This book embodies a codification of the present-day general parliamentary law (omitting provisions having no application outside legislative bodies). The book is also designed as a manual to be adopted by organizations or assemblies as their parliamentary authority. When the manual has been thus adopted, the rules within it, together with any special rules of procedure that may also be adopted, are binding upon the body and constitute that body’s rules of order.
Parliamentary law originally was the name given to the rules and customs for carrying on business in the English Parliament that were developed through a continuing process of decisions and precedents somewhat like the growth of the common law. These rules and customs, as brought to America with the settling of the New World, became the basic substance from which the practice of legislative bodies in the United States evolved. Out of early American legislative procedure and paralleling it in further development has come the general parliamentary law, or common parliamentary law, of today, which is adapted to the needs of organizations and assemblies of widely differing purposes and conditions. In legislative bodies, there is often recourse to the general parliamentary law in situations not covered by the rules or precedents of the particular body—although some of the necessary procedure in such a case must be proper to that type of assembly alone.
The kind of gathering in which parliamentary law is applicable is known as a deliberative assembly. This expression was used by Edmund Burke to describe the English Parliament, in a speech to the electorate at Bristol in 1774; and it became the basic term for a body of persons meeting (under conditions detailed in 1:1) to discuss and determine upon common action.
Acting under the general parliamentary law, any deliberative assembly can formally adopt written rules of procedure which, as fully explained in 2:14–22, can confirm, add to, or deviate from parliamentary law itself. As indicated above, the term rules of order, in its proper sense, refers to any written parliamentary rules so adopted, whether they are contained in a manual or have been specially composed by the adopting body. The term parliamentary procedure, although frequently used synonymously with parliamentary law, refers in this book to parliamentary law as it is followed in any given assembly or organization, together with whatever rules of order the body may have adopted.
Thomas Jefferson speaks of “the Parliamentary branch of the law.” From this country’s beginning, it has been an underlying assumption of our culture that what has been authoritatively established as parliamentary law is in the nature of a body of law—in the sense of being binding within all assemblies except as they may adopt special rules varying from the general parliamentary law. But since there has not always been complete agreement as to what constitutes parliamentary law, no society or assembly should attempt to transact business without having adopted some standard manual on the subject as its authority in all cases not covered by its own special rules.
The holding of assemblies of the elders, fighting men, or people of a tribe, community, or city to make decisions or render opinions on important matters is doubtless a custom older than history. The ancient Athenian historian Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.), in his History of the Peloponnesian War (between Athens and Sparta), cites numerous cases of determinations by the peoples of cities being decided in assembly by vote. In one passage (Book I, 86–87), describing the assembly at Sparta in which, in the beginning, the Peloponnesian alliance reached the decision to declare war on Athens, he records a specific instance of what we now know as a voice vote (referred to, however, as a decision “by acclamation”), where the device that developed in modern parliamentary times as a Division of the Assembly (see 29:1–8) was resorted to, in its original form. His account of the incident reads, in part, as follows:
Sthenelaïdas, one of the ephors1 at this time, came forward last and spoke to the Lacedaemonians in the following way:… [delivering a brief indictment summarizing a pattern of conduct by the Athenians that, he argued, constituted a breach of a thirty year treaty of truce which he found totally unacceptable].
After making this sort of speech, he himself as ephor put the question to the assembly of the Lacedaemonians. And he stated that he could not distinguish which shout was the louder (for they decide by acclamation, not by vote) but said, because he wanted them to become more eager for war by revealing their opinions openly, “Lacedaemonians, those of you who think that the treaty has been broken, and the Athenians are aggressors, stand over there,” pointing out the place to them, “and those who do not think so, on the other side.” They stood up and separated, and there were many more who thought the treaty had been broken.
According to a widely held view, our own tradition of parliamentary process may be traced to ways of life in Anglo-Saxon tribes before their migration to the island of Britain starting in the fifth century A.D. Among these peoples on the continent of Europe, the tribe was the largest regularly existing political unit. From analogy with the customs of other Germanic tribes, it is supposed that freemen were accustomed to come together in the “Village-moot,” to make “bye-laws” for their village and to administer justice. These groups also chose men to represent them at the “Hundred-moot,” of the district, which acted as a court of appeal and arbitrated intervillage disputes. Still higher in authority, and similarly constituted, was the “Folk-moot,” which was also the citizen army of the tribe.
The same institutions, it is believed, were carried into Anglo-Saxon England, where the Folk-moot became the “Shire-moot.” There is little historical knowledge of events in the island of Britain during the two hundred years after the first Anglo-Saxon invasions early in the fifth century. When a picture of Anglo-Saxon England in its formative stages does emerge, the Shire-moot—later called the “Shire Court”—is found to be an instrument of local government subject to crown supervision, under a king advised by a national assembly known as the “witan,” or “witenagemot.” Originally established in each of the separate early English kingdoms and supposed to include all freemen who held land, the witenagemot in the united and Christianized England normally met at the call of the king and was composed of such major landholders, ealdormen, king’s officers, bishops, and abbots as he might wish to summon. Although the witenagemot was not in practice a democratic institution, the king’s authority was held to derive from its consent, and it might exert influence in the choice of a new king.
The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought England under tight military control by a French-speaking administration, but the structure of Anglo-Saxon governmental machinery was left largely intact.
The Norman kings assembled councils composed of court officials, barons, and prelates—of whom the number present depended on the importance of the business to be discussed. In its fullest form this assembly was known as the “Great Council,” and was looked upon as constitutionally a continuation of the witenagemot. Under the feudal system, it was the duty of each baron to advise the king on any matter on which he might request the baron’s opinion. The early Great Councils were feudal assemblies summoned by the king for the purpose of obtaining such advice.
The conversion of the Great Council into what we now know as Parliament came about during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The word parliament was in use slightly earlier to describe any important meeting held for the purpose of discussion. This word was first officially applied to certain Great Councils of a particular character in the time of Henry III (reigned 1216–1272). The distinguishing feature of the early parliaments was the fact that the barons of the Council were invited not only to express their opinions individually on matters laid before them by the king, but to discuss, with each other, the overall “state of the realm”—the business “of king and kingdom” rather than only “the king’s business.” The earliest parliament clearly identifiable as of this character was held in 1258.
A second important change in the English national assembly began soon afterward with the introduction into Parliament of representatives of the shires (knights) and of the towns or boroughs (burgesses)—that is, taken together, representatives of the communities, or Commons. Although a number of precedents for such a step had been set earlier, the first national parliament in which the Commons were included was that held by Edward I in 1275. Initially, the primary purpose in summoning the Commons was usually to obtain their approval for measures of taxation, and they were included in Parliament only on occasions when such support was desired. After 1311, however, the Commons were in attendance at every parliament. Separation of Parliament into the two branches which later became known as the House of Lords and the House of Commons took place by degrees and was completed shortly after 1340.
“The proceedings of parliament in ancient times, and for a long while,” Thomas Jefferson wrote more than four and a half centuries later (in the preface to his famous Manual, discussed below), “were crude, multiform, and embarrassing. They have been however constantly advancing towards uniformity and accuracy.…”2
Many of the advances in the parliamentary system alluded to by Jefferson occurred from the latter part of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth century. This was a period of prolonged internal conflict over the prerogatives of Parliament—as opposed to those of the king—which stimulated an increased interest in procedure, especially in the House of Commons. During this same time, the Journal of the House of Commons, which was first undertaken by the clerk of the House on his own initiative in 1547, became established as a source of precedent on matters of procedure. The first recorded instance of such use of this Journal was in 1580 or 1581. The Journal was given official status as a document of the Commons about 1623.
Roughly concurrent with the initiation of the Journal of the House of Commons was the development of a body of writing on its procedure. The earliest formal treatment of the Commons’ procedure in English was written between 1562 and 1566 by Sir Thomas Smyth and was published in 1583, six years after the author’s death, as part of a larger work, De Repvblica Anglorvm: The manner of Gouernement or policie of the realme of England. Activity by other authors in writing treatises on parliamentary precedents and practices followed. In 1689, the small book Lex Parliamentaria (London), variously attributed to George Petyt or George Philips, listed as references thirty-five earlier parliamentary works or sources. The book—a pocket manual prepared for the convenience of members of Parliament—includes entries from the Journal of the House of Commons relating to procedure, of which the following examples illustrate the gradual evolution of parliamentary law and are readily recognized as early wordings of present-day principles and rules:
• One subject at a time: 1581. When a Motion has been made that Matter must receive a Determination by the Question, or be laid aside by the general Sense of the House, before another be entertain’d. (Lex Parliamentaria, p. 158.)
• Alternation between opposite points of view in assignment of the floor: 1592. It was made a Rule, That the Chairman shall ask the Parties that would speak, on which side they would speak… and the Party that speaketh against the last Speaker, is to be heard first. (ibid., p. 209.)
• Requirement that the chair always call for the negative vote: 1604. [I]t is no full Question without the Negative part be put, as well as the Affirmative. (ibid., p. 161.)
• Decorum and avoidance of personalities in debate: 1604. He that digresseth from the Matter, to fall upon the Person, ought to be suppressed by the Speaker.… No reviling or nipping words must be used. (ibid., p. 157.)
• Confinement of debate to the merits of the pending question: 1610. A Member speaking, and his speech, seeming impertinent, and there being much hissing and spitting, it was conceived for a Rule, that Mr. Speaker may stay impertinent Speeches. (ibid., p. 156.)
• Division of a question: 1640. If a Question upon a Debate contains more Parts than one, and Members seem to be for one Part, and not for the other; it may be moved, that the same may be divided into two, or more Questions: as Dec. 2, 1640, the Debate about the Election of two Knights was divided into two Questions. (ibid., p. 169.)
The same period when the procedure of the House of Commons was undergoing its new development was also the time during which permanent English colonies were established in the Western Hemisphere, beginning with Virginia in 1607. The founding of this colony was soon followed by the institution of the first representative assembly in America, authorized for Virginia by the governor acting for the London Company in 1619. This body consisted of a House of Burgesses as an elected lower chamber and a small Governor’s Council as an upper chamber. As additional colonies were founded, similar assemblies were established in them, and succeeding generations of English settlers brought along the parliamentary processes they had known in the old country.
Into each legislature—into county, town, and parish meeting—the colonists transplanted the rules and customs of Parliament, as far as these rules and customs were applicable under the particular company charter, proprietary grant, or similar instrument by which the colony was established. This new type of self-government, through general parliamentary principles operating under specifications contained in a written basic document, represented a phase in the development of parliamentary law that was peculiar to America, since in England the Constitution was unwritten. Thus, each colony acquired the beginning of a body of experience later to go into the framing of individual state constitutions. The manner in which these rules and customs were adapted to meet the situation within each colony may account for the local variance in parliamentary tradition which persisted among people in America long after the founding of the United States, and that would eventually be one of the conditions that led to the writing of Robert’s Rules of Order.
When policies of the mother country in the 1700s had gradually changed with the growth of the British Empire in such a way as to set the stage for the American Revolution, representatives of the different colonies considered common resistance to the actions of Parliament. In these deliberations, the colonists were able to function effectively by depending on procedures originally developed in Parliament itself!
The First Continental Congress, convening in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, was made up of delegates largely unacquainted with the representatives of colonies other than their own, and most of the advance planning among the colonies had been by correspondence. Thus, the accomplishments of the first two days of the Congress are worth mentioning as an indication of the grounding and experience of the members in parliamentary methods, and of the thoroughness of their preparation. By September 7 the Continental Congress had: (1) examined the credentials of, and certified as delegates, the accredited representatives; (2) completed its own organization by adopting four “rules of conduct to be observed in debating and determining the questions”; and (3) made progress toward carrying out its purposes to the extent of adopting resolutions for the appointing of committees to study the colonies’ rights and to examine statutes affecting their trade and manufactures.
Under existing rules and customs, the Second Continental Congress carried on the war; it also directed the framing of, and adopted, the Declaration of Independence. In assemblies in each state, through similar proceedings somewhat modified by local tradition, colonial charters were amended to conform to an independent status, or new state constitutions were drafted. Many of the provisions thus codified had been gradually arrived at by the separate colonies over periods of more than a hundred years. These state constitutions in turn—stemming from a common experience with English law and adapting that law to the new conditions—provided the material from which the Constitution of the United States was produced at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, in the face of seemingly deep and discouraging disagreements.
By the close of the eighteenth century, the stages through which the parent English parliamentary methods had passed in America may be summarized as follows:
• the use, within each colony, of such parliamentary rules as were applicable under its individual charter or other authorization for the establishment of the colony;
• the application of these same practices in intercolonial gatherings when representatives of the colonies met to act in their common interest; and
• the use of parliamentary procedure as an instrument for implementing the processes of representative government under a written constitution.
Despite this progress, the parliamentary system of the young United States needed further codification. As presiding officer of the Senate while serving as Vice-President of the United States (1797–1801), Thomas Jefferson saw this need, which he described—with respect to the situation in the Senate—in this way:
The Constitution of the United States… authorizes each branch of [the Congress] “to determine the rules of its own proceedings.” The Senate have accordingly formed some rules for their own government; but these going only to few cases, they have referred to the decision of their President, without debate and without appeal, all questions of order arising either under their own rules or where they have provided none. This places under the discretion of the President [of the Senate] a very extensive field of decision… which, irregularly exercised, would have a powerful effect on the proceedings and determinations.… The President must feel… the necessity of recurring… to some known system of rules.… But to what system… is he to recur, as supplementary to [the rules] of the Senate?3
Parliament, Jefferson concluded, provided the most practical model for the Congress. It had “served as a prototype to most of” the existing state legislatures. It was “the model which we have all studied, while we are little acquainted with the modifications of it in our several states.… Its rules are probably as wisely constructed for governing the debates of a deliberative body, and obtaining its true sense, as any which can become known to us.…”4
“Considering therefore the law of proceedings in the Senate as composed of the precepts of the constitution, the regulations of the Senate, and, where these are silent, of the rules of Parliament,”5 Jefferson compiled his Manual of Parliamentary Practice, published in 1801. In it, he extensively cited about fifty English works and documents on parliamentary law and related subjects. Among his sources, however, Jefferson in his preface to the Manual (p. xv) acknowledges primary indebtedness to Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons by John Hatsell, who was clerk of the House of Commons from 1768 to 1820. First published in 1781, Hatsell’s work is today the best authority on eighteenth-century procedure in the House of Commons.
The position of Jefferson’s Manual is unchallenged as the first to define and interpret parliamentary principles for our democratic republic and to offer a basic pattern of rules and a measure of uniformity for the legislative processes of the United States. The authority of the Manual became established through its adoption by state legislatures and by other groups. The House of Representatives also adopted Jefferson’s Manual; however, differences between the House and the Senate would cause the House to develop and become governed by a separate body of rules and practices largely superseding Jefferson’s work.
Within a few decades after Jefferson wrote his Manual, the formation of societies of various kinds—political, cultural, scientific, charitable, and religious—began to create an increasing need for a body of rules adapted to the requirements of nonlegislative organizations. It seems to have been early recognized that such societies have a deliberative character which calls for the application of essentially the same principles of decision as in a legislative body. Yet certain differences in their conditions—as compared with those of the legislative body—must be taken into account in the formulation of any system of rules suitable for the occasional meeting or the nonlegislative organization. For example:
• Congress and most state legislatures are composed of two Houses, with sessions (8:2(2)) usually lasting from several months to nearly a year; but sessions of an ordinary local society rarely last longer than one meeting of two or three hours.
• The members of a legislative body are generally paid to attend its daily meetings and can be legally compelled to do so, so that the quorum—in Congress, for example—is a majority of the members; but the quorum in a voluntary society must be much less if the organization is to be able to function.
• The business of a legislative body is vastly greater in volume and more complex than that of the typical ordinary society, so that most of the work in legislative bodies is done in standing committees, whereas in a local society it is handled by the assembly or, if necessary, is assigned to special committees.
The first author who attempted to meet the procedural needs of the country’s growing number of voluntary societies was Luther S. Cushing (1803–1856), Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and a noted jurist. His small volume, Manual of Parliamentary Practice: Rules of Proceeding and Debate in Deliberative Assemblies—which became known as “Cushing’s Manual”—was published in 1845, with a section of further notes being added in 1847. This work, the author said, was intended for “assemblies of every description, but more especially for those which are not legislative in their character.”6 Cushing accordingly omitted from his manual rules applicable only to lawmaking bodies, but he included those that he considered suitable for both legislative and lay assemblies.
Among Cushing’s observations and conclusions with respect to nonlegislative assemblies in particular were the following:
1. The general parliamentary rules in Jefferson’s Manual formed “the basis of the common parliamentary law of this country.” (Cushing’s Manual, p. 4.)
2. Through modifications by state legislatures, “a system of parliamentary rules [had] been established in each state, different in some particulars from those of every other state.” (ibid., p. 13.)
3. Some ordinary meetings were conducted “not merely according to the general parliamentary law” but also following the system of the individual state. (ibid., p. 14.)
4. For such societies to be considered bound by the parliamentary practice of a particular state legislature in this way, Cushing held, was “erroneous.” (ibid., p. 14.)
5. The “occasional assembly” or ordinary organization was properly subject only to the common parliamentary law and to such rules as the body would specially adopt for itself. (ibid., p. 14.)
In adherence to the last proposition, Cushing confined his book to what he considered “common parliamentary law,” and prescribed that on all other necessary matters of procedure, each organization or assembly should adopt rules of its own (rules of order)—much as Congress and legislatures do.
Although Cushing’s Manual was concisely written, was well received, and became a classic accepted as standard, it was to prove insufficient to the needs of the assemblies for which it was intended. The devising of an adequate supplementary system of rules of order by each assembly for its own use—as envisioned by Cushing—was to prove a task beyond the capacity of the average organization. In the years following the Civil War, the confusion that still existed in parliamentary practice among the multiplying number of lay associations and meetings became a matter of concern to Henry Martyn Robert.
Henry Martyn Robert7 (1837–1923) was an engineering officer in the regular army—finally attaining the rank of Brigadier General as chief of his corps—who was active in church organizations and civic and educational work wherever he was stationed, as much as military duties allowed him time. He was the son of Dr. Joseph Thomas Robert (1807–1884), successively a physician, Baptist minister, and educator, who became the first president of what is now Morehouse College. Henry Robert’s interest in parliamentary law—as he often related—had been precipitated in 1863 at New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he had been transferred from more strenuous war duty after a recurrence of tropical fever. Without warning, he was asked to preside over a meeting—said to have related to the defense of the city in the event of Confederate attack from the sea and to have lasted for fourteen hours—and did not know how. But he felt that the worst thing he could do would be to decline. “My embarrassment was supreme,” he wrote. “I plunged in, trusting to Providence that the assembly would behave itself. But with the plunge went the determination that I would never attend another meeting until I knew something of… parliamentary law.”8
Afterward, in a small book on another subject he found a few pages of “rules for deliberative assemblies.” From these he copied information “showing four or five motions according to rank” (see 5:10–13), “two or three… that could not be debated and some that could not be amended” and carried it on a slip of paper in his wallet for several years afterward. With this, he hoped he would be safe.
In 1867 Robert was promoted to Major and ordered to San Francisco, which was then a turbulent community made up of people recently arrived from every state. As he and his wife worked with persons from different parts of the country in several organizations seeking to improve social conditions there, they found themselves in the midst of a strange situation. Remarking on it many years later, in a lecture in Cincinnati, he stated that “Friction as to what constituted parliamentary law was indeed no uncommon thing.” Each member of these organizations had brought from his home state different and often strong convictions as to what were correct parliamentary rules, and a presiding officer usually followed the customs of the locality from which he came. Under these conditions, confusion and misunderstanding had reached a point where issues of procedure consumed time that should have gone into the real work of the societies.
Robert doubted that these organizations would be able to function efficiently until there could be better agreement as to what constituted parliamentary law. In his words:
So I inquired at the largest book store for the best books on the subject. Cushing’s Manual was handed me and also Wilson’s Digest, a book containing about 2400 decisions made in the English Parliament and our Congress. Then I sent for the Congressional Manual, which contained Jefferson’s Manual—…[,] The Rules of the House of Representatives and Barclay’s Digest of Rules and Practice of the House.…
A careful reading of these books showed that it was not an easy matter to decide what was parliamentary law.… For instance, both Jefferson and Cushing gave an equal rank to the motions for the Previous Question, and to Postpone Definitely, and Indefinitely, and to Commit; the House of Representatives makes them rank thus: Previous Question, Postpone Definitely, Commit, Amend, and Postpone Indefinitely at the foot of the list; and the Senate does not allow the Previous Question and instead of placing Indefinitely Postpone at the foot, it puts it at the head of the list. Also if a motion to strike out a paragraph is lost, the paragraph can afterwards be amended according to the rules and practice of both Houses of Congress, but it could not be amended according to Jefferson and Cushing and the practice of the English Parliament. In Congress the question would be stated and put on striking out the paragraph whereas according to the other authorities it should be put on whether the paragraph shall stand as a part of the resolution.
Again, as to debate: The U.S. Senate allowed each member to speak twice on the same day to the same question without any limit as to time; all the other authorities allowed only one speech from each member on any question, and the House of Representatives also limited that speech to one hour. Also in Congress certain motions are undebatable, whereas the other authorities did not allude to such a thing as an undebatable motion, except that Cushing said in a note that legislative bodies usually, to quote, “provide that certain questions, as for example, to Adjourn, to Lay on the Table, for the Previous Question, or as to the Order of Business, shall be decided without debate.”
These examples will… show the difficulties in the way of [anyone]… who was anxious to know enough [parliamentary law] to enable him to cooperate with others in effective work in lines in which he was interested.
Robert decided to prepare a few rules of order—expected to run to about sixteen pages—which he hoped would be suitable for the societies to which he and his wife belonged. If these organizations adopted such rules, “each member could know what motions could be debated and amended, which ones required a two-thirds vote, and what was the order of precedence.”9 When a few sheets had been printed, he began to try them out. The reception was encouraging, but the pamphlet was never completed. He came to the conclusion that the real problem would not be solved by “a half dozen societies having a system of parliamentary law of their own.”
At about this time (1871), Robert was transferred to duty based in Portland, Oregon. Although he was obliged to lay aside parliamentary studies because of heavier responsibilities, such contact with organizations as he had time for strengthened ideas which had begun to crystallize in San Francisco: (1) In the country at large, the average society would find it difficult to have an adequate set of rules of order prepared specially for its own use, as Cushing had apparently expected it to do. Few ordinary organizations had, in fact, done so. (2) Even if a society were in a position to work out a satisfactory set of rules, this would only create further multiplicity. The need was the reverse—to enable civic-minded people to belong to several organizations or to move to new localities without constantly encountering different parliamentary rules. (3) Conditions in ordinary societies, different as the purposes of those societies might be, were sufficiently similar from a parliamentary point of view to be guided by practically the same rules of order. (4) As far as any trend could be seen, it appeared that the best presiding officers were following the practice of the U.S. House of Representatives on basic points, such as the order of precedence of motions, which motions could be debated, and so on. The practice of the House was then approaching an established form after marked evolution during the preceding decades—during which it had become considerably different from the “old common parliamentary law” as laid down by Jefferson and Cushing.
Robert thus became convinced of the need for a new kind of parliamentary manual, “based, in its general principles, upon the rules and practice of Congress, and adapted, in its details, to the use of ordinary societies. Such a work should give, not only the methods of organizing and conducting the meetings, the duties of the officers and the names of the ordinary motions, but in addition, should state in a systematic manner, in reference to each motion, its object and effect; whether it can be amended or debated; if debatable, the extent to which it opens the main question to debate; the circumstances under which it can be made, and what other motions can be made when it is pending.”10
Writing such a manual as Robert envisioned would amount to weaving into a single whole a statement of existing parliamentary law and a set of proposed rules of order. His idea was that the book should be written in a form suitable for adoption by any society, without interfering with the organization’s right to adopt any special rules it might require. In the manual, rules taken from the practice of the House should be used except in specific cases where analysis showed that some other rule was better for the conditions in an ordinary organization—which did not, for example, have the enormous volume of business to be handled, the sharp division along party lines, or the extended length of congressional sessions with daily meetings. Sometimes the Senate practice might be preferable, such as allowing each member to speak twice to the same question on the same day.
Robert had no time to begin writing until January 1874 in Milwaukee, when a severe winter tied up army engineering services along Lake Michigan for about three months. By October he had a revised manuscript of the rules of order proper, for which he was ready to seek a publisher. This manuscript, which would have made up the complete book as he originally conceived it, became the first part of the work that was finally published. When early efforts to obtain a publisher failed, he decided to have 4,000 copies made by a job printer at his own expense and under his direction. Since Robert’s military duties often would not permit him to correct proofs promptly, the printer could only spare enough type to set and print sixteen pages at a time—the type then being distributed and used again for the next sixteen pages.
The printing slowly progressed in this manner through most of the year 1875. Soon after it began, Robert—having concluded, at least partly through his wife’s influence, that more information should be added for the benefit of persons with no experience in meetings—wrote and added a second part, to which he gave the title “Organization and Conduct of Business.” Because of its purpose and the nature of its contents, Part II was written in a simpler style, and it contained such repetition of material from Part I as the author thought would be useful to the intended reader. By the end of 1875, the printing of the two parts of the Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies (176 pages) was completed.
Even then, with his 4,000 “ready-printed” copies, the author was able to obtain a contract with a publisher only by making unusual concessions. In the face of the latter’s skepticism as to the demand for such a work, Robert agreed to pay for binding the 4,000 copies and to bear the expense of giving 1,000 copies of the book to parliamentarians, educators, legislators, and church leaders throughout the country. The first edition of the manual accordingly was published by S. C. Griggs and Company of Chicago on February 19, 1876. The publisher placed on the cover the title Robert’s Rules of Order. That first edition is now long a rare book.
Robert expected the 3,000 copies available for sale to last two years, during which he planned to prepare a revision on the basis of comments and suggestions from users. But the edition—received with immediate and enthusiastic acclaim—was sold out in four months. Six weeks after the original publication, work was begun on a second edition, with sixteen more pages, which was ready at the end of July 1876.
The following year, the portions of the second 1876 edition comprising the elementary Part II, “Organization and Conduct of Business,” and the “Table of Rules Relating to Motions”—which, with continuing development, has been found in all editions but was originally a new and unique feature of the Pocket Manual—were also offered separately in paperback under the title Parliamentary Guide (price twenty-five cents). The Guide did not remain long in print, however, as the demand apparently was for the complete Robert’s Rules of Order (then priced at seventy-five cents). The latter volume gained another twenty-six pages through changes and additions made by the author in a third edition issued in 1893.
In 1896, when the Griggs firm went out of business, the then recently formed Scott, Foresman and Company purchased the former publisher’s list and thus acquired the publishing rights to Robert’s Rules of Order. The designation “Robert’s Rules of Order,” the short title printed on the cover of the Pocket Manual, properly refers only to the three earliest editions, the last of which was superseded in 1915. At that time, the three editions of the Pocket Manual had totaled more than a half million copies.
Robert’s Rules of Order Revised, the first complete revision, was the product of three years of the original author’s full-time effort, beginning in 1912, with his second wife, Isabel Hoagland Robert, a former teacher, acting as his secretary and editorial assistant. (His first wife, Helen Thresher Robert, who influenced him to include the elementary portion in the first edition, had died in 1895.) The revision was published on May 5, 1915. Shortly afterward, General Robert wrote that much more work had been put into it than into the three previous editions combined. The 1915 revision, expanded by 75 percent from the 1893 edition, had less than one fourth of its content taken directly from that edition. The reorganization, expansion, and clarification represented by Robert’s Rules of Order Revised was largely the outgrowth of hundreds of letters received by the author over the years, submitting questions of parliamentary law arising in organizations and not covered in the earlier editions.
Upon General Robert’s death in 1923, his only son, Henry M. Robert, Jr.—a professor of mathematics, and later economics, at the United States Naval Academy, who also taught parliamentary law at Columbia University during each summer session—took over the author’s office under a trust that his father had established. In that capacity, Henry Jr. continued his father’s practice of replying to parliamentary questions from users of the book. It had been the original author’s wish that after his death his son should further revise the manual as developments might dictate. Henry Jr. looked forward to doing this following his retirement from the Naval Academy, but he died in 1937 before that time came.
The trusteeship of Robert’s Rules of Order Revised then passed to Henry Jr.’s widow, Sarah Corbin Robert—like Isabel, a former teacher. At General Robert’s request, she had served as a critical reader in the preparation of his last two books, the elementary text, Parliamentary Practice (1921), and the work he considered his definitive explanatory effort, Parliamentary Law (1923). She had also substituted in teaching her husband’s courses at Columbia when Henry Jr. had to give up doing so because of an increased workload at the Naval Academy.
In 1943, changes that General Robert had recorded between 1915 and the time of his death, for inclusion in the next revision of the manual, were incorporated within the 1915 pagination with Isabel and Sarah Robert serving as editors. Under their authorship, additional front and end matter was inserted and further in-page changes were made for the Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition of 1951. Under the title of Robert’s Rules of Order Revised, the manual thus remained in basically the 1915 typesetting until 1970, by which time a combined total of 2.65 million copies of all editions issued until then had been in use.
About 1960, work was begun on a second complete revision of the book under the direction of Sarah Corbin Robert. She was joined in this project by her son, Henry M. Robert III, and by William J. Evans, a Baltimore lawyer, with James W. Cleary later serving as an editorial adviser to the publisher. This undertaking had a twofold goal: (1) a thorough overhauling of the parliamentary content dictated by two generations’ use of the then-existing work, and (2) the new development of a reference book that would both be suitable for adoption by organizations as their parliamentary authority, and at the same time be as readable and as near to completely self-explanatory as possible—equally useful to a presiding officer, organization member, parliamentarian, and instructor in parliamentary procedure. Achieving this dual goal to the authors’ best ability proved to be a task whose magnitude was only dimly perceived at the outset. The resulting general revision of the book was published as Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised on the ninety-fourth anniversary of the publication of the first edition, February 19, 1970. As the original author stated that more work had been put into the 1915 revision than into the three previous editions combined, so it is believed that more work went into the production of the 1970 edition of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised than into all six editions brought out previously.
An additional key figure in guiding the authorship affairs of the book since that time, particularly in their commercial aspect, was John Robert Redgrave, a great-grandson of the original author and the business representative of the Robert’s Rules Association, which replaced the first trust after the death of General Robert’s last surviving child.
Consistent with the earlier practice of publishing partial revisions containing in-page changes within the same pagination, a 1981 edition prepared by Henry M. Robert III and William J. Evans made a number of clarifications throughout the work. These changes were the result of experience in using the book in the eleven-year period following the 1970 revision. Some of the more important areas of clarification related to the Previous Question, the motion to Lay on the Table, the nature of a board as a form of assembly, the rule prohibiting interruption of actual voting, and the rules governing amendment at the expiration of the allotted time under different kinds of orders limiting debate or setting a time for voting. The 1981 edition was issued additionally in paperback format by Scott, Foresman and Company in 1984. This was the first time that a current edition of the complete manual had been offered in paperback.
In 1990, the same process was carried further with the issuance of a ninth edition of the work, again authored by Henry M. Robert III and William J. Evans, with Daniel H. Honemann, also a Baltimore attorney, then joining to assist them. Under new technology applied to that edition, however, a complete resetting of the book became for the first time an easy matter. This fact permitted a greater variety of changes and the incorporation of more additional material than would otherwise have been feasible. Two of the most significant of the revisions were the reinsertion, in improved form, of a subsection on hints to inexperienced presiding officers found in earlier editions, and a new treatment of some standard principles of interpretation of bylaws and other documents.
The tenth edition was published as the Millennium Edition of the year 2000. It was the work of four coauthors, with Henry M. Robert III, William J. Evans, and Daniel H. Honemann joined by Thomas J. Balch, a member of the Illinois bar residing in Virginia. A listing of the more important areas of revision in the 2000 edition appears in its preface. Among them were clarification of the role of “established custom” in relation to written rules, and greater specification of the cases in which an action is null and void so that a Point of Order that would otherwise be untimely may be raised and, correlatively, those circumstances in which the rules may not be suspended.
The eleventh edition was published in 2011. With the passing of William Evans, that edition was the work of Henry M. Robert III, Daniel H. Honemann, and Thomas J. Balch, joined by Daniel E. Seabold, a professor of mathematics at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, and Shmuel Gerber, who was at that time the chief copy editor for the weekly print edition of the Five Towns Jewish Times, a New York–area newspaper. Among its revisions were expanded treatments of electronic meetings and disciplinary proceedings, a new subsection on challenging the announced result of elections, and permitting notice to be sent by e-mail to members who consent.
This Twelfth Edition responds anew to the ever continuing need for further refinement of interpretation and for answering newly arising questions. As the Twelfth Edition was nearing completion, the authorship team lost the grandson of the original author: Henry M. Robert III, who had been intimately associated with the work for six decades, died at the age of 98 in January 2019.
All editions of the work issued after the death of the original author have thus been prepared by persons who either knew and worked with him or are connected to such persons in a direct continuity of professional association.
The crux of Robert’s Rules of Order’s initial contribution was in making it possible for assemblies and societies to free themselves from confusion and dispute over rules governing the use of the different motions of parliamentary law. In this respect the book filled the need that the author accurately stated in the quotation from his preface found on page xli of this Introduction.
In basing his rules on the practice of the U.S. House of Representatives in the manner already described, Robert stated that this practice—except where obviously unsuited to ordinary societies—had come to determine the actual common parliamentary law of the country, just as the practice of the House of Commons had done in England. Within any assembly or organization, however, it was his idea that the authority of his rules should rest on formal adoption of his manual by the particular body. But the book was soon cited increasingly as an authority apart from individual adoption—in such a manner as to constitute acknowledgment of its rules as parliamentary law itself. Thus Robert—by offering a codification of the rules and practices of the House of Representatives adapted to ordinary societies—gave formal direction to a movement toward establishing a more complete common parliamentary law, built upon congressional practice. In this way, Robert had a central role in bringing the parliamentary law of the United States to a stability and a stage of development that led former House parliamentarian Clarence Cannon to describe it as a “system of procedure adapted to the wants of deliberative assemblies generally and which, though variously interpreted in minor details by different writers, is now in the main standardized and authoritatively established.”11
In an often quoted statement, the original author said: “The great lesson for democracies to learn is for the majority to give to the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out, until they can secure its repeal.”12 But this same man, as he headed many engineering boards in the later phases of his professional career, became known for guiding them to produce reports that were unanimously concurred in by the board members. His record as a leader in civic, social-service, and church activities was similar. He was loath to settle for less.
This was not the contradiction that it may at first seem. Robert was surely aware of the early evolutionary development of parliamentary procedure in the English House of Lords resulting in a movement from “consensus,” in its original sense of unanimous agreement, toward a decision by majority vote as we know it today. This evolution came about from a recognition that a requirement of unanimity or near unanimity can become a form of tyranny in itself. In an assembly that tries to make such a requirement the norm, a variety of misguided feelings—reluctance to be seen as opposing the leadership, a notion that causing controversy will be frowned upon, fear of seeming an obstacle to unity—can easily lead to decisions being taken with a pseudoconsensus which in reality implies elements of default, which satisfies no one, and for which no one really assumes responsibility. Furthermore, what is apparently taken to be the sense of the meeting may well be little more than a “least common denominator” of such generality as to contribute little to the solution of the practical problem involved, thereby leaving such matters to officers or staff or the meeting’s organizers to work out according to their own intentions. Robert saw, on the other hand, that the evolution of majority vote in tandem with lucid and clarifying debate—resulting in a decision representing the view of the deliberate majority—far more clearly ferrets out and demonstrates the will of an assembly. It is through the application of genuine persuasion and parliamentary technique that General Robert was able to achieve decisions in meetings he led which were so free of divisiveness within the group.
1. In Sparta during that period, the ephors were a board of five “overseers” elected annually who were the top governing officials in the city.
2. Thomas Jefferson, preface to A Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States (1801; reprint, Old Saybrook, Conn.: Applewood Books, 1993), p. xv.
3. Jefferson, Manual, pp. xiii, xiv.
4. Ibid., p. xiv.
5. Ibid.
6. Luther Cushing, Manual of Parliamentary Practice: Rules of Proceeding and Debate in Deliberative Assemblies, 7th ed. (Boston: Taggard & Thompson, 1847), p. 4.
7. Named by his parents after Henry Martyn (1781–1812), English Anglican missionary to India who translated extensive portions of the Bible into Eastern languages, and perished from the rigors of his missionary efforts. Martyn’s journals and letters were published posthumously under the editorship of Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873), noted Anglican bishop, in 1837, the year Henry Robert was born.
8. Henry Martyn Robert, notes for a lecture in Cincinnati, c. 1916, in Henry M. Robert Papers, Library of Congress. Further quotations of remarks by General Robert are from the same source, except as noted.
9. That is, which motions can be made when which others are pending (see 5:8–13).
10. Henry M. Robert, preface to Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies, 1st ed. (Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Company, 1876), p. 3, carried with but slight variation in several succeeding editions (emphasis added).
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1958 ed., s.v. “Rules of Order.”
12. Henry M. Robert, Parliamentary Law (1923; reprint, New York: Irvington Publications, 1975), p. 4.