Winner of the Society for History in the Federal Government's
George Pendleton Prize for 2013 The United States Senate has fallen
on hard times. Once known as the greatest deliberative body in the
world, it now has a reputation as a partisan, dysfunctional
chamber. What happened to the house that forged American history's
great compromises? In this groundbreaking work, a distinguished
journalist and an eminent historian provide an insider's history of
the United States Senate. Richard A. Baker, historian emeritus of
the Senate, and the late Neil MacNeil, former chief congressional
correspondent for Time magazine, integrate nearly a century of
combined experience on Capitol Hill with deep research and
state-of-the-art scholarship. They explore the Senate's historical
evolution with one eye on persistent structural pressures and the
other on recent transformations. Here, for example, are the
Senate's struggles with the presidency-from George Washington's
first, disastrous visit to the chamber on August 22, 1789, through
now-forgotten conflicts with Presidents Garfield and Cleveland, to
current war powers disputes. The authors also explore the Senate's
potent investigative power, and show how it began with an inquiry
into John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. It took flight
with committees on the conduct of the Civil War, Reconstruction,
and World War II; and it gained a high profile with Joseph
McCarthy's rampage against communism, Estes Kefauver's
organized-crime hearings (the first to be broadcast), and its
Watergate investigation. Within the book are surprises as well. For
example, the office of majority leader first acquired real power in
1952-not with Lyndon Johnson, but with Republican Robert Taft.
Johnson accelerated the trend, tampering with the sacred principle
of seniority in order to control issues such as committee
assignments. Rampant filibustering, the authors find, was the
ironic result of the passage of 1960s civil rights legislation. No
longer stigmatized as a white-supremacist tool, its use became
routine, especially as the Senate became more partisan in the
1970s. Thoughtful and incisive, The American Senate: An Insider's
History transforms our understanding of Congress's upper house.
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