Senate pages

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Two pages supply a senator with material for his great speech, 1897.

Senate pages are employees of the United States Senate who serve as auxiliaries in the work of the Senators. As part of the Senate page program, 30 students are hired as pages for one semester or during the school holidays on the recommendation of the Senators.

The bellhops are responsible for preparing the meeting room, preparing and distributing documents, running errands and providing assistance. The attraction of the serving position for the young pages is that they get to know the Capitol with its institutions and employees from the inside out and can make valuable connections. The bellboys are housed in a special building where they also receive schooling.

Page programs also existed in the House of Representatives (1842–2011) and the Supreme Court (1860s to 1975). These programs were discontinued while the Senate Page program continues to this day. Page programs also exist in the parliaments of some states in the United States and in Canada.

Word meaning

In the Middle Ages, the French word page was used to describe a noble boy who served a noble person, for example a squire . Today the word page is used in the United States and Canada for young parliamentary and court ushers, in German also for bellboys .

attitude

30 pages are employed in the Senate. Applicants for a page position must contact a senator who is allowed to assign a page position. Since there are 100 senators, but only 30 page seats, the faction leaders determine the senators who can nominate a page. The number of seats allocated to a parliamentary group depends on the majority in the Senate. In 2017, the Republican majority group had 16 seats and the Democratic minority group had 14 seats. The Sergeant at Arms is the page's chief superior.

Students from junior high school are eligible as Page . You must be 16 or 17 years old and have a grade point average ( GPA ) of at least 3.0. Applications can be submitted for the autumn semester (September to January), the spring semester (January to June) or on two dates lasting several weeks during the summer holidays (June and July).

Accommodation

The Senate pages are housed in the Daniel Webster Senate Page Residence, named after the founder of the page program, Senator Daniel Webster . The residence is about 1 kilometer as the crow flies from the Capitol. It houses the male and female pages on different floors. In the basement there is a canteen and the United States Page School, where the pages receive schooling.

tasks

Senator's desk after preparation by a page.

General

Before a Senate session begins, the pages prepare the meeting room. This work includes the provision of documents on the senators' desks: the congressional record, the daily calendars (the dailies) as well as bills and reports to be negotiated (the day's legislation). During the sessions they sometimes act as door openers, otherwise they sit at the sides of the presidential podium, the Democratic Senator pages on the left, the Republican Senator pages on the right. At the signal of a senator, the front page goes to him and accepts the senator's order.

The page's duties also include transporting documents within the Capitol and the Senate office buildings, making and receiving telephone calls, delivering messages to and from visitors, and small handouts such as getting drinks.

A page can be "promoted" from the floor page, which is employed in the Senate Chamber, to the cloakroom page. This position is reserved for senior pages. You will assist the staff in the cloakrooms and have the opportunity to meet the senators in a more personal atmosphere than in the hall.

Lecterns

The viewer of Senate meetings notices that the meeting room is mostly empty, except for votes, apart from the President, the session officials and the bellhops. While the desks of the two faction leaders are always equipped with lecterns, a page has to bring a desk top before another senator speaks. The observer wonders why the essays are not permanently installed, but have to be carried in and out of the room in a laborious ceremony. As with many other Senate customs, it may be a historical relic whose original meaning is no longer known.

Presidential election

Joint session of the Congress, entry of the Senate pages into the House of Representatives, in front the bearers of the voting boxes, 2017.

If a Senate page is lucky, his tenure will include a joint session of the United States Congress (joint Senate-House session) to count electoral votes after the presidential election. While the pages usually do their work unnoticed, they are sure to get public attention on this day. A solemn procession forms in the Senate, led by two Senate pages with the ballot boxes, followed by the other pages and the Senators. The train moves across the Capitol, from the Senate Chamber through the Great Rotunda and the National Statuary Hall into the House of Representatives Hall. There the two front pages put the ballot boxes on a table in front of the presidential podium. The electoral votes are then counted.

history

Daniel Webster, founder of the Senate Page Program.

Many institutions of the US American parliaments were modeled on British models, but the page program is an independent institution of the American Senate.

Beginnings

In 1829, Senator Daniel Webster hired nine-year-old Grafton Hanson, a grandson of Sergeant at Arms Mountjoy Bayly, as the first Senate page. In 1831, Webster called a second Senate page so that each side of the Senate would have a page: 12-year-old Isaac Bassett, son of Senate messenger (Senate messenger) Simeon Bassett. Bassett served the Senate for 64 years until his death in 1895: 7 years as a page, then as a messenger and from 1861 as an assistant doorkeeper (deputy doorman). In the 19th century, orphans or sons of widows were often employed as pages for social reasons. The pages were mostly between 8 and 13 years old, today the pages are 16 or 17 years old. The number of pages has increased over time, in 1888 there were already 15 pages, to this day their number has grown to 30.

African Americans

Jacob K. Javits was a Liberal Republican, first member of the House of Representatives, then attorney general for New York State, and since 1957 a senator for 24 years. An enemy of all forms of discrimination, he campaigned against the voter tax in the 1940s, campaigned (in vain) in 1954 for the abolition of racial segregation and supported the civil rights laws of 1957 and 1964 . In 1961 he tried to hire women pages, which he could only get through in 1971, see women .

Javits nominated Lawrence Wallace Bradford Jr. as the first African-American Senate page to be sworn in on April 13, 1965. The next day, on the centenary of President Abraham Lincoln's death , Frank Mitchell was sworn in as the first African-American page in the House of Representatives. As early as 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren had nominated Charles Bush as the first African-American page to the Supreme Court after the court had enacted the groundbreaking ban on racial segregation in public schools a few months earlier .

Women

A sensational event (note the many microphones): the swearing-in of the first female pages Ellen McConnell Blakeman and Paulette Desell-Lund, 1971.

Since the first senate page was hired in 1829, only young boys and men had been appointed pages. There was no requirement that pages be male, but given the prevailing custom, it never occurred to anyone to employ female pages.

A pioneer in the fight for female pages was Senator Jacob K. Javits , who had already nominated the first African-American page in 1965. In 1961 he wrote to Sergeant at Arms Joseph C. Duke to inquire about the possibility of appointing female Senate pages. Duke defended the previous practice of hiring only male pages, because the pages often had to transport heavy, bulky material between the Capitol and the office buildings and had to run and run constantly, and the working hours were too strenuous for young girls.

The experiences of Julie Price, who asked a congressman about a position as a page a decade later in 1970, throw light on the prevailing notions:

“He said, good idea, but you know you can't. Girls are not allowed to be pages. I was surprised. Of course that didn't make sense to me. I had three sisters and two brothers and we lived on a farm and I knew that I could do everything my brothers could. I was surprised that my wish should be rejected like this. "
The first female Senate pages 1971–1972 (from left): Julie Price, Ellen McConnell Blakeman and Paulette Desell-Lund.

1964 was the Civil Rights Act (Civil Rights Act) was passed, which prohibited gender discrimination in the workplace. A grass-roots movement to end discrimination against women emerged, and in its wake Senator Javits resumed his campaign for women pages in 1970, nominating Paulette Desell as a page candidate. Two colleagues, Senators Charles H. Percy and Fred R. Harris , joined Javits' struggle, winning Ellen McConnell and Julie Price as candidates. Acting Sergeant at Arms Robert G. Dunphy, however, refused to swear in the three young women due to a lack of relevant Senate regulations.

Now a long waiting period began for the applicants, during which the young women were celebrated like heroines by the media. From January to May 1971 the problem of female pages was widely discussed, first in an ad hoc subcommittee, then in the Rules Committee, and finally in the Senate plenary. Finally, on May 10, 1971, the Senate approved the recruitment of female pages. Ellen and Paulette were sworn in as the first female pages on May 14th and Julie on May 17th. A year later, Felder Looper, the House's first female page, was sworn in in the House of Representatives, and Deborah Gelin, the court's first woman page, was sworn in at the Supreme Court.

Senate pages over time

  • A page prepares a senator's desk, 1940.

  • The smallest page and the greatest cop, 1940.

  • A page hands a bill to a senator, 1872.

  • A page to two “Grand Senators”: “Business in the Senate requires your presence”, 1886.

  • Senate page Michael A. Johnson between Hubert Humphrey (left) and Walter Mondale , 1970.

  • Donald J. Detwiler, Senate page 1917–1918.

  • Pages play Senator, 1893.

  • Two pages lounging in the Senate, front right, 1868.

Known pages

Numerous former pages of the Senate and the House of Representatives embarked on a political career or became parliamentary employees, judges, writers or entrepreneurs. Some of the pages who later became internationally famous include:

  • former Senate page Spiro Agnew , Vice President from 1969 to 1973
  • the former Senate page and later writer Gore Vidal
  • Microsoft founder Bill Gates was the House of Representatives page in 1972

Amy Carter, daughter of President Jimmy Carter , served as Senate page in 1982. Other pages acquired historical importance:

  • 1829 and 1831: the first two Senate pages, Grafton Hanson and Isaac Bassett, see beginnings .
  • 1954: First African-American page to the Supreme Court, Charles Bush.
  • 1965: the first African-American pages Wallace Bradford Jr. (Senate) and Frank Mitchell (House of Representatives), see African-Americans .
  • 1971 and 1972: first female bellhops Paulette Desell-Lund, Ellen McConnell Blakeman and Julie Price (Senate), Felder Looper (House of Representatives) and Deborah Gelin ( Supreme Court ), see Women .

literature

  • Christian F. Eckloff: Memoirs of a Senate Page (1855-1859). Reprint of the original 1909 edition: Kessinger, Whitefish, Montana 2007.
  • Darryl J. Gonzalez: The Children Who Ran For Congress: A History of Congressional Pages. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, 2010.
  • Matthew Hofstedt: Afterword: A brief history of Supreme Court messengers. In: Journal of supreme Court history, Volume 39, Issue 2, July 2014, pages 259-263.
  • History of the House Page Program. online .
  • Bill Severn: Democracy's messengers. The Capitol pages. Hawthorn, New York 1975. The Story of the Capitol Pages for Young Readers.

Web links

Commons : Senate Pages  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ [1] .
  2. ↑ # House Page Program .
  3. ↑ # Hofstedt 2014 .
  4. ↑ Pronunciation: German ˈpaːʒə, English ˈpeɪdʒ.
  5. ↑ [2] .
  6. ↑ [3] . - Daniel Webster Senate Page Residence address: 300 4th Street, Northeast, Washington.
  7. ↑ [4] , page i, 9-10.
  8. ↑ Recording of the joint session in January 2017: [5] .
  9. ^ Isaac Bassett, a Senate memoir .
  10. ↑ [6]
  11. ↑ Politico, April 14, 2010 .
  12. ^ History of Supreme Court Page Program .
  13. ^ Letter from the Sergeant at Arms, 1961 .
  14. ^ First Female Senate Pages , pp. 57–58.
  15. ↑ Report of the first female Senate page, Ellen McConnell Blakeman, on the long road to admission of female pages, c-span , First Female Pages Appointed , History of Supreme Court Page Program .
  16. ↑ Well-known Senate Pages : en: United States Senate Page # Notable former Senate Pages . Well-known House of Representatives pages : United States House of Representatives Page # Notable Pages .
  17. ↑ [7] .