In November 1905 Henry Adams affirmed that he would be present as usual to witness the opening of Congress. “If anyone were to come and take me by the ear, and lead me off to statesmen in the moon, I should go more readily, but, lunatic for lunatic, the Washington type has to me the merit that I have known him drunk and have known him sober, for fifty years, and drunk or sober there was never anything in him – but himself.” The statesmen on Capitol Hill responded in various ways to the demands of the new century, but, as Adams implied, for all the stresses and strains that they were subjected to, they remained largely true to type. Although Congress as an institution differed markedly from its nineteenth-century forbears, there remained significant elements of continuity. Although new legislative challenges and new problems of governance crowded in upon it at the start of the new century, its responses were shaped by habits of mind and structures of decision making inherited from an earlier epoch. And, although it was closely involved in the creation of a newly invigorated nation-state, Congress as an institution continued to transmit diverse constituency pressures and to give voice to the influence of “localism” in American political life.