ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three issues posed by early House history: the origin of the moderator speakership, the establishment of the majoritarian speakership, and the subsequent flexibility of the majoritarian model. The majoritarian speakership originated in experiential learning, in which Henry Clay and his party's rank and file evaluated the House's experience under moderators through a cognitive framework of ideological beliefs, leading them to support the establishment of a very different sort of leadership. So, too, before the 1994 elections, Newt Gingrich and his party's rank and file evaluated the House's experience under relatively weak Democratic Speakers through their own ideological framework, concluding that such leadership lacked the centralization, power, and initiative needed to legislate their views. Andrew Stevenson, James Polk, and Robert Winthrop particularly stacked the deck, loading Ways and Means with a proportion of their partisans that exceeded their share of House seats by 15 percent or more.
