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By: Rebecca,
on 4/15/2010
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Donald A. Ritchie, historian of the U.S. Senate and author of the forthcoming The U.S. Congress: A Very Short History, as well as Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, appeared on a panel about “The Uses and Abuses of New Deal History,” at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, on April 8, 2010. Summarized here, his remarks dealt with common misperceptions about Roosevelt and Congress.
All presidents since the 1940s have been held to standards set by Franklin D. Roosevelt with regard to their relations with Congress. There is a common assumption that at least during Roosevelt’s first term, a compliant Congress gave him everything he wanted, and that the New Deal was exclusively an executive branch creation, with legislation written at the White House and promptly passed in Congress, sometimes without being read. This argument has been employed to promote the notion of presidential primacy in the federal government, from the “Imperial Presidency” to the “unitary executive.” While the image contains some truth, it is also clouded with inaccuracies.
The media has measured Presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama by what they accomplished in their first hundred days. This prospect was so troubling to John F. Kennedy that he added a disclaimer to his inaugural address that “All this will not be finished in the first 100 days.” Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days were unique. Republicans had lost 100 seats in the House (by comparison, the Democratic sweep in 1964 added 44 seats in the House; and the Republican victory in 1994 election brought a gain of 54). Those new members in 1933 looked to Roosevelt for leadership because the national economy had gone into free fall since the election, creating a sense of dire emergency that required extraordinary measures.
After Roosevelt called Congress into special session, he sent them a banking bill that the House passed that morning, the Senate that afternoon, and the president signed that night, the beginning of an unprecedented burst of legislative activity. But of all the bills Roosevelt signed during the Hundred Days, only two had fully originated with him: the Civilian Conservation Act and the Economy Act–which cut federal salaries and veterans’ pensions. Even the banking bill had been drafted by volunteers who stayed on from Hoover’s Treasury Department. Other ideas bubbled up from congressional sources. Commonly after there has been a change in party control of the White House, Congress will dust off measures that previous presidents vetoed. So Senator George Norris, a progressive Republican from Nebraska, revived the Tennessee Valley Authority, which Roosevelt now signed. Members of Congress also pressed on a skeptical Roosevelt the idea of federal deposit insurance, which today is counted as one of his smartest achievements. Other of Roosevelt’s proposals were designed to head off an activist
By: Rebecca,
on 7/21/2009
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Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, reflects on Walter Cronkite’s death. Ritchie has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades.
The veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite died disappointed with the trends in network evening news programs since his retirement in 1981. Cronkite had aspired to make the CBS Evening News the New York Times of television, but after he left the air he thought the program went tabloid, reducing serious coverage of foreign and national events in favor of human interest stories, health and consumer reporting. He regarded this as “trivializing,” and lamented the general decline in standards of television news.
The root of problem was the limited time available for news in a half-hour format. Cronkite had begun anchoring when the network news had just fifteen minutes a night, following or preceding fifteen minutes of local news from the network’s affiliates. Over the Labor Day weekend in 1963, CBS inaugurated the half-hour format, featuring Cronkite interviewing President John F. Kennedy at Hyannisport. NBC used CBS’s initiative to overcome resistance from its own affiliates and expand its popular Huntley-Brinkley Report to a half hour. Soon afterwards, surveys showed that more Americans relied on TV than newspapers as their chief source of news. But even at a half hour, with seven minutes subtracted for commercials, there were only twenty-three minutes for news. Cronkite’s program devoted an average of eight minutes each night to its Washington bureau, whose stellar squad of correspondents–including Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Nancy Dickerson, Bernard Shaw, and Leslie Stahl–jockeyed for air time. They boasted that their deadline of 6:30 PM EST became the deadline for the entire federal government.
Cronkite wanted to expand his news program to an hour, opening with hard news and then turning to lighter features. Even at the height of network domination in the 1960s and ‘70s, half of all television owners never bothered to watch the evening news and only one in fifty watched the network news every night. News drew its viewers from older, better-educated, middle- and upper-income professionals, who were disproportionately male. To expand their audience the networks needed to attract more women, racial and ethnic minorities, and younger people–consumers that advertisers were anxious to reach. The networks’ affiliates pioneered with local news programs heavy on crime, disaster, scandal, celebrities, and sports, which Cronkite dismissed as more show business than news reporting. No matter, local news grew so profitable that the affiliates resisted his efforts to expand network news to an hour.
The passing of the old era became evident as early as August 16, 1977, when Elvis Presley died. ABC News–being managed by the sports producer Roone Arledge–led off with Presley, while on CBS Cronkite opened with a report on the pending Panama Canal treaty. (Compare that to the way all of the networks covered Michael Jackson.) With Cronkite’s retirement, the local news approach finally penetrated the CBS Evening News. Cable networks challenged the three original networks–whose share of the news audience shrank from 98 percent in the 1960s to less than half today–and Cronkite lamented that too often the newcomers replaced sober news analysis with “polarizing diatribes.” He regretted that networks’ business managers replaced serious news documentaries with “trashy syndicated ‘news’ shows” on prime time. The Federal Communications Commission dropped the public service requirements for broadcast licensing, and the networks’ new corporate owners saw news budgets as ripe for trimming. CBS’s Washington bureau, which employed 21 correspondents at its peak under Cronkite, shrank to nine by the end of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, a new generation of news consumers was turning to the Internet as its major source, abandoning the evenings news along with the newspaper. The number of patent medicines sponsoring the evening news clearly demonstrate its aging demographics. “And that’s the way it is,” Cronkite had famously signed off his program, but what he saw of television news was not the way he wanted it to be.
By: Rebecca,
on 12/2/2008
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The election seems like old news at this point and yet we are still over a month away from inauguration day. Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, looks at this lag in historical perspective. Ritchie, who has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades, explains why a President-elect may need this time prepare to take over.
Many Americans, and the rest of the world, wonder why so much time elapses between the U.S. presidential election in November and the inauguration on January 20. Why not reform the system and reduce the interval? The answer is we did reform it–the interregnum used to last twice as long.
Under the original Constitutional scheme, the new president took office on March 4, four months after the November elections. The new Congress would not convene until the first Monday in December, thirteen months after the election. This made sense to the framers in the eighteenth century, when transportation was slow and treacherous. The incoming president would call the Senate into special session for a week in March to confirm his cabinet, and then have the rest of the year to get his administration underway free from congressional interference.
By the twentieth century, the old system had grown obsolete. The second session of every Congress did not meet until after the next election had taken place, meaning that senators and representatives who had been defeated or retired came back as lame ducks. They proved especially susceptible to lobbyists, and since the short session had to end at midnight on March 3, they could easily filibuster to block needed legislation. George Norris, a progressive Republican from Nebraska who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, led the effort to amend the Constitution and move the presidential inauguration from March 4 to January 20, and the opening of Congress from December up to January 3. By staggering the closing dates of the terms of the president and Congress, the amendment also eliminated the need for outgoing presidents to spend their last night on Capitol Hill signing and vetoing last-minute legislation.
Beyond getting rid of most lame duck sessions, Norris’ amendment halved the transition between presidential administrations, from four months down to two. Transitions had grown increasingly awkward. During peaceful and prosperous times, the incoming president had to keep out of the way of his predecessor. Herbert Hoover, for instance, sailed off to South America after the 1928 election to avoid upstaging Calvin Coolidge’s final months in office. During periods of conflict and crisis, however, the interregnum cost the nation needed leadership. Outgoing presidents tried to coerce their successors into continuing their policies, as James Buchanan attempted with Abraham Lincoln in 1861, and Herbert Hoover did with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Lincoln and Roosevelt wisely avoided committing themselves to failed ideas, but these impasses did nothing to resolve the crises they faced, which grew worse by the time they took office.
The transition between Hoover and Roosevelt took place against a dramatic collapse of the American financial system, with the nation’s banking system shutting down, credit drying up, and unemployment soaring. Congress had passed the Twentieth Amendment in March 1932 and sent it to the states, but the necessary three quarters of the states did not ratify it until January 23, 1933, three days after the new date for inaugurations, making it too late for that year. The first inauguration on January 20 took place in 1937.
That last long interregnum convinced everyone that a shorter transition was preferable, but is the current system still too long? In a parliamentary system such as Great Britain’s, the new prime minister can move into 10 Downing Street the day after the election and the new cabinet can show up ready for work. The American system of separation of powers, however, makes no provision for a shadow cabinet in waiting. The president-elect needs time to select cabinet members and a host of other executive branch nominees who will be confirmed by the Senate. It may not do the new president any favor to shorten the interregnum further, although when times are tough the inauguration still looks awfully far away.
By: Rebecca,
on 4/11/2008
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Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. Earlier this week he sent me this blog along with the following introduction: Even though I study news rather than make it, last week I was invited to give a “newsmaker” luncheon talk at the National Press Club. The occasion was the club’s centennial, the video of that talk is online here. I thought the condensed version below would make a good blog.
Boy was he right! Below Ritchie talks about the National Press Club and its place in history.
The National Press Club is celebrating its centennial, raising a question about why journalistic competitors feel compelled to band together. Founded in 1908, the club had many short-lived predecessors. The Washington Correspondents’ Club, for instance, held several dinners designed to reduce tensions between reporters and their political sources during the difficult days of Reconstruction. Such nineteenth-century press clubs failed because they let their members run up a tab at the bar (the National Press Club has never extended credit), and because they were either press clubs, founded by reporters for Washington, D.C., papers that excluded national correspondents, or correspondents’ clubs that barred the local press, indicating the animosity between them. The genius of the National Press Club was that it combined reporters for both the local and the national press.
But only men. The club left women and minorities outside the parameters of mainstream journalism. Not until 1955 did it hold a vote of its entire membership to admit Louis Lautier, a reporter for the National Negro Publishers Association. Radio news broadcasters were also treated as second-class citizens at first, being permitted to join the club only as non-voting members. Women reporters founded the Women’s National Press Club, but the separation prevented them from covering the National Press Club’s regular “newsmaker” luncheons.
In 1956, the men offered a compromise by inviting women to attend the luncheons, so long as they sat in the balcony and left as soon as the lunch was over. While the men dined below, the women shared the balcony with television cameras, hot lights, and coils of electrical wiring. Women reporters appealed to the famous guest speakers not to participate unless they could dine below with the men. Among the few to comply was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, eager to publicize an American injustice. One who failed to offer solidarity was Martin Luther King, Jr., desperate to attract national press attention to the March on Washington. Dr. King spoke to an audience segregated by gender rather than race. Economic pressures on the club, whose membership declined during the 1960s, finally persuaded the men to admit women as members in 1971. Fittingly, the club’s centennial-year president is Sylvia Smith of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
Regardless of race, gender, or media, Washington correspondents have historically been caught in a creative tension between the scoop and the pack–between professional rivalries and forces that pull the competitors together. They spend much time together outside the same closed doors, riding the same campaign trains, planes, and vans, being handed the same press releases, attending the same press conferences, cultivating the same high-placed sources. This pack journalism is counteracted by each reporter’s dream of the scoop, beating everyone else to the big story that makes a difference.
Somewhere between the scoop and the pack, the club has provided a welcome respite for the working press. Formed for reasons of camaraderie, the club has helped to shape the press corps and to define legitimate reporting. Unique among world governments, the U.S. allows reporters themselves to determine who deserves a press pass. Both the press galleries and the press clubs have guarded this prerogative jealously, and have labored diligently to decide whom to admit. Sometimes they have been too narrow in their definition and too slow to diversify. But ultimately the galleries and clubs have expanded to accommodate a more diffuse news business, one that continues to evolve with each startling technological breakthrough. The Internet will not be the last. A central institution in this transformation, the National Press Club has provided a common ground for newsmakers and news reporters. It would be hard to image the Washington press corps operating without it.
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The Jonathan Lethem/Philip K. Dick event at Cooper Union was a real delight. It began with Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, announcing that a second volume of PKD's novels will be released from the LOA in August 2008, also edited by Lethem. He rattled off the titles of the five novels quite quickly, but -- assuming I heard him correctly and nobody involved with the book changes their mind between now and then -- the included novels will be:
Lethem then read some excerpts from his introduction to the
selected stories
collection from a few years ago (which, Lethem informed us, would not be released in paperback because the paperback rights to the stories are owned by somebody else) and the whole of his own story
"Phil in the Marketplace". Lethem then answered a number of questions from the audience. I took some notes, but missed as much as I got, and all of it is at best paraphrase. Nonetheless, here 'tis:
To a question about why, when other writers also write about paranoia and such, Dick is so special, Lethem replied that when he speaks of Dick, he often also finds himself (or other people) bringing up Pynchon, DeLillo, and Vonnegut, among others, but that for him the difference is a matter of distance and emotional reserve -- Dick's difference is defined by his emotional investment in the situations. His empathy is his only compass. He possessed an obvious satirical impulse (or worldview, even), but he doesn't make fun of his characters' situations. He seems to grapple with the world and seek for solace.
Lethem had mentioned early on that one of the things he found most interesting and challenging about putting together the first LOA volume was working on the timeline, where 40 years of disappointments and struggles were not buffered by a biographical narrative, but were, instead, tied to particular dates. An audience member asked him to elaborate on this, and on the timeline's effect on his story "Phil in the Marketplace". He got a bit off topic and talked for a while about
Hampton Fancher, who wrote the
first version of the script of
Blade Runner, mostly as a way to explain that it seemed Dick was deeply uncomfortable with his growing fame, and feared the encroaching outer world as much as he desired it. Who knows, for instance, how uncomfortable he might be with the kind of canonization he's recently received? Yet he would also, hopefully, be hugely gratified. "Phil in the Marketplace" is about his exile temperament -- he wrote from the margin and drew energy from what he saw as the fate of the pulp writer. Lethem said he wants, and has wanted since he was young, what every PKD fan vociferously wants -- legitimacy for Dick. And yet he noted that he and many fans also have another side, one that no matter what sort of accolades or canonization Dick receives, still feels slighted, denied, defiant. But, Lethem noted, Dick is now in the Library of America, and nobody can remove him.
The next question referred to
I Am Alive and You Are Dead
, and the questioner asked if Lethem thought Dick was ever really in control. Lethem said he admired that book, but thought it played to the Romantic view of Dick as a crazy artist, and that we have to remember that he had other sides to his life and personality, and that he also really enjoyed wearing masks (playing a role) and being a raconteur. He loved to create theories, test them, and test the credibility (and gullibility) of his audience with them. He didn't stand on one patch of ground. It's as hopeless, Lethem said, to defend him against the word "crazy" as it is to defend Faulkner against the word "alcoholic", but we also have to recognize how generally functional Dick was, and how much more to him there is than just the crazy stuff.
Another questioner asked if he liked Dick's
Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Lethem said he did, and he thought it was, as Dick's last completed novel, a very encouraging place for his career to end up, because it's a sensitively-written novel told from a woman's point of view -- and if you're going to have trouble with any element of Dick's writing, Lethem said, you're going to have trouble with the female characters in many of his books, because they are often treated as [I think this is the term he used, but had some trouble hearing it:] dark lords. Dick wrote 40+ novels, Lethem said, and on any day at least 8-10 of them seem to him to be among PKD's best, and
Transmigration is up there.
He then made a point I think is insightful -- that you have to read at least 3 Dick novels, preferably in different modes, to really understand his accomplishment. (I should have raised my hand and asked him to elaborate on this, but he's probably done so in an essay or interview somewhere.)
Finally, someone asked what Lethem thought of the
movies made from Dick's writings. He said two or three are worthwhile.
Blade Runner he said he hated when he first saw it, because of its huge divergences from the original novel, but that later, and particularly with the
director's cut, he decided it was one of the great American movies, something any PKD fan could be grateful for the way a Hemingway fan, for instance, could be grateful that something by Hemingway inspired a movie as great as
To Have and Have Not [the obvious difference being, though, that that great movie -- with a script that William Faulkner, among others, worked on -- was based on one of Hemingway's lesser novels, whereas
Blade Runner was based on one of Dick's best]. Lethem said he liked
A Scanner Darkly, though it certainly shows some of the limits of adaptation. Of the other films, he said there are some scenes that he likes very much, and wished he could put together a movie just from some of those. He said we can be grateful that most of the movies based on Dick's writings have been made from the short stories, leaving the major works for future
Richard Linklaters. Or so we can hope.
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I talked about this over at Mahablog and pointed out that perhaps the President could take office immediately after the start of the New Year.
Either that or make Shadow Cabinets legal in this country.
If we wanted to speed up the transition even more, here’s a perfectly moral, legal, and constitutial way do so:
Nancy Pelosi calls the House of Representatives back into session, and steps aside as Speaker. Since constitutional scholars agree that the Speaker of the House need not be a member of that body, they elect Barak Obama to that post. Then George Bush and Dick Cheney both resign. The Speaker of the House is next in line, and becomes President to fill out the remainder of Bush’s term. Obama can still be re-elected in 2012 because the 22nd Amendment permits that for a person serving out another President’s term for less than two years. However, Joe Biden can’t become Vice-President immediately by the same means, but he could quickly take that office if he’s nominated by Obama and a majority of both Houses of Congress approve, as the 25th Amendment provides. Anybody see any holes in that (other than Bush and Cheney are hunkered down for the duration)?
Otherwise, what are we waiting for?
For foreigners looking at the US transition the question about length is related to just how many positions are required.
The U.S. is encumbered by a system of patronage that permeates its bureaucracy. More than 9,000 jobs - listed in the so-called “plum book” - must be filled by an incoming administration, not only major offices such as attorney-general, secretary of state and secretary of the treasury, but in some cases much more junior positions, including clerical staff.
Among the many challenges facing the new administration of Barack Obama after Jan. 20, then, is the appointment of a deputy division director, low level waste management and decommissioning, in the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards. In Treasury, Mr. Obama must settle on an assayer (San Francisco) for the U.S. Mint.
This arcane system hampers an administration’s effectiveness for as much as two years as those jobs are being filled. The numbers of political appointees may be small compared to its vast civilian bureaucracy, but the U.S. should still follow the lead of most other Western countries and professionalize the ranks of its bureaucracy at the lower levels.
This measure would help, but they would not entirely eliminate the problem of a power vacuum in Washington. Two and a half months is too long. The U.S. needs to have its new president in office sooner. If the problem relates, as some suggest, to the logistics of staging the elaborate inauguration celebrations, then the ceremonial should come later, in the way that a coronation comes later. If the outmoded Electoral College system is to endure, then Mr. Obama should become president the moment the vote of the electors is announced. The Twentieth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution should be amended to allow for the oath of office to be administered promptly. The ceremonial of Inauguration Day could wait until Jan. 20.
Americans like to think of themselves as citizens of a young country. It’s time they started, then, to behave like one by modernizing their democratic institutions.
While I certainly wish that the transition could take place faster, and I certainly think that due to modern technology, we should be able to speed it up again, one needs only to look back 8 years to show just how long it might take to figure out who actually won an election and show that the President-elect can very easily not be decided by November 15 or December 1 or whatever arbitrary new date we choose.
It seems that the Electoral College and the entire system of selecting the President would need an overhaul before we get into moving up the date. Not that I’m arguing against that mind you…
To Don Sherfick above. Your idea was actually seriously considered by Woodrow Wilson in 1916. He worried that if he lost the election he could not speak with the country’s backing, particularly on matters of foreign policy. So he was going to appoint his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, to Secretary of State, then resign along with the Vice President. Rules of succession at the time would have made Hughes the president. Wilson won, so we’ll never know how that would have worked out.
This is a though-provoking discussion of what must seem like a cumbersome system to much of the world. When you add in the now two-year campaign just to get the nomination, they probably wonder how we ever get any governing done.
Richard Smith’s observation about patronage suggests that a president elect might need more than two months to get ready to govern, but that would never fly. However, why not have the cabinet members and other appointees start serving on January 20 as temporary appointments. Those needing Senate confirmation would still require confirmation within the first year.