According to the US Constitution after each census the House of Representatives is to be reapportioned according to the results of the census.
But after the 1920 census that never happened. It had to wait till after the 1930 census.
From the Wikipedia
OK I’ve Googled around and I find things like:
“in direct violation of the Constitution”
“illegally refused to reapportion”
And such.
My question is, why didn’t any one care? I may be Googling wrong, but you think a huge stink would’ve been raised and their would’ve been lawsuits or such. I know were more litigious now then we wre then, but still
I mean did the Democrats say “Well we lost by so much even a reapportionment wouldn’t help us much. So why bother?”
Were there any legal battles to try to get the congress to reapportion? Any other info you can provide I’d be happy to read.
Here’s a fragment of a 1921 article that indicates the House would have grown from 435 to 483 members after the 1920 Census,. If the size of membership were held steady, as you note, there would have been lots of shifts (cited that Missouri, New York, North Carolina and Virginia would lose seats; Montana, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Vermont would gain, and implied that other states would be affected, as well.)
In 1929 the size of the House was permanently fixed at 435, so at least half the controversy was settled.
My guess is that it wasn’t just Republicans, but also Democrats who didn’t want to go through the hassle of redistricting only to see state lose while some other state gained.
Any attempt to litigate the 1920’s failure to reapportion would have been dismissed as a ”political question”. In the case of Colegrove v. Green in 1946, Felix Frankfurter mentioned in passing that
As for the political implications of the controversy, it wasn’t purely a partisan issue. The Democratic-urban versus Republican-rural split was less pronounced in 1920 than later. During much of the 1920’s, for example, Chicago had a Republican mayor. And, the rural South was 100% Democratic.
Rather, the urban-rural split was tied in with Prohibition. Drys lived in the country and wets in the cities, and reapportionment and redistricting would both strenghten the hand of the wets. So, the drys didn’t do it.
Here’s a book on the subject if interested. Google Books has some lengthy excerpts but nothing that appears to directly address the question of why there wasn’t more outrage.
But I think Freddy the Pig’s cite is correct. Even if the courts did admonish the Congress to do its job, exactly how that reapportionment should be done is still up to the legislature and the Supreme Court can’t compel a majority to vote for a specific proposal.
The laws passed in 1929 and 1941 pretty much made reapportionment based on the census results and automatic thing or else I have to think we’d have faced the constitutional question several times since (and trying to do it in 2012 would probably be almost impossible).
A primary reason to avoid a reapportionment in 1920 was the singular issue of the day Prohibition. With the movement from the population from rural to urban centers between 1910 and 1920 a reapportionment would have given enough support to “City Minded” Wets that would have made a repeal of the 18th amendment possible.
In many ways, Prohibition was an expression of the WASP power holders trying to maintain a hold on their power vs all the non-WASPs. Not reapportioning in order to pass prohibition also had the effect of precluding all those “Beer-guzzling, Wine-loving, liquor-chugging foreigners” from gaining political power in congress. In fact, prohibition was the lesser of the two issues.