time to time. you can almost hear the echos. you can hear the gavel of the chairman. >> you are out of order. >> council advises the chair the senator is engaging in a statement. >> mr. chairman, i am getting sick of being interrupted in the middle of a sentence. >> i would like to say that -- >> mr. chairman, do i have the floor or do i not? >> it's not a part of order. >> oh, be quiet. >> i haven't the slightest intention of being quiet. you are not running this. >> do i have the floor? >> the chair has the floor. >> the story of congress is the story of the nation and that's the story of growth. the capital started out as a very small little sandstone square box. it grew as states enter the union and as more senators and

representatives came. in the 1850s, they had to put on the wings. by the 1870s, they were crowded. they couldn't find space for the sn senators to work. offices were their discs in the chamber. of course, they were constantly besieged there. so eventually they kept adding space to the capital. they built terraces in the 1870s and added extra rooms and that p wasn't enough. in the 1890s, they bought an old apartment house, which is down constitution avenue about where the taft stands today. for a while, senators moved in there, to the envy of many house members, because that gave senators private offices, at least some of the senators. but the building had been built as an apartment house, not an office building. the weight of an office building was too much. it began to sink. the elevator shaft was seven inches lower by the time they moved out.

that was pulling the floors apart. it was unsafe. it was a fire trap. it was very uncomfortable. people complained about it. it would have been expensive to try to rebuild the building as an office building. so around 1903 the senate had a committee to study building a senate office building. the house of representatives desperately needed space. they were investigating. they finally in 1906 the house lay the corner stone for its first office building, which was the cannon building. the next year the senate had a very modest ceremony to lay the cornerstone for this building. the russell building opened in 1909. at one time had housed all of the u.s. senators. now it's one of three senate office buildings. less than half of the senators are in this building. the others are spread out in the two other buildings. it's a gorgeous building. this is built in the french

style that was popularized -- the capital complex was neoclassical. george washington wanted a neoclassical city. he picked the designs of the whitehouse. he wanted a marble city. they had been in philadelphia. he didn't want another brick city. they even renamed a lot of the physical features in the new washington, d.c. after famous roman places. so jenkins hill became capitol line hill. it was called gooseberry creek that ran through the middle of washington. and they wanted to give a stature to the you are in government. it was the first major republic since the row map republic in their eyes. this was a new city for a new government. it was mostly tobacco fields and empty spaces. so they gave it sort of a grand name and planned out major

streets. and that was the style. they slowly built the city. then in the 1890s, there was a major exposition in chicago, the white city they called it, because it was looked like a white marble roman forum in a sense. it was really mostly made out of paper mache. it was a temporary expo decision for the columbus centennial, quinn centennial. that inspired the construction of new buildings in washington. the union station, for instance, a few blocks from here is in that style. and the same architects were involved in that. plus a lot of the art sans who worked on chicago expo decision came to washington immediately after working on the library of congress and other buildings. when they started planning for a new office building and they hired a new york firm to design

this. their specialty was bozart. they did the new york public libra library. they wanted a building that would fit in with the capitol, that would match the style of the capitol with columns and with marble front and others. but would not overwhelm the capitol. so these buildings are four stories tall from the street. of course, they are built on hills. they go underground and behind it. so they flank the capitol building without distracting from the capitol building. in that sense, they were very successful. the house -- the entire house of representatives, 435 members, were going to move into this new building. each member got one room. it was going to be very cramped. but they there are only 90 senators at the time. they got pretty close to the same appropriation to build the two buildings. they didn't need a four-sided building for the senate.

they only built a three-sided building. they used the extra money to make the russell building a more elegant building than its matching house office building, which became the cannon building. so that in this building, the doors are actually made of mow hog any instead of painted to look that way. in this building, the stair rails are brass. in the house office building, they are iron. in this building, there's a lot more marble than there is in the other building. it's just a lovely building. the senior senators especially like this building. it has a style of the old school of the senate. the junior senators for the most part find this a very inconvenient building. so today, what used to be a series of senators' offices, maybe when senators had two or three rooms, now a hallway will

be ten rooms linked together creating a senator's office suite. it's like a railroad train. you go from room to room to room. the modern building, the heart building was designed for the computer era. so i have talked to senators who have loved this building but have moved into the heart building because they didn't think this building worked as a senator office building anymore. there are others, however, who would never want to leave here that -- it's a wonderfully stylish building. they appreciate the amenities, the marble fireplaces and the crystal chandeliers and the views of the capitol building, especially if you have a balcony room facing the capitol. that's usually where the senior senators have their offices. there's always going to be somebody who will criticize anything the government does. of course, when they started building this building, there were a lot of the complaints in the press, he is person when the building oched. one num said that it looked more

like a lady's boudoir than an office building. there was hew and cry about the building. that's true of any building they built along the way. it eventually became comfortable. people got used to it. it no longer seemed outrageous that they would have such an elegant building. i think you have to remember also that most governments in the world in 1906 were not republics. there was still a sense we were the new government. we were the emerging government. we were trying to show that we were just as important, just as significant as the european m e monarchies at the time. we wanted a stately appearance in our offices. actually, this room looks better than when it was designed. originally, that was not a painted ceiling. it was only in the remodeling in the recent decades that it has been highlighted that way. it would have looked a little

plainer. the room is so magnificent. it's got these wonderful big columns, these huge windows looking out on to the courtyard. it's a stunning room. it's a room that's used not only for hearings but it's also used for special receptions, for lunches, for heads of state, for first ladies, special events that have been happening here constantly. and it certainly adds a certain grandeur to whatever the event is. this building opened in 1909. this was called the caucus room or assembly room. they weren't sure what they were going to use it for. but they knew major events would take place in here. in 1912, the titanic sank on its maiden voyage from england to new york. many of the survivors and the crew -- members of the crew who survived were brought by boat to new york. the senate wanted to investigate what had happened. this was a very shocking event.

and they were afraid that the british white star line was going to try to immediately get any of the british crew on another boat and back to england before they could be interrogated. so a special committee was created. it went up to new york and held hearings. and then it came down here to washington and held the very first major hearing. it was held in this room was the -- on the sinking of the titanic. a huge crowd showed up. because this was a big event because so many aristocrats in england and the united states had gone down on this ship. they mobbed into the room. they frightened the senators. the next hearing was in a smaller committee room. they didn't want to have a big show in this room. it certainly drew a lot of attention to the issue. the hearings are fascinating. when the movie came out, they actually reprinted the excerpts from the hearings. they make fascinating reading.

they have influenced the way hollywood depicts many of the scenes and movies about the titanic. the senate and house have had standing committees since 1816. the way in which committees gather information is to take testimony. and so all through the 19th century and early 20th century, there were hearings being held in which senators, represents would integrate cabinet officers or citizens or anyone who had any knowledge about the issue to be able to draft legislation. in some cases they held investigations to find out what went wrong. that went back to 1792 and there had been a great defeat of the american army by native americans in the northwest territory. the congress wanted to know why. so they were integrating members of the washington administration. over time these hearings got more and more elaborate and more

staged to some degree. when this building opened, the russell building, they build large committee rooms. and in those days the committees mostly met around a table that was in the center of the room. the senators would sit on one side. the witnesses would sit on the other side. staff would sit in between. people who wanted to watch this what was going on would sit around the edges. newspaper reporters and others. there wasn't a lot of room, but there wasn't a lot of big crowd in washington for events like that. if it was after 1912 that there was a big crowd for something, then they moved them into this room where they could accommodate more people. but holding hearings was really a fundamental way in which the legislative process operates. that's how congress finds out what's going on and how it gets public attention involved in this. to get anything of significance done, you have to get public opinion behind you. you have to get the public to pay attention to this issue and want to change whatever the situation is so that they write

to their members of congress or tell their members when they see them that something is the matter, you have to fix this. so had is an important part of the legislative process. and the big hearings, the big investigations are usually when somebody smells a rat, when somebody says there's something really wrong going on here. we're going to look into this. i don't want to give the impression that all of these hearings are successful. the overwhelming majority of congressional hearings have happened and then faded away off within no conclusion, with no legislation. they didn't prove their case. there was a lot of fanfare and then they trailed off. there was a lot of posturing and speech making but not a lot of evidence. a successful investigation has to do drudge work. they have to did homework. they have to sort through mountains of records. they have to integrate witnesses in private before they talk to them in public.

they really got to know what the story is. and they've got to be willing to ask tough questions whether these people come up. but a really successful investigation also has to treat witnesses with some degree of humanity. and certainly we've had instances where our witnesses were terribly abused by congressional investigations. eventually, the supreme court had to weigh in in 1957 and say, a citizen does not lose their constitutional rights by testifying before congress. everything that the congress -- everything that the constitution protects a witness before in a court applies as well in congress. so that's one of the criteria. but they also have to have some showmanship. they have tho draw attention. they have to get the press here. they have to keep the story alive over a period of time. it can't be a one day wonder. it's got to be something that is persistent and really shows what's going on. and then hopefully by the time they get to the end of hearings, they have to come up with some sort of legislative solution to

prevent the problem from recurring. i think those are the criteria that historians have used to judge successful investigations over time. during world war i, the federal government had taken over a lot of lands in the west that set them aside as reserves, as naval oil reserves because they were going to need it for the military. when the war was over, there was an argument that the government didn't need these naval reserves and that private developers should be able to pump oil from them. in wyoming, there was an outcrop that looked like a tea pot. it got the name tea pot dome. that was the property that a fellow named sinclaire was able to get the rights to to drill on. but then it turned out that he had been bribing the secretary of interior to get the rights. tea pot dome started out as an investigation that most of the

members of the press corps didn't think was going anywhere. they thought it was a typical congressional investigation. a lot of talk but no action. and for a while, it seems that was true, because they couldn't come up with any real hard evidence. but there was a chairman of the committee named thomas walsh, who was a senator from montana. democrat from montana. even though the republicans held the majority in the congress, walsh had such personal reputation that he chaired this investigation and looked into issues. of course, was looking into misbehavior by the warren g. harding administration, which was a republican administration. walsh continues to press on this until he finally got some breaks. he got some people to admit that what they had originally said was not true. one of whom was the publisher of the "washington post" who when the secretary of the interior

was charged with suddenly having rebuilt his ranch in new mexico, a beautiful road leading up to it and fixed up the exterior, just about the time that the oil leases were being sold to private investors, ned said that he lent secretary that money. he didn't have to get it through illegal means. and then finally walsh got mcklain m mclane to testify in this room and said, you know, did you lend him the money? he said, yes, i did, but he returned it right away. that pulled the rug out. and it became clear he had taken a fall. fall became the first member of the president's cabinet to go to jail as a result of this. the attorney general was also involved. the whole harding administration was coming apart at the seams. harding died very unexpectedly in the summer of 1923. calvin coolidge came in as

president, a very different type of person. there was a sense of trying to clean up the mess from tea pot dome. tea pot dome not only led to legislation but led to some major supreme court decisions. people weren't quite sure what the rights of congress were. one of the issues was, can the congress call just a private citizen who is not a federal official? the supreme court in that summer, because of tea pot dome, said, yes, anybody can be called to testify before congress. one of those, a case of a man who said, i'm not really a federal employee. you shouldn't call me. supreme court said, yes, you have to testify. and then another case people said, this has nothing to do with legislation. the supreme court said, it doesn't have anything to do with legislation. it's nice if it does, but the congress has a role in our system of being able to investigate wrongdoing. so those were major decisions

that supported subsequent investigations. the furniture you see is what you would have seen in 1923 when thomas walsh was sitting there or when joe mccarthy was sitting there or sam urban. it's original piece of furniture, the large bench with the eagles on either side. that was purposely bought for this room, one on either end. the long table is a table that the senators would have sat at, usually with a green felt top on it. sometimes with extensions, depending on how long -- how many members of the committee are up there. they would have sat there. then there would have been a chair facing them with a small table where the witnesses would have sat. around them, would have been sort of not quite a semicircle but a box-like arrangement in which the first rows would be reporters and then beyond that

would be family members of the members of congress and beyond that would be the general public. would you get 300 people or so squeezed into this room. it adds to the drama of whatever the event is. >> make whatever statement you would wish to make to the committee. >> mr. chairman -- >> excuse me. i instruct the officers, do not let anyone in or out of that door while professor hill is making her statement. >> in 1929, the stock market crashed. it brought to the end of a very prosper out decade. it wiped out a lot of people. it led to the depression. businesses began to close down. banks failed. and there was this great panic really among members of congress that because the entire financial system was collapsing. the question was, why? president hoover got reports that short sellers were behind the collapse. and he thought prominent democrats like joseph kennedy,

for instance, might have been behind all of this. so it was president hoover who called on the republicans who were in the majority in the senate to begin an investigation in 1932. well, they started in here. they started in '32. they called various people. they discovered right away that the bear raiders were not responsible. there were more causes involved. people like kennedy profited by the collapse because they saw it coming, but they didn't cause it. the investigation sort of floundered. there were several different counsels of the committee. couldn't get any traction. they called in the head of the new york stock exchange. he stonewalled them. they couldn't figure out what to do. finally came the end of the year. they had to do a final report. they hired a prosecutor from new york by the name of ferdinand

pecora. he was a new yorker, he had been in the new york district attorney's office. he came down here and he was supposed to just write the final report. he started going through it and he realized, they didn't prove anything. he asked the chairman if he could have just a little extra -- a month or so to tie up the investigation, to reopen it and to tie it up. they called in the president of the national citibank. he immediately subpoenaed all of the records he could from the national citibank, went up to new york with his staff, went through those records carefully, the way a prosecutor should. and then came back and brought in this fellow, charles mitchell, who was a tall, distinguished banker. he had been an adviser to presidents harding, coolidge and hoover. he came with a large group of bank officials. he was supremely confident that he was going to come out of this with no trouble at all.

pecora began to lay out what the bank had done, including selling short its own stock, including the fact that mitchell hadn't paid income taxes for years, he had written off all of his losses in the process, even though he is a wealthy man. a bunch of irregularities. eventually -- in those days, a stockbroker company were a part of the bank. basically, whenever the bank had a bad asset, it turned it over to its stockbroker, which then sold it to unsuspecting investors. they were unloading bad stocks along the way. they just documented all of this. one by one, the group that were around charles mitchell disappeared. the bank fired him. while he was testifying here. there was a huge headline in the newspapers and big shock along the way. this really showed that there was some substance to charges about irregularities in wall

street. wall street was unregulated at this time. the stock exchange was like a private club rather than a public entity. so the democrats had just won the election in 1932. they were coming into power in march. the incoming chairman of the committee said, we want you to stay and we want you to continue this investigation. pecora gave -- wrote a memoir and gave an oral history about his experiences. he talked about being in this building, in the russell building, in 1932 about the time -- '33, about the time of roosevelt's inauguration and looking at the window and seeing charles mitchell walking by himself with his suitcase to union station. there were hotels around the plaza here. and here is this man who showed up with all this group of bank officials and everything else, was all by himself leaving in the process. that led to pecora carrying on an extremely extensive and

careful investigation of wall street banks and brokerages. he was not a senator. he was the cheer counsel. often this is called the pecora investigation or the pecora committee. it's the only investigation known for a staff person rather than for the chairman of the committee. it is misidentified sometimes as the pecora commission. it was the banking committee of the senate. that was very important, because the senators were also participating in the questioning and listening to the witnesses. that led to some of the most significant financial legislation that the congress has ever passed. and it really helped to not only to get out of the depression but also to shore up the american economy and the financial system for the next 60 years with major legislation that stayed on the books, including the securities act, the securities and exchange act, public utilities holding

act, all this came out of this productive investigation. pecora was a very good investigator. he always got dirt on people he was looking into. he did the homework he needed to. co-spri he could spring it on them. he would start by asking innocuous questions. and then he to would get people sucked into that and then he would come up with his -- and here is the document that -- can you explain this situation? he had the most famous bankers and brokers of the era here to testify, which, of course, drew in a lot of press. newsreels cameras and all the rest. j.p. morgan, junior, testifies in this room. that got a huge amount of attention because j.p. morgan was a private banker. no bank examiner had ever gone into the morgan bank at that point. it was here and it was in may of 1933, the beginning of may, that morgan was testifying.

barnum and bailey circus happened to be in washington. a circus promoter brought along a little person who identified herself as a circus midget. during a break, the senators withdrew to the back room to talk something over. morgan was sitting at the witness stand. the circus promoter dropped the minute i had in midget into morgan's laugh. he said i have a granddaughter who is bigger than you. she said, yes, but i'm older. and then he realized that it wasn't a little girl. he quickly dropped her out of his lap. every photographer had a picture of it. the committee came back. they were chagrinned about this. they asked the press not to print this picture. of course, it was on the front page of pretty much every newspaper the next day. it was a symbolic picture of these once olympian bankers being humbled by what was going on in congress. it had nothing to do with the

circus midget, but it showed the attention that was being given to his committee and the effectiveness that his committee investigation was having. you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter at c-span history to keep up with the latest history news. opened in 1909, the russell senate office building caucus

room has witnessed many senate investigations. in the setcond of a two-part presentation, we talk about a 1954 mccarthy investigation and the watergate investigation. >> people come into this room all the time. it's used for lunches. it's used for receptions. it's used for lectures. meetings, awards ceremonies, announcements. it's a grand room. it's just a wonderful setting. immediately, people are impressed by the dimensions of the room, by the wonderful carvings and fixtures, the great chandeliers and the history. there's a plaque on the wall that lists the famous events that took place in this room. i was once asked by a radio correspondent to describe this room to a radio audience that couldn't see it. i said, you know, this room always reminds me of grand

opera, because it's a magnificent setting. when there's an investigation, it usually has a large cast of characters and a very convoluted plot and everyone sits around waiting for the witness to sing. television came along in 1947. the first televised hearing was general george marshal testifies before the foreign relations committee. this had to do with american foreign policy. he was secretary of state at the time. the marshal plan was one of the big issues of the day. >> europe is still emerging from the devastation and dislocation of the most destructive war in history. within its own resources, europe cannot achieve within a reasonable time economic stability. the solution would be much easier, of course, if all the nations of europe were cooperating, but they are not. >> the real excitement of television covering hearings didn't happen until 1950