January 2011

Now rarely used outside the United States Senate, the filibuster has played a key role in the enactment of federal law since 1789. Amply protected by custom and the formal rules of Senate procedure, the practice is seen by some as the ultimate expression of free speech and by others as a capricious assault on democratic rule. We present here a review of filibusters in the American past. -- The Editors

The filibuster is undoubtedly the clearest demonstration of raw political power in all of American government. The most formidable weapon in the legislative arsenal, it strikes directly at the concept of majority rule that lies near the heart of the democratic process. It permits a single legislator—or a determined minority acting in concert—literally to talk a bill to death and, through various parliamentary maneuvers, to extort concessions that effectively thwart the majority’s will. Once invoked, it can bring lawmaking to a standstill in the United States Senate and, on occasion, in the House of Representatives as well.

In 1888 Century magazine put out an extraordinary illustrated history called Battles and Leaders of the Civil War . It contained hundreds of pictures of battles, bivouacs, incidents, marches, skirmishes—all intended to convey a vivid visual impression of what the great conflict, still less than a generation in the past, had been like. The editors of the four-volume work faced a difficult problem, for in the 188o’s the techniques had not yet been invented for printing good halftone reproductions of drawings, paintings, or photographs. Instead the work of the artists and photographers who recorded the events of the great war had to be painstakingly translated by skilled artisans who copied each picture as best they could, carving each detail into woodblocks from which engravings could be printed.

Midshipman Nathaniel Fanning, Continental Navy:

I shall now proceed to give a circumstantial account of this famous BATTLE … between the GOOD MAN RICHARD … and the SERAPIS . …

She was the most powerful woman in America, if not the world. He was the junior senator from the state of Massachusetts. She wanted no position or favor, only to extend her already enormous influence, something she professed not to have. He wanted desperately to become the next President of the United States. Clearly he was at a disadvantage.

I saw Mrs. Roosevelt weekly in the spring of 1958 and throughout the academic years of 1959-60 and 1960-61. We taught a seminar together on international law and organization at Brandeis University. She adopted me and my family as she did so many others. There were visits to her cottage at Val-Kill and dinners at my home in Massachusetts. From there we would drive to the campus, where she usually slept the night before our morning class. Then breakfast in the mornings to prepare for the seminar or just as often to talk politics.

William Maclay, elected by the Pennsylvania Legislature to the Senate of the United States, left his farm near Harrisburg early in March, 1789, and journeyed to New York to attend the first session of the First Congress. He took board and lodging for two dollars a week at a Mr. Vandolsom’s near the Bear Market, and for the next month he waited for the two houses to form a quorum, meeting informally each morning with other members at Federal Hall on Wall Street. To his friend Benjamin Rush he wrote on March 9: “I never felt greater mortification in my life to be so long here with the eyes of all the world on us and to do nothing is terrible.”

On September 23, 1779, Captain John Paul Jones, wallowing along the English coast in the unwieldy Bonhomme Richard , met the British frigate Serapis . The battle that followed remains one of the most extraordinary single ship actions in history. The Richard had been a weary old French Indiaman, condemned for rot, when Jones took her over. He armed her with such guns as he could get, many of them antiquated and in poor condition, and took her to sea as a balky, decrepit frigate mounting six eighteen-pounders, twenty-eight twelvepounders, and six nine-pounders. His crew was made up of men from a dozen different nations. But Jones was a fighter and longed to bring this dubious ship into action.

Clara Boule of Lewiston, Montana, recently heard from her mother. This is less than startling, since her mother, Mrs. Elmer Lazure, lives at Belt, only eighty miles from Lewiston. But—the letter was postmarked November 17, 1969

Friends of Mrs. Edith Knudsen thought she was out of her mind when a group of young adults received vacation post-cards from her mailed from West Palm Beach and conveying greetings suitable for six-year-olds. The ex-planation: the addressees were six-year-olds when the cards were mailed.

In Washington, Senator Clifford P. Case of New Jersey, whose office is in the old Senate office building, reported that a letter mailed to him from the new Senate office building took three weeks to reach him. The two buildings are across the street trom each other.