Understand the Sources

Overview: Congressional Hearings

CIS U.S. Congressional Committee Hearings Collections: Published and Unpublished

Origin

Unlike the House and Senate Reports, Documents, Journals, Bills and Resolutions, Congressional Committee Hearings lack a uniform numbering system and consistent publication history. As in the case of their monographic sisters the Congressional Committee Prints, the printing and publication practices for Committee Hearings vary from committee to committee and change over the history of individual committees. They are the product of record of the individual committees. The historical roots of Committee Hearings procedures lie in the British parliamentary system, as modified by the American Colonies and the evolving U.S. Congress.

Mostly Not in Serial Set

Since the U.S. Congressional Serial Set by definition is restricted to the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the hearings publications of individual congressional committees were generally not included in it and certainly not included as a distinct publication class. For an explanation of the largely early hearings officially issued in the Serial Set Document and Report publication series, see the section on "Overlap with Other CIS Retrospective Collections" below. Unpublished hearings transcripts by definition could not have appeared in the Serial Set.

Definition and Identification

Hearings publications generally contain the full transcription of proceedings before the committees, usually arranged chronologically in the order of the appearance of the witnesses summoned or volunteering to testify before the committee. These proceedings include the record of the oral testimony, committee questions of the witness and further discussion, witness responses, and materials submitted by the witnesses in amplification, background, or further justification of their position. The submitted materials may also contain related reports, statistical materials, evidentiary exhibits, etc. Witnesses may be technical and academic experts, Federal agency administrators, Federal, state or local officials, public and private interest groups and individuals. They may testify voluntarily, be present according to statutory requirement, or be subpoenaed to appear before the committee.

The vast majority of these publications have the word "Hearing" on the cover or title page, though in the early decades of the U.S. Congress such a heading may more often than not be lacking. Some committees occasionally assigned internal serial numbers to their hearings publications, but most did not.

Published -- Unpublished Distinction

For much of the Senate's history there was no overall effort to record Committee Hearings. Although the committee system developed its basic structure in the early congresses and grew in responsibility and influence throughout the 19th century, hearings proceedings were only sporadically transcribed during those years. Even though transcripts were gradually more regularly made of hearings sessions, many committees considered them to be internal documents for the use of the committee members and their colleagues. This practice continued sporadically into the early 20th century, but hearings, especially those on important topical issues, began to be considered public documents as we view them today.

On the House side, the proliferation of committees in the decades following the Civil War resulted in the passage of House Rule 36. This rule, passed in 1880, governed the disposition of records of all House committees. It required that "all bills, joint resolutions, petitions and papers referred to the committee together with all evidence taken by such committee" be delivered to the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The rule also empowered the Clerk, in lieu of compliance on the part of the committees, "to take into his keeping all such papers and testimony." In the language of that regulation the words "evidence" and "testimony" refer to material covered in hearings proceedings.

Thus by 1880 the importance of hearings in the investigative and legislative activities of the committees was clearly recognized, and the number of hearings that were actually recorded increased. While the records of the sessions were usually verbatim transcripts, some committees chose only to take minutes of their ordinary proceedings.

The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 required the transcription of all public and closed session hearings by all House and Senate committees. Despite the regulations guaranteeing that a record of the hearings deliberations would be compiled, however, there were no provisions in the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act requiring the publication or even the preservation of hearings transcripts.

The responsibility for deciding which hearing transcripts should be published rested, as it still does, with the individual House and Senate committees. Factors influencing a committee's decision to publish a hearing include the committee's publication budget, the committee's perception of the session's relation to the open or public business of Congress of the time, and the sensitivity of the matters discussed. Broadly speaking, hearings that may be withheld from publication fall into one or more of the following hearings procedural classes:

• Ordinary open committee meetings: committee chairmen made decisions, for printing budgetary reasons or simply based on their own assessment of public interest in the matters raised in a hearing, on which hearings were to be published. Political expedience, not surprisingly, often played a role in those publishing decisions. In the Senate, these transcripts are open public documents, but in the House, they are closed for 30 years.
• Hearings on private legislation: meetings, frequently without external witnesses, on legislation introduced on behalf of private persons to redress claims, resolve conflicts with Executive Branch agencies, or to make public or Indian land transactions.
• Nomination hearings: usually involving nominations of noncontroversial ambassadorial, department agency or bureau chiefs, or district court judges, and often viewed as routine, though issues of personal confidentiality could sometimes be involved.
• Executive or closed session hearings: prior to 1976, when rule changes in both the House and the Senate required committees to meet in open session except as authorized by committee vote, committee chairmen were free to decide to hold committee meetings in closed session. While such a practice was often a matter of convenience for the committee in dealing with routine issues not significantly different from the open sessions, the unpublished transcripts of those meetings also include legislative mark-up sessions, or, especially in the case of Senate transcripts, general discussions of legislative issues among committee members. In the Senate, the majority of these are opened after 20 years. In the House these may remain closed for at least 50 years; CIS has expended considerable effort to open these House documents early, and the forthcoming House Unpublished part will include a significant number of them identified over the past 10 years.
• Classified hearings: for reasons of national defense, foreign policy, and other sensitive issues, some hearings were required to be held in closed session. The transcripts of these hearings typically remain closed until reviewed and declassified.
• Investigatory hearings: conducted for reasons of uncovering wrongdoing, mismanagement, or other reasons, these investigatory or oversight hearings have often been held in executive session in order to protect personal confidentiality or avoid personal embarrassments. Of these hearings, many were either not published or published only in edited versions. In both Senate and House these are typically closed for at least 50 years.

Date Ranges, Published hearings 1833-1969
Unpublished hearings 1823-1976

Since the independent congressional committee publication system developed slowly throughout the first half of the 19th century outside of the reports and documents series of publications issued by the full House and Senate, there are far, far fewer Committee Hearings publications compared with number of published reports and documents of the House and Senate. With the growth of the committee system from 1865-1900 and the increasing complexity and responsibilities of the federal government, the volume of Committee Hearings publications increased. There were further increases, of course, in the 20th century, but over half of the Committee Hearings in the CIS collections date from 1935 onward.

The unpublished hearings transcripts are opened for general public access according to different schedules by the Senate and House of Representatives for their respective committees. On the Senate side unpublished hearings, like other committee papers, are closed for 20 years. House hearings and records are closed for 30 years. Furthermore, investigative hearings of both the House and Senate normally remain closed for 50 years. Finally, the rules of access and publication are further complicated by the fact that a Senator can insist that any proceeding of which he was a part remain closed until his death even if they exceed the 20-year rule restriction. Since the opening of hearings records in themselves does not in any way result in publication by the committees [CIS now assumes that role] except in very exceptional circumstances, these historical and previously unpublished hearings transcripts have not been and are not covered in the CIS/Index to Publications of the United States Congress.

Subjects of Committee Hearings
Again like Committee Prints, the subjects of Committee Hearings reflect the full range of concerns and responsibilities of the committees themselves. Obviously the different functions of the various committees cause differences in the subjects of their hearings. The subject classes of Committee Hearings may be summarized in the following way and illustrated by sample hearings titles:

• Legislative hearings: when bills are introduced in Congress, they are routinely assigned to committees having jurisdiction over that area of legislative concern. Usually the committees hold hearings to gather concrete information on the desirability of the proposed legislation. This is the largest class of hearings. Sample titles: Eight-Hour Law Hearings; H.R. 9897, Amending the Copyright Law; Water Pollution Control-1966
• Investigatory hearings: these hearings focus on alleged maladministration, wrong doing, or misconduct by Federal agencies, the judicial branch, and, in cases of censure and impeachment, of their own members. Sample titles: Investigation of Hazing at the U.S. Military Academies; Public School System of D.C. [investigation of Black public school students nude photographs]; Commercialization of Items Carried by Astronauts
• Oversight hearings: these hearings may focus on routine reviews of the administration and effectiveness of Federal programs or the administration of Congressional legislation. Sample titles: Condition of the Library of Congress; Reorganization of the Patent Office; Implementation of Florence and Beirut Agreements
• Information gathering hearings: these hearings are concerned with current issues of national or international concern which may or may not lead to specific legislative initiatives. Sample titles: Garden City Movement; Hydroelectric Development in Navigable Streams; International Wireless Telegraph
• Nomination and treaty hearings: these hearings, exclusively Senate prerogatives, play a central role in the Senate's constitutionally mandated advice and consent responsibilities (Art. II, Sect. 2). Sample titles: Nomination of Louis D. Brandeis; Nomination of Chester Bowles Under Secretary of State-Designate; Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan

Size of the Collections

A total of approximately 63,000 titles on some 112,000 microfiche. The largest, most complete single collections of Committee Hearings are the CIS U.S. Congressional Committee Hearings Collection, the CIS U.S. House of Representatives Unpublished Committee Hearings Collection, and the CIS U.S. Senate Unpublished Committee Hearings Collection. The published hearings now constitute well over fifty percent of the collections, but as more and more unpublished hearings transcripts are released for publication, the ratio between published and unpublished hearings will slowly change.

Specifically, the published hearings amount to about 40,000 titles on 84,000 microfiche, the unpublished Senate hearings through 1976 are 7,300 titles on 11,590 microfiche, and the unpublished House through 1964 number 15,870 titles on 15,696 microfiche. The next segment of the House transcripts, scheduled for publication in the Fall of 1999, will cover 2,500 transcripts from 1965-88 plus another 1000 House transcripts previously closed to CIS. Senate transcripts for 1977-80 will be published in 2000.

Original Format

Published hearings are printed documents of uniform page size approximately 6" x 9".

Unpublished hearings transcripts for much of the early 19th century are manuscript records which gradually give way to typewritten transcripts in more recent periods.

SuDoc Classification

In the Superintendent of Documents classification scheme, the "Y" class covers miscellaneous congressional publications and includes the "Y4" subclass for Committee Hearings.

Access through CIS Finding Aids — Print and Congressional Masterfile® 1 on CD-ROM

• Subjects and Names Index. Includes controlled subject vocabulary, act names, Federal agency and other corporate names, and personal names [published and unpublished hearings]
• Title Index [published and unpublished hearings]
• Bill Number Index [published and unpublished hearings]
• SuDoc Number Index [published hearings only]
• Index by Report and Document Numbers [published hearings only]
• Index by Congress and Committees [published and unpublished hearings]
• Reference Bibliography entries displaying full bibliographic data and assigned index terms, which serve as a kind of verbless abstract, for each hearing [published and unpublished hearings]
• Note: House Unpublished Hearings transcripts for 1959-64 and Senate Unpublished Hearings transcripts for 1973-76 are searchable only in the CIS printed indexes, not on Congressional Masterfile® 1 on CD-ROM

Sources of Filmed CIS Committee Prints Collection:

• Senate Library's bound collection of Committee Hearings [filmed by Greenwood Press]
• Library of Congress bound collection of Committee Hearings [filmed by Greenwood]
• Y4 Collection of the Superintendent of Documents Library at the National Archives
• Congressional committee legislative archives at the National Archives [primary source for the unpublished Committee Hearings transcripts]
• Congressional committee offices on Capitol Hill
• Federal Departmental libraries and numerous other Washington, D.C. libraries and libraries outside Washington

Overlap with other CIS Retrospective Collections:

• Committee Hearings in Committee Prints: There is a small degree of overlap between Committee Prints and Congressional Committee Hearings. Although 11% of the Committee Prints titles were indexed to the subject term "Congressional Committee Hearings and summaries," about a fourth or more of those items are simply brief excerpts from the full hearings or summaries of them.
• Committee Hearings in the Serial Set: Hearings were held by committees before the practice of printing hearings as distinct publications arose. Many such hearings may be found in the American State Papers and the Serial Set. The Senate Library bound as a separate collection a selection of hearings originally published in the reports or documents of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set. For the period 1833-1934, this amounts to approximately 800 publications. The Senate Library's bound Serial Set hearings were originally filmed by Greenwood Press, a firm subsequently acquired by CIS, and incorporated in the CIS U.S. Committee Hearings on Microfiche. The accession numbers for these Serial Set hearings include the abbreviation Doc. or Rep. so they are easily identifiable. There are undoubtedly more "hearings" in the Serial Set and its predecessor, the American State Papers, which were not segregated by the Senate Library and which CIS did not choose to re-index in its U.S. Congressional Committee Hearings Index since they already are covered in the CIS U.S. Serial Set Index.
• Serial Set Reports in Committee Hearings: Approximately 100 House and Senate Committee Reports, out of more than two hundred thousand titles originally published in the Serial Set through 1969, are included, usually among appendix materials, in published hearings.

Post -1969 Committee Hearings Coverage:

Provided on a current basis by the CIS/Index and its enhanced electronic version Congressional on the World Wide Web.