him—and thereafter assured Roosevelt that O’Mahoney was “on board.” The Man in the White House was a master at pulling levers attached to senators. “Kentucky’s Democratic Senator Marvel M. Logan had been recalcitrant about the Court plan,” Leonard Baker reports, but Kentucky needed flood control projects. “Senator Logan became a supporter of the plan. Kentucky got its flood control projects.” Routine judicial and patronage appointments in many states were suddenly held up because “Mr. Farley is working on them.” And the Senate was a New Deal Senate, after all. Democratic Leader Robinson counted the votes now, and assured Roosevelt of a majority.

And indeed if the vote had been taken then, not long after the proposal was made, the President would probably have had his majority.

But the vote wasn’t going to be taken then, for the Senate, thanks to the Founding Fathers, also had weapons, most crucially its rule allowing “unlimited” debate. Deliberation requires time—and the Senate was going to get time. Roosevelt and Robinson summoned the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashurst of Arizona, to the Oval Office. Ashurst was usually soft-spoken and complaisant, but he was, as they may have forgotten, the same Senator Ashurst who eighteen years before had demanded, “Who is this Colonel House?” Roosevelt and Robinson attempted to persuade him to place a limit—perhaps two weeks apiece—on the length of time each side would have to present witnesses before his committee, but Ashurst felt that the Court-packing proposal was “the prelude to tyranny,” and, thanks to the Founders, he had a weapon to fight “tyranny.” “I replied that I would avoid haste, would go slowly and give the opponents of his bill ample time and opportunity to explore all its implications,” he told the President. There would, he said, be no time limit at all.

The President, Ashurst was to recall, “received this statement with disrelish.” But there was nothing the President could do about it. Judiciary Committee hearings in the Senate Caucus Room went on for more than two months, and during that time there were many speeches on the Senate floor, and the passage of time did just what the Founders had intended. As Alsop and Catledge wrote:

It is easy to make fun of such public speaking as the country was treated to during the court fight. Turgid, repetitious, crammed with non-sequiturs, richly ornamented with appeals to prejudice and self-interest, couched in an English which would have made Edmund Burke weep for very horror at the fate of the language—most of it was all these things. But it gave the country a chance to think the issue over. By sheer force of its repetitions it dinned the arguments for and against into the ears of the electorate.

In 1937, as in 1919, there were “the great stump-speaking tours across the country, which senators resorted to as they never had before except in the League of Nations fight.” Their speeches were reported in depth in newspapers, and heard on the radio; the airwaves were filled each night with the oratory of both sides in a remarkable public debate. And as America heard the arguments, America’s initial enthusiasm for the President’s proposal began to diminish.

And the delay, moreover, was affording not only America’s people but America’s senators “a chance to think the issue over.” Every time a Roosevelt supporter who had given a hint of wavering appeared in the cloakroom or in a Capitol corridor, a reporter wrote, “you were certain to see one or two opposition senators pleading, persuading, exhorting or shaming the worried man into independence.” More and more senators began to feel that the issue was too big for them to be influenced by customary political considerations. Summoned to the Oval Office along with a prominent liberal professor from Harvard, Wyoming’s O’Mahoney found himself the recipient of a lecture on the need for “co-operation” between the executive and the judiciary. The lecture was delivered with the full measure of presidential charm, and, Alsop and Catledge wrote, beet sugar “may not have been completely absent from O’Mahoney’s mind.” But, they wrote, the concept of the American constitutional structure held by the Senator and the professor was “rather more conventional than the President’s. As they listened to the President calmly explaining what he wanted, they could not forget the doctrine of separate powers.” Not long thereafter, O’Mahoney unexpectedly appeared at a meeting of senators opposed to the bill. He wanted to join them, he said; he would oppose the bill to the end, no matter what the political cost.

Similar evolution was taking place in the attitude of other senators, as day by day, the great issues involved were examined and re-examined. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, long a leader in Senate fights for liberal causes, was coming to see that the Court plan implied an alteration in the whole balance of governmental power in favor of the White House. What, he wondered, would come next? He refused to fight for this cause. Wheeler was a senator other senators followed. Roosevelt sent his aide Thomas G. Corcoran to him with an offer. Its details would be a matter of dispute; at the very minimum, Wheeler would be allowed to give “advice” on the nominations of two of the six justices. Wheeler had accepted other offers from Corcoran before, but he refused to do so on the Court-packing plan. “I’m going to fight it with everything I’ve got,” he told Corcoran. The President hurriedly invited his old friend Burt to dine at the White House that evening; the Senator replied that the President had better “save the plate for someone who persuaded more easily.” George Norris, “the great old man of liberalism,” asked himself the question, how would he have stood “if Harding had offered this bill.” And then he gave his answer: he would have opposed the bill had Harding offered it—and he would oppose it though Roosevelt offered it.

And while much of the repetition of arguments was boring and banal, some was not—particularly when, the Judiciary Committee having reported it out unfavorably by a 10–8 vote, with the formal recommendation that it not pass, debate on it began on the floor.

As Majority Leader Robinson rose at his desk, in “the high, wide chamber, so meaninglessly decorated with square yards of tan and gray and faded yellow, [so] colorlessly illuminated by its huge sky-light,” the galleries were jammed, Alsop and Catledge were to relate. “There were senators’ wives, diplomats, connoisseurs of the Washington scene, hundreds upon hundreds of sight-seers…. The overwhelming impression was that the plain people of America had come to see their government in action. In the pitlike space which the galleries enclose was the government they had come to see, scores of rather elderly, remarkably ordinary-looking men.”

As Robinson roared threats, and defended the President, opposition senators bombarded him with questions that emphasized loyalty not to a President but to a Constitution. As senators dueled with words, the rage on both sides often boiled over; on one such occasion, “Robinson and his followers and the leaders of the opposition were all on their feet, all bellowing at once. Order was gone; the fascinated galleries buzzed with excitement; and on the floor such a scene of bitterness and hatred, fury and suspicion was enacted as the Senate had not witnessed in a quarter century.”

There were moments when the debate served the purpose that the Founding Fathers had intended—as, for example, when the speaker was Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina. Bailey was usually ponderous, given to pounding on his desk and shouting out the points he wanted to stress. But the independence of the judiciary was sacred to him, and he had been preparing this speech for weeks—and he delivered it with pounding and shouting, but also with what Alsop and Catledge call “all the force of absolute conviction.” Listening senators rose, walked hastily to the cloakrooms and brought colleagues to the floor to hear, or sent pages to fetch others from their offices. Soon “every desk for rows around the speaker was filled—a sure sign of interest—and the chamber was perfectly still. That rare thing, a successful and convincing argument, was being made on the floor.” Leaving the Chamber, Robinson telephoned his White House liaison. “Bailey’s in there and he’s making a great speech,” he said. “He’s impressing a lot of people….” In the back, on “freshman row,” where the new Democrats were seated behind the Republicans, were three senators of whose votes Robinson had been confident. Now, they changed their minds and went (along with a fourth freshman who had earlier decided to oppose the bill) to inform Roosevelt to his face of their decision. Thus confronting a popular President would have posed immediate political danger for a member of the House of Representatives, up for re-election in another year, but these senators were safe in their seats for another five years; Roosevelt might not even be President when they stood for re-election.

After two weeks of debate, Robinson suffered a heart attack in his apartment, where a maid found him dead. Following a state funeral in the Senate Chamber, thirty-eight senators accompanied the Majority Leader’s body home to Arkansas, aboard a train on which the debate raged as bitterly as ever. Vice President Garner, who had come up from Texas to travel with the senators, arrived—the senators greeted him “like a long-lost father”—counted votes, and on the return to Washington, went directly to the White House and asked the President, “Do you want it with the bark on or the bark off?” and when the President opted for the latter, told him flatly he was licked, and with his permission, arranged a “compromise” that left the Supreme Court untouched. Attempts were made to couch the result in terms that would save the President’s face, but old, sick Hiram Johnson of California stumbled heavily to his feet and asked, “The Supreme Court is out of the way?” And when Senator Logan replied solemnly, “The Supreme Court is out of the way,” Johnson said: “Glory be to God!” The old senator had spoken the words half to himself, but the galleries heard them. For a moment, the Chamber of the Senate of the United States was silent and frozen—the red-faced, white-haired little man on the dais, the men sitting at the quadruple arc of mahogany desks who had beaten the unbeatable President, the crowd in the galleries above. And then there was a burst of wild cheering. Garner still held his gavel, waiting to call for the yeas and nays. But before he did so, he let the people cheer their fill.

THE BATTLE OVER THE SUPREME COURT, like the battle over the Treaty of Versailles, ended in victory for the Senate—and the victory reverberated far beyond the issue itself. Franklin Roosevelt, who by his political genius and his popularity had stripped the Senate of its power, now had inadvertently, by his arrogance and miscalculation, handed that power back, uniting the opposition senators against him, as an historian of the Senate puts it, “in a way they would have been completely incapable of achieving on their own.” Uneasy though they were over the New Deal’s heavy spending, its support of labor and blacks, its whole liberal agenda of social reform, conservative Democratic senators, particularly from southern and border states, had been cowed by FDR’s seemingly invulnerable popularity. They were cowed no longer. Moreover, in opposing the Court-packing bill, they had worked with Republican senators—and had realized the similarity of the Republicans’ philosophy to their own.

The bipartisan conservative coalition that formed in both houses of Congress demonstrated its strength within the year. With the number of unemployed creeping ominously upward again, in November, 1937, with the Court fight over, the President, in an attempt to end this “Roosevelt recession,” summoned Congress into special session and presented it with an ambitious package of “must” bills. Not one passed.

A President—even Roosevelt—was all but helpless to break this power. When in 1938 he attempted to “purge” Senate Democrats Walter George of Georgia, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Ellison (Cotton Ed) Smith of South Carolina, going into their own states to campaign against them, the resentment of southern voters to presidential intervention in their states’ internal politics was summarized in newspaper headlines—in Maryland denouncing Roosevelt’s “invasion,” in Georgia likening his campaign to General Sherman’s pillaging of the state during the Civil War. And the intervention gave Roosevelt not a single victory. In George, Tydings, and Smith, moreover, Roosevelt had selected incumbents he had felt could be defeated. He never even tried to take on other, more solidly entrenched conservative senators running in 1938, such as Nevada’s Patrick McCarran and Colorado’s Alva Adams. Exasperated by “the sense that Congress did not reflect the sentiments of the country,” the New Dealers had, as the historian John Garraty puts it, “attempted to nationalize the [Democratic] party institution, to transform a decentralized party, responsible only to local electorates, into an organization responsive to the will of the national party leader and the interests of a national electorate.” But the Senate had been armored against the will of a national leader or a national electorate. It had been designed not to respond to but, should it wish to do so, to resist the “sentiments of the country.” Even if the President had succeeded in ousting George, Tydings, and Smith; even if he had fought, and defeated, McCarran and Adams; even if he had campaigned against, and defeated, every incumbent senator, of any persuasion, running in 1938, he would have changed the membership of only one-third of the Senate. Two-thirds of the Senate would still have been untouched.

The conservative Democrat-Republican coalition was formidable in both houses of Congress—in the House of Representatives its heart was the Rules Committee headed by Howard Smith of Virginia—but most of the coalition’s key figures were senators: southerners like Bailey, Tom Connally of Texas, and Carter Glass and Harry Byrd of Virginia; border-staters like Tydings; Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and, after 1939, Robert Taft of Ohio. And year by year its strength grew. The Court fight, as Garraty says, “marked the beginning of the end of the New Deal.” During the remaining seven years of Roosevelt’s Administration, Congress blocked every major new domestic law he proposed. One by one, the older Supreme Court justices resigned, and as Roosevelt filled their places, the Court moved steadily to the left. The lower levels of the federal judiciary also moved left, as the effect of presidential appointments accumulated. Congress moved nowhere. The Senate moved nowhere. In domestic affairs, the Senate was again what it had been with brief exceptions during the four generations since the Civil War: the stronghold of the status quo, the dam against which the waves of social reform dashed themselves in vain—the chief obstructive force in the federal government.

The Constitution’s Framers had given the Senate power to block legislation, to stand as the rampart against the exercise of popular and presidential will. This power was only a negative power, a naysaying power, the power to obstruct and to thwart. But it was an immense power—and the Framers had built the rampart solid enough so that it was standing, thick and strong, in the twentieth century as it had stood in the nineteenth century.

BUT THE FRAMERS had intended the Senate—had intended Congress as a whole—to have other, more constructive, powers. In the nineteenth century, the Senate had exercised these powers. In the twentieth century it didn’t.

In part the explanation lay in changes in the world outside the Senate, in the enormous growth and complexity of government which demanded a dispatch and a body of expertise possessed more by the executive than the legislature; in the activist presidents who attracted the attention of press and public at the expense of Congress.

But in part the explanation lay in the Senate itself.

“Congressional procedure,” Life magazine was to note in 1945, is largely “the same as it was in 1789.” As for the Senate’s basic committee and staff structure, that had been established in 1890. During the intervening decades, government had grown enormously—in 1946 the national budget was three hundred times the size it had been in 1890—but the staffs of Senate committees had grown hardly at all. To oversee that budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff consisted of eight persons, exactly one more than had been on that staff decades earlier. Not only were they ridiculously small, the staffs of Senate committees had little of the technical expertise necessary to understand a government which had become infinitely more complicated and technical. The salaries of congressional staff members were so low that Capitol Hill could not attract men and women of the caliber that were flocking to the executive branch. A study done in 1942 concluded that only four of the seventy-six congressional committees had “expert staffs prepared professionally even to cross-examine experts of the executive branch.” As for senators’ personal staff, as late as 1941, a senator would be entitled to hire only six employees, and only one at a salary—$3,000—which might attract someone with qualifications above those of a clerk. So little importance was attached to staff that many senators didn’t hire even the six to which they were entitled, and an astonishingly high proportion of the approximately 500 employees on senators’ personal staffs and the 144 on the staff of Senate committees were senators’ relatives. The Founding Fathers had envisioned Congress as a check on the executive. Congress couldn’t make even a pretense of analyzing the measures the executive submitted for its approval. During the decades since 1890, when the Senate had authorized a staff of three persons for its Foreign Relations Committee, the United States had become a global power, with interests in a hundred foreign countries. In 1939, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still three: one full-time clerk who took dictation, typed, and ran the stenotype machine, and two part-time clerks. As one observer put it, “There could be no adversary relationship between the two branches of government [in foreign relations] because most of the professional work had to be done in the Department of State.” Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate’s willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy. The adversary relationship—the relationship that had lain at the heart of the Framers’ concept of the American government they thought they were creating—had become impossible in virtually all areas; even Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick had to admit that “with occasional exceptions, Congress did little more than look into, slightly amend or block the bills upon which it was called to act.”

Unable to analyze legislation, Congress was equally unable to create it.

This was perhaps the most significant alteration in the power of the House and the Senate. The Framers of the Constitution had given Congress great power to make laws, vesting in it “all legislative powers,” and during the early, simpler days of the Republic, Congress had jealously guarded that power; as late as 1908, the Senate had erupted in anger when the Secretary of the Interior presumed to send it a bill already drafted in final form. But by the 1930s, with government so much more complicated, bill-drafting had become a science. Knowledge of that science was in extremely short supply on Capitol Hill. There were plenty of legislative technicians with the necessary expertise at the great law firms in New York. There were plenty at the White House, and in the executive departments—the legislative section of the Agriculture Department alone had six hundred employees. In 1939, the Legislative Drafting Service that helped both houses of Congress consisted of eight employees. And of all the scores of major statutes passed during the New Deal, approximately two per year were created by Congress—because, as Tommy Corcoran explained, Congress simply lacked the “technical equipment to draft a big, modern statute.”

To draft one—or even to explain one and defend it in detail, as was often required when major new legislation was being presented to the Senate. The Senate was going through the same rituals it had gone through in the nineteenth century, but frequently now they were rituals without meaning—as was known by those Senate insiders who understood the significance of the fact that often the new Majority Leader, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, rising to speak, would signal a page to place a small portable lectern atop his desk. His intimates knew that Barkley, a gifted extemporaneous orator, needed a lectern only when he was reading a speech written by someone else—and that often the someone else was a White House official. Barkley was not alone. Senatorial floor managers of major legislation were relying more and more often on explanatory speeches written by White House aides. The legislative power was in effect being exercised increasingly by the executive. The Framers had vested in the Congress the power to make laws, but Congress itself had made it all but impossible for it to exercise that power. And the explanation for the lack of adequate Senate staff was as significant as the lack itself. For the fundamental explanation was that the Senate didn’t want the staff it needed. Repeated proposals to add an expert permanent staff to committees—House and Senate—were applauded in principle, and died away without action being taken.

The reason for this rested partly on philosophic considerations, extremely shortsighted ones. Describing the senatorial attitude, Time magazine’s longtime congressional correspondent Neil MacNeil says, “The damned staff cost money,” and conservative senators believed in reducing government spending, not increasing it. Senators who did not spend even the meager allocation for personal staff boasted when, at the end of the year, they turned the money back to the government. For many senators, large, bustling staffs fit in neither with their concept of their beloved institution—“It was a quiet, sleepy place, and they wanted to keep it that way,” MacNeil says, “and besides, they didn’t want the institution to change, and they never had had staff”—nor with their concept of themselves: “They were senators, senators of the United States, not corporation executives supervising staffs.” A senator, MacNeil says, “would go back to his office, and put his feet up on his desk, and think about what was going on in the world, and after a few weeks, he’d make a speech. He’d sit there and think, and come up with ideas and theories. And that didn’t work with a staff.” Most senators seemed to have no concept of what a staff could do. When the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, proposed augmenting the tiny Legislative Reference Service so that congressional committees would have “scholarly research and counsel… at least equal to that of” the witnesses from the executive branch and private industry who testified before them, Congress rejected the proposal.

There were more pragmatic considerations as well. The staff of senatorial committees was controlled by the committee chairmen; giving individual senators more staff would therefore dilute the chairmen’s power, and the chairmen were not eager to have it diluted. The press referred to the proposed administrative assistants as “assistant senators,” reinforcing senators’ apprehensions at establishing “a cadre of political assistants who would eventually be in a position to compete for their jobs.” Senior senators, entrenched in power under the old system, had, as one would put it, a “suspicion… that they had little to gain and much to lose from a change in the status quo.” Richard Strout of The New Republic was to say that “Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.” It wasn’t outside forces that kept the Senate inefficient—fifty years out of date. It was the Senate itself, for its own reasons.

The same was true of the other reasons for the Senate’s increasing inability to perform the function for which it had been created: the autocratic, paralyzing power of the committee chairmen, their selection not by ability but by seniority alone—these practices were not changed because the Senate did not want them changed, and in fact had incentives not to change them. And the Senate did not have to change them. It was increasingly unable to respond to the demands of a changing world, but, because of the armor that the Framers of the Constitution had bolted around it, that world couldn’t touch the Senate. The Framers had sought to insulate the Senate against the executive and the people, against outside forces, and they had done the job too well. No one could take away the Senate’s power to play the role the Framers had envisioned for it; the Senate had, without consequence to itself, given that power away.

AND WHEN, in foreign affairs at least, it attempted to play that role, the attempt resulted in a tragedy that vividly illuminated the full potential for disaster that could be caused by the Senate’s unshakable power—and that illuminated as well the Senate’s utter inability to respond to the modern world.

After the First World War, an America sickened by the war’s horrors, disillusioned by its apparent senselessness, and cynical and distrustful of the political maneuvering of foreign powers turned its back on the world, refusing to accept responsibility for maintaining the peace; insisting rigidly on the repayment of the colossal war debts it was owed by its struggling Allies, while raising tariff walls against them and thereby exacerbating international tensions. While totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan were building huge military machines, America scrapped its navy, reduced its army, tried to lull itself into a belief that trouble could best be avoided by ignoring it, and refused to participate in attempts to create a collective security and an international rule of law. The Twenties and Thirties were decades of a tragic national self-delusion, of shortsighted diplomacy, of a refusal to understand the terrible new forces arising in the world, of a belief that America could simply isolate herself from them. And the Senate was the stronghold of isolationism.

Many of the most influential senators—Wheeler, Norris, both La Follettes, Vandenberg, Taft, Key Pittman, Hiram Johnson—were isolationists, as was Henry Cabot Lodge’s successor as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William E. Borah of Idaho.

In a Chamber filled with renowned orators, Borah, a former Shakespearean actor, was the orator without peer. Whenever during his thirty-three-year senatorial career word spread through the Capitol that “Borah’s up,” spectators would pour into the galleries, and senators would hurry onto the floor to hear him speak. “The Lion of Idaho” possessed, as well, a gift for attracting the journalistic spotlight. At his daily three o’clock press conferences, journalists crowded into his office, leading a disgruntled President Coolidge to comment that “Senator Borah is always in session.” For decades, a historian says, “it seemed impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a Borah pronouncement.” And while Borah, a liberal Republican on domestic issues, often employed his eloquence on behalf of the farmer or the factory worker, its impact was greatest on foreign policy.

In rejecting the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Senate had undermined the possibility of peace in the world. For more than twenty years thereafter, it carried on that work. In 1923, President Coolidge proposed that the United States become a member of the World Court. Since this tribunal could settle disputes only when every member agreed, its threat to America’s sovereignty was minimal, and not only the President but both political parties, in their platforms of 1924, and the House of Representatives, by an overwhelming vote of 303 to 28, and in polls, a majority of the American people, endorsed the World Court treaty. But treaties require Senate ratification, and the Senate, following Borah’s lead, made ratification contingent on five conditions. The Court’s twenty-one member nations accepted four of them, and expressed a willingness to negotiate on the fifth, but the Senate made clear that its resolution was non-negotiable—and America’s failure to become a member made the Court ineffective. In 1931, the Japanese invaded Chinese Manchuria, and quickly began turning it into a puppet state. Amid warnings that failure to force Japan to disgorge its new territory acquired by naked aggression would encourage not only the Japanese but other potential aggressors, the League of Nations met to consider action, and American representatives sat in on the discussions. But the discussions were shadowed by the old concern: even if the League members agreed on some course of action, what would the American Senate do? And nothing—at least nothing effective—was done. In 1933, President Roosevelt asked for congressional authority to block arms shipments to aggressor countries. The House gave it to him. The Senate didn’t. In fact, it amended the House resolution to force the President to embargo shipments to every country involved in a war—an amendment which, as Arthur Schlesinger puts it, “destroyed the original purpose of the resolution, which was precisely to discriminate against aggressors,” and which would actually have an effect opposite to what Roosevelt had wanted, “by strengthening nations that had arms already” at the expense of those who didn’t.

For almost two years beginning in September, 1934, the high-ceilinged, marble-columned Senate Caucus Room was the chief rallying point for isolationist sentiment in the United States, as a special Senate committee, chaired by the ardent isolationist Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, held ninety-three hearings, staged with great public fanfare, to “prove” that America had been lured into the Great War to boost arms makers’ profits. In 1935, with Hitler rapidly rearming, the danger of a worldwide conflagration increased as Mussolini massed troops on the borders of the primitive kingdom of Ethiopia. When Roosevelt asked for authority to impose an arms embargo, the Senate’s response was to pass, in twenty-five minutes, the Neutrality Act of 1935, which tied the President’s hands by making it impossible for him to exert effective influence against Italy by forbidding the export of munitions to all belligerents. While noting that the bill penalized not Italy but Ethiopia, Roosevelt, afraid of exacerbating isolationist passions, felt he had no choice but to sign it. That same year, the President urged the Senate—as, twelve years before, President Coolidge had urged the Senate—to allow America to join the World Court. From the Senate floor came the response. “We are being rushed pell-mell to get into this World Court so that Señor Ab Jap or some other something from Japan can pass upon our controversies,” Huey Long shouted. “To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations,” Minnesota’s Thomas Stall cried. Although there were seventy-two Democrats in the Senate, the proposal could garner only fifty-two votes, a majority but short of the two-thirds needed for passage. At the very height of Roosevelt’s popularity, twenty Democratic senators had deserted him. “Thank God!” Borah said. That same year, the Senate passed legislation, drafted by Borah, strictly limiting expenditures for warships or for any other form of national defense. Nineteen thirty-six brought a further escalation in international tensions, so the Senate passed that year’s Neutrality Act, which restricted even more tightly America’s ability to deter aggressors by adding to the earlier restrictions on arms aid to all belligerents restrictions on financial aid as well. By the time Congress convened in 1937, Francisco Franco’s fascists, armed and aided by Hitler, had launched a campaign against Spain’s Republican government. This was a civil war, and the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 did not apply to civil wars. So Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, which broadened the embargo so that it wouldapply to civil wars. “While German planes and cannon were turning the tide in Spain, the United States was denying the hard-pressed Spanish loyalists even a case of cartridges,” Garraty observes.

“With every surrender the prospects of European war grow darker,” Roosevelt was warned by his ambassador to Spain, but it was not the President but Capitol Hill’s isolationists who were shaping American foreign policy. The Senate vote for the Neutrality Act of 1937 was an overwhelming 63 to 6. In October, 1937, with Japanese troops now pushing into North China, with the fascists winning in Spain, with Germany having reoccupied the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles treaty and with Germany, Italy, and Japan having formed a military alliance, Roosevelt warned that if totalitarianism rolled over one country after another, America’s turn would eventually come. Predicting that there would be “no escape through mere isolation or neutrality,” he called for a “quarantine” of aggressor nations. Nye and Borah accused the President of trying to police the world and plunge America into another “European war.” In December, 1937, Japanese warplanes sunk the United States gunboat Panay (foreshadowing another surprise attack on a December Sunday morning) as it lay in a Chinese river. Borah reminded the reporters crowded into his office that America had “the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other,” and was therefore safe from invasion. “The United States is getting worked up over the prospect of war. I’m not,” he said.

Forced to abandon his hopes for collective security, Roosevelt began concentrating on America’s own military preparedness, calling for huge defense appropriations. To these Congress agreed, particularly after Nazi tanks rolled into Austria in May, 1938. But when, in September, with Hitler now menacing Czechoslovakia, the President asked also for a modification of the Neutrality Acts that would allow him at last to discriminate, in supplying arms, between aggressors and their victims, the isolationists on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee flatly refused to report out any modifications at all; they, not the President, were the best judges of the international situation, they made clear. When Roosevelt predicted that war in Europe was imminent, Borah replied confidently: “We are not going to have a war. Germany isn’t ready for it…. I have my own sources of information.” In March, 1939, in violation of his promises at Munich, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Borah had a reaction: admiration. “Gad, what a chance Hitler has!” the Senator said. “If he only moderates his religious and racial intolerance, he would take his place beside Charlemagne. He has taken Europe without firing a shot.” The Senator’s sources of information were evidently still operative. “I know it to be a fact as much as I ever will know anything … that Britain is behind Hitler,” he said at this time. Roosevelt again appealed to the Senate to repeal the arms embargo, but on July 11, 1939, in a showdown vote, the Foreign Relations Committee decided, 12 to 11, to defer consideration of the matter until the next session of Congress. In August, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact. In desperation, Roosevelt called the committee members to the White House and, urging them to reconsider, came as close as Franklin Roosevelt ever came to begging. The world was on the verge of a catastrophe, he told them, and he needed all the power he could muster to avert it. “I’ve fired my last shot,” he said. “I think I ought to have another round in my belt.” The senators sat there cold-faced. Vice President Garner, their leader in 1939 as he had been in the court-packing fight, showed Roosevelt who was boss. After polling the senators one by one in front of the President, he turned to him, and said: “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.” (Not until Germany invaded Poland in September, and World War II was actually under way, was the arms embargo finally repealed. And even then—and even after a poll that showed that 84 percent of the American people wanted an Allied victory—it was repealed only after six weeks of acrimonious Senate debate, during which Borah, still adamantly insisting that America need not be involved in war, made his last impassioned radio address to the American people.)

In April, 1940, the full force of the Nazi blitzkrieg struck Europe. Denmark fell, and Norway, and Holland and Belgium and then France. And month after month the Nazis rained bombs on London as a prelude to a planned invasion of the last country to stand between America and Hitler’s military machine. Americans were suddenly forced to confront some facts about Senator Borah’s invincible oceans. Fleets could sail over them, and Britain’s might soon be flying the swastika. And planes, as Roosevelt pointed out, could leave West Africa with their bomb bays crammed with bombs and re-emerge over Omaha. As the national mood changed with dramatic swiftness, Senate and House acted with unaccustomed speed in approving Roosevelt’s requests for vast new sums for the Army and Navy.

But when Britain, alone, beleaguered, asked for help to keep fighting—fifty or sixty overage World War I destroyers to combat Nazi submarines—Roosevelt feared the Senate mood hadn’t changed, at least not enough. “A step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of Congress, and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment,” he told Churchill. The accuracy of the President’s assessment was demonstrated that summer, when the Senate amended the Naval Appropriations Bill to stipulate that military equipment could be released for sale only if the Navy certified it was useless for defense. A nation may have been jolted awake; its Senate hadn’t. Roosevelt, fearing that if he went to Congress, the isolationists might very well block the proposals, at last determined to bypass Congress and trade the destroyers for the lease of a number of British naval bases through an executive agreement that did not require its approval. The help given England in its darkest hour was given in spite of the United States Senate.

Following his re-election in November, 1940, Roosevelt, with Britain running out of funds to purchase military equipment, hit upon the idea of lending or leasing arms and supplies. First he took his case to the American people in momentous fireside chats, and then he took it to Congress.

Borah had died in January, 1940. His death spared him from seeing the consequences of the policies in which his eloquence had been enlisted. But the Senate’s other isolationists were not to be so lucky, not that some of them understood, even yet. Their statements against the Lend-Lease Bill were as harshly uncompromising as ever. It was at a desk in the Senate—Burton K. Wheeler’s desk—that the Lend-Lease Bill was called “the new Triple A Bill” because “it would plow under every fourth American boy.” (“Quote me on that. That’s the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation,” Roosevelt replied.) Once again, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard witnesses (“The chair calls Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh”) in the Caucus Room in which the League of Nations had been destroyed, and the World Court, and the arms embargoes, and so many other initiatives to preserve peace through international cooperation. The Foreign Relations gavel was held now not by Lodge or Borah but by Walter George, whom Roosevelt had once tried to purge but who now supported Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and Lend-Lease passed the Senate (“I had the feeling … that I was witnessing the suicide of the Republic,” Arthur Vandenberg mourned). The Senate isolationists still fought on. All through 1941—at least through the first eleven months and six days of 1941—the America First Committee continued its attempts to rally the country against interventionism, and to insist that America was not going to have to go to war, and Nye and Wheeler and other senators argued for this proposition in nationwide speaking tours reminiscent of those the Senate irreconcilables had made in 1919.

The first reports on December 7 discredited them—and the Senate. Nye was speaking before twenty-five hundred people at an America First rally in Pittsburgh when the note was laid on the podium before him. Doubting its veracity, the Senator completed his address before announcing that there were rumors that Japanese planes had bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was appropriate that a senator was speaking at the moment the news came. Senators had been assuring the American people for more than twenty years that America could stay neutral in a world at war. Now, as an historian of the Senate wrote, “Twenty years of political debate ended in a beautiful Hawaiian harbor, marred by the burning hulls of a fleet of American warships.” That evening Roosevelt summoned congressional leaders, including members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to the White House. As the isolationists walked past the crowd of reporters outside, some of them, for once, had nothing to say.

IN A SINGLE FLASH, the flash of bombs, the policy of the Senate of the United States was exposed as a gigantic mistake. The failure of the world’s most powerful nation to lead—or in general even to cooperate—in efforts, twenty years of efforts, to avert a second world war must be laid largely at the door of its Congress, and particularly at the door of its Senate. That has been the verdict of history. Walter Lippmann was to write that it was with the actions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the late 1930s “that the emasculation of American foreign policy reached its extreme limit—the limit of total absurdity and total bankruptcy.” That was the verdict of the President, who had pleaded in vain with the senators for “another round in my belt.” Returning during the war from the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt startled his young assistant Charles Bohlen by the bitterness with which he denounced the Senate “as a bunch of incompetent obstructionists.” “[He] indicated that that the only way to do anything in the American government was to bypass the Senate,” Bohlen was to say. That was the verdict of the President’s most respected opponent: Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate in 1940, was to speak of devoting the rest of his life “to saving America from the Senate.”

And that was the verdict of the Senate itself (and of the House). Schlesinger was to write of Congress that “many of its more thoughtful members now confessed to a sense of institutional inferiority if not institutional guilt…. No one for a long time after [Pearl Harbor] would trust Congress with basic foreign policy. Congress did not even trust itself.”

BEFORE THE WAR, Roosevelt’s New Deal had been constructed on the basis of specific authorization granted by Congress, but wartime urgencies required broader, less specific, authority. Congress quickly gave it to him—in two War Powers Acts granting the President enormous discretionary authority—and he quickly used it, and, in his role as wartime Commander-in-Chief, went beyond it. Not congressional legislation but an executive order created an Office of Emergency Management—under which, in turn, were created twenty-nine separate war agencies. Most of the immense agencies under which America was mobilized were similarly established by some form of presidential decree. And in general Congress, despite occasional champing at the bit of presidential authority, and constant bridling at the new agencies’ bureaucrats, acquiesced in their establishment in response to wartime necessity. When faced with requests for huge appropriations, Senator George admitted, “All we can do is ask, ‘Do you really need all that?’ Then we grant the funds.”

As for the direction of the war overseas, Roosevelt’s undisputed authority over military strategy as Commander-in-Chief, the world-shaping diplomatic pronouncements that emerged from wartime summit conferences—all these made the war a war directed almost entirely by the President, and Congress acquiesced in that arrangement, too. Congress was an irrelevancy, a fact more striking in the case of the Senate than of the House because it was the Senate that the Constitution had entrusted with the primary congressional power in foreign affairs. In the greatest crisis to face America in the twentieth century, America’s once-mighty Senate played an insignificant role.

For a time, Congress seemed similarly cowed on the home front. When, in 1942, for example, Roosevelt’s proposed farm price support legislation met congressional resistance, the President set a deadline: three weeks. “In the event that Congress should fail to act [within that time], and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I shall act,” he said. (Congress rushed through the legislation in time to meet the deadline.) Then bitterness began to mount on Capitol Hill—against the President, whom not a few conservative congressmen viewed as a would-be dictator; against his “ass-kissing New Dealers”; against the administrative agencies which conservatives felt were misusing the powers granted by Congress to extend the New Deal under the cloak of wartime necessity; against the new agencies’ regulations that conservatives felt were creating a vast, unconstitutional body of “administrative law.” With what one commentator described as “a real, deep and ugly hatred” escalating “between the Hill and the White House,” Congress began attempting to reassert its status as a coequal branch of government.

Undermining the attempt, however, was the performance. Returning from the Army at the end of 1943 to cover the Senate for the United Press, Allen Drury, who would later write perceptive novels about Washington, began keeping a perceptive personal journal on the Senate’s activities. Noting in it shortly after his return that senators “have been worrying for years because they let so much power slip out of their hands,” he at first predicted that the moment “the war ends, Congress will begin stripping the Presidency of one power after another.” But then Drury began scrutinizing the Senate in action.

The Senate met for 13 minutes…. The Senate met again today—nine minutes this time…. The Senate met today for an hour or two while [James] Tunnell talked about the poultry situation in Delaware, and then went over until tomorrow, when it will again go over to Friday. …

He watched the Senate “debating” a major bill.

Debate was desultory and interest slack. Thirteen Senators were on the floor at one point when it seemed the bill might pass. When it turned out it wouldn’t, five of them left…. In a day or two, after more half-hearted discussion, it will rather absent-mindedly pass one of the most important pieces of legislation to come before it in this era, and out of which there will subsequently grow many bitter and indignant attacks upon the Administration as it reads into the loose language of the law things which it was never the intent of Congress to authorize. The answer to that one lies in 13 Senators, who subsequently became 8.

At first Drury was reassured when old Senate hands told him that there were few senators on the floor only because most were hard at work in committee meetings. But then Drury started attending committee meetings.

The hearings drag on and on. The routine is unvarying. Each morning the committee is scheduled to meet at 10:30…. At 10:35 Bob [Senator Robert] Wagner comes in, looks around at the press table with an invariable chuckle and, “Well, the press is here anyway.” By 10:40 he had requested the committee secretary to call the other members on the phone and find out if they will be there…. After they finally arrived, everybody then settles down for a session that usually lasts until 1 pm when Wagner breaks in apologetically on the witness and asks if he would mind coming back after lunch…. Wagner adjourns the hearing until 2:30…. At 2:35, with a wisecrack for the press, Wagner enters….

Drury was privy to senators’ true feelings about a proposed reorganization of Congress’s archaic procedures and maze of overlapping committees, and about proposals to add staff adequate for the modern era. “You can overdo this streamlining business,” one senator told him. And he saw how the Senate dealt with the great problems that were urgently confronting it: the planning of postwar demobilization and the reconversion of a wartime to a peacetime economy to avoid massive dislocations and hardships to the millions of men and women who were serving their country in war. Not even the urgency of these issues could interfere with the inviolability of congressional vacations. “Everybody is ready to go home on March 31 and not come back until April 17,” Drury wrote in 1944. “Why, nobody knows—except that there is an ‘agreement.’ … It is inexcusable. Reconversion is hanging fire and a terrific rumpus has been raised because ‘Congress was being bypassed,’ yet here goes Congress off home….” There was another vacation—five weeks long—in July, and Drury knew that after the Senate returned, “the first week or so is going to be a mere formality anyway. [Senator] Jim Murray [of Montana] is on the coast holding hearings…. Nothing can be done to bring his conversion bill out of committee until he returns….” When his mind turned to the men and women fighting on Pacific islands and in the hedgerows of Normandy, Drury wrote,

a kind of desperation sometimes rests upon the heart. No one here is talking their language, no one here is inspiring them or giving them purpose. Nothing is planned to help bring forth tomorrow’s world, or if it is it will be referred to committee and hearings will be held and someday if it is really lucky, it will appear upon the floor and become the center of a bitterly partisan fight that will presently rob it of all its heart and spirit.

Capitol Hill, he concluded, has a “subtle influence,” a “certain indefinable inertia, the scarcely noticeable desiccation of ambition, force and will.” Senators fall all too easily under this influence, are beaten “just by the sheer ponderous weight of an institution moving too slowly towards goals too petty and diverse.”

As the war churned toward its conclusion, he noted with interest “the way in which, all over the Hill, thoughts are beginning to turn to the Senate and the coming peace debate.” But, he also noted, the thoughts were not sanguine. “Deep down underneath,” he wrote, “all of us are afraid of what the Senate will do. The press is afraid, the Senate is afraid. The responsibility is so great, and no one can be sure that the strength will be found to meet it….” During his early days in the Press Gallery, Drury had longed for the men on the Senate floor below to assert their power. Now, having spent more time observing them, he was no longer sure he wanted them to assert it. “There are times when you sit in the gallery and watch the Senate as though you were observing some fearful force,” he wrote. “You can’t help a certain amount of foreboding. In spite of all the ridicule that comes their way, and in spite of all the derogation they receive, they are still terribly important and terribly powerful people.” What would they do with a peace treaty? Would they do again what they did with the Treaty of Versailles?

DRURY’S UNEASINESS WAS SHARED by the country at large. During the war, public regard for congressmen, already low, sank still lower. During the war’s very first months, while an unprepared America—an America unprepared largely because of Congress—was reeling from defeat after defeat, a bill arrived on Capitol Hill providing for pensions for civil service employees. House and Senate amended the bill so that their members would be included in it, and rushed it to passage—before, it was hoped, the public would notice. But the public did notice: the National Junior Chamber of Commerce announced a nationwide Bundles for Congress program to collect old clothes and discarded shoes for the destitute legislators. Strict gasoline rationing was being imposed on the country; congressmen and senators passed a bill allowing themselves unlimited gas. The outrage over the pension and gasoline “grabs” was hardly blunted by a hasty congressional reversal on both issues. Quips about Congress became a cottage industry among comedians: “I never lack material for my humor column when Congress is in session,” Will Rogers said. The House and the Senate—the Senate of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, the Senate that had once been the “Senate Supreme,” the preeminent entity of American government—had sunk in public estimation to a point at which it was little more than a joke.