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 bittern
ess 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.
3
Seniority
and the South
AFTER THE WAR, the institutional inertia seemed to grow worse, in part because with the war’s end the rationale for executive dominance lost some of its force, in part because the war’s end allowed journalists to focus on the inertia more intensely—and in part because with the passage of time one cause of the inertia was indeed growing worse, since its root cause was the passage of time, and its effect on men.
Seniority—not even mentioned in the original Senate rules, much less in the Framers’ deliberations; not even a consideration during the first half century and more of the Senate’s existence—was in a way a child of slavery. That issue came to overshadow all others,
so political parties had to be able to count on loyalty from senators who sat on or chaired the committees that dealt with its various aspects. In December, 1845, party caucuses took over the power of committee appointments within the Senate, passing resolutions that committees would be chaired by members of the majority party, that members of committees be carried over from Congress to Congress, that rank within each committee be determined by length of service in the Senate, and that the most senior member of the majority party would automatically become chairman.* Thereafter, party caucuses drew up lists of committee appointments; the Senate as a whole simply accepted them. A senator’s rank on a committee was therefore determined by one qualification, and one alone: how long he had sat on it. And, as a student of the Senate noted, “once appointed to a committee,” he could sit on it “as long as he desires.” In his 1956 book on the Senate, Citadel, William S. White wrote that chairmanships “are not awarded by any party leader or group of hierarchs but, in nearly every instance, simply go to that man of the dominant party who has been longest on the committee,” and “once a chairmanship is attained it is not in practice lost by any man” except when his party loses its majority in the Senate, and when his party regains the majority, he regains his chairmanship. “The perquisite… may be considered to be for the political life of the holder; it is in this sense hardly less than an old-fashioned kingship.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 15
