65th United States Congress
1917-1919 U.S. Congress
The 65th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D.C., from March 4, 1917, to March 4, 1919, during the fifth and sixth years of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. The apportionment of seats in this House of Representatives was based on the 1910 United States census.
The Senate maintained a Democratic majority. In the House, the Republicans had actually won a plurality, but as the Progressives and Socialist Representative Meyer London caucused with the Democrats, this gave them the operational majority of the nearly evenly divided chamber, thus giving the Democrats full control of Congress, and along with President Wilson maintaining an overall federal government trifecta.
Major events
March 4, 1917: Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman member of the United States House of Representatives.
March 8, 1917: The United States Senate adopted the cloture rule to limit filibusters.
March 31, 1917: The United States takes possession of the Danish West Indies, which become the US Virgin Islands, after paying $25 million to Denmark.
April 2, 1917: World War I: President Woodrow Wilson asks the U.S. Congress for a declaration of war on Germany.
December 4, 1917: World War I: President Woodrow Wilson delivers the State of the Union Address and requests declaration of war on Austria-Hungary.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4642149. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1919 and 1910.
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This entry incorporates text from “65th United States Congress” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.