Cultural Change for the We the People Amendment
eleventh in the series
'The Bosses of the Senate' (23 January 1889). Joseph Keppler
Many U.S. constitutional amendments have addressed adding rights that were not included in the original document, revised elections for the President or changed the balance of power between the states and the federal government. The 17th Amendment is the only Amendment that deals with the structure of Congress.
The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3, states: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.”
The effort to allow voters to directly elect U.S. senators was initially proposed during the constitutional convention by James Wilson, a lawyer from Pennsylvania who would later become one of the original Supreme Court Justices. He was the lone supporter. The framers thought that senators chosen by state legislatures would create legislators who would, supposedly, be more deliberate and independent when considering issues.
The issue resurfaced decades later as several U.S. Representatives introduced the Amendment in the early 1850’s. Future President Andrew Johnson, while serving as a Congressperson, proposed the Amendment in 1857.
The momentum for the popular vote for senators increased during the next half-century over two issues: electoral deadlocks and corruption.
Disagreements and disputes among rival factions in state legislatures often led to scores of prolonged deadlocks, leaving states without representation in the Senate for months or even years at a time. The deadlock of the Delaware legislature, for example, resulted in that state without U.S. senators for two years.
Cases of bribery and undue influence by corporations and wealthy individuals of state legislatures became a major public concern over time. Railroad and other industrial executives often used their vast resources to influence or outright bribe state legislators to elect them to the Senate, leading to the body being derisively called a "millionaires' club.” One grotesque and blatant example was William A Clark. A wealthy copper magnate, Clark was appointed by the Montana legislature in 1899, but the U.S. Senate refused to seat him when it became widely known that he had bribed state legislators for their votes: cash from $240 to $100,000, as well as paid mortgages and debts, purchased ranches and financed banks. Clark reportedly once said in his defense, "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale".
Calls for a constitutional amendment increased at both the federal and, especially, at the state level.
Federally, the amendment was introduced in every Congressional session from the 1860s into the early 1900’s. At least 287 proposals were introduced in Congress by 1912. Some eventually passed in the House, but always failed in the Senate.
Frustrated by federal inaction, various measures occurred in the states. Citizens-led movements defeated Senate candidates who opposed direct elections. State legislatures passed resolutions calling on Congress to act, other measures called for an Article V constitutional convention. States also enacted laws allowing for popular “non-binding” votes for senators. Abraham Lincoln won the popular vote for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, but lost the election in the state legislature to Stephen Douglas because the popular vote was non-binding, The “Oregon Plan” was replicated in many states. It mandated that state legislative candidates pledge their support for Senate candidates who in the primary won the popular vote. More than one-half of states passed laws incorporating some type of popular election to select U.S. senators by 1911.
This growing state energy pressured Congress to pass the 17th Amendment in 1911. It was ratified by the required three-fourths of the states in 1913 and became part of the Constitution for the 1914 elections.
The Role of Popular Culture
A political truism is that law follows culture. Passage of the 17th Amendment didn’t occur in a bubble advocated solely or even mainly by federal and state legislators. A popular movement sparked and pressured federal and state legislators to support the amendment, especially in the decades after the Civil War.
• Similar to other movements in this series, anchoring the public commitment for the amendment was the core belief that people should have a legitimate role in the making of decisions and the choosing of the deciders affecting their lives.
As mentioned in the previous article on the Populist Movement of the late 19th century, individuals created an “insurgent culture” – an environment where “a personal self-respect and collective confidence and hope that fundamental chance was achievable” would motivate participants would lead to systemic economic and political self-determination. They believed they had a right to be active in changing an oppressive system. Agrarian farmers who constituted the base of the Populist Movement were among the first group to call for the direct election of senators.
The political vacuum left by the decline of the Populist Movement in the 1890s was soon filled by the Progressive Era, during which a prevailing cultural belief took hold: that laws and the U.S. Constitution should be more directly responsive to the will of ordinary people and freed from the corruption and power of the ruling Robber Barons. Many of those active in the movement for the direct election of senators were also involved in the suffrage movement, the labor movement, and efforts to challenge the undemocratic power of local and state governments controlled by political machines. What united these movements was a shared desire for basic rights and for ordinary people to have a meaningful, direct role in decisions that affected their lives, workplaces, and communities.
• A wide coalition of political reformers, civic associations, women’s organizations, labor unions, and lecture-circuit networks played a crucial role in advocating for the direct election of U.S. senators before the 17th Amendment. The demand was a plank of the platforms of the Populist (People’s) Party - called the Omaha Platform – in 1892 and the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party in 1912. These groups argued that the Senate’s indirect election system encouraged corruption, corporate influence, and legislative deadlocks. Women’s clubs held civic programs, discussion circles, and local campaigns that popularized the campaign. National lecture and education networks, including the Chautauqua Movement, the Lyceum system, spread the message to rural and small-town audiences. These groups helped frame direct election as a common-sense solution to the “Millionaires’ Club” reputation of the Senate. Labor organizations such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and railroad brotherhoods also endorsed the reform, arguing that senators chosen through state legislatures were too closely tied to powerful corporate interests.
State-level reform groups in Oregon, Wisconsin, and Nebraska pushed direct primaries and public election mechanisms that anticipated the future amendment. Together, these organizations created a sustained national movement that made direct election both politically feasible and broadly popular, paving the way for the 17th Amendment in 1913.
• Public art; especially political cartoons that incorporated humor, exaggeration, and metaphor, played a crucial role in shaping public opinion and mobilizing support for the direct election of U.S. senators. Political cartoons visualized Senate corruption – translating complex political ideas about corruption, corporate influence (i.e. these were the early days of corporate constitutional rights, especially to railroad corporations), and legislative dysfunction into memorable, easily understood imagery for a mass audience. In shaping public opinion, they indirectly pressured legislators and state governments to support reform measures which made the 17th Amendment more politically and socially achievable.
• While political cartoons provided visual education, literature played a significant role in the movement to pass the 17th Amendment. Novels, muckraking investigative articles and pamphlets offered narrative depth and analytical arguments that helped readers who were not deeply involved in politics understand why the direct election of senators was necessary to address political corruption. Writers often used literature to frame the issue in ethical and democratic terms – emphasizing justice, citizen empowerment, and the right of the people to control their government and lives.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a historical novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, described the corruption and political maneuvering inherent in the original system where state legislatures elected senators. David Graham Phillips’ series The Treason of the Senate, published in the muckracking Cosmopolitan magazine, portrayed senators as servants of big business rather than the people.
The United States Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be…It is notorious that the senatorship is bought and sold as openly as the merchandise on the counters of a department store…The people have no more voice in the choice of many senators than they have in the choice of the Grand Lama.
Pamphlets, tracts, and civic manuals, often published by Good Government Associations, women’s clubs, and Progressive organizations, such as the National Municipal League and General Federation of Women’s Clubs, clearly described Senate dysfunction, making the issue accessible to ordinary citizens.
Additionally, many literary works were adapted into lectures or serialized discussions at Chautauqua assemblies and Lyceum circuits, where audiences could hear reformers compellingly explain the need for direct elections of senators.
Lessons for Move to Amend and the We the People Amendment
• Move to Amend has been consistent in our messaging that We, the People, have the right, knowledge, experiences and abilities to be actively engaged in demanding passage of the We the People Amendment. We consciously respect and strive to affirm the dignity and worth of our supporters. While always learning from internal education and engaging with constitutional professors, public officials and other “democracy” organizations, we’ve never backed down from believing that the public should be actively involved in constitutional change – which is too important to be left simply to professors, politicians, think tankers, and media pundits. The power structure of any society always seeks deference, if not resignation, from the public. We have never accepted this.
• Organization is essential for building a movement, but it must be politically and economically independent of the power structure. The wide range of groups – from the Populist to the Progressive eras – that worked to enact the 17th Amendment were able to mobilize their supporters to pressure state and federal legislatures because they weren’t controlled by Robber Barons, corrupted Senators or political machines. Organizations with the capacity to act powerfully are able to build the confidence of its current supporters, effectively recruit new supporters, provide education and organize actions and campaigns.
Move to Amend in its nearly 16-year history has always been politically and economically independent from the power structure – political parties, big foundations, the super rich and politically connected individuals, corporations and governments. This has allowed us to provide radical (i.e., getting to the root) political education and to organize to pass a transformative amendment to the U.S. Constitution – the We the People Amendment – to abolish all corporate constitutional rights and to reverse the Supreme Court decision equating political money spent in elections as First Amendment-protected free speech.
But providing personal self-confidence and education aren’t enough to yield systemic change. Political corruption is far greater today than during the age of the Robber Baron and the public is just as aware and outraged by system political corruption due to money in elections. The public is equally opposed to corporate power. No amendment targeting these realities has come remotely close to passing even one branch of Congress, let alone both, let alone the likelihood it would be ratified by the required three-quarters of state legislatures.
Organizations and movements must be able to recruit masses of people and mobilize self-actualized, educated and trained masses into political education. Move to Amend has been unsuccessful on these aspects up to this point. We understand that we must leverage our organization to build a movement of allied organizations and millions of supporters.
However, we face must higher political and economic hurdles than any time in the past to achieve transformative changes given the enormous political influence of corporations and the super rich to maintain the status quo – along with the inherent difficulty of enacting a constitutional amendment and other constitutional barriers, political polarization, government gridlock, and fractured democratic guardrails. It simply may not be achievable or even effective to enact any single constitution amendment given the required constitutional changes needed – no matter how powerful our or any organization may be.
• The power of the visual arts, including satire, to promote political causes targeting the power structure has a long history. Memes, reels, and videos on social media platforms are today’s equivalent of the political cartoons of the populist and progressive eras.
Move to Amend has an increasing social media presence. We post on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (X), Bluesky, and other platforms. Our content consists of Reels, long-form videos, memes, text posts and live streaming. Several of our recent posts have yielded hundreds of thousands of views, popularizing our mission and work that are visually attractive, entertaining and informative. The opportunity to widen our reach is much greater given the increasing popularity of our focused issues and upcoming plans as we became more adept in the growing social media arena.
• As with the movement to directly elect senators, literature (fiction and nonfiction) and films are an additional powerful cultural arena to resist and promote alternatives to corporate rule and political money in elections.
Novels exploring themes of corporate power include Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which portrays a future where corporations act like city-states. David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, and Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine are among many non-fiction books on corporate power.
Popular culture is increasingly critical of corporate power and the corruption of money in politics, which has contributed to the distrust of big business (15% this year) and Congress (10% this year). There is a long list of films both past and present critiquing corporate power. Many have focused on regular people taking on corporate giants. There’s an entire genre of dystopian and science fiction films. There’s no shortage of anti-corporate documentaries, including The Corporation and The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel and on money in politics, including Wealth of the Wicked and Ohio Confidential.
The problem is that many literary works are exquisite in focusing in monumental detail on the problem of corporate rule or money in politics, but are vague or general in solutions. When solutions are presented, they are incomplete (i.e. only reversing the Citizens United ruling) by not demanding to abolish money as free speech and corporate constitutional rights – Judge-made doctrines that precede Citizens United by decades and more than a century respectively.
For this reason, Move to Amend has begun collecting examples of literature, music, films and poems on our Creative Resistance page. These various forms of expression “aim to expose the impact of big money in elections and corporate influence on our democratic processes” and to promote the We the People Amendment as part of wider effort for systemic democratic change. We must create our own literary works that accurately describe our produced solution. Our original documentaries are Legalize Democracy and, in collaboration with others, Shadows of Democracy (password is “Mashup”); as well as short video Why we need the We the People Amendment. Our most recent works are the short video Peter Coyote on why he supports Move to Amend and the documentary American Oligarchy: Five Fights.
• Passage of the 17th Amendment was a notable democratic achievement that spanned two important social movement eras: the Populists of the late 19th century and Progressives of the early 20th century.
Both made important political contributions to its passage: the Populists in calling for the direct election of senators before and following its inclusion in their People Party “Omaha Platform;” and the Progressives in educating, advocating and organizing at the state and federal levels to enact an amendment Both movements emphasized that people should have greater power over the decisions affecting their lives.
An important cultural difference, reflected in their political programs, was that Populists sought political and economic transformation of society, whereas Progressives accepted the reality that large corporations were the dominant political force in society. Populists sought a cooperative state while progressives accepted the corporate state. Populists created economic cooperatives and demanded public ownership of railroad corporations and the ending of bank creation of money – elements of fundamental economic and political democracy. Progressives were resigned to “regulating” the worst harms of corporations.
Move to Amend has never accepted that corporate actions should be merely “regulated,” not when corporations are even more powerful politically, economically and socially than ever before. As the dominant institution of our society — if not the world — it’s our responsibility to assert our superiority and sovereignty over our artificial legal creations. Our psychological and political approach shouldn’t be to “negotiate” with corporations, but rather to authorize and define them. That is how self-governing people should think and act. Being in the streets shouting “this is what democracy looks like” pales in comparison to being the democratic deciders of policies that affect our lives, communities and natural world.
People’s movements are not yet more powerful than corporations, shielded with never intended constitutional rights, enormous economic wealth and influencers of many of our dominant media, entertainment, and educational institutions. Nothing will ever change, however, if we culturally accept this as a given. The first step is always to firmly believe that we have the right and the potential power to create an authentic equitable democracy.
The U.S. Constitution has become deeply flawed, and many Supreme Court decisions have only intensified its undemocratic features. Advancing the We the People Amendment is likely only possible as part of a broader package of constitutional reforms aimed at establishing a truly equitable and authentic democracy – for the very first time.
In solidarity
Greg Coleridge
National Co-Director
