Who's the Lobby? Hearings at the US Congress, 1877–1932

This poster examines Congressional hearings from 1877 through 1932, showing the shifts in topics as well as the changing patterns of what kinds of entities (companies, unions, charitable and advocacy organizations) the witnesses represented. These years witnessed the rise of the corporation, Progressive reform movements, and heated labor-capital conflict, and much of this turmoil was reflected in the legislative and investigative hearings held by the United States Congress.

Congressional hearings, particularly for the pre-WWII era, have attracted relatively little attention as a subject in their own right rather than as source material for research on other topics. Yet scholars have long argued that a fundamental change in lobbying took place in the early twentieth century as formal interest groups with paid staffs and well-planned campaigns took the place of sporadic and informal interventions by individual companies or organizations. As early as 1929, E. Pendleton Harring coined the term "new lobbying" to refer to this more permanent and sophisticated effort to influence government policy. Moreover, as the federal government grew and as the Progressive Era's reform spirit pushed Congress to examine an ever greater range of social, economic, and cultural phenomena, holding Congressional hearings became a tool for public relations as well as public policy.

In the half-century from 1877 to 1932, the U.S. Congress held a total of 2,073 hearings at which it heard 139,074 testimonies, information that can be derived from the metadata this project has culled from the ProQuest Congressional database. Besides the date of the hearing, the committee that held it, and the names and affiliations of witnesses, the metadata also explicitly lists the general subjects considered at the hearing, allowing an overview of content as well as who testified, where, and when.

A number of computational techniques are applied to this data to identify patterns and extract information. Through a series of computer scripts, the data is tabulated and sorted in various ways, collated with other data on e.g. early-twentieth-century labor, business, and public interest organizations, and transformed into formats suitable for a variety of visualizations.

Some visualizations take a graph form and focus on change over time: the development and frequency of subjects over time, the distribution of hearings and witnesses over the years. Preliminary analyses show, for example, that while the number of hearings per year is fairly constant, the number of witnesses per hearing rises dramatically, probably reflecting the Congress' tackling of a greater variety of issues, the growing power of the federal government, as well as, possibly, the rise of organizations coordinating Congressional testimony by their members (after about 1908, far more witnesses have an organizational affiliation of some type).

Other visualizations create circular charts (using Circos; http://circos.ca) highlighting relationships between particular groups of witnesses and particular Congressional committees: for example, both business and labor organizations frequently appeared before the House Committee on Labor and the Senate Committee on Labor and Education, but only business organizations appeared frequently before the Committee on Ways and Means, which considers legislation on the tariff.