In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery.

The house belonged to a relatively obscure Washingtonian, a widow named Ann Sprigg. In those days, boardinghouses like Sprigg’s were fixtures of the capital landscape—where congressmen, senators, government officials, and the like tended to live during legislative sessions. Quarters were often cramped. Men rented a room—or just a bed, or even half of a bed—and communed in shared bathrooms and living spaces, with the day’s debates sometimes carrying over to the dinner table. Many houses developed reputations as being favored by certain factions, turning them into political clubs as much as living quarters.

In 1841, Ann Sprigg’s house came to be known as the “abolition house.” Three anti-slavery Whig congressmen—Seth M. Gates, a New Yorker, William Slade, a Vermonter, and Joshua Giddings, an Ohioan—moved in alongside two prominent abolitionists, Theodore Dwight Weld and Joshua Leavitt. Leavitt—a New Yorker from a landowning family who shared a Sprigg House bed with Weld—quickly set about convincing the representatives to work alongside the wider abolition movement as an anti-slavery lobby. The group became the brain trust behind the first significant congressional campaign to combat slavery from the nation’s capital.

The brain trust’s goal was straightforward: to develop a caucus within the legislature, a lobby to influence the legislature, or at the very least an argument that would challenge the power of slavery and slaveholders in the American government. But it was also radical, representing a major sea change in American history, and ultimately a turning point in slavery’s demise. Up until this point, the anti-slavery movement had largely eschewed politics. Led by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, the early abolitionists focused strictly on changing hearts and minds—what they called “moralsuasion”—not changing votes. Garrison once even burned copies of the U.S. Constitution (which he called “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell!”) on stage—a flaming, charred reflection of the fact that he preferred challenging slaveholder power from outside the halls of power.

By the time the brain trust moved into the Sprigg House, however, the movement had started to splinter, with more abolitionists taking up the banner of political activism. A year prior, one group of abolitionists broke with Garrison by forming their own political party. Known as the Liberty Party, it was the first ever expressly anti-slavery party in American history, though it never registered more than a blip on the national political radar. As a result, many anti-slavery Whigs like Giddings and Slade opted to remain Whigs, where they could challenge slavery within the existing two-party structure.

This shift within the anti-slavery movement was partly a result of recognizing that as of the late 1830s and early 1840s, slavery’s defenders clearly had the upper hand, especially in the United States Congress. In fact, so great was slaveholder influence in the nation’s capital that in 1836 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a series of resolutions that became known as the “Gag Rule.” At the time, constituents would send petitions to their legislators to read on the house floor; the Gag Rule barred the reading of the many anti-slavery petitions congressmen received, which left slavery virtually unchallenged in Congress.

Carroll Row, which included Ann Spriggs’ boarding house, was located at the site of present-day Library of Congress. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The first task of the boarders in the Sprigg House was to repeal the Gag Rule. Weld and Leavitt helped prepare anti-slavery speeches and advised the congressmen on strategy, forming what Giddings described as an informal “select committee.” They soon found a key ally in president-turned-congressman John Quincy Adams. Though Adams never lived in the Sprigg House, he spent hours there conferring with the boarders. Finally, on December 3, 1844, thanks in no small part to plans hatched at the Sprigg House, Congress repealed the Gag Rule, galvanizing anti-slavery politicians across the country. Many of them later became “Conscience Whigs,” a faction within the Whig Party that opposed slavery, in opposition to their rivals, the pro-slavery “Cotton Whigs.”

While not as radical as many of his “Conscience Whig” colleagues Abraham Lincoln was himself an anti-slavery Whig, and this is perhaps what drew him to the Sprigg House when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1847 as a little-known congressman from Illinois. For the next two years, it was where he slept, ate, and debated his fellow boarders on the major political topics of the day, including the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the possible expansion of slavery into the West. Though the other members of the brain trust had moved on by then, Lincoln’s fellow Midwesterner in the House, Giddings, still lodged there, and the two most certainly dined together when in session.

Lincoln spent only a single term in Congress, but his time at the Sprigg House was clearly a formative experience, if not also a fond memory for him. When he returned to Washington more than a decade later, this time as president of a fractured nation, he looked in on Ann Sprigg, who had since moved houses and fallen on hard times. When Lincoln learned that she needed help, he got this “most estimable widow lady” a job working as a clerk in the Treasury Department, a position that allowed her to support her family through the war.

Ann Sprigg died in 1870, and her boardinghouse—and the entire block of row houses on which it stood—was demolished in 1887 to build the Library of Congress. Since then, the story of this old D.C. boarding house and the woman who ran it has been largely forgotten. The history of the anti-slavery movement has often focused on bigger, more prominent figures and emphasized the work of activists based in New England or New York and not necessarily a slaveholding city like Washington, D.C.

Yet for the better part of a decade, Ann Sprigg’s abolition house formed the nucleus of a new political attack against slavery. It was there at the dining room table that anti-slavery politicos put together a strategy for combatting slavery within the halls of Congress, a change that thrust anti-slavery activism away from the fringe and placed it right in the heart of American politics.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that while Joshua Leavitt came from a wealthy family, he was not personally wealthy.

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On January 7, cameras recorded a beaming Kevin McCarthy as he ascended the rostrum of the House of Representatives and raised the speaker’s gavel. If one knew nothing about the previous few days, they might imagine this image captured the ceremonial coronation of a speaker who, like every other speaker for 100 years, had known the job was theirs for months.

A slightly wider angle shot of the House rostrum shows a more complicated scene. Mr. McCarthy is the only one smiling. The seven clerks gathered around the dais all sit expressionless, looking exhausted. This is because McCarthy took the gavel at 12:30 a.m. on the fourth day of voting. In the words of Florida’s Rep. Matt Gaetz, McCarthy “sold shares of himself” as he campaigned and traded so much of the speaker’s authority for votes that Gaetz “ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for.” McCarthy’s concessions are apparently so significant that he refuses to divulge them to his aides or the public.

What happens when someone gains a prestigious political position but loses the respect and authority that its holders usually command? To answer that question, we can look to Marcus Didius Julianus, the Roman senator who became emperor by winning his crown at auction.

Julianus was born in 133 C.E. to a wealthy Milanese family. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Roman senate. He also won a major victory against Germanic invaders as a legionary commander, served as a Roman consul, and governed multiple provinces. This distinguished career put Julianus among the most accomplished senators of his generation. But Julianus really wanted to be Roman emperor.

He got the chance on March 28, 193, when the reigning emperor Pertinax was killed in the palace by rebellious praetorian guards. The praetorian commander knew about the rebellion in advance and arranged for Flavius Sulpicianus, his choice for the next emperor, to be in the praetorian barracks when Pertinax died. The plan was that Sulpicianus would secure the guards’ support and then use the soldiers to compel the senate to recognize him as emperor.

Julianus, however, heard about the murder of Pertinax before Sulpicianus and the soldiers agreed on terms. He “raced to the camp” and “promised to give the praetorians everything they wanted” if only they would award him the title of emperor.

The senator Cassius Dio called this “a most disgraceful affair” in which “both the City and its empire were auctioned off as if in some market.” The soldiers shuttled back and forth between Sulpicianus and Julianus, informing each of them what the other had most recently bid. When it seemed that Sulpicianus’ offer to pay each soldier 20,000 sesterces apiece (an amount equivalent to 33 pounds of silver) might win the day, Julianus raised his bid to 25,000 “both shouting it in a loud voice and indicating the amount with his fingers.”

The soldiers, “captivated by this excessive bid…received Julianus inside and declared him emperor.” The senate approved the choice without any real enthusiasm, largely because Julianus had surrounded its meeting place with praetorians.

After the senatorial vote, Julianus walked across the Forum to the imperial palace. He might have been grinning in a McCarthy-esque fashion as he climbed the ramp up to the Palatine Hill and walked into the residence. When Julianus entered the dining room, he saw the spartan dinner that had been prepared for Pertinax and “made great fun of it, sending people out to every place where something expensive could be found at that time of night” so he could feast in style. He then summoned a famous actor “to play dice” with him as they celebrated his accession.

The party did not last long. A sullen mob rioted in the Forum the following morning as Julianus tried to enter the senate house. Within a week, crowds in the Circus Maximus began chanting for him to be replaced, senators started mocking him in private, and the praetorians became antsy when they realized that he did not have the money he promised to pay them.

Julianus responded to this discontent in the only way he knew. He “paid court to the senate and all men of influence by making promises, bestowing favors, and laughing and joking with everyone.” Cassius Dio wrote that “he left nothing undone to court our favor,” but everything he did “made us suspicious because he was indulging in servile flattery.”

Julianus was so obviously weak that three commanders stationed all around the empire rebelled almost immediately after hearing about how he had taken power. By early May, the forces of Septimius Severus, the rebellious governor of Pannonia Superior, reached the outskirts of Rome. “Dumb and witless” Julianus, the historian Herodian wrote, “did not know how to handle the situation” without making yet another offer that further reduced his already much-diminished power. He sent “a letter to Severus” in which he offered “to make him [Julianus’s] colleague as emperor” in exchange for peace. The senate and praetorians supported this proposal until they realized that Julianus “was terror stricken and in despair.” At that point, the praetorians and “all the senators immediately abandoned him for Severus”—despite all Julianus had promised them.

The senators then condemned Julianus to death and the praetorians sent soldiers to execute him. When the executioners arrived in the palace, Cassius Dio wrote, the bewildered Julianus asked them: “But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?”

He was right to be confused. He died not because he was evil, but because he had nothing more with which to buy support. “Servile flattery,” as Cassius Dio described it, had failed him. The emperor had burned through all his political and financial capital in only 66 days.

Will Kevin McCarthy last that long?

The speaker’s time on the dais, however long it lasts, likely will be filled with the same string of smiling concessions, exorbitant promises, and compromises that consumed Julianus’ short residence in the imperial palace. And when the new speaker runs out of things to give his allies, one wonders if he will understand any better than Julianus why those to whom he promised so much could turn on him so suddenly.

The post Can Kevin McCarthy Outlast an Ancient Roman Emperor? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One enduring answer to that question lies in the ways that Romans responded after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths and their king, Alaric, in the year 410 CE.

That fall of Rome is among the most famous and closely studied attacks on a capital in world history. It also shares some key particulars with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Perhaps most notably, just as some American politicians spurred on the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, a group of 5th-century Roman politicians engaged in treacherous acts that eventually culminated in the attack on their capital.

Alaric’s final assault on Rome came after three years of failed negotiations over payment for past military services. Alaric had fought for the Romans in the Balkans upon orders from the emperor Honorius. But Honorius changed his plans and then refused to pay Alaric and his followers.

Early in 408, Alaric moved just north of the Alpine passes to Italy, and threatened to attack Rome if he was not paid. Honorius’s great general Stilicho convinced the Senate, which had grown increasingly involved in negotiations, to make some payment. But Stilicho’s support for paying Alaric aroused the suspicions of the emperor, so Honorius had Stilicho killed on allegations of having colluded with Alaric.

According to the Greek historian Zosimus, Alaric’s demands then changed; he wanted only a “moderate” sum of money, an exchange of hostages, and the concession of land in Pannonia (modern Hungary and parts of Austria and the Balkans) for his people to inhabit. Alaric marched through northern Italy to the walls of Rome unopposed. His first siege of the city in 408–9 brought suffering for the inhabitants. So, the Senate sent an ambassador to negotiate with Alaric and then voted to agree to his request. But Honorius and his courtiers kept delaying approval of the agreement.

In winter 409, Alaric seized Rome’s port, Portus, and its granaries. In a direct challenge to Honorius, the Senate, with the support of Alaric, recognized one of their own as emperor: Priscus Attalus. Then, Attalus installed a number of senators in prominent positions in his regime, although some senators, including the eminent Anicii family, refused to go along.

Attalus’s regime did not last long. After Attalus failed to defeat Honorius’s general in the province of Africa, Alaric removed his support for Attalus, who renounced his claim to the throne.  Once more, Alaric began negotiations with Honorius. The unexpected appearance of Alaric’s enemy, the Goth Sarus, who volunteered to fight with Honorius, disrupted what may have been the final resolution of the conflict; Honorius declared outright war on Alaric, who in anger turned against Rome.

For the third time, Alaric laid siege to the city.  No doubt, Honorius expected Rome would withstand another siege, and it may well have. But someone in the city—the culprit remains unknown—opened the gate for the Goths, and Rome fell.

“The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals” (1890) by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Alaric’s path through the city makes his anger at Roman elite institutions visible. His men targeted political centers. They set fire to the lush green park known as the Gardens of Sallust, which were part of the imperial properties. Then they advanced to the center of the city, plundering and destroying public buildings in the Forum, including the Secretarium off the Senate House. They then looted certain churches and private houses, taking with them as much gold, silver, and captives as they could. Priscus Attalus, his son Ampelius, and the senators who had supported his attempted regime change left Rome with Alaric after three days of violence.

In the shock that followed Rome’s fall, many Romans across the Mediterranean decried this violence to the capital of the Empire and found it easiest to blame the “barbarian general” Alaric. In North Africa the Christian bishop and future saint, Augustine, was among those who interpreted the attack as God’s punishment for the Romans caring too much about the present world. Blaming Alaric or God was also safer for the senators who wanted to remain in Rome.

Yet contemporaries and later Greek historians acknowledged that some of the blame fell on the senators themselves. The disloyalty of Attalus and his supporters had undermined Honorius’s efforts to restore his authority as emperor and weakened his claim to the loyalty of the Roman troops at a critical juncture. Attalus had put his political ambition above the security of the state.

Alaric departed the city on August 27, 410, and died unexpectedly in southern Italy weeks later. The Goths then headed west for Gaul, easing the Romans’ fears. Some of the senators who had fled Rome appeared in public in the city once more.

A number of senators who had been loyal to Honorius emerged to help rebuild the city. Senator Epiphanius, who was also urban prefect (a position akin to mayor of Rome), started repairs on a section of the Senate House that had been damaged in the attack. Another senator, Albinus, oversaw the restoration of the food supply, and Probus, a member of the Anician family who had returned to support Honorius, was put in charge of state finances.  Absent from any of these positions were the senators who had supported Priscus Attalus, and, we must imagine, those who had left with the Goths as well.

Honorius’s new general, Constantius, regained control of Gaul in 415 and captured Priscus Attalus and his followers, handing them over to the emperor. We can only imagine the conversations among the senators as they saw the chastened Attalus being paraded through the city. No one spoke publicly in Attalus’s defense—including the senators who had sided with him. There was no attempt at minimizing Attalus’s role in the coup, nor did the senators pretend they had not witnessed an attempted regime change by their former colleague. Rather, the full Senate and the emperor witnessed and approved Attalus’s public punishment—the removal of his thumb and forefinger, the digits used for speaking. Attalus accepted his punishment, and was exiled to the Lipari Islands. No one objected or appealed the sentence.

Our leaders would do well to reflect on these Roman exemplars. We do not have to remove the fingers of members of Congress who colluded with the insurrectionists. But politicians must publicly acknowledge their responsibility for the attack, including spreading the “Big Lie” about the election. And if they cannot acknowledge their guilt and accept the consequences and take steps to repair the damage, as the Roman Senate did, like Attalus they should be forced from the capital.

Only then can our representatives begin to rebuild the civility and public trust that once made the Congress a respected institution, and the Capitol a hallowed place. The Romans did it, and their Senate lived on for another 200 years after the attack of 410.  We should be so fortunate.

The post Let’s Respond Like Romans to the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s especially true when undocumented immigrants are characterized as criminals—often merely on the basis of their legal immigration status. This rhetoric isn’t new—it has long been used to justify immigration crackdowns. But the framing of unauthorized migration as illegal does have an origin point: a little-known law in 1929.

The law—Senate Bill 5094, also known as the Undesirable Aliens Act—was notable because it was the first time criminal penalties were attached to undocumented entry to the U.S. While the law’s passage was not big news in 1929, it is vital to understanding how we discuss undocumented immigration today.

To understand the 1929 bill, it’s important to understand the nativist wave that gripped the United States in the 1920s. That wave most famously produced the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which set national quotas for immigration in a way that was transparently designed to preserve the cultural dominance of Northern and Western Europeans. The law also marked a transition from earlier anti-immigrant campaigns that had targeted Catholics, Southern Europeans, Chinese, and other Asian migrants, because for the first time, the law targeted Mexican immigration.

As historian Mae Ngai documents in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, immigration across the southern border went largely ignored until the 1920s. It was mostly seen as being regulated by labor demands in the Southwest, but this changed after World War I ushered in an era of harder borders. In 1924, the Border Patrol was founded to stop Mexican immigrants from entering illegally as undocumented entry began to be seen as a problem.

After the passage of Johnson-Reed in 1924, some members of Congress, looking for new targets for their anti-immigration work, pushed for a way to limit Mexican immigration to the United States through the extension of quotas to Mexico as well. In their arguments, Mexicans were often characterized as economic burdens, threats to American jobs, unclean and potentially diseased, and with a greater tendency towards criminality.

They also were not considered white. Representative Robert Green, a Democrat from Florida, would make the racial aspect of his opposition clear in a radio address on January 27, 1928, on the subject of “Immigration and the Crime Wave.” In this address, Green noted that quotas should be applied to Mexico because of the mixture of “White, Indian, and negro” blood, which placed a “very great penalty” upon any society attempting to assimilate it. Making a eugenicist argument, he continued, “influx of all types of undesirable aliens and their amalgamation with our people will cause a general weakening, physically and mentally, of our civilization.”

One of the most outspoken, and ultimately successful, critics of Mexican immigration was Democrat John Box of Texas. Box had opposed quotas for Mexican immigrants in Johnson-Reed because he feared it would kill the legislation, but, beginning in 1926, he introduced a number of bills specifically seeking to limit legal Mexican immigration. Box would become so associated with the push for restriction of Mexican immigration that one House bill he introduced, H.R. 6465, which would have imposed quotas on immigration from both Canada and Mexico, was nicknamed the Box Bill.

During a January 1928 address at an immigration conference organized by the briefly popular, anti-communist Key Men of America, he declared: “One purpose of our immigration laws is to prevent the lowering of the ideals and the average of our citizenship, the creation of race friction and the weakening of the Nation’s powers of cohesion, resulting from the intermixing of differing races. The admission of 75,000 Mexican peons annually tends to the aggravation of this, another evil which the laws are designed to prevent or cure.”

Box catered to his Key Men audience, not only by calling them a “patriotic organization,” but by tying immigration to their fears of communism. “In proportion to her population, Mexico is now by far the most bolshevistic country in the Western Hemisphere,” Box later said in testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. And he didn’t stop there, suggesting Mexican immigrants were poor, illiterate, criminal disease-carriers who posed threats not only to American culture but also to the very safety of its citizens.

In the same Key Men address, Box claimed, “the Mexican peons are illiterate and ignorant. Because of their unsanitary habits and living conditions and their vices, they are especially subject to smallpox, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and other dangerous contagions….Few, if any, other immigrants have brought us so large a proportion of criminals and paupers as the Mexican peons.”

Despite this, the Box Bill failed in the Congress—but Box and other restrictionists would adopt a new tactic in their push to restrict Mexican immigration by targeting the undocumented. When Senator Coleman Blease, a known white supremacist from South Carolina, introduced Senate Bill 5094, also known as the Undesirable Aliens Act the next year, Box became one of its most outspoken supporters. The bill proposed to criminalize illegal entry—making it a misdemeanor—and to turn illegal re-entry into a felony, which made the immigrant inadmissible to the United States in the future. Reentry after deportation also carried penalties of up to two years in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both. Illegal entrants would face misdemeanor charges and one year in prison, a $1,000 fine, or both.

The bill was not unopposed. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, submitted a protest at committee hearings. “It is one thing to deport a person for coming here illegally; it is quite another thing to imprison for a year or fine him a thousand dollars, especially as he might be quite ignorant of the law when he starts his journey,” the ACLU memo said. But the ACLU’s criticism proved to be a lonely one and the Hoover Administration supported attaching criminal penalties to illegal entry. The Senate Committee’s report included a letter from the Secretary of Labor, James Davis, noting that a deterrent penalty was necessary if undocumented entry was to be dissuaded.

The bill passed with little fanfare and without a recorded vote, but the debate set many of the terms for immigration discussions for the rest of the century and beyond by making dubious connections between immigration and a variety of social ills. Representative Green of Florida noted that, “if you will examine the criminal records you will find that…the percentage of criminals is largely foreign.” Representative Box would repeat the negative stereotypes he had drawn on in pushing for quotas on Mexican immigration: “They are badly infected with tuberculosis and other diseases; there are many paupers among them; there are many criminals; they work for lower wages; they are as objectionable as immigrants tried by the tests applied to other aliens. Republican Representative Roy Fitzgerald of Ohio would claim that Mexican immigrants were poisoning American citizens, and fellow Republicans John Schafer of Wisconsin and Thomas Blanton of Texas would accuse Mexican immigrants of taking the jobs of native-born Americans, with Blanton going so far as to suggest that Mexican immigrants would cause the starvation of the native-born.

The passage of the Undesirable Aliens Act shifted how Mexican immigration was treated in the U.S. Later that same year, 1929, the federal government, along with state and local governments, began a program of Mexican Repatriation as America slid into the Great Depression. This campaign sought to coerce Mexican immigrants to return to their country of origin through immigration raids and threats of penalties for those who could not prove they were in the country legally.

Indeed, the criminalization of undocumented entry, in combination with decreasing job opportunities during the Depression and aggressive tactics by the Immigration Service and other authorities, made the Mexican Repatriation a success. The program resulted in an estimated 20 percent of the Mexican population of the United States returning to Mexico.

The undocumented were now criminals, and could be treated as such. In this way, the Undesirable Aliens Act established a new pattern of American policymaking that holds to this day: The law, and the many that have followed it, have reinforced the tendency to see the solution to undocumented immigration as more punitive policy, instead of treating it as an issue of labor.

It has not mattered that such policies have not worked, or that they create pain for undocumented immigrants, who have contributed so much to America throughout its history. Instead, such policies are justified by the argument that they are just the law—laws that continue to rely on the dubious racist and nativist arguments of 1929.

The post The 1929 Law That Turned Undocumented Entry Into a Crime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before you chuckle, first consider how far we’ve come since April 1776, when John Adams wrote that a legislature should be “in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large.”

Over the past couple of centuries, our definition of “the people” has expanded to include people without property, former slaves, and women, but the ideal of legislative bodies that actually resemble the citizenry still eludes us. Congress is a political class distinct from the citizenry—whiter than the American population at large, much more male, and much wealthier. A majority are millionaires. Our national legislature is very far from any resemblance to a “portrait” of the people.

Modern elections make this pattern unlikely to change. Private money dominates federal elections and, increasingly, state and local contests. Elected legislators play to broadcast and social media by vilifying opponents and grandstanding on behalf of parties, lobbyists, or themselves. Partisan electoral imperatives encourage politicians to focus on vilifying opponents and raising campaign funds, rather than governing. Members of Congress spend a huge percentage of their time courting donors.

Conflicts of interest, corruption, and systemic dysfunction are woven through American legislative history, from Tammany Hall in the 1780s to the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s and the recent federal government shutdown. One reason is that the electoral system itself often attracts the wrong kind of candidates and rewards unethical campaigning. Gerrymandered district boundaries, voter suppression efforts, and winner-take-all election laws serve to restrict voter choices. People who choose to run for election are too often driven by ego and personal ambition, qualities at odds with the genuine give and take of deliberation. Donald Trump may seem to stand out in this regard, but his character flaws are less distinctive than his willingness to parade them publicly as a kind of perverse populist brand.

So why not random selection instead? Yes, tossing Congress, en masse, out its own front door and refilling the chamber with everyday citizens might seem like a crazy idea. But when asked about this prospect in surveys conducted in 1999 and 2012, Americans place more trust in a randomly-selected body than in Congress.

So what if we took that idea seriously? Could we replace some of our elections with selection by lot, also known as “sortition?”

Sortition has considerable advantages over elections. Equality and fairness are baked into its selection process. Unlike elections, public lotteries cannot be readily rigged or bought. The members selected by lottery would owe nothing to special interest donors or party leaders. They would be free to focus on making good policy, instead of fighting each other for power and playing to the media, which now feeds on the permanent election cycle as voraciously as politicians themselves.

Americans from all walks of life would see people like themselves in a Citizen Assembly selected at random. Women, for instance, would make up roughly half its membership, and a plurality of its members would probably identify as political independents.

Though this Assembly would be representative, skeptics might doubt its ability to govern effectively. Would the random rabble prove competent at drafting laws, holding committee hearings, weighing expert testimony and evidence, and deliberating in the public interest?

A handful of the Assembly’s lawmakers might prove to be rascals or incompetent, though perhaps at a lower rate than among an equivalent body of elected legislators. What matters, however, is the collective capacity of the whole group, when supported with professional staff and resources. A randomly selected body of citizens, free from special interest control and partisan electoral imperatives, could well be more capable at finding optimal policy solutions than an elected body at war with itself.

Social science supports this idea. A randomly selected legislature would be more likely than an elected one to harness the “wisdom of crowds,” whereby a large number of diverse individuals can arrive at better solutions than a small group of comparatively homogeneous experts.

It’s not just a social science dream. Sortition has precedents. It was part of the earliest recorded history of democracy. In the reformed democracy of ancient Athens, panels of citizens chosen by lot (not the mass Assembly) made remarkably good laws for a hundred years. Aristotle’s Politics stated that “the appointment of magistrates by lot is considered democratic, and the election of them oligarchic.”

Sortition is also already at work in the United States. Small bodies of randomly selected citizens, in the form of civil and criminal juries, serve a vital democratic role. Through the jury system, we ask fellow citizens to resolve cases that could result in life imprisonment or a billion dollar judgment. On the whole, they do an excellent job, and a growing number of nations, such as Argentina, Japan, and South Korea, are now establishing jury systems of their own.

Less well known are the hundreds of experiments in citizen deliberation conducted in recent decades. The State of Oregon, for example, established a process in 2009 in which randomly selected panels of citizens listen to pro and con arguments for a week, then write an analysis of each ballot initiative for the state’s voter guide. This Citizens’ Initiative Review has inspired similar experiments in Arizona, Colorado, and Massachusetts. Outside the U.S., sortition has been used to revitalize student government in Bolivia, draw up city budgets in Australia, rebuild infrastructure in China, revise election laws in Canada, and convene a constitutional convention in Ireland, to name but a few.

The role of a randomly selected legislature in the U.S. could begin as a modest one. It could start with the special authority to resolve those questions where legislative conflicts of interest are greatest: drawing district lines, setting salaries, and watching out for corruption.

The next step could give the randomly selected body the power to draft, revise, or review legislation. Or it could have the final vote on key legislation and budgets.

This could lead to the full-fledged Citizen Assembly referenced earlier. One blueprint would use this body to replace one elected house in a bicameral legislature. With full legislative powers, the Assembly would introduce bills that force the elected house to vote on “hot potato” proposals that electoral pressures would have caused them to avoid. (How long has Congress sidestepped the most difficult policy questions posed by climate change?) The Assembly would likewise consider bills from the other chamber.

Some proposals suggest eventually moving to a sortition-based democracy and dispensing with legislative elections altogether.

Imagine how refreshing it would be to watch the Citizen Assembly in action. Picture this body of everyday Americans speaking and acting out of a genuine desire to develop good policy, rather than playing partisan power games. One could see honest dialogue in committees and vigorous debates on the floor. Without the predictability of partisan scripts, such events would have real drama. The legislators would bring to the nation’s toughest problems perspectives informed by a wide range of occupations, ages, ethnicities, and viewpoints.

As incredible as that vision might seem, serious national conversations are already under way about randomly selected upper houses in Australia, Belgium, Canada, and the U.K. Many more countries are poised to institutionalize smaller-scale innovations. Rather than remaining stuck in a centuries-old electoral system, the U.S. should join the global conversation about sortition.

Filling a legislative chamber by lot may sound reckless, but given the failings of elections and the gravity of the challenges we face in this century, it would be reckless not to experiment with alternatives. As Abraham Lincoln said, democracy should be about self-government by the people themselves, rather than by a political class. Sortition is a proven and practical tool for achieving this goal.

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In developing the exhibition American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith, which will open—mark your calendars—July Fourth weekend, 2016, we want to explore some of the most elemental debates and issues that have confronted the founding revolutionary generation and that resonate to this day. Americans have viewed the right to petition—which plays out in our right to debate openly, lobby government officials, and mount Internet letter-writing campaigns—as a very basic democratic right. We’ve continued to exercise it to shape our country beyond the ballot box. We may take it for granted today (see this petition to start construction on a Star Wars-inspired Death Star by 2016), but it was under serious attack in the 19th century. Americans in the formative years of the country clashed over the most limited aspirations of its founding documents and helped define the practical meaning of democracy.

The elegant cane was presented to Massachusetts Congressman John Quincy Adams—the former president—in March 1844, by Henry Ellsworth, commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. It featured Adams’ name and the Latin words Justum et tenacem propositi virum (“A man just and firm of purpose”) on a band below the knob. This was not a cane that served any practical purpose, but rather was a ceremonial object, a trophy to recognize Adams for his role in the ongoing battle to abolish slavery. The cane was a gift from Julius Pratt and Co. of Meriden, Connecticut, one of the country’s leading importers of ivory. Pratt, an active abolitionist, asked Ellsworth to present the cane to Adams to honor him for his long campaign to defend the right to protest the institution of slavery and his battle against what had become known as the House of Representatives “gag rule” covering all anti-slavery petitions.

The idea of a gag rule on petitions presented to Congress on any subject seemed a contradiction and assault on the very idea of democratic government. It was an ancient privilege that dated back to the rights of subjects to petition kings and lords to redress grievances or ask for favor. The First Amendment of the Constitution established that Congress shall make no law restricting “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Not limiting their participation to electoral politics, individuals and groups with very different resources brought their interests and concerns before the nation: on the streets, in back rooms, and through the media of their times. In the early American republic, petitioning provided disenfranchised poor white men, women, free blacks, and other minorities a means to voice their concerns and to claim a role in determining the direction of the country.

Pratt requested that when Adams successfully defeated the rule, he add the date of his victory to the inscription. Adams wrote in his diary, “I accepted the cane as a trust to be returned when the date of the extinction of the gag-rule shall be accomplished,” and asked Ellsworth to keep the cane until that time.

The campaign to defeat the gag rule had become a major symbolic focus of the revitalized abolitionist movement. In an effort to promote a national debate on slavery, abolitionists had organized petitioning drives in the 1830s, calling on Congress to prohibit slavery in the nation’s capital, the one undisputed area the legislature controlled. Traditionally, petitions to the House of Representatives were presented individually and then assigned to the appropriate committee, which would recommend action. Southern representatives and their Northern allies argued that giving even this much attention to the subject served to heighten regional tensions and to promote violent slave rebellions. To cut off the abolitionists’ efforts, the House of Representatives adopted on May 25, 1836, a resolution that all petitions, resolutions, and memorials regarding slavery or abolition would be tabled without being read, referred on, or printed.

This original gag rule, which under the rules of the House of Representatives needed to be reaffirmed with each new session of Congress, and was, for roughly eight years, was denounced as an infringement of the First Amendment. Rather than discouraging petitioners, it actually energized the movement of those who argued that the suppression of debate was yet another example of the willingness of slave-holding Southern politicians to trample on the rights of all Americans so as to preserve their so-called “peculiar institution.” Abolitionists promised that the gag rule “shall be a ‘firebrand’ in our hands to light anew the flame of human sympathy and public indignation.”

Petitions from anti-slavery societies flooded the Capitol, thanks in large measure to the growing activism of women. The anti-slavery groups found additional support outside the movement from sympathizers who questioned how a democratic society could exist if people’s voices and debates were censored on the most central issues of the day.

The petitioners found a champion for their cause in Adams, who had returned to Congress in 1831. Year after year, Adams introduced anti-slavery petitions and railed against the gag rule. He argued that the refusal to accept the petitions was “beneath the dignity of the General Legislative Assembly of a nation, founding its existence upon natural and inalienable rights of man.” Each time, the House voted against his resolutions. The growing petitioning drives found popular support across the North and West, created mounting political pressure. On December 3, 1844, in a vote of 108-80, the gag rule was abolished.

Although this might seem like a small victory in the history to end slavery, at the time the vote was viewed as a major defeat for the South, a recognition that its power over Congress wasn’t absolute. And indeed, the feeling that their institutions were now under attack by significant hostile political forces helped to fuel a burgeoning Southern secessionist movement in the following decades.

The anti-slavery petitioning drives of the 1830s and ’40s strengthened the abolitionist movement and served as a training ground for future women’s and civil rights struggles in the years that followed. They also helped challenge and redefine the meaning of American democracy and the unfulfilled promises in the nation’s founding ideals, asserting the principle that beyond the ballot box, citizens have a role in shaping the debate and policies of their government.

Following Adams‘ victory, Ellsworth had engraved on the scroll above the eagle “Right of Petition Triumphant” and sent it on to Adams for him to add the date. On the tips of the eagle’s wings, Adams asked a jeweler to add “3 December” and “1844.” Adams, who normally refused gifts from political supporters, returned the cane to the Patent Office. In his will, Adams bequeathed it to the United States, and the Patent Office later transferred it to the Smithsonian.

Soon it will be on display, as an evocative—if not as well-known—icon of American democracy as the Constitution itself.

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