When liberals established DSG in September 1959, the election of a leadership was the first group decision; leaders initially comprised of Reps. Lee Metcalf (D-WY) as chair, James Roosevelt (D-CA) as vice chair, and Frank Thompson (D-NJ) as secretary.2 These elected representatives would come to constitute the “Executive Committee,” which will be the primary focus of the analyses presented in this chapter. From 1959 to 1995, the Executive Committee comprised between 8 and 38 of the most ambitious, active, and engaged liberals in the House. It was the site of the majority of DSG’s leadership training, although the group provided a range of activities and services that cultivated leadership skills among the broader membership. Initially headed by a small group of members, the committee would grow to include several (at-large) vice-chairmen, a separate secretary and whip, regional vice-chairmen, a freshman representative, 1-2 appointed members, and all former chairmen of the organization, by the early 1970s. Former chairmen were guaranteed a seat as long as they served in the House, which formalized the relationship between DSG allies after they moved into formal leadership positions – ensuring that they were not only involved in DSG decision-making, but they were encouraged to contribute valuable leadership intelligence, as well as resources provided by the leadership apparatus.3
2 September 9th, 1959 Meeting Minutes of the Policy Committee Meeting, House Judiciary Committee
Room. DSG papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., part I, box 135, folder 10.
3 For example, if a DSG leader became the whip (such as Rep. Thomas Foley (D-WA) or Rep. John
Brademas (D-IN)), they could share information about where other members stood on a bill, and how that was likely to shape leadership strategy on the floor.
147 5 10 15 20 25 30 N u m b e r o f Y e a rs in O ff ice 1959 -196 0 1961 -196 2 1963 -196 4 1965 -196 6 1967 -196 8 1969 -197 0 1971 -197 2 1973 -197 4 1975 -197 6 1977 -197 8 1979 -198 0 1981 -198 2 1983 -198 4 1984 -198 6 1987 -198 8 1989 -199 0 1991 -199 2 1993 -199 4
DSG Leaders Party Leaders
5 10 15 20 25 30 N u m b e r o f Y e a rs in O ff ice 1959 -196 0 1961 -196 2 1963 -196 4 1965 -196 6 1967 -196 8 1969 -197 0 1971 -197 2 1973 -197 4 1975 -197 6 1977 -197 8 1979 -198 0 1981 -198 2 1983 -198 4 1985 -198 6 1987 -198 8 1989 -199 0 1991 -199 2 1993 -199 4
Committee Chairs Subcommittee Chairs
DSG Leaders
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throughout the group’s tenure in the House. Figures 5.1 and 5.2 compare seniority differences between the DSG leadership and party and committee leaders, respectively, from the 86th – 103rd congresses.4 These differences were especially pronounced in the 1960s and 1970s. While DSG leaders averaged about 8.5 years in office (or 4 terms), party leaders averaged 18 years (9 terms) of service in the House (Figure 5.1). Similar trends can be observed in Figure 5.2, with DSG leaders consistently ranking significantly beneath the average seniority of both subcommittee and full committee chairs. Committee chairs averaged 24 years (12 terms) of service and
subcommittee chairs averaged 14 years (7 terms) of service.5
The continuity in seniority status of the DSG leadership is remarkable. Despite significant increases in the size of the liberal faction, and the adoption of reforms expanding junior members’ access to power (Rohde 1991; Schickler, Sides, and McGhee 2003), DSG remained a site in Congress where junior members dominated available leadership positions. This continuity reflects a culture among liberals that the responsibilities and opportunities associated with serving as a DSG leader should be spread among members, rather than
concentrated among a small subset of them. Beginning with original DSG chairman’s (Rep. Lee Metcalf (D-MT)) election to the Senate in 1960, DSG began an informal practice of rotating their leadership. No single member occupied the same role in two consecutive congresses.6 During the March 1965 DSG leadership election, outgoing chairman Rep. John Blatnik (D-MN) said that “It has always been my strong feeling that there should be a rotation of officers and a broad sharing
4 DSG leaders are operationalized as members of the DSG executive committee, a group of 8-32 members
elected by the membership to make decisions on the group’s behalf. DSG leadership data was collected from the DSG papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and seniority data on all Democrats was collected from the Congressional Quarterly.
5 These significant seniority differences also reflect the growth of careerism in the House, which worked
against the ambitions of many junior members (Hibbing 1991).
6 For example, a member could move up from the secretary or whip position to the chairmanship, but they
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of responsibilities in DSG.” This practice was formally inscribed into the DSG bylaws at the request of outgoing chairman Donald Fraser (MN) in 1971. In a letter announcing nominations for the Executive Committee in 1973, the nominating committee wrote, “In no small part, the past success of DSG in meeting such challenges has been due to the renewed energy and drive and the fresh ideas which successive new leaders have brought to our group.”8 These archival documents suggest that Executive Committee service was not just a responsibility for members, but an opportunity as well.
Rotating membership of the Executive Committee ensured that DSG provided leadership opportunities and experience to a wider and more diverse group of members – in stark contrast to the committee system, which across numerous, conflicting theories of organization (Adler and Lapinski 1997; Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005; Krehbiel 1998; Hall 1998) favors and result in the leadership and participation of a smaller number of members. Instead, DSG disseminated this training and experience, rather than concentrating it among a subset of members. Rotating leaders also ensured that no single member could rely exclusively on DSG as a platform for their leadership ambitions. This is especially important in ensuring that DSG remained a consistent mechanism of progressive change in the House. If “Institutions, like people, tend to radicalism in youth and conservatism in old age” (Cannon 1971), then the forced leadership rotation helped DSG evolve as the House itself evolved. While factions built on the foundation of a single charismatic leader are unlikely to prevail over the long-term, DSG’s organizational structure ensured that they consistently attracted and socialized a new group of ambitious, liberal members into the House leadership.9
7 Introductory Remarks, March 3, 1965 DSG meeting, DSG papers, Part II, box 3, folder 8. 8 DSG papers, Part II, box 4, folder 1.
9 One consequence of DSG’s rotating leadership was the elevation in responsibilities and importance of the
DSG staff. Every staffer interviewed in the course of this project stressed that the rotation of the leadership did not negatively impact DSG’s ability to develop long-term plans or strategy. Rather, it elevated the significance and power of the DSG staff – which numbered between 20-25 by the 1970s – and in particular,
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overwhelming majority were from western and mid-western states. Broad geographic
representation helped ensure that the group anticipated potential regional problems or concerns, with members giving “insights into how people from those regions would think.”10 And as liberals were disproportionately likely to be elected from marginal districts, so too were many Executive Committee members – giving DSG unique insights into the needs of rank and file members often ignored by electorally safe party and committee leaders. Some Executive Committee members even represented districts where association with DSG posed an electoral threat. In an interview with political scientist Thomas Mann who worked for Rep. James O’Hara (DSG chairman from 1967-1968) – he recalled that O’Hara “represented a pretty conservative democratic constituency…where George Wallace did extraordinarily well.”11 Liberals in DSG’s early days were keenly aware of the electoral vulnerability posed by association with the “official organization of liberals” in the House. The group was careful to recruit junior members with a promise of confidentiality, providing reassurance that their opponents in future elections could not use their membership against them.12 For example, in 1965, Rep. Thomas Foley’s (D-WA) conservative district provided a challenge to Rep. Mo Udall’s (D-AZ) recruitment efforts. In a letter thanking him for a check for his membership dues, Udall wrote, “As I told you this morning, the DSG officers are keenly aware of the nature of your district and the special
problems that you face. There are no DSG membership lists, but we are happy to provide you
the executive director. The DSG executive director was considered such an important position that DSG’s longest serving top staffer, Richard “Dick” Conlon, was referred to in press reports as the “436th Member of
the House.” Both Conlon and his successor, Scott Lilly, were on a first name basis with nearly all members they interacted with, and had strong personal relationships with many Executive Committee members.
10 August 6, 2015 in-person interview.
11 November 17, 2015 telephone interview. Mann served as an APSA fellow for O’Hara.
12 Of course, the archival record strongly contradicts any claims made about this policy. DSG kept
numerous, detailed records of its members and research subscribers each Congress, including records of member financial contributions. The policy was, more accurately, a promise that DSG would not disclose membership lists to the press, the leadership, or anyone else – a promise that DSG strenuously upheld throughout their tenure in the House.
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with the benefit of research and assistance of our group” (emphasis added). Udall’s letter suggests that Foley’s membership in DSG was conditional on its secrecy. Obviously by 1975 when Foley became DSG chairman, the benefits and power of public association with – even leadership of – DSG outweighed the potential negative electoral consequences.
Executive Committee meetings, which occurred on average once every two weeks, socialized junior members into the responsibilities and compromise inherent to leadership decision-making. Each meeting was organized around a specific agenda set by the chair and executive director, but individual members were encouraged to contribute. Nevertheless, Executive Committee meetings were not dominated by “aimless discussions and monologues or to be interrupted by members who want to pursue their [personal] agendas.”14 Meetings were action-oriented – anchored around specific events or the membership’s needs (upcoming
legislation, leadership races, elections). When members disagreed over a course of action (about where to devote resources, strategy, whether to endorse a bill), the committee cast a formal vote and the majority decision carried. If the committee was significantly divided, the decision was sometimes forwarded to the full membership to be voted on at the next membership meeting.15
The archival record suggests that Committee meetings served as a forum for members to discuss their own legislative and policy priorities. A former DSG staffer who regularly attended these meetings described this process in the late 1960s and 1970s:
“The idea was the chair of DSG and maybe one or two other members…would contact [executive director] Dick and say go get the members together. It’s more like a sharing [forum]…it was a pretty large group, which was good – you’re lucky when you have a meeting and you’re lucky to get a dozen. The idea was to have some give and take. Some
13 June 24, 1965 letter from Udall to Foley. DSG papers, Part II, box 132, folder 6. 14 Undated memo from Conlon to Brodhead. DSG papers.
15 DSG always strived to compromise and settle debates before taking procedural and policy matters before
the Democratic Caucus. At a 1981 Symposium on the U.S. Congress honoring Tip O’Neill, Conlon said “Each of the various reforms was subjected to prolonged and deliberate discussion and debate in the DSG Executive Committee and at DSG membership meetings before being offered in the caucus to make sure they would work as intended and that they would not have undesirable side effects. As a result, virtually all of the major DSG reforms were approved as initially offered” (Hale 1983, 241).
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talk about it, how they wanted to handle it, how they want to [address it]” (emphasis added).16
DSG was unique among groups in the House in its emphasis on active participation by members serving on the leadership. And as the caucus system exploded during the 1970s and 1980s, many members belonged to numerous organizations, and their leadership board was more perfunctory and symbolic than substantive (Hammond 1989; 1991). Scott Lilly, a longtime congressional staffer and former DSG executive director, described how DSG leaders differed from the leaders of other caucuses in the House:
“We wanted the Executive Committee to not only help us think about what we were gonna do, but make our efforts resonate more broadly in the House once we did
something…we did have a good deal of investment by a lot of the Executive Committee. There were some people who belonged to 15 different LSOs, and didn’t participate in any of them. We tried to make sure that didn’t happen in DSG.”17
The archival record supports Lilly’s account of members’ commitment to DSG. Executive Committee meetings were generally well-attended by DSG leaders, and they actively participated in the discussions.