“Please send me a few of those publications that are printed by the Government,” a constituent in search of free reading matter asked his Congressman. “I particularly want some of those eloquent eulogies that are delivered in Congress, because I dearly like to read about a dead Congressman.” It is to be hoped that the readers of this book will share at least some of that gentleman's fascination with the behavior of dead Congressmen. It may seem that another element in the title, progressive reform, is, as a historiographical quantity, hardly less moribund than the honorable gentlemen over whom valedictory addresses were read on the floor of the House of Representatives. What twenty or thirty years ago was a veritable historiographical boom area has become a kind of ghost town as the vein of scholarship dried up and historians moved on to other, seemingly more profitable, seams. But the territory is not deserted. Its abandonment by historians leaves it open to exploitation by historically minded political scientists interested in such questions as electoral realignment, congressional “modernization,” the politics of regulation and the creation of the twentieth-century American state. While they do not always use the term, the subjects of their investigations are essentially aspects of what was once called “progressivism,” albeit a rather spectral variety divorced from its corporeal historical context.