Made In America - Bill Bryson [186]
Finally in 1860, after a rout in Honduras, Walker surrendered to the British navy. To his astonishment, his captors did not repatriate him to America as had always happened before, but turned him over to the Honduran authorities, who promptly took him and his co-conspirators to a town square, lined them up before a firing-squad and brought to a close their lives and the fashion for private revolutions.6 Filibuster, however, did not die with them. By the mid-1850s it was being used in Congress to describe any vaguely disruptive debating tactic, and by the 1880s had settled into its present sense of a wilful delaying action designed to thwart the passage of a bill.
Still other words might have filtered out into the world at large except that Congress in its early days was remarkably unforthcoming about its doings. Senate debates were kept secret until 1794, and reported only sketchily after that for several decades. The House of Representatives attracted more attention, partly because it was more open in its dealings but also because well into the nineteenth century it was regarded as the more prestigious chamber. Not until well into the nineteenth century did the Senate begin to take on an air of pre-eminence, for the simple reason that the House, reflecting the growth of American population, began to become very crowded – by 1860 it had 243 members, by 1880 332 – while the Senate remained comparatively compact and thus more exclusive and clubby. The men who made the Senate famous – Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun – would very probably have been in the House had they been born a generation earlier.7
At all events, the public enjoyed no right of access to congressional debates until as late as 1873, when the Congressional Record was at last created. Contrary to common belief, the Record even now does not constitute a full, verbatim transcription of all the debates in Congress. Speeches are frequently edited before being placed in the Record, and indeed the Record sometimes contains speeches that were never given at all. It has, in the words of Daniel Boorstin, ‘no more than the faintest resemblance to what is actually said’ in Congress.8
The nineteenth century also marked a busy time for political parties as alliances endlessly formed and reformed, often around a single issue like slavery or immigration. Political parties in America effectively date from the period immediately after the drafting of the Constitution, when the two main sides formed into loose associations. Those in favour of the Constitution pulled off something of a linguistic coup by dubbing themselves Federalists. In fact, the term would more accurately have described those who were against the Constitution and wished to revive the Articles of Confederation. Deprived of the term, this faction became known by default as the Antifederalists, which was not only inaccurate but had a negative ring to it that the more positive-sounding Federalists were delighted to exploit.9 Saddled with a misleading name, the Antifederalists began, confusingly, sometimes to call themselves Democrats, sometimes Republicans, and sometimes Democrat-Republicans.10
A succession of party names briefly blazed and faded in the nineteenth century, like matches struck in a darkened auditorium – a not inapt metaphor since that is how one of the more memorably known parties got its name. I refer to the Equal Rights Democrats, who were known to everyone as the Loco-Focos, and so called because when one of their meeting halls was plunged into darkness by saboteurs the adherents continued with the aid of the new sulphur matches called locofocos.11 No less memorable were the Know-Nothings – not the sort of name that would seem to inspire confidence in their capacity to lead. Officially called the American Party, it was as much a secret society as a political body and got its name from the reply members were instructed to give when asked to elucidate the party’s aims: ‘I know nothing.’ Despite the obvious shortcomings