Content area
Full Text
The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment. By C. H. Hoebeke. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995. xii, 211 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-56000-217-4.)
"To cure the evils of democracy with more democracy": In C. H. Hoebeke's view, this was what proponents of the Seventeenth Amendment, which introduced the direct election of United States senators in 1913, had in mind.
By the turn of the century, the individual citizen had become voiceless and impotent because of the consequences of the industrial revolution, the rise of corporations and economic organizations, and the political power of the party machines. Progressive reformers tried to reestablish popular sovereignty by giving the ordinary citizen access to more direct methods of governing.
According to Hoebeke, the enactment of the Seventeenth Amendment was part of the "Progressive Myth." In his view, however, this enactment contradicts the...