To find any useful historical parallels to the intraparty turmoil that played out in the U.S. House last week, when a small faction of hard-line conservative Republicans held up for four days the election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker, one has to reach back to the antebellum period.
Only once since the Civil War had it taken more than one ballot to elect a speaker, when in December 1923, Rep. Frederick Gillett was picked on the ninth ballot. But the 1840s and ’50s witnessed increasingly long, fractious and even vicious speakership elections that presaged the nation’s descent into secession and Civil War.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a preeminent scholar of antebellum U.S. politics, said the issue at the center of the long-ago speakership fights was different than the one facing Congress today. Back then it was slavery. Today it is the fate of effective liberal governance itself, Mr. Wilentz said. But both episodes possess valuable lessons for American democracy.
“It’s about political fractionalization, an old party system or an old way of doing politics falling apart. We’re seeing that now the same way we saw it in the 1850s. This has been going on for a long time for us. It’s not like it suddenly happened. It’s been happening since at least the 1990s. What it shows is political instability and political volatility, and what’s going to come of it, we don’t know,” said Mr. Wilentz, the author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.”
The fight over Mr. McCarthy’s speakership, which involved concessions to about 20 lawmakers that may weaken Mr. McCarthy’s position, may have damaged the institution of Congress, another possible parallel to the nasty battles of the 1850s, Mr. Wilentz said. In 1859, for instance, the conflict over slavery left the major parties’ sectional blocs unable to agree on a speaker, leading to the selection of a “compromise” candidate in first-term New Jersey Rep. Willam Pennington. But the compromise resolved nothing. Slavery remained an explosive issue through the rest of the year and into 1860, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s election and the South’s secession.
SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: Are we reliving the 1850s?
Four years earlier in 1855-56, it had taken a record 133 ballots over two months to elect antislavery Rep. Nathaniel Banks as House speaker. Banks had started his career as a northern Democrat before throwing in with the nativist Know Nothings before ultimately joining the antislavery Republicans, his career a microcosm of the rapidly shifting political winds of the era.
Listen to Mr. Wilentz discuss the House fights in 1849, 1855, and 1859 and how they helped pave the way to civil war, by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
