On April 8, 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was ratified.
Prior to this, senators had been appointed by state legislatures. It was John Dickinson of Delaware who suggested that the Senate be selected by state legislatures. “The combination of the state governments with the national government was as politic as it was unavoidable,” he argued. But as early as 1826, resolutions calling for direct popular election of senators appeared in the House of Representatives, but none succeeded. Following the Civil War, disputes among state legislators over Senate elections resulted in deadlocks, leaving some Senate seats vacant for long periods — Delaware remained without representation in the U.S. Senate for two years. In light of such problems, reformers in many states began calling for a change to the system of electing senators. In 1906, publisher William Randolph Hearst, a proponent of direct election, hired novelist David Graham Phillips to write a number of articles on the subject. Phillips’ series, “The Treason of the Senate,” portrayed senators as pawns of industrialists and financiers — with no small amount of hyperbole (to put it politely). The articles further galvanized public support for reform.
Senator Joseph Bristow of Kansas offered, in 1911, a Senate resolution to amend the Constitution. In two years the Constitution was amended.
One reply on “The 17th Amendment”
Article V of the Constitution specifies the possibility and process of Amendment. It specifically prohibits any Amendment that removes the equal representation in the Senate of a constituent state without the consent of that state. The Constitution does not equal a state with the population or voting population within the jurisdiction of that state, and in places explicitly distinguished them. In other words, the ostensible Seventeenth Amendment cannot be adopted thing without unanimous consent of the state legislatures. No deadline was baked into the ratification process, so I suppose that it could still happen.