The Raucous History of the Speakership

T he failure of House Republicans to agree on a new speaker on the first day of Congress was an embarrassment for the party. But it is not without historical precedent.

The title of “speaker” dates back to the medieval English Parliament:

The House of Commons has had a presiding officer since the 13th century, although it was not until the 14th century that the term ‘Speaker’ for this office first emerged. Peter de Montfort is recorded as having been ‘prolocutor’ (i.e. speaker) of the ‘Mad’ Parliament which met at Oxford in 1258. In the Parliament of 1376, the Commons chose Sir Peter de la Mare to act as its spokesman before the King. The following year, Thomas Hungerford was the first spokesman to be termed Speaker in the official record. From the office’s emergence until the 17th century, Speakers were appointed by the King and were often regarded by the Commons as his mouthpiece. However, Speakers did sometimes have to deliver bad news from the Commons to the King and this made their job risky. Between 1394 and 1535, the role of Speaker became synonymous with death as seven men who held or had previously held that position were executed by beheading.

The Constitution gives no formal powers to the speaker; until the 1967 passage of the 25th Amendment, which mentions the speaker as a recipient of formal notices of presidential incapacity, its only reference to the speaker was in Article I: “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.” The only concern the Framers addressed was therefore to avoid giving the president the power of choosing the speaker that English kings had enjoyed before the 1640s. The power was instead given to the House, which was intended to be the government body closest to the ordinary citizen and most reflective of popular sentiment. The Framers had no illusions about the House: They expected it to be noisy, fractious, and populist. That is why they gave it the power of the purse and the power of impeachment to discipline the less-populist government bodies, but gave those other bodies more sober duties such as making treaties and enforcing and interpreting the law.

The House in its early decades was indeed an unruly place, full of rough men who carried guns openly on the floor and spat tobacco juice. The flamboyant John Randolph of Roanoke, Va., was notorious for bringing his pack of hunting dogs into the House chamber. When 34-year-old Henry Clay was elected to the House and immediately chosen as speaker, he made Randolph’s dogs an early test of his own political strength:

While consolidating power early in his Speakership, Clay took a symbolic stand against one of the House’s most rowdy wildcards. A few weeks into the first session, Randolph entered the chamber trailed by one of his dogs. Clay quietly instructed longtime Doorkeeper Thomas Claxton to remove the offending animal. The Members present, including Randolph, watched silently as Claxton escorted Randolph’s dog from the House Floor, a move that seemed to please everyone but John Randolph. “Mr. R. has brought his dog into the House only once this Session,” noted Representative John Adams Harper of New Hampshire later that Congress, “and then the Speaker immediately ordered the Doorkeeper to take her out.”

It was Clay, in his three terms as speaker, who transformed the job into a position of great power. That may be Clay’s most lasting legacy, notwithstanding that he’s better known today for his work as “the Great Compromiser” in the Senate and his three failed presidential campaigns.

Elections for speaker have been wild affairs at times. In 1839, there was a protracted delay in even starting the vote for speaker due to a fight over which of two rival New Jersey delegations should be seated in the House, with the majority hanging in the balance:

In the October 1838 congressional elections, the New Jersey Governor and his Privy Council (the equivalent to a modern cabinet) had the obligation of totaling the votes received from the county clerks and issuing certificates stamped with the “broad seal” of the State to the victors, who in turn would submit them to the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate. New Jersey’s six House seats were on the ballot in the election of 1838. Since New Jersey did not have congressional districts at the time, all of the House seats were elected at-large by all State voters. Governor William Pennington (a member of the Whig Party at the time) announced that all six incumbent Whig Party candidates were re-elected by an extremely narrow margin and issued certificates to them to deliver to the House of Representatives. Only one of the candidates (Joseph Fitz Randolph) collected significantly more votes than his Democratic opponents. After major irregularities were discovered in South Amboy and Salem, the Democratic Party not only contested the election, but sent their candidates to Washington to take their seats in the House. After much wrangling, it was decided that only Fitz Randolph would be seated and that New Jersey would lose 5/6th of its representation for the term. Given the political division within the House (the Democrats held an extremely narrow margin), this not only greatly diminished New Jersey’s representation but effectively enabled the Democrats to hold on to their now tainted majority. Ultimately, the Congressional committee led by former President and now Congressman John Quincy Adams tasked with investigating New Jersey’s disputed election determined that the Democratic candidates were the actual winners and seated all five.

Pennington, ironically, went on to become speaker of the House himself in 1860, at the end of a divisive battle that lasted 44 ballots over eight weeks. He became the first Republican speaker, and he and Clay remain the only House freshmen to win the post. (He lost reelection in 1860 and died of an accidental morphine overdose two years later.)

The craziest speakership election had happened five years earlier, in 1855. The Whig Party had dissolved in 1854, once it became clear that it was no longer a workable vehicle for opposing the Democrats’ agenda. Yet the Democrats’ passage of the unpopular pro-slavery Kansas–Nebraska Act led to the party’s annihilation in the North. In those days, the new Congress did not meet for a year after a midterm election, so the new House gathered in December 1855. Party labels and alliances were fluid: The new House’s 234 members included between 79 and 83 Democrats, most of them from the South, whereas the previous Congress had included 156 Democrats. But the “anti-Nebraska” opposition’s large majority was divided among those who still carried the Whig label, those who were elected as Republicans or had embraced the label in the months after their election, members of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party, and those affiliated with the anti-immigrant American Party, known to history as the Know-Nothings. There were around 50 Know-Nothings — a third of the 150-odd-member majority — and two-thirds of those were from slave states.

The factions composing the majority saw the fight for the speakership as a power struggle to determine which party would emerge to take the Whigs’ place as the Democrats’ main rivals in the 1856 presidential election. It was also seen as a battle to determine whether opposition to slavery or opposition to immigration would be the cause to unite that rival party. The Democrats saw the chaos as an opportunity to steal a march, and they nominated a Northerner and ally of Stephen Douglas, William Richardson of Illinois. But they had denounced the Know-Nothings in terms that made it impossible to form an alliance even with those southern Know-Nothings who were both pro-slavery and “anti-Nebraska.”

Twenty-one candidates threw their hats in the ring for speaker, and 17 of them got votes on the first ballot. One of them, freshman Know-Nothing Alexander Pennington of New Jersey, was the cousin of William Pennington. The Know-Nothings were regionally divided and unable to unite behind a single candidate; the former Whigs and former Democrats among them were often unwilling to trust one another. The early leader was Lewis Campbell of Ohio, an ex-Whig whose support had been crucial to the election of new Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase. Chase, the leader of the Free Soilers, had declared himself a Republican and hated the Know-Nothings, but made enough peace with them in the 1855 gubernatorial campaign to prevent them from uniting with the Democrats. He was never much for personal loyalty, though, and he distanced himself from Campbell’s bid for the speakership. Eventually, Campbell, Pennington, and Richardson gave up, as did several other candidates who’d briefly appeared to be gathering momentum.

The speakership election dragged on for two months and 133 ballots, paralyzing the House into 1856, with the next presidential race beginning to loom as a problem for the struggling Democratic incumbent, Franklin Pierce. One consequence of the absence of a speaker was that the House refused to receive Pierce’s written State of the Union message, which declared his plan for Kansas statehood amid the bloodshed in the territory. The refusal to hear from the chief executive without a speaker reflected the role’s original medieval function. Pierce’s secretary was literally shouted down, with one observer commenting that the anti-Nebraska forces were “bawling and halloing like a parcel of wild Comanche Indians” to prevent the president’s message from being heard. But a vote to receive the message was brokered by Alexander Stephens, the pro-slavery Georgian who had been the House floor leader for the Kansas–Nebraska bill as a Whig before entering the new Congress as a Democrat. Southern Know-Nothings voted with Stephens on the message.

This seemed to represent progress for Stephens’s late bid to get a critical mass of Southern Know-Nothings (especially his former Whig colleagues) to back William Aiken of South Carolina, the Democrats’ substitute candidate for speaker. There was no question where Aiken’s loyalties lay on slavery: He was the state’s former governor and perhaps its largest slaveowner.

Republicans, meanwhile, reached outside their own party, and threw their support behind Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts. Banks was a likeable and mostly unprincipled opportunist of humble origins who had worked as a machinist. A former Democrat, Banks had joined the Know-Nothings and ridden their support to become speaker of the Massachusetts House after the party took it over, with an assist from the chamber’s Free Soilers. In Congress, Banks ran for the speakership as a Know-Nothing, but he already had his eye on jumping to the Republicans and bringing as many Know-Nothings as possible with him. His commitments on both slavery and immigration remained vague. In the end, Aiken drew about 20 anti-Nebraska votes and some two-dozen members sat out the final vote on February 2, 1856, but Banks defeated him 103 to 100.

The coalition that founded the Republicans was just as messy and unruly as today’s party: The victory for Banks gave Republicans a leg up, but the Know-Nothings still recruited former president Millard Fillmore as their presidential candidate and got 22 percent of the national popular vote compared to 33 percent for Republican John C. Frémont and 45 percent for James Buchanan, who had unseated Pierce at the Democrats’ convention. It would take the rise of Abraham Lincoln a few years later for Republicans to fully incorporate the remnants of the Whigs and the Know-Nothings. The 1855-56 speakership battle would have a lingering impact. In historian James McPherson’s view, the two-month struggle “crystallized [Banks’s] supporters as Republicans. . . . If any one moment marked the birth of the Republican party, this was it.” Banks ended up as one of Lincoln’s generals during the Civil War, while Chase ended up in the cabinet, his presidential ambitions repeatedly thwarted by the enemies he’d made within the Ohio Republican Party.

There were more such contentious speakership fights to come. Republicans took nine ballots to pick a speaker in 1923, when the party’s progressives rebelled after it had lost 77 seats in the 1922 midterms, cutting its 171-seat majority down to an 18-seat margin. As the Congressional Research Service notes:

A majority of the full membership of the House (218, in a House of 435) is not required. Precedents emphasize that the requirement is for a majority of “the total number of votes cast for a person by name.” A candidate for Speaker may receive a majority of the votes cast, and be elected, while failing to obtain a majority of the full membership because some Members either are not present to vote or instead answer “present” rather than voting for a candidate. During the period examined, this kind of result has occurred five times:

• in 1917 (65th Congress), “Champ” Clark was elected with 217 votes;
• in 1923 (68th Congress), Frederick Gillett was elected with 215 votes;
• in 1943 (78th Congress), Sam Rayburn was elected with 217 votes;
• in 1997 (105th Congress), Newt Gingrich was elected with 216 votes;
• in 2015 (114th Congress), John Boehner was elected with 216 votes; and
• in 2021 (117th Congress), Nancy Pelosi was elected with 216 votes.

In addition, in 1931 (72nd Congress), the candidate of the new Democratic majority, John Nance Garner (later Vice President), received 218 votes, a bare majority of the membership.

The bottom line is that such fights have happened before, and the parties have survived them. Individually, in some cases, those narrowly elected or reelected to the speakership have prospered, amassing great power in the job (Clark, Rayburn, Gingrich, and Pelosi) or going on to even higher office (Garner). In other cases — like that of Democratic speaker Tom Foley, who lost his reelection to his seat in 1994, beaten by a populist Republican whose campaign message was, “We need a listener, not a speaker” — the job has proved to be a poisoned chalice.

The House may often be a mess, but it’s a very American mess.