Senate in the Progressive Era in the United States
Senate: History of the Senate: The Progressive Era
Introduction to Senate in the Progressive Era
The political debates of the Progressive Era, which lasted roughly from the 1890s until the 1920s, focused on the need to democratize all levels of the political system and to restrict the influence of large businesses in American society. Progressive reformers attacked the party system that controlled the Senate, claiming that it was prone to manipulation by corporate interests.
The drive for progressive reforms also fed pressure to change the rules for selecting senators. State legislatures, which held the power to choose senators, frequently deadlocked on voting to select a Senate delegation, especially when the two chambers of a legislature were controlled by different parties. In many cases powerful business interests controlled the selection of senators, sometimes bribing legislators to vote for a particular candidate. By 1909, 33 state legislatures had urged Congress to draw up a constitutional amendment for direct election of senators, and 29 states had devised procedures whereby citizens could vote their preference of senatorial candidates (the vote was not binding on the legislature). The House of Representatives passed numerous resolutions calling for the Senate to subject its members to direct election, but the Senate rebuffed these efforts. The Senate relented only after the states threatened to call a constitutional convention, and it voted for the 17th Amendment in 1912. The amendment, which transferred senatorial selection from the legislatures of each state to “the people thereof,” passed the House and was ratified by the states in 1913.
The Senate embraced another important reform in 1917 when it adopted the first cloture rule, which allowed the chamber to end filibusters by a two-thirds vote of present members. The Senate has modified the rule several times since then, and it now takes three-fifths of all Senate members to invoke cloture.
The Democrats won both the White House and Congress in 1912. Congress followed the lead of President Woodrow Wilson in banking reform, military mobilization for World War I (1914-1918), and reducing the tariff. Largely to deal with presidential legislative proposals, Senate Democrats chose the first majority floor leader in 1913-John Worth Kern of Indiana. Cooperation with Congress faltered after the war, and the Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations, the central goal of Wilson’s postwar foreign policy.
Wilson was followed in the White House by Republicans Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, presidents who generally allowed Congress to take the lead in drafting legislation. The Republicans held majorities in the Senate from 1921 to 1933, but the chamber passed little significant legislation in this period because some Republicans tended to support Democrats in floor votes, resulting in deadlock. Despite the devastating stock market crash of 1929 and the unemployment that followed, neither Congress nor President Hoover took decisive steps to resolve the crisis in the early 1930s.” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Senate in the Progressive Era in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia