Picking Fruit in the Historical Garden

Charles Stewart III
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

My own turn down the historical path in studying Congress came because my dissertation committee advised it--or, more accurately, John Ferejohn made me do it. I was in college in the late 1970s, when students of American legislative politics were busy puzzling through the reforms that Congress had passed earlier in the decade. My college mentor (Dennis Ippolito, then at Emory) was a student of the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. His fascination with congressional reform was infectious. I wanted to know more.

That interest carried over into graduate school. When it came time to write my dissertation (1983), it was natural to propose a project that examined the spending effects of the 1974 Budget Act. When I was literally on the way out the door to drive to Brookings to start the dissertation research, Ferejohn sat me down over cookies at the Hoover Institution. He suggested that what might really be interesting would be a comprehensive assessment of the effects of congressional reform, starting some time around the Civil War.

Armed with this advice, I trundled off to Washington where I spent a year gathering as much evidence as I could--contemporary and historical--about the passage of appropriations reform in Congress and its effects on congressional spending decisions. Then I started writing. The first chapter was going to be about the early history of congressional reform, starting in 1865, ending in 1921. Halfway through Chapter 1, I had 150 pages of text. I sent that along to Ferejohn, who called right back to say, "Good God, man!! Stop! You're going to kill us with all this paper. Instead of writing a chapter that stops in 1921, why don't you write a dissertation that stops in 1921? Your next project can be about what's happened since then." Sounded good to me.

Writing my dissertation clued me into two things about congressional research. The first was that most of the low-hanging fruit in the study of the contemporary Congress had been picked. By the early 1980s the third generation of modern students of Congress were doing their work; all the basic parameters of the institution had been staked out. The Hill was lousy with journalists who could document, in greater detail than I ever could, the interior workings of Congress.

Which brings me to the second thing I learned--low-hanging fruit abounded in congressional politics from before World War II. Contrast the density of knowledge about congressional reforms of the 1970s with what I found when I began examining reform using a longer time frame. Looking at spending reform starting with the Civil War, I wasn't jostling around with hundreds of journalists and dozens of academics--my company was a couple of academics (Wander [1984]; Brady and Morgan [1987]) and no living journalists. Instead of writing in a context in which everyone knew the broader political landscape and the major players, I was faced with learning about (and then writing about) the broader context from the ground up. The narrative I constructed was about a series of events that were virtually unknown to modern students of politics; most of the data I gathered had not existed before I had done my research.

Therefore, if I had to identify one advantage to studying Congress historically, it would be this: Studying Congress with an historical bent provides a degree of intellectual freedom that is nearly impossible to replicate in studying contemporary congressional politics. There are no reporters competing to tell saucy inside-the-beltway stories. There aren't a hundred other researchers poring over the same roll call votes or exegeting the same pages of CQ Weekly Report. 

Speaking selfishly, doing historical congressional research must produce an affect akin to that of the early pioneers in modern congressional studies--scholars such as Truman, Hewitt, Matthews, and Fenno. In reading congressional scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s, what is compelling is that these scholars had a general perspective on American politics to explore and they had a bunch of untold stories to tell about congressional politics. Likewise, while I also have a general view of American politics that I am interested in exploring when I examine congressional history, in doing my empirical research I also come across fascinating stories that need to be told, or at least understood better.

With thousands of journalists and hundreds of political scientists doing research on the contemporary Congress, virtually every empirical acre of ground has been plowed over and over again. Historical research, on the other hand, represents largely uncleared--not to mention unplowed--land.

My own view of political science tends to emphasize the science part of the phrase. Therefore, in my own judgment the most fruitful applications of history to congressional research have been those with a scientific bent. By "scientific" I mean systematic, with respect both to observation and explanation. On the observation side, scholars have made tremendous strides over the past two decades in gathering together the basic data necessary for systematic observation of Congress across history. These data sets start with stalwart ICPSR studies 0004 (United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1996) and 7803 (Roster of United States Congressional Office Holders). Working with David Canon, and building off of the prior work of Garrison Nelson, I will soon be releasing a similar roster accounting of all congressional committee memberships. (This effort was associated with the collaborative data collection project that was led by Elaine Swift in the early 1990s. It has led to some new data sets in areas like congressional committees, workload, rules changes, and biographical information.) The problematic ICPSR congressional election returns data sets have been improved by Gary King (study 6311) and by a recently published volume by Michael J. Dubin (1998), which, if the world were just, would have been released electronically. 

Data collection in the area of congressional history is proceeding apace, but more needs to be done. Strangely enough, there is no electronic (i.e., easily analyzed and manipulated) version of the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. A comprehensive accounting of all bills introduced and motions made on the floor of both Congresses would be a big boost to scholarship. (Creating such a data set would be aided by making the early versions of the congressional journals available on CD-ROM, rather than simply searchable through a web interface. The web interface to the Journals of the first 42 Congresses at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html is a godsend, nonetheless) Election returns are still fugitive in electronic form, as are constituency characteristics. (The volumes published by Greenwood Press--Parsons, Beach, and Hermann [1978]; Parsons, Dubin, and Parsons [1990]; and Parsons, Beach, and Dubin [1986]--are a start, but only a start.)

While scholars have made great strides in amassing data relevant for analyzing congressional history, fewer strides have been made on an ambitious substantive goal, which is to develop a more nuanced view of Congress's role in American political development, particularly before the twentieth century. (See Silbey [2000] for a view of the matter from the perspective of modern American history.) Though there are obvious exceptions in recent scholarship (e.g., Stewart and Weingast [1992]; Hill and Williams [1993]; Bianco, Spence, and Wilkerson [1996]; Weingast [1998]; Carpenter [2000]), we have only begun to scratch the surface in understanding systematically the role that Congress played in the development of the armed forces, adjudicating claims, developing administrative controls over far-flung agencies such as the Treasury and Post Office, distributing patronage, distributing land grants, and siting federal facilities. And although electoral politics has been at the center of contemporary congressional studies, the early electoral connection is a matter that has been more speculated about than studied (but see McGerr [1988] and Bianco, Spence, and Wilkerson [1996]).

Writing about what is yet to be done in historical congressional research leads me to the three biggest pitfalls in this pursuit. The first is simply that there aren't enough of us doing this work--and there never will be--to give the history of Congress its due. (And historians can't be counted on to help fill the gap. See the Summer 2000 symposium of congressional historiography in Social Science History.) The second pitfall pertains to sources. Knowledge about the past is ephemeral; first-hand evidence about past congressional behavior is fast slipping into dust--often quite literally, as older government documents disintegrate and librarians respond by putting early congressional material further and further from our reach.

The final pitfall concerns having to justify this enterprise--to the profession, to one's colleagues, and often (unfortunately) to promotion and tenure committees. In thinking about answers to this problem of apologizing for the enterprise, I have found three reasons that, taken together, justify an historical turn in congressional studies.

First, the historical study of Congress helps to bring into focus the "story of democracy" in the United States. Viewed across two hundred years (plus) of American history, congressional politics has been remarkably varied. It has endured periods of strong parties and weak parties, strong committees and weak committees, professionalization and rank amateurism. I find this point particularly important to make in teaching undergraduates, who naturally believe that the details of American politics during their lifetimes are hard-wired into the polity. Professional Congress-watchers could understand this point better, too.

Second, members of Congress themselves frequently reason by precedent--that is, historically. This is most clear in the amassing of precedents in the scrapbooks that eventually morphed into the tomes associated with Messrs. Cannon, Hinds, and Deschler. Such reasoning also is clear when Congress considers reforming itself, since there is no new reform under the sun; understanding past experience with alternative institutional arrangements--either in Congress's past or in state legislatures--is useful for helping current members of Congress steer the course of their institution.

Third, studying Congress historically helps us students of contemporary American politics hone our empirical and theoretical skills for use in other settings. As I write these words, I am immersed in a short-term project to study voting technologies in the United States (see www.vote.caltech.edu). This is a project that dropped out of the sky at the end of 2000--a subject area to which I had not given much thought before. As a student of congressional history, however, I am used to taking on projects, the details of which I have to learn about from the ground up. Likewise, the data-grubbing and -analysis skills I've applied to congressional history over the past two decades have been precisely those I have applied to this contemporary project.

In all honesty, the study of congressional history often simply fulfills a curiosity about past politics and its (dis)continuity with the present. Like any rich academic enterprise, however, the greatest payoff is not necessarily in understanding the subject itself, but in keeping oneself sharp for the rare moments in one's life when something really interesting comes along.

References

Bianco, William T., David B. Spence and John H. Wilkerson. 1996. "The electoral connection in the early Congress: The case of the Compensation Act of 1816." American Journal of Political Science 40: 145-71.

Brady, David and Mark A. Morgan. 1987. "Reforming the structure of the House appropriations process: The effects of the 1885 and 1919-20 reforms on money decisions." In Congress: Structure and policy. Ed. Mathew D. McCubbins and Terry Sullivan. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Carpenter, Daniel. 2000. "State building through reputation building: Policy innovation and coalitions at the Post Office, 1883-1912." Studies in American Political Development 14: 121-55.

Dubin, Michael J. 1998. United States congressional elections, 1788-1997: The official results of the elections of the 1st through 105th Congresses. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Hill, Jeffrey and Kenneth C. Williams. 1993. 'The decline of private bills: Resource allocation, credit claiming, and the decision to delegate.' American Journal of Political Science 37: 1008-31.

McGerr, Michael. 1986. The decline of popular politics: The American North, 1865-1928. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parsons, Stanley B., William W. Beach, and Michael J. Dubin. 1986. United States congressional districts and data, 1843-1883. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Parsons, Stanley B., William W. Beach, and Dan Hermann. 1978. United States congressional districts, 1788-1841. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

Parsons, Stanley B., Michael J. Dubin, and Karen Toombs Parson. 1990. United States congressional districts, 1883-1913. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Silbey, Joel H.. 2000. "Current historiographic trends in the study of the twentieth-century Congress." Social Science History 24: 317-331.

Stewart, Charles III and Barry R. Weingast. 1992. "Stacking the Senate, changing the nation: Republican rotten boroughs, statehood politics, and American political development." Studies in American Political Development 6: 223-71.

Wander, W. Thomas. 1984. "The politics of congressional budget reform." In Congressional budgeting: Politics, process, and power. Eds. W. Thomas Wander, F. Ted Hebert, and Gary W. Coperland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Weingast, Barry R. 1998. "Political stability and civil war: Institutions, commitment, and American democracy." In Analytic narratives. Eds Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.