This week we officially launch the new name for our Center as the first act in a two year mission to commemorate the legacy of Senator Robert C. Byrd, which will culminate in November 2017, the 100th anniversary of Senator Byrd’s birth. This new name reflects a sharpening of our mission and a recognition of what we have accomplished since the Center opened in 2002.
By Ray Smock
The Rules of the U. S. House of Representatives provide a device to remove a Speaker from his job. Last week a member of the House, Mark Meadows (R-NC) filed a motion to vacate the chair which would challenge the leadership of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and call for a new election for the speakership. As I write this there is no way to know if this is a minor tempest in a teapot or not. But the timing of the resolution and the fact that it was referred to committee and not brought up as a privileged resolution is a good indication it may go nowhere. But theresolution itself shows how one member, at least, feels about Speaker Boehner’s leadership. Click here to read the article from The Washington Post Reporters have been asking how common such a motion has been in House history and if it has ever been used before. The closest example in history occurred 105 years ago when Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon (R-IL) had his leadership challenged by a member of his own party George W. Norris (R-NE). But the circumstances were not exactly the same. On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1910, and running for two days, the progressive wing of the Republican Party staged a successful revolt against the strong authoritarian rule of Speaker Cannon. “Uncle Joe,” as everyone called him, wielded more power than any other speaker, with the possible exception of his predecessor Thomas Brackett Reed (R-ME). Both Reed and Cannon were often referred to as “Czars” for their dictatorial styles and centralized control of House procedures. Reed was famous for his “Reed’s Rules,” which strengthened the majority party’s control of the House and ended obstructionist tactics from the minority party. During Cannon’s speakership from 1903 to 1911 he had broad powers to appoint committee chairs and to completely control the Rules Committee with his hand-picked lieutenants. By Ray Smock Partisanship in American politics is as old as the republic, even older. While George Washington warned us of the dangers of falling into factions, he well understood that human nature included vastly differing visions of the goals and purposes of government. We have all inherited in varying degrees the two visions of this nation as expressed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson saw a nation of small landowning farmers with local control of most governmental functions and a limited federal role. Hamilton saw the power of a centralized federal government to be the engine for building a powerful nation of commerce and trade that would rival and exceed that of the British Empire. Both views are still contained in American culture and politics. I am often asked if partisanship today is worse now than it was in the past. The answer is not an easy yes or no. Partisanship has to be examined in the context of a specific time and place. Certainly partisanship was so extreme in the 1850s to the point that it led to Civil War in 1861. And while we are not in a shooting war in 2015, the nation has been seriously divided on numerous major issues for a long time during decades of steadily increasing partisanship fueled in no small part by the rise of mass media. by Ray Smock
April is National Poetry Month and the Byrd Center’s contribution to this worthy endeavor is to share a reflection on two poets, more than 100 years apart, who wrote about the Congress of the United States. What follows is taken from the private journal I kept when I served as the Historian of the U. S. House of Representatives. The first poet, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) wrote about the Congress that first convened in December 1865. The Civil War was over, Reconstruction was beginning. Congress had a big job on its hands in the midst of tumultuous times. The second poet, Howard Nemerov (1920-1991), the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1989, wrote a poem to commemorate Congress completing two centuries. It was my great pleasure to ask Mr. Nemerov to write this poem and then to ask him to deliver it before a joint meeting of Congress held Mar. 2, 1989. Nemerov became the first poet to ever deliver a poem in person before a joint meeting of Congress. He was the second poet to appear before Congress, the first being Carl Sandburg in 1959, on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg spoke to Congress on Lincoln’s life but did not read poetry that day. The Byrd Center is pleased to pass along the announcement that one of our board members and longtime friend and colleague Dr. Richard A. Baker, the Senate Historian Emeritus has won the prestigious D. B. Hardeman Award for the best book on Congress. Our entire board and the staff of the Byrd Center express our heartiest congratulations. Here is the official announcement from the LBJ Foundation in Austin, TX. The LBJ Foundation will award the 27th D.B. Hardeman Prize to the authors of The American Senate: An Insider’s History at a dinner at the LBJ Presidential Library on Thursday, May 7, 2015. Author Richard A. Baker and Deirdre MacNeil, who will accept the award on behalf of her father Neil MacNeil, will split the $10,000 prize that accompanies the recognition of being the best book written on the U.S. Congress in 2013. In The American Senate, Richard A. Baker, historian emeritus of the Senate, and Neil MacNeil, former chief congressional correspondent for Time magazine, integrate nearly a century of combined experience on Capitol Hill with deep research and state-of-the-art scholarship. They explore the Senate’s historical evolution with one eye on persistent structural pressures and the other on recent transformations. Mr. Baker will also be speaking to students at The LBJ School of Public Affairs on May 7 to discuss the book and the current state of Congress. Books will also be available for purchase.
By Ray Smock Several weeks ago, when I was interviewed about recent House Speakers for C-SPAN-3 American History TV, I also made comments about the Speaker’s Lobby in the House of Representatives, an ornate room just outside the House chamber that the public rarely sees. The room has not changed much over the years except for the addition of newer portraits of recent speakers, and the absence of teletype machines, where members could see breaking news stories on the wire service. Now they get this information on their smart phones. Join me on a brief tour of this historic space in the United States Capitol.
By Ray Smock I was pleased to participate in a panel on the State of Congressional History at the annual meeting of the Society for History in the Federal Government, which met here at the Byrd Center last April. My colleagues on the panel were Richard McCulley of the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives, the Senate Historian, Don Ritchie, and the House Historian, Matt Wasniewski. All of us spend a great deal of time thinking about Congressional history, the progress we have made and the long road ahead to preserve and disseminate the rich history of the United States Congress. I had the great honor to serve as the first official historian of the House many moons ago, and that experience opened my eyes to how little the public knows of the history of this part of government and how little many of the people elected to serve there know of this 226 year history of this great ongoing experiment in representative democracy. Fortunately for the past 30+ years both the Senate and House established dynamic small offices to carry out the role of being keepers of Congress’s institutional history and to provide outreach to the public and the press on matters of Senate and House history. |
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