There were barely one hundred post offices and no more than seven thousand miles of post roads for three million Americans when Congress passed the Post Office Act on February 20. The service it established was no bargain, and delivery—there was no service west of Pittsburgh and Albany and almost none south of Virginia…was a near-miracle. Rates were based on distance and the length of the letter: six cents to send one page thirty miles; a steep twenty-five cents to send it four hundred and fifty miles or farther. Delivery below Virginia slowed to once a week during the cold months. The act commanded that the Post Office support itself and that a greater network of post roads be established. In fact, between 1792 and 1799 more than nine thousand miles were added, bringing neglected parts of Pennsylvania, Vermont, Ohio, and Kentucky into the fold.

In the 1790s letter carriers, many of them women, took two cents in excess of postage for every missive that found its destination. There were no salaries in the early days.

The Republican senator from Wisconsin, Robert La Follette, had been shocked by the President’s Armed Ship bill request. He saw in it a transfer of war powers in violation of the Constitution, and he marshaled his forces to oppose the bill, which opened for debate on Friday, March 2. By that time he had signed up ten like-minded senators to filibuster.

For two days and nights the Senate argued over war, neutrality, and parliamentary procedure. On Sunday the morning’s New York Times called the filibuster “an evil endeavor, in which no loyal American would have engaged.” Against this, La Follette placed the opinion of his heavily German constituents, whose telegrams were running 4 to 1 against passage. At 5:00 A.M. Sunday he got an anonymous tip on pink Senate memo paper that said he would be passed over when he himself tried to speak and a vote would then be pushed through. He instructed an aide and his son, Robert, Jr., to lay in stacks of resource materials to read aloud in the event he got himself recognized by the chair.

La Follette was, in fact, passed over in favor of several long-winded colleagues—the object of a senatorial game of “keep away.” The President’s supporters were filibustering the filibuster. When he protested loudly, La Follette caused a near-riot among the Democrats.

The session had been scheduled to run out at noon on March 5, when Woodrow Wilson would take his second oath of office, and it did so with the vote successfully forestalled by La Follette and his little band. Wilson began his new term temporarily without the power to arm merchant ships, the victim of “a little group of willful men,” as he said that day. The filibuster was a setback for him, but it nearly ruined La Follette politically. “Germany has been patient with us,” he was soon quoted all over America as having said. As the war spirit set in, he survived a subsequent call for expulsion by his fellow senators and was censured by the Wisconsin state legislature. When war was finally declared, early in April, he fell in behind the President.

On the evening of March 1 the House voted 307 to 116 to exclude Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., from the 90th Congress. A jumble of charges had been assembled against Powell, who had represented New York’s Harlem district in Congress since 1945. These included misuse of public funds, evasion of the New York courts, absenteeism from congressional business, and generally living like an unapologetic playboy at the public’s expense.

Powell had been a dashing and defiant young congressman when he arrived, a black politician who spoke with exhilarating bluntness at a time when black political leaders were rare in the country. He later became a power broker and effective student of the Washington game as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor while simultaneously railing against the “white power structure.”

Powell was, in fact, playing dominoes and drinking Cutty Sark with milk at Bimini’s End of the World pub when news of his exclusion came over the radio. “Why should I be angry,” he asked a prodding reporter, “with all these lovely friends I have on Bimini?”

The congressman had taken junkets to foreign cities and from 1961 to 1966 had paid his estranged wife, who lived in Puerto Rico, a staff salary. The investigating committee also found that dozens of plane tickets bought with staff credit cards had in fact been used by others. In the face of these charges, Powell claimed two “standards of conduct” were being employed, one for “white Congressmen and one for Negro Congressmen.” Powell noted that Connecticut’s senator Thomas Dodd, censured by the Senate in June for misuse of public funds, was allowed to serve.

The House could exclude Powell, but it could not prevent him from entering April’s special election to fill his Harlem seat. He won it, and won the general election that November with 80 percent of the vote. Then, rather than be seated as a freshman congressman, he sued his way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in June 1969 that the House had overstepped its bounds.

The Court decision was Adam Clayton Powell’s last hurrah. He was eventually seated, but as what he called a “part-time congressman,” since the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d paid to his wife was deducted from his salary. The fight had tired but not chastened him; his attendance in the House was no better once he returned “part-time.” “It would be all too easy to say that white America destroyed him,” the writer Julius Lester observed after Powell’s death, “but that would not be the whole truth.… Black people changed and he didn’t. His way of life had once been an act of rebellion; it became nothing more than self-indulgence.” By 1970 it had been years since Powell had been in a tough campaign, and he lost to a smart, young challenger in the primary, Charles Rangel.