The Reform Movement: Populists, Progressives, the Oregon System and the Race Rider

Lesson 3 covered what went wrong with election by legislatures: the deadlocks, the empty seats, the Clark and Lorimer cases. This lesson is about the people who decided to do something about it, and the twenty years it took them. The campaign had three fronts. In Congress, the House kept passing an amendment and the Senate kept sitting on it. In the states, reformers built machinery that made legislatures ratify the voters' choice whether the Constitution said so or not. And in the state capitols, legislatures began applying for a convention under Article V, the one route to an amendment that bypasses the Senate. Each front moved the others. The Senate gave in only when the state machinery had changed who sat in the Senate.

An old idea with new owners

The Senate's own historians date the first proposal to 1826, when a resolution for popular election of senators was offered in the House. Nothing came of it. Nothing came of the petitions voters sent the House in the 1870s either. The National Archives' account puts the turn in the late 1800s, when state legislatures "deadlocked over the election of senators, which led to Senate vacancies lasting months and even years," political machines controlled some legislatures, and the chamber picked up the name "millionaire's club." Those were the conditions. The organizers came from the farm revolt.

The People's Party held its first national convention in Omaha and adopted its platform on July 4, 1892, the 116th anniversary of the Declaration. The platform proper has three planks: finance (free silver, a graduated income tax, postal savings banks), transportation (government ownership of railroads, telegraph and telephone) and land. If you read only the platform you will not find the Senate. The direct election demand sits in the "Expression of Sentiments," a list of resolutions the convention adopted alongside the platform. Resolution 8 favored a constitutional provision limiting the President and Vice President to one term and "providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people." The text comes down to us through the World Almanac for 1893 and George Brown Tindall's A Populist Reader, both cited by the History Matters archive at George Mason University that reproduces it.

The Populists did not make the Senate their main target, and they were not the only ones talking about it. But they were the first national party to write the demand down, and when the Democrats absorbed much of the Populist program after 1896, the demand came with it. The Senate Historical Office's briefing says that in the mid-1890s "neither the Democrats nor the Republicans paid much notice at the time." That changed as the Progressive wing of the Republican Party, strong in Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Oregon and Idaho, took up the cause after 1900. By 1911 the sponsors on the Senate floor were a Kansas Republican, Bristow, and an Idaho Republican, Borah, with Democrats such as Owen of Oklahoma pushing from the other side of the aisle.

The House passes, the Senate waits

Five times between 1893 and 1902 the House passed a joint resolution proposing a direct election amendment. Senator Robert L. Owen of Oklahoma, who made direct election his personal cause, listed the votes in a Senate speech printed by the Government Printing Office in 1912. Contemporary newspapers fill in the 1893 vote he did not list.

Date	Chamber action	Vote	What happened next
January 16, 1893	House passes the joint resolution under a motion to suspend the rules, after Republican members filibustered for a time	Carried without division (no recorded tally), per the Record-Union and Salt Lake Herald dispatches of that night	Died in the Senate
July 21, 1894	House passes a direct election amendment	141 to 50	Died in the Senate
May 11, 1898	House passes a direct election amendment	185 to 11	Died in the Senate
April 13, 1900	House passes a direct election amendment	242 to 15	Died in the Senate
February 13, 1902	House passes a direct election amendment	Voice vote, no dissent recorded	Died in the Senate
May 23, 1908	Senate votes to refer S.J. Res. 91 to the Committee on Privileges and Elections	33 yeas to 20 nays, 39 not voting	Referral killed it, per Owen
April 13, 1911	House passes the Rucker resolution (H.J. Res. 39) with the race rider	296 to 16	Goes to the Senate; see below

Look at the margins. Two thirds of the House is a high bar, and the House cleared it every time by a wide margin. Owen said the House had passed such resolutions "on four occasions by two-thirds votes," counting from 1894. The Record-Union's Washington dispatch of January 16, 1893 shows how little drama the first one had: after the war claims business and a failed swamp-land bill, "the Republicans filibustered against the motion to suspend the rules and pass the joint resolution for the constitutional amendment for the election of United States Senators by the popular vote, but in the end permitted it to be carried without division, and the House adjourned." A constitutional amendment passed on a Monday night as the last item before adjournment, and nobody in the Senate had to answer for it.

The Senate never voted the proposals down. It declined to vote at all. The National Archives puts it flatly: "Each time, however, the Senate refused to even take a vote." That is the detail the reformers came to hate most. A recorded defeat would have given them names to run against. Silence gave them nothing. Owen's 1912 speech names the senators he blamed for the delay, Lodge of Massachusetts, Depew of New York, Aldrich of Rhode Island, Kean of New Jersey, Hale of Maine and Penrose of Pennsylvania, and says Lodge, Aldrich and Kean "actually tried to prevent my obtaining a vote" in 1908 by "the small parliamentary device" of asserting he was asking unanimous consent when he had moved for a vote. He quotes Idaho's own Weldon Heyburn dismissing the demand as "popular clamor." When the Senate finally did act on a proposal, on May 23, 1908, it was to send S.J. Res. 91 back to committee, 33 to 20, with 39 senators not voting. Owen treated the referral as a defeat, which it was.

What the Senate's defenders said

The Senate's defenders were not all machine men. George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, a grandson of Roger Sherman and a senator from 1877 until his death in 1904, made the case against direct election in a speech in April 1893, during the special session of the 53rd Congress, and the Senate Historical Office has preserved his argument alongside his 1897 essay "Has the Senate Degenerated?" Hoar argued that the amendment would replace state legislatures, which are permanent bodies answerable for their votes, with party conventions, which are temporary, poorly regulated and answerable to no one, "having no other responsibilities." He predicted that direct election would invite a different corruption, lower the quality of senators, and weaken the Senate as a check on hasty majorities. And he warned that it would be the first of several such amendments: the Electoral College next, then popular election of federal judges. His 1897 essay described the Senate's purpose as giving voice to "the sober second thought of the people."

Hoar's argument has outlived him, and lesson 8 and lesson 10 take it up again in modern form. Hoar was arguing in 1893, before the worst of the deadlocks and before the Clark and Lorimer cases gave the reformers their best material. And his claim that conventions would replace legislatures as the real selectors was accurate, and the direct primary was in part the reformers' answer to it. If the problem with popular election was that party conventions would pick the nominees, the direct primary took the nomination away from the conventions too.

The other arguments were about the states. Senators from the South argued that federal supervision of Senate elections, which Congress had the power to impose under Article I, Section 4, would follow popular election into their states. That argument produced the race rider, discussed below. Senators from small states argued that election by the legislature was part of the bargain of 1787 that gave each state two senators, and that the one could not be changed without unsettling the other. Lesson 1 covers the bargain. The reformers answered that equal suffrage stayed in the amendment untouched, which it did.

The Oregon System

While the Senate waited, Oregon changed the facts on the ground. The Oregon Blue Book's official list of ballot measures records the three steps.

Election	Measure (title as listed in the Oregon Blue Book)	Yes	No	Effect
June 2, 1902	Initiative and referendum amendment (legislative referral)	62,024	5,668	Oregon voters could now write laws themselves
June 6, 1904	"Direct Primary Nominating Convention Law" (initiative)	56,205	16,354	Party nominations, including for United States senator, moved from conventions to a popular primary; legislative candidates could sign Statement No. 1
June 1, 1908	"Instructing Legislature to Vote for People's Choice for United States Senator" (initiative)	69,668	21,162	The legislature was directed to elect the primary winner

The mechanism was the pledge. Under the 1904 law a candidate for the legislature could sign Statement No. 1, a promise to vote for the candidate for United States senator who received the most votes at the primary, whatever his party. William G. Robbins's entry on George Chamberlain in The Oregon Encyclopedia describes it as directing legislators to support the winning candidate, "the people's choice." A candidate who refused to sign had to explain why to voters who had just given themselves the initiative by eleven to one. Most signed.

The first test came in 1906 and 1907. Oregon's June 1906 primary produced Jonathan Bourne Jr. as the Republican choice for the full Senate term and Frederick W. Mulkey for the short term left by John H. Mitchell's death. When the legislature met in January 1907, Governor Chamberlain's biennial message, as the Spokane Press reported on January 15, advocated "the election of Bourne and Mulkey to the senate, ratifying the popular choice." The Condon Globe's legislative correspondent explained why the vote waited until Tuesday, January 22: even to fill a vacancy, the 1866 federal law required the election on the second Tuesday after the legislature organized. Chamberlain's message had recommended exactly that, their election "in accordance with the result of the direct primary election," and on that day the legislature elected both men. The Constitution still said the legislature chose. The legislature chose whom the voters told it to.

The 1908 test was harder, and it is the one everyone remembers. Chamberlain, a Democrat and the sitting governor, ran for the Senate in a Republican state and won the popular vote. The legislature that met in January 1909 had a Republican majority. But a majority of its members had signed Statement No. 1, and the June 1908 initiative had instructed the legislature to vote for the people's choice by better than three to one. On January 19, 1909, in the Senate Historical Office's words, the Republican legislature elected the Democratic governor "because of the state's direct primary nominating law." Robbins says the legislature "reluctantly elected" him. Reluctance was allowed. Defiance was not, if a member wanted to come back.

Other states copied the parts they liked. The Constitution Annotated, drawing on George Haynes's 1938 history, describes the range: some states let voters express a preference among party candidates at the primary, and the state legislatures then generally elected the candidate who won; in two states, legislative candidates "were required to promise to support, without regard to party ties," the Senate candidate with the most votes; and by the year before ratification "at least twenty-nine states were nominating Senators on a popular basis," so that the legislature's discretion, as the Constitution Annotated puts it, had been reduced to roughly what presidential electors retain. The Senate's own page says that by 1912 "as many as 29 states" elected senators through party primaries or general elections. Nebraska followed Oregon soon after 1907, by the Senate Historical Office's account. Owen's 1912 speech counted West Virginia and Delaware among the nine states that had not "definitely" acted, but noted that in West Virginia primaries in almost all counties instructed legislators, and that in Delaware legislative elections carried an understanding about the Senate vote.

The number 29 matters for the rest of this course. When the Senate finally voted in 1911, a large share of its members had themselves been chosen through state primaries or pledges. The Senate Historical Office's briefing says the Senate approved the resolution "largely because of the senators who had been elected by state-initiated reforms, many of whom were serving their first term." The Oregon System did not persuade the old Senate. It replaced it.

The convention petitions

Article V gives the states a second route to an amendment. On the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the states, Congress "shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments." It has never happened, and the states' campaign for a direct election convention is the closest it has come. The National Archives' feature on the amendment says that when passage by both houses of Congress seemed unlikely, many states applied to Congress for a convention, that the method had never been used, and that "as the number of applications neared the two-thirds bar, Congress finally acted." The Archives reproduces sample documents: petitions from the Illinois State Grange (1887 and 1898), the resolutions of the Utah legislature and governor (1897), and the convention applications of Colorado (1901) and Louisiana (1907).

Counting the applications is harder than it sounds, and this lesson will not give you a single number as if it were settled. The applications were not uniform. Some asked for a convention limited to the Senate question; some asked Congress to propose the amendment itself and mentioned a convention only as a fallback; some were adopted by one chamber and not the other; some were later rescinded or repeated. Owen's 1912 speech says that by May 23, 1908 he had presented resolutions from 27 states urging Congress to act, and that by 1912 37 states favored direct election or direct nominations, by resolution or by practice; he describes Iowa's joint resolution of April 12, 1909 as calling for a constitutional convention, which suggests he did not count every resolution as a convention application. The threshold in 1911, with 46 states, was 31. Whatever the exact count, the Senate's defenders could do the arithmetic. If the applications reached 31, Congress would face a convention it could not control, with no limit on the amendments such a convention might propose. A direct election amendment written in the Senate started to look like the safer course.

That pressure is one reason a chamber that had refused to vote for eighteen years agreed to vote twice in 1911. The other reason, covered above, is that by 1911 the chamber was different. Both can be true. Reformers tend to credit the convention threat, the Senate's historians tend to credit the state primaries, and the Senate's own page notes both the applications and the changed membership. Report both.

The press

The muckrakers gave the movement its villains. In 1906 William Randolph Hearst hired the novelist David Graham Phillips, whose series "The Treason of the Senate" ran in Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine over several monthly issues and portrayed senators as the paid agents of industrialists and financiers. The Senate Historical Office credits Hearst's publications with championing reform and credits the political scientist George H. Haynes, whose 1906 study of Senate elections and later two-volume history remain the standard works, with building the scholarly case. Phillips's articles were partisan and sometimes unfair, and President Roosevelt coined the word "muckraker" partly in reaction to them. They also sold. Lesson 3 covers the Clark and Lorimer cases that gave the series its best evidence after the fact.

1911: Sutherland, Bristow and the race rider

Here the story gets procedural, and the procedure is the point. Two Congresses, two resolutions, two amendments to strike the same clause.

The 61st Congress, February 1911

Senator Borah of Idaho was in charge of the resolution reported by the Judiciary Committee in the closing weeks of the 61st Congress. As reported, it provided that the times, places and manner of holding Senate elections would be prescribed in each state by its legislature. That language is what came to be called the race rider. Under the original Constitution, Article I, Section 4 lets each state legislature prescribe the times, places and manner of congressional elections "but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators." Congress had used that power in the 1866 Act described in lesson 2, and it had used it for House elections in the Reconstruction enforcement acts. The rider would have removed Senate elections from Congress's reach. Michael Dimino's essay in the Heritage Guide to the Constitution states the effect plainly: it would have prevented Congress from intervening in Senate election laws that disenfranchised Black voters.

Senator George Sutherland of Utah moved to strike the rider and restore Congress's power. The Seventh Circuit's survey of the debate in Judge v. Quinn cites Sutherland's remarks of January 13, 1911, the exchanges between Sutherland and Borah on February 16, and the Senate's approval on February 24, 1911 of the amendment "retaining federal oversight of senatorial elections" (46 Cong. Rec. 3307). The Morning Oregonian's report of March 1 describes the resolution as "altered under the Sutherland amendment, which placed control of elections in the hands of Congress." Borah had opposed Sutherland's change and lost on it, then stayed with the resolution.

On February 28, 1911 the Senate voted on the resolution as amended. The Oregonian's roll call shows 33 nays and reports that the resolution "lacked four votes of the two thirds majority necessary to its adoption," which puts the yeas at 54. Fifty-four is a majority of the Senate. It is not two thirds of 87 voting. Among the yeas: Borah, Bourne, Bristow, Cummins, La Follette, Owen, Sutherland. Among the nays: Root and Depew of New York, Lodge of Massachusetts, Penrose of Pennsylvania, Smoot of Utah, Bacon of Georgia, Tillman of South Carolina, Lorimer of Illinois, and Heyburn of Idaho. Senator Bacon had tried to add an amendment limiting federal supervision to states whose legislatures provided no method of election, and Vice President Sherman ruled it out of order. The Senate Historical Office's briefing, describing the opposition to Bristow's resolution, says "eight southern senators and all Republican senators from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania" opposed it, and the Oregonian's February roll call shows the same two blocs. The two groups wanted different things. The southerners wanted the rider back; the northeasterners wanted no amendment at all. Together they had 33 votes, and 33 was enough.

The 62nd Congress, April to June 1911

The new Congress had a Democratic House, and the House moved first. On April 13, 1911, by 296 to 16, it passed the Rucker resolution, H.J. Res. 39, named for Representative William W. Rucker of Missouri. The San Francisco Call's dispatch says the resolution was "in the form of the Borah resolution reported out of the senate judiciary committee in the closing days of the last congress," that is, with the race rider and without Sutherland's change, and that Republican opposition "was based on the fact that it did not contain the changes afterward made in the fight in the senate, which assured to congress continued control over elections in the several states." All but 15 Republicans voted for it anyway, saying the public wanted the amendment submitted quickly. The National Archives holds the Senate's desk copy of H.J. Res. 39 dated May 1, 1911, and quotes the rider: "The times, places, and manner of holding elections for Senators shall be as prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof."

In the Senate, Bristow offered a substitute: the same amendment without the rider. The Seventh Circuit's footnote cites the Senate debate on Bristow's proposal on May 23, 1911 (47 Cong. Rec. 1482 to 1490) and the final debate on June 12 (47 Cong. Rec. 1879 to 1925). The Asheville Citizen's account of June 12, datelined Washington that night, gives the sequence. Bacon of Georgia offered an amendment to qualify Bristow's so that federal supervision would be barred unless the state legislature refused or failed to act; it was defeated. The Bristow substitute then came to a vote and the Senate divided 44 to 44. Vice President Sherman cast the deciding vote for it (47 Cong. Rec. 1923). Senator Clarke of Arkansas was the one Democrat who voted for the Bristow substitute, which the Citizen says produced the tie; he then voted with his party on final passage. The resolution as amended passed 64 to 24.

The debate was personal. Stone of Missouri accused Bristow of "snatching" the amendment from Sutherland, since Bristow had voted against Sutherland's amendment in the previous Congress and now carried the same idea. Bristow answered that he had once thought the measure stronger without the federal supervision provision and now believed it stronger with it. Davis of Arkansas attacked Bristow and the insurgents and was called to order. Bacon said "great interests" had pressed to defeat the resolution, and Works, Guggenheim and Cummins objected. Borah, again in charge of the resolution, spoke for it. He had opposed Sutherland's change in February and accepted Bristow's in June; the Idaho course in lesson 7 returns to his role.

Version	Who	Elections clause	Vote	Result
Judiciary Committee resolution, 61st Congress	Reported; Borah in charge	Times, places and manner prescribed in each state by its legislature (the race rider)	Amended by Sutherland, February 24, 1911	Rider struck; Congress's power kept
Resolution as amended by Sutherland	Senate	Congress's Article I, Section 4 power preserved	54 to 33, February 28, 1911	Failed, four votes short of two thirds
H.J. Res. 39 (Rucker)	House, 62nd Congress	Race rider included	296 to 16, April 13, 1911	Passed House, sent to Senate
Bristow substitute	Senate	Rider struck	44 to 44, Vice President Sherman votes yea, June 12, 1911	Adopted
H.J. Res. 39 as amended	Senate	Congress's power preserved	64 to 24, June 12, 1911	Passed; sent back to House; conference from July 5, 1911

The rider deserves to be described without softening. The southern senators who wanted it said so openly: they wanted to keep federal election officers out of their states' Senate elections. The Fifteenth Amendment had been on the books since 1870, and the states in question had spent the previous two decades writing it out of their constitutions through poll taxes, literacy tests and white primaries. The rider would have constitutionalized their control of the new popular Senate elections. Sutherland and Bristow, both western Republicans, refused to let a democratic reform carry that clause, and Bristow was willing to be accused of inconsistency to stop it. The amendment that emerged kept Congress's power intact, and Congress used it: the Constitution Annotated's doctrine essay records that in Chapman v. King (5th Cir. 1946) federal courts held that barring a Black citizen from a United States Senate primary because of his race violated the Seventeenth Amendment. That ruling was possible because the rider failed by one vote.

The House did not accept the Senate's version for nearly a year. The Daily Kennebec Journal of May 14, 1912 reports that the resolution had been "in conference since July 5, last year." Lesson 5 picks up there, with the House's vote of May 13, 1912 and the enrolled joint resolution at 37 Stat. 646.

Questions and answers

Did the Populists invent the direct election idea?

No. The Senate Historical Office dates the first House resolution to 1826, and voters petitioned the House for popular election in the 1870s. What the People's Party did on July 4, 1892 was put the demand into a national party's adopted resolutions, where the Democrats and later the Progressive Republicans could pick it up. The Omaha text is on History Matters.

If the House passed the amendment five times with two-thirds majorities, why did it never reach the states?

Because Article V requires two thirds of both houses, and the Senate never voted on the House's resolutions. The National Archives says the Senate "refused to even take a vote." The one recorded Senate action before 1911, on May 23, 1908, was a 33 to 20 vote to send S.J. Res. 91 to committee, which Owen's 1912 speech treats as the end of that resolution.

How could Oregon bind its legislators when the Constitution said the legislature chose?

It did not bind them in law. It bound them in politics. Statement No. 1 was a voluntary pledge a legislative candidate signed before the election, and the 1908 initiative was an instruction from the voters. A legislator who broke the pledge faced the voters who had given themselves the initiative by 62,024 to 5,668. The Constitution's text was satisfied because the legislature still cast the votes, as it did for Bourne and Mulkey on January 22, 1907 and for Chamberlain on January 19, 1909.

How many states used the Oregon System by 1912?

The Senate Historical Office says "as many as 29 states" chose senators through party primaries or general elections by 1912, and the Constitution Annotated, citing Haynes, says "at least 29 states" were nominating senators by popular vote the year before ratification, with two states requiring the Oregon pledge. Most of the 29 used advisory preference primaries rather than Oregon's full machinery, so "copied Oregon" overstates it for many of them.

How close did the Article V applications get to two thirds?

Close enough that Congress worried, according to the National Archives, which says the number of applications "neared the two-thirds bar." With 46 states in 1911 the threshold was 31. Owen counted 27 state resolutions urging Congress to act by May 1908, but his count mixed convention applications with resolutions asking Congress to propose the amendment itself, so the exact number of valid applications depends on how you count. This lesson gives you the sources rather than a single figure.

What exactly was the race rider?

A clause in the House's resolution, quoted from the National Archives' copy of H.J. Res. 39: "The times, places, and manner of holding elections for Senators shall be as prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof." Under Article I, Section 4, Congress has the power to make or alter such rules. The rider would have taken that power away for Senate elections, which, as the Archives states, was meant to bar federal intervention in cases of racial discrimination against voters.

Why did the amendment fail in February 1911 and pass in June 1911 with much the same Senate?

The Senate was not the same. The 61st Congress ended March 3, 1911, and the 62nd brought in new senators, several of them chosen under state primaries. Beyond that, the February vote of 54 to 33 and the June vote of 64 to 24 were on resolutions with the same elections clause after Sutherland's and Bristow's amendments, so the shift of ten votes is a shift in membership and in pressure, not in text. The Senate Historical Office credits "the senators who had been elected by state-initiated reforms" for the June result.

Why does the lesson say Borah opposed Sutherland and accepted Bristow?

Because the record shows it. The Seventh Circuit's footnote in Judge v. Quinn cites the Sutherland and Borah debate of February 16, 1911, and the Morning Oregonian's account describes the resolution Borah managed as "altered under the Sutherland amendment." In June, with Bristow's substitute doing the same thing, Borah again had charge of the resolution and spoke for it, per the Asheville Citizen. The Idaho lesson in this course takes up what that sequence says about him.

Hard questions

Isn't it unfair to call it a "race rider" when its sponsors said it was about state control of elections?

The name is the one the National Archives uses, and the Archives states the clause's purpose: to bar federal intervention in cases of racial discrimination against voters. Its sponsors did talk about state control. They also knew, and said in debate, that federal control meant federal election supervisors in southern states. Bacon's two attempts to limit federal supervision, in February and in June, were explicit about this. A reader can hold both facts: the clause was framed as a federalism measure, and its purpose and effect were racial. The lesson reports what the sponsors said and what the Archives concludes, and gives you the Congressional Record pages to read the debate yourself.

Hoar predicted that popular election would bring its own corruption, through party conventions and campaign money. Wasn't he right?

Partly, and the reformers conceded the first half of it. The direct primary was their answer to the convention problem Hoar identified, and Oregon adopted it in 1904 before the amendment passed. On campaign money, Hoar had a point that lesson 10 treats seriously: statewide Senate campaigns cost more than lobbying a legislature, and the money had to come from somewhere. The counter-evidence is in lesson 3: the Senate heard nine bribery cases between 1866 and 1906 under the old system, and buying a legislature turned out to be cheaper than buying a state. Which corruption is worse is a judgment. That both existed is a fact.

If 29 states had already given voters the real choice, why amend the Constitution at all?

Because the 29 were not 46, because the state systems depended on pledges and instructions a legislature could defy, and because the deadlock problem in lesson 3 continued in the states without them. The reformers also wanted uniformity: a senator from Oregon chosen by the voters and a senator from Delaware chosen after months of balloting sat in the same chamber with the same vote. Whether the amendment then changed very much in practice is the question lesson 9 takes up, and the 29-state figure is the strongest evidence that it changed less than either side claims.

Didn't the Senate act only because it was scared of a runaway convention, not because it was persuaded?

The National Archives says the applications "neared the two-thirds bar" and that Congress then "finally acted," which supports the fear theory. The Senate Historical Office says the resolution passed "largely because of the senators who had been elected by state-initiated reforms," which supports the persuasion theory, or at least the replacement theory. The honest answer is that the two causes are hard to separate and that the Senate's own sources credit both. Reformers who want the convention threat to carry the whole story should notice that the June 1911 vote was 64 to 24, well past two thirds, which does not look like a chamber acting under duress at the margin.

The vote on the Bristow substitute was 44 to 44 and a Vice President decided it. Doesn't that mean the amendment's elections clause has no real mandate?

It means the Senate was evenly split on one clause on one day. The resolution containing that clause then passed 64 to 24, the House accepted it 238 to 39 in May 1912 (see lesson 5), and 36 state legislatures ratified it within eleven months, with 52 of the 72 chambers unanimous by Dimino's count. The clause also did nothing new: it left Congress's Article I, Section 4 power where the 1787 Constitution put it. A tie vote to keep an existing power is a weaker story than a tie vote to create one.