The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History: Volume I and II

health and illness

For much of American history, matters of disease prevention and health promotion were neither the concerns of the national government nor matters of political discourse. One of the critical tropes of American political history is the evolving sense of government authority and responsibility at the local, state, and federal levels for protecting society from disease and promoting individual and community health in the context of an increasingly pluralistic society. Government interventions in different eras have included quarantining the sick, conducting medical inspections of immigrants, sterilizing those defined as mentally defective, providing the public clean water and air, regulating the contents of food and drugs, seeking cures and therapies for disease through medical research and epidemiology, creating institutions for the care of the ill, and preventing disease through inoculation and education. Politicians rarely spoke of such matters until the early years of the Progressive Era, when the pressures of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration threatened to undermine the health and vitality of American citizens and stymie local economic development. In the decades to come, and especially following World War II, battling disease and improving the publics health and access to medical care increasingly became federal priorities and the stuff of national political debate.

What Makes People Sick?

Governments have long acted to protect their communities from foreign diseases. Regulations in medieval Venice required returning seamen who were ill to remain isolated from their neighbors for 40 days. The Italian word for 40, quarentenaria, was the origin of the word quarantine, the practice of separating the ill from the well for a specified time. In eighteenth-century North America, each colony had quarantine procedures that became state statutes after the American Revolution.

In the eighteenth century, aside from quarantine enforcement and local regulations designed to promote public hygiene, government officials could offer physicians little assistance. A 1744 New York City ordinance stated that “the health of the Inhabitants of any City Does in Great measure Depend upon the Purity of the Air of that City and that when the air of that City is by Noisome smells Corrupted, Distempers of many kinds are thereby Occasioned.” The ordinance reflects physicians’ beliefs that disease resulted from effluvia or miasmas, noxious gases arising from decaying organic matter. In the mid-nineteenth century, sanitarians would argue that filth caused disease, leaving public sanitation the best form of prevention. In the 1880s, Germany’s Robert Koch and France’s Louis Pasteur demonstrated that specific diseases were not simply the result of filth but were caused by specific microorganisms, or germs that invaded the body.

Disease and Therapy in Colonial America

Long before most physicians accepted germ theory, however, many understood that contact with a disease, if not fatal, often rewarded victims with immunity. Inducing smallpox immunity via inoculation by placing some diseased matter under the skin was likely taught to the Puritans in the seventeenth century by African slaves. Some thought the procedure the practice of the devil because the slaves were heathens, but others, including the influential minister Cotton Mather, believed in its efficacy and inoculated his family members. Such injections were not without their dangers, because an inoculated individual, even if immune, could still pass smallpox to another who was uninoculated. By 1760, laws regulated the practice and provided for a minimum quarantine period for those inoculated.

Colonial Americans also sought to protect patients from irresponsible medical practitioners. In 1736 the Virginia legislature enacted a law specifying fees for medical services. University-trained physicians could charge more than apprentice-trained doctors. Physicians’ bills had to specify what drugs they had prescribed. However, the measure lapsed after two years and was never repassed. True regulation began in New York in the 1750s. By 1760 New York’s Provincial Assembly passed the first colonial medical licensure law for New York City, requiring that applicants for a medical license be examined by government officials assisted by respected physicians. Still, quacks and charlatans were ubiquitous.

Government Power in Support of Public Health

Under the U.S. Constitution the new government possessed powers to “promote the general Welfare,” powers hardly ever invoked in matters of health and disease. Seamen’s health was the exception. Merchant seamen, often without families or permanent abodes, created a burden on public hospitals where they existed and aroused public sympathies. On July 16, 1798, Congress passed and President John Adams signed a bill establishing the United States Marine Hospital Service (USMHS, renamed the U.S. Public Health Service in 1912), a uniformed service for “the temporary relief and maintenance of sick or disabled seamen in the hospitals or other proper institutions … in ports where no such institutions exist….” The first hospital built with Marine Hospital funds was in Boston. Soon, America’s westward expansion prompted the building of hospitals near rivers in ports such as New Orleans, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Louisville. In these hospitals all the surgeons, stewards, matrons, and nurses were political appointees.

In the nineteenth century, state and local governments and private voluntary organizations protected community health with limited funding. Most well-off individuals loathed spending money on the health of strangers, especially those who were nonwhite or from other countries. However, two great epidemic diseases, yellow fever and Asiatic cholera, demanded a cohesive public response. In the South, yellow fever epidemics in the 1850s aroused state legislatures to use their quarantine regulations to keep ships with sick passengers or crew out of their ports. The wealthy could temporarily flee stricken cities, but yellow fever was bad for business. There were passionate political debates over how to keep cities fit for investment and trade. Because of yellow fever, Louisiana became the first state with a permanent board of health. After 1900, when Dr. Walter Reed and his U.S. Army Commission in Havana, Cuba, discovered that yellow fever was spread by a mosquito vector, states funded mosquito control.

In northern cities, Asiatic cholera and poor immigrants, especially the Irish, often arrived simultaneously. In 1832, 1849, and 1866, major cholera epidemics swept the East Coast of the United States. Nativists blamed the immorality and ignorance of Irish Catholic newcomers for the cholera epidemic of 1832. In New York, a Special Medical Council was formed by the politically appointed Board of Health and manned by seven of the city’s leading physicians. However, when the epidemic receded in the autumn, the Board of Health regressed into its apathetic state. When New York clergy petitioned President Andrew Jackson to appoint a day of national fasting, prayer, and humiliation to mark the devastation of the epidemic, he refused, affirming his belief in the efficacy of prayer but citing the separation of church and state. Not until 1866 did New York finally launch a permanent Municipal Board of Health removed from the choke hold of politicians and given over to physicians. New York gradually improved urban sanitation and hygiene, the price of industrialization and population congestion.

After the Civil War, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, popularly known as the Freed-men’s Bureau, offered medical attention and constructed hospitals to serve newly emancipated black slaves and displaced whites. By 1872 racism and corruption within the bureau had undermined these efforts. Medical research did not become a routine federal endeavor until 1887, when Surgeon General John Hamilton opened the Hygienic Laboratory in one room of the Marine Hospital on Staten Island. There, director Dr. Joseph Kinyoun studied cholera, yellow fever, and the bacterial content of the waters in New York Bay. In 1891 the laboratory moved to Washington, evolving into the National Institutes of Health under the Public Health Service in the next century.

Doctors at the Gate: Immigration, Industrialization,
and Disease Prevention in Progressive America

When the federal government assumed responsibility for immigration in 1891, USMHS physicians examined all newcomers at depots such as New York’s Ellis Island. Those deemed physically or mentally unfit to support themselves were not admitted. In San Francisco Bay, a depot on Angel Island was the entrance for many Chinese and Japanese arrivals as well as some Europeans, all of whom also underwent physician inspection. An 1893 law gradually transferred quarantine authority from state to federal officials. At Ellis, there were two hospitals to treat newcomers, one a contagious disease facility. Immigrants who recovered were eventually allowed to leave the island and enter the country.

These safeguards proved insufficient for immigrations critics. Nativists, including many eugenicists seeking to improve human stock by encouraging some individuals to procreate while discouraging others, advocated the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and its highly restrictive quota system. A broader eugenical concern about the number of children born to those defined as mentally defective, especially retarded persons, criminals, and the insane, resulted in passage of state laws permitting involuntary sterilization of institutionalized persons. These laws were found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), and many remained in force until the late twentieth century.

In unhealthy, congested cities, immigrant workers were felled by such infectious diseases as tuberculosis. Illnesses and injuries from unsafe working conditions abounded. Progressive reformer Dr. Alice Hamilton investigated conditions in tenements and factories where lead in paints and phosphorus on matches were poisoning workers and their families. In public schools, the children of the poor received health education and sometimes even health care, including minor surgeries. Often only labor union agitation or tragedies, such as the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, resulted in state legislation improving health and safety. At the federal level, the Food and Drug Act of 1906 defined food adulteration and the misbranding of products and regulated the interstate shipment of food, penalizing violators. The act was superseded in 1938 by the stricter Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act.

Government intervention was at times tainted by racism and ethnocentrism. In 1900 several cases of bubonic plague were identified in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Local citizens blamed immigrants for their unsanitary living conditions. The government response smacked of anti-Chinese bias, including San Francisco’s imposition of quarantine on all Asian residents of Chinatown but not Caucasians and, at the suggestion of USMHS officials, the state’s forced inoculation of Asians with an experimental serum. The courts offered relief, lifting the quarantine under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Federal Power, Prejudice, and the Public Health

When they had nowhere else to go for assistance, urban immigrants often turned to political machines, such as the New York Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall. Tammany, dominated by Irish political bosses, pushed for municipal hospitals and helped individuals gain access to physicians or hospital admission in exchange for votes. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal sounded urban bossism’s death knell. Government agencies began to offer health services once obtainable only as political patronage, increasing the federal role in health care. The American Medical Association (AMA), founded in 1847, continued its long-standing opposition to government involvement in such matters. However, the Farm Security Administration’s rural health programs provided more than a million migrant workers and some 650,000 others in rural America with medical care. Republicans condemned it as “socialized medicine.”

The 1930s was also the time when the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to treat syphilis in African American communities of the South had to be abandoned because of the economic pressures of the Depression. Instead, in 1932, the PHS, in collaboration with the Tuskegee Institute, embarked on an investigation of untreated syphilis involving hundreds of Alabama blacks that lasted until 1972, long after the discovery that syphilis could be treated with penicillin and long after any medically useful results had been produced. The episode remains synonymous with American medical racism.

A more benign episode of federal investigation and experimentation was the PHS pellagra study under federal physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger, who established that pellagra was a dietary disease. By the 1930s, researchers identified niacin as the missing element in pellagrins’ diets. Bread and dairy products were enriched with niacin by presidential order during the war and by state law afterwards.

Federal Aid Improves Health Care in Postwar America

Following World War II, federal funds and regulation had a major impact on research and the provision of health care. The Hospital Survey and Construction Act of 1946 (Hill-Burton Act) funded hospital construction in underserved communities, largely rural and suburban, creating a proportion of 4.5 hospital beds per 1,000 individuals. Prior to the war, Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, had recommended $15 million for medical research to investigate the therapeutic value of penicillin, the development of insect repellents and insecticides, and the use of serum albumin as a blood all—substitute valuable in wartime. His 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, pressed for more funding in science and medicine to establish the National Science Foundation and energize agencies such as the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health. Extramural federal funding supported research at medical schools and universities.

Soon a vast federal health bureaucracy developed. In 1953 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created, redesignated the Department of Health and Human Services in 1979. It oversees the Public Health Service, which itself has 42 divisions, including NIH for medical research, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implement public health measures, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which battle the spread of disease.

Health care became more accessible when President Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid legislation in 1966 to assist elderly and poor citizens, respectively, with medical bills driven higher by an increasing array of drugs and sophisticated medical technologies. However, along with these programs came red tape and regulations that contributed to the escalating cost of medical care.

The Politics of Health Care in the Twenty-First Century

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, issues of health and illness occupied center stage in American politics. Immigration amplified demands for political action in the name of public health. Concern about swine flu crossing the Mexican border increased demand for government expenditures to develop new influenza vaccines. Data collected by the New York City Board of Health tracing spikes in drug resistant tuberculosis to migrants from China and Mexico raised concern about the adequacy of federal health restrictions and immigration procedures. Health care for racial and ethnic minorities and the native-born poor remained inadequate. State governments increasingly offered free DPT vaccinations to children whose parents could not afford them and provided other health care services, as well.

The HIV-AIDS crisis occasioned virulent debates over cultural values but also increased levels of federal funding for research on this disease as well as on cancer, heart disease, and obesity. The federal genome project redefined the future of medical research, stimulating the search for the genetic origins of various diseases. Debates over the morality of stem cell research divided conservatives, especially those on the Christian Right, from their opponents on the liberal left.

Issues of health and disease have long been debated in the political arena. Until the twentieth century, partisan conflict over such matters was largely state and local, but the expanded use of federal power in the twentieth century allowed some Americans to argue that promoting “the general Welfare” should include battling disease, promoting preventive public health measures, and perhaps providing health insurance to every American. The degree of responsibility the federal government ought to assume to conquer disease and in defense of the publics health has become a political perennial.

See also cities and politics; nativism.

homosexuality

Although the modern concept of “homosexuality” did not emerge until the late nineteenth century, characteristics associated with this category—same-sex desire, same-sex sexual acts, and nonconformist gender performance—have been contested within American political culture since the colonial period in two critical ways. The first involves political struggles over policy, including the legality of same-sex sexual acts, and, by the latter half of the twentieth century, civil rights protections for those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered. Second, homosexuality has served a powerful function within American political discourse. Especially in the arena of electoral politics, sodomy and homosexuality have functioned as rhetorical markers of weakness and subversion to social order and American values.

The Politics of Sodomy in Early America

In the seventeenth century, all American colonies adopted sodomy—or “buggery”—laws that prohibited non-procreative sexual acts between men, as well as between men and women and between men and animals. However, not all forms of nonprocreative sex met with the same level of condemnation or prohibition; in New England, for example, governmental and ministerial officials characterized such sexual acts between men as more sinful and socially dangerous than those committed between men and women. Although religious authorities also condemned sex between women, the crime of sodomy typically required evidence of penetration, so such acts were rarely prosecuted in colonial courts (the sodomy code of the New Haven Colony proved exceptional in its explicit prohibition of sex between women). Colonies imposed a range of punishments for sodomy, from the imposition of fines to execution. However, sodomy laws were unevenly enforced, and severe forms of punishment were relatively rare; historical evidence suggests that American colonists responded to sodomy in more pragmatic ways, carefully weighing their religious opprobrium against the social disruption of legal prosecution.

This disinclination to prosecute sodomy, even more pronounced in the eighteenth century, did not evince true tolerance, however. Indeed, colonial authorities interpreted evidence of male same-sex acts and other forms of sexual “deviance” as grave threats to social and political order. In 1642 Plymouth governor William Bradford ascribed an outbreak of “sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name)” to the arrival of migrants to New England who did not share the Puritan goal of establishing a shining and moral “city on the hill.” The linking of sodomy to political subversion became more common in the 1700s when the “sodomite”—a male person who desired sex with other men—emerged as a category of personhood in the transatlantic world. In 1726, for example, a Boston newspaper, reporting on the raids of a number of “sodomitical clubs” in London, linked sodomy to the dangers of a growing and threatening urban commercialism; sodomites and financiers alike conducted secretive and illegal deals that threatened social stability. Sodomy and commercial exchange also evinced European dissoluteness and corruption, as did Freemasonry. Anti-Masonic Massachusetts satirists used phallic homoerotic imagery to recast ostensibly civic-minded Masonic fraternal rituals as corrupt and emasculating. Such aspersions were intended to counter the political prominence of Freemasons in the colony.

This predilection for defining both the practice of sodomy and effeminate gender performance as distinctly foreign—as violating the foundations of American character—continued into the Revolutionary and early national eras. An ascendant Enlightenment ethos was manifested in the revocation of capital punishment for sodomy, but it also produced a model of white American national manhood that emphasized independence and self-governance, a hallmark of which was the control of sexual desire and intensified stigmatization of nonmarital sexual practices. This prescriptive model, espoused by northern elites, took as a foil the stereotype of the decadent and corrupt European “fop,” a figure associated with sexual profligacy if not always sodomy. The sodomitical qualities of this figure grew more explicit in the middle of the nineteenth century when American newspapers began to report on groups of urban men who engaged in same-sex relations. The first such known report, appearing in the New York paper The Whip in 1842, attributed the appearance of a sodomitical subculture to foreign influences and condemned this development as antithetical to the purity of the young American nation.

Homosexuality and Political Subversion

By the end of the nineteenth century, the figure of the sodomite had been replaced by the “homosexual,” a modern category defined by an inversion of gender role and by same-sex desire. The homosexual—alternatively referred to as someone of the “third sex” or an “invert”—emerged from sexology, a new field of medical science that had originated in Europe. Yet, antecedents to this modern figure can be found in nineteenth-century American political culture. Critics of those who advocated radical reforms of the American political system, such as abolitionism and woman suffrage, had been pilloried as improperly gendered. The pejorative name “Miss Nancy” was applied to male abolitionists and male prostitutes alike, for example. Proponents of civil service reform and of third-party movements acquired such descriptors as “third sex” and “political hermaphrodite.” This conflation of sexual and political subversion is evinced by the first published American analysis of homosexuality, neurologist Edward Spitzka’s “A Historical Case of Sexual Perversion” (1881), which retroactively diagnosed Lord Cornbury the colonial governor of New York and New Jersey who was alleged to have dressed as a woman, as sexually inverted, anathema to the American ethos of masculine individualism, and as a threat to national strength.

The negative political meanings attached to homosexuality grew more vociferous in the twentieth century, as homosexual men and women were pathologized by medical professionals and further criminalized within the law. In the 1920s, critics used a stigmatizing psychological model of homosexuality to impugn politically active “New Women” who had formed lifelong intimate relationships with other women—including the leading social reformer Jane Addams—as unnatural and perverted “short-haired women.” During World War II, homosexuality functioned as grounds for exclusion or discharge from military service; more than 10,000 lesbians and gay men were discharged for “undesirable habits or traits of character” between 1941 and 1945. The policing and persecution of homosexuality intensified after the war. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which excluded those deemed to be homosexual from federal employment on the grounds that they represented a threat to national security. An array of American thinkers and politicians, including liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., conflated homosexuality and communism, interpreting both as threats to a masculinist tradition of American pragmatic centrism. Zealous cold warriors, including Senator Joseph McCarthy, viewed both homosexuality and communism as anti-American and embarked on a systematic effort to root out gay men and women from the civil service and to smear their political opponents on the left. The resulting “lavender scare” ruined careers and lives and undermined the 1952 presidential candidacy of Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

Homosexual Rights and Conservative Backlash

The postwar period also saw the rise of the modern American homosexual rights movement, beginning with the founding of homophile organizations in the postwar years. Although the first to form a sustained movement, homophile leaders drew on an older leftist political discourse that resisted a dominant pejorative American conception of same-sex desire. An array of late-nineteenth-century intellectuals and bohemians, influenced by the poet Walt Whitman’s vision of homo-erotic democratic “adhesiveness” and the sex radicalism of European freethinkers like Edward Carpenter, had maintained that same-sex desire might be directed toward the civic good. This position was argued most forcefully by American anarchists, including Leonard Abbott and Emma Goldman, who viewed state efforts to regulate homosexuality as a violation of individual freedom and an unjust expression of state power. Early homophile leaders—notably, Harry Hay, who founded the Matta-chine Society in 1950—spoke for this tradition within the Communist Party in the 1930s. Although American Communists ultimately proved hostile to homosexuality, Hay and others brought the organizational skills and political commitments developed within the Communist Party to the cause of “homosexual liberation.”

Influenced by the civil rights movement, Hay and his homophile comrades conceptualized homosexuals as a minority group “imprisoned within a dominant culture.” The 1950s saw the formation of similar groups, including the first lesbian political organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955. Although homophile activists struggled over organizational strategies, and many sought to distance themselves from the early leaders’ Communist roots, the movement gained strength and engaged in more militant forms of activism by the 1960s. In 1964 members of the East Coast Homophile Organizations coalition staged a demonstration in New York City to protest military policy toward homosexuals. In 1965 the Washington, D.C., Mattachine chapter, led by Frank Kameny, a scientist who had been fired from his government post during the lavender scare, picketed the White House, Pentagon, and Civil Service Commission to protest antigay employment practices.

By the late 1960s, members of the growing homophile movement allied themselves with black power and other radical liberation movements as well as with New Left student and anti-Vietnam War efforts. This radicalization found expression in new slogans like “Gay Power” as well as in more confrontational forms of protest, especially in relation to police harassment in burgeoning urban gay enclaves like New York City’s Greenwich Village and the Tenderloin and Castro neighborhoods of San Francisco. Two such dramatic and spontaneous acts of rebellion catalyzed a more radical movement: the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco, led by trans-gender women and gay hustlers, and the more famous 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York City. These pivotal events set the stage for a dizzying proliferation of gay and lesbian activism, including the 1969 founding of the Gay Liberation Front, inspired by third-world liberation movements, and the lesbian feminist groups Radicalesbians (1970) and Salsa Soul Sisters (1974), which protested both the misogyny of gay male activists and the antilesbian positions of the National Organization for Women.

The mid-1970s saw two key developments in the politics of homosexuality. First, a reform-oriented model of gay activism began to dominate the movement, finding institutional expression in such organizations as the National Gay Task Force (founded in 1973); these organizations achieved significant successes in the legal arena, including the repeal of state sodomy statutes and the passage of antidiscrimination legislation at the local level. Reformist efforts also led to the election of gay and lesbian candidates, notably Harvey Milk as San Francisco city supervisor in 1977. However, the successes of the gay rights movement also engendered a political backlash led by religious conservatives who, calling on the established trope of homosexuality as subversive to American values, waged a vociferous and well-funded battle against “the gay agenda.” In 1977 religious singer and orange juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant, arguing that homosexuality posed a threat to American children and families, led an effort to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. Her campaign found significant national support, especially among evangelicals, and laid the foundation for the antigay activism of New Right organizations like the Moral Majority, established by Jerry Falwell in 1979.

With the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, culture warriors like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson attained considerable influence in the Republican Party, which identified homosexuality as an effective wedge issue in state and national elections. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration all but ignored the suffering and devastation of the new AIDS epidemic, some gay activists turned to a more confrontational and performative mode of activism, exemplified by ACT UP (the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), which charged that federal neglect amounted to complicity in the suffering and deaths of those afflicted with AIDS. With the availability of medications that mitigated the effects of HIV (at least for those with access to health care) in the 1990s, the political struggle over gay rights shifted to issues of marriage and military service. Although many had viewed the presidential election of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 as a favorable development for the gay rights movement, the failure of the administration to implement a nondiscriminatory military service policy and Clinton’s endorsement of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages, attested to the continued political opposition to the aims of the movement.

The politics of marriage rights have remained especially contentious into the twenty-first century; by 2008, judicial gains had been countered by restrictive legislation and ballot referenda at the state level. That opponents of same-sex marriage framed their position as “defending” a foundational social institution points to the resilience of an understanding of homosexuality as threatening to social order.

See also gender and sexuality.

House of Representatives

The House of Representatives is often considered to be Americas most democratic institution. Since the founding of the American government in 1789, the House has been populated by a more diverse range of individuals than the Senate or the White House. Legislators have been required to face reelection every two years. To win election to the House, the Constitution requires only that a candidate be a minimum of 25 years of age and a U.S. citizen for 7 years. Candidates also have to reside in their district. The founders decided that membership in the House would be proportionate to the size of the population so that the delegations from each state corresponded, albeit imperfectly, to demographic realities. The sheer number of members has required negotiation and compromise. In this respect, the House lived up to George Masons aspiration that it would be the “grand depository of the democratic principle of the government.”

The Constitution bestowed three important responsibilities on the House: the power over revenue and spending, the power to impeach an elected official, and the power to elect the president if the Electoral College was deadlocked. This authority reflected how highly the nation’s founders valued the House as an antidote to the British monarchy.

There are four different eras in the history of the House of Representatives, each defined by the procedural framework—the informal and formal rules—through which legislators operated.

The Founding Period

The first three decades of the House were the founding period, during which legislators established the basic mechanisms through which decision making would take place.

In the founding period, legislators developed the committee system and party organizations, as well as procedures that enabled individual legislators to influence decision making from the floor. Initially, the relative importance of each procedure remained unclear. Most legislation would be worked out on the floor and then given to a committee that was temporarily convened to deal with the issue. But some committees became regular components of the House, such as the Rules Committee (created in 1789), which made decisions about scheduling legislation and about the rules through which bills would be debated. Procedural decisions had a big impact on the character of the House. In 1811, for example, an important rules change ensured that the House would become a majoritarian institution by allowing half of the chamber to end debate. This procedural change limited the potential for minority obstruction (in contrast to the Senate filibuster).

One of the most influential legislators in the founding period was Henry Clay of Kentucky. During his tenure as Speaker, Clay, first a Democratic-Republican and later a Whig, elevated the institutional status of the Speaker by using his power to keep members in line. While the speakership was the only position mentioned in the Constitution, its actual status in the House had remained unclear. When he became Speaker at the start of the congressional session in 1812, just after being elected to the House, Clay headed a coalition of war hawks who mounted pressure for military action against Great Britain. Clay also pushed for an expanded role of government in promoting the economy through public works, tariffs, and road construction. To achieve his objectives, Clay took responsibility for deciding which committees would deal with legislation, and he made appointments to key committees.

Even as legislators tried to determine how the House would function, they confronted a series of major challenges. In 1801, for example, the House had to decide a deadlocked presidential election after the electors cast an equal number of votes for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The vote went to Jefferson. In 1825 the House was required again to settle a presidential election when none of the candidates received a majority from the Electoral College. The House then chose John Quincy Adams to be the next president of the nation.

In the era, house majorities also voted for a significant expansion of the federal government. Through the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the House strengthened the authority of government to crack down on the political activity of aliens and to prosecute opponents of the Federalists. Although Democratic-Republicans such as Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania and Edward Livingston of New York derided the Alien and Sedition Acts as a violation of state and individual rights, Federalists pushed the bills through the House by narrow margins. Additional legislation strengthened the administrative capacity of government to conduct war, regulate banking and currency, and improve networks of internal communication. Pork barrel spending was central to financing the construction of roads, railroads, and canals. Tariffs protected industrial goods such as cotton and iron.

Even when not explicitly discussed, slavery was extremely influential throughout the founding period. When considering most issues—as wide ranging as direct taxation, territorial expansion, and diplomacy—legislators always weighed the potential impact of a decision on the slaveholding economy. This was not surprising. Between 1788 and 1850, according to the historian Robin Einhorn, a slaveholder served as Speaker 66 percent of the time and as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which controlled revenue and trade, 68 percent of the time.

The Party Period

Despite the fear that the founders expressed about the dangers of political parties and partisanship, a party system slowly took form. In the founding period, Federalists faced off against the Democratic-Republicans. Parties became even more important during the second era in the history of the House—the party period—which lasted from the 1830s to the 1900s. Even though the formal organization of parties remained tenuous before the Civil War, parties influenced House politics in a number of ways, as was evident from the large number of party-line roll call votes in this period. Partisan electorates and state legislators weighed heavily on the decision making of congressmen. Informal norms discouraged mavericks from challenging party leaders. Subsequent speakers followed Henry Clay’s precedent by making committee assignments on the basis of party loyalty in voting and sometimes punished those who defied them. Speakers controlled floor debate to protect their party. Party bosses relied on patronage to ensure that lower-ranking legislators remained loyal.

From the 1830s to the 1850s, Whigs competed against the Democrats. The Whigs supported national programs to promote economic growth, protective tariffs, the creation of a national bank, and moral reform. In contrast, Democrats championed presidential power, protection for southern slaveholders, territorial expansion, and local and state over federal power. Third parties, such as the Anti-Masons, the Liberty Party, and the Know-Nothings, formed to promote issues when neither the Whigs nor Democrats seemed responsive.

By the 1850s, the pull of section in the House became stronger than the pull of party. Each time that the federal government acquired a new territory, legislators fought over whether slavery should be allowed. The tension worsened with congressional passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). Whigs and Democrats divided along sectional lines. Although a coalition of northern Whigs, northern Democrats, and Free-Soilers had attempted to block the measure, southern Whigs helped remove the bill from committee. In May 1856, sectional tension became so severe that Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with his walking stick. Brooks was furious about a statement that Sumner, an opponent of slavery, had made about his uncle.

The Civil War of 1861-65 severed the nation. The secession of southern states and the departure of southern politicians were followed by brutal battles on the home front. Toward the end of the conflict, Congress responded to the crisis through legislation. In 1865 the House passed the Thirteenth Amendment (approved by the Senate the previous year), which abolished slavery within the United States. Throughout the war the Republican House remained active on a number of fronts in addition to slavery. For example, the House passed the Pacific Railway Act, created land-grant colleges, and enacted a national income tax. House Republicans also conducted investigations into how the Lincoln administration handled the war.

During Reconstruction, House Republicans pushed for an expanded role for the federal government to rebuild the nation and improve race relations, although the party divided between moderates and radicals over how far the policies should go. In 1866 the House passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed due process and equal treatment before the law to all Americans, and, in 1869, the House passed the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected the right of every male citizen to vote. Congress also created the Freedmen’s Bureau, which provided food, education, and other forms of assistance to freed African Americans. During Reconstruction a significant number of African Americans were elected to the House. President Andrew Johnson, who opposed most Reconstruction initiatives, attempted to capitalize on divisions among congressional Republicans. His efforts to split moderate and Radical Republicans, however, backfired. In February 1868, the House voted to impeach Johnson. Following a lengthy trial in the chamber, the Senate acquitted him by one vote. Support for Reconstruction diminished by the 1870s.

After Reconstruction the parties regained their strength. Republican legislators captured support in the northern industrial sector by promoting policies to expand national markets, preserve the gold standard, and provide generous Civil War pensions. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators retained their hold on the South by pushing farm assistance, inflationary monetary policies, free trade, and states’ rights. These years were competitive for the parties. Republicans tended to control the Senate and Democrats the House between 1875 and 1897. Majorities in both chambers were razor thin. Congress passed legislation in 1872 that required all elections for the House to be held the same day.

Parties were important because they offered platforms to members, but also because they provided some organizational coherence in an era of high turnover. According to Congressional Quarterly, 145 out of 243 members of the House were new in 1869.

Members of the House were at the forefront of efforts to expand the federal government beyond policies related to Reconstruction. Democratic House representative John Reagan of Texas, for example, headed attacks against the railroads throughout the 1870s. Reagan’s main goal was to protect the interests of farmers, whose distrust of national corporations he shared. He called on the House to impose regulations through legislation rather than rely on independent commissions. He feared that corporations would capture control of a regulatory commission and subvert agrarian interests. This was a widespread fear among southern Democrats. In 1876 Reagan used his seat on the House Commerce Committee to expose the activities of railroad magnates and build support for legislation. He introduced a bill that would prohibit pooling—where the railroads pooled their revenue so that no individual company would have an incentive to lower its charges and be able to undercut competition—and guarantee fair rates for shippers. Teaming up with the moderate Shelby Cullom of Illinois, Reagan won the support of southern and western legislators, who voted for his bill in 1885. Although the final legislation in 1887 created the Independent Commerce Commission rather than relying on legislative regulations, Reagan’s efforts had spearheaded one of the biggest expansions of federal power into the economy.

Toward the end of the party period, the Republican leadership in the House added procedural muscle to their influence. In 1890 Republican speaker Thomas Bracket Reed of Maine won support from his caucus for a rules change that allowed the majority party to block obstructive tactics of the minority. The most important was the “disappearing quorum,” whereby Democrats in the House had refused to answer roll calls even while present in order to prevent a quorum. Reed ended this practice by announcing that those physically present were in attendance. After becoming Speaker in 1903, Republican Joseph Cannon of Illinois further strengthened the office. He used his power to stifle progressive legislation and frustrate President Theodore Roosevelt.

However, just as legislative parties started to gain more organizational cohesion, the strength of parties as national political institutions weakened. While parties remained a crucial component of American political life, their influenced vastly diminished. Electoral reforms increased the prevalence of split-ticket voting and precluded many of the tactics that parties had traditionally used to influence voters. National and state civil service reforms, such as the Pendleton Act of 1883, sharply curtailed the parties’ ability to ensure loyalty through patronage. Moreover, both parties were forced to compete with organized interest groups, whose leaders promised they could deliver solid votes and ample campaign assistance. The partisan press disintegrated as a new medium arose, a system of professional journalists with an adversarial outlook who maintained weaker allegiances to elected officials. Americans did not vote as much, and electoral politics lost its salience with many citizens, who were more enthralled with amusement parks than with campaigns. Dramatic scandals in the Gilded Age that involved the parties had also spurred reforms that weakened the hold of parties. Partisan roll calls declined.

The high turnover in House membership on which parties had thrived diminished as rates of incumbency increased and legislators started to conceive of serving in the House as a full-time occupation. Seniority took hold as legislators obtained committee assignments by remaining in office for the longest amount of time rather than by displaying party loyalty. Committees themselves gained greater autonomy. Strong party leaders came under attack. In 1909 and 1910, a coalition of insurgent Republicans and Democrats who were unhappy about repeated failures in the legislative process—and about how Cannon had treated them—revolted against the Speaker. Representative George Norris of Nebraska led the attack for the Republicans, working closely with Victor Murdock and Edmund Madison of Kansas as well as John Nelson and Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin. Missouri’s Champ Clark and Alabama’s Oscar Underwood led the Democratic part of the team. The coalition removed the Speaker from the Rules Committee and ended his control over committee assignments. It also passed reforms that allowed chairs to bring bills directly to the floor if they were bottled up in the Rules Committee. Finally, legislators agreed to delegate more governance responsibilities to independent commissions. Further reforms in the 1910s facilitated this trend. In 1911, for instance, the Democratic caucus empowered the Ways and Means Committee to handle committee assignments, thereby taking this responsibility away from the Speaker. Promotions in the chamber revolved around seniority. Formal rules and informal norms discouraged younger members from challenging committee chairmen.

The Committee Period

The committee period constituted the next stage in the evolution of the House and lasted from the 1910s through the early 1970s. The committee chairs retained tight control over proceedings. Access to information was restricted to the chairs and a few select senior members. Most deliberations were closed to the public. Legislative negotiations were dominated by tight-knit policy communities composed of committee chairs, representatives from the executive branch and agencies, powerful interest groups, and policy experts. Committee chairs rarely spoke to the national media.

The committee period had several pillars beyond the sheer power and autonomy of chairmen. At the electoral level, states preserved outdated district lines that favored rural constituencies and failed to reflect the growth of urban and suburban populations. The campaign finance system required legislators to cultivate a handful of prominent families, corporations, and unions that were willing to make large contributions. As parties with strong ties to the electorate weakened, interest groups offered legislators a resource to deliver blocs of voters and money. Striving to be objective, the media generally did not adopt an adversarial stance toward the House leadership.

During the committee period, party caucuses refrained from removing committee members for party disloyalty or incompetence. The weak Democratic and Republican caucuses rarely met, and they avoided taking strong positions or imposing them on members. The most influential party leaders were successful because they deferred to committee chairs rather than dominating them.

The committee process did not take hold automatically. Even after the historic revolt against Speaker Cannon, party caucuses remained influential throughout most of the 1910s. During World War I, to the frustration of Republicans, President Woodrow Wilson operated through a partisan alliance with congressional Democrats. He depended on Ways and Means Chairman Claude Kitchen of North Carolina, a progressive who initially opposed American intervention, to move much of the wartime legislation through the House in exchange for reforms. Yet by the Great Depression, the committee system was in place.

By the advent of the New Deal, southern Democrats and the committee process came to be seen as inseparable. While some Northerners, such as New York’s Emanuel Celler, thrived in the committee process, Southerners claimed the greatest rewards in the House since they came from noncompetitive districts and thus retained their seats for longer periods of time. Southerners also constituted a disproportionate part of the Democratic Party. Southern Democrats held over 50 percent of the key committee chairs after the party regained control in 1933.

At the height of the New Deal, Congress responded to the Great Depression and often initiated policies before President Franklin D. Roosevelt did. House Democrats crafted legislation that preserved the alliance between Southerners and Northerners in the party who agreed on many areas of economic policy but disagreed on race relations and unionization. The House leadership included Speaker Henry Rainey of Illinois and Majority Leader Joseph Byrnes of Tennessee. Legislators such as Sam Ray-burn of Texas and David Lewis of Maryland were instrumental in passing New Deal legislation.

But the committee process became a subject of contention for New Deal liberals. President Roosevelt had taken the unusual step of campaigning against five conservative Democrats in the 1938 election. He was able to unseat only one of those Democrats: New York representative John O’Connor, chairman of the House Rules Committee. Republicans also scored major victories in 1938. Conservative Democrats replaced liberals and moderates in a number of southern districts. Following the election, tensions escalated between southern chairs and northern Democrats. Southerners were not opposed to the expansion of government in general, but they did oppose unionization in their region and civil rights protection for African Americans.

When northern liberals began to support these issues in the 1940s, the committee process in the House became a major obstacle to twentieth-century liberalism. Southern Democrats, allied with Republicans, could rely on procedures to influence the House. Besides procedural power, southern Democrats and Republicans formed a potent voting bloc on the floor of the House. They could also count on southern Democrats in the Senate to use the filibuster, as they did with an antilynching bill in 1937, to block any civil rights legislation that the House passed.

Throughout World War II and the cold war, the committee-period House continued to produce legislation that expanded government. During World War II, the House agreed to a vast expansion of the tax base as well as a withholding system that enabled the government to collect taxes directly from paychecks. A decade later, the House voted to fund scientific research, highway construction, and civil defense. The House Un-American Activities Committee, founded in 1939, was at the forefront of the congressional investigations of suspected Communists.

By the 1950s, there were enough proponents of civil rights to produce legislation in the House, even though southern power in the Senate remained formidable. House liberals became pivotal players as they continued to force senators to grapple publicly with racial issues many preferred to ignore. The 1960s offered another burst of government activity. Almost 90 years after the end of Reconstruction, the House passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Under the banner of the Great Society, the House passed legislation dealing with the environment, health care for the elderly, urban decay, and the War on Poverty.

A majority of Democrats and Republicans in the House also agreed to an expanded international role for the United States. During World War II and the cold war, the House supported a vast mobilization of resources and manpower in the effort to combat fascism and communism. But the Vietnam War broke that concensus apart. Although many members of the House voiced their doubts about intervention in 1964 and early 1965, they allowed President Lyndon Johnson to expand Americas involvement in Vietnam. The vote for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was unanimous. By the late 1960s, however, many Democrats and Republicans joined colleagues in the Senate to build pressure on President Richard Nixon for a gradual withdrawal.

Many liberals came to believe that success could only occur if northern legislators worked around the committee system. One of the foils of the 1960s House was Virginia’s Howard Smith. Elected in 1938, Smith had taken over the House Rules Committee in 1955 and used the power of his chairmanship to stifle liberal legislation.

As the federal government expanded, so too did the executive branch. Some observers believed this was the period of the “imperial presidency.” But many legislators felt differently. Congress continued to exert influence on national politics. In the creation of domestic and international programs, committee chairs retained a tight grip over the government. Wilbur Mills, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the Ways and Means Committee, caused enormous problems for President Johnson in 1968, when he forced the president to accept domestic spending cuts in exchange for higher taxes.

The Supreme Court had made a series of decisions between 1962 and 1964 that affected the composition of the House because they forced it and state legislatures to create voting districts with equal populations. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) the Court ruled that Georgia’s federal districting system was unconstitutional. Plaintiffs from Georgia’s district alleged that they were unjustly treated, since their population was three times as large as the population of the ninth, the smallest district in the state. The fifth district was the most underrepresented in the nation. The Court ruled 6 to 3 that populations in each congressional district must be roughly equal so that the vote of each citizen carried the same weight. In the short term, the decisions put conservative Democrats on notice. One of the earliest victims was Howard Smith. He lost in the 1966 primaries to a Democrat who was more popular in the suburbs but who became part of Smith’s district as a result of the “one man-one vote” Supreme Court rulings. In the long term, the Court decisions opened up the opportunity for Republicans to make gains in the South and end the region’s one-party monopoly.

Public hostility toward the House intensified in the 1960s, as did the frustration with all government institutions. Liberals denounced Congress for being too timid in its support for the Great Society and for allowing Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to fight the Vietnam War. At the same time, conservatives attacked the House for being inefficient and corrupt. Public interest reformers attacked Congress for failing to represent average citizens and stifling democratic participation. Although the Watergate scandal focused on the abuses of the presidency, reformers believed that Congress could only regain its stature by dismantling the committee process.

During the early 1970s, congressional reformers obtained support for procedures that aimed to weaken committee chairs. The reforms simultaneously centralized power by granting more decision-making authority to the party caucuses and decentralized power through the Subcommittee Bill of Rights in 1973. The House voted for reforms that constrained the power of the president in budgeting and war making. After the 1974 midterm elections, the “Watergate babies” (an influx of newly elected Democrats following Nixon’s resignation) deposed four powerful House committee chairs, further weakened the autonomy of committees, and opened more proceedings to the public.

As the committee period ended, the House became fractured and unstable. Freed from the dominance of committee chairs, individual legislators, specialized caucuses, subcommittees, and the congressional minority pursued their own electoral and ideological interests. Although committee chairs lost power, party leaders were not yet able to impose order on the House. For instance, legislators constantly amended committee bills after they reached the floor, in contrast to the previous period when such activity was rare. Several scandals also shook the House, including sexual scandals that brought down Democratic congressmen Wilbur Mills and Wayne Hays as well as the ABSCAM scandal in 1980, when legislators were videotaped accepting bribes. The House reprimanded its first member since the Civil War.

The Partisan Period

In the most recent period, elite partisanship took hold of the House. Although most Americans were not strongly partisan, party caucuses became more influential in the House in two ways. First, Democrats and Republicans became more homogenous ideologically. As the number of southern conservative Democrats diminished and moderates lost power in the Republican Party, Democrats moved to the left and Republicans to the right. Facing more cohesive membership, party leaders were more willing to use procedural tools that they had gained in the 1970s to expand their role. Between 1987 and 1989, for instance, Speaker James Wright of Texas intimidated members of his own party and manhandled Republicans. On one occasion, he extended the time for voting after Democrats could not find a sufficient number of members to vote for a tax package. Democrats used the extra time to round up more legislators outside the chamber. Younger Republicans such as Newt Gingrich of Georgia rejected the bias of older moderates who favored compromise. Gingrich publicly broke with President George H. W. Bush in 1990 who broke his campaign pledge by agreeing to a tax hike. When Republicans elected Gingrich Speaker after the GOP gained control of the House, he excluded Democrats from deliberations and enhanced the power of party leaders.

The new partisanship in the House differed from that of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century parties lacked strong centralized organization in the House but maintained deep roots in the electorate. But after the 1980s, political parties were organizationally strong within the House but lacked meaningful connections to the electorate. American voters thus witnessed a more partisan institution to which they did not feel connected. Instead of mechanisms of political participation, parties increasingly became fund-raising devices and organizational tools.

Partisan fighting was fierce in the partisan period, since neither Republicans nor Democrats were able to maintain solid control over Congress, and the leadership passed back and forth several times. In 1980 Democrats retained control of the House but Republicans gained control of the Senate until 1986. Republicans won both chambers of Congress in 1994, lost the Senate in 2001, and regained control of both chambers in the 2002 midterm elections. In 2006 Democrats regained control of both chambers. Although control of the House remained relatively stable after 1994, razor-thin margins during much of the 1990s fostered insecurity among those in power.

While the reforms of the 1970s had promised to make Congress the dominant branch of government, legislators were still working under tremendous constraints. There were multiple and competing centers of legislative power, with none achieving absolute dominance and none conducive to producing legislative compromise. Many reformers had hoped to ensure that no part of Congress developed the kind of singular strength that committee chairs had; the reformers succeeded in this respect. The proliferation and empowerment of subcommittees and specialized caucuses produced small fiefdoms that became obstacles to party leaders and committee chairs. Furthermore, new rules and norms encouraged mavericks and freshmen to take action when they felt an issue was being ignored by the party leadership. Every legislator from senior party leaders to lower-ranking representatives was subject to new ethics regulations and norms. Scandals brought down powerful leaders, including Speakers Wright, Gingrich, and Tom DeLay.

Public policy was a second constraint on legislators in the partisan period. Since the 1970s, the federal budget loomed large over every congressional decision. The tremendous increase in pre-committed spending, as well as sizable federal deficits and debt, meant there was less money for legislators who wanted to construct new types of government programs outside of national emergencies. By the 1980s and 1990s, almost half of the federal budget went to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. For most of these years, the federal government spent more than it took in in taxes. In an environment of fiscal constraint, it was hard to create new programs. The nature of the federal budget also made it difficult to dismantle programs.

When conservatives took power in the 1980s, culminating in the 1994 congressional elections, they discovered it was hard to alter most programs, except for federal taxation. Republicans could not touch items like Social Security without severe electoral consequences. This left conservatives with the unattractive option of cutting modestly priced programs like welfare that came with the high cost of antagonizing active interest groups or attacking programs important to their own supporters. Even after the 2000 election, with a staunchly conservative president in office, federal spending grew. The war on terrorism increased the size of government. Conservatives railed against Republicans by 2006, accusing the party of having accepted “big government.” In reality, however, cutting the size of the state was virtually impossible.

The news media constituted a third constraint on the power of representatives. In contrast to the committee period, the news media had a hostile relationship with elected officials. Trust and cooperation evaporated. The rise of adversarial journalism in the 1960s and 1970s had produced a new generation of reporters and editors determined to expose corruption. This outlook would continue to shape the print media as well as television. Cable television added to this volatile environment. Producers worked on exposes to attract large television audiences. Even though ownership became concentrated, the number of stations multiplied. Cable television created a 24-hour news cycle, which made controlling the flow of news more difficult since stories could go on the airwaves within seconds. Media organizations looked for shocking material to fill the airwaves and generate high ratings. In a period when most Americans distrusted government, scandals became a favorite topic. Legislators responded by honing their media skills. Some relied on C-SPAN, created in 1979, two years after the House authorized televised proceedings, to communicate directly to voters without the filter of reporters.

It was not just that the media had changed. Another challenge facing legislators in the partisan period was the fractious world of interest groups, think tanks, and political activists. While all these organizations were present throughout the twentieth century, their numbers grew after the 1960s. The expansion of federal regulations and domestic policies since the 1960s increased the incentive for them to lobby legislators. Moreover, campaign finance reforms of the 1970s required legislators to expand their base of financial support. Public interest groups also formed lobbying organizations. The number of think tanks proliferated. This hyper-competitive environment resulted in a situation in which legislators were constantly scrambling to secure their links to a greater number of interest groups, none of which was dominant.

Divided government through much of this era made it difficult for legislators who sought dramatic policy change. Although divided government did not prevent Congress from passing legislation, it no longer offered a hospitable climate for major innovations like the Great Society.

The Supreme Court and the president also remained strong. The Court continued to take an active stand on issues such as legislative redistricting and states’ rights. The presidency continued to remain a dominant institution, as when Ronald Reagan used his office to advance conservative aims. The War Powers Act seemed almost irrelevant when Reagan authorized military operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador without congressional approval. Presidents relied on international bodies to legitimate military action. While Congress responded with litigation, investigation, and legislation, the president usually had his way.

Despite all these obstacles, the House still passed significant legislation. In 1990, the House agreed to a deficit reduction plan that increased taxes and lowered spending. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress restructured airline security, put money into public health research, and created the Department of Homeland Security. Congress also created a prescription drug benefit for Medicare.

With all the uncertainties that legislators faced, a high rate of incumbency provided a form of personal security. The trend toward incumbency that started in the late nineteenth century never abated. While the Supreme Court had forced the elimination of congressional districts with unequal populations, it never tackled political gerrymandering. As a result, state legislatures were able to draw district lines to protect incumbents. After 1949, the majority of elections brought only 80 new members to the House. Campaign finance rules, moreover, favored those who already held office, since they could raise large sums of money quickly and receive free media exposure. Citizens also tended to like their representatives, even though they disliked Congress as an institution.

As George Mason hoped, the House has energized and preserved America’s democratic aspirations. Commentators like to joke that legislation resembles sausage in that the taste may be good, but people do not want to see how the product was made. Yet the messiness and complexity of deliberations in the House, which are often criticized, reflect tensions and divisions that exist in the country. The House has struggled to forge compromises in response to the nation’s biggest challenges. Sometimes the institution has failed in this task, but, at other times, the House has sent the Senate legislation that ended up transforming America. At the same time, the history of the House reminds us of some of democracy’s biggest weaknesses, including corruption, destructive partisanship, and the lack of accountability on the part of elected officials.

See also Senate; state government.