Reform movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had as a primary goal the expansion of democracy in the political system. Shifting the power to elect senators from state legislatures to the voting population was one of the most important means of democratizing the system. In an era of concentrated wealth and political power, money played a large role in determining both who was elected to political office and in how the government acted. For many progressives, the symbol of the corrupting influence of money in government was the United States Senate. Indeed, they pointed to the Senate’s loss of public esteem as a result of how the Senate seemed to operate both as a “rich man’s club” and as an obstacle to political reform. In 1906, David Graham Phillips, a muckraking journalist, published a series of essays in The Treason of the Senate, which exposed corruption and bribery in the Senate chambers. Between 1900 and 1910, three senators were indicted for accepting bribes, and 12 more faced charges of corruption. The reform press saw the Senate increasingly as an “obstructive, spoils-seek-ing, courtesy-bound, corporation-fed” group.
The chief problem, reformers argued, was that the Constitution had given the authority to select senators to state legislatures, where Senate seats were, some said, “a matter of purchase.” In 1907, Senator Simon Guggenheim admitted that he had received his Senate seat by contributing to the political campaigns of Republican members of the Colorado legislature. There was a groundswell of popular support for the passage of an amendment for the direct election of senators. By 1912, the House of Representatives had already considered an amendment five times, but each time the Senate blocked the amendment. In 1912, when the issue was raised again in the wake of the Senate expulsion of William Lorimer, a Chicago political boss, for vote-buying, 29 states already had moved to elect senators by popular vote. WoODROW WiLSON, then governor of New Jersey, had earned public respect for blocking the appointment of a political boss to the Senate, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt gained political visibility when he lead insurgents against the appointment of a Tammany candidate to the Senate. Faced with this new political climate, the Senate passed the resolution for what would become the Seventeenth Amendment, for the direct election of senators. The required number of states ratified the amendment in 1913, and it became law in the 1914 election year.
The struggle to pass an amendment for the popular election of senators was only one of a series of political reforms central to PROGRESSIVISM. In seeking greater political access for ordinary people, progressive reformers and politicians sought to expand the franchise in a rational manner (the extension of the vote to women) and to grant to ordinary citizens the powers of initiative and referendum, which enabled direct legislation; recall, to make representatives and judges more responsive to popular opinion; and the direct primary, a means of dismantling the power of party bosses in the electoral process. These later reforms, unlike woman suffrage and popular Senate elections, were not adopted into the Constitution. They remained in the province of progressive state politicians. By 1914, 12 states, all of them west of the Mississippi, had adopted some form of direct democracy. None of the democratic reforms, however, changed the way in which the Senate or politicians fundamentally did business. The Senate has remained for most of the 20th century a governmental body with a disproportionate number of wealthy members, and direct primaries did not stop political party bosses from working the backrooms of conventions to ensure their candidates’ success.
See also CONGRESS; elections; POLITICS.
Further reading: George Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 (New York: Harper, 1958).
World History
