This is what happened in the Speaker’s selection 100 years ago: In 1923, it was Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts.
The nominee himself wasn’t particularly controversial. He had risen through the ranks, a survivor of earlier leadership upheavals, generally compatible with the party’s broad rank and file.
But having reached the top of the leadership ladder, Gillett and his opponent represented a party establishment regarded with hostility by a powerful faction of the party. They became the embodiment of that faction’s grievances.
Here’s how things unfolded for Gillett:
Gillett was a 72-year-old Boston Brahmin with a Harvard law degree who was serving his 15th term in the House. He had first grasped the big gavel years earlier after Republicans seized the House majority in the 1918 midterms, the month World War I ended.
Two years later, Gillett’s party rode to a vast majority on the same postwar wave that swept Warren G. Harding into the White House in 1920. The party of Lincoln was gaining ground in most of the country and beginning a decade of Washington domination in the White House and Congress alike.
But the brief era of the Harding administration stalled the party’s momentum. The economy was still recovering from its postwar recession and widespread labor unrest, including significant strikes by coal miners and railroad workers, was widespread.
The House had also brought criticism on itself in 1921 and 1922 by refusing to accept the official U.S. Census of 1920. That renewal of the decennial study documented how immigration had exploded and, for the first time, more Americans were living in urban areas than rural.
These controversies, coupled with the typical swing of the midterm political mood, led to Harding’s GOP losing 75 House seats and a net of 6 Senate seats in 1922. It was a worse shellacking than Barack Obama or any other president of the past four decades would experience in his first midterm.
The 68th Congress was officially in office as of March 1923, but Gillett and his House leadership team did not convene its first session until late that fall. Harding died suddenly in August of that year and was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. By the time the vote for Speaker commenced, it was December.
With a majority barely larger than Republicans have now, Gillett found it more difficult to corral the factions within his party. He got just 197 votes on the first ballot, fewer than McCarthy got in his first test this week.
On that first ballot, the Democratic nominee Finis J. Garrett of Tennessee, got 195 votes and two other Republicans got 23. But the key obstacle for Gillett was a bloc of his party members who called themselves “progressives,” the term used by Theodore Roosevelt in his third-party “Bull Moose” bid for president in 1912.
Seventeen House members who identified as progressives (The New York Times called them “radical progressives”) would cast their first-round speaker votes for Henry A. Cooper of Wisconsin. Cooper was a former prosecuting attorney from Racine who represented southeastern Wisconsin from 1893 to 1919 and again from 1921 until he died in 1931. Over his long career, Cooper only lost once, paying the price in 1918 for opposing U.S. entry into World War I.
Cooper, whose parents had operated a station on the Underground Railroad by which escaped enslaved people reached freedom, was a longtime ally of Wisconsin’s legendary progressive governor and Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. When Cooper was opposing Gillett in the House, LaFollette was conducting a smaller-scale revolt against the GOP leaders in the Senate.
Although the voting continued for days, no clear alternative emerged with any chance of getting a majority. Finally, however, Gillett survived. Ultimately, he won over the Cooper voters with the help of his No. 2 leader, Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. Widely viewed as Gillett’s heir apparent, Longworth was able to convince enough of the progressives that there would be procedural reforms.
Getting Gillett over the finish line took nine ballots; in the end, some of Cooper’s backers voted “present.” The Speaker was reelected with just 215 votes. (That was a majority because by then, only 414 members were present and voting for a name.)
Today — this week! Some suggested this might be a model for McCarthy’s strategy: Vote, wait, vote again, repeat. Over many votes and ballots, some of the less zealous members might drift away as the hour grew late or the weekend grew near.