580
Changing the Constitution
tion of Senators. Gradually, in many States, the legislatures yielded to
popular pressure, and members of those bodies pledged themselves at
the time of their own election, or on some other occasion, to vote for some
particular candidate for the United States Senate when the State legislature chose the next Senator. This was the process that had converted the
Electors of the Electoral College into mere registrars of the popular choice
for the Presidency. In theory, then, United States Senators still were chosen
by legislatures. But in reality, State legislators voted for senatorial candidates quite as their constituents told them to vote. When the Senate finally
capitulated in 1912, the voters in some twenty-nine States had already
obtained the right to indicate their preferences for Senator in the party
primaries—and State legislatures invariably followed the wishes of the
voters.
Like the Sixteenth Amendment, the Seventeenth grew out of the Populist and Progressive revolt of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Generally favoring more democracy in every aspect of political
life, State as well as Federal, the Populists and Progressives launched major political reform efforts, particularly in the Deep South and west of the
Mississippi River, to reduce the political and economic power of America’s burgeoning class of plutocrats—men of humble origin, often, who
had become wealthy almost overnight as a result of the industrial revolution and exerted a powerful influence in State governments.
In the legendary stories of Horatio Alger, they were America’s heroes,
symbols of the American success story—immigrants, perhaps, who
through self-sacrifice and hard work had risen to the top. To the Populists and Progressives, however, they were often the proverbial business
tycoons—greedy capitalists, they charged, who engaged in monopolistic
practices to maximize their wealth and used their wealth to buy votes in
legislative bodies, courts of law, and governors’ mansions. The restructuring of State Constitutions throughout the country at this time—for the
purpose of circumventing State legislatures through the initiative and
referendum devices, and controlling the courts through the election or
recall of judges—was the fruit of their labor.
Whereas the Sixteenth Amendment promised to limit the wealth and
economic power of these millionaire industrialists, the Seventeenth was
premised on the assumption that the direct election of Senators would