By the beginning of the Gilded Age, the “seniority rule” had hardened into unwritten law; it was because not even the Senate Four would contravene it, not even when a member’s views turned out to offend them, that the Four were careful in assigning new senators to committees. “The committee assignments of one year would affect chairmanships ten years later,” a Senate historian notes. Although other factors contributed, the Senate’s decline during the Gilded Age paralleled this hardening.
By the mid-twentieth century, when Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate, seniority had been what White called “an ineluctable and irresistible force” for decades. It governed every aspect of formal Senate business, determining not just where senators sat at the long committee tables (ranking down from the chairman to the newest members at the far end; when the most junior member came to his first committee meeting, he found his name plaque at the table’s foot), but the order in which they could question witnesses: questioning, as White wrote, “proceeds in the immemorial way—by seniority—first from the top man on the majority side, then to the top man on the minority side, back again to the majority side, and so forth.” It determined not only committee but also subcommittee chairmanships: when a subcommittee (whose members had been appointed by the chairman of the parent committee) met for the first time, the chair was taken automatically by the senator from the majority party who had been on the parent committee longest.
Seniority also governed the Senate in ways that were seldom written about, but that were decisive in the body’s impact on national life. Little journalistic attention was paid, for example, to the “conference committees,” composed of delegations from each house which were appointed ostensibly only to resolve differences between the Senate and House versions of a bill (but in the case of the Senate, its conferees were authorized to insert new material) and to report back to each house an agreed-upon “compromise” version for final ratification. But after the more dramatic floor debates and votes were over, these committees met behind closed doors, generally in the Senate wing of the Capitol, and these secret meetings were often decisive in determining a bill’s final form, since the version reported back to the two houses was generally accepted; as George H. Haynes, author of the most authoritative work on the Senate’s first 150 years, the two-volume The Senate of the United States, asked: “What chance is there, especially in the hectic closing hours of Congress, for members to decide whether they ought to agree to concessions that have been made?”—particularly since reopening the subject would mean reopening debate on the entire bill, thus effectively killing it. And since the members of conference committees were almost invariably the most senior members of the committees that had reported out the bill in the first place, the reliance on these “conferences” led, in Haynes’ words, to the assigning of “tremendous powers over legislation to a small group of senior senators” more conservative than the Senate as a whole. As the liberal Hubert Humphrey, who also came to the Senate in 1949, was to discover,
Too often, particularly in areas of concern to liberals, [the] senior members … had voted against the bill in question or against important amendments which had been added as the result of floor debate. It was not unusual, therefore, for legislation to come back in final form without important parts that already passed the Senate. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation then and the ultimate weapon for conservatives who might have been beaten earlier.
Seniority governed not only formal but informal Senate business. A newly elected senator encountered it on his first day on Capitol Hill, when he applied to the Rules Committee for one of the ninety-six office suites—and was informed that he had his choice only of those that had not already been chosen by senior members, and that even after he had chosen a suite, and moved in, should a more senior member change his mind and ask for it, it would be reassigned to him. Seniority governed the assignment not only of offices but of desks on the Senate floor, and of parking spaces in the Senate garage. It determined a junior senator’s place at official dinners—far below the salt. So vital was the exact degree of his seniority in a senator’s career that elaborate—and rigid—formulas had been devised to determine it. Senators sworn in on the same day, for example, were ranked according to previous service in the Senate, followed by service in the House, and then within the Cabinet. If necessary, the holding of a governorship was factored in. And if it was still impossible to differentiate between two senators, White says, “one may be declared senior to the other simply because his state was the earlier of the two involved to enter the Union….”
Only what White calls “the passage of time” could make it appropriate for a freshman senator to rise on the floor. A new member of almost any legislative body is well advised to remain silent for a time, but in the Senate that time was supposed to last longer—until, in fact, the elders let him know it was time for him to speak. A young senator was to recall that for months after he had been sworn in, he “did not rise once.” Then, “one day, a matter came up with which I had had considerable experience.” An older senator “leaned over to me and said, ‘Are you going to speak on this?’ I said, ‘No.’ … ‘I think you should speak,’ he replied.” And when the freshman remained reluctant, the older senator said, “‘Look, I am going to get up on the floor and ask you a question about this bill. Then you will have to speak!’ And that’s how I made my first speech in the Senate.” Waiting for such permission was wise. “Any fledgling who dared to so much as open his mouth on the floor” without it, one observer wrote, might suddenly realize that the senior senators seated at their desks were staring at him with expressions he could hardly consider approving. And as word of what he was doing circulated, other senior senators would come to the Chamber and sit at their desks, so that they, too, could join in the cold stares.
The feelings about premature speech were very strong. Once, a freshman finished a speech on the floor and sat down next to the great Walter George. When no compliment on his oration was forthcoming, the freshman, trying to make conversation, asked George how the Senate had changed since his own early days in it. “Freshmen didn’t use to talk so much,” George replied. An elderly senator loved to recall the birthday of the revered Senator Borah years before. “A number of the older men got up and offered brief, laudatory speeches about it. Borah was pleased. Then a freshman senator—one who had been in the Chamber three or four months—got to his feet” to join in the chorus of praise. “That son of a bitch,” Borah whispered loudly. “That son of a bitch.” Borah “didn’t dislike the speaker,” the elderly senator would explain. “He just didn’t feel that he should speak up so soon.”
The more impressive a new senator’s pre-Senate accomplishments might be, the more determined were the Senate elders to teach him that those accomplishments meant nothing here.
“We are skeptical of men who come to the Senate with big reputations,” one “old-timer” said during the 1950s. Former governors were the worst; they seemed to think that they deserved more respect than the average freshman. They were quickly disabused of this notion. As one former governor related, “Back home everything revolved, or seemed to revolve, around the Governor. I had a part in practically everything that happened. There was administration. There was policy making. But [in the Senate] there was just a seat at the end of the table.” Senators who had previously “reached national fame … have found four years and more not to be long enough to feel free to speak up loudly in the Institution,” White wrote.
THE PASSAGE OF TIME had another, darker side, of course.
Because senators’ terms were so long, and because many of them served so many terms (in 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, ten senators were in their fourth or fifth term, which meant they were nearing, or had passed, a quarter of a century in the Senate), the body’s membership changed little from decade to decade—which meant that the membership was growing steadily older. In the nineteenth century, the average age of senators had been forty-five: by 1900, it had
passed fifty. By 1940, it was sixty, and thirteen senators were in their seventies or eighties (in an era in which the average life span was far shorter than it would become later), and there were increasing references to Capitol Hill’s “senility system,” a phrase which seemed funny only until Hiram Johnson, born in 1866, shuffled slowly into the Foreign Relations Committee room, in which he had once been a towering figure, leaning heavily on a cane and supported by his wife, to sit through hearings, usually silent but occasionally straining to address a question in a barely audible voice with long, painful pauses between words: “Is—it—not—true—that…” (When reporters asked Johnson if he planned to run again in 1946, when he would be eighty years old, he said he did—and probably would have, had he not died in 1945.) One day in 1945, seventy-seven-year-old Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee fainted during a speech. His ailment proved to be only indigestion, but Allen Drury, observing from the Press Gallery the anxiety on other senators’ faces as they huddled in little groups below him, realized that “the ghost of Death” is “never far from the mind of the Senate.” Rome’s Senate had, of course, been conceived as an assembly of elderly men, and of all the Roman concepts that had been realized in America’s Senate, none had been realized more fully. It was a place of old men, old men in a young nation; not a few of them had been born before their states had even been states.
Since chairmanships were awarded by seniority, the seniority rule’s most significant impact on America’s Senate—and on America—therefore came through the chairmanships of the Senate’s fifteen great standing committees, those committees whose decisions were almost never overruled. The chairmen were the real powers in the Senate; a committee could not even meet except at its chairman’s call. He and he alone set his committee’s agenda, he alone appointed its staff, decided the number of subcommittees that would be established, and what bills would be referred to them. A party leader—a Majority or Minority Leader—was only a mere primus inter pares (and not all that primus either) among fiercely independent senatorial barons, unassailable in the committee rooms that were their strongholds. The removal of a chairman was all but unthinkable; no chairman had been removed for more than a quarter of a century. “The ‘Old Bulls’—the committee chairmen—ran the Senate,” one observer recalls. And a gavel in one’s hand was no defense against the infirmities of age. In 1940, when seventy-five-year-old Arthur Capper of Kansas became ranking Republican member of the Agriculture Committee, he was already deaf, an old man so frail that one reporter called him “a living shadow, one hand cupped behind his ear and a strained expression on his face” as he tried to hear witnesses’ testimony, “breaking in from time to time with some hurrying querulous question.” But in 1946 the Republicans became the majority party in the Senate, and seniority elevated Capper, now eighty-one, to Agriculture’s chairmanship, although by that time, as another reporter noted, “he could neither make himself understood, nor understand others.” Democrat Carter Glass of Virginia had ascended to the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee in 1932, when he was seventy-four. During the 1940s, Glass was very ill—had been very ill for years, sequestered in a suite in the Mayflower Hotel that always had a guard at the door. He had not even appeared on Capitol Hill since 1942. By 1945, there were even suggestions that perhaps Glass, then eighty-seven, should resign. But, as Drury reported, “from the guarded suite … through whose doors no outsider has passed in many months to see what lies within, has come the usual answer. Mrs. Glass has replied for the Senator. The suggestion will not be considered.” In Glass’ temporary absence, the seventy-seven-year-old McKellar presided over Appropriations. “In his day,” Allen Drury wrote, “Old Mack from Tennessee” had been “the most powerful and the most ruthless man in the Senate,” but that day was drawing to a close. More and more frequently during the 1940s, after he had been presiding over a committee hearing for some hours, he would pound the gavel to signal the session to begin. (McKellar was sensitive about his age. Once he was politely asked in a Senate corridor, “How are you today, Senator?” As the journalist Russell Baker relates, “In reply, the old man, interpreting the words as a reflection on his failing health, raised his cane, thwacked it angrily across the fellow’s collarbone, and passed on without a word.”) When Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate in 1949, McKellar, now eighty-one, was still Chairman of Appropriations; five other committee chairmen were in their seventies.
As disgust with the Senate’s ineptitude intensified after the war, a hundred critics focused on the seniority system as a major culprit. Columnist Ernest K. Lindley wrote in 1949 that “it has been condemned in recent years by almost every authority or impartial observer of Congress.” Pointing out that under that system, ability counted for nothing, energy counted for nothing—intelligence, passion, will, principles, all counted for nothing—they noted that, in the words of Roland Young, secretary of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the seniority rule makes impossible “the utilization of the best material for the most important offices. Tenure and ability are not the same thing.” The Washington Post, referring to Congress as a “gerontocracy,” said that “to consider nothing but length of service in the choice of chairmen is to put Congress under a crippling handicap.” And there was another point. Since chairmen owed their places not to their party’s leader in the Senate or to their national political party but solely to what the political scientist George B. Galloway called “the accident of tenure,” they were therefore independent not only of the senatorial leader but indeed of their party, and of its platforms, promises, and philosophy—of party responsibility in the largest sense. The system “flaunts established political principles: that of party government; of a legislature responsible to the electoral mandate,” Young said. Furthermore, since, particularly in the Democratic Party, “the seniority line,” as the political scientist E. L. Oliver put it, “is also the line of cleavage between progressives and conservatives,” reliance on seniority put effective control of the Senate (and of the House) “into the hands of men wholly out of sympathy with the party platform, with the national administration, and with the clear majority of Congressmen elected upon the party ticket.” “Adherence to blind choice under the seniority rule … makes a farce out of the democratic principle,” the Washington Post said. Such arguments ignored the fact that it was not that principle but rather independence (including independence of the “electoral mandate”) that was the Founding Fathers’ most cherished desideratum for senators—that the seniority rule was, as one Senate historian did in fact note, “a protection against boss rule of the Senate.” But it was also true that parties had not been a major factor in government when the Fathers had been drafting the Constitution, and that independence of party, when parties had become so integral a part of the governmental process, had skewed the Senate’s relationship to that process. Seniority therefore added, in George Goodwin’s words, “a new non-constitutional dimension … to our constitutional system of separation of powers.” Feeling that the will of the people would be thwarted as long as the rule stood, the critics demanded that it be abolished. “If either of the two major parties is to serve as a vehicle for social action,” Oliver wrote, this “archaic procedure … will have to be scrapped…. Unless such a change is made, the expressed attitudes of the people will not be embodied in legislation.”
ADVOCATES OF THE SENIORITY SYSTEM, however, pointed out that its rigidity eliminated the bitter, time-consuming fights and political logrolling that would otherwise accompany the selection of committee chairmen at the beginning of each new session of Congress. “Nobody has ever produced a really workable alternative,” William White says. And harshly though that system might be assailed, it was protected by a very powerful force: itself. Junior senators might sneer at it, but senators are human, and as, with the passage of years, they accumulated the power and perquisites which were based on that system, the logic behind it, its fairness and justice, became increasingly clear to them. It was, in many cases, the rock on which
they based their campaigns for re-election, since their more sophisticated constituents—the ones most deeply concerned about the outcome of that campaign—were well aware of the benefits the incumbent’s seniority gave to his state, gave, to a disproportionate extent, to them. “The longer I stay in Washington, the more sympathetic to [the seniority rule] I become,” Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts said. The chairmanships that senior senators held because of that rule—had become, as one observer was to put it, a part of their identity, “a part of their being … almost of life itself.” There seemed no realistic possibility of persuading them that the rule should be changed. And since these were the senators who held the power—all the power—in the Senate, there was no realistic possibility that the rule would be changed. William White said flatly that “The Senate would no more abandon it than it would its name.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 16
