H enry Clay was by all accounts a brilliant, eloquent, and altogether remarkable politician. Not only was he said to be the greatest dancer of his generation, Clay single-handedly transformed the House of Representatives into a functioning legislature and forestalled the Civil War by decades. But the Great Compromiser’s intellect, although widely praised, had one rather peculiar, if chronic, lacuna: a complete inability to remember poetry. For Clay, this was particularly troublesome, as he was wont to burst out with a few lines of favored verse amid orations that, in typically nineteenth-century fashion, could last for hours. Once, when Clay garbled an obscure passage from Hamlet during a speech on the House floor, several members jointly and acidly shouted out the correct phrases, greatly embarrassing the Kentuckian.

This incident is recorded in the magisterial and door-stopping biography of Clay by Robert Remini, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the nation’s leading historian of antebellum America, whose other works include award-winning studies of Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster. For Remini, Clay’s struggle with poetry was an amusing foible, a small crease on the smooth surface of greatness. But for modern observers of the House, the anecdote–not to mention the great struggles of that earlier era – gives the Congress of Clay’s day a distant feel. The institution now headed by Dennis Hastert may share the same name as that led by Clay, but which member of Congress today reads Shakespeare? Is it possible to imagine a single twenty-first-century politician–much less several–who is so confidently educated as to recognize a minor quotation from the Bard, much less a misquotation? Even if such politicians were to be found, they wouldn’t be present on the House floor during another member’s speech. Rather, they’d be holed up in their office, probably meeting with a lobbyist, with (at best) a watchful eye on the now-televised floor proceedings. And the issues that confront today’s member of Congress hardly seem to be as existential as the Compromise of 1850 or the Kansas-Nebraska Act; a sense of personal and professional triviality pervades.

The distance from Clay to Hastert can only be measured along a steep descent. It is for this reason that Remini’s new history of the House of Representatives reads like a chronicle of degeneration, a well-wrought record of the decay of American politics and, perhaps, of American character, too. The House once was the very heart of democracy; such was its prestige that Clay himself left the Senate to seek election to what he called the "people’s chamber." Clay was joined in his esteem for the House by men like Daniel Webster, James G. Blaine, and Cordell Hull, whose love for the institution was matched only by the quality of their public service within it. But the House hasn’t seen their like in quite some time. Remini, whom the House requested write its history, would no doubt disagree, but his own fine telling leads to no other conclusion.

I served in the House of Representatives from 2001 to 2005. I was routinely required to vote on bills that not a single member of the body had read–a bill with hundreds, even thousands, of pages would be presented to the full House for a vote just a few hours after its drafting. The work week usually started on Tuesday evening and concluded by noon on Thursday, and there was rarely a vote of any consequence. Any significant vote invariably and inexplicably took place between midnight and six in the morning, which I and other young members concluded was done to minimize the number of cspan viewers, who would no doubt be shocked at the griminess of the proceedings. Committee hearings had the spontaneity of kabuki, and they were usually sparsely attended by members. With a growing number of members coming from safe districts, there was neither a check on, nor penalty for, raging partisanship and naked demagoguery. And for those few members either ambitious for higher office or, more rarely, in competitive districts, fundraising was a concern that trumped nearly all others; each week, dozens of hours were devoted to the thankless task of cold-calling high-net-worth individuals or meeting with lobbyists who controlled political action committees. When you left office, you were almost expected to join a trade association or become a lobbyist. I left the House convinced that, the usual encomiums to American genius aside, something had indeed been lost in the two centuries of the institution.

The Founding Fathers intended the House of Representatives to be the fulcrum of American government, though making it so required a large dose of initial imagination. The First Congress, dominated by Federalists, had few rules and no precedents on which to rely when it met in New York City’s Federal Hall. The Founders even had to guess at the population of each state in apportioning representatives, and the resulting errors vitiated the representative quality of the first meeting. Fortunately, the travails and intrigues of the colonial period had created an entire class of well-trained leaders like James Madison, who dominated the First Congress. Indeed, only two members of the First Congress lacked previous public service. And the people of the new nation were keenly interested in self-government – in the early years of the House, legislation was often a direct response to citizens’ petitions.

But, if the Founders had dreamed of an institution immune from the unsavory compromises of party politics, the House of Representatives soon betrayed that vision. By the second session of the First Congress, partisanship had emerged, usually based on the regionalism that haunted the nineteenth century and that, to a lesser extent, still stands today. Quickly in the life of the new republic, slavery rose to the surface as the one seemingly insoluble problem that confronted the House of Representatives. From the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Wilmot Proviso two decades later (which argued for a slavery ban in territory won in the Mexican-American War), the House was central to this critical debate – and over time reflected the chaos and chasms of American society.

The House of Representatives during the 1840s and early 1850s was populated by Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Northern and Southern Whigs, and a divided Democratic Party, all of whom gave the institution a tumultuous feel. In 1849, the election for speaker took three weeks and more than 60 ballots. In 1855, the election for speaker took 133 ballots. Characteristic of the House were men like William Yancey of Alabama, of whom it was said that a duel was only a "pleasant morning recreation." Even the great Henry Clay routinely challenged opponents to duels, including one with John Randolph of Roanoke, a flamboyant Virginian well-known for aggression and for bringing his hound dogs onto the House floor. Before House debates in the run-up to the Civil War, congressmen would arm themselves with knives and pistols; many, perhaps most, House members carried derringers to protect themselves from sudden attack. There was reason for fear: in 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina marched over to the Senate, where he brutally attacked Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts for insulting Southern honor. Disorder quickly became bedlam after the deaths in 1850 of John Calhoun and in 1852 of Clay and Daniel Webster, who had done so much to bottle up the centrifugal tendencies that, in their absence, would soon violently overtake the nation.

The years leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction saw the verbal, if not physical, violence continue. Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens and Galusha Grow, two more of the many remarkable men who served in the House during the nineteenth century, aggressively pushed the radical Republican cause. For Stevens and Grow, the oncoming war was not a terrible ravage to be avoided, but a biblical event to be welcomed. "No flag alien to the sources of the Mississippi," cried Grow from the House floor, "will ever float permanently over its mouth till its waters are crimsoned in human gore; and no one foot of American soil can ever be wrenched from the jurisdiction of the Constitution of the United States until it is baptized in fire and blood." Grow, who would briefly serve as speaker, and Stevens, who chaired the Ways and Means Committee, ran the House with an iron fist, hastening the Civil War and abetting its prosecution. Even the North’s victory did little to slacken the zeal of Stevens, which would animate Reconstruction and culminate in the failed impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868.

But, by 1869, Stevens was dead and the American people had wearied of Reconstruction, which, by 1877, was officially over. The Gilded Age awaited, and politics temporarily abandoned its central role in the drama of American history. This new era would be a time when the needs of commerce both superceded and corrupted the political process. The greatest days of the House were over. But what days they had been: three generations of leaders – men like James Madison, Webster, Clay, Randolph, Abraham Lincoln, James K. Polk, and Stevens – had made good on the Founders’ great hopes for the House of Representatives.