Managing Congressional Papers: A Repository View

Abstract

Walter Judd had a grievance. Judd was the United States congressman from suburban Minneapolis and vicinity from 1942 to 1962. During these twenty years, he had experienced a distressing change in the nature of his public service. By the end of his term, his major duties seemed to him no longer to be those of a lawmaker with a substantive role in formulating and structuring national policy. Instead he found constituent requests, services, and liaisons commanding 80-85 percent of his time and energy; and he felt that this change had come about because ordinary citizens had no recourse to the federal government except through their congressman. His defeat for re-election in 1962 followed an aborted announcement of retirement earlier that year, which had been prompted by his distaste and disappointment at what he obviously considered a comedown from lawmaker to lackey.1 Judd's papers reflect this transformation. Constituent service materials approximately doubled in quantity during his second decade in office, with the greatest increases occurring for such matters as assistance to military personnel, social security cases, and passports and visas.2 A similar pattern appears in the papers of most of Judd's contemporaries and successors. More than a third of the papers (1947-58) of Senator Edward J. Thye concern his interactions with federal agencies and congressional committees in behalf of his constituents. In 1948, similar letters begin to appear in abundance in Harold C. Hagen's papers (1943-54). Constituent files for legislative issues, executive departments, casework, and general constituent relations comprise half or more of the papers of representatives Joseph E. Karth, Ancher Nelsen, and Clark MacGregor, all of whom served during the 1960s.3 In the early 1950s, as the nature of the documented functions of members of Congress was shifting, the bulk of their papers began to mount in what an enterprising cataloger several years ago memorialized as a crescendo of volume.4