The American Senate: An Insider's History

The late correspondent Neil MacNeil began writing a book about the United States Senate after he published his look at the United States House of Representatives, "Forge of Democracy" in 1963. Fifty years after "Forge", MacNeil returns with "The American Senate", with the additional work of historian Richard Baker. Baker and MacNeil have produced a large, lively, and compulsively readable look at the Senate from it's earliest days right up to today. What began as an almost private club meeting in secret, the Senate today has dissolved into chaos and dysfunction. But it is secret no longer; the dysfunction is seen live and unfiltered on C-Span since 1984.The US Senate is supposed to be both a counterbalance to the House and another step in the enactment of legislation. The lower house was seen as a place - unruly at times - that needed the seriousness of those upper house members to calm the fervor of the elected representatives. Senators, from the earliest days, were not elected directly from the voters; rather the Senators were "selected" from House members, state party hacks, and general rich men. It took the enactment of the 17th Amendment in 1913 to secure the election of Senators directly by the voters. Up until then, it really was a rich man's club.But the Senate has always been the home of gifted politicians, as well as by political hacks and ne're-do-wells. Who can forget Nebraska's Republican Senator Roman Hruska, defending mediocrity - "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." - in his speech on the Senate floor, defending Richard Nixon's nomination of Harrold Carswell to the US Supreme Court in 1970? Hruska was just as mediocre as the man he was defending, and surely one of the many mediocre Senators who have served.But if mediocrity has been represented in the Senate, so has brilliance and daring by many of the members. MacNeil and Baker write about the men and women who have served their Senate terms with great distinction. Of course, distinction can also be of the physical - as well as the mind. The authors write of physical duels between members and of the hours of filibustering to stop bills from passing.MacNeil and Baker have done an excellent job of making the United States Senate come alive to the reader.

To much information, and too little perspective in the news these days? Read Richard Baker and Neil MacNeill's history of the U.S. Senate. While the text assesses how the Senate developed beyond being the agency of wisdom and decorum that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created it, Baker and McNeill, without editorializing and moralizing, explain how the chamber responded If you avoid history because it is just a bunch of dates and irrelevant facts, or because history takes you to another, past world when you would rather remain where you are, you will be pleasantly surprised. Many of the battles fought in the Senate take on a tone that seem up to date by the freshness of description. A fine example appears in Baker and MacNeill's account of partial precedents as President Woodrow Wilson's titanic struggles with the U.S. over whether the U.S. should resist isolationism and help form the League of Nations, predecessor by a generation of the United Nations. The violence of debate then will likely remind you of the efforts of President Obama when dealing with the U. S. House of Representatives. You won't be reading in Baker's book how history repeats itself. Instead, history offers anyone interested in politics and history a lot of echoes. The American Senate; An Insider's History lives up to its title because of the authority with which Baker and MacNeill wrote. Baker served as the The Historian of the United States Senate from 1975, when he founded the Senate Historical Office, until he retired in 2009. While Baker was effective enough as historian to win praise from Senators of all stripes and persuasions, he writes with masterly simplicity and directness, rather than with the feathered weapons of bureaucracy. The other support for the authority and power of the story of the Senate comes from the late Neil MacNeill. As the chief correspondent on Capitol Hill for Time, it was his job to know what was happening on the "inside" of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Before turning to the Senate, MacNeill wrote a highly regarded history of the U.S. House of Representatives, contributing to his authority on the inside history of both Chambers of Congress. For years, Baker and McNeill lunched together. So it was fortunate that when McNeil died, Baker possessed the knowledge and talent to fill in and complete this remarkable book. Anyone with a serious interest in what constitutes politics in America and how it developed should buy this book for his or her library.--James Sayler

The United States Senate has a long history from its origins in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that crafted the bicameral Congress, its first meeting in 1789, and then continuing to the present day. In its more than two hundred years of history, the Senate has seen its share of great people and bad people, statesmanship and skulduggery, compromise and partisanship.The book itself is essentially broken up into several sections that each look at certain aspects of Senate history. First, for example, is looking at senatorial elections. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures, however this system fell apart in the late nineteenth century under the clouds of scandal and gridlock that led to the adoption of the seventeenth amendment and the direct election of senators. With the candidates now having to appeal directly to the people, the cost of Senate campaigns, first with newspapers and then radio and television, continued to skyrocket.Other topics cover the Senate's often tumultuous relationships with presidents and the House of Representatives, the development of party floor leaders and the styles each majority leader brought to the Senate from Lyndon Johnson's tough whipping to Mike Mansfield's humble leadership, and the role of debate in Senate history.The book also covers one of the Senate's most notable modern-day characteristics: the filibuster. The history of it is looked at and how the use of it and the cloture rule increased dramatically in the 1970s.I found this book to be an excellent look at the history of the United States Senate. I would recommend this to those interested in American political history.

A good book that could probably have been a little shorter - and it's not so much a history as an evolution of certain parts of the senate (like committees) and an overview of them. But still a good read, albeit a little dry in places.

What could have been a very interesting study on one of the most interesting of US political institutions instead was a lopsided history of that body. Democrats are praised while Republicans are either ignored or excoriated.