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For all the Senate's self-importance—and despite its quickly asserted control over presidential appointments—there was little doubt in the early days of the Republic that the real power lay in the House of Representatives. But after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the struggle to hold the Union together gave new importance to the Senate as the forum of national debate, and it found its highest prestige in this time of great orators: Webster, Clay and Calhoun. These men served so long that, in their perspective, Presidents came and went, but the Senate continued. When Andrew Jackson, an outsider who swept into office with the first genuine popular vote, ventured to object to a Senate action, the body replied stonily: "The President has no right to send a protest to the Senate against any of its proceedings."
Jackson represented the first major presidential challenge to the Senate. He tried to wrest patronage away from the Senate, where it had been a somewhat clubby affair, and largely succeeded in putting it under party control. More important, he sought to establish the concept of the President as the representative of the whole nation. The Jacksonian concept did not immediately prevail. During the Civil War, the Senate was subservient to Lincoln. But with war's end and Lincoln's death, it rapidly reasserted itself and achieved its pinnacle of power if not prestige. Its leaders were party bosses and spoilsmen; in the burgeoning economy of the Reconstruction Era, many a robber baron found that a state legislature could be bought and, with it, a Senate seat. When one Senator seriously proposed a bill unseating those Senators whose places had been purchased, Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho replied: "We might lose a quorum here, waiting for the courts to act."
Senators never felt grander. The Congress decided what industries to protect with tariffs, what railroads to build, what public works to undertake. They chose, or thought they chose, Presidents. And they were hawks: the Senate had more than its share in pushing the U.S. into the Spanish-American War. Some time before, a young scholar named Woodrow Wilson had written mournfully: "The President may tire the Senate by dogged persistence, but he can never deal with it upon a ground of real equality. His power does not extend beyond the most general suggestion. The Senate always has the last word." Noted Senator George Hoar at the turn of the century: "If Senators visited the White House, it was to give, not to receive, advice."
But the bosses went too far, and such reformers as Wisconsin's Robert La Follette and Idaho's William Borah in 1911 forced the Senators to accept the 17th Amendment, providing for election of Senators by direct popular vote rather than state legislatures. The Senate was never the same again—nor was the presidency.
The New Base