Henry Martyn Robert’s Rules of Order

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Frye. I don't remember exactly what was
happening when, like the first seed was planted for this episode,
but I am pretty sure I was on discord, which
means I was playing a game, whatever it was. Things
were winding down and somebody said I moved that the

(00:33):
meeting be adjourned. We were not in a meeting, but well,
we all knew what that meant, and I found that
whole moment hilarious. So that's stuck in my brain, even
though the exact surroundings of what was happening did not.
And then in the weeks after that, just random references
to Robert's Rules of Order kept popping up at odd

(00:56):
places in my life, until I was finally like, Okay,
who is Robert? Robert was Henry Martin Robert, so unlike
what I had always assumed, Robert was his last name,
not his first name. My first experience with Robert's Rules
of Order was in four AH meetings in the nineteen eighties,

(01:17):
and to me, it somehow felt like something out of
my parents' generation. But Henry Martin Robert lived way before that,
and he was connected to multiple events that we have
covered on the show before, most of them really had
nothing to do with parliamentary procedure. I know all of
you know how much I like to read from old

(01:39):
historical documents on the podcast. And if you're thinking, Tracy,
are you about to trick us into listening to you
read Robert's Rules of Order? No, we are not going
to read Robert's.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Rules of Order.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Because I don't want to, and I also don't want
people who are super familiar with it to yell at
me about getting anything wrong. This is way about his
life than the specifics of Robert's rules, all right.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
So, Henry Martin Robert was born May second, eighteen thirty
seven on his grandfather's plantation near Robertville, South Carolina, And yes,
Robertville was named for the Robert family, although they were
descended from Huguenots, who probably would have pronounced it in
a more French way because who wouldn't want you anyway?
The white families in this area were tightly connected through

(02:27):
various intermarriages. Henry's parents Joseph Thomas Robert and Adeline Lawton
were cousins.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Henry was one of six children born to Joseph and Adeline,
and four of those children survived until adulthood. This family
was devoutly religious. They had been devoutly religious for generations.
Those ancestors who first immigrated to North America included Pierre Robert,
who became pastor of South Carolina's first French Huguenot church. Eventually,

(02:57):
the Robertses had become Baptists, and Henry's father and grandfather
were both Baptist ministers. His father, Joseph Thomas Robert, also
trained as a doctor.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
In the years before the US Civil War, there were
white clergy who used the Bible and religion to justify slavery,
but Joseph Robert's religious convictions eventually led him to oppose slavery.
Some of the more recent writing on Henry Martin Robert
makes it sound like his father was a vocal abolitionist
who manumitted his enslaved workforce and moved the family to

(03:31):
the free state of Ohio to get away from the institution.
Many of the more recent writings also assigned this viewpoint
to Henry's mother, Adeline as well as to Henry himself.
The reality is a.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Little bit more complicated. Though they did not go straight
from South Carolina to Ohio, they moved several times between
eighteen thirty nine and eighteen forty nine. The exact reasons
for all those moves aren't clearly documented, but it was
pretty common for past to move from one congregation to
another for all kinds of reasons. The family's first move

(04:06):
was to Covington, Kentucky, in eighteen thirty nine. Kentucky was
a slave state and there were both pro and anti
slavery factions in Covington. They were in Covington for less
than two years before moving to Lebanon, Ohio, so a
free state, but then five years later they moved to Georgia,
a slave state, where Joseph served as pastor of the

(04:28):
First Baptist Church of Savannah. In eighteen forty nine, they
moved back to Robertville. When the family moved yet again
to Portsmouth, Ohio, they were in a free state, but
they were in a town that had a lot of
Southern sympathizers. Although there are family stories about Adeline trying
to teach enslave children to read in her youth and

(04:50):
coming to oppost slavery as well. She also maintained strong
Southern sympathies and clearly missed her plantation life in South
Carolina and Henry Martin robert views on slavery are not
specifically detailed in his public writings or in the papers
that have been made available to historians and biographers. Yeah,
I read a whole paper that was published back in

(05:11):
twenty twelve that was like, his personal views on almost
everything are a total mystery. And while there is a
biography that came out after that paper was written, it
also is not very specific about his views on pretty
much anything. We'll talk about that a little bit more
on the Friday Behind the Scenes. While the Roberts family

(05:32):
was living in Portsmouth, Ohio, Henry Martin Roberts was appointed
to the US Military Academy at West Point in New York,
where he hoped to train as an engineer. He was sixteen,
That made him one of the youngest cadets in his class.
He graduated in eighteen fifty seven, and during his last
year at the academy, he also served as a mathematics instructor.

(05:55):
Math is, of course a huge part of engineering and
a lack of mathema proficiency was one of the main
reasons that cadets failed out of that course of study.
Henry really excelled at math, though so much so that
they had him teaching it before he had even graduated,
and then he graduated fourth in his class overall. When

(06:16):
he graduated, he became a second lieutenant in the Army
Corps of Engineers, and for a year he continued teaching
at West Point. I will say, if you can do
your studies and have the job of teaching and still
graduate fourth, I think you're terrifying as an achiever in
a good way. After that, his first assignment was to

(06:38):
Washington Territory. He set out on October third, eighteen fifty eight,
taking a steamship south, crossing the Isthmus of Panama by
train and making the rest of the voyage by sea.
He contracted malaria while traveling across Panama, and he wasn't
really given any time to recover. Once he arrived in Washington,
he and his unit were immediately set to work building

(06:59):
a road. The United States was at war with indigenous
nations in the Pacific Northwest, and the Army Corps of
Engineers was building roads and bridges and surveying for railroad
lines to facilitate troop movements in that conflict. Yeah, that's
not the only place that wars with indigenous people were
going on, but he was. That's where he was located

(07:21):
at that point. Robert's work building roads was disrupted by
an incident we covered on the show almost a decade ago.
That was the Pig War, and we will run that
episode as a Saturday Classic, but briefly, because of some
unspecific treaty language, the United States and the United Kingdom
were both claiming to control San Juan Island, which is

(07:44):
east of Vancouver Island and northwest of Seattle. On June fifteenth,
eighteen fifty nine, an American named Lyman Cutler shot and
killed a pig that was rooting through his crops. And
this pig was the property of the Hudson's Bay Company,
so this became an international incident. As this dispute escalated,

(08:04):
Robert and a ten man engineering team were sent to
the island to build fortifications in a camp along with
a one hundred man army detachment. They built an earthen
redoubt that was nicknamed Robert's Gopher Hole. In doing so,
they totally changed the landscape of San Juan Island. Much
of it had been covered by fir trees which were
felled to build that redoubt, leaving a prairie behind. The

(08:28):
Remains of this redoubt are still visible today. It's a
National Historic Landmark that's part of San Juan Island National
Historic Park. This redoubt is sometimes credited with helping to
keep this standoff from turning into an active shooting war.
It offered cover for cannons from an army steamer that
had been dragged up a hill, so that made it

(08:50):
possible for a very small American force to hold the
island against pretty much any attack that the British could muster.
But the building process for this did not go very smoothly.
There was a lot of difficult, dirty labor, A lot
of it was more physically grueling than the engineers were
used to. The army detachment was simultaneously frustrated that Robert

(09:12):
was not rationing out enough whiskey and also able to
get access to enough illicit alcohol that drunkenness and misbehavior
were ongoing problems. There were two mutinies, a court martial
and at least one duel that had to be broken up. Eventually,
President James Buchanan ordered General Winfield Scott to the island

(09:33):
to try to restore calm. By that point, Robert's engineering
team had finished the redoubt and were building other defenses
and a larger camp. Scott ultimately negotiated a joint occupation
of San Juan Island, so those defenses and camp facilities
were no longer needed. Robert was sent back to the
road project that he had been working on before the

(09:54):
Pig War, but in April of eighteen sixty Robert asked
to be relieved of duty. He was chronically ill and
also frustrated by the work he was doing didn't really
line up with what he had been studying at West
Point or hoping to do. Another frustration was what he
saw as a lack of discipline and protocol in the
men who were serving under him. Initially, he did not

(10:17):
get a response to this request, and he became very ill.
A couple of months later, while trying to blaze a
pack trail to Fort Vancouver, he finally received word that
he could return to Washington, d C. Once he was
relieved by another officer. That happened, and he left in
September of eighteen sixty. That, of course, was not long

(10:39):
before the start of the US Civil War, and we
will get into that after we pause for a sponsor break.
Brother against brother is one of the cliches that comes
up a lot around the US Civil War, and the

(11:00):
Robert family was one that really did have members on
opposite sides. Henry Martin Robert's father, Joseph, stayed in the North,
something that most sources attribute to his feelings on the
issue of slavery. Henry's mother, Adeline, was more conflicted. She
stayed with her husband, but she still felt a deep
loyalty to her home state of South Carolina. She really

(11:23):
hated being cut off from all of her family there
because of the war. She was also terrified that her brothers,
who joined the Confederate Army, would wind up facing her
son Henry in combat because Henry remained with the United
States Army.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Although South Carolina seceded from the Union over the issue
of slavery, Henry Martin Robert's decision to remain in the
US Army doesn't seem to have been about slavery at all,
or if it was, that's not something that he left
any kind of record of in the material that's been
available to biographers and historians. Robert thought South Carolina did

(12:01):
have the right to secede, but he also thought that
if states seceded, they would eventually destroy themselves through factionalism
and division. Like his mother, he felt a sense of
loyalty to South Carolina, but he thought it was in
the state's best interest to preserve the Union. Robert had
actually been thinking about leaving the army before the Civil

(12:21):
War started. He had been offered a job as a professor.
He had also married Helen Marie Thresher in December of
eighteen sixty. They had been courting for a couple of years,
with a lot of that courtship happening through letters while
he was in the Pacific Northwest. But when he heard
about the Battle of Fort Sumter in April of eighteen
sixty one, he ended his furlough a week early and

(12:44):
he went to Washington, d c. He was promoted to
first lieutenant and assigned to work under Major John G.
Bernard fortifying the area around the capitol. Robert still had
not fully recovered from malaria, though, and soon his illness
was one again, affecting his ability to work, he was
transferred to Philadelphia, where the work was expected to be

(13:06):
less strenuous, and then in April of eighteen sixty two
he was transferred again, this time to New Bedford, Massachusetts,
where it was helped that the cooler climate would help
him recover.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
He had an experience while living in New Bedford that
later led him to study and write about parliamentary law.
Although some of the details are fuzzy and some of
the accounts of this are conflicting, there was a meeting.
It was probably a public meeting, it was probably held
at a church, and it was probably about the local defenses.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
If you are familiar with the form.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Of governance known as the New England town meeting, meaning
that rather than electing a representative government, the entire body
of eligible voters acts as the town's legislature and open meetings.
This was not that New Bedford was chartered as a
city in eighteen forty seven, and by definition of open
town meetings are four towns, not cities. So New Bedford

(14:04):
had a mayor and a board of aldermen and a
common council, but it could also convene more general meetings
on matters of public good whatever the details of this meeting.
Robert was elected to serve as its chair, maybe because
he was there in his officer's uniform so he seemed
like a logical person to put in charge. Some accounts

(14:25):
say that this meeting went on for fourteen hours and
was generally terrible, and others say that it actually didn't
go all that badly, But Robert wasn't happy about it.
He wasn't expecting to have to chair a meeting and
didn't know what to do. In his opinion, his study
at West Point and his army service had not prepared
him for this at all. Some things he thought he

(14:48):
needed to know but didn't know included which motions took
precedence over others, which were debatable, and which could be amended.
So he said, quote, I plunged in, trusting to providence
that the ass Asembly would behave itself. But with the
plunge went the determination that I would never again attend
to any meeting until I knew something on the subject

(15:08):
of parliamentary law. After this experience, he reportedly made himself
kind of a little quick reference in case he found
himself in this situation again, just a sheet of paper
that listed out the types of motions that could be
put forth during a meeting according to their rank, along
with which of the motions could be debated or amended.

(15:31):
He did not start working on the book that would
become Robert's Rules of Order until a bit later, though.
The first of Henry and Helen's five children was born
on April eighteenth, eighteen sixty five. I was a daughter,
also named Helen, and about four months later Henry asked
for another transfer. He had been dealing with the effects

(15:51):
of malaria at this point for more than five years,
and he needed the help of aids to carry out
his regular duties in the field.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
He asked to.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
Be sent to the United States Military Academy to teach instead,
and this request was granted and he was put in
charge of the Department of Practical Military Engineering at West Point,
and he taught there until the autumn of eighteen sixty seven.
That year, Robert was promoted to major and named Chief
Engineer of the Military Division of the Pacific. He and

(16:21):
the family moved to San Francisco, where they lived until
eighteen seventy one. A lot of his engineering work from
this point on focused on shorelines, rivers, and lighthouses, and
he worked on some of the infrastructure around the Presidio
in San Francisco. His time in San Francisco also included
a lot of work with social, religious and reform organizations.

(16:43):
He was on the board of trustees of San Francisco's
first Baptist Church and on the board of directors at
the YMCA. His work with the Baptist Church included establishing
Sunday School for Chinese immigrants. This was about a decade
before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act banned all
immigration from China to the United States, and San Francisco

(17:04):
had a significant population of Chinese workers, who were frequently
the targets of racism, discrimination, and violence. He also served
as treasurer of the Society for the Rescue of Fallen Women,
which was a ministry that essentially tried to rescue women
from sex work. Something Robert noticed while working with these
and other organizations in San Francisco was that there were

(17:27):
a lot of disputes and a lot of time spent
in meetings arguing California had become a US territory after
the Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight. It
had become a state in eighteen fifty, so is still
pretty new in terms of being part of the United States.
A lot of people living there were relative newcomers from

(17:49):
other parts of the US. People all had their own
ideas about how to do things, and those ideas were
informed by whether they had previously been living somewhere that
had been colonized by Britain, France, or Spain, whether they
had indigenous or African ancestry, what kinds of organizations they

(18:10):
had experience with. People just all had different ideas of
how to do things, and they wasted a lot of
time arguing over the substance of their meetings, but also
over procedural questions about how the meeting itself should be conducted.
So Robert thought there really needed to be one uniform
rule set which could be used all over the United States,

(18:32):
so that as people moved around and tried to establish
new organizations and tried to run meetings, they would at
least all start out on the same page when it
came to the way that the meeting should be structured
and organized.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
He started reviewing the books that were already available about
parliamentary laws, that is, the various rules protocols, standards, and
points of etiquette that are used to govern meetings of
legislatures or non legislative organistsations. Those non legislative organizations that
conduct their meetings according to parliamentary law are often called

(19:07):
deliberative assemblies. Robert intended for his work to be used
by deliberative assemblies, not by legislatures. When Robert started this research,
the major works on parliamentary law in the United States
included Thomas Jefferson's eighteen oh one Manual of Parliamentary Practice
and Luther S. Cushing's seventeen forty five Rules of Proceeding

(19:32):
and Debate in Deliberative Assemblies that was more often known
as Cushing's Manual.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Cushing's Manual was in pretty common use, but Robert really
didn't think either of these works was well suited for
non legislative bodies. Thomas Jefferson was Thomas Jefferson and Luther S.
Cushing had been clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives,
so both of their works were informed by working in legislatures.

(19:59):
He also thought that these rules a lot of the
time were too specific and too complicated for something like
a non legislative local organization. And some of the rules
just were not relevant to those kinds of organizations. He
also got a copy of the Congressional Manual and John M.
Barclay's Digest of Rules and Practices of the House, but

(20:21):
again these were rules for legislatures. That wasn't quite what
he wanted in the end. In eighteen sixty nine, he
wrote a brief pamphlet of basic rules, which he had
printed at his own expense and handed out to friends, family,
and colleagues. He started working on a short manual that
would be suitable for wider distribution, but he wasn't able

(20:41):
to finish it before being transferred to Portland, Oregon, where
he wound up being a lot busier with his engineering
work than In late eighteen seventy three, Robert was sent
to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to oversee the construction of lighthouses around
Lake Michigan. When he got there at the very end
of descem much of the lake was frozen and temperatures

(21:03):
were well below zero fahrenheit. That put a stop to
pretty much all of the work that had to be
done outside. His wife and children also stayed behind in Dayton,
Ohio for a while, and so this finally gave him
time to really focus on his work on parliamentary law,
and then he continued that work after the weather warmed

(21:23):
up and his family got to Milwaukee.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Henry's wife, Helen, played a key part in this book.
Henry had written out his rules of order, including rules
for obtaining the floor and introducing business, types of motions
and their order of precedence, committees, debates, voting, and officers,
as well as some miscellaneous rules. But Helen pointed out
that these rules were only really useful to someone who

(21:47):
already knew how to run a meeting. People who were
just getting started would want to know how to convene
a meeting, how to call it to order, and what
was supposed to happen from there.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Henry didn't want people to open the book and think
it was all just basics though. He was trying to
update and reform parliamentary law into something that could be
used and endorsed by respected organizations all around the country.
But he also saw his wife's point, and he wound
up writing a second part to the book, titled Organization

(22:18):
and Conduct of Business, to supplement the rules that were
in the first part. The finished book was one hundred
and seventy six pages long, and it was meant to
be easy to carry around and use. In eighteen seventy five,
he had this book typeset and four thousand copies printed,
but he had trouble finding someone to bind and distribute it.

(22:38):
Robert had written this book because he thought what was
already available was inadequate, but publishers thought there was no
way some random military engineer's parliamentary law book would supplant
Cushing's manual. He finally worked out a deal with publisher
s C. Griggson Company, in which Robert paid for almost
all of the binding costs himself. Copies of the book

(23:01):
were earmarked to give away eight hundred by the publisher
and two hundred by Robert, and the publisher would pay
Robert forty percent of the retail price of any of
the other three thousand copies that were sold. The Pocket
Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies, or just
Robert's Rules of Order, sold for seventy five cents. They

(23:21):
sent those thousand free copies to parliamentarians, schools, and organizational
leaders all over the United States, and to book reviewers,
and this book was very well received. In the words
of A review in a San Francisco newspaper quote, it
is less cumbersome than Jefferson, more American than Cushing, and

(23:43):
better adapted than either to the common wants of the masses.
A review in the Chicago Standard wrote, quote, a book
more needed has not appeared in many a day. We
are happy to find that this one meets the case
so admirably.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Side note. One of the places that Robert sent free
copies of his book was the seminary for Friedman, where
his father worked. Henry's mother, Adeline, died in eighteen sixty six,
so she never returned to the South after the start
of the Civil War, but his father had moved south
in eighteen seventy because of his health. He got a
job at Augusta Bible Institute, which was one of several

(24:21):
schools for free black people established by the American Baptist
Home Mission Society. Joseph Thomas. Robert served as the institute's
first president. It later moved to Atlanta, and in nineteen
thirteen it was renamed Morehouse College. Robert sent the free
books in eighteen seventy seven, when the institute was still
in Augusta, Georgia.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
We will talk more about his life and Robert's rules
after a sponsor break Henry Martin. Robert had thought that
those three thousand copies of his Rules of Order would
last for two years, but they sold out in only

(25:06):
six months. Even though he had no formal training as
a parliamentarian. This meant that he was immediately seen as
a big authority on parliamentary law. So many people wrote
to him with questions, and some of those questions were
very specific. He tried to individually answer all of these
letters and also to use the kinds of questions that

(25:28):
people were asking him to inform later revisions and updates
to his rules. At the same time, though, he also
encouraged the people writing him to adapt these rules to
their circumstances and just to approach problems and disputes with
common sense, patience, and understanding, rather than trying to rigidly

(25:50):
adhere to rules for their own sake. Also, Robert's whole
goal here was for people to be able to run
their meetings efficiently and effectively, and to that end, he
also wanted to write articles and other material about parliamentary
law and to create a shorter version of his rules,
specifically for churches. This led to a dispute with his publisher,

(26:12):
who was afraid that if he kept reprinting the same
rules in other publications, he was going to lose control
over the copyright of his work. As Robert revised and
added to his rules of order, he also continued to
serve in the Army Corps of Engineers. In eighteen eighty nine,
he was appointed to a board of engineers to select
a site for a port on the Gulf of Mexico.

(26:35):
The board selected the island of Galveston, Texas as the
side of this port, and Robert worked on a series
of jetties to change the way the river water moved
through the gulf and to make the water deep enough
for ships to be able to navigate over a sandbar.
Robert's return home from Galveston was disrupted by the Johnstone

(26:55):
flood on May thirty first, eighteen eighty nine. Was stuck
on his train for two days and spent a week
in Altoona, Pennsylvania before he was able to continue on.
Prior host Sarah and Deblina covered the Johnstown flood on
the show in twenty twelve, and we ran that episode
as a Saturday Classic back in twenty eighteen, but briefly

(27:16):
an earth and dam owned by the South Fork Fishing
and Hunting Club failed, causing massive flooding and damage downstream
and killing more than twenty two hundred people. This flood
became notorious both for the catastrophic damage and death and
because of survivor's lengthy and unsuccessful efforts to collect damages
from the club, whose members included people like Andrew Carnegie,

(27:39):
Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellin. In February of eighteen ninety,
Robert was named Engineer Commissioner for the District of Columbia.
While he was in Washington, d C. He continued to
focus both on his engineering work and on social reform.
For example, he didn't think it was feasible to totally
ban alcohol or sex work, but he saw both of

(28:02):
them as the causes of various societal problems, so he
wanted to limit and regulate them. Of course, this was
something else in his life that was influenced by his
own religious beliefs, and he also kept working on his
rules and answering people's letters about them. This added up
to a lot of work, and Robert left this role

(28:23):
in October of eighteen ninety one after a doctor diagnosed
him with neurasthenia brought on by overwork. By the following year,
Robert's rules had been through twenty one printings, with more
than one hundred and forty thousand copies in circulation, but
salees started to drop in eighteen ninety three in the
wake of the financial panic that year, and his publisher

(28:46):
also went out of business. Then, on October tenth, eighteen
ninety five, his wife Helen died suddenly of heart failure.
Robert continued working, though, including on various defense projects, when
the Spanish America War started in eighteen ninety eight. By
that point he was getting close to the army's mandatory
retirement age of sixty four. He turned sixty four on

(29:10):
May second, nineteen oh one, and retired with the rank
of brigadier general, and by that point had also been
named Chief of Engineers. Robert had been awarded this promotion
on April thirtieth, nineteen oh one, so just a couple
of days before he retired, which had involved a considerable
amount of jockeying. A few years before Chief of Engineers,

(29:31):
William P. Craighill had retired, Robert and his friend and
colleague John M. Wilson were the same age, with birthdays
on May second and October eighth, respectively. In addition to
being a few months older, Robert had seniority, and both
men thought that when Craig Hill retired, Robert would be promoted,
and then when Robert retired, Wilson would be promoted, so

(29:53):
both men would retire with the distinction and benefits that
came with the rank of brigadier general. Both of them
were surprised when Wilson got the promotion instead. Wilson protested
this decision and then spearheaded a whole campaign, complete with
newspaper editorials and letters to President William McKinley, to try
to get Robert promoted before his retirement. McKinley was reluctant

(30:18):
to allow this because of the precedent that it would set,
but ultimately Wilson did retire a few months early and
Robert was promoted.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
A few days after his retirement. On May eighth, nineteen
oh one, Robert married Isabelle Livingston Hoagland. They went on
a honeymoon to Cuba, and after they got back, Henry
started consulting as a civilian engineer. A massive hurricane had
struck Galveston on September eighth, nineteen hundred. Past hosts covered
this hurricane in an episode called Five Historical Storms that

(30:51):
was also a Saturday Classic in twenty eighteen and again briefly.
Galveston was on a low lying island and this hurricane
caused a massive storm surge. More than six thousand people died,
and the city faced immense damage. Henry Martin, Robert Alfred Noble,
and Henry Clay Ripley were tasked with finding a way
to protect the city, which they did by building a

(31:14):
massive sea wall and raising the city. Robert also worked
on a causeway bridge linking Galveston to the mainland. In
nineteen eleven, the government of Mexico invited Robert to work
on improvements to the port of Fronterra in the state
of Tabasco, and Isabelle went with him. They did not
get to see this project through to completion, though, due

(31:35):
to the Mexican Revolution. Resident Porfirio Diaz was forced out
of office on May eleventh, nineteen eleven. He went into
exile and the Robertses went back to the United States.
By this point, there had been a number of updates
and reprintings of robert Truls of Order. The first one
to be specifically framed as a revised edition came out

(31:58):
in nineteen fifteen. In nineteen sixteen, Robert started work on
a much longer work called Parliamentary Law, which he intended
for the use of professional parliamentarians and people who taught
parliamentary procedure. He also worked on a shorter training manual
called Parliamentary Practice, which included lessons and drills. Parliamentary Practice

(32:20):
was published in nineteen twenty one, and Parliamentary Law in
nineteen twenty two. His wife Isabelle and daughter in law
Sarah Corbin Robert were a very big part of getting
these books written, as was their friend Mildred Anderson. And
that was because at this point Robert was advancing in age,
and he had developed cataracts and hearing laws, and he
just needed people to help take notes and dictation as

(32:41):
he wrote out this work. Henry Martin Robert died in Hornell,
New York, on May eleventh, nineteen twenty three, at the
age of eighty six. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Robert's Rules of Order became the almost ubiquitous manual of
parliamentary procedure in the United States. Not every organization uses it,

(33:02):
of course, but there are still a lot of nonprofits,
student governments, homeowners' associations, and other organizations that rely on it.
This includes some legislative bodies, like some of the New
England town meetings that we mentioned earlier. There's some suggestion
that Robert's Rules of Order did more than just give
existing organizations a formal framework on how to conduct meetings

(33:25):
more efficiently and in a more orderly way, that it
also inspired the creation of new organizations by providing a
practical reference for how to do it. And the words
of historian Don H. Doyle, writing an American Quarterly in
nineteen eighty quote, Robert's remarkable achievement came about because his
book both stimulated and fed a soaring popular demand for

(33:50):
parliamentary law. It's definitely true that there was an explosion
of organizations, especially organizations devoted to some kind of social
or political reform, in the progressive era of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, after Robert's
Rules came out, a lot of those letters Robert personally

(34:10):
answered came from people who were trying to start or
manage organizations for women's suffrage or racial equality, prohibition, and
other social and political issues. For example, Carrie Chapman Kat
once wrote to Robert to say that she had been
running suffrage meetings with his rules for thirty years.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
At the same time, there have been increasing criticisms of
Robert's Rules in more recent years. Although he wrote it
for non legislative bodies, it was informed by existing rules
for parliamentary procedure. Those had roots that mostly went back
to the British Parliament. So this comes from a very
Eurocentric perspective and from the rules of governing bodies that

(34:53):
were made up exclusively of men at the time.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Aside from that, even a brief overview of re Robert
Rules can seem overwhelming to someone who doesn't already have
a background in it, which can make meetings less accessible
to newcomers. The twelfth edition of Roberts Rules came out
in twenty twenty, and it is definitely not a pocket
sized book. It's eight hundred and sixteen pages long, perhaps
if you have very big pockets. Roberts Rules in Brief,

(35:20):
which came out the same year as two hundred twenty
four pages. There are various quick references in cheat sheets,
but still all of this can just feel like a lot.
It's also possible for people to use Robert Trulls in
bad faith to get their own way or to silence people,
especially if those other people that are being silenced are
not as familiar with the rules. Some organizations instead focus

(35:43):
on methods that emphasize consensus building and collaboration rather than
formal rule sets, for things like introducing motions, controlling the
floor voting, and determining when it is acceptable to interrupt
the person speaking.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
At the same time. Some of the criticisms of are unfounded.
For example, the US Congress does not use Robert's rules
of order. Most legislative bodies, apart from things like New
England town meetings, have their own specific rules. So if
you are mad about something going on with the Senate
or House rules in the United States, you're going to

(36:19):
need to find somebody else to blame besides Henry Martin.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Robert.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
He is not the cause of philibus. No, he did
not make that happen in Congress. I have some listener
mail to take us out.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
Fabulous.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
This is from K and k wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly,
I always get excited for disease related episodes because it's
something I've always found fascinating. In this episode, that episode,
being the one on measles, turned out to be relevant
to my academic life, which at the moment is the
same as my life in general. I'm a PhD student

(36:56):
in education and am at the stage of knowing enough
about my dissertation topic to start info dumping at the
slightest invitation, but not yet to the writing and dedicated
research stage. I'm studying polio, specifically how it contributed to
the formation of disabled identity in the United States, but
also filling in some of the archival gaps what happened

(37:18):
when someone who wasn't a middle class, white, urban educated
nine to twelve year old got polio. As part of
my information gathering, I'm working on a paper on schools
as sites of healthcare, specifically how schools became trial sites
for vaccines. So I was delighted to hear you discuss
measles vaccine trials, and then immediately disgusted but not surprised,

(37:40):
to hear that disabled children were used as guinea pigs.
This happens over and over with medical advances, and it's
horrifying and infuriating, so I really appreciate that you explicitly
call out the horror and fury. Willowbrook is a notorious
name in disability history. It was famously the subject of
an expose film by a young GERALDO Rivera that exposed

(38:04):
the deplorable and inhumane conditions of the institution, which led
to public outcry and years of legal cases that eventually
shuddered the institution. It comes up frequently in my disability
studies courses, and every single time I have to brace
myself because it's always worse than I remember. Thank you
as always for the work you do, and so as

(38:24):
not to end on a downer, here's some cats. My
torty baby shark toposts will display her belly, but it
is such a trap. The two babies on the tree
are my cat nieces Pesto and Yoki the pastas or
sisters from the same litter and are spoiled rotten by
my sibling and sib in law.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Best K.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Thank you so much K for this email, which also
included some potential episode topics related to Kay's dissertation research.
I very much appreciated this email. These kitty cats so adorable.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
The tummy trap them. I feel lucky because none of
mine have a tummy trap. I've even our cat that
came to us feral.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
If you can get your hand on his tummy, he's like, oh, relaxing. Yeah,
and he's the one I would have thought would be
setting the trap, but he doesn't.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Yeah. Both of ours do a thing where they flump
over on their signs and they want to be petted
kind of aggressively to me, like on the side slash
slash belly area, and neither of them do the thing
where they suddenly aggressively attack you. Uh. But they will

(39:41):
sort of do a thing that is like a little
bunny kick, but very lightly and like I'm putting my
teeth on you. I'm not biting you. I'm just putting
my teeth on you, which is sort of funny to
me because it's like all of the motions of the
tummy trap cat bitiness, but like in the most gentlest,

(40:02):
delicatenest way. It's because they were raised together. Yeah, so
they've taught each other to temper that behavior and be
like no, no, if you're playing with me, you're playing
with me. Yeah, don't be throwing those claws and teeth out. No,
they're so good. This is why you should always get
two kittens together. I feel strongly on this issue. Yeah,
we intentionally when we got them, were looking at rescues

(40:27):
and intentionally looking for a pair of kittens because we
did not have any other cats in the house, because
I had come to Massachusetts with a cat who had
eventually passed away at the age of nineteen, and so
since we had no other cats in the house, we
definitely wanted two kittens together because it is definitely better

(40:48):
for kittens to have behaviorally, it's so much other cats around,
so much easier. They had also been taken care of
by a foster family who, in my opinion, was really good.
They also had other cats to sort of teach the
kittens how to be.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
Cats, how to be good citizens. They've taught them cat
parliamentary procedure.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, yeah, they know. They know which motions can be
debated and amended. So anyway, thank you again so much
for this email. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcasts or a
history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, we're on some social
media at miss in History, Facebook, the x Thing, Instagram,

(41:34):
is it right now? And you can subscribe to our
show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like
to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(41:56):
to your favorite shows.

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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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