A portrayal of Woodrow Wilson's legislative leadership and administive methods has more uses than as a reminder of achievements durably impressive in themselves. His practice partly answered his own unresolved thinking about the presidency; in turn it implied theories that serve as foils in looking at later developments. The centennial of Wilson's birth is a fitting time to recount the story drawing on memoirs that accumulated after his death. The emphasis may well be on domestic policy in view of the greater attention that has been given to Wilson's role in war and peace.

First we must examine the prior development of Wilson's thinking about the presidency. Our concern is the working conception of the office of American elected chief executives that he had come to hold by the time of his full entrance into public life.

As a college senior Wilson wrote on “Cabinet Government in the United States.” He deplored, as real cause of solicitude and doubt, “the absorption of all power by a legislature which is practically irresponsible for its acts.”

A little over a century ago, De Tocqueville ended the first volume of Democracy in America with the flashing paragraph which identified two rising nations destined to become transcendent centers of power. The prescience of that ending was matched by the closing sentence of the second volume: “The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.” This sentence is more than a frame of the age, even to the hour. It hints at a theory of history; it is a clue to the relation of trends and choices.

Each major trend, holding such momentous alternatives, is itself the cumulative outcome of choices. The main alternatives, likewise, result from the interaction of fresh ideas with tradition, available resources, and potential techniques. Each new choice sets in motion its limited train of consequences, to be worked out in a succession of adaptive changes. In this restricted sense, man is intermittently the captive of his own discoveries. But spontaneity survives amid the accommodating changes launched by earlier acts of creation. Recurrently, as well as originally and fundamentally, ideas are the determinants.

Federalism is not the least of interests shared by Canada and the United States. The elements of likeness and unlikeness exist in a balance that makes comparison profitable, although such comparison is allowed to remain implicit in the following survey of trends in the United States. To discuss in Canada the federalism of another country, of course, is to carry to Newcastle the ashes of its own coals, so greatly are all federal systems in debt to the monumental inquiry of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations. No similar focus yet enlightens the analysis of federal problems in the United States.

The temper of the United States is incorrigibly one of contrivance. The brevity of the constitution leaves it essentially unwritten. Of the obstacles of the formal amending process, of course, it can no longer quite be said, as Frank J. Goodnow put the matter in 1911, that “the constitution of the United States is, on account of the complicated procedure and the large majorities required, very difficult, if not impossible, of amendment under ordinary conditions.” After forty-three years without an amendment, six have been ratified since 1913. But the habit of relying on adjustment by interpretation is deep. The Supreme Court controversy in 1937 would have found the country at a loss to suggest just how it would amend the Constitution if the discussion as a practical matter had taken that turn. Students of government are sometimes irked by the atmosphere that takes for granted the necessity of advance by accommodation; mostly, however, their lives are spent on detailed inquiries that merely deepen the assumption. In recent years the impact of events abroad has challenged them to identify and to reaffirm the fundamentals of popular government. But the effect of these events has been to throw the United States back upon its constitutional tradition. The mood will last, it is admitted, only so long as there is movement and vigour. Never has the constitutional system of the United States been more fluent. Paradoxically, this condition encourages the survival of the old reliance on piecemeal adaptation.

The main feature of the coup which the most principled, if not the most typical, British newspaper has called “the shortest, strangest, and most fraudulent election campaign of our time” are well known. Recapitulation has its uses, however, even if lack of space, not to mention more fatal inadequacies, must confine it to the narrowest of backgrounds and to statistics that lie near the surface of politics.

The almost shamed hush that fell in the Senate at noon on March 4 was more fitting than the jubilation in the House. Certainly there was no ground for congratulations in any corner of the Capitol, and least of all among the group in the President's room.

Membership and Organization. When the session began, the Republicans in the House numbered 266, the Democrats 165, with one Farmer Labor member and three vacancies. The two party shifts involved in the seating of thirteen new members reflected Democratic victories in by-elections in the 6th Wisconsin and 24th Illinois districts. In the Senate, inter-sessional gains on the minority side were more pronounced; there were 42 Democrats instead of 39, leaving 53 Republicans and 1 Farmer Labor member.

The uncertainty that attends the regulation of campaign expenditures by exclusion was illustrated in the seating of James J. Davis, lately Secretary of Labor, as junior senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. Davis stood aside at the opening of the session, in order to permit the chairman of the special committee investigating senatorial campaign expenditures, Gerald Nye, to offer a resolution by which his right to a seat was referred to the select committee. The resolution was rejected on December 2 by a vote of 27 (9 Republicans, 17 Democrats, 1 Farmer Labor) to 58 (39 Republicans, 19 Democrats). The committee on privileges and elections, acting through subcommittees, took up the dusty task of recounts in Alabama and North Carolina.

The uncertainties of party control in the next Congress cast a sharp but wavering shadow over the proceedings of the session.

Membership. Even in seasons when politics are pointing toward congressional elections of unusual interest, the filling of vacancies in the House attracts little attention. Political perspectives are almost unavoidably narrowed by the reaction of presidential government; localism confuses general tendencies; and the prevalence of one-party areas further conceals trends which can be read only by a close scrutiny of relative returns. It is not that the opportunity for by-elections is lacking. In the course of the session under consideration, twenty-three seats in the House were vacated, five by resignation and eighteen by death. The resulting replacements brought the Democrats a net gain of one; for, though losing their sole foothold in Pennsylvania, they won in the third district in Kentucky and the second district in Massachusetts. In the latter, never previously represented by a Democrat, the victory of W. J. Granfield in the special election on February 11,1930, was widely noted and deemed significant by many, although it was not clear whether it indicated a desire for drink or a dread of depression.

The Senate came to grips at last with the long-delayed problem of the Pennsylvania senatorship. In accordance with an understanding reached in the special session, Senator Norris's resolution (S. Res. 111) to deny William S. Vare a seat in the Senate came up on December 3. Debate closed on December 6, when the resolution was adopted by a vote of 58 (25 Republicans, 32 Democrats, 1 Farmer Labor) to 22 (all Republicans).

(April 15,1929, to November 22, 1929). Almost the last word said in the Senate before the adjournment of the special session was a remonstrance from the chair. “No one in the gallery has a right to laugh,” said the Vice-President, “and the occupants of the galleries will be in order. That includes the press gallery.” It has been easy to laugh. Seldom, however, has a single session of Congress held greater interest for the observer of social forces. Seldom has the salutary rôle of the Senate in our present political complex been more convincingly demonstrated.

Membership. The general election of 1928 seated 268 Republicans, 166 Democrats, and one Farmer Labor member. Three of the four vacancies that developed before the new Congress convened were on the Democratic side. At the opening of the special session, the Republican majority was 103, compared with majorities of 39, 60, 15, 167, and 39 in the Congresses elected in 1926, 1924, 1922, 1920, and 1918, respectively. Even in the more nearly poised, less regimented Senate, the weight of the majority seemed to afford a considerable margin of safety, with 55 Republicans (not including a junior senator from Pennsylvania) listed in opposition to 39 Democrats and one Farmer Labor member.

Organization. No innovations in procedure or outcome marked the institution of the party instrumentalities summarized in an attached table. The four preparatory caucuses were held between the first and the fifth of March. The House Republicans continued their organization without material change.

(December 3, 1928, to March 4, 1929). “I have stated universally to various callers,” wrote the President-elect to the President on January 28, 1929, “that it would be improper for me to express any views on current matters of the administration.” It is aside from the point to question the complete consistency of Mr. Hoover's added remark (the subject being the cruiser construction bill): “As you know, I warmly support your own views, and you may so inform others if you wish to do so.” The truth is that the President-elect would have set the tone of the short session if he had merely failed to state that there would be no special session. As soon as his willingness to call Congress back in April was known, most of the steam escaped and pressures in connection with farm relief which might have involved the whole program were forestalled. Under these relaxing circumstances, the cynosure of the session came to be the ironical juxtaposition of the left-over cruiser bill and the multilateral peace treaty in the Senate. Meanwhile the momentum of the inherently decentralized congressional system carried it past the dead-points of the interregnum and produced interesting, and even noteworthy, bits of domestic legislation.

It is the purpose of this note to bring down to date an analysis of the selection and tenure of bureau chiefs in the national administration offered by the writer in this Review in 1926. A complete enumeration of the changes that have taken place at this crucial level in the civil service during an interval of nearly three years has suggestive value, at least in indicating the trend of our bureaucracy.

The mode of approach in the original study was primarily biographical. The bureaus were classified with reference to the manner of selection and the nature of the prior experience of the bureau chiefs then in office. The same method and arrangement are used in dealing with shifts since 1926.

First to be considered are the new bureau chiefs whose positions are in the classified competitive service under the supervision of the Civil Service Commission. Replacements in this group since 1926 have involved the amalgamated Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, the Bureau of Dairy Industry, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the Bureau of Biological Survey, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Entomology, and indirectly the newly constituted Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration and the Plant Quarantine and Control Administration—all in the Department of Agriculture; also the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior. In two instances competitive examinations have been employed; in another, one has been ordered; in the remaining cases the new chiefs have been chosen by promotion from within the competitive classified service.

Long sessions in presidential years are short ones in the sense that the conventions dictate earlier and more definite limits than even Washington weather invites. Moving to such an end, the recent session could not escape the season's contagion. Yet presidential politics hardly set the tone of the session. Its work had unusual inherent interest. The array of questions before it, mingling economic and technical elements, was indicative of the trend of problems of public policy. It presented the paradox of all Congresses, of course: partisanship in building the machine; eclectic voting or bipartisan combinations in the actual passing of bills.

Membership. The Republican majority in the House had been cut by the 1926 elections and by a party shift in one of five by-elections from 61 to 40—a margin safe enough for purposes of organization, even apart from the relaxed mood and leaderless condition of insurgency in the lower chamber.

In the Senate, however, the Republican lead had been reduced to a hair. Even if Smith of Illinois and Vare of Pennsylvania were counted, those called Republicans numbered only 48, against 47 Democrats and a Farmer Labor member. Deaths chanced to net the Republicans a seat, so that at the session's close, although lacking Smith and Vare, they still had a plurality of one. Two empty seats in the meantime were evidence of the weakness of the regular Senate Republicans when deprived of the aid of House amendments and House conferees.

Short sessions are short enough—sixty-seven days of actual meetings in that of the Sixty-ninth Congress—but the public's memory is even shorter. It thinks of the recent session almost wholly in terms of the colorful Senate filibuster at the end and forgets that such occurrences are the rule rather than the exception in the short sessions of Congress. When Senator Reed of Pennsylvania was chided by Senator Pittman for “putting your will against the rest of the Senate,” he replied: “As I have a right to do”; and he could point his rejoinder by recalling Mr. Pittman's own obstructive action at the termination of Congress two years before. The system itself invites congestion and obstruction. Rapping for order and snapping “sit down” (the printed proceedings do not record this but give the extinguished Pat Harrison's expiring lament, “Oh, it is a shame to spoil a good speech like this!”), Mr. Dawes snatched the last two minutes from the Senate in order to say that “the Chair regards the results of the present legislative session as primarily due to the defective rules of the Senate” (p. 5687) With equal logic, and perhaps more soundly, one may find in the situation on March 4 reasons for sharpening the question why the Norris constitutional amendment to change the scheme of congressional sessions, which passed the Senate on February 14, 1926, and which was favorably reported in the House within the same month, was not allowed to come to a vote.

The Public Health Service, the Coast Guard, and (under very recent legislation) the Coast and Geodetic Survey constitute a special group of bureaus, distinguished by the fact that their heads are selected as a matter of rule from groups of higher subordinates who are originally admitted by non-competitive examinations and advanced under the closed systems of commissioned personnel peculiar to these services.

In the case of the surgeon general of the Public Health Service, the statutes say merely that he shall be appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate. A regulation of the service, however, provides that the surgeon general shall be selected from the commissioned medical officers above the rank of “passed assistant surgeon”—next to the lowest grade. The President presumably could override this regulation, and indeed an opinion of the Attorney General has indicated that his choice is not confined to the list of commissioned officers by any law relating to the service. In fact, however, the principle has been observed in the selection of the four surgeons general appointed since 1879. This system of selecting the heads of the service guarantees training and acquaintance with its problems, but—especially in view of the flexible type of assignments so characteristic of the Public Health Service and so useful in freshening a permanent personnel—the options open to the President and the Secretary of the Treasury are numerous enough to leave room for the possibility of a sort of administrative politics.

The regular long session of the 69th Congress met in December to harvest the legislative fruits of the Republican victory of 1924, then almost too well dried by thirteen months' standing and a little damaged by some bad weather in the special session of the Senate. The spirit of quiet husbandry, almost bereft of partisanship, was signalized by the enactment of the Revenue Act of February 26, 1926, which at last virtually realized the oft-frustrated “Mellon plan” of tax revision. Within two months, however, the propitious, if hardly exciting, skies that looked down on these early scenes were darkened, and an almost dramatic transition from sunshine to the shadow of farm-relief perplexities and the distant thunder of the oncoming primaries invested the session with other points of interest besides its industry and output.