Haunted House

Paul Ryan’s Haunted House

What can he learn from the ghosts of speakers past?

By  Josh Zeitz

If all goes according to plan, on Thursday House Speaker John Boehner will hand over the big gavel to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. It’s little wonder that Ryan was loath to accept the job. Who’d want to rule a party racked by internecine warfare—a party that deposed its own leader without an apparent game plan to avoid a government shutdown and default? In no small way, the House has become ungovernable, and the speakership, as one columnist recently observed, a “dead end.”

Ryan can at least take comfort in history. Simply put, we’ve been here before.

By the standards of its day, the 50th Congress, which sat between March 1887 and March 1889, was the most “feeble” in the history of the American republic. These problems were particularly acute in the House. Stymied by deep partisan and sectional fissures and constrained by arcane procedural traditions, the institution earned the disdain of voters from all political parties and persuasions. “[N]o other body in the world takes up so much time and spends so much money doing nothing,” groused the editors of the Washington Post, who scorned the “wonderful inertia of this unwieldy and self-shackled body.”

Many people thought that the House needed a dictator to make order out of chaos. Which is precisely what it got. With his ascension in late 1889, Rep. Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine—Czar Reed, as his opponents soon dubbed him—applied ruthless energy and discipline to the task of making Congress work. He remains to this day one of most commanding incumbents to occupy this sometimes powerful but more often unwieldy constitutional office. Like a small handful of speakers who preceded and followed him, he ruled the House and did not for one second let it rule him.

The long evolution of the speakership yields several clues about what it takes to succeed. The most effective speakers had to get their hands dirty, whether that meant carting in ailing congressmen on stretchers, recording members as present while they cowered under their desks or serving up libations to powerful committee chairmen. Those who did it best made the rules up as they went along. They combined force of personality with a keen sense of timing and opportunity. Above all, they understood that power in Congress is a simple equation: 50 percent plus one.

The Constitution provides that that the “House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker,” but it doesn’t enumerate the responsibilities and prerogatives of that office. It’s likely that the framers considered the answer self-evident on the basis of 500 years of English and Anglo-American common law. Since the 13th century, parliamentary speakers—and later, speakers of colonial and state assemblies and Continental Congresses—had provided impartial arbitration of procedure and kept good order during debate.

Until the late 18th century, the idea that a speaker might play a partisan role in the legislative process was foreign. Most Americans believed in an organic body politic and denied the legitimacy of factions and parties. Virtuous republicanism required that men of talent and education set aside personal needs and considerations for the good of the whole community. In this vein, legislative bodies selected speakers who could be counted on to act as fair mediators of the public good.

So it was that when the first House of Representatives convened in New York in 1789, it chose Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg to serve as speaker. A Lutheran minister, former member of the Continental Congress, and former speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Muhlenberg spoke with a “clear penetrating voice,” a quality that likely recommended him for the office. He was highly regarded by his colleagues, well educated, and a representative from a mid-Atlantic state—the perfect candidate to balance the twin centers of power that were Virginia and Massachusetts.

By the standards of his day, Muhlenberg performed his duties ably. The speaker reminded visitors not to crack nuts during session and furnished the sergeant at arms with a mace, to signal to disorderly members or gallery guests that the House would brook no interruption to its proceedings. Though of little import at the time, Muhlenberg’s colleagues established a precedent by which the speaker appointed members of standing and special committees, a privilege that would prove consequential to subsequent officeholders.

The first incumbent to wield significant power was Henry Clay, who served three noncontiguous terms (and 10 years cumulatively) as speaker between 1811 and 1825. A political wonder from Kentucky, Clay had already served two short stints in the United States Senate when, at age 34, he won the speakership on his first day in the House. An outspoken “war hawk” who favored confrontation with Britain, he promptly installed like-minded colleagues—most of them young, all of them full-throated nationalists—as chairmen of the body’s most influential committees.

Unlike his predecessors, Clay often stepped into the well to play an active role in floor debates, earning considerable political capital with his eloquence and charm. He brandished the gavel with authority and, breaking with tradition, voted on measures before the Committee of the Whole and the full House. Some of his colleagues considered him “haughty and imperious,” but the speaker was a master politician, careful to assuage the feelings of older, more experienced lawmakers who chafed at the rising influence of the young guns who now ran the House. “Bold, aspiring, presumptuous, with a rough, overbearing eloquence,” Clay was, in the estimation of his Massachusetts colleague, Josiah Quincy, “neither exact nor comprehensive, [a quality] which he had cultivated in the county courts of Kentucky, and quickened into confidence and readiness by successful declamations at barbeques and electioneering struggles.” Even one of his bitter rivals, John Randolph of Virginia, acknowledged that as speaker, Clay was “the second man in the Nation.”

Under Clay, the number of standing committees expanded from 11 to 24, not only enhancing the authority of the speaker, who selected their members and chairmen, but also of the House, which gradually claimed budgetary oversight of almost every function of the federal government, from the size of the military and placement of roads and bridges, to fiscal and monetary policy. John C. Calhoun, a close ally of Clay’s who would later become a storied foe, perfectly articulated the expanded scope of the House when he decreed, “Not a cent of money ought to be applied but by our direction and under our control.”

Though better remembered as a master of the Senate, four-time presidential candidate and champion of the “American System” —a holistic platform that called for internal improvements, strong tariffs, the promotion of both agriculture and industry, and a national banking system—Clay, was also the prototype of the modern speaker. He didn’t change the rules so much as he built and availed himself of a strong majority that would sustain his expanded authority. He understood that pivotal moments—be they foreign policy challenges (the War of 1812), inter-sectional crises (notably, the great slavery debates of 1820 and 1850), or the rise of a formidable political enemy (Andrew Jackson)—presented opportunities. In a vacuum, Congress would clamor for a strong leader. Only his colleagues could limit his power, and they rarely did.

For the half-century after Clay vacated the office, House speakers generally served short tenures of between one and three terms and commanded little authority. During the tumultuous 1850s and 1860s, powerful committee chairmen—most notably, Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slavery radical who at various times headed the Appropriations and Ways and Means Committees—acted as party leader, relegating the speaker to the role of quiet parliamentarian. Stevens, whom John F. Kennedy later described as the “master of the House of Representatives, with a mouth like the thin edge of an axe,” was arguably one of the most formidable politicians ever to serve in Congress. Wearing a perpetual scowl, he deployed an encyclopedic knowledge of parliamentary procedure and razor-sharp debate skills to rein over the lower chamber through a combination of fear and moral suasion. Fiercely opposed to slavery and committed to the principle of racial equality, he managed somehow to lead both the House Republicans and their radical faction, while overshadowing three speakers under whom he served between 1859 and 1868.

In the twilight days of Reconstruction and early dawn of the Gilded Age, a handful of speakers asserted greater authority. James G. Blaine, a Republican from Maine, once famously left a dinner party and, still attired in formal dress, reclaimed the gavel to shut down debate over a bill that he opposed. Though avowedly partisan in his approach to leadership, Blaine nevertheless earned the respect of Democratic leaders for his consultative manner.

Democrat Samuel Randall, who served as speaker from 1876 to 1881, liberally exercised his prerogative to recognize only those members who would support his position during debate. He also made himself chairman of a new, standing Rules Committee and reestablished the by-then defunct right of the speaker to select the members and chairmen of all House committees (a practiced that had waned as the size of the House and number of committees grew). His fellow Democrat, John Carlisle, who held the speakership from 1883 through 1889, built on this foundation by appointing the chairmen of the powerful Ways and Means and Appropriations committees to the Rules Committee, thus tightening their collective grip on the House and his singular grip on them. When congressmen sought the floor, he routinely asked, “For what purpose does the gentleman rise?” If the member’s purpose was at variance with his, the speaker simply refused to recognize him.

But even Carlisle couldn’t resolve the most vexing challenge facing the institution: the “disappearing quorum.” By the late 19th century, minority members—regardless of which party controlled the chamber—had developed a highly effective pattern of grinding proceedings to a halt simply by refusing to furnish a quorum.

It would go as follows: A member of the minority would request a quorum call, thus requiring the sergeant at arms to scour the Capitol for members (may of whom hid themselves in hard-to-find places) and compel them to the chamber; opposition members would then sit sullenly behind their desks and refuse to answer present when the clerk read their names. In the absence of a quorum, the House could not vote on pending legislation. Try as he might, the speaker admitted that he knew “of no process by which a member of the House can be compelled to vote.”

Republicans won control of the House in 1888, and the following year, Thomas Brackett Reed took the gavel from John Carlisle. He had no intent of allowing Democrats to obstruct his chamber.

By the time that Reed assumed the speakership, the House of Representatives was in a sorry state. Populated essentially by men of little distinction or scruples—men deeply in the thrall (and grip) of corporate lobbyists and handlers—on any given day its chamber was a political cartoonist’s dream. “Do Congressmen smoke during session?” one bemused observer asked rhetorically. “Why bless you, yes … they chew, too! Every desk has a spittoon of pink and gold china beside it to catch the filth … even though your average Congressman often disregards his spittoon and spits on the floor.”

Few members bothered to listen, let alone participate in, the cursory business that passed for parliamentary debate, prompting a longtime Washington observer to lament that “[s]uch oratorical conflicts as frequently occurred between. … Mr. Clay and Mr. Calhoun, are almost as rare this day as a real tournament of medieval times.”

A tall, imposing figure, Reed “had a clear, strong, resonant voice with a distinctive down-east twang, which filled the great Hall of the House and could be heard above any uproar,” remembered a contemporary. Those who admired him remembered a generous and embracing leader. Though a Democrat, Mark Twain thought it was Reed’s “nature that invited affection—compelled it, in fact—and met it halfway.” GOP Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge insisted that “no more agreeable companion ever lived.” But to his opponents, Reed could be formidable and intimidating. Sharp-tongued and quick for the kill, he once quipped that two of his Democratic colleagues “never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge.” An equal opportunity offender, he informed a fellow Republican, “You are too big a fool to lead and you haven’t got enough sense to follow.”

Reed made no apologies for wielding a partisan sledgehammer. “The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch,” he affirmed, “and on general principles I think it would be better for us to govern and the Democrats to watch.” Though when in the minority, Republicans under his watch had made ample use of the “disappearing quorum,” Reed broadcasted his determination to push legislation through an otherwise ungovernable institution. “The rules of this House are not for the purpose of protecting the rights of the minority,” he told magazine readers, “but to promote the orderly conduct of the business of the House.”

In coordination with two of his trusted lieutenants, Reps. William McKinley of Ohio and Joseph Cannon of Illinois, Reed orchestrated the greatest coup then or since in the expansion of the speaker’s powers. During a routine quorum call, he instructed the clerk to record the names of those members who were present but who had not answered the roll. Democrats loudly protested, denouncing the speaker as a “Czar” and “tyrant” and going so far as to duck beneath their desks so as to avoid detection by the clerk. When a Democrat who had refused to answer the roll denied the speaker’s right to “count me as present,” a bemused Reed replied, “The chair is making a statement of the fact that the gentleman from Kentucky is present. Does he deny it?”

Quorum call after quorum call, the clerk recorded silent Democrats as present until finally, Reed—who went so far as to order a sick Republican brought to the chamber by stretcher—was able to secure a quorum comprised solely of Republicans. By a majority vote, the chamber imposed a new rule counting all members present toward future quorums. The logjam had been broken.

From 1889 to 1891, and again from 1895 to 1899, Reed presided over the House as no other speaker had before him. He created the office of majority whip and relied on its first incumbent, Minnesota Rep. James Tawney, to maintain discipline among conference members. For good measure, he installed himself as chairman of the Rules Committee and single-handedly determined which bills went to the floor and which languished without a vote. Reed’s critics denounced him as autocratic and lamented the day when “one man transacts the business of 357.” But many Republicans admired him precisely because of his dictatorial methods. In an editorial entitled, “Our Ruler, Our Speaker,” the Nation saluted the “benevolent tyrant” for imposing order and will on the House.

When Joe Cannon—one of Reed’s chief allies—acceded to the speakership in 1903, he announced his intention to be a more congenial sort of leader. “I believe in consultin’ the boys, findin’ out what most of ‘em want, and then goin’ ahead and doin’ it,” he explained in his unpretentious, folksy manner. As unpolished as Reed had been buttoned-down, Cannon—always seen chomping on a cigar and slapping a colleague on the back—professed to believe that the “Speaker is the servant, not the master, of the House.”

But that was just for show. In reality, Cannon made Reed look permissive. From 1903 to 1911, he ruled the House with an iron fist, rewarding those who bent to his will and punishing those who did not. Reed had been marginally respectful of the seniority system that took root in the late 19th century; Cannon disregarded it altogether. He stripped errant members of their chairmanships and committee spots and denied them the opportunity to introduce or move legislation on the floor. When the first congressional office building opened in 1907 (it would later be named in Cannon’s honor), he used congressional real estate as yet another carrot and stick. Like his predecessor, Cannon chaired the Rules Committee and kept a tight lid on all matters legislative and procedural.

“I doubt if any speaker in the history of Congress was as ruthless as Joe Cannon sometimes was,” observed George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska.

Ultimately, his ruthlessness proved the undoing of Joe Cannon—as did his politics. Whereas Reed brandished his gavel in the interest of moving legislation through Congress—he was a close partner to his friend William McKinley, who entered the White House in 1897, and helped secure passage of a sizeable GOP agenda—Cannon was a staunch conservative who used his power to prevent Theodore Roosevelt from enacting such progressive measures as an income tax, worker’s compensation and an eight-hour work day. He was a small-government Republican who once offered, “You may think my business is to make appropriations, but it is not. It is to prevent their being made.”

In 1910, a coalition of progressive Republicans and Democrats—and other Republicans who were simply fed up with Cannon—staged a daring coup. Led by Norris, they enlarged the Rules Committee, barred the speaker from serving on it, and democratized the way its members were selected. They also introduced new means to move legislation to the floor without the speaker’s approval. The vote marked the high water mark of the imperial speakership. Never again would the House invest so much power in one man.

In the century since the insurgents stripped Joe Cannon of his absolute authority, the speakership evolved markedly. Under Nicholas Longworth, the dashing, talented Republican who held the gavel from 1925 to 1931 (and who was married to Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice), the position regained some of its luster and clout. But the rising importance of the seniority system and the emergence of committee and subcommittee fiefdoms—in addition to deep intraparty rivalries that cut along regional and ideological lines—made it all but impossible for subsequent speakers to control the House with the same iron grip that Reed and Cannon exhibited in their day.

Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving speaker to date, developed a model based more on comity and consensus-building. He devolved power to committee chairs and forged compromises over long evenings at his Capitol hideaway, H-128—the so-called “Board of Education” (a term he inherited and for which he didn’t particularly care), where democracy flourished amid cigar smoke, the sound of ice rattling in cocktail glasses and the shuffling of cards. Solicitous of minority as well as majority members, revered for his gentlemanly approach to politics, Rayburn enjoyed greater longevity in office and arguably more lasting influence than Reed and Cannon. Temperamentally, he was uniquely well suited to lead Congress into the modern age.

If Paul Ryan turns to history for his cues, he might learn that some of the most consequential speakers—including Clay, Reed, Cannon and Rayburn—led in equal measure by ideological conviction and force of personality. Each was attuned to the opportunities of the moment and developed a distinctive style suited to his own times. And each measured the limits of his power by the willingness of his colleagues to follow suit. Cannon overstepped that limit, and he lost his power.

The Constitution says little about what a speaker can and cannot do. “Regardless of the rules,” Nicholas Longworth observed, “the speakership will always be what the speaker makes it.”