Then why did the states or the voters thereof approve it?
States would often leave seats vacant for years. Then there's the corruption and bought positions, as we saw recently with attempts to sell a vacancy-filling appointment. Some states had already started direct-electing senators through referendum.
And then you can't forget the effect of William Randolph Hearst. After all, his ability to vastly spread lies helped get us into the Spanish-American war and make marijuana illegal.
States would often leave seats vacant for years. Then there's the corruption and bought positions, as we saw recently with attempts to sell a vacancy-filling appointment. Some states had already started direct-electing senators through referendum.
And then you can't forget the effect of William Randolph Hearst. After all, his ability to vastly spread lies helped get us into the Spanish-American war and make marijuana illegal.
The Civil War killed federalism, and the debate after the war was who was going to control that all-powerful federal government.
In the 1870's, the Progressives made their first appearance. They started out as a branch movement from the Republican Party with religious roots. In the Northeast, they were primarily Episcopalians, and in the Midwest, they were primarily Lutherans. The Jeffersonian impulse, squashed at Appamattox, now came forward with the idea of using the federal government to work on behalf of the people, not on behalf of the corporate interests who now controlled many, if not most, of the states. They came up with a number of ideas.
There were others, but these were the big items.
The Progressive spent a generation wandering in the wilderness like most new political movements, and they finally achieved power in 1901 with Theodore Roosevelt.
In the first years of the Twentieth Century, Republican Progressives had enough clout to get direct election of senators through the House by the necessary two-thirds margin, but the Senate Judiciary Committee killed it every session.
The states then began invoking Article V, petitioning Congress for a Convention for Proposing Amendments to address direct election. (There were enough legislatures in the hands of Republican Progressives to get this movement some traction.) When two-thirds of the states petitioned for a Convention, the Senate acted.
Under the accepted rules for an Article V Convention, Congress should have called that Convention, but some of the petitions from the state legislatures stated that if Congress passed an amendment to effect direct election of senators, their petitions would be considered discharged. What the Senate feared was that the states would word the 17th Amendment to toss out all sitting senators and require the entire Senate to be re-populated in one election. So the Senate worded its version by permitting direct election to start with the 1914 congressional elections, and no sitting senator would be tossed out because of the amendment. It finally got out of the Senate by a two-thirds vote and was ratified by the states in record time.
It was an extremely popular amendment, as were most ideas the Progressives suggested in that era.