Page Traditions
Many of the House traditions that developed over more than two centuries included the Pages. As the Page program grew with the House over the course of the institution’s history, this was inevitable.
Drawing of Seats on House Floor
Before the installation of the theater-style bench seats in the modern House Chamber, Representatives sat at individual desks on the House Floor. When the House first occupied its current chamber in December 1857, the Members already were sitting in party blocs—with Democrats to the Speaker’s right and Republicans to his left. But individual desks were chosen by lottery. At the opening of each Congress, the Speaker requested Members to clear the contents of their desks and retire behind the back rail of the chamber. From there, they were spectators to the seat selection lottery.
About this object This 1869 print accompanies a newspaper article explaining how business was conducted in the Congress. The seat assignment lottery, with a blindfolded Page drawing the names of Members who came forward to choose their seat in the House Chamber, was part of the excitement of a new Congress.
With the need for more space, the first House Office Building (now named the Cannon House Office Building) was built and opened in 1908, further reducing the need for Members to have individual desks on the House Floor. But here, too, House Pages played a role in assigning space. On January 8, 1908, in preparation for the opening of the office building at the conclusion of legislative proceedings in the chamber, a blindfolded House Page once again drew numbered marbles (each corresponding to a Member) and in succession each Representative was allowed to choose his office from a floor plan of the building. Claude Kitchin of North Carolina won the “lottery” as the first Member chosen, and picked his office, which was then Room 430 of the building.44
Mock Sessions of the House
Well into the twentieth century, House Pages held mock legislative sessions in the empty chamber during recesses and wrestled with surprisingly complex policy and procedure, often with “delight in aping their congressional masters,” quipped one observer.45
About this object In 1944, the Capitol Page School awarded House Page Joe Bartlett, whose career as a House staffer eventually spanned 38 years, a varsity letter in basketball. Pages attended school in the early morning; worked as messengers in the Capitol during the day; and, as with Bartlett, a few played basketball in the evening.
Some observant Pages were more attuned to parliamentary maneuvering than the legislators they served. One such example was precocious Thaddeus Morrice of Washington, D.C., first appointed a Page in the late 1840s. In the days before a formal Parliamentarian’s Office existed, the youthful Morrice graduated from the Page ranks to serve as the “Clerk at the Speaker’s Table.” Always standing at the presiding officer’s side when the House was in session, Morrice prompted him, sotto voce, on rulings. Beginning with Speaker Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts (1855–1857) and extending into the Speakership of Schuyler Colfax of Indiana during the Civil War, this parliamentary prodigy was the chamber’s “recognized authority” on procedural questions and precedent.51
Sporting Events
Pickup games and less organized extracurricular “sporting” activities also remained popular pastimes. Nineteenth-century Pages played marbles behind the Speaker’s Rostrum when the House stood in recess, and even as late as the mid-twentieth century some Pages hunted—with pellet guns and terriers—the large and unusually bold pack of rats that populated the labyrinthine basement of the Capitol. “Darn things were about as big as housecats,” Representative John D. Dingell, Jr., recalled many decades later.55
Initiation Rituals
From the nineteenth century forward, numerous accounts relate traditional jokes and pranks that senior Pages played on their recently-arrived colleagues. Newcomers might be asked to fetch a “Congressional Record player,” procure pigeon’s milk for a thirsty congressman, or acquire polish for the Capitol Dome. “If we had a green Page,” recalled Glenn Rupp, “ . . . we might send him for a check stretcher, or a sky hook, and keep a straight face.” The Page would be dispatched to the Clerk’s Office or the House Document Room, “scratching his head all the way over there to figure out how he was going to ask for such a silly thing.”56Bill Goodwin likewise remembered that one typical request grew out of the notion that as bills were debated and amended, the original bill would need to be “stretched” to fit new text crafted by legislators’ handiwork. “‘Go down to the House document room and get a bill stretcher,’” Goodwin recalled instructing a new Page. “‘Congressman Jones wants a bill stretcher over in his office.’”57
Given that many of the Pages were teen boys, nineteenth-century accounts suggest that such hijinks and a general lack of supervision away from work sometimes created a world of “bumptiousness and disaster.” One news correspondent from the 1890s noted, “A majority of [Pages] live away from home, and enjoying pretty good incomes for boys, their habits are not always of the best. Pages as a rule imitate the men whom they serve in chewing tobacco, smoking cigars and cigarettes, playing the races, and drinking beer.” Occasionally, unacceptable behavior prompted the Doorkeeper to relieve a Page of his duties and to send him packing back to his family.58
Singing in the Chamber
Some traditions—such as singing in the well of the House—helped to pass time or to celebrate special events. Pages and Members often sang in the chamber while the House stood in recess. One evening in the 1950s, recalled Bill Goodwin, while the House was waiting for the Senate to complete its business, Michigan Congressman Louis Rabaut (known among colleagues for his habit of spontaneously breaking into song) asked the young Page to come into the well of the House. “Bill, I understand you sing,” Rabaut said. “Yes, sir, I do,” Goodwin replied. “Well, several Members of the House have told me they heard you sing at the [Page] graduation, so I would like for you to sing that same song here.” Before a jam-packed chamber, Goodwin performed “The Lord’s Prayer.” Goodwin and Congresswoman Coya Knutson of Minnesota then sang a duet for Members in the chamber.59
Footnotes
43“For a Tariff Bill: Congress Responds to the Call of the President,” 16 March 1897, Chicago Daily Tribune: 1.
44See “Lottery in the House Near,” 6 January 1908, New York Tribune: 3; “Congressmen Hold Lottery,” 10 January 1908, Atlanta Constitution Journal: 5; and Congressional Record, House, 60th Cong., 2nd sess. (9 January 1908): 567–569.
45Carpenter, “Congressional Pages.”
46Thomas, The Print of My Remembrance: 46.
47“Precocious Pages”: 22.
48John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., “The Ambitious Congressional Page: His Interesting Routine and Generous Pay,” 25 May 1902, Detroit Free Press: D4.
49Losche, Washington Memoirs: 126–127.
50Rupp, Interview 1: 16.
51Walter Wellman, “Smart Boys Are They: Meaning the Pages at the National Capitol,” 20 September 1890, Aberdeen Daily News (SD); “Speaker’s Page,” 12 March 1860, Lowell Daily Citizen and News: n.p.; “Deaths,” 16 March 1864, Daily National Intelligencer: np; “Death of a Useful Congressional Officer,” 16 March 1864, Baltimore Sun: 1. For more on the development of the Parliamentarian’s Office see, http://history.house.gov/People/Office/Parliamentarians/.
52See “Alexandria Annals,” 29 April 1878, Washington Post: 3; Gonzalez, The Children Who Ran for Congress: 26. For reference to Pages from the “east” side of the chamber playing those who worked the “west” side, see “Precocious Pages.”
53“House Pages Defeat Their Elders,” 2 August 1914, Washington Post: S1.
54Severn, Democracy’s Messengers: 42–43.
55Bartlett, Interview 1: 10–11; Dingell, unpublished interview: 22.
56Rupp, Interview 1: 46.
57Goodwin Interview: 6. For more on the practice, see Gonzalez, The Children Who Ran for Congress: 51.
58Wellman, “Smart Boys Are They: Meaning the Pages at the National Capitol.”
59Goodwin Interview: 13.