A Step Back for the House
The House and Senate Historical Offices both trace their roots to the post-Watergate environment, when Congress bolstered its institutional standing in myriad ways. With political scientist Richard Baker and historian Don Ritchie, the Senate Historical Office has been a model for how government agencies should address their past. In addition to providing quality bipartisan service for senators and a media outlet for information about the upper chamber, the office has overseen ambitious oral history and photo history programs, published dozens of volumes of executive sessions of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and provided a comprehensive bibliography of publications relating to the Senate—all while Baker and Ritchie have remained among the nation’s most prominent published scholars of Congress.
The House History Office never achieved the bipartisan backing of its Senate counterpart, and the lower chamber went without an official historian for nearly a decade following the Republicans’ capture of Congress in the 1994 elections and associated personnel difficulties in the office. A few years ago, however, positive signs began to emerge from the House. Largely thanks to leadership provided by House Clerk Jeff Trandahl, the House established an Office of History and Preservation. Led by Kenneth Kato, a veteran of the Center for Legislative Archives, the OHP has undertaken ambitious projects ranging from profiles of women and minorities in Congress to providing the type of assistance for scholars that the Senate Historical Office made routine.
When word went out last year that the House planned to hire an official historian, it seemed as if Trandahl’s efforts to restore the lower chamber’s historical infrastructure would be complete. This expectation, therefore, makes recent news from the Capitol all the more perplexing.
Speaker Dennis Hastert named as the new House historian Robert Remini. (For full disclosure, I did not apply for the position, nor did anyone that I know.) Remini is clearly a distinguished scholar—a dominant figure in the historiography of the Jacksonian era, the University of Illinois at Chicago professor emeritus is author of a forthcoming government-sponsored (and much-needed) narrative history of the House of Representatives. Yet Remini is also 83 years old, and it seems highly unlikely that he can provide the type of hands-on, durable leadership that has allowed the Senate Historical Office to flourish under Baker and Ritchie. Indeed, he got off to an awkward start: his refusal of repeated interview requests from The Hill generated the headline, “New House historian Remini to the press: Get lost.” The Capitol Hill newspaper warned reporters not to expect Remini “to be as cooperative and helpful as his Senate counterparts, Richard Baker and Don Ritchie.”
Perhaps because of his advanced age, Remini was allowed to hire an associate historian, a position that was not initially advertised. His selection was baffling: Fred Beuttler, a UIC adjunct professor and associate university historian. According to the information supplied on his website, Beuttler has no background at all in congressional or even political history: his dissertation is on 20th century religious history, and he is the main author of a book called The University of Illinois: A Pictorial History. I wasn’t privy to the pool of candidates that Remini considered for the position. But unless there wasn’t even one younger scholar well-versed in U.S. political or legal history who wanted to serve as associate historian of the House, I am skeptical of the wisdom of hiring someone who, in effect, will have to learn the field of congressional history on-the-job.
This appointment seems to be a step backward in what, up until now, had been a series of positive developments to restore the luster of the House’s history program. I began studying congressional history in 1990, the year that Daniel Patrick Moynihan deemed the academy’s lack of attention to Congress a “scandal” of American scholarship. A decade hence, I fear that we will look back on the Remini/Beuttler appointment as a lost opportunity to undo the late New York senator’s lament.