Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The Senate was not in disarray. As the Foreign Relations Committee had been its stronghold against the League, against Progressivism the stronghold was the Finance Committee, still dominated by Allison, Aldrich, John Spooner of Wisconsin, and Thomas Platt of New York. The “Senate Four” or the “Big Four,” as they were known, still met in summer at Aldrich’s great castle in Narrangansett, near Newport—four aging men in stiff high white collars and dark suits (Aldrich, being at home, might occasionally unbend to wear a blazer) even on the hottest days, sitting on a colonnaded porch in rockers and wicker chairs deciding Republican policy—a policy that was still based on an unshaken belief in laissez-faire and the protective tariff. And, as the New York Times reported: “The four bosses of the Senate can and do control that body. This means that these four men can block and defeat anything the president or the House may desire.” Aware of this power, the new President was aware too that senators would play a key role in disposing of the presidential renomination he coveted. And while in certain areas he moved against the “trusts” with unprecedented vigor, ordering his Attorney General to initiate suits to protect miners from the strike-breaking tactics of the big coal operators, and although he continually proclaimed the need for “Government” supervision “over business,” the supervision turned out, during his first term, to be limited to “executive actions” he could take on his own authority, without the need for legislation from Congress. When he ventured toward broader moves he always took the Senate into account. His rhetoric was as dramatic as even the most passionate Progressive could have hoped, but in August, 1902, the Big Four, along with several other senatorial elders, including Mark Hanna, the man who made McKinley, traveled to Roosevelt’s home on Long Island for an all-day conference. A month later, there was another conference—and this time it was the President who came to the senators, sailing across Long Island Sound to Narragansett, where the senators were waiting for him at Aldrich’s castle. And thereafter TR’s speeches on the tariff and the monetary system were first submitted to Aldrich for approval; on one occasion, the President wrote the Senator that “I want to be sure to get what I say on these two subjects along lines upon which all of us can agree.” Dynamic in delivery though the speeches continued to be, they were somewhat less so in content; abrupt changes in the tariff would be dangerous, he said; any changes that were made should be managed by experts, working “primarily from the standpoint of business interests.” (“Sound and wise” words, Allison and Spooner said.)

  In 1904, the American people’s demand for social justice—a demand now in its fourth decade—carried Roosevelt to election in his own right. “The current he rode was … public opinion,” Josephson says. “In 1904 it ran more swiftly, stronger than ever in the direction of popular reform.” Encouraged, the President turned to what he called the “paramount issue”: the regulation of railroads for which farmers had pleaded for thirty years, while for thirty years, discriminatory freighting charges had kept rising. The country rallied behind TR when he called on Congress to give the Interstate Commerce Commission authority over rates and regulations, and the House, by a majority of 346 to 7, passed a strong bill.

  At first glance, prospects in the Senate seemed unprecedentedly favorable. Platt was dying, Allison and Spooner were in their last terms; 1905 marked the arrival in the Senate of a group of independent Republicans such as Borah of Idaho, who took their cue from Wisconsin’s “Little Giant,” the reformer Robert La Follette. Progressives felt their time had come.

  Dying though the Old Guard may have been, however, it wasn’t surrendering. When Beveridge spoke for railroad regulation, Aldrich, his suave facade cracking for once, snarled at the young senator, “We’ll get you for this.” When La Follette, fresh from his triumphs in the provinces, rose in the Senate to give his maiden speech, a plea for regulation, one by one the Republican elders stood up at their desks and stalked out of the Chamber. By the time the railroad bill finally emerged from the Senate, and then from a Senate-House conference committee, the strong House measure had been drastically watered down.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s subsequent victories in the Progressive cause—protection of the nation’s forests, for example, and regulation of the food and drug industries—were generally victories that did not require Senate concurrence (or, after 1905, when Speaker Joseph Cannon solidified his control of the House, the concurrence of that body). Denouncing “malefactors of great wealth,” the President came out for federal income and inheritance taxes that would begin a leveling of wealth, for broader regulation of corporations, and for reforms in factory working conditions. The Senate’s Old Guard (and the House’s Cannon) decided that reform had gone far enough—and that was as far as reform went. Although as the champion of the American people, TR had campaigned for almost eight years against economic injustice, his victories—at least his domestic victories—were generally achieved by the exercise of his executive authority. He had managed to broaden that authority, but only to the point at which it conflicted with legislative power. When he left office there was still no federal child labor law, no effective federal workmen’s compensation law. The problems posed by trusts and tariffs had not been resolved. And the Senate was the principal reason.

  AND WHEN, IN 1909, there was a new President, there was still the Old Guard—as was demonstrated in their first encounter. William Howard Taft had been advocating tariff reduction—a reduction desired by the overwhelming majority of the American people—since he was a young man. The Republican Party platform of 1908 had contained an “unequivocal” pledge for tariff revision, and Taft quickly summoned Congress into special session to pass a tariff bill “drawn in good faith with the [platform’s] promises.” The House of Representatives passed one—a measure that would substantially reduce many duties—but its bill was then sent to the Senate Finance Committee. Allison, Platt, and Spooner were gone, but their places around the green baize committee table were filled by other Old Guard stalwarts, and the committee’s gavel was still in the hand of Nelson Aldrich. Hearings were held behind closed doors, and the bill that was reported out was no longer a bill for tariff reduction but for tariff increases: of 847 amendments on individual items, 600 raised existing rates.

  As a “prairie fire” of indignation spread across an outraged nation, editorials denounced Aldrich as “dictator,” “despot,” “tyrant,” but the Founding Fathers had armored the Senate against indignation, and Aldrich did not even attempt to conceal his contempt for the people. His only response was a sneer on the Senate floor. Certainly, the Republican platform had promised tariff “revision,” he said, but “where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward?”

  Taft gave in, but ten Progressive Republicans, led by La Follette, decided to fight. Among them were some of the era’s greatest orators, and the battle they made on the Senate floor day after day, all through a long, hot, Washington summer, in a debate out of the Senate’s long-gone Golden Age—a battle against not only a President of their own party but against the mighty Aldrich as well—was the great topic of the hour; reporters crowded the Press Gallery above the presiding officer’s dais; teletypes clattered with news; on the summer-baked streets of cities and towns all across America men and women discussed the arguments made on the floor of America’s Senate, among those four curved rows of mahogany and red leather. And all during that summer of 1909 public outrage against Aldrich and the Old Guard rose.

  But the Senate had been created to stand against public opinion. Aldrich’s bill passed easily, and so did the “compromise” Act that emerged from a stacked conference committee—an Act that La Follette branded “the consummation of privilege more reprehensible than had ever found a place in the statutes of the country.” It was quickly signed into law by Taft. When Aldrich had first reported his bill out of committee, and the “prairie fire” had been raging against it, the Senator had predicted calmly that the bill would pass substantially as he had written it. The prediction had p
roven correct.

  DURING THE remaining years of Taft’s presidency, there would be a few victories for reformers to celebrate, but only a few. By March, 1910, Cannon had been ousted as Speaker, and in the elections that November, public indignation removed the GOP from control of the House. But in the Senate, that indignation echoed only faintly, and when, in 1911, Aldrich retired, the Old Guard’s ranks simply closed around the gap, as solidly as ever. And Taft continued to “compromise” with—more accurately, to surrender to—the Senate’s power. At the end of the Taft Administration in 1913, as at the end of the Roosevelt Administration in 1909, a supposedly representative republic had not come to grips with concentrated economic power, or with the impact of that power on the human condition. A tide of concern about the impact of industrial concentration on America had begun rising during the Gilded Age—had begun rising soon after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in fact. At first, the tide had risen slowly, but by the 1880s and ’90s, it was rising fast. But all through the Gilded Age, the Senate had stood against the tide.

  At the turn of the century, with the onset of the Progressive Era, the tide became a wave—a great wave of conscience, of anger over injustice, of demand for a cleansing of government and for a mobilization of government to meet the needs of its people. The wave of Progressivism and reform washed across America, through statehouses and city halls, even through the White House. When the wave crashed against the Senate, it broke on the Senate, the waters falling away from it as they had been falling away for half a century. The Senate stood as it had been standing for so long—a mighty dam standing athwart, and stemming, the tides of social justice.

  2

  “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.”