Daniel S. Holt on Gerald Gamm and Steven S. Smith’s *Steering the Senate: The Emergence of Party Organization and Leadership, 1789–2024 *

It warms the heart of every political historian when political scientists turn to the historical record to inform their theorizing and understanding of the American political system. Political scientists Gerald Gamm and Steven S. Smith go one better by engaging in their own prodigious historical research that enriches our understanding of a key political institution. In Steering the Senate—a project that has been gestating for over 25 years—Gamm and Smith uncover the deep historical roots of party leadership and organization in the US Senate from the early nineteenth century and trace the story up to the present day.

If they accomplished nothing else, Gamm and Smith’s volume would be valuable simply for clarifying historical facts about a key aspect of the Senate’s past. Where historians of the Senate had tended to see party caucus’s as late-nineteenth century inventions, Gamm and Smith demonstrate that regular meetings of co-partisans for the purpose of creating legislative agendas and strategy can be traced back to Henry Clay and the Whig party in 1841. Because of the informal nature of the earliest party leaders’ roles in the Senate, scholars have disagreed for decades about who were the first senators to act as floor leaders, a position not mentioned in the Constitution nor the earliest rules of the Senate. Drawing on digitized newspapers to which earlier Senate scholars lacked access, the authors make a compelling case that Senator Arthur Gorman of Maryland pioneered the role when he took over as chair of the Democratic Conference and was widely recognized as “the leader” of the Democrats after 1890. On the Republican side in the same era, they detail the origins of the Republican Steering Committee, led by powerful senators William Allison of Iowa and Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, that came to dominate the Senate from behind the scenes during the mid-1890s to 1911. Gamm and Smith bring clarity to what often have been murky historical narratives and provide a depth of detail that has not been known previously.

As a work aimed at political scientists, the book is framed around concepts like collective action problems and coordination and transaction costs, and in its conclusion uses the Senate case to offer a corrective to theories of conditional party government, which have traditionally rested on experience in the House of Representatives. But these concepts are sprinkled very lightly throughout the text and, when they are used, help clarify rather than obfuscate. (Nor will the reader encounter a single regression analysis.)

Gamm and Smith tell an institutional history, but among the book’s strengths is its focus on how and when individual senators (“entrepreneurs”) innovated in party organization and leadership tactics in response to the political realities they faced. The main thrust of the argument is that leaders established new party practices when engaged in intense conflict with the rival party and when forced to manage difficult internal factional disputes. The story of party institutions in the Senate is not a linear one, but one of fits and starts, shaped by notable Senate personalities like Joseph Robinson of Arkansas and Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Nevertheless, the authors conclude, party development was “cumulative,” with senators building on the structures established by their predecessors and leading to a ratcheting effect that has strengthened the power of party leaders and centralized legislative processes in leader offices.[1]

As the best histories do, this book points to new questions and future historical research, including some that may interest intellectual historians. For example, the framers of the Constitution envisioned the Senate as a collection of the nation’s elite individuals who could arrive at the public good through deliberation. Into the mid-nineteenth century, some senators and outside observers criticized party caucuses as “extra-constitutional” and distrusted those who would scheme to set public policies in secret outside the Senate Chamber. How did ideas about deliberation and the Senate shape party development and how did those ideas change to accommodate stronger party organization and leadership? Individualism in the Senate has waxed and waned in relation to party leadership and we can surely learn more about how senators viewed leaders who sought to increase their power. Gamm and Smith provide numerous leads for future scholars to follow on these and other questions. This book should surely find a place on the shelf of any historian of American politics and political institutions.

[1] Gerald Gamm and Steven S. Smith, Steering the Senate: The Emergence of Party Organization and Leadership, 1789–2024 (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 400.