Mr. Speaker!

The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed The Man Who Broke the Filibuster

James Grant

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451611090
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

James Grant's enthralling biography of Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the House during one of the most turbulent times in American history—the Gilded Age, the decades before the ascension of reformer President Theodore Roosevelt—brings to life one of the brightest, wittiest, and most consequential political stars in our history. The last decades of the nineteenth century were a volatile era of rampantly corrupt politics. It was a time of both stupendous growth and financial panic, of land bubbles and passionate and sometimes violent populist protests. Votes were openly bought and sold in a Congress paralyzed by the abuse of the House filibuster by members who refused to respond to roll call even when present, depriving the body of a quorum. Reed put an end to this stalemate, empowered the Republicans, and changed the House of Representatives for all time. The Speaker's beliefs in majority rule were put to the test in 1898, when the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor set up a popular clamor for war against Spain. Reed resigned from Congress in protest. A larger-than-life character, Reed checks every box of the ideal biographical subject. He is an important and significant figure. He changed forever the way the House of Representatives does its business. He was funny and irreverent. He is, in short, great company. "What I most admire about you, Theodore, " Reed once remarked to his earnest young protégé, Teddy Roosevelt, "is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments." After he resigned his seat, Reed practiced law in New York. He was successful. He also found a soul mate in the legendary Mark Twain. They admired one another's mordant wit. Grant's lively and erudite narrative of this tumultuous era—the raucous late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—is a gripping portrait of a United States poised to burst its bounds and of the men who were defining it.

Chapter 1
“Oh happy Portlanders”

THOMAS BRACKETT REED was born in Portland, Maine, on October 18, 1839, in a two-story wood frame house on Hancock Street, hard by the birthplace of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Reed home bore not a trace of resemblance to Lincoln’s log cabin, a fact about which Reed, Speaker of the House and presidential hopeful, was slightly defensive.

One day in Reed’s Washington office, a congressional aide, Amos Allen, was examining a photograph of the place. He showed it to the boss.

“That’s a pretty fair house to have been born in,” Allen observed.

“Yes, Amos,” said Reed. “But, you see”—pointing to a new addition—“I was not born in all that house.”

“Even so,” Allen persisted, “it is a pretty good house to have been born in.”

“Yes, but still,” Reed returned, “I was not born in more than two or three rooms of that house.”

Then again, there were only three or four Reeds on the premises—mother, father, boy and girl, Harriet, born in 1846—and the father, Thomas Brackett Reed Sr., a sailor and fisherman, sometimes spent the night afloat. Each side of the family was of 17th century, Pilgrim-and-Puritan stock, though Reed, in later life, was no more inclined to talk up his bloodline than he was to pass around the picture of his birthplace. Rather, he would say that he was descended from generations of fishermen and sailors and that, in making a genealogical investigation, he was hard pressed to prove that his ancestors ever existed.¹ Still, Thomas Reade, the first in the family to make landfall in America, in 1630, settled at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he accumulated land and honors.² And interwoven among the succeeding Reades, latterly Reeds, were strong and accomplished men and women. George Cleve, the principal founder of the colony of Maine, was a forebear of Mary Brackett, who married Joseph Reed, of York, Maine. Among their children was Thomas B. Reed, the father of the future Republican Speaker.

The senior T. B. Reed was born in 1803. The consensus of Portland opinion was that, in courting and winning his second wife, Mathilda Mitchell, he had married above himself. Miss Mitchell had beauty, intelligence, piety and a Mayflower-company bloodline. The neighbors agreed that she was the probable source of young Thomas’s brains. The boy was not yet three when the Reeds made a crosstown move to a little one-and-a-half-story house on Brackett Street. The absence of a stable in back meant that the family was only scraping by.³

To judge by the city statute book, over-exuberance came as naturally to Portland’s boys as it did to any other city’s. Under the law, it was forbidden to swim naked in public places, shoot off fireworks or fire guns in the streets, frighten the horses or jump rides on the back of horse-drawn conveyances. And there was to be no irreverence on Sundays. It was the law against Sabbath-breaking that marked Portland as a New England community with a still-living connection to the faith of John Calvin. Young Tom Reed had not turned five when Aaron Burnhan, “a child,” was fined 50 cents and court costs for fishing on Sunday. Not having that kind of money, the youngster went to jail.⁴

Fondly would Reed remember what fun he could have with a nickel, especially on the Fourth of July. A penny bought 10 firecrackers or two round cakes. Independence Day, Reed recollected, was the day of the boy: “All other days in the year he took a back seat, cowered in the darkness, or did his deeds of disorder behind fences or haystacks or in barns or sheds; but on the Fourth of July he came out openly and flouted the good citizens. What guns we used to use and what pistols!”⁵

And what theology! “[T]he happiness of the righteous, and the punishment of the wicked, will both be endless” was a fair sample of the Protestant doctrine still in place as Reed was growing up. Man was a fallen and sinful creature, “destitute of holiness and justly exposed to the wrath of God.” Salvation there could be through Jesus Christ, but “such is the depravity of the human heart that no person will come to Christ except the Father draw him.” By the same token, not just anybody could be drawn, only those so predestined. As for the young Sabbath-breakers, a Portland newspaper editorially advised the Almighty to lay them out in a sickbed.⁶

The Portland elders judged Reed’s generation to be just as depraved, idle and lawless as most generations of adults have appraised their own rising young to be. In church, children giggled, riffled through books and ate candy with their mouths open. There was worse. Parties went on well beyond the sensible hour of 9 PM and February 22 was commemorated not in remembrance of the first president of the United States but by mobs moving through the unlit streets with burning pails of pitch and by gangs doing battle, the Middle-Enders against the Lower-Enders, or the Hog-Towners against the Liberty Street boys.⁷ So it came to be that, in Portland, “Tarbucket Day” was a child’s first association with the birth of George Washington. “There is a sad want of comity and propriety, or what was once termed good manners, among a portion of our boys, while in the street,” attested the annual report of the Portland School Committee for 1841—“and, we wish we were not compelled to add, among our girls likewise.”⁸

To the naked eye, Portland seemed not at all close to civic or spiritual breakdown. Set on a three-mile-long peninsula sheltering Casco Bay from the Atlantic, it was ventilated, then as now, by health-giving sea breezes. Climbers to the summit of the Portland Observatory, 210 feet above sea level, could gasp at the beauty of the glittering bay to the southeast, with its white sails and awkward-looking, newfangled steamboats and its hundreds of green islands. The White Mountains, then as now, rose to the west, Mount Washington, 68 miles distant, lording it over the rest. Fog rolled in from the east or southeast, winter gales from the east or northeast, summer storms from the west. In all kinds of weather, sea gulls wheeled and screeched.⁹ Portland then had grand houses, rich merchants, rising entrepreneurs and thousands of sheltering trees. An arboreal census conducted in 1854 found 3,300 trees on 134 streets and lanes. “[N]o person builds a house on a respectable street but his first object is to plant trees about it,” reported the census-taker.¹⁰

The English novelist Anthony Trollope visited Portland on the eve of the Civil War. “The faces of the people tell of three regular meals a day, and of digestive powers in proportion,” the author of The Way We Live Now recorded. “Oh happy Portlanders, if they only knew their own good fortune. They get up early, and go to bed early. The women are comely and sturdy, able to take care of themselves without any fal-lal of chivalry; and the men are sedate, obliging and industrious.” Trollope confirmed that young people did attend parties and that young women could be seen walking home at 10 PM. Yet, he pointed out, each reveler carried her sewing basket. What kind of dissipation was this? “Probably of all modes of life that are allotted to man by his Creator, life such as this is the most happy.”¹¹

Prohibition was the secret of this felicity, to hear the reformers tell it. The famous “Maine Law” of 1851 banned the sale of beer, wine and liquor by retail establishments throughout the Pine Tree State. Trollope, for one, wrote off the law as another futile experiment in government coercion, but the city fathers didn’t doubt its necessity. They at least could see that Portland had a drinking problem.

The people drank because they wanted to or had to or even because their doctors advised them to. Alcohol made the long winters bearable and lightened the load of labor, especially the lumbering and fishing that the hard-bitten Maine men performed without the softening influence of women and children. Employers seemed not only to condone drinking, but almost to encourage it. Workers dropped tools at 11 AM and 4 PM when the town bell signaled grog time. No public hanging, firemen’s parade, militia day, cattle show, election day, wedding day, town meeting or Fourth of July was complete without good, hard, purposeful drinking. Sailors ashore needed no town bell or festival day as a pretext to get drunk, and not a few landsmen followed their example. In 1840, temperance advocates estimated, 500 Portlanders, out of a population of 12,000, were generally under the influence; 1,000 more were episodically drunk.¹² Then too, alcohol lubricated the wheels of commerce. Merchants sent their fish and timber to the West Indies in exchange for molasses and rum. The molasses, they turned into sugar or distilled into New England rum. The rum, they sold—or paid out in wages.¹³

Trollope insisted he saw no poor people in Thomas B. Reed’s hometown, but the Reverend William Hobart Hadley, the city’s minister at large, had seen plenty, a good many of them drunk. Hadley arrived in 1850, a decade before Trollope and a year before prohibition. “Unforeseen misfortunes and unavoidable casualties, produce a considerable amount of poverty and suffering,” he wrote of the epidemic of alcoholism he encountered. “These cases call for our kindest sympathies and most liberal charities. But the great mass of squalid poverty we witness, is the effect of idleness, prodigality and intemperance. This last named evil is the great and terrible scourge which afflicts our community, and produces more poverty and misery than all other causes combined.”¹⁴

The mature Reed had not one doubt that progress was the way of the world. “Far enough indeed are we from perfection,” he once addressed his Portland constituents. “But whoever doubts progress doubts God.” In the city of Reed’s youth, dogs, pigs and cows competed with well-booted pedestrians for right-of-way on the unpaved streets. Stagecoaches from Boston or northern Maine scattered the pedestrians. Wagons loaded with cheese, lumber and butter from Vermont and New Hampshire rumbled down to the waterfront to trade for tools, cloth, sugar, molasses and liquor, the latter especially welcome for the long drive home through the White Mountain Notch.

To the city fathers, lighting these thoroughfares—snow-choked in winter, miry in springtime, dusty in summer, pungent with manure in all seasons—seemed a frivolous extravagance. Certainly, it was out of the question in the straitened years following the Panic of 1837. Moonlight was more than bright enough for the criminal class, which seemed bolder every year. Was not the immigrant element of the city’s fast-growing population unusually prone to draw knives? Was it not remarkable that boys were “permitted to bellow through the streets, insult men and women, smoke in their faces, spit tobacco juice… and pull the bells and knockers of doors?”¹⁵ To many, it seemed so.

In 1849, the city government moved to establish a full-time, day-and-night police force.¹⁶ In the same year, it reconsidered its view of the utility of street lights. “[T]here is not a city in the Union of the size and importance of Portland that is not lighted,” a citizens group petitioned the City Council.¹⁷ Gas lamps appeared in the early 1850s.

Perhaps respectable Portlanders exaggerated the incidence of depravity in their midst, as respectable people sometimes do. The City Marshal’s Report for the 12 months ended April 1, 1854, reveals a grand total of 240 complaints: three for larceny, four for assault and battery, four for assault on city officers (by this time Portland had its own police force), a few dozen for selling liquor (now prohibited) and one for “keeping a gaming-house.” There had been one murder and one abduction. By far the largest number of offenses was for drunkenness, 202; the authorities had seized 4,027 gallons of illegal liquor.¹⁸ Of the 415 persons incarcerated in city “watch houses” over the course of the year, 127 were American citizens; most of the rest were Irish.

The heavenly city that Trollope visited lacked indoor plumbing. An 1848 law mandated the siting of outhouses, or “necessaries,” no closer than 20 feet from the house proper, a sign of refinement; 15 feet was the previous minimum lawful distance. A Portland barber pressed for the building of municipal baths by playing—unavailingly, as it turned out—to civic pride. In Boston, this advocate reported, Portlanders were mocked as the “great unwashed.”¹⁹

But the ruling spirit of the Portland of the 1840s and 1850s was neither riot nor dirt but progress. Most of the Western world was embarked on a golden age of prosperity and invention. Steam power propelled vessels and machinery with a degree of efficiency never before imagined. Trade among nations had increased wonderfully, and the telegraph linked distant cities. The 1848 California gold strike expanded the world’s wealth and imagination alike, even to distant Portland. The contagion known as “gold fever” found a carrier in the person of a jeweler’s son who returned home from his California prospecting adventure in February 1850 bearing $3,000 in bullion. But there were better ways of profiting from the gold discoveries in California (and Australia too) than by setting off for distant parts to dig. Within 15 years, the Portland Shovel Company was turning out as many as 2,400 shovels a day “of the most improved patterns,” to answer the demand from hopeful adventurers.²⁰

A spirit of commercial optimism infused Portland during Reed’s high-school years. Smoke belched from the Portland Sugar Company, with its two steam engines doing the work of no fewer than 75 horses while daily consuming 10 tons of anthracite coal. By 1849, 23 stationary steam engines were speeding the production of lumber, furniture and ships. They pounded piles, lifted grain, and powered presses, punches, planers, saws, drills and lathes. The pride and joy of the city’s manufacturing economy, the Portland Company, turned out railroad locomotives and rolling stock for sale throughout New England, the Canadian Maritime Provinces and beyond.²¹

Not all bowed down before the mighty steam engine, which made human labor easier but also, to a degree, redundant. It was steam power that caused Reed’s father, a man of sail, to quit the coasting fleet and take a job as mate on an oceangoing vessel—and, later, as a watchman at a sugar plant near the Portland waterfront.²² The coming of the railroads disturbed long-established overland trade patterns and seemed, at first, to rob Portland of its commercial reason for being. But a pair of local entrepreneurs, John A. Poor and William Pitt Preble, conceived a railroad connection with Montreal. The “wilting” of Portland, a sentiment much on the lips of Portlanders in the early 1840s, now gave way to talk of boom and, at some length, to the gorgeous thing itself. “It was a revival movement—and everybody but a few croakers was converted,” a historian of the times records. “The city loaned its credit in bonds to the amount of $2 million; 11 miles of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad were opened in 1848, and in 1853 it was finished to its junction with the Canada road from Montreal—a distance from Portland of 149 miles. The Grand Trunk Railway brought our city into connection not only with the towns and cities of Canada but the vast grain-growing regions of the West.”²³

Next came steam-propelled, seaborne connections to Liverpool, England, and the construction of Commercial Street, a mile-long, 100-foot-wide thoroughfare along the entire Portland waterfront. The Forest City was back in business again.²⁴

A PICTURE OF the young Reed participating in Portland’s Tarbucket riots or gang fights does not come easily into focus. The three-term S...