The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment.

• Author: Zywicki, Todd J.

The Constitution of 1787 provided for the appointment of United States senators by state legislatures. In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, installing the current regime of direct election of U.S. senators.

The bloated and special-interest-driven nature of the federal government during this century has led scholars in recent years to reexamine the original framework of the Senate and to consider the causes of the Seventeenth Amendment and its consequences for U.S. twentieth-century politics and society. C. H. Hoebeke's The Road to Mass Democracy is an important addition to this growing literature.

According to Hoebeke, the Senate was explicitly modeled after the British House of Lords. It was intended to be an upper-class, conservative body that would check the populism of the democratic House of Representatives. State legislatures would serve as intermediaries identifying and elevating to the Senate the "best men," marked by ability, virtue, and achievement. The Senate would be a "natural" aristocracy, "an agency which would fulfill a function similar to that of the [House of] Lords in checking the runaway tendencies of popular rule, but which at the same time would remain a non-hereditary body" (p. 45).

Hoebeke argues that the idea of using state legislatures as the instrument to create an anti-democratic and conservative body was flawed from the outset. After all, the Constitution itself was a reaction to the democratic excesses of the states and their governments during the period of the Articles of Confederation. The notion that those same state legislatures would appoint senators who would buck a popular tide was absurd. As he demonstrates, even after the adoption of the Constitution the state governments remained far more receptive than the national government to populist reforms.

Despite these flaws, appointment of senators by state legislatures was one of the least controversial elements of the new Constitution. Popular election of senators was proposed at the Constitutional Convention but received almost no support. Beginning after the Civil War, however, and escalating through the late nineteenth century, proposals for direct election became increasingly frequent, until the Seventeenth Amendment was finally adopted.

Traditional explanations for the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment can be divided into two categories: "internal" and "external" (Todd J. Zywicki, "Senators and Special Interests: A Public Choice...