Todays program is the third researcher talk this year. Next month, we pick up the pace a bit. On may 19, a professor of law and taxation at the university of virginia law school, and a former chief of staff on the joint committee of taxation, will speak about his research and that committees records, and the history of the joint committee. And on may 26, we host the professor of Political Science at wingate university, who will discuss her research for her book manuscript about the politics of National Identification documents in the United States in the 20th century. An Important Mission of the center is promoting Scholars Research in the records of the senate and house of representatives, and advancing the study of the history of congress. This researcher talk series helps us gauge how fully that mission is being met. And we do so by regularly hosting scholars who have conducted research in house and senate records, or have written significant books on the history of congress. In todays much anticipated talk, we hear about one of those very significant books on the history of congress. Our guest, charles stewart, gave a marvelous Research Talk last november on a book that he coauthored, electing the senate and direct democracy before the 17th amendment. At that time, the battle over who would succeed the speaker was finally dying down, and charles graciously agreed to return this year to discuss the history of electing the speaker of the house. He has given todays talk the enticing title speaker battles then and now. A talk informed by a book coauthored with jeffrey jenkins, fighting for the senate the house the rise of Party Government, which i highly, highly recommend. Charles, a longtime friend to the center, is a distinguished professor of Political Science at m. I. T. , where he has taught since 1985. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of arts and sciences. In addition to the two books i have already mentioned, charles is also the author of a wonderful textbook, analyzing congress. An editor with garrison nelson of the indispensable two volume committees in the United States congress. Thank you very much for being here today with us, charles, and letting us host you. We should have a few minutes for q a after the presentation. But before you ask a question, please raise your hand so we can pass the microphone and you can be heard. Thank you, charles. Mr. Stewart so, thanks, richard. And its great to be here. Again, as richard was saying, a few months ago i was going to be giving a talk about actually, a more recent book about Senate Elections before the 17th amendment, right as john boehner was eventually swept off the stage, and i suggested to richard that, well, maybe i should talk about speaker elections. He said, no, why dont you talk about the senate, as advertised. But you can come back next year. So that is what i am doing here. And when i was here last time, i also just had to say, and i will repeat it this time, its a real thrill to be speaking here. Richard did not mention that my first book, which was about the history of budget reform, basically was written in this building when i was a graduate student, it was my dissertation first. Later on in the early 1980s, back when you got off the archives metro stop, you hightailed it as fast as you could across the street because it was a very different neighborhood 30, 40 years ago than it is today. You could not go across the street and sit in french bakeries, eat croissants, all those sort of things. I think it was the canadians too who upped the quality of the neighborhood down the street. In any case, its really great to be here. Its also really interesting, in these talks, to be reminded that although in my life as a congressional historian, i do my work because i just love stories and find it really interesting, and have helped to build a subfield of congressional history within the field of the Political Science. Which you will discover is quite different than what it looks like in the field of history. We study these things because we love them, there are great stories, they have largely not been told, and history these days does not tell stories about political institutions. We could complain about history these days if youve like. But i have discovered that these books actually become relevant. When i was talking about the passage of the 17th amendment and how elections happened before the 17th amendment, when i got into that project i did not realize there would be a movement to repeal the 17th amendment. In fact, ted cruz favors appealing the 17th amendment. And so, it might become a current topic. And likewise, when i first started thinking about writing about the speakership, it was interests. Quarian and it may have some currency itself. So, what i will be talking about is leadership battles, or how and why did the party stopped airing their dirty laundry on the floor, and what that tells us about today. I will mostly talk about the book that richard so nicely advertised for us. And then, i realized when i was putting together the talk, that although i would have much preferred to do the playbyplay announcement for more recent speakership battles, it turns out that since no one knows the old battle, that it might be useful just to give the Historical Context and then come back at the end and say a bit about why the degree to which current battles over the speakership share features with the past, and to the degree to which one could easily make bad comparisons to the past as well. So, my interest in oh, and by the way, i should note, for those of you who are really interested in this, Geoff Jenkins and i have two monkeycage blog posts where we try to bring together the fight for boehner to retain his seat, and these older stories i will be telling you about. Google monkey cage Stewart Jenkins speaker, you can find these on the Washington Post site. My interest in speakership battles and Senate Elections came as a graduate student when i started reading into the history of congress. It was not actually a whole lot about the history of congress. But i discovered that there had been battles before the civil war for the speakership. This is the picture from our cover of our book. This is the celebration in the election of Nathaniel Banks as speaker in 1855. And i discovered that it was quite common, not only to have uncertainty of who the speaker would be, but that there could be battles on the house floor that would go on for days, and weeks, and months, and this just seemed to really cool. Exactly the sort of thing you want to take on after you get tenure, not before. [laughter] so, i got tenure and i got to do these fun things. And so i started to piece together the history. And frederick muilenburg was the first speaker. Although it was not nearly as sexy and exciting an election as Nathaniel Banks, they had to endure a multiballot contest to be elected speaker. It turns out that it used to be very common, not just the famous cases of Nathaniel Banks, a very common in the antebellum period to have multiple ballots for elections and have a real, honesttogoodness fight. I will come back to that. Then when i started skkertence benny has was speaker of the house when i started. If you were to fastforward to the present, you would see quite a different story. You would see almost a kabuki theater set of performances upon the convening of every house of representatives every two years. Where somebody leaving the Majority Party would nominate someone for speaker and someone from the Minority Party would nominate someone for speaker. There would be a vote and, surprise, surprise, all the ds would vote for democrats and all the rs would vote for republicans. Whoever would win, everyone would celebrate and be happy. Or rather, what would happen is a resolution that would elect the clerk, the offices of the house, and after that, election the committees. Very, very, very simple. There would be caucuses ahead of time to nominate the two parties, but it would be leaders that were wellknown. And if there were disagreements, and there have been disagreements and there have been fights for leadership of the party, but they have all been contained within the party, within the caucus. Decided,he caucus is then things move on. That was the world basically for everybody in this room. In our lifetimes, that was basically the story. Nancy pelosi, getting closer to actually our book being done a decade later, pelosi began to run into trouble. And i will come back to this. I hope i will have time. In fact, i will have time. I will make time for it. But many of you will recall that after the shellacking the democrats took in 2010, in the runup to that election, there was talk among Many Democrats that nancy pelosi has to go. There was a bit of a rebellion within the Democratic Party that she survived, but nonetheless, if the democrats had held the house in 2010, the story could have been very, very different. By the time we rolled into finishing our book, john boehner had been elected speaker, and storm clouds were on the horizon. And then as has been mentioned several times, well, here you go, here is his second election as speaker, and we see that john boehner got a bunch of votes and nancy pelosi got a bunch of votes and a bunch of other people got votes. All the stars are next to republicans. So this old world has begun to fray. And this was even before last year when a group within the tea Party Started circulating a petition to declare the chair of house vacant, and basically to depose boehner. This did not happen, of course. Paul ryan got to be speaker. But nonetheless, that would have been really quite different if ryan, yall will recall the speculation about ryan, and although a lot of work happened behindthescenes, there was a big chance that if ryan had not taken the position, it could have been chaos. And we have not seen that in a long, long time. So, its a new world. And what i want to come back to at the end of this talk, is the degree to which the really old world can help to inform the new world. First of all, let me give you an overview of what happens in this book. Which by the way, is probably the last 450page book ever to be published in Political Science. We start in the earliest years with the speakership being decided in contests that are quasibipartisan. By which i mean, Political Parties grew up in the early period of the republic. But in the earliest days, the earliest few decades, i will give specifics in a bit, there werent caucuses in the way we understand them now. And so, there was oftentimes uncertainty. Even when one party had a majority, of who the speaker would be. When the speaker was decided it was not necessarily determined who would be on the committees, etc. Eventually and early in the antebellum period, speakership contests became structured around partisanship and around ideology. And this is kind of in the Lady Antebellum period, where the really fun fights happened. And in these circumstances there are still informal caucuses, not the kinds we have right now. And it was not always clear what the implications of the speaker being chosen were. And it certainly was not an expectation that the caucus nominee would be supported by everybody in the party. Nonetheless, it became partisan in the antebellum period. The really important thing, this is the world most of us have lived through, actually, all of us have lived through this. Because after the civil war, with some very interesting timing during the civil war, after the civil war, the organization of the house became very, very regular. It became regular in such a way that jeff and i refer to this as a cartel, by which not only did the Majority Party control, not only control all of the offices, but that expectations fell from that. That the Majority Party actually would control legislation in the house. And that depended on there being certainty that the majority caucus would come to the defense of the nominee for speaker. And once that happened, the world was really different. And thats the world that may or may not be unraveling. This is a world that was built up in a period from the civil war, up until the speakership of one of the most famous speakers, for those of you who are not professional congress geeks, speaker reed. That is basically a three decade period. So, it grows up and becomes really mature in the early 20th century. Oh, and one last thing. We discover, in the process of writing the book, that the speaker was the tip of the iceberg, just in terms of the story. Because one of the things we did not expect we just thought we would tell a bunch of knock out, drag down, Rockem Sockem fights. A lot of times those offices were as important, if not, more important to the members of the house than the speakership. And in many ways may be more important for the development of party than the speakership at various times. And those include the printer, those include the clerk, those include the sergeant at arms, and once there was a fight over who the chaplain was going to be. At least once a chaplain was deposed. So, there is a lot of just interesting stuff, especially in the antebellum. And this is where we talk about the development of Party Government, that this conglomeration of offices in the antebellum period are in the eye of martin van buren, who is americas great party thinker. And he has a theory about how you can knit all these things together and you can control national politics. So it is not just a speaker. This is a vision test. I used to be able to read this, but there is a table of contents in the book. There is a bunch of appendices. So for those of you who do buy the book or look in the book and are interested in this era, not only do we have blowbyblow chapters, really focusing on the precivil war, then we have postcivil war. One chapter of postcivil war, that tells you about this. But we have a bunch of appendices. So if you are interested in all the balloting for all of these offices that a told you about, including the speaker, we have the numbers, we have sources. Likewise, we have gone through and we have actually collected sources and numbers about the caucus battles, so, where the speakers came from, etc. So, its all in there. Relying on a bunch of data sources instead of historical ones. The various recordings, the journals, the debates, as well as the party and other newspapers during this period. It is primarily a documentary study. Unfortunately not too much in the archives. So, let me just quickly and this is the rest of the talk i will probably skip over the Political Science part of why this is important. Do a slightly more overview on the speaker of elections. Probably jump over talking about clerks and printers, voting, and then get to the nine critical elections, which i think helped to inform how we think about the problem that john boehner had and that ryan has had. So, why study this . One of the things i just want to note is that there is a number of questions intellectually about studying speakership fights. Some of them, we could just call them purely historical. Just a lot of really interesting empirical questions. There are larger issues as well that i have already talked on. For instance, there are still questions remaining about the evolution of Party Government in america. Parties are not in the constitution, as you know. They have to be built. I have one of my movements, there is something in american politics known as the president ial synthesis of american politics. I want to build the congressional synthesis of american politics. And i think there is meat here for the building of that congressional synthesis. And finally, this is kind of the Political Sciencey question, but this is a really hard question. Embedded in how we elect speakers is a kind of election that we are about to see in cleveland. And that Election Form is, majority requirement, no entry barriers, how do those get resolved if no one has a majority . Ok . So if you have a hung convention in cleveland, how does that get resolved . Speakership is the same thing. Get elected speaker, you need a majority of the chamber. Anyone can be nominated. You can vote for anybody. If there is a deadlock, how do you resolve that . It is a really hard question theoretically as well as practically. A couple of possible unifying stories. Actually, i will skip over that, because you dont want to see Political Science, you probably want to hear more about fights. Let me give you a chronology of the period. We break it down into five periods. The first period up to 1811 is the preinstitutional period. It begins with speaker varnum. There is usually one or two ballots. All of these will have some speakers for awhile. We dont know. It is not even in a journal how many ballots there were. Newspapers have some accounts. So we have the number of ballots, who the speakers were. Informal nominations. Sometimes the Majority Party gets the speakership, sometimes not. I would not say its lackadaisical, but its not as highpowered and as focused as it comes later on. Especially after the 12th congress and the rise of henry clay. So again, henry clay is one of the great monumental figures, not just in American History writ large, but in the Institutional Development of the house of representatives. Speaker,s in, becomes, and tries to turn the house into a proto incipient version of what we see now. Committees that are spending committees, a strong speaker controlling the floor, and those sorts of things. During this period, clay allows people to see the value of a strong presiding officer and the speakership becomes more valuable. For individual politicians and for the parties. However, without very strong parties during this period, clay is able to get elected speaker because of his forceful personality maybe, i dont know. There are a lot of reasons. I am still puzzled why clay is always gets elected speaker so easily. He comes and goes. He has gambling debts. He negotiates treaties. And whenever he leaves during this period, he leaves in the middle of the 16th congress and taylor gets elected speaker. It takes 22 ballots to elect clays replacement. Barber, the next congress, 12 ballots. Clay comes back in, hes right back in. Taylor again, two ballots. So, theres no guarantee that things are going to be resolved quickly if you are not henry clay. An interesting thing happens in 1839. Before 1839, balloting for speaker was by secret ballot. If i have time, and if i dont have time maybe in the q a i can talk about this, but in 1839, the house starts voting the way they do now, live voice, out loud. And that changes a lot. The most obvious thing is we now know how individual members of congress of the house are voting. If you are a constituent, you can observe this. If you are party leader, you can observe this. You could imagine how it changed the dynamics. This period from 1839 to 1865 is the one that has the many , many deadlocks, and the most famous ones. So you can see when cobb was elected to the 31st congress, 133 ballots. Cobb, 63. Pennington, 44. And on and on. Ok . Twice in the 31st congress and the 34th congress, there are motions to adjourn the house and wait for the next elections. You will recall if you read your constitution, the house could not do that because they cannot adjourn unless the senate says so. And thats the only time in American History when that provision really mattered. The senate would have said, no, you have to work us out. Imagine this, on the eve of what became the civil war, Congress Almost said, well, lets just go home. We cant solve it. After the civil war, things really, really change. You dont see any numbers by the speakers. So no more multiballots after the civil war. Parties begin to nominate speakers in formal caucuses. It becomes a binding caucus. There then becomes the question over whether the new arrangement will stick, and it does. And we are off to the races. Just to talk so, about the transition for a second. 1891, speaker reed, again, an important moment in history when speaker reed basically codifies birth by force of personality, by theory of government, and by changes in the rules, really codifies the control of the floor by the Majority Party leadership. So, you now have kind of this bundle of a nominating caucus where the Majority Party works out its problems privately, they come to an agreement about who is going to lead, the vanquished get really good promises, and go to the floor unified. And that is basically the form that is kind of the system we think we still have right now. So after 1891, its pretty much one ballot, except for 1923, when there was a progressive stalwart split nine ballots in 1923. That is the episode thats been seen as being the most paralleled to what boehner did experience, and that ryan may experience in the next congress. But other than 1923, caucuses have made nominations and they have gone through with the Majority Party winning. Ok . What is this . Fromis not a seismogram oklahoma these days. This is just a visual thats in the book. And let me explain it to you. You dont need to know the details to get the importance of the visual. So, this line right here is it reflects how many seats the Majority Party has in the house of representatives from the First Congress up to the 112th congress. The solid line, the dark line, is the fraction of votes received by the top vote getter from the Majority Party in the first round of voting for the speaker. And you will notice up until here, its pretty erratic. Often times less than one, which indicates that, often times, the Majority Party cannot get everyone to vote for a single person. You notice that things start getting calm around 1870, and things have been pretty calm ever since. The fact that the solid line does not get up totally to one is not because of defections, but usually just because of absences and things like that. This is a slightly different graph, but this is the boehner problem and the ryan problem, which kind of puts it in context. It is the biggest diversion from the expectations from the civil war, with the one exception of 1923. So, this is a big deal. This is a really big deal. I am going to skip over clerks, printers, and others, and you can just believe me that they were really important and interesting. Or you can buy the book and find out about that. But this is a visualization just to kind of show visually where the conflicts are. So, each column is a congress from the first down to the 115th. This row is oops. What happened. There we go. Shows as when speaker of election blew up, when printer election blew up, and you can see this comes up to the 1850s. And then lots of blowing up all up and down the line, starting with the 37th congress there is thatse color, and cells, thats 1923. So, things were really different. I will also skip over vote. Except to say this. If you want to read the slide, you may while i talk. The importance about viva voche is a think its one of the great examples of unintended consequences in reforms in congress history. The intention of viva voce was to overcome reneging on promises in the election of the subsidiary officers and the printer, where this really became an issue. So, van buren and other Party Leaders decided the solution to reneging on promises was to open up voting in public, so we can observe if someone reneges. And in the short term it worked wonders. We got really a high spike of Party Loyalty in these elections. Editorsm is newspaper also started noticing, and citizens started noticing, right at the moment the nation gets divided along with slavery and other issues. So back in the olden days, if you were from the south, you might be able to vote for someone from the north, and then just claim to your constituents, hmm, most have been somebody else who voted for that guy. It was not me. You could not do that. And in a heightened ideological environment it becomes much harder to put together coalitions within parties, and that becomes the really important thing. And you get a lot of data. Scientist, political i love a lot of data. There is a bunch, over 115 elections for speaker in american politics. There are nine that i think are particularly worth noting. Im not going to go through all the details here. But just note that really, really quickly that there are a couple of general patterns here. The first one i would note is the election of 1839, which had 11 ballots over two days and Robert Hunter was elected speaker. The story here was that, going into the election, nobody quite knew which party had a majority. To begin with. But layered on top of this, there was an infamous disputed election in new jersey. Which of elected their members at large. And it would be the outcome of that disputed election that would determine whether the whigs or the democrats had the majority. It took two weeks just to decide what to do with that disputed election. The democrats eventually won that fight, and then it took another two weeks to decide who would be speaker. Hunter, who gets elected, gets elected because the democrats, although they ended up having the majority, are not very good at counting votes. So hunter was a whig, although the democrats had a majority. So the outcome here was just a simple vote counting problem. For 1849 and 1855, these are the real donnybrooks. 61 ballots over three weeks. Howell, was eventually elected. 34th congress, 113 ballots over two months, in which Nathaniel Banks was elected. The gist of these elections were that these two were threecornered affairs. And if other congresses had been, basically, closely allied, or the numbers had been close, they would have been three quarters. By which i mean, there were whigs, or some opposition to the democrats, you had the democrats, and in the free soil party. Antislavery, then the democrats and whoever opposed the democrats had northern southern whigs. So you basically had this division between parties and over slavery. And that is inherently an unstable mix in a majority voting. And in both of these cases, the house eventually decided to select their speaker through plurality votes. The only time in history. Thats the only way they could get out of the conundrum. In 1836, now were coming into the civil war, pennington from new jersey gets elected. Here, its actually kind of interesting. It was very different and much more easy to understand. By the 36th congress, slavery was basically the issue, and everyone was arrayed along some continuum about how you felt about slavery. With the democrats being a proslavery party, the republicans and an Opposition Party and other parties who were not democrats arrayed against slavery. And here, the issue ended up being that a group of, lets call them republicans, just to make it easy, who were not quite as antislavery as the others, started playing chicken. They would vote for the democrats in a series of battles in order to try to move the Republican Party more to the left, away from the antislavery movements. The democrats noticed this. And unbeknownst to the republicans, on one day there are six guys playing chicken, voting for democrats, trying to play a mind game on the republican leadership. The democrats with a few of the american party, which is pivotal here, they all ganged up and voted for the same democrat. They almost grabbed speakership away from the majority. It ended up not happening. Pennington ends up getting the speakership. He is a more moderate republican than the person that republicans had been trying to get to be speaker. The 37th congress is really important because this breaks the pattern of airing dirty laundry on the floor. What happens in the 37th congress, so this is right as the civil war is starting, republicans come into town, they decide not to have a caucus. But what leaders agreed to do is that there will be a ballot, whichever republican on the house floor, whichever republican gets the most votes, on the second ballot, the republicans will all vote for him. So he comes in, he gets the most votes, its not a majority. However, on the very next move, the fellow who came in second, that is frank blair, the son of one of the printers, who we saw a few decades ago, enough people who had voted for blair changed their votes. So he gets the majority, and no multiballot affair. And that kind of knocked the lights out under multiballot affairs. So from that time forward, the question becomes after the civil war whether the caucuses will hold on the floor. The first real task becomes oh, by the way, its 1865 its the first time both the democratic and Republican Caucus both come to the floor and make a nomination. 1876 is the First Congress were the democrats regain control of the house after the civil war. So there is a question about whether the democrats will do what the republicans did, which is to resolve things within the caucus and give out goodies to the people who were vanquished and go to the floor united. They did. 1847 to 1852 ended up being caucus fights in which the parties were divided in three, four, five, sevenway contests. Question was a you know, people were just so ticked off at the end of these contests that there was a question about whether the losers would come and vote for the winner on the floor. And they did in both cases. And so this is the biggest test, the stress test up till 1891. So, that is the stress test. Really, the last time the whole system fell apart was in 1923. And just to give you a really quick overview, because we have probably about five more minutes of me talking, and then questions. 1923 you will recognize as being in a period in which the Republican Party was divided basicallyallworth, conservatives, which were the Largest Group of the party, and progressives. And the republicans had taken a shellacking in the 1922 election. And so, progressives ended up being there were about 24 of them, there was only a 14 vote majority for the republicans. They wanted the leadership of the Republican Party to be more open, and they demanded the his of the republican leadership. He said, no way, you will do what i say. The progressive said, ok, fine. See you on the floor. Basically it was a game of just staring. A staring contest for three days, and eventually the progresses won. The threat behind the door was that progressives could conceivably go over an organized chamber with the democrats. Culturally, they never would have. But that was there, it was possibly ideological. Progressives eventually won, and got changes to the house rules. Progressives are no longer pivotal. Longworth is now speaker. He took everything back. He punished the progressives. If you had a really Good Committee assignment, you were taken off that committee. In the 1924 election, if you supported the progressive candidate, you are out of the party. If you dont vote for me, you are out of the party. So, by 1926, all the progressives were back in the party. And they came along. I would say that that was the period where this practice of who you vote for for speaker determines which party you are in, really begins. That norm begins then. If you dont vote for the speaker, youre not in the party. Very quickly, there are two types of stalemates. We have the three coroner stalemate for the civil war, a big party, a little party who are organized along some major dimension. And a third party in there, like the free soilers, who want to do something else. Whereas, there is another pattern we saw with progressives, we saw a few times in the antebellum period. We had two parties and you have what we call the pivotal insurgents of the progressives. So those are the two. Pelosis problem i will tell you what these graphs will say. Nancy pelosi had problems, as i mentioned earlier, in the 2010 election with the socalled blue dog democrats who ran against her in the general. Now, the democrats had their own shellacking in 2010. So it was not like she was nominated for speaker. But at the end of the day, there was a revolt against her continued leadership in the caucus. She lost Something Like 43 votes in the caucus. 43 people voted against her in the caucus. And 11 members voted against her on the floor for speaker. They voted for others. This just shows, ideologically, using a common measure of ideology, this is the left, this is the right, republicans are all over here. The red dots are where the people who voted against pelosi were. So those are the most conservative democrats. The interesting thing here is this is the ideologically of everyone who left on the congress on the democratic side. This is intended to remind me, to remind us, that one of the things the 2010 election did was removed more conservative democrats. I think if they had organized democrats in 2010, pelosi would have been in trouble. Or the democrats would have been in trouble. John boehner we all know had problems. This is a similar picture to this one, which shows the ideological location of everybody who voted against boehner on the far right. There is certainly an ideological mapping to boehners problems. Ryans problems so, this is paul ryans problems. And this is thanks to keith poole, on his blog a few days ago. Keith plots every member of the house of representatives, the s are democrats and the rs are republicans, by this measure that he produces of ideology. These are the liberals, these are the conservatives. The y axis is how many votes the members got in the last exercise. And poole does the following exercise. He says, what if this is as bad of an election for republicans as people can imagine . Not that he says it will be, but he says what if. He says, what if there is a seven point swing away from the Republican Party . If so, then these republicans lose. Ok . Now, this would be an extreme swing. Republicans still have a majority, but it might only be 10 seats. Look at who stays . The further the right you are, the more likely you are to stay. So this so, ryans best hope is still not going to be happy times. When it comes to organizing. But with keith does not say is that, if things get even better for the democrats, and there is some miracle the democrats take the house, the democrats who come in are likely to be conservative democrats. So, nancy pelosi, or whoever the democratic nominee is going to be, is also not going to be in good shape either because of these ideological battles. So just to wrap up, considering the past, and thinking about the future and the next few years, we think about the current conflicts over the speakership, there is no evidence so far that members want to upset what i call the organizational cartel. That is, there is no evidence that they really want to give up the system with the party is organizing things internally. The question is whether they can keep the system going together. I think there is an argument that if you just kind of look at the types of very abstractly, the types of contests that happen, especially before the civil war, and map those types onto the current conundrums for the democrats and the republicans, the democrats have the bigger problem. Because the democrats who would defect from a nominee are conservative democrats. They could plausibly walk over to the Republican Party and organize with the republicans. Not that it would happen, but they could make that credible threat. Whereas tea party republicans, what keith poole called the suicide caucus, his terms, not mine, they have nowhere ideologically to go. They cannot say if you dont capitulate, we will vote with the democrats to organize. So, its more likely that the Republican Caucus will be like the democrats used to be. Remember the old saying, not a member of an organized political party, im a democrat. Now that is true of the Republican Party, and that may and up being the case. Democrats have more to lose on the floor. Some other things to think about is that some of the way the president really differentiated from the antebellum period is there was no third force in american politics. It was the three corner contests that are the most vexing. If there were a third force, like donald trump starts his own party, then things could get really, really nasty, but there isnt. And actually election laws in states make it really hard for third parties to come along. And then finally, the party rules. And this is little bit inside baseball, but i think it is really important. Party rules are really different. Back in the olden days, nominations were made the night before the congress convened. Now, especially republicans, actually both democrats and republicans now meet right after the election to decide who they will nominate for speaker. So they have two months to figure this out. The republicans furthermore have a rule which says that to nominee nominate, if we have a bunch of people want to be speaker, we will take a bow, the person on the bottom gets dropped off. We will vote again in the person on the bottom gets dropped off. They have a rule that gets down to a twoperson contest and pick somebody. So there are rules that are very, very different than the past. And finally, i just have to mention that we may have a trial run, that oldstyle nominations speaker fight of politics in cleveland this summer. Because as i mentioned before, a brokered convention in many ways is the same thing as a speakership fight. Thank you, and happy to take questions. [applause] richard please, raise your hand if you have a question. Fascinating talk. I am again wondering about some of the comparative situations here. I am thinking of the british system where you also have, obviously, greater stakes that the person who gets voted on is not just the speaker, but is the prime minister. But there, its not just that you organize the house of commons with that election, you also determine policy. How far do you have Party Governments in the American Congress where you may organize the house, but you still dont have assurance that you can get your policies through . I am thinking of my particular area, tax policy. There are lots of cases were both the chairman of the ways and means and the House Speaker want something, but the members simply dont vote for it. So, how much power do the parties actually have . Mr. Stewart not as much as in parliamentary systems. And i should mention that the very first paper i wrote when i started this research, now about 20 years now, had the title, the inefficient secret. That is an allusion to someone wrote this history of the english constitution which was called the efficient secret. And it turns out that this is the interesting thing about intellectual history. Van buren is developing theories about caucus government at the same time anglophile parliaments are coming up with solutions to this problem of coming together coalitions. Vanit is very clear that buren wanted the caucus to be a binding caucus. And van buren tries it and he fails. And there end up being times in the 1890s, the 1920s, and we have seen in more recent history attempts to create binding caucuses. And sometimes there is like a little flash in the pan, like in the teens with the democrats, but then they go away. So the binding caucus on policy, which was a glean in van burens eye, is the one part of the van buren plan that never got enacted, but Everything Else did. We can talk in length about that. But certainly van buren wanted to go there and he could not get it. If i could have a followup. Tom reed resigned to the speakership, john boehner resigned the speakership. Could either of them survive given their particular personalities and political ideas . Mr. Stewart could they have survived without resigning . Right. And could they have been effective in the house of representatives . Mr. Stewart of course, tom reed was a little before my time. So, reeds problem was with the administration. A disagreement about policy. Boehner it seems to me was similar, but the party was divided about policy and it was an inside baseball type of thing. I was not on the hill at the time, so i dont know if boehner could have survived, but it does strike me that he did not want to survive. And that was probably good enough. But i dont have a good answer to that question. Was a he elected speaker as a freshman . Mr. Stewart the question was about clay being elected to speaker as a freshman. Clay was elected speaker the very first day he was a member of the house. Keep in mind, he had been speaker of the kentucky legislator and he had been a u. S. Senator a couple of times, so he was not exactly a neophyte. Likewise, pennington was elected speaker in his first term as well, although pennington had been the governor of new jersey. And in fact, i did not get into the details, but although he was a neophyte in the house of representatives, actually he was the key player in this disputed election case involving new jersey when he had been the governor of new jersey. So he was well aware of organizational things. But yeah, clay was definitely a different guy. Special guy. Richard we are going to ask you to speak into the microphone so we can capture you on tape. Seems like a lot of what we are talking about today is centralized power. You have a very topdown structure. That necessarily was not always the case. Committees have also been incredibly powerful throughout the course of the history of the have delegateds powers to the individual chairman. And in the 19th century, in particular, how powerful, in your opinion, was the office of the speaker . Especially kind of in this, well, up to when clay becomes speaker and especially after clay becomes a speaker . Mr. Stewart that is a whole other book, and we address some of that in our book. I will say a couple things. First, i think you have described well what is conventionally believed by the house. I think there is a lot of truth to it. Having said that, one of the things is really striking looking at the history is that the members act as if, even during the period where we know just observationally that the committee sometimes will just do wildly unpredictable things, that the speaker of elections proceeds as if the speaker is a dictator. It is really kind of striking, even when you know. And a little bibliography here. The author of one of the most famous books in congressional history, he has a great section about henry clay. He says clay is seen as being the father of american parliamentary power, but he got they wiped the floor with him so many times. He lost so many things. He could not stack committees to save his life. I mean, all sorts of failures, and yet he is held up as being the strong speaker in the antebellum period. Maybe that is why he kept being reelected, because he was a weak speaker. But you are right, observationally, the committees are weak, but they are fighting tooth and nail over this position. So either they are deluded, or there are things still worthwhile in being speaker. As mel brooks once said, its good being king. And i think if nothing else, you did get some things as speaker. Richard i believe our time is about expired. We want to give charles another really round of applause for a really aero diet and informative presentation. Thank you for attending. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] president ial to ads during the 1950s you contest between president dwight d. Hisenhowers are and hi opponent. Here is a look. I was born in a little town called hope, arkansas, three month after my father died. Armor but that old twostory house where i lived with my grandparents. They had very limited income. It was in 1963 that i went to washington and met president kennedy at the boys nation program. Thinking what an incredible country this was that someone like me who had no money or anything would be given the opportunity to meet the president. That was when i decided i could do Public Service because i cared so much about people. I worked my way through law school, parttime jobs, anything i could find. After i graduated, i didnt care about making a lot of money. I just wanted to go home and see if i can make a difference. We worked hard in education and health care, to create jobs, and we have made real progress. It is exhilarating to think that as president we can change all these peoples lives for the better and bring hope back to the american dream. I dont believe him. I dont believe him one bit. I dont believe him. I dont know much about clinton except promises. He tells everyone what they want to hear. Less food on the table. Broken promises. Less clothes on the kids backs. Less money to go to the doctor. We get less of everything. Who is the best qualified person on the stage to create jobs . Make your decision and vote on november 3. I would suggest you might try someone who has created jobs. Who is the best person to manage money . I would suggest you pick a person who has successfully managed money. Who is the best person to get results . Look at the record, make your decision. Finally, who would you give your pension fund and your savings account to to manage . Who would you ask to be the trustee of your estate and take care of your children if something happened to you . God bless you. I am doing this for you. [applause] the american people, i am doing this because i love you. Thats it. If you like politics, you can find plenty of archival eyes, president ial debates and Campaign Speeches on our website, cspan. Org. Let me begin with some numbers. There have been 45 presidencies but only 44 persons who have served as president , thanks to the peculiar way that way we count the two nonconsecutive administrations of Grover Cleveland back in the 19th century. All 44 of those president s have been males. All but two of them have been white protestant males. 17 of them, 17 of the 44, have been elected to second terms, which is a