530 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896
The House of Representatives, on the other hand,
was one of the most disorderly and inefficient legislative
bodies in the world. “As I make my notes,” a reporter
wrote in 1882 while sitting in the House gallery,I see a dozen men reading newspapers with their
feet on their desks.... “Pig Iron” Kelley of
Pennsylvania has dropped his newspaper and is
paring his fingernails.... The vile odor of...
tobacco... rises from the two-for-five-cents cigars
in the mouths of the so-called gentlemen below....
They chew, too! Every desk has a spittoon of pink
and gold china beside it to catch the filth from the
statesman’s mouth.An infernal din rose from the crowded chamber.
Desks slammed; members held private conversations,
hailed pages, shuffled from place to place, clamored
for the attention of the Speaker—and all the while
some poor orator tried to discuss the question of the
moment. Speaking in the House, one writer said, was
like trying to address the crowd on a passing
Broadway bus from the curb in front of the Astor
House in New York. On one occasion in 1878 the
adjournment of the House was held up for more thanCongress Ascendant
A succession of weak presidents occupied the White
House during the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Although the impeachment proceedings against
Andrew Johnson had failed, Congress dominated the
government. Within Congress, the Senate generally
overshadowed the House of Representatives. In his
novelDemocracy(1880), the cynical Henry Adams
wrote that the United States had a “government of
the people, by the people, for the benefit of
Senators.” Critics called the Senate a “rich man’s
club,” and it did contain many millionaires, among
them Leland Stanford, founder of the Central Pacific
Railroad; the mining tycoon James G. “Bonanza”
Fair of Nevada; Philetus Sawyer, a self-made
Wisconsin lumberman; and Nelson Aldrich of Rhode
Island, whose wealth derived from banking and a
host of corporate connections. However, the true
sources of the Senate’s influence lay in the long
tenure of many of its members (which enabled them
to master the craft of politics), in the fact that it was
small enough to encourage real debate, and in its
long-established reputation for wisdom, intelligence,
and statesmanship.
An 1887 cartoon indicting the Senate for closely attending to the Big (read, fat) Trusts rather than to the needs of the public (whose “entrance”
to the Senate is “closed”). Drawn by Joseph Keppler, a caricaturist who was born and trained in Germany, this type of grotesque satire greatly
influenced late-nineteenth-century American comic arts.