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.