Two senators for each state. There was no change in that respect.
We will remember the talk about the triple E senate being equally effective. While it was a double E senate, it was equal and effective. There were very high level debates in the senate. The office of senator was highly respected, although it was not an elected office. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, were debates of two candidates for the senate in the late 1850s.
There were a number of things that were problematic about this. It was not democratic for one thing. In addition, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates point this out, they went to these debates in front of vast audiences and argued the democratic and republican positions on the issue of slavery, western expansion and so on, and then people voted for their members of the state legislature largely based on who those people would then vote for in the state house to send to Washington as their senator, which means that to some degree the legislature was being turned into an electoral college for senators.
I do not want to exaggerate the importance of this transformation into an electoral college of the state houses but it was a problem. Of course, having discharged that one responsibility, a person then had to get on for the next two or four years, depending on the state one was in, with actually governing the state and other issues under state jurisdiction might not have been discussed in the fullness with which they should have been discussed. That was a problem.
What happened was the progressive movement of the 1890s and particularly the first decade of the 20th century arose and there was a movement for a variety of improvements, many of them democratic, including the introduction of the primary system to control the party bosses. There were some temperance movements that were tied in with it as well.
It was very much a populace movement. There was a lot of citizen engagement, some of it unfortunately tinged with racism and so on. None the less it was a genuine populace movement.
The state of Oregon decided that state elections would be held to select senators with the first election being held in, I think, 1906. This movement was already taking place in other states, but the election happened first in Oregon with the senator being accepted. The senate had the capability to reject a member of its body, but that was not done and the senator from Oregon was elected.
Senate elections occurred on a two year cycle. In 1908 there was a larger number. This number also increased with the 1910 elections. In 1913 an amendment was proposed which required acceptance by three-fourths of all the states making senate elections mandatory.
I do not think, as a result of that, the quality of the United States senate has gone down. It was always regarded as the chamber in which a more thoughtful level of debate occurred than that which occurred in the House of Representatives. Tocqueville points out that comparison.
Although the House of Representatives has become better, the senate has still retained a kind of gravitas that comes from the length of service. For example, Ted Kennedy has been around for years and so have many other senators. Unlike the lower house, it also has the advantage of not being subject to gerrymandering which is a severe problem unfortunately in the United States.