Talking About Madison While Thinking About Perfect Waves at Black's, or Some Thoughts on the Trials and Rewards of Doing Historical Research on Congress Randall Strahan
|
| Congressional scholars have long
had a serious interest in the history of the institution they study. Early
in the modern era of congressional scholarship, Nelson Polsby, Joseph Cooper,
David Brady, Charles O. Jones and others demonstrated the importance of
looking back as one way to move the understanding of Congress forward.
Recently, at the same time most historians have been losing interest in
traditional political history, political scientists have begun to show
a renewed interest in historical work. Over the last few years historical
studies of Congress by political scientists have been proliferating luxuriantly.
In this essay I offer some thoughts on why congressional scholars have
been doing so much historical work of late, describe briefly the historical
research on which I and some of my graduate students at Emory have been
working, and conclude with some comments on the problems and rewards associated
with this type of work.
Congressional scholars study an institution, and the serious study of institutions is inherently historical. Sooner or later the best congressional scholarship always gets to the question of the origins and consequences of the forms that define the institution. Because so many of the institutional features of the modern Congress have their beginnings in the nineteenth century, the politics of that century have come to exercise almost a gravitational pull on scholars interested in congressional institutions. Those interested in the effects of congressional institutions such as parties and committees are also drawn to history because it offers a wider variety of conditions under which to explore the effects of institutional forms, and so many more points of comparison from which to develop or test generalizations. In an essay that should be required reading for all political scientists interested in historical research, John Aldrich describes these two approaches to historical evidence as "history as comparative politics" and "history as data" (Aldrich 1997). Regarding the history as data approach, another cause for the proliferation of historical work is that more and more historical data on Congress have become easily accessible in recent years. My own interest in doing research in congressional history was first occasioned not by a quest for the primordial cycling majority from which institutions must have emerged, or by the opportunities presented by the information technology miracle of NOMINATE coordinates for every member of Congress who ever cast a vote, but by an encounter with Dan Rostenkowski. This was during the mid-1980s, before he left his position as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee for what he now calls his "Oxford education." Rostenkowski just was not acting the part of the permissive leader I expected after reading some of the (then) current literature on congressional leadership. So after finishing my book on the postreform House Ways and Means Committee, I began focusing on the question of how Congressional institutions define opportunities and constraints for leaders, and started looking for examples of other congressional figures who had attempted to expand the limits of leadership positions. Two figures emerged almost immediately from my reading on leadership in the House of Representatives, but both happened to have served in the nineteenth century Congress. Naively, I decided this should not be any deterrent to undertaking some sort of comparative study and decided to begin working on such a study, along two tracks. The first was theoretical and involved reading through the literature on leadership in Congress as well as other political institutions, and more generally on the relationship between political and social structure and individual agency. The second track, which turned out to be a much larger and more difficult task than I anticipated, involved developing some minimal political literacy concerning the speakerships of the two nineteenth century congressional figures to whom my attention had been drawn, Henry Clay and Thomas Brackett Reed. In the meantime, two contemporary cases struck me as worth including in my study, Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich. So at times I found myself stretched across the better part of two centuries, spending time in special collections at Bowdoin College reading Thomas Reed's mail, then traveling to Washington to interview a Gingrich aide, then to Fort Worth to seek out material on budget politics in Jim Wright's papers at TCU, then settling back in Atlanta with some tariff histories and the Annals of Congress trying to figure out how the politics of the tariff may have influenced Henry Clay's conduct of the speakership between 1815 and 1824. Some initial reports from this ongoing project have been presented at conferences, and a number of those have now appeared or will appear shortly in print (see Strahan 1998; Strahan, Moscardelli, Haspel and Wike 2000; Gunning and Strahan, 2000; Strahan forthcoming). I plan to have a book manuscript based on this research (tentatively titled, Congressional Leadership in Institutional Time) completed by December 2001. The central argument proposed in the book is that under certain conditions the skills and goals of individual leaders can matter a great deal in congressional politics. My analysis of the cases of Clay, Reed, Wright, and Gingrich suggests that recent theories that rely almost exclusively on contextual factors to explain congressional leadership may be incomplete in two respects. The first deficiency is that these theories may not incorporate sufficiently the fact that contextual constraints on congressional leaders can vary significantly over time. In more theoretical language, the amount of "slack" in the agency relationship between followers and leaders may not be as constant or as limited as these theories generally assume. A second gap is that theories of leadership may not have given adequate attention to the variety of goals that motivate congressional leaders. Some leaders are up to much more than merely retaining their offices, and explaining how they act requires paying greater attention to the multiple goals leaders actually pursue. Now whether my own contribution to historical scholarship on Congress will have been worth the time and effort involved is a question I leave to the judgment of my colleagues. But I would offer a couple of thoughts on the trials and benefits of this type of research for those who might be considering taking it up. Those considering projects of this type should be forewarned that this type of research, if taken beyond certain readily accessible data sources such as roll call votes or NOMINATE scores, is extremely labor intensive. Tracking down some fact or sequence of events that can take a few minutes or a few days when studying the contemporary Congress, can take much, much longer when studying the nineteenth century institution. And what you do find in the documentary record or personal papers or an historical narrative that touches on congressional politics often cannot be made sense of without even more digging. Aldrich (1997) has noted that chronic problems with missing and biased data mean that historical political science probably works much more like paleontology than the model of classic experimental science. Those impatient to get on with the test, those who don't truly enjoy sifting through lots and lots of historical material and then puzzling over just what it is they found, are unlikely to succeed at this type of work unless they stay very close to the few well-beaten data paths. Fortunately a talented group of students with interests in legislative politics has come through Emory's graduate program while I have been working on this project (including Vin Moscardelli, Virginia Hettinger, Matt Gunning, Moshe Haspel, and Richard Wike), and these students have been of tremendous help to me both in collecting historical evidence and figuring out what to make of it. So if you decide you need to head off into the past to go exploring, my basic advice is: be persistent, be patient, take plenty of supplies, and think twice about striking out alone. But having issued those cautions, I think the potential disciplinary and personal payoffs more than justify the costs and risks involved. Regarding the disciplinary payoffs, I need only mention as examples the excellent historical studies of congressional politics that have appeared recently by scholars such as Sarah Binder (1997), David Mayhew (2000) and Eric Schickler (2001). Regarding the personal rewards, few things in my professional life are as enjoyable as finding one of Thomas Reed's letters in his own hand explaining his decision to resign the speakership in 1899, or encountering John Quincy Adams's diary entry describing Henry Clay as a "gamester" with "a very undigested system of ethics," or sifting though the fragmentary evidence about early House committee appointments with my students trying to solve the puzzle of just what Henry Clay may have been up to as speaker. I was reminded as well of the rewards of doing historical work on Congress while attending a conference in San Diego this past March. It was a pleasure to be among the group of historically-minded political scientists Sam Kernell convened at U.C. - San Diego on the 250th anniversary of James Madison's birth to discuss Madison's contributions to American politics and political science. But on the first day of the conference I kept stealing glances out the window of the conference site in La Jolla at perfect six foot waves peeling left on Black's beach below. Having spent most of my waking hours before I entered graduate school seeking out the perfect wave rather than the perfect theory of politics, this was one of the most pleasant distractions I've ever encountered at a political science conference. And had I not decided some years back to venture off into congressional history, I'm sure I would have been back in Atlanta that spring day, rather than discussing the logic of Federalist #10 and the politics of the Constitutional Convention while periodically glancing outside and imagining myself inside one of those beautiful Black's lefts. References Aldrich, John. 1997. "Does Historical Political Research Pose Any Special Methodological Concerns?" The Political Methodologist 8 (Fall): 17-21. http://web.polmeth.ufl.edu/tpm.html Binder, Sarah A. 1997. Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunning, Matthew and Randall Strahan. 2000. "The Emergence of the U.S. House Speaker as a Policy Leader, 1789-1841." Paper presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta. Mayhew, David R. 2000. America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison Through Newt Gingrich. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schickler, Eric. 2001. Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strahan, Randall. 1998. "Thomas Brackett Reed and the Rise of Party Government." In Masters of the House: Congressional Leaders over Two Centuries, eds. Roger H. Davidson, Susan Webb Hammond, and Raymond W. Smock. Boulder, CO: Westveiw Press. Strahan, Randall. Forthcoming. "Leadership and Institutional Change in the Nineteenth Century House." In Theoretical Explorations of the History of Congress, Volume II: Turning Points, eds.Mathew McCubbins and David Brady. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Strahan, Randall, Vincent Moscardelli,
Moshe Haspel, and Richard Wike. 2000. "The Clay Speakership Revisited."
Polity 32: 561-593.
Randall Strahan is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of Graduate Studies at Emory University. His email address is polsrs@emory.edu |