You're listening to this because, well, you want
the facts without the fluff. You're someone who
loves a good aha moment. You want to be well
-informed, but you completely dread the feeling
of information overload. Right. You want to understand
the world, and you want it delivered in a way
that respects your time. That is exactly what
we do here. Today, we are taking a really fascinating
set of source materials, a comprehensive look
at the page of the United States Senate, and
our mission. is to uncover a world that operates
right under our noses. It really does. We are
looking at the hidden, intense, and often completely
surprising ecosystem of the teenagers who literally
keep the gears of the US Senate turning. OK,
let's unpack this, because I had absolutely no
idea how intense this role actually is. It is
a remarkable system to examine, honestly. We
tend to view congressional pages through this
lens of, I don't know, quaint Americana. Yeah,
exactly. Maybe a nice photo opportunity for a
local teenager on the Capitol steps. But the
reality is that this is a high stakes, highly
disciplined environment. It is an intricate functioning
piece of youth labor and education that is deeply
embedded into the daily moment to moment functioning
of the United States government. Without them,
the floor operations of the Senate would fundamentally
stall. And I want to start right at the beginning,
because when I think of a government internship
or an entry level political gig, I am picturing
a college student. Sure. Maybe someone in their
early 20s looking. to build a resume. But this
program goes all the way back to 1829, and the
profile of very first page completely shatters
that modern expectation. That's putting it mildly.
The very first Senate page was appointed by Daniel
Webster, the prominent senator from Massachusetts.
And his appointee, a boy named Grafton Hanson,
was just nine years old. Nine. A nine -year -old.
You were talking about a third grader walking
the floor of the United States Senate. Think
about the sheer contrast between what a nine
-year -old was expected to do in 1829 versus
the duties of a modern page. Today, the role
is highly administrative and logistical. Right.
We see pages delivering legislative correspondence,
preparing the chamber, carrying documents back
and forth across the Senate floor and various
Capitol Hill offices. It is an organized dance
of paperwork and proceedings. But back in the
19th century, little Grafton Hanson and the boys
who followed him were essentially doing pure
manual labor. They weren't just passing notes.
No, not at all. They were refilling ink wells.
They were actively constructing and tending to
the fires just to keep the Senate chambers warm
during the winter. They were fetching chewing
tobacco for the senators. And this is the crazy
part, cleaning the spittoons. It's a vivid image.
Just imagine the sights and the smells of the
1830s Senate floor and handing a nine -year -old
a mop and a bucket for his spittoon. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, the evolution of
those duties and who was allowed to perform them
really mirrors the broader evolution of American
society. For over a century, the program was
an exclusive boys club. Wow. A century. The Senate
modernized its heating. It got rid of the spittoons,
but it held on to that gender barrier for a very
long time. It wasn't until a massive cultural
milestone in 1971 that the Senate finally integrated
the program. So 142 years later, who were the
ones to finally break that barrier? Because I
have to imagine stepping onto the Senate floor
as the first young women in that role was an
incredible culture shock for an institution so
steeped in its own traditions. Oh, it was a seismic
shift for the chamber's daily culture. The first
female pages appointed in 1971 were Paulette
de Selle, Ellen McConnell, and Julie Price. That's
amazing. Their appointment fundamentally changed
the dynamic of the floor. It signaled that the
Senate, which is notoriously slow to change its
internal rules and traditions, was finally being
forced to reflect the modernizing workforce of
the country it governed. And once that door opened,
it stayed open. The program seems to have this
incredible resilience. It just keeps churning
session after session, adapting to the times.
It is resilient, but it isn't invincible. The
operational streak of the PAGE program was actually
broken very recently. Really? Yes. In March 2020,
as the COVID -19 pandemic swept across the globe,
the PAGE program was completely suspended. The
Senate essentially had to figure out how to function
without this vital connective tissue. I didn't
realize that. That suspension lasted until September
2022. It was the very first time in its nearly
200 -year history that the program was halted.
Which means a whole cohort of kids completely
missed their window of opportunity. And that
window is already unbelievably small. Because
applying for this is not like applying for a
summer job at the mall or even a standard college
internship. No, the bottleneck is extreme. The
baseline demographic requirements alone weed
out almost everyone. You have to be 16 or 17
years old. You must be a high school junior,
not a sophomore. We're not a senior. And you
have to have at least a 3 .0 GPA. And meeting
those academic and age requirements just gets
you to the starting line. You cannot simply submit
a resume to a general Capitol Hill hiring portal.
Right. There's no online form for this. Exactly.
The selection process is deeply rooted in political
patronage. To become a U .S. Senate page, you
must be nominated by a senator, generally from
your home state. So you are a 16 -year -old in
Ohio or Oregon. And you are competing against
every other high achieving ambitious 16 year
old in your entire state just to get the attention
of your senator's office. Precisely. They are
evaluating transcripts, resumes, intensive essay
requirements, and often putting these teenagers
through rigorous interviews with a board of review.
And there is a strict cap on how many pages can
serve per session. How many are we talking? The
entire program is limited to just 30 pages at
a time. 30 teenagers for the entire United States
Senate. And because this is Washington, D .C.,
I'm assuming even these high schoolers are subject
to partisan dividing lines. Oh, absolutely. The
partisan balance is baked right into the math.
The majority party gets to appoint 16 pages and
the minority party gets to appoint 14. Fascinating.
You serve the senators of your sponsoring senators
party. You sit on their side of the aisle. It
creates a highly elite, fiercely competitive
micro society right on the Senate floor. And
once they are selected, they are incredibly visible.
They're walking around the Capitol and you know
exactly who they are because of the uniform.
It is a strictly conservative, traditional appearance.
Very traditional. We are talking about. The current
uniform is conservative, but it is actually quite
modern compared to what it used to be. Up until
the 1960s. The boy pages were required to wear
old -fashioned clothing styles dating back to
before the 1940s. They were actively walking
the Senate floor in knickerbockers. Wait, knickerbockers?
Yes. Shortened pants paired with long -knit stockings.
I cannot get past that visual. You are talking
about the 1960s, the era of the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, the counterculture movement,
and the United States Senate is forcing high
school boys to walk around the Capitol building
in knickerbockers. It is a perfect illustration
of how deeply steeped in tradition the Senate
is, sometimes to the point of absurdity. If you
want to see exactly what this looked like, there
is a 1941 Hollywood feature film called Adventure
in Washington that depicts the page uniform in
action. I'll have to look that up. It serves
as a visual time capsule. The Senate clung to
that specific aesthetic long after the rest of
society had moved on, simply because that was
how it had always been done. Here's where it
gets really interesting, though. We know what
they wear. And we know how mathematically difficult
it is to get the job. But we are talking about
30 16 -year -olds moving to Washington, D .C.
They aren't commuting from a high school down
the street. So where do they actually live? They
live in a dedicated facility located near the
Hart Senate office building called the Daniel
Webster Senate Page Residence, widely known as
Daniel Webster Hall. And the history of this
building is wild. It isn't a purpose -built dormitory.
It is a renovated Former private funeral home.
Yes, it was purchased and completely reconfigured
to serve as a secure home away from home for
these minors. The layout is segregated by gender
one floor for males, one for females. They share
furnished rooms with four of the six occupants
per room. Put yourself in the shoes of a 16 -year
-old for a second. You move away from your parents
for the very first time. You're working for the
highest levels of the federal government. And
your brand new dorm is a renovated funeral home
where you are bunking with five strangers. It's
a lot to handle. But honestly, the real estate
history is the least intense part of living there.
The rules that govern their daily lives are staggering.
The environment requires a level of discipline
that most adults would struggle with. Let's start
with the isolation. None at all. None. There
is no Wi -Fi access for personal use at Webster
Hall. They are allowed to use specific monitored
Senate computers, but those are strictly reserved
for schoolwork. So they're entirely cut off from
the modern teenage social ecosystem. In 2024...
Taking away a 16 -year -old smartphone is like
severing a limb. They can't scroll social media
to decompress. They can't easily text their friends
back home. And they can't even document their
own experience. No, absolutely not. Let's say
they have a digital camera or some other non
-phone device. They are strictly forbidden from
taking photographs or videos of their daily lives.
Think about the confidentiality of what they
are seeing on a daily basis. You have teenagers
carrying sensitive legislative drafts. overhearing
backdoor negotiations, and witnessing the unpolished
reactions of national leaders. Good point. You
simply cannot have a 16 -year -old live tweeting
a closed -door Senate negotiation or posting
a vlog from the cloakroom. The security and media
blackouts are absolute. They cannot even speak
to the news media without explicit permission
from the program director. And to enforce all
of this, Webster Hall operates on a brutally
strict demerit system. And we aren't just talking
about getting a demerit for breaking a major
security protocol. The demerits cover the kind
of mundane, everyday things that a normal teenager
does without a second thought. Oh, it's very
granular. You get a demerit for forgetting to
push in your desk chair. You get a demerit if
you leave your toothbrush or toiletries on the
bathroom counter. If you leave your bed unmade
or leave a book in a common space, that is a
demerit. It functions like a military barracks.
The psychological pressure of maintaining that
level of perfection in your personal space is
immense, and the consequences for slipping up
escalate very quickly. What happened? If a page
accrues just 10 demerits, they are placed on
room restriction. That means they cannot step
foot outside of their room after 9 .000 p .m.
10 demerits is nothing. That is five unmade beds
and five unpushed chairs, and suddenly you are
confined to your quarters. As the demerits build,
the punishments become more severe. There is
zero tolerance for disrespect or unbecoming behavior.
Pages have been outright dismissed from the program
and sent home for failing to adhere to these
standards. So you have these high achieving kids
living in a total pressure cooker without their
cell phones, terrified of forgetting to push
in a chair. And we haven't even touched on their
academic schedule yet because they don't get
a pass on being high school juniors. They still
have to take their core classes. They do. They
attend the U .S. Senate Page School, which is
physically located in the lower level, the basement
of Webster Hall. The academics are grueling.
This is a fully accredited program by the Middle
States Association of Colleges and Secondary
Schools. They are required to take four. core
classes covering math, science, English, and
social studies. They are typically assigned five
to six hours of homework each night. Five to
six hours? Yes. And the academic sword of Damocles
is always hanging over them. If they drop below
a C average in any single class, they are subject
to immediate dismissal. Five to six hours of
homework, on top of working a full -time job
on the Senate floor. And the most bizarre part
about this school is the schedule. You don't
just show up at 8 a .m. Classes begin every single
weekday at 6 .15 a .m. The school schedule is
entirely beholden to the legislative calendar.
Because the pages must be physically present
on the floor whenever the Senate is in session,
the page school has to wedge its academics into
the early morning hours. Generally, school is
designed to end one hour and 15 minutes before
the Senate convenes. But the Senate doesn't operate
on a normal 9 to 5 clock. Not at all. The Senate's
schedule is notoriously fluid. If the Senate
convenes late, school might stretch out until
9 .45 a .m. Okay. But what happens if a senator
decides to launch a filibuster? If a senator
is intentionally delaying a vote by talking for
hours on end deep into the night, the daily schedule
is thrown completely out the window. That sounds
chaotic. It is. If the Senate was up late the
night before and convenes early the next morning,
Classes are truncated. It is entirely possible
to have a math class that only lasts 20 minutes
or for school to be canceled entirely on a given
day. Imagine trying to learn precalculus in 20
minute increments because a senator from Texas
won't yield the floor. It is a punishing, chaotic
way to get an education, which brings us to a
much broader, more serious discussion about the
viability and the ethics of this program as a
whole. This raises an important question, and
it is one we must look at objectively. Looking
at the historical record, particularly Daryl
Gonzalez's comprehensive book, The Children Who
Ran for Congress, this program has not existed
without severe scrutiny. It has faced massive
political, legal, social, and personal pushback
over the years. Right. To fully understand the
weight of that scrutiny, you have to look across
the Capitol building to the House of Representatives.
Right, because the House used to have an identical
program, House pages running documents for representatives.
But that program does not exist anymore. The
House page program was entirely shut down in
2011. The closure followed multiple highly publicized
sex scandals involving House pages and members
of Congress, as well as other Capitol staff.
I see. The fallout from those incidents was catastrophic
for the program. The structural vulnerabilities
of having minors embedded in that environment
were deemed too great, resulting in the complete
termination of the House program. But the Senate
page program survived. It underwent major adjustments,
increased its security protocols, but it kept
its doors open. However, keeping the doors open
hasn't shielded it from ongoing criticism. No,
it hasn't. The sources highlight several major
critiques that persist today. First, that the
program is inherently elitist and overly patronage
-based, relying far too heavily on who you know
and which senator you can impress. Second, that
it is deeply isolating, taking 16 -year -olds
and severing them from their normal social support
systems. The third and perhaps most pressing
critique revolves around the physical and mental
toll. When you calculate the math of a 6 .4 a
.m. school start, the physically demanding nature
of running the Senate floor and five to six hours
of basement homework, the numbers are alarming.
They really are. Pages routinely get less than
six hours of sleep at night. They are often working
over 60 hours a week at the Senate, all while
operating under the threat of dismissal if they
fail to maintain an 80 percent academic average.
It sounds like a guaranteed recipe for adolescent
burnout. You are pushing these kids to the absolute
breaking point. However, the source material
does point out that the Senate has implemented
safety nets to counterbalance this pressure.
That's true. During their stay in Washington,
pages are provided with free, comprehensive physical
and medical health care. More importantly, they
have mandated access to psychological and social
counseling to help them process the stress of
the environment. The safety nets are there, but
the baseline environment is undeniably extreme.
It is an extreme crucible. But it is also a crucible
that has forged some very notable individuals.
When you put a teenager in that environment,
you are essentially providing them with an early
training ground for American politics and culture.
So what does this all mean? I want you to imagine
sitting in a room with these 30 teenagers. They
are sleep deprived. They are stressed out about
their pre -calculus grades. They are wearing
their identical Navy blazers, paranoid about
getting a demerit for leaving a toothbrush on
a counter in a former funeral home. It's a surreal
image. It really is. Who are you actually looking
at? When they leave Webster Hall, who do they
become? The alumni roster for this program is
staggering. If we look at the political heavyweights
who started as pages, the list reaches the highest
courts in the land. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch,
who currently sits on the Supreme Court, was
a Senate page. We see them return to the very
chamber they used to run documents for. Christopher
Dodd walked the floor as a page and eventually
returned as a senator from Connecticut and even
ran for president. Michael Bennett, the current
senator from Colorado, was a page. Mike Lee,
the current senator from Utah, was a page. And
it spans across different eras of political history,
too. Spiro T. Agnew, who served as vice president
under Richard Nixon, was a Senate page. On the
strategic operational side of politics, Robbie
Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential
campaign, learned the ropes of Washington as
a page. It's a huge network. Abigail Spanberger,
a prominent former member of the House and governor
of Virginia, also went through the program. But
it isn't strictly politicians. The program has
hosted massive cultural figures and the children
of American political dynasties. Amy Carter,
the daughter of President Jimmy Carter, lived
this life. Jack Schlossberg, the journalist and
the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy
and Jacqueline Kennedy Anastas, also served as
a page. Think about how that specific experience
shapes a person. These individuals didn't learn
about the legislative process from a textbook.
They experienced the inner workings of American
democracy at its most raw and exhausting level.
They saw the unpolished, behind -the -scenes
reality of how laws are negotiated, delayed,
and compromised upon long before they ever ran
for office or entered public life. It perfectly
encapsulates the profound duality of the United
States Senate page program. On one hand, it is
an unparalleled front -row seat to history. You
are literally in the room where it happens, holding
the documents that will change the trajectory
of the country. Exactly. But on the other hand,
it comes at the incredibly steep cost of a normal
teenage experience. It demands extreme discipline,
strict secrecy, and severe sleep deprivation.
It's a heavy burden for a 16 -year -old. It really
is. I want to leave you with one final fascinating
image from our research to mull over on your
own. We talked about the notable alumni, but
there was one more name on that list, Gore Vidal.
The famous American writer, author, and incredibly
sharp public intellectual. Yes. Gore Vidal was
a Senate page as a teenager, but he was there
for a very specific, highly personal reason.
His grandfather was a senator, but his grandfather
was blind. So teenage Gore Vidal was appointed
so he could literally serve as his grandfather's
eyes on the Senate floor. Just take a moment
to imagine that scenario. Imagine being a 16
year old standing in the well of the United States
Senate tasked with observing the raw, complex
and often ugly machinery of the government so
you can accurately describe it to a lawmaker
who cannot see it himself. That's intense. How
would acting as the literal eyes of the Senate
witnessing the unvarnished truth of American
power shape a teenager's worldview for the rest
of her life? It is no wonder he grew up to be
one of the country's most critical and observant
public intellectuals. It is an incredible story
hidden inside a program that operates right in
plain sight. Thank you so much for joining us
on this deep dive. We hope you walk away with
a whole new perspective the next time you see
a teenager walking in the halls of the Capitol
in a Navy Blazer. Keep learning, keep questioning,
and we will catch you on the next one.