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Chauncey Depew was born in Peekskill, New York in 1834, descended from Huguenots among the town's original land purchasers and, on his mother's side, from the family of Roger Sherman. After 12 years at the Peekskill Military Academy he entered Yale in 1852, led the Linonian Society and joined Skull and Bones, graduating in 1856 with future Supreme Court justices David Josiah Brewer and Henry Billings Brown. He campaigned for John C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, entered the New York Assembly in 1862 and became New York's secretary of state in 1863. In 1865 he turned down the post of U.S. minister to Japan and instead went to work for Cornelius Vanderbilt, becoming attorney for the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1866.

Depew became general counsel of the Vanderbilt system in 1876 and president of the New York Central in 1885, later its chairman until his death. He lost an 1872 race for lieutenant governor as a Liberal Republican, gave the main oration at the 1886 unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, received 99 votes for president at the 1888 Republican convention and nominated Theodore Roosevelt for governor. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1899, he was the first target of David Graham Phillips's 1906 Cosmopolitan series The Treason of the Senate, which called him a boodler owned by the Vanderbilts, and he left the Senate in 1911. He lived to 93, dying in 1928, and left $1 million to Yale with no restrictions.

• When Depew asked William Howard Taft what he would name the baby in his belly, Taft said a bag of wind would be named Chauncey Depew.
• In 1897 he opened New York City's pneumatic tube mail system, calling speed the hallmark of civilization.
• He smoked 25 cigars a day for decades before quitting at 65, and gave up alcohol at 88.
• Despite 1908 reports that he had gone vegetarian, he said he had only given up red meat and ate poultry.
• The village of Depew, New York, a town in Oklahoma and Depew Park in Peekskill bear his name.

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Gerald Nye was born in Hortonville, Wisconsin in 1892. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 13, and he grew up writing and editing the family newspaper while his father, a follower of Robert La Follette, introduced him to the progressive senator. In 1916 he bought a weekly paper in North Dakota and wrote editorials defending farmers against banks and railroads. After losing a 1924 House race as a Democrat, he was appointed to the Senate in 1925 when Edwin Ladd died, and conservatives challenged the governor's authority before he was seated in January 1926. As Public Lands Committee chairman he helped create Grand Teton National Park and pushed for farm price supports.

In the 1930s Nye chaired a special committee on the munitions industry and bankers, branding them merchants of death, though its final report did not find a coordinated plot to start World War I. The hearings fed the Neutrality Acts, and Nye became a leader of the America First Committee. In 1941 he accused Hollywood studios, including Warner Brothers, of war propaganda, drawing charges of antisemitism from Wendell Willkie and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. After voting to declare war on Japan, he lost in 1944 to Governor John Moses, then stayed near Washington, ran a business called Records Engineering and worked for the Federal Housing Administration on housing for the elderly. He died in 1971 at 78 after a reaction to penicillin.

• On December 7, 1941, in Pittsburgh, he pocketed a note about the Pearl Harbor attack and spoke for another hour before announcing the news.
• Harry Truman dismissed the munitions committee as demagoguery.
• He sought to lift the arms embargo to aid the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
• He helped North Dakota businessman Herman Stern bring more than 140 Jewish refugees to the United States.
• Dr. Seuss mocked his isolationism in cartoons, and his 1966 retirement party at the Capitol drew Everett Dirksen and the Kennedy brothers.

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Henry S. Foote was born in Virginia in 1804, graduated from Washington College around age 15 in 1819 and was admitted to the bar in 1822. In Tuscumbia, Alabama he practiced law, started a Democratic newspaper and helped found LaGrange College, then set up practices in the Mississippi river towns of Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg and Raymond, and in 1841 published the two volume Texas and the Texans. Mississippi sent him to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1847, where he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and fought for the Compromise of 1850. In 1851, running for governor on a Union ticket of anti-secession Democrats and Whigs, he narrowly defeated Jefferson Davis and served from 1852 to 1854.

Five days before his term ended he resigned and moved to San Francisco, joined the Know Nothing Party, failed to win a California Senate seat and campaigned for Millard Fillmore in 1856. Back in the South, he represented Tennessee in both Confederate Congresses while attacking Davis's war policies and making antisemitic attacks on Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. In early 1865 Confederate troops caught him trying to cross Union lines, and a vote to expel him fell short of two thirds. Lincoln refused to see him, and he went into exile in Canada and London before returning to practice law in Nashville. He joined the Republican Party in 1875, ran the New Orleans Mint from 1878 to 1880 under Rutherford B. Hayes, and died in 1880.

• When Thomas Hart Benton charged at him on the Senate floor, Foote drew a loaded pistol, and senators wrestled it away and locked it in a drawer.
• Benton shouted for them to let the assassin shoot.
• The Confederacy later made him a commissioner for Confederate prisoners held by the Union, and one of those prisoners was his own son.
• His final public speech, in 1879, argued for civil rights.
• His second wife's inherited land in West Nashville became the core of Vanderbilt University, where their 1858 house, Old Central, still stands.

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Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston in 1850 into the Lodge and Cabot families and grew up on Beacon Hill. As a boy in Nahant he testified to help convict the kidnappers of a classmate, and his father died in 1862 after being kept out of the Civil War. After Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he became in 1876 one of the first Americans to earn a PhD in history, studying under Henry Adams and writing biographies of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and his great grandfather George Cabot. He went from the state legislature to the U.S. House and in 1893 to the Senate, where he stayed for the rest of his life, forming a close alliance with Theodore Roosevelt that survived Lodge's decision to back Taft in 1912.

Lodge co-authored the 1890 federal elections bill to protect Black voting rights in the South, yet opposed women's suffrage and led the push for immigration restriction, serving on the Dillingham Commission and supporting the literacy test in the Immigration Act of 1917. He backed the Spanish American War and the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. As Foreign Relations chairman after World War I, he attached 14 reservations to the Treaty of Versailles, aimed chiefly at Article 10 of the League of Nations charter. After Woodrow Wilson's September 1919 stroke, Wilson told Democrats to vote against the treaty with reservations, and it failed twice. Lodge was a delegate to the Washington Naval Conference and died in November 1924 at 74.

• On April 2, 1917, the 66 year old senator threw the first punch in a fistfight with an anti-war constituent in the Capitol.
• He wrote to Roosevelt that he had never expected to hate anyone in politics as much as he hated Wilson.
• His opposition to suffrage cost fellow Massachusetts Republican John Weeks his Senate seat in 1918.
• In the Alaska boundary dispute he helped secure a result that cut Canada off from direct ocean access to the Klondike.
• The UN Security Council veto reflected his sovereignty demands, and his grandson Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. became U.S. ambassador to the UN.

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Jeff Bingaman was born in El Paso, Texas in 1943 and raised in Silver City, New Mexico, where his father taught at Western New Mexico University and his mother taught in the public schools. He made Eagle Scout by 15, earned a government degree at Harvard and a law degree at Stanford, where he met his wife, Anne, and from 1968 to 1974 served in the Army Reserve as a chaplain's assistant. He was counsel to the 1969 New Mexico Constitutional Convention and, after winning the attorney general's race in 1978, focused on antitrust and environmental cases until the state's term limits barred another consecutive term.

In 1982 he unseated Republican Harrison Schmitt, the Apollo 17 astronaut, with the slogan What on Earth has he done for you lately? He served from 1983 to 2013, spending 26 years as junior senator behind Pete Domenici while rising to ninth in Senate seniority and chairing the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He backed the Clean Energy Act of 2007, tried a cap and trade bill in 2006, supported more Border Patrol agents and a guest worker program, and voted against the 2006 Secure Fence Act. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 but later against a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, and supported the Affordable Care Act in 2009. After retiring he became an energy policy fellow at Stanford Law School.

• He went through basic training as a private in New Jersey before qualifying as a chaplain enlisted assistant.
• In the 110th Congress he and Domenici were the longest serving senator duo in the Senate.
• In October 2002 he was one of 23 senators to vote against authorizing force in Iraq.
• He argued that indefinite detention at Guantanamo endangered captured U.S. troops.
• He was one of three senators to vote against the 2012 STOCK Act, and in 2022 he published Breakdown: Lessons for a Congress in Crisis.

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Harrison A. Williams Jr., known as Pete, was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1919 and graduated from Oberlin College in 1941. He left Georgetown's School of Foreign Service to fly as a naval aviator in World War II, was discharged as a lieutenant junior grade in 1945, worked in the steel industry, and graduated from Columbia Law School in 1948. He lost races for the state assembly in 1951 and city council in 1952, then won a 1953 special election to the U.S. House, lost the seat in 1956, and won the Senate in 1958. Reelected in 1964, 1970 and 1976, he became the first New Jersey Democrat elected to four consecutive Senate terms.

As chairman of the Special Committee on Aging and later the Labor and Human Resources Committee, Williams championed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, OSHA and the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. The Abscam sting, in which FBI agents posed as Arab sheiks through a front called Abdul Enterprises, caught him on tape promising help with government contracts for a titanium mine venture in exchange for hidden shares. Convicted of bribery and conspiracy in 1981, he resigned on March 11, 1982 rather than face expulsion, and became the first senator in over 80 years sent to prison. He died in Denville, New Jersey on November 17, 2001, at 81.

• His Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 was the first federal law giving mass transit aid directly to states and cities.
• The Williams Act of 1968 required anyone acquiring 5 percent of a company's stock to disclose it and set timelines for tender offers.
• The Senate Ethics Committee called his conduct ethically repugnant and recommended expulsion.
• He was fined $50,000, sentenced to three years and served two as inmate 06089-050.
• The Metropark train station named for him in 1979 had his name removed, and President Clinton later denied his pardon request.

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The U.S. Senate has served its bean soup every day for more than a century. The modern recipe uses navy beans, ham hocks and onions, while earlier versions added celery, garlic, parsley and sometimes mashed potatoes as a thickener. A 1967 memo from the Architect of the Capitol to the Librarian of the Senate fixed the standard at two pounds of small Michigan navy beans. The Senate's own history lists competing legends about which senator ordered the soup served daily, none of them corroborated. Food historians, including John Egerton, note that flavoring slow cooked beans with smoked ham hock is a Southern technique, and the Capitol kitchens in the early 20th century were staffed largely by Black Southerners.

On September 14, 1943, wartime rationing left the kitchen out of navy beans, and the Washington Times-Herald reported the missing soup the next day. In a 1988 floor speech Bob Dole recounted how more beans were found by the following day and the streak continued. Cold War planners made sure the soup could be served in Project Greek Island, the secret congressional bunker. In the 1980s cost cutters quietly replaced the ham hocks with a commercial soup base until a new dining manager restored them in 1984. The Senate Dining Room still requires a senator's letter and a dress code, though the public can order the soup at the Capitol Visitor Center restaurant and the Longworth cafeteria.

• A bowl cost 15 cents in 1940 and did not reach $1 until 1996.
• The price rose to $4.50 by 2004 and $6 by 2010 as dining services were privatized and subsidies cut.
• By 2014 a 16 ounce bowl was priced at $3.60.
• The bunker's supplies were planned so the Senate could keep its ritual after a nuclear attack.
• The book The Best Soups in the World said the famous soup unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired.

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After five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, the White House called it a third rate burglary and Richard Nixon won 49 states that November. The House Banking Committee under Wright Patman of Texas tried to investigate in October 1972, but its subpoena vote failed when several Democrats joined Republicans. In February 1973 the Senate voted 77 to 0 for Resolution 60, creating the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities with four Democrats and three Republicans. Sam Ervin of North Carolina chaired it, Howard Baker of Tennessee was the ranking Republican, and Samuel Dash and Fred Thompson served as majority and minority counsel.

Hearings opened in May 1973. CBS, NBC and ABC carried them live, PBS replayed them gavel to gavel each night on more than 150 stations, and NPR carried the audio, for 319 hours of coverage reaching 85 percent of American households. Baker asked what the president knew and when he knew it. John Dean testified for four days that he had warned Nixon of a cancer on the presidency, and Alexander Butterfield revealed the secret Oval Office taping system. Ervin pressed John Ehrlichman on whether any law let a president authorize the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. The committee disbanded in June 1974 with a seven volume, 1,250 page report, 40 officials were indicted, and Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

• Some Southern Democrats on the House committee faced White House threats to district funding and primary challenges.
• Ervin, 76, paired a folksy manner and quotations from the Bible and Shakespeare with deep constitutional scholarship.
• Dean revealed a White House enemies list under questioning by Senator Daniel Inouye.
• Republican committee member Lowell Weicker learned he was on that enemies list.
• The coverage is credited with turning NPR from a fledgling network into a national news force.

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John C. Stennis was born in 1901 in Kemper County, Mississippi, graduated from Mississippi State in 1923 and won a seat in the Mississippi House while still a law student at the University of Virginia. As a state prosecutor in the 1930s he tried the case that became Brown v. Mississippi, in which three Black sharecroppers were convicted on confessions obtained by torture that deputies admitted in court. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 1936. After Theodore Bilbo died, Stennis won a 1947 special election to the Senate and served 41 years without losing an election, spending 31 of them as junior senator behind James Eastland.

He backed the Dixiecrats in 1948, signed the Southern Manifesto in 1956, and voted against the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act, while pushing amendments to hold Northern school districts to the same desegregation standards. In 1965 he became the first chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and wrote its first ethics code. In 1973 Richard Nixon proposed that Stennis, who was hard of hearing, review and summarize the Watergate tapes, but special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused, setting off the Saturday Night Massacre. As Armed Services chairman he funded nuclear carriers and missile defense. Late in his career he voted to extend the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and in 1986 campaigned for Mike Espy, Mississippi's first Black congressman since Reconstruction.

• In January 1973 two teenagers robbed him of his wallet, his watch and 25 cents outside his Washington home, then shot him twice.
• From his hospital bed he began work on limiting a president's power to commit troops without Congress.
• After Nixon resigned, Stennis opposed criminal charges, arguing that losing the presidency was punishment enough.
• He lost his left leg to cancer in 1984 and later served as president pro tempore.
• He voted against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1983, citing the cost of new federal holidays.

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Andrew Johnson was born in North Carolina in 1808. His father, Jacob, died of a heart attack after rescuing drowning men when Andrew was three, and at ten his mother bound him as an apprentice to a tailor named James Selby. About five years later he and his brother ran away, with a $10 bounty posted for their return. He settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where his wife, Eliza McCardle, taught him writing and arithmetic in his tailor shop. He rose from alderman and mayor to the legislature, the U.S. House, the governorship and the Senate, championing a Homestead Bill for 160 acre grants, while owning at least ten enslaved people, including Dolly, Henry and Sam. In 1860 and 1861 he was the only senator from a seceding state to keep his seat.

Lincoln named him military governor of Tennessee in 1862 and chose him as his 1864 running mate on the National Union ticket in place of Hannibal Hamlin. After his drunken inaugural speech in March 1865, he became president on April 14, 1865, when George Atzerodt, assigned to kill him at the Kirkwood House, lost his nerve. With Congress out until December, Johnson pardoned former Confederates while Southern legislatures passed Black Codes, then vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau extension and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Congress overrode him, and after he fired War Secretary Edwin Stanton despite the Tenure of Office Act, the House impeached him. The Senate acquitted him by one vote. In 1875 he returned to the Senate, the only former president to do so.

• He campaigned against secession in Tennessee with a loaded gun on his lectern before fleeing through the Cumberland Gap.
• Sam, whom he had enslaved, later became a Freedmen's Bureau commissioner and received land from Johnson in 1867.
• On his 1866 Swing Around the Circle tour he traded insults with hecklers and compared himself to Jesus.
• Stanton locked himself in his War Department office rather than leave.
• He was buried in Greeneville wrapped in a flag, his head resting on a copy of the Constitution.