We don’t know for certain that the Massachusetts Legislature was the state’s most exclusive speakeasy during Prohibition. True, contraband liquor was stored in the basement of the State House, but as for the accusation by the Massachusetts Anti-Saloon League that lawmakers celebrated the close of the 1927 session with a drunken party…well, the Legislature itself launched an investigation and found no proof of the charge.
Of course, the Legislature, formally known as the General Court, had developed a tough skin long before that. It was heading into its fourth century and had survived countless attacks by the press and by its own constituents; the rise, fall, and revival of political parties (including a takeover by the now-infamous Know Nothing Party); and even periods of near extinction during the pre-Revolutionary era. As it nears its 375th anniversary, it has even more to toast—or to take the blame for, depending on your point of view.
The precise anniversary, on October 19, will be marked by a joint session of the Senate and House with guest speakers. The celebrants will be able to recite a long list of accomplishments by the General Court, one of the advantages of its having survived so long. For example, Massachusetts enacted the first compulsory education law in the Americas, in 1642. It was the first state to mandate a secret ballot for legislative elections, in 1888; it passed one of the nation’s first lobbying registration laws, in the 1890s; and it enacted the first minimum-wage law, in 1912. In 1854, it even anticipated itself with a public works nightmare that makes the Big Dig look like smooth sailing: the “Agony of the Great Bore,” a trouble-plagued project to build a railroad tunnel through Hoosac Mountain that cost state taxpayers more than $10 million and took 21 years to complete.
It has also gone through many changes in form and function. As the name suggests, the General Court began life in Boston in 1630 more as a combination of judge and jury than as a legislative body. For a while it was known as “The Great and General Court,” but the longer name, more apt for the government of Oz, was dropped upon independence from Britain. Much later, in 1917, a constitutional convention took up the issue of changing the name from General Court to Legislature, the term used by just about every other state, but tradition won out—not surprisingly, considering we’ve never even adopted the term “state,” preferring to remain one of four commonwealths.
The first members were called assistants rather than senators and representatives, a term befitting their relationship to Gov. John Winthrop (himself more of a CEO than an elected official), and they were more concerned with keeping order among neighbors than with dreaming up new forms of public policy. As elements of a judicial system slowly fell into place, it moved on to deciding such broader issues as town boundaries and the ownership of rivers and streams. This history may explain why some legislators have antipathy toward “activist judges”: They’re still smarting at giving up turf. Indeed, control over the judiciary has been a sore point for the Legislature for centuries. In 1772, British colony administrators enraged the General Court by stepping in to pay judges’ salaries, formerly paid by the Legislature. The General Court saw the move as an attempt to buy the loyalty of the judiciary.
But micromanagement has always been characteristic of the Massachusetts Legislature. Until the passage of a constitutional amendment in 1966, cities and towns had to get the approval of Beacon Hill for such matters as granting tenure to certain town employees. Even now, in considering misleadingly named “home rule” petitions, which are not so much assertions of local authority as they are pleadings for it, the Legislature takes a second crack at many small-bore issues already decided by municipal governments. Given its history, that’s hardly surprising.
TOWN MEETING WRIT LARGE
During the formal observance, the General Court’s anniversary will undoubtedly be played as an ode to democracy. But there has always been tension over just how far to take the democratic ideal here, both within the Legislature and in other institutions of government. The question of who could participate in Bay State democracy took a couple of centuries to settle, as the General Court gradually eliminated requirements that voters and candidates be landowners, churchgoers in good standing, and, of course, men. The journey toward near-universal suffrage was slow and erratic: It took until 1877 to repeal a ban against Harvard University faculty serving in the Legislature—a law left over from the pre-Colonial era when the then-public college, like the judiciary, was considered its own branch of government. But there hasn’t been any serious reconsideration of the idea that all adult citizens should have some voice in how the state is run.
Just what form that voice should take has been more of a puzzle, and state leaders have gone back and forth on the merits of representative government vs. “pure” democracy, the latter epitomized by the town meeting cherished in Massachusetts. In 1894, for example, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Commonwealth was a representative democracy and that voters had no authority to make laws, thus derailing (at least temporarily) the new practice of settling policy questions by public referendum. In its decision, the SJC noted that the Bay State’s famed town meetings may be democracy in its purest form, but “few if any persons seem to have been in favor of such a form of government for the state.” But more and more people seemed to be precisely in favor of such a form of government, and the Legislature finally responded in 1917, approving a constitutional amendment to allow lawmaking through public referenda. Nevertheless, the General Court has tinkered with the initiative process ever since, even this year considering proposals that would make it tougher to put questions on the ballot.
Despite the SJC’s rather snide reference to town meetings, the state Legislature isn’t a completely different political animal—indeed, the two forms of government are closer in practice than romanticizers of direct democracy might want to admit. Jonathan Jackson, a Newburyport merchant and observer of contemporary politics, wrote in 1788 that larger town meetings “must depend upon a few to guide and manage the whole,” a description that rings true today. For all the complaints about heavy-handed leadership in the Legislature, power is often even more concentrated in town meetings.
City and state government here have not had the hierarchical relationship found elsewhere in the US. On at least one occasion, the two forms of government have been interchangeable: When the British-appointed governor blocked the General Court from meeting in 1768, out of fear that it would incite passions against British troops occupying Boston, a “convention of towns” met to air the colonists’ grievances instead—an idea suggested by Boston’s own town meeting. And when the state was without a Constitution—from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 through 1780—town governments kept Massachusetts from falling into anarchy. (“Every town seemed to have its own constitution, written in the minds of its inhabitants and preserved in the multitude of precedents contained in the town records,” write Richard Brown and Jack Tager in Massachusetts: A Concise History.) Occasionally, the Legislature has been led by the towns instead of the reverse, as when temperance forces failed to get alcohol banned at the state level in the 1840s and instead turned to municipal government, making almost the entire Commonwealth “dry” within a few years.
In its early years, the Legislature had to deal with some of the same problems that still plague town meetings, most notably erratic attendance levels. “Out of a total of 204 towns listed in a 1761 tax list, only about 120 were represented in the legislature in any year in the late provincial period,” writes historian Stephen Patterson in Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts. “The average number of towns responding in each of six roll call votes taken between 1757 and 1764 was 84…[and] a high rate of absenteeism after the first few days of a new session cut the numbers actively engaged in legislative work even further.”
Given that context, the General Court’s long and cumbersome process for enacting legislation—see, for example, the requirement that bills stop at each chamber’s Committee on Bills in the Third Reading, which is empowered to “examine and correct” them before senators or representatives can cast final votes—has entirely sensible origins. It made it more difficult, though certainly not impossible, for a small slice of the membership to pass sweeping laws while most of their colleagues were tending their farmlands. Such a scenario was hardly far-fetched, given that in 1780 the Massachusetts Constitution established a quorum of 60 in the House to do business—even though the membership, which fluctuated according to town populations, would eventually exceed 700.
EAST VS. WEST
Before modern methods of transportation, absenteeism was especially high among legislators from the western part of the state. “It would take two or three days on horseback to get to Boston, and then you would have to find a place to stay,” noted Jack Tager at a 2002 CommonWealth Forum. (For more on the subject, see the transcript of “East Meets West: Bridging the Politics, Economics and Histories of Eastern and Western Massachusetts,”) And so the first great split in the General Court was not between political parties but between larger eastern communities, with growing economies based on trade, and agrarian towns with stagnant or slowly growing populations. That the east has always had an edge in this fight is underscored by the fact that the Legislature sits in coastal Boston, by far the largest city in the state. (In most other states, including California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, the capital is located some distance from the biggest urban area.)
Even so, small towns had far more power during the Legislature’s first century, when representation was based more on geography than on population size. Until 1776, each town with more than 30 voters was given a seat in the House of Representatives, while towns many times larger received only one to three additional seats. For example, Ipswich had a voting population equal to eight western towns put together, but those towns sent 10 members to the House of Representatives to Ipswich’s two. Boston’s delegation, meanwhile, was capped at four seats.
That year a group of Essex County towns sent a petition to the General Court complaining that, as Patterson puts it, “a majority in the House…could be obtained from the representatives of towns that paid not more than one-quarter of the public tax.” The solution was to keep increasing the size of the House, giving a town with 220 voters three representatives, a town with 320 voters four representatives, and so on. (The House roster was eventually capped at 240, and it is now down to 160 members as a result of a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1974—arguably a triumph of efficient lawmaking over a more “pure” democracy in which almost every town had its own voice in the Legislature.) The expansion of the House was one piece of legislation that that passed very quickly—within four days of its introduction at the very end of a General Court session, when many representatives from the “frontier” towns to the west had likely gone home. According to Patterson, the battle over representation even overshadowed the drive for American independence. While most other towns passed resolutions in favor of independence earlier that spring, most Essex County towns waited until they had won more General Court seats before they joined the cause.
Since then, there have been repeated flare-ups of the great east vs. west battle, beginning with Shay’s Rebellion in 1786, in which western farmers seeking debt relief seized courthouses in Northampton and Worcester. Instead, they inadvertently pushed the state Legislature toward ratification of the US Constitution, as representatives from eastern communities suddenly saw the benefit of a strong federal government that could suppress such uprisings. More recently, complaints from the west have centered on spending priorities, especially when the state backs the Big Dig and other massive transportation projects that benefit Boston and its suburbs but do little for the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires.
The balance of power is not likely to shift anytime soon. No one from west of Framingham has headed either legislative chamber since Senate President Maurice Donahue (1964-70) and House Speaker David Bartley (1969-75), both of whom were from Holyoke. One reason may be that we have no political equivalent of upstate New York or downstate Illinois, two regions that have often served as Republican counterweights to heavily Democratic New York City and Chicago, respectively. In this state, even most suburbs and small towns have generally cast their lot with the Democratic Party.
IRISH VS. YANKEES
As the eastern part of the state grew more and more powerful, first from a maritime economy and then from manufacturing, Bay State politics became a matter of Boston vs. everyone else. In other words, Irish Catholics vs. Yankee Protestants.
The Yankees enjoyed numerical superiority through most of the 19th century. Their political power hit a peak in the 1850s thanks to the American Party, more popularly known as the Know Nothing Party (because its members were initially sworn to secrecy about the workings of the party). Both anti-slavery and anti-immigration, the Know-Nothings won all 40 state Senate seats and all but three of the 379 state House seats in 1854, in addition to the governorship and the entire congressional delegation. Once in power, the Know-Nothings passed legislation to deport poor or mentally ill Irish residents; to “inspect” Catholic schools and convents; and to order daily readings from the Protestant Bible in public schools. The party also tried, but failed, to deny Catholics the right to vote or hold office.
At the same time, the Know-Nothing Legislature abolished debtors’ prisons; forbade state officials from assisting in the return of fugitive slaves to Southern states; and voted to desegregate the Boston public schools. This schizophrenic philosophy, mixing opposition to slavery with the most extreme kind of xenophobia, established a link between racial tolerance and anti-Catholicism among many Massachusetts residents for decades to come. However, the Know-Nothings in other states were much less progressive on racial issues, and the party was quickly superseded in Bay State politics by the more steadfastly anti-slavery, and more subtly anti-immigration, Republican Party. The state GOP, of course, inherited the enmity of Catholic voters but, like the Know-Nothings, would eventually be seen as more liberal than its national counterpart.
When the city of Boston became predominantly Catholic, the Republican-controlled Legislature devised ways to keep control over the capital city, in much the same way that the US Congress has always restricted the local government in majority-black Washington, DC. An 1891 constitutional amendment mandating that a majority of members in each chamber be present to conduct business—an idea that had been kicked around for more than 100 years—was passed in part out of fear that the Boston delegation could dominate a lightly attended session. The Legislature also gave the governor the right to appoint the police commissioner of the capital city. (In 1962, with the Democrats in control of both the State House and City Hall, that power was transferred to the mayor.) And in 1909, the Legislature passed a new charter for Boston that reduced the size and power of the city council and also mandated nonpartisan mayoral elections—both attempts to undermine the Democratic Party machine in the city. This did not prevent the populist Democrat James Michael Curley from assembling his own “nonpartisan” machine after being elected mayor in 1913 and re-elected twice after that. So the GOP-run Legislature amended the charter again to ban anyone from serving consecutive terms as mayor of Boston (and only Boston). When Curley tried to recapture City Hall in 1941, the Republicans changed the charter back, allowing the less objectionable incumbent, Maurice Tobin, to run and win again.
The hostility of the state Legislature toward the city lessened as many Boston natives moved to the fast-growing suburbs, and as those suburbs became increasingly Catholic —and Democratic. The first Boston Democrat to lead a legislative chamber was Senate President Chester Dolan, in 1949. Since then, the city’s population has dropped considerably, but as if making up for lost time, it has continued to dominate leadership positions in the Legislature: The past three Senate presidents and the past two House Speakers have all been from districts at least partially in Boston. This is in sharp contrast to the unwritten rule that no one can get elected governor from a Boston base; there hasn’t been a chief executive from Suffolk County since Republican Christian Herter left office in 1957. (It seems axiomatic that only Republicans can be elected governor after heading a legislative chamber. Currently, all four governors with such experience—in Georgia, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Vermont—are from the GOP. In Massachusetts, the last Senate president to become governor was Republican Frank Allen in 1929; the last House Speaker to become governor was Herter in 1953.) But that doesn’t mean Boston wins all its battles at the State House. Proposals allowing the city to impose a tax on commuters—an example of Boston wanting to be different from all the other cities in the Commonwealth—have repeatedly died in the Legislature.
DEMOCRATS VS. REPUBLICANS
Aside from geography and ethnicity, there haven’t been too many long-lasting schisms in the General Court. During the mid-18th century, the membership split into three factions, but loyalists to England and “moderates” (wanting to preserve some kind of relationship with the mother country, on terms more favorable to the colonies) eventually lost out to proponents of complete independence, led by Samuel Adams and James Otis. It was Otis who, addressing his fellow legislators in 1768, referred to the British House of Commons as a bunch of “horse jockey gamesters, pensioners, pimps, and whoremasters.” A few days later, the House voted 92-17 to defy the Townshend Act, by which the British government imposed new taxes on the colonies, and the loyalists never had much power in the General Court after that.
Such lopsided margins have been the norm in the Legislature. In particular, during the past two centuries there have been only brief periods of real two-party competition. For most of that time, one or the other party has controlled both chambers by margins of more than 2-to-1, meaning that few Election Days have carried even a glimmer of doubt about the outcome. Except for two sessions in which the parties were tied in the number of seats they held, the Republicans controlled the Senate from the Civil War (by which the current two-party system was cemented in place) through 1959, and the Democrats have held it ever since. Similarly, the Republicans held the House through 1949 and, except for the 1953-54 session, the Democrats have been in control ever since. The Democrats’ first Speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Cambridge, was one of the most beloved figures in Bay State politics, with great appeal among both “town” and “gown,” or traditionalist and reformist, voters. With legions of Democratic legislative candidates aping his style (typified by his motto “All politics is local”), it’s not surprising that his party held onto power long after he left the General Court and rose to become Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
Even if the two major parties have rarely fought on a level playing field, there have frequently been bitter struggles within the party in power. In 1957, the Republicans controlled the Senate but were split over the question of who would become Senate president. Democrats saw an opportunity and backed the candidate with minority support within the GOP. Thus, Republican Newland Holmes became majority leader on a secret ballot with the votes of 15 Democrats and only five Republicans. (House members have used an open roll call to elect its leaders since 1914, when Republicans suspected that some of their own might vote for a Democratic Speaker if given the chance to do so secretly; Senate Republicans tried to switch to an open ballot for the same reason when they realized there was a plot to install Holmes but didn’t have enough votes to change the voting rules.) The next year, Democrats won enough seats to take control of the chamber and dump Holmes in favor of one of their own. Nearly 40 years later, Republicans returned the favor by giving Thomas Finneran enough votes to become Speaker of the Democratic-controlled House, even though a majority of Democrats voted against him.
The two bitterest fights of the past half-century over who would control a legislative chamber have both been between Democrats. Democratic Gov. Endicott Peabody tried to oust Democratic Speaker John “Iron Duke” Thompson in 1963, but ran through several candidates before Thompson was elected with the support of 118 of 240 members (with 15 abstentions) on the sixth ballot. And in 1983, majority leader George Keverian began a successful campaign to unseat Speaker and fellow Democrat Thomas McGee, winning support from rank-and-file members who chafed under McGee’s highly centralized style of governing. “Over 14 months, the House of Representatives waged bitter civil war, with every legislative battle colored by the leadership fight,” wrote former state representative John McDonough (“The Speaker who believed in democracy,” CW, Winter ’02).
The history of the Senate has not been quite so raucous, perhaps because its smaller membership is mindful of its status, however symbolic, as the “upper chamber.” Shortly after Keverian left the House, having achieved mixed success in opening up the legislative process to rank-and-file members, state Sen. Patricia McGovern argued against a proposed rules change in her body by saying, “the House was in absolute meltdown because of rules changes we all know in our hearts made little sense.” At that time, the Senate was led by William Bulger of South Boston, whose tenure (1978-96) was by far the longest of any Senate president or House Speaker in Bay State history. Yet even the Bulger regime was far from peaceful, with reformist members loudly protesting his centralized rule even if they never amassed enough votes to oust him.
The power struggles within the Democratic Party have fascinated State House reporters and political junkies, but they may not be as satisfying to voters, who are often left on the sidelines with uncontested legislative races.
“The combined effect of a factionalized ‘majority’ party and an opposition party of little force is that responsible party government in Massachusetts has all but disappeared,” wrote Boston University professors Murray Levin and George Blackwood in their book The Compleat Politician: Political Strategy in Massachusetts—published way back in 1962.
BIG GOVERNMENT, THEN AND NOW
The General Court has seen some epic battles—from east vs. west to Democrats vs. Democrats—but none has slowed the output of the Legislature for very long. From its very start, the Bay State has been blessed, or cursed, with highly productive lawmakers. Nearly a century ago, Albert Pillsbury, then the state attorney general, complained, “probably there is not a community on the face of the earth that is so over-legislated for as this Commonwealth of Massachusetts, nor a community anywhere which tolerates such petty, inconsequential, and unnecessary legislation.”
What constitutes “unnecessary legislation” is clearly in the eye of the beholder, but the Bay State has never been known for libertarian leanings. In 1981, the General Court overrode the veto of Gov. Edward King to make Massachusetts one of the first states to encourage recycling, and cut down on litter, by requiring deposits on soda and beer containers—even though voters had narrowly rejected this idea in a statewide referendum five years earlier. And in 2004, it enacted one of the toughest smoking bans in the US, covering workplaces, restaurants, and bars across the state (many of which were already smoke-free as a result of local legislation). Bills pending in the current session include a ban on caging pregnant pigs “in a manner that prevents the pig from turning around freely” and a requirement that school lunch menus published in newspapers include “a nutritional report listing fat grams, vitamins, minerals, and calories.”
These are recent examples, but they are not inconsistent with Bay State history. As the authors of Leading the Way: A History of the Massachusetts General Court 1629-1980 note, with more diplomatic language than Pillsbury used, “Any existing myth regarding an earlier age free from government control is unsubstantiated by fact. If there was ‘less government’ visible in nineteenth century Massachusetts, it was because of problems of enforcement.”
Enforcement was not such a problem in the 1630s, when the General Court, imposing order on a small and homogeneous population, prescribed dress codes for citizens (with an emphasis on simplicity), and imposed wage and price controls along Christian principles of charity. The mandatory observance of Puritan principles gradually fell by the wayside, but attempts to ensure a conformist population continued for centuries. In 1935, the General Court, with overwhelming support from Catholic lawmakers, passed a bill requiring all teachers to take a “loyalty oath.” The bill’s sponsor, Thomas Dorgan of Dorchester, warned of “Reds” at Harvard and MIT and later said that “obedience to authority should be the motto of this country.” But the oath was narrowly repealed just two years later, and a key opponent was freshman legislator—and devout Catholic—Tip O’Neill.
The repeal of the loyalty oath was one sign that the General Court had shifted its energies from simply policing its citizens to protecting them, even if not everyone agreed that they needed protecting. Once an experiment in dour Puritanism, the Bay State became a “nanny state” well before the term was born. For example, in 1894, preceding the automobile, Massachusetts implemented an array of restrictions on bicycle riding, including a speed limit of 10 miles per hour on public roads and mandatory “alarm bells” on all pedal vehicles. And long before Prohibition (or the abolition of “happy hour” in the 1980s), the state banned the sale of liquor to anyone receiving public assistance and gave local officials the power to close down package stores when there was a threat of “riots.”
Of perhaps more lasting consequence, the General Court was ahead of the US Congress in setting what would come to be known as a progressive agenda in the early 1900s. As early as 1820, the Legislature established a well-publicized commission, headed by future Senate president Josiah Quincy, on the best way to provide relief for the state’s poor population. A few decades later, Massachusetts was the first state to pass substantial laws protecting factory workers. The flood of legislation also included the Factory Inspection Act of 1866; a 10-hour limit on workdays for women and children, passed in 1874; and the recognition of Labor Day in 1887. These laws made life at least marginally better for the working class; they also probably hastened the shift of the textile industry to less-regulated, cheaper-labor states in the South.
They also lifted the General Court to what may be its high-water mark in public esteem. Leading the Way quotes the assessment of political scientist Paul Reinsch, who surveyed state governments in 1907 and concluded, “The General Court of Massachusetts is in all respects nearest to the people, and most responsive of any American legislature to intelligent public opinion.”
It’s hard to imagine a contemporary political scholar lavishing such praise on the Massachusetts Legislature. Perhaps that’s because our reverence for government of any kind has dimmed after the great struggles, from the War for Independence through World War II, that determined whether Massachusetts and the entire US would continue to exist. Perhaps the race toward “smaller government,” which has dominated American politics since Ronald Reagan became president, is a competition that Massachusetts just can’t win, and our Legislature will rise in stature only if and when the pendulum swings back toward state activism.
Or maybe we’re just more clear-eyed about the limitations of the people who govern us. One turning point in how the public views the General Court came in 1933, when Harvard University students stole the “sacred cod”—a wooden fish commemorating one of the mainstays of the state’s economy during the Colonial era—that had been hanging in the House chamber since 1784. (Was this in revenge for the earlier ban on legislators from Harvard?) The sacred cod was returned within a few days, and it still hangs in the House (the Senate has a smaller “holy mackerel” incorporated into its chandelier), but the prank may have made the Legislature seem a bit less exalted. It probably didn’t help that members of the House declared that they couldn’t do the state’s business without the cod in its place, or that the state police were so caught up in the hysteria that they dredged the Charles River looking for the wooden talisman.
The fish on the wall, like the liquor in the basement during the 1920s (both reminiscent of college-dorm décor), may have made the General Court seem less like a history museum and more like one of our famed town meetings: noisy and unpredictable and full of characters.
Additional research by Eric Wagner.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The most comprehensive source of information on the General Court may be Cornelius Dalton, John Wirkkala, and Anne Thomas’s Leading the Way: A History of the Massachusetts General Court 1629-1980, which was published by the Secretary of State’s Office in 1984 and is, sadly, now out of print. Also invaluable in researching this piece was Richard Brown and Jack Tager’s Massachusetts: A Concise History, a revised edition of which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2000. And Stephen Patterson’s Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (University of Wisconsin, 1973) provides a good overview of state politics at the time of American Independence.