=The Direct Primary.=—­In connection with the uprising against machine politics, came a call for the abolition of the old method of nominating candidates by conventions.  These time-honored party assemblies, which had come down from the days of Andrew Jackson, were, it was said, merely conclaves of party workers, sustained by the spoils system, and dominated by an inner circle of bosses.  The remedy offered in this case was again “more democracy,” namely, the abolition of the party convention and the adoption of the direct primary.  Candidates were no longer to be chosen by secret conferences.  Any member of a party was to be allowed to run for any office, to present his name to his party by securing signatures to a petition, and to submit his candidacy to his fellow partisans at a direct primary—­an election within the party.  In this movement Governor La Follette of Wisconsin took the lead and his state was the first in the union to adopt the direct primary for state-wide purposes.  The idea spread, rapidly in the West, more slowly in the East.  The public, already angered against “the bosses,” grasped eagerly at it.  Governor Hughes in New York pressed it upon the unwilling legislature.  State after state accepted it until by 1918 Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, and New Mexico were the only states that had not bowed to the storm.  Still the results were disappointing and at that very time the pendulum was beginning to swing backward.

=Popular Election of Federal Senators.=—­While the movement for direct primaries was still advancing everywhere, a demand for the popular election of Senators, usually associated with it, swept forward to victory.  Under the original Constitution, it had been expressly provided that Senators should be chosen by the legislatures of the states.  In practice this rule transferred the selection of Senators to secret caucuses of party members in the state legislatures.  In connection with these caucuses there had been many scandals, some direct proofs of brazen bribery and corruption, and dark hints besides.  The Senate was called by its detractors “a millionaires’ club” and it was looked upon as the “citadel of conservatism.”  The prescription in this case was likewise “more democracy”—­direct election of Senators by popular vote.

This reform was not a new idea.  It had been proposed in Congress as early as 1826.  President Johnson, an ardent advocate, made it the subject of a special message in 1868 Not long afterward it appeared in Congress.  At last in 1893, the year after the great Populist upheaval, the House of Representatives by the requisite two-thirds vote incorporated it in an amendment to the federal Constitution.  Again and again it passed the House; but the Senate itself was obdurate.  Able Senators leveled their batteries against it.  Mr. Hoar of Massachusetts declared that it would transfer the seat of power to the “great cities and masses of population”; that it would “overthrow the whole scheme of the Senate and in the end the whole scheme of the national Constitution as designed and established by the framers of the Constitution and the people who adopted it.”