I was watching HBO's John Adams and 2012 Lincoln and they were yelling in 1865.
But congress today is very tedious and sleep inducing.
As others have mentioned, the yelling and shouting you are probably thinking of in the British Parliament is Prime Minister's Questions (PMQ). This is the image of Parliament that people are most familiar with, since it is the most dramatic and likely to be broadcast on television. It is also commonly broadcast because it is the format in which the current issues of the week are debated in a contemporary way, as opposed to debating a bill which might have taken years to respond to an issue. This is likely why you think of Parliament as loud and exciting. Outside of PMQ, most of the time Parliament is actually similarly as tedious and sedate as Congress. The majority of bills are passed by consensus and often there are very few people in the chamber. Parliamentarians are in their offices or in committees and come down for votes and then get back to their other work.
Congress does have its share of yelling and arguing - this is inevitable in any format where you get a lot of people in a room who disagree. For example, see this episode with Paul Ryan calling for a vote. What it doesn't have is half an hour set aside each day for the government to be questioned. Looking at the context, there seem to be two historical reasons contributing to this.
The first is that PMQ in its current form didn't exist until 1961. There is a relatively detailed outline of the development of Prime Minister's Questions in a response to an earlier AskHistorians question here.
As you can see, up until 1880, questions to the Prime Minister were treated as the same as questions to all other government ministers, and were more a regular part of the week rather than what they are now, which is high political theatre. The Constitutional Convention which shaped the fundamentals of Congress occurred in 1787. The Founding Fathers did to a degree get some ideas from the British Parliament, for example a bicameral legislature, but even if they were inclined to bring across PMQ to the Congress, it just didn't exist in its current state at that point in time. Rather than having a similar type of Question Time in Congress which got quieter while Parliament stayed loud, Parliament and Congress diverged at a certain point in history and evolved in different ways, with Parliament getting increasingly rowdy in its own way.
The increase in rowdiness in Prime Minister's Questions is laid out pretty well by the Speaker of the House of Commons in this 2010 speech. He notes that even in the early 60s PMQ was still relatively calm, and the PM was more likely to pass questions to the relevant Minister. A few different things began to happen - more generic questions began to be asked so the PM was less likely to pass them off to other Ministers. The Speaker also notes that in the 70s a high degree of personal animosity between Edward Heath as the PM and Harold Wilson as the opposition leader also exacerbated the situation. In the 1980s the Opposition Leader Neil Kinnock used strong questioning in PMQ as a way to raise his profile, a trend that was followed by subsequent Opposition Leaders. So over time politicians increasingly saw the value of PMQ as a tool of political imagery rather than of government, and adjusted their behaviour accordingly. The progression from substantive questioning to full-blown political posturing was recognised at the time as detrimental to the process (as it still is), and in 1995 a review was undertaken with a number of recommendations to adjust PMQ to make it more useful, for example separating it into an open questions session and a topic-based session. But these suggestions were not adopted, and so the trend continues to the present day.
While this is the historical background to note to the current situation with PMQ, it's also interesting to note that the Question Time in Australian Parliament, while slightly different in style, has a similar degree of yelling and posturing. This indicates that it is not just the specific British context that facilitates such behaviour, but it's also contributed to by the structure of Parliament, which Australia and the UK share, at least in the lower house. Leading me to my second point, that the other significant contributing factor is to do with the structure of the US Congress vs the UK Parliament.
In the Westminster system, the Prime Minister and other government ministers are members of the executive who also sit within the legislature. This is the same as in other Westminster style parliaments like Australia and Canada (though Australia actually has what we call a "Washminster" system since the upper house is a Senate like the US).
In the Westminster system, separation of powers between the executive and the legislature is highly blurred. While Prime Ministers are less prominent than US Presidents, they are more powerful than the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, despite similarly being the leader of the majority party in the lower house, because the Prime Minister is the leader of the country in a way that the Speaker is not. Therefore in PMQ, the Opposition is able to question the leader of the nation, who is also a member of the executive. This is where you can get a lot of juicy questions about current government activities, because it is the Prime Minister who is the leader of the country, and the executive who implements laws, while theoretically the legislature just makes them.
In contrast, in the US there is a strong separation of powers. The President as the head of the executive branch does not sit in Congress. When outlining the nature of Congress, the Founding Fathers were very concerned about the power of the executive and keeping it adequately corralled into its own limited sphere of influence, because they saw it as the executive, in the form of royal power, which was responsible for the tyranny that they rebelled against. The reason the Prime Minister is part of the executive in the Westminster system is because they are exercising the sovereign's executive power on the monarch's behalf and request. America was looking for something far removed from the British system, and so ended up with a highly separate executive branch. The President is the leader of the country and a member of the executive in a similar way to the Prime Minister, but since the President does not sit within Congress, they can't be questioned in the same way that the Prime Minister is.
The President does give a State of the Union address to Congress, so this can be seen as a political sibling of Question Time, though obviously the President does not respond to questions on the floor.
So overall, it's to do with the history of how PMQ developed in the UK, and also how the structure of government facilitates the Question Time format. Additionally I'm sure the increasing television coverage of government in the 20th century added fuel to the fire, creating a whole new medium for politicians to present themselves through. Politicians know the value of theatre, and a televised half hour where they can debate their opponents is perfect for that.
While the rowdiest part of UK Parliament is assuredly PMQ as /u/Comnena notes, that doesn’t cover the entirety of the decorum differences between UK and US legislative bodies. UK MPs are allowed, within limits, to cheer and jeer speakers during the course of normal debate. As the UK parliamentary website describes it:
The style of debate in the House has traditionally been one of cut-and-thrust; listening to other Members' speeches and intervening in them in spontaneous reaction to opponents' views.
This style of debate can make the Commons Chamber a rather noisy place with robustly expressed opinion, many interventions, expressions of approval or disapproval and, sometimes, of repartee and banter.
This kind of more somewhat more rowdy discourse was historically a feature of the US House of Representatives where parliamentary procedures were initially modeled after Westminster. In 1801, the US Senate adopted a new manual of parliamentary procedure (written by Thomas Jefferson). Among other provisions, the manual included the following lines about parliamentary decorum:
No member shall speak to another, or otherwise interrupt the business of the Senate, or read any printed paper while the Journals or public papers are reading, or when any member is speaking in any debate. Rule 2.
No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting, 6 Grey 332. Scob. 8. D'Ewes 332. col. 1. 640. col. 2. speaking or whispering to another; Scob. 6. D'Ewes. 487. col. 1. nor to stand up or interrupt him; Town. col. 205. Mem. in Hakew. 31. nor to pass between the Speaker and the speaking member, nor to go across the House; Scob. 6. or to walk up and down it, or to take books or papers from the table, or write there. 2 Hats. 171.
In 1837, House Rule XXIX, § 1105 adopted a revised version of Jefferson's Manual for the chamber. The rule remains in effect to this day. Although the details of the Manual and the rules governing House decorum are modified with each new congress.
Regarding OP's specific question: while perhaps the most infamous breach of decorum in congressional history (The Caning of Senator Charles Sumner) occurred during the run up to the Civil War, neither that period in history nor its cinematic portrayal are particularly representative of legislative debate in the era or before.
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