Why are there 435 in the House?

"The Constitution states that the number of representatives is one for every 30,000 people. How is it now limited to 435?" — Randall Woodman, Dallas, Texas


You're right. The Constitution states that "the Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one representative."
The key here is that the founders set a maximum number, not a minimum.
With a current U.S. population of over 300 million, that would work out to about 10,000 representatives — not to mention the chiefs of staff, legislative analysts and spokesmen for each of them.
Until the 20th century, the size of the House increased after each census to reflect the growth in the country's population.
Over time, the growth in new states and the country's population threatened to make the House too large to be a workable legislative body in the views of many in D.C.
After the 1910 census, Congress fixed the size of the House at 435, where it remains today. Congress later made the cap official when it passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which also established a procedure for automatically reapportioning seats after every census.
The cap on the House's size has made battles over how they are distributed inevitable.
A new complication arose after the 1920 census showed that for the first time there were more Americans living in cities than in rural areas.
Rural representatives fought a reapportionment that would have granted more representation to urban states while cutting House seats in rural states, arguing that people who lived on farms and in small towns were the heart and soul of America.
The battle between the rural and urban factions caused the House to fail to reapportion itself throughout the 1920s. When reapportionment finally did take place after the 1930 census, 21 states lost at least one House seat, while California nearly doubled its delegation.
That trend continued over the course of the 20th century due to population growth, migration and immigration. Ohio, for instance, has gone from a high of 24 representatives to 18, while Pennsylvania has dropped from 36 to 19.
California's delegation, on the other hand, has grown from 11 members in the 1920s to 53 today. Florida, Texas and Arizona have also seen similar exponential jumps.
The cap on the House's size also affects small states in unusual ways.
In 1950, Congress adopted "the method of equal proportions" which allocates House seats according to a complicated mathematical formula designed to minimize population variation among districts.
But the variance in size of congressional districts is still a source of controversy.
Seven states have only one member, but the population of those states is widely varying. Montana, which has only one at-large representative in the House, has a population of nearly a million, while Wyoming's at-large member represents roughly half as many constituents.
— Frances Symes, Congress.org