MODERN SENATE HISTORY: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE MEDIOCRE

MODERN SENATE HISTORY: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE MEDIOCRE

U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings captured headlines during a December 2004 floor speech, shortly before his retirement. The seven-term South Carolina Democrat joked that when he arrived in 1967, the Senate had "five drunks or six drunks," and that their membership had expanded from one female member to 14 women and "you can't shut them up." The AP called the speech "irreverent"; Rush Limbaugh called it "sexist." As Lewis L. Gould's "The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate" tells it, a better description would have been true.

Gould, a historian at the University of Texas who has chronicled the …