Master of the Senate (11 page)

That pattern prevailed on other major issues. House procedures gradually became more orderly after the election of “Czar” Thomas Reed as Speaker, but senators—particularly those committee chairmen who had held their positions for years—were still the balance wheel of the federal government. A law to authorize federal action against the renewed disenfranchisement of black voters in the South was passed in the House but blocked in the Senate. So was a law that would have banned violence against strikers by private police forces. The Gilded Age, as Josephy says, “was not a day for the weak, the unorganized or the powerless”; the legislative pages of that age are sparse indeed if one searches them for laws that would help farmers, labor, minorities, consumers, or the crowded poor in the wretched slums of the great new cities. All during this time, Americans asked their government for help, but, except for scattered moments like the Sherman Act, help was not forthcoming. Congress, summed up one observer, “does not solve the problems, the solutions of which is demanded by the life of the nation.” And for this the Senate must bear a large part of the blame. To a degree perhaps unequaled in any other period of American history, the Gilded Age was the era in which the Senate was the preeminent force in the government of the United States—the “Senate Supreme” indeed. And it was during this era that the government was, as the historian John Garraty puts it, “singularly divorced from what now seem the meaningful issues of the day”—divorced to a degree perhaps unequaled in any other period of American history. Between 1874, when Charles Sumner died, and 1900, not a single figure comparable to Clay, Calhoun, or Webster—or to Benton, or to Seward or to Douglas or to any of a score of other senators of the Senate’s Golden Age—sat in that tiered semi-circle of desks. In creating a Senate for the new nation, its Founding Fathers had tried to create within the government an institution that would speak for the educated, the well-born, the well-to-do, that would protect the rights of property, that would not function as an embodiment of the people’s will but would rather stand—“firmly”—as a great bulwark against that will.

They had succeeded.

D
URING THE
G
ILDED
A
GE
—the era of its greatest power—the Senate sunk from the heights of public esteem to the depths. Its inertia was a subject of public ridicule—“The Senate does about as much in a week as a set of men in business would do in half an hour,” one newspaper correspondent wrote—as was the corruption that infected it. And it was the subject of public anger.

Once, Senate and senators had been immortalized in paintings, in a classical,
heroic style that became famous—George Healy’s glowing
Webster Replying to Hayne;
Peter Rothermel’s majestic
The United States Senate, A.D. 1850;
Henry F. Darby’s
Henry Clay;
Rembrandt Peale’s
John C. Calhoun;
Francis Alexander’s “Black Dan” portrait of Webster. Now, it was not classicism but caricature with which the Senate was depicted. It was chronicled in cartoons—cartoons so savage and telling that
they
became famous. One of a hundred brilliant depictions of the Senate that appeared in the pictorial weekly
Puck
, founded in 1877, was Joseph Keppler’s “The Bosses of the Senate.” The cartoon shows the desks of the Senate, and the senators sitting at them, men drawn small. Behind the desks, looming menacingly over the little senators, stands a row of huge, pot-bellied, top-hatted, arrogant “bosses” labeled “Copper Trust,” “Standard Oil Trust,” “Sugar Trust,” “Tin Trust.” Behind these figures is a sign: “This Is A Senate of the Monopolists, By the Monopolists, and For the Monopolists.” Above, in the gallery, is a “People’s Entrance,” barred with a padlock and marked “Closed.” Once foreign observers had marveled at the Senate as “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.” Now their tone had changed. Writing in 1902, the Russian-born, French-educated political scientist Moisei Ostrogorski would say,

D
URING THE
G
ILDED
A
GE
, the Senate’s power reached its peak not only in domestic affairs but in foreign. One-third plus one of the Senate had of course been given power to reject treaties by the Constitution, and in 1868 the Senate was given additional power by itself: it revised its standing rules so that treaties could be
amended
—their text changed—by a simple majority. And throughout three decades, as Schlesinger notes, “the Senate exercised its power in this realm with relish, freely rewriting, amending and rejecting treaties negotiated by the executive.” Rejecting was the operative term: between 1871 and 1898 the Senate did not ratify a single significant treaty. Writing in 1885, Professor Woodrow Wilson said that since a President was forced to deal with the Senate on treaties “as a servant conferring with a master,” its power was unbalancing the whole system of checks and balances. During this era, senators made policy
in another way as well: as had in fact been the case during the entire nineteenth century, most secretaries of state were former senators.

Nor did the Senate confine its foreign policy role to treaties. Together with the House (and the yellow press), it pushed a cautious President (“I have been through one war,” McKinley told a friend. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another”) into war with Spain. Only with reluctance was the President finally induced to send the
Maine
to Havana. After it blew up, McKinley still resisted intervention, but a delegation of senators went to Cuba to make their own investigation, and when, upon their return, they told on the Senate floor of Spanish brutality and mass starvation in the
reconcentrado
camps, the journalistic clamor was suddenly clothed with authority. The Allison-Aldrich clique came down for war; three days later, McKinley issued an ultimatum to Spain; on April 25, 1898, it was war—war on both sides of the world as the young nation’s cruisers steamed aline into Manila Bay to destroy the fleet of the old.

And when the war ended, after just four months, and the country suddenly had to confront a great decision, it was among the desks of the Senate that that decision was made. As once, three quarters of a century before, the Senate had debated the wisdom of building a fort on the shore of the far-off Pacific, now the Senate debated the question of whether America’s expansion should stop at that shore—or go beyond it; of whether a young nation which had so quickly become a giant power would confine its power to its own continent—or extend it throughout the world; of whether it would still be merely a nation—or an empire. In December, 1898, under a peace treaty hammered out in Paris, Spain relinquished Cuba, and ceded to the United States Puerto Rico, Guam, and, for a token $20 million, the Philippines, an island archipelago seven thousand miles west of the United States.

Subject, of course, to the advice and consent of the American Senate.

The debate in the Senate over ratification of the treaty ending the Spanish-American War was a national soul-searching. It was among the Senate desks—eighty-four of them now—that the imperatives of imperialism confronted other imperatives, imperatives dramatized because even as the debate raged, Filipino nationalists rose in rebellion against American troops, and the debate was conducted against a backdrop of atrocities committed by both sides in a brutal guerrilla war that would last three years and require the commitment of seventy thousand American troops before the independence movement was crushed. Rising for the first time among those desks, thirty-seven-year-old Albert Beveridge of Indiana proved that a single speech in the Senate could still catapult a newly elected senator to national fame. “The Philippines are ours forever,” Beveridge said,

And it was among those desks that seventy-two-year-old George Hoar of Massachusetts rose to reply—in a voice trembling with anger.

Anti-imperialists said governing a foreign country without its consent was a violation of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence; the United States was “trampling on our own great Charter” in the Philippines, Hoar declared. Henry Cabot Lodge responded that that was not the point, since “the Philippines mean a vast future trade and wealth and power.”

The vote on the treaty was very close. Fifty-six of the eighty-four votes would be necessary for ratification, and the vote, taken in February, 1899, was 57 to 27. That was the vote—a vote in the Senate—that set the stage for the American Century.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Senate had been the dominant entity in the American government for perhaps three quarters of that century. If its glory was gone, its Golden Age vanished long before, its power seemed as great as ever.

B
UT THEN CAME
the twentieth century.

Suddenly, with that treaty, the United States was no longer merely a nation but an empire—an empire with colonies stretching from the Caribbean to the China Sea. The oceans were no longer broad moats that protected and insulated an infant republic and let it grow strong, but lakes over whose surface sped the Republic’s powerful fleets, lakes on the far side of which were the Republic’s colonies and coaling stations, sources of its raw materials, markets for its industries, lakes dotted with islands—Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, other, smaller Pacific islands—vital to American interests, in some cases garrisoned by American troops. And with the acquisition of colonies came, all at once, new needs—a navy powerful enough to keep open
the sea lanes to the colonies, an Isthmian canal so the navy’s squadrons could be shifted rapidly between ocean and ocean, protection for the canal’s Caribbean approaches. Indeed, the acquisition of colonies created problems beyond the immediately obvious: had not America brought peace and stability to Cuba?—was it not only logical then, “for economic, strategic and humanitarian reasons,” to bring peace and stability to the entire region, to supervise much of the Caribbean and Central America? And, as Americans were to discover in the very first years of the “American Century”—in that “revolt” (or “War for Independence”) in the faraway Philippines—conquering a country was easier than governing it. All at once, with American citizens, property, and commercial interests scattered all over the globe, there were decisions to be made: whether or not to send troops to protect them from imminent menace; decisions on how far to go in countering Russian expansion in Manchuria; on how to deal with Santo Domingo’s default on debts to European nations—a default that led France and Italy to threaten immediate intervention in the Western Hemisphere. And these were decisions that couldn’t wait for Senate deliberations; there were threats and maneuvers that might come when the Senate was not in session, and that had to be met immediately.

And suddenly there was a President who was confident that he could make these decisions by himself. Senatorial power had been a coefficient of presidential weakness, and for thirty years, Presidents had been either inexperienced like Grant, or indecisive, or simply cowed by the mighty Senate. But with the crack of the assassin’s gunshot that struck down McKinley, and, to the rage of Senator Mark Hanna, put “that damned cowboy” Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, the era of weak Presidents was over.

The executive agreement—the international covenant devised by the President acting alone—had had its origin almost a century before in certain murky phrases in the Constitution. “Gradually, in a way that neither historians nor legal scholars have made altogether clear”—but largely, it appears, because in the early nineteenth century the Senate accepted the device to spare itself the task of considering a multitude of technical agreements—it obtained the color of usage, but almost entirely for minor matters. But when, in 1901, Roosevelt became President, the executive agreement became almost the order of the day.

When the Senate moved too slowly for Roosevelt’s taste in ratifying a treaty with Santo Domingo to forestall European intervention, Roosevelt, as he himself described it, “put the agreement into effect, and I continued its execution for two years before the Senate acted; and I would have continued it until the end of my term, if necessary, without any action by Congress.” In another executive agreement—one kept so secret that historians would not discover its existence for two decades—Roosevelt agreed to Japan’s imposition of a military protectorate on Korea.

Coupled with the rise of the executive agreement was what Arthur Schlesinger calls a “new presidential exuberance” about the use of armed force
“on the pretexts of protecting American citizens and property.” Roosevelt, often without congressional permission, dispatched American regiments to Caribbean countries and installed provisional governments.