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Jacket Art: Clifford Berryman, illustration from February 4, 1911, originally published in the Washington Evening Star. Berryman Political Cartoon Collection, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schiller, Wendy J., 1964
Electing the senate : indirect democracy before the seventeenth amendment / Wendy J. Schiller, Charles Stewart III.
pages cm. (Princeton studies in American politics: historical, international, and comparative perspectives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-16316-1 (hardback)ISBN 978-0-691-16317-8 (paperback)
1. United States. Congress. SenateElections. 2. United StatesPolitics and government.
I. Stewart, Charles Haines. II. Title.
JK1965.S45 2014
328.730734dc23
2014021499
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro
Printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface
T HIS PROJECT BEGAN AS many do in political science; at a political science conference panel titled Institutional Development of the Senate. Wendy Schiller was a presenter on a paper on the effects of the Seventeenth Amendment on the interaction of same-state senators, and Gerald Gamm and Charles Stewart were the discussants. In the postpanel recap, Schiller and Stewart sat down for a chat about how to expand the project to study the impact of the switch from indirect to direct elections of U.S. senators in a systematic way. When Schiller asked which states should be collected in the study, Stewart responded (predictably) with all of them.
Such began this long journey to document the indirect election of U.S. senators in state legislatures. We narrowed our focus to the postCivil War period (18711913) because an 1866 Act of Congress had standardized the process across states, thus allowing for comparisons, and we set out to see just how difficult the mission of collecting roll call ballots and the identities of the state legislators who cast them would be. Truth be told, we were both fairly confident that some scholars and archivists had already collected such data; however, we soon realized how wrong we were. It took a year to amass the data for eleven states, at which point we realized we would not be able to complete this project without outside funding. So we applied to the National Science Foundation and were fortunate enough to receive a large grant to complete the project (NSF Grant 0517813). And with a great deal of help, complete it we did, amassing over 577,000 roll call votes and the names of 106,000 state legislators who cast them.
Without reducing the incentives for reading the entire book, we can tell you that elections for U.S. senator in the indirect age were fiercely contested; in contrast to conventional wisdom, neither machine politics nor the results of state legislative elections predetermined who would become U.S. senator, or how easily they would be elected. State legislatures took multiple ballots to elect their senators, and the process could last for an entire legislative session and still produce no winner. Indirect elections involved political and economic elites, political party organizations, and inexperienced short-term state legislators. Moreover, local and national media covered these elections extensively, detailing party infighting, personal ambition, competition, corruption, and the strategies employed by both challengers and incumbents to win Senate seats. Partisanship was intense, money flowed, and factions battled it out to win these Senate seats. The Seventeenth Amendment was designed to give the people a direct voice in choosing their senators, which would in turn produce a different type of winning Senate candidate as well as reduce the influence of parties and money in controlling elections. Our study reveals that there are structural and conditional forces in American politics that produce similar outcomes across time, despite changes to the underlying electoral system. For those promising a better democracy with constitutional change, our book offers a cautionary tale.
We would like to acknowledge the generous financial support from Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and most especially the National Science Foundation (grant 0517813) for allowing us to expand our pilot study of eleven states into a comprehensive data set covering all forty-eight states from 1871 to 1913.
For assistance on gathering and managing the Senate election data, we would like to extend our appreciation to research assistants from Brown University (Kelly Bay, Matthew Corritore, Amy Goins, Janine Heath, Jeremy Johnson, Kevin McDonald, Ravi Perry, Ari Savitsky, Kaitlin Sidorsky, and especially Benjamin Xiong), MIT (Keith Edwards, Kristin Falciglia, Adam Groce, Laura Hajj, Tony Hill, Jessica Karnis, Ruth Miller, HyeMee Shin, and Daniel Yellin), Miami University of Ohio (Abigail Schiller), Wellesley College (Marrisa Geller, Allison C. Jones, Clare Kim, Sandy Naing, Marit P. Schroeder, and Gabriella Wakeman), the University of Wisconsin (Andrew Gordon and Eli Lewien), the University of Virginia (Jessica Schiller), the University of West Virginia (Carl Taylor), and George Washington University (Jennifer Davis and Jennie Shulze). Charles Stewart would also like to thank a series of administrative assistants at MIT for their help with this project, including Seth Dickinson, Daniel Guenther, and Andrea OConnell. Finally, Rafaella Wakeman, Stewarts UROP for life, devoted a significant fraction of her MIT education, undergraduate and graduate, to the most difficult aspects of building parts of the initial data set. Sam Kernell was very generous in providing us his data on state legislative elections and encouraging us as he was pursuing a project that was complementary to our own.
We also want to thank the librarians and archivists at the various places we gathered data: Brown University, Cleveland Public Library, Georgia State Archives, Harvard University, Kentucky State Library and Archives, Library of Congress, MIT, Maine State Library, Massachusetts State Library, New York Public Library, New York State Library, New York University Law School, Rhode Island State Archives, University of Kentucky, University of Miami, Wisconsin Historical Society (a national treasure), and Yale Law School Library.
We would like to thank the participants in seminars at the College of William and Mary (with special appreciation to C. Lawrence Evans for hosting a miniconference on our book), Duke University, Ohio State Law School, University of Georgia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University as well as discussant and panel participants at MPSA and APSA panels where we presented portions of this work.
