Granting that there does not appear to be any evidence explicitly tying the proposal and ratification of the 20th Amendment to the opening years of the Great Depression and the highly unfortunate administration of President Herbert Hoover, the proximity of the two nevertheless strongly implies some manner of causal connection. Could it have been a simple coincidence that the United States Congress ended up resurrecting George Norris’s lame-duck amendment at around the same time in 1932 that it became clear the increasingly unpopular sitting President was not going to be reelected? Absolutely. The problems inherent in allowing federal terms in office to continue at significant length beyond the most recent election had been relatively clear – albeit, not always top of mind – for the better part of one hundred and fifty years. Congress accordingly did not need to be acting in response to a particularly urgent dilemma for an appropriate reform proposal to have made sense. That being said, it would seem to make slightly more sense for the immanent defeat of an extremely unpopular chief executive – and the prospect of their remaining in office for months following a rejection at the polls – to be the primary trigger for a substantial discussion of modifying the relevant sections of the Constitution. Consider, in support of this position, certain developments within the Republican Party leading up to Hoover’s re-nomination in June of 1932.
Writing in the St. Paul Dispatch in
July of 1931, former White House physician James F. Coupal (1884-1935) publicly
declared that Hoover’s predecessor, Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), would accept
his party’s nomination in place of Hoover if it was offered to him in a free
and unqualified manner. Several months later in November, California Senator
Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) likewise publicly advocated for Hoover’s retirement
from politics following the conclusion of his term as President, specifically
in the belief that their party would fare better with a different nominee on
the ballot the following year. For several months thereafter, Hoover’s
opponents within the party accordingly began seeking out a potential
replacement in time enough for the forthcoming Republican National Convention.
This group’s first choice, New Jersey Senator Dwight Morrow (1873-1931), had
unfortunately died a month prior to Johnson’s public plea to the President,
while their second choice, former Vice-President Charles G. Dawes (1865-1951),
had already accepted Hoover’s offer to head the aforementioned Reconstruction
Finance Corporation. But while this still left a raft of Republican officials
favored by the party’s progressive wing as potentially viable candidates –
including the likes of Nebraska Senator William Borah (1865-1940), Pennsylvania
Governor Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), and the aforementioned Senators Hiram
Johnson and George Norris – it soon became clear that Hoover’s hold on the
nomination was much stronger than it appeared. He may indeed have been doomed
to lead his party to a crushing defeat at the polls, but the contemporary GOP
nevertheless appeared incapable of coalescing around a viable alternative.
Bearing all of this in mind, the fact that
Congress ultimately approved Norris’s lame-duck amendment in March of 1932 would
arguably stand to reason. Pursuant to the 1930 mid-term elections, the
Republicans held a single-seat majority in the Senate and – following a series
of deaths and special elections – had been reduced to a similarly narrow
minority in the House of Representatives. In consequence – and in keeping with
ongoing attempts by certain members of the GOP to maneuver the incumbent
president out of winning re-nomination – it would seem a far from unreasonable
turn of events for certain distressed members of the Republican Party to have
determined that a constitutional amendment capable of removing Herbert Hoover
from office sooner rather than later was decidedly worth pursuing. Not only did
these dissidents likely have cause to disagree with the President’s approach to
public policy – especially if they counted themselves among the GOP’s
aforementioned progressive element – but it would surely have occurred to them
that their party’s reputation was bound to suffer the longer the man remained
in office. Rather than allow Hoover to win re-nomination – which he was bound
to – lose re-election – which he was bound to – and then continue to sully the
Republican brand during his last four months in office, these men may therefore
have instead opted to approve the lame-duck amendment and thus speed their
nominal leader’s ill-omened administration to as prompt an end as possible.
Notwithstanding the length of time which
usually elapses between the approval of an amendment by Congress and its final
ratification by the states – tending, on average, towards a year or more – and
the grace periods which are often built into amendments themselves, it would in
fact have been possible for the lame-duck amendment proposed in March of 1932
to have come into force in time to effect the next scheduled presidential
inauguration in March of 1933. This was owing to a specific clause in the text
of the amendment itself, the copy of which, in full, states that, “Sections 1
and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification
of this article.” As the cited sections were the ones which asserted explicitly
when the terms in office of the President, Vice-President, and the various
members of Congress would thereafter end and begin, a successful ratification
no later than October 15th, 1932 would have immediately shortened
Hoover’s term in office by a total of forty-three days. That this was the case
– that the proposed amendment was specifically intended so that it could be
applied to the incumbent administration – would further seem to indicate that
Hoover’s swift removal was on the minds of its supporters. If it had not been –
if the amendment had simply been intended to address a long-standing
institutional problem – then one would accordingly be forced to wonder at the
purpose of the cited clause. Why, in short, make its application at all
time-sensitive if it was not intended to address a specific, urgent problem?
Unfortunately, the amendment’s ratification
process is somewhat harder to account for. Based on the assumption that the
proposal itself was approved by Congress in part due to the support of
dissident Republicans who wished to prevent further harm being done to their
party’s reputation, one might thereby reasonably conclude that the ratification
of the same would rapidly become one of the top priorities of contemporary
public officials situated across the political spectrum. As long as the process
was concluded by October 15th at the latest, Hoover would be forced
to leave office on January 20th rather than March 4th, an
outcome which would allow the incoming President over forty extra days to begin
implementing the kinds of wide-ranging social assistance, financial relief, and
public works programs that the beleaguered country sorely needed. This didn’t
leave the supporters of the proposed amendment very much time to bring about
its ratification, of course. As of 1932, thirty-six states constituted the
three-fourths threshold for ratification. With only slightly more than six
months to go between March 2nd and October 15th, six
state legislatures would accordingly need to approve the proposed amendment
every month in order to reach the relevant deadline. And while this certainly
would not have been impossible – previous amendments had managed to meet or
even best this rate – it was still something of a tall order.
Initially, the process did seem to proceed
apace. In March of 1932 alone, eight state legislatures voted to ratify the
proposed amendment, followed by three more in April. As spring turned to
summer, however, the tempo began to slow. Only one state, Louisiana, voted to
ratify in June, followed by one more in July and two more in August. September
saw a further two states, Texas and Alabama, follow suit, bringing the total up
to seventeen. With little more than a month to go before the October 15th
cutoff, nineteen ratifications were still required. With the election for
president now in full swing, however – the Republicans having re-nominated
Hoover after a rather desultory convention in June while the Democrats coalesced
around the ascendant Roosevelt at the beginning of July – there no longer
seemed to be any room on the political calendar for anything other than the
race for the White House. Precisely when the next chief executive could legally
take office was still, doubtless, a matter of significant public concern. Under
the circumstances, however, with President Hoover travelling the country
continually arguing the dangers of depending on the federal government for
assistance while Governor Roosevelt built on the promise in his convention
acceptance speech to create a “new deal” for the American people, the question
of who would take office naturally rose to the forefront. In the end, of
course, Roosevelt emerged victorious, garnering four hundred and seventy-two
electoral votes to Hoover’s comparatively measly fifty-nine. Hoover carried six
states, Roosevelt took forty-two. And while Hoover did only slightly worse than
the victorious Republican candidates in 1920 and 1924 in terms of the popular
vote, his tally of fifteen million, seven hundred thousand nevertheless paled
in comparison to Roosevelt’s nearly twenty-three million.
Yes, the American people had most
definitely spoken, and with an emphasis and a sense of concord not seen since
the beginning of the previous decade. But while Roosevelt’s ultimate triumph
did augur a more active federal response in the near future to the privation
being daily wrought upon the American people by the Great Depression, it was no
longer an open question exactly when the man would take office. The October 15th
deadline having long since been blown past, Hoover would accordingly remain in power
into March of 1933. In light of the opportunity which the original amendment
proposal had offered, this was doubtless a substantially frustrating outcome
for many Americans. Though he had been elected in a landslide to bring the kind
of expansive public assistance programs he had erected in New York to the
nation as a whole, Roosevelt would nevertheless be forced to wait for almost
four months to elapse before being permitted to finally take office. Now, while
he was doubtless embittered by his loss, Hoover was unlikely to use the
intervening period to deliberately make things more difficult for his elected
successor. A stubborn man he may have been, but he had never shown himself to
be particularly vindictive. And yet, simply by remaining in office while doing
very little to offer substantial relief to his countrymen, Herbert Hoover was
bound to do his share of harm as the Depression continued to worsen around him.
Meanwhile, of course, the proposed amendment remained on the books,
half-finished but still a going concern. And so, as was often the case with
amendments to the Constitution, January witnessed a kind of revivification. It
may have been a done deal that Roosevelt’s tenure in office would not begin
until March 4th, 1933, but in the event that his policies proved no
more effective than Hoover’s, it would be to the benefit of the American people
not to be forced into the same situation four years later in 1936.
But while many amendments, as
aforementioned, experienced a sudden burst of support at the beginning of the
year following their initial approval by Congress, few quite equals that which
carried the 20th Amendment across the finish line. The most obvious
reason that this sort of thing often occurs is surely that majority of states
tend to hold their annual legislative sessions in January. Sessions can be
called at other times of the year, of course, and as the ratification process
for most amendments makes clear, such sessions often are called for
exactly that purpose. But depending, among other things, on the nature of the
amendment, the identity of the majority party in the relevant legislature, and
the ability of lawmakers to make an unexpected trip to the state capitol, it
doubtless seems much easier in most cases for state assemblies to simply take
up proposed amendments during their regularly scheduled session in January. But
while this, no doubt, is what happened at the beginning of 1933, convenience
would still not entirely explain the sudden fervor for ratification that seemed
to overtake the various states. Between January 4th and January 23rd,
all of the remaining nineteen states necessary to secure the
ratification of the proposed amendment submitted their approval of the same.
Where this not – frankly – astounding enough, the eight days that followed –
the 23rd to the 31st – witnessed a further nine states
add their names to the final tally as well. This made for a total of
twenty-seven states, all of which voted to ratify the proposed amendment over
the course of January 1933, averaging out to something like one state every day
for one full month.
To be fair, such a tremendous acceleration
in the rate of ratification was not entirely unheard of. Something very much
like it had also happened in 1919 during the process which brought about the
ratification of the 18th Amendment. Having been approved by Congress
on December 18th, 1918, the proposed prohibition amendment
languished for an entire year until, in January 1919, the pace of approvals
suddenly and dramatically increased. From January 2nd to January 16th,
all twenty-one states necessary to secure its final ratification voted to endorse
the amendment in question, followed by eight more between the 16th
and the 29th. This made for an astounding rate of twenty-nine states
in less than twenty-nine days, a record which even the 20th
Amendment was ultimately unable to beat. But while the final success of the 18th
Amendment – and the regime of nationwide prohibition it inaugurated – was inarguably
the product of a long and multifaceted pressure campaign on the part of
countless grassroots organizers and political operatives, the success of the 20th
Amendment seemed to be the result of a far more disjointed and ad-hoc process.
The various social crusaders at work in the American temperance movement had
been endeavoring for decades to build lobbying networks, organize voting blocs,
and establish sustainable connections within the mainstream political
establishment, the end result of which was a tremendous arsenal of resources
which could be brought to bear as the situation required. When the
constitutional amendment towards which they had worked for so long became
stalled in the states as 1918 drew to a close, therefore, temperance activists
had it entirely within their means to suddenly accelerate the process. The same
could not be said for the supporters of the 20th Amendment.
This isn’t to say that the problem the
proposed amendment was intended to address was particularly new or novel as of the
early 1930s. On the contrary – and as the last several entries in the present
series have attempted to make clear – the ability of lame-duck Congresses and
lame-duck presidents to interfere in the ability of the American people to make
manifest their democratic will had been painfully evident for almost one
hundred and fifty years as of 1932. The thing that set this issue apart from
the likes of temperance or the female franchise, however, was that it really
only made itself known on an intermittent basis. For most of American history
up to the early 1930s, the fact that lame-duck officials enjoyed an extra four
months in office beyond their potential defeat at the polls had only shown
itself to be a source of controversy on a handful of occasions. Outside of
these infrequent occurrences – distressing though they may have been in the
moment – the American people seemed inclined to forget that the lame-duck
problem existed at all, thereby preventing the emergence of a cohesive reform
movement and the concomitant accumulation of influence and resources. Bearing
all of this in mind, the fact that the 20th Amendment also received
a burst of support at the beginning of the year following its approval by
Congress would seem to be especially inexplicable. Not only does it appear a
rather strange turn of events for an amendment which had only seemed to become
necessary in the spring of 1932 to experience a sudden surge of support in the
states in January of the following year, but the fact of the surge itself would
seem rather oddly timed. If such passionate support for the proposed amendment
existed at all, why was it deployed in January 1933 instead of the summer of
1932? In short, what caused twenty-seven states to suddenly find their
enthusiasm that could not have had the same effect six months prior?
There do not seem to be any obvious answers
to these questions. As aforementioned, the contemporary Republican Party was
generally split between those conservatives who were willing to continue to
support President Hoover and those progressives who felt that his policies were
simultaneously damaging to the country and deleterious to the party’s brand.
While it accordingly makes a certain amount of sense for the former group to
withhold their support for the proposed lame-duck amendment out of a belief
that Hoover deserved to see out his term in office to its intended conclusion,
it doesn’t necessarily follow that these same Republicans – who presumably
wielded a substantial amount of influence within a great many state assemblies
– would have then reversed course entirely once the October deadline was
passed. It may be that they favored the amendment in principle but did not want
it to apply to Hoover. Or perhaps, having witnessed the full extent of the
nation’s discontent with Herbert Hoover in particular and the Republican Party
in general – the Election of 1932 having flipped the Senate in the Democrat’s
favor and increased their House majority from two hundred and twenty seats to
three hundred and eleven – certain Republicans sought to shore up their party’s
badly tarnished public image by enthusiastically throwing their support behind
a measure which had already shown itself to be broadly popular. Or maybe, as
aforementioned, it was simply a question of timing.
Unwilling to convene in special session to
ratify an amendment which, even if approved before the deadline noted in its
text, might not actually have had all that much effect on the nation’s already
troubling economic state, it’s quite possible that most state legislators opted
simply to wait until their customary January meeting. And then, having taken
the opportunity to study the proposed amendment in some detail, they then
universally decided that it was worthy of their approbation. Granted, this
would not necessarily explain the intensity of support which the
proposed amendment suddenly garnered, but perhaps it doesn’t need to. The 20th
Amendment, even divorced from the circumstances which likely led to its
approval by Congress, was a very necessary reform. Several incidents in the
early 19th century had made this fact painfully clear. And while it
seemingly took most state legislators until January of 1933 to take account of
this fact, their tardiness need not be evidence of anything other than
run-of-the-mill political lethargy. Lethargy, granted, that was followed by a
frankly astounding burst of activity, but lethargy all the same. And while this
apparent sense of malaise did ultimate prevent the 20th Amendment
from applying to Herbert Hoover – thus permitting his term in office to
continue until March 4th, 1933 – it at the very least did not
prevent the reform in question from being enacted with uncommon speed. By
January 23rd, 1933, thirty-nine states had voted to ratify, three
more than the requisite thirty-six. Less than a month later, following
certification, this tally rose to forty-six, with the remaining two states,
Maryland and Florida, submitting their belated ratifications in March and
April, respectively. Thus it was, a little more than a year following its
approval by Congress, that the 20th Amendment to the United States
Constitution had been endorsed by the legislatures of all forty-eight states.
As to how one would classify the amendment
itself – whether, according to the criteria established previously, it could be
described as a popular proposal or was more institutional in nature – there
likewise does not seem to be an obvious conclusion. On the one hand, the
essential nature of the thing would seem to suggest that only public servants
and political operatives were likely to be interested in its passage. It only
effected, after all, certain specific aspects of the federal timetable for
which the average American doubtless rarely spared a thought. Granted, on
certain previous occasions, the order of operations by which federal officials
were sworn into office had had a tremendous effect on the lives and livelihoods
of everyday American citizens. The election of Thomas Jefferson by a lame-duck
Federalist Congress in 1801, for example, fundamentally altered the course of
the nation’s early political history. Not only did it allow for the first
peaceful transfer of power between rival political factions in the history of
the America republic, but it ushered in the age of Jeffersonian democracy, a
period of administrative decentralization that witnessed the repeated and
widespread expansion of the electoral franchise and a concomitant
diversification of the nation’s political elite. Had the incoming Congress been
given the choice instead – and if that same body had conspired to grant the
presidency to Aaron Burr – one cannot help but conclude that the proceeding era
would have played out very differently indeed. Laying aside the dubious
speculation of many contemporary observers that Burr was a charlatan who was
bound to drag the nascent republic in a decidedly aristocratic direction, one
can at the very least quite easily envision a split occurring among the Democratic-Republicans
between the supporters of Vice-President Jefferson and the devotees of
President Burr. What might have come of this split, ultimately, it would not do
to speculate here. Suffice it to say, as far as the American people were
concerned, their lives would likely have been altered in a most dramatic
fashion.
Just so, the 1825 election of John Quincy
Adams by another lame-duck Congress served to fundamentally fracture the
ascendant Democratic-Republican Party and arguably accelerated the rise to
power of radical populist Andrew Jackson. Had Jackson been elected in place of
Adams by the incoming Congress rather than the outgoing Congress, one fairly
struggles to imagine the potential consequences for near-term American history.
Without a “corrupt bargain” around which to build a fervent following, would
the relatively inexperienced Jackson have been able to sustain his popularity?
Would the Democratic-Republican Party have split quite as quickly or as
definitively under Jackson’s leadership in 1825? Would the 2nd Bank
have been destroyed sooner? Would there have been a financial panic in 1836? In
attempting to answer just about any of these questions, one cannot help
remarking upon the incalculable effects that the presence of a lame-duck
Congress in February of 1825 ultimately wrought upon the fates and fortunes of
millions of Americans. Clearly, then, while 20th Amendment did
constitute a substantially technical kind of reform – of the sort normally of
interest only to public officials and political insiders – the issue which it
sought to address had often drastically affected the lives of everyday
Americans. Granted, the last time this had been obvious before the early 1930s
had been several decades prior to the American Civil War. But while the
American people may not have had cause to grasp the practical significance of
certain aspects of the federal timetable for nearly one hundred and fifty years
as of 1932, this did not necessarily preclude them from being made to grasp it
again. All that was required was the right kind of crisis.
Then again, when one re-examines the
specific circumstances under which the 20th Amendment was ultimately
approved by Congress and ratified by the states, the role of certain
institutional actors would seem to be quite significant. In order to be
submitted to the states for ratification, recall, any proposed amendment
requires the affirmation of two-thirds of the sitting members of both the
Senate and the House. And so, while the Democrats had a majority in the latter
and one seat less than the Republicans in the former as of 1932, they could not
have approved the lame-duck amendment proposal entirely on their own. They
would have if they could have, to be sure. It would have been very much to
their benefit to hasten the conclusion of Herbert Hoover’s term in office and
usher in their chosen candidate, one Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The sooner
Roosevelt was able to begin implementing his promised “new deal,” the sooner
the Democrats could begin to rehabilitate their reputation after losing three
presidential elections in a row over the course of the 1920s. But as it then
stood, according to the terms of the Constitution, they would require the
assistance of a certain number of Republicans. Eighty-eight of them, to be
exact, bringing their majority of two hundred and nineteen in the House up to the
two-thirds threshold of two hundred and ninety and their minority of
forty-seven in the Senate up to the requisite sixty-four. The fact that they
were ultimately able to accomplish this, as aforementioned, is really very
telling. Clearly, no small number of congressional Republicans saw some benefit
to shortening Hoover’s term as well.
Perhaps, as noted previously with the
various Republican legislators in the states, these federal members of the GOP
simply saw the inherent wisdom in the proposal. They may not have felt it the
most urgent thing in the world to usher President Hoover out of office some
forty days ahead of schedule, but the utility of shortening the lame-duck
session might still have been reasonably evident. And so, presented with the
opportunity to secure the passage of an amendment which made good sense
regardless of the circumstances of the moment, they opted to vote in its favor.
Then again, it may also have been a question of post-disaster damage control. Hoover’s
continued presence in the White House, particularly by the end of 1930, had
proved itself to be quite corrosive to the reputation of the Republican Party
as a whole. The results of the 1930 mid-terms were proof enough of that, with
the Democrats picking up fifty-two seats on Election Day and winning enough
special elections over the next several months to take control of the House for
the first time since 1919. The Senate remained in Republican hands, if only by
a single seat, but the balance of governorships – previously weighted thirty to
eighteen in favor of the Republicans – also shifted in favor of the Democrats to
a ratio of twenty-five to twenty-one. Clearly, between the elections of 1928
and 1930, something had happened to set the American people against the
Republican Party in spite of the former’s consistent support of the latter
throughout the 1920s. The most obvious culprit, of course, was Herbert Hoover,
his leadership, and his response – or lack thereof – to ravages of the Great
Depression. And while it may not have been possible to replace Hoover at the top
of the ticket going into the Election of 1932 – in large part because there
just didn’t seem to be any viable alternative – many Republicans were doubtless
concerned about their prospects and eager for some means to separate themselves
from their ill-starred leader.
The 20th Amendment no doubt
appeared to be a suitable lifeline. Granted, its passage would not prevent the
Republicans from losing control of the White House, but its application being
tied to a specific deadline predating Election Day would conceivably have
allowed anxious Republicans to draw a distinction between themselves and their
doomed nominee for President. “Yes,” they might tell their constituents while
they were campaigning for re-election, “Herbert Hoover has indeed led the
country astray. And it was for that exact reason that I voted in favor of the
lame-duck amendment. He will surely be defeated when he faces the voters in
November, but I think we can all agree he could always leave sooner than next
March.” There was no guarantee, of course, that the proposed amendment would be
ratified in time to actually apply to the incumbent president. But as long as
the otherwise vulnerable Republicans remembered to pawn off any blame for
failure on the noted lethargy of state lawmakers, support for the proposed
amendment might still have proven itself a useful tactic. And in this sense,
the relevant reform might be thought of as being both popular and institutional
in nature. On the one hand, its passage was likely aided by a desire on the
part of certain vulnerable Republicans to insulate themselves from what they
had every reason to believe would be a particularly bruising election cycle in
November of 1932. It might thus be fairly described as a means by which a group
of political insiders sought to hold on to their accustomed power. On the other
hand, however, given precisely what it was that these same Republicans had
cause to fear – i.e., the disapprobation of the American public – it might also
be perfectly valid to think of the lame-duck amendment as a measure largely
propelled to ratification by widespread public discontent. After all, had
Hoover not so thoroughly made himself an object of public scorn, would anyone
have suddenly thought it necessary to shorten the term in office of the sitting
president?
In either case – again, reaching far,
faaaar back to where the current discussion actually began – the impact of the
17th Amendment on the behavior of the Senate within the specific context
of its approval of the 20th Amendment would seem to be fairly clear.
The fact that, per the terms of the 17th Amendment, the Republican
Senators who were up for re-election in 1932 had to make their case to the
general population of their states rather than to the legislatures thereof
doubtless strongly colored whether they supported the lame-duck amendment or
not. Had the legislatures still performed the role of insulating Senators from
being directly accountable to the public, fewer of them would surely have had
cause to fear being unambiguously associated with President Hoover and his
disastrous response to the opening phase of the Great Depression. Indeed, so
long as they continued to please their legislative sponsors, one finds it hard
to imagine that any Republican Senators in states with Republican-controlled
governments would have needed to harbor any anxiety whatsoever. As it stood,
however, the fact that Senators at the federal level were elected by
popular vote arguably made the re-election bid of every Republican incumbent in
1932 a referendum on the policy record of Herbert Hoover as well as themselves.
What else had the President been doing, after all, but giving voice to
Republican orthodoxy? And How many Republican Senators had voted in favor of
Smoot-Hawley? Some kind of answer was required; the people would surely demand
it. And while some progressives in the party might reasonably have claimed that
they were opposed to Hoover from the very start, those not possessed of
similarly radical bona fides would have had every reason to grab hold of
anything that might seem to separate them from their party’s nominee. The 20th
Amendment, as it might have applied to Hoover himself, had the potential to be
exactly that. And the reason for this, amusingly enough, was effect of the
otherwise unrelated 17th Amendment.
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