It was at a dinner in Washington that I had the good fortune to find
myself seated next to Thomas B. Reed, of Maine. It was a brilliant
occasion, for around the table sat well-known statesmen, scientists,
jurists, economists, and literary men, besides two or three who had
gained eminence in the medical profession. Mr. Reed was at his best,
"better than the best champagne." His conversation, sparkling with
good-nature, was not only exhilarating to his immediate neighbors, but
at times to the entire table. Being among friends, among the sort of
men he really liked, he let himself out as it were.
[Illustration: Thomas B. Reed, Portland Me, 17 July 1893]
Before the conversation had gone beyond the serious point I remember
asking the ex-Speaker how he felt at the time when the entire
Democratic press of the country had pounced upon him; when he was
being held up as "The Czar"--a man whose iron heels were crushing out
American popular government. "Oh," he promptly replied, "you mean what
were my feelings while the uproar about the rules of the Fifty-first
Congress was going on, and while the question was in doubt? Well, I
had no feeling except that of entire serenity, and the reason was
simple. I knew just what I was going to do if the House did not
sustain me;" and raising his eyes, with a typical twist of his mouth
which those who have seen it don't easily forget, he added, "when a
man has decided upon a plan of action for either contingency there is
no need for him to be disturbed, you know."
"And may I ask what you determined to do if the House decided
adversely?"
"I should simply have left the Chair, resigning the Speakership, and
left the House, resigning my seat in Congress. There were things that
could be done, you know, outside of political life, and for my own
part I had made up my mind that if political life consisted in sitting
helplessly in the Speaker's chair, and seeing the majority powerless
to pass legislation, I had had enough of it, and was ready to step
down and out."
After a moment's pause he turned, and, looking me full in the face
with a half smile, continued: "Did it ever occur to you that it is a
very soothing thing to know exactly what you are going to do, if
things do not go your way? You have then made yourself equal to the
worst, and have only to wait and find out what was ordained before the
foundation of the world."
"You never had a doubt in your own mind that the position taken was
in perfect accordance with justice and common sense?" I ventured.
"Never for a moment. Men, you see, being creatures of use and wont,
are naturally bound up in old traditions. While every court which had
ever considered the question had decided one way, we had been used to
the other. Fortunately for the country, there was no wavering in our
ranks."
"But how did you feel," said I, "when the uproar was at its worst,
when the members of the minority were raging on the floor together?"
"Just as you would feel," was the reply, "if a big creature were
jumping at you, and you knew the exact length and strength of his
chain, and were quite sure of the weapon you had in your hands."
This conversation gives a clear insight into the character of Thomas
B. Reed. It shows his chief characteristics: manly aggressiveness, an
iron will--qualities which friend and foe alike have recognized in
him--with a certain serenity of temper, a broadness, a bigness of
horizon which only the men who have been brought into personal contact
with him fully appreciate.
Standing, as he does, in the foremost rank of public men, one of the
leaders of his party, the public has certainly a right to know
something of the man. First of all, one thing about him has to be
emphasized; he lacks one of the traits that popular leaders too often
possess. He cannot be all things to all men. He is bound to be true to
his personal convictions, and he is not the man to vote for a measure
he detests, because his constituents clamor for it. Every one knows
how public men have at times voted against their earnest convictions,
and then gone into the cloak room and apologized for it; but it would
be difficult to imagine a man of Mr. Reed's composition in this role.
To judge a man well, to know his best side, it is necessary to see him
at home, and I cull from notes made several weeks ago, during a visit
to Mr. Reed in Portland.
I found Mr. Reed in a three-story corner brick house, on one of the
most sightly spots in town. Over the western walls of that modern,
substantial New England home there clambers a mass of Japanese ivy,
which, relieving the straightness of the architectural lines, gives a
pleasing something, an artistic touch, to the _ensemble_. Its owner
having shown his pride in that beautiful ivy, straightway took me to
the roof of the house, to admire the superb view of Casco Bay and the
picturesque expanse of country around Portland.
The stamp of the man's character is plain everywhere in that house.
The rooms are large, airy, and unpretentiously furnished, yet with
solidity and that certain winning grace of domestic appointments in
old New England. Much of Mr. Reed's work is done at his desk in a wee
bit of a room on the second floor, where crowded book-shelves reach to
the ceiling. His library long ago overflowed the confines of his den,
and books are scattered through the rooms on every floor; books,
bought not for binding nor editions, but for the contents, ranging
from miscellaneous novels to the dryest historical treatises, from
poetry to philosophy.
The library,[1] on the ground floor, where callers are usually
received, has among the inevitable book-shelves a few photographs of
masterpieces. Over the mantelpiece a painting of Weeks's shows that
the sympathies of the owner extend beyond that sphere to which the
great public is inclined to confine him.
[1] The picture which forms the frontispiece of the Magazine
represents him in this room, at his favorite seat by the
window.
Of the favorite haunts of Mr. Reed, the place of all to study his
social side is at his club, The Cumberland.
"You see," said Mr. Reed, "a club of this kind is only possible in a
conservative town like Portland, a staid, old place which grows
slowly, at the rate of about five or six hundred a year, where the
one hundred club members, while belonging to opposite political
parties, unite to a man in celebrating the victory of any of their
fellow-members. Most of them, friends from boyhood, have gone to
school together, and are known to one another but by their
Christian names." There the ex-Czar is always called "Tom," or
"Thomas, old boy," and there reigns supreme a fine spirit of
equality, or unpretentious "give and take" sort of intercourse,
which is really the ideal object of a club.
"Indeed, there is no place like it," said Reed. "It is the most
home-like club one can imagine; too small to have coteries, and with
lots of bright, sensible boys, quick at repartee. People talk of my
wit, but, I tell you, it's hard work to hold my own there; and then no
one can try to pose among us, or attempt to make a fool of himself,
but he is properly sat upon. Intercourse with your fellow-men in such
a _milieu_ is the best discipline I know of for a man--except that of
political life," he added, with his droll smile.
Of course Mr. Reed is interested in the welfare of Portland, and he
cherishes the idea that some day the city of his birth will become one
of the great cities of the continent. "Portland harbor is one of the
finest on the Atlantic coast. It is at least two days nearer Europe
than New York, and one day nearer Europe than Boston. The annexation
of Canada to the United States, or the union of the two countries, one
of which is bound to come in the course of time, will surely bring to
Portland the great prosperity that should be hers by reason of her
admirable harbor and her geographical position. And," he added, "while
I like the life in Washington, especially when the session is active
and there is plenty of work to do, it has never yet been the case that
I have left Portland without regret, or gone back to it without
pleasure."
[Illustration: MR. REED'S HOME IN PORTLAND.]
The frame house in which he was born still stands, shaded by two elms
of obvious age. Henry W. Longfellow was born just around the corner
from it, in a dwelling that marks the spot where, in 1632, one George
Cleeve built the first white man's habitation ever erected in the
territory now included in Portland's boundaries. The settlement was
called, in tender remembrance of an English field, "Stogumnor," and
its founder's life was one of almost ceaseless conflict, now with the
redskins and now with the white neighbors of other settlements, so
that Cleeve left behind him the impress of a bold, vigorous fellow.
His daughter married Michael Mitten, whose two daughters in turn
married two brothers named Brackett. One of the Brackett daughters
married a fisherman named Reed, whose descendant, Thomas Brackett
Reed, has exhibited, in a different way and under vastly different
circumstances, much of the nerve and daring that animated his stern
old fighting settler-ancestor, George Cleeve.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE ROOF OF MR. REED'S HOUSE.]
At nine Mr. Reed entered the grammar school, at eleven the high
school. He was sixteen years old when he completed his course in the
latter. His boyhood friends say he was fond of fun, though the amount
of knowledge he absorbed would indicate that he was also fond of
books; yet Mr. Reed himself confesses that literature in general, and
old romances in particular, attracted him more than text-books. He
still remembers his first schoolmaster, a spare young man, "the best
disciplinarian I ever knew," who had the art of holding a turbulent
school by finding out what was the particular spring he could touch to
control every one of his lawless boys.
"He had the pull on me," says Mr. Reed, "by simply holding over me in
critical moments the penalty of dismissal. You know, I had a sort of
inborn idea that the school was a great thing for me, and I knew that
my parents were too poor to afford to send me anywhere else, so I kept
straight along, doing my duty. It was the master's custom to allow
each boy who had no demerits to ring his bell before leaving the
class, and once for three days in succession I did not ring that bell.
I can see now the master coming to me, and saying: 'Tom, is it an
inadvertence?' 'No, sir.' 'Did you break the rules?' 'Yes, sir.'
'Why?' 'Because they were too hard.' 'Well, boy, you know what you can
do if the rules are too hard; you can leave school.' I hung my head,
and he went away, after a few moments of, to me, terrible silence,
saying: 'Never let me hear of this again, Tom.' And I replied: 'No,
sir.' And meant it."
On entering Bowdoin College in 1856, young Reed had a half-formed
desire of becoming a minister, which he relinquished, however, long
before his graduation. His life struggle began in earnest with that
first year at college, for he had to earn enough to pay his way as he
went along. His attendance at class recitations during the first term
of his freshman year was regular, but he found it necessary to drop
out the next two terms and earn some money by teaching. He kept up his
studies, however, without an instructor. All through the first part of
his college course young Reed devoted a great deal of time to
literature, to the neglect of his studies. While in the high school, a
garret in the house of one of his mother's relations had become his
Mecca. It was packed full of books, especially novels, and there he
was wont to journey twice a week, loading himself with volumes, over
which he spent his days and the best part of his nights. Mr. Reed says
that it was mostly trashy, imaginative stuff, but that it also was
full of delight, and in some ways full of information for him. To that
omnivorous reading he attributes in large part his knowledge of words,
and it was also, no doubt, an apprenticeship from which he naturally
stepped into higher literature.
Graduation was but little more than a year off, when, the contents
of the garret being exhausted, the young man realized to his
consternation that his class standing was very low. His place at the
end of the college course depended on his average class standing all
through. He had received none of the sixteen junior parts which were
given out during the junior year, and to his dismay the English
orations, corresponding to the junior parts at the end of the course,
were reduced to twelve. There was but one course open to the
ambitious, spirited boy--to offset the low average of his earlier
terms by an exceptionally high average during his last. Romances
and poems were laid aside, and from that time forward until
Commencement he was up at five in the morning, and by nine o'clock
every night he was in bed, and tired enough to drop asleep at once.
Mr. Reed says very frankly that he did not relish this regimen, for
by nature he is indolent. Apropos of this, it was a common saying
among his comrades that Reed would be somebody some day, if he were
not so lazy.
The consequences of his three years of novel-reading were such a
serious matter to him that he was afraid to go and hear the result of
the final examinations but remained in his room until a friend came to
tell him that he was one of the first five in his class in his average
for the entire course. This is the other side of Reed, "the lazy."
Besides this success, his oration on "The Fear of Death" won the first
prize for English composition. It was in delivering it that Mr. Reed
felt the first emotions of the orator, when every eye in the audience
was riveted upon him, and when the profound silence that prevailed
told the deep interest which his words aroused. Of the year's work
which won for him the privilege of delivering it on that Commencement
Day, thirty-three years ago, Mr. Reed says that it was the hardest of
his life, and the only time he has forced himself up to his full limit
for so long a period.
Graduation from college was not by any means the end of the struggle
for the young man. Money was still lacking, and to get it he engaged
in school-teaching, an occupation which he had already followed during
two terms, and in vacation times. He taught at first for twenty
dollars a month, "boarding round," and the highest pay he ever
received as a teacher was forty-five dollars a month. His old comrades
delight in telling an incident of his school-teaching days. He once
found it necessary to chastise a boy who was about his own age,
although he had been cautioned against whipping, by the members of the
committee of the district, unless he first referred the case to them.
But Reed was Reed even in those days. The committee having failed to
sustain him in the past, in this instance he decided that some one
must be master at school, and that he would be that some one.
Accordingly, the refractory young man was thrashed, after an exciting
quarter of an hour--a close victory, which one pound more avoirdupois
might have decided against the teacher.
Mr. Reed soon gave up school-teaching, and, thinking that a young man
would have a better chance out West, he went to California. Judge
Wallace, afterwards Chief Justice of California, examined Reed for
admission to the bar. It was in '63, during the civil war, when the
Legal Tender Act was much discussed in California, where a gold
basis was still maintained, that Wallace, whose office adjoined
the one where Reed was studying, happened in one day and said, "Mr.
Reed, I understand you want to be admitted to the bar. Have you
studied law?" "Yes, sir, I studied law in Maine while teaching."
"Well," said Wallace, "I have one question to ask. Is the Legal
Tender Act constitutional?" "Yes," said Reed. "You shall be admitted
to the bar," said Wallace. "Tom Bodley [a deputy sheriff, who had
legal aspirations] was asked the same question, and he said 'no.' We
will admit you both, for anybody who can answer off-hand a question
like that ought to practise law in this country."
[Illustration: MR. REED IN HIS LIBRARY.]
Reed's sojourn on the Pacific coast was short. In '64 he was made
Assistant Paymaster in the United States Navy, and served in that
capacity until his honorable discharge a year or so after. His
admission to practise before the Supreme Court of the State of Maine
followed on his return to the East. Cases came to the young lawyer
slowly. The first ones were in the minor municipal courts. Gradually
he secured a certain run of commercial and admiralty cases which began
to yield something tangible in the shape of fees. Yet the goal of
success seemed a long way off, when it happened that in one of those
minor cases he cross-examined a refractory witness in such a manner as
to completely overturn the testimony given, and thereby won the case
for his client. The unexpected result was that the witness who had
been upset by the young lawyer's skill conceived a great admiration
for him, and became influential in sending him many cases.
That he made his mark in his modest position is shown by the fact that
after two years, in 1867, Mr. Reed was nominated for the State
Legislature. Judge Nathan Webb, then County Attorney, who had known
Reed simply as his opponent in a number of cases, had proposed his
name, and, after six ballots, had succeeded in nominating him. The
first thing Reed knew about it was when reading the papers the next
morning, and his first impulse was to decline. When Webb came in he
urged him to accept, saying that a winter's legislative experience
would broaden and be in every respect valuable to him. Mr. Reed
accepted, and after serving two terms in the House he was elected to
the State Senate. Then he was made Attorney-General and afterwards
City Solicitor of Portland, and in 1876 he was for the first time
nominated to represent his district in the House of Representatives in
Washington.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE LIBRARY.]
At the very moment when Reed, escorted by one of his colleagues, took
a seat at the first convenient desk, on the day when he began his life
as a congressman, Mr. Reed's massive figure, suggestive of physical
strength; the easy and yet not offensive assurance with which he took
his seat and glanced with quizzical eye about the chamber; the
unaffected way with which he accepted congratulations from the New
England members who knew him, and the reputation he had already won as
a master of wit and the possessor of a tongue which could be eloquent
with sarcasm, all of these things so impressed Mr. S. S. Cox that he
turned to Mr. William T. Frye, then a member for Maine, and said:
"Well, Frye, I see your State has sent another intellectual and
physical giant who is a youngster here." "Whom do you mean?" asked
Frye. "This man Reed, who must be even now cracking a joke, for I see
they are all laughing about him."
But to maintain the reputation which his State had secured for
committing its interests to master men, Mr. Reed had a hard task
before him. Blaine, who had just passed from the House to the Senate,
had made Maine of preeminent influence by reason of his formidable
canvass for the presidential nomination. Eugene Hale and Mr. William
T. Frye represented in part the State in the House. Hannibal Hamlin
was a member of the Senate, and the tradition of the remarkable
intellectual achievements of William Pitt Fessenden, so long a senator
from Maine, was still so fresh in the minds of many members of
Congress that it was common to hear Mr. Fessenden spoken of as perhaps
the ablest senator since the days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. But,
unlike the stories that are told of the debuts of many statesmen, Mr.
Reed's first speech was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a
success. A success all the more brilliant because won under trying
circumstances.
A bill was under consideration to pay the College of William and Mary,
in Virginia, damages for the occupancy of its buildings by United
States troops during the war. It was one of an almost innumerable
class of similar claims in the South, and its payment would have
established a precedent that would at that time have opened the door
to the appropriation of millions of dollars. It had been put forward
as being the most meritorious of these southern war claims, in the
hope that the sympathy which could be aroused in behalf of the
venerable institution of learning making the claim (it dating back to
Washington's time, and being of a religious and eleemosynary as well
as educational character) would stir up a sentimental feeling by means
of which the other claims could be slipped through the House.
[Illustration: MR. REED'S BIRTHPLACE IN PORTLAND.]
Doctor Loring, a Republican member from Massachusetts, one of the most
polished and eloquent speakers in the House, had made a strong and
touching appeal, full of pathos and sentiment, in favor of the bill.
At the conclusion of his speech spontaneous applause burst from all
sides; Republicans and Democrats thronged to the desk of the orator to
congratulate and shake him by the hand. The scene was a memorable one.
Cries of "Vote," "Vote," rose from all parts of the House, and it
seemed inevitable that the bill would pass by an almost unanimous
vote.
At this juncture Mr. Reed arose. He has told that he would at that
moment have sold his opportunity to speak for a very insignificant
sum. He stood motionless for ten minutes, unable to utter a word.
Knowing that his only chance was to dominate the turmoil, he at last
raised his voice, and, after five minutes, he felt that he would have
a hearing. Slowly the excitement and noise quieted down, and for forty
minutes he was given the closest attention. The speech was so clear,
forcible, and convincing that, in spite of some break in the
Republican ranks, it recalled members of both parties from their
temporary emotional lapse and turned the tide against these dangerous
claims.
[Illustration: THE MEMBERS OF THE PENTAGON CLUB OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE. (MR.
REED IN THE CENTRE.)]
In '77 he was made a member of what was known as "The Potter
Committee," appointed to investigate the operations of the returning
boards in the South. Committee work was essentially congenial to Mr.
Reed. He delighted in cross-examinations, and his power of sarcasm and
of insinuating inquiry furnished the committee and the public with the
most dramatic scenes which occurred at any of its sessions. In
cross-examining a clever scoundrel, one Anderson, for instance, for
two whole days, he at last compelled him to admit that he was a
forger. "Who is this man Reed," every one began to ask, and the young
congressman found himself, perhaps more in his legal capacity than as
a legislator, famous.
It is not the purpose of this article to describe Mr. Reed's public
career, further than to say that there came a day when, upon the
departure of Mr. Frye from the House to the Senate, and the election
of General Garfield to the presidency, Mr. Reed passed, by common
agreement and without questioning, to the leadership of his party in
the House, and that, in the logical course of events, he was naturally
indicated as the candidate for the Speakership, when, in 1889, after
six years of minority, his party became a majority. What a magnificent
combination of assaults and eulogies his career as Speaker brought
forth is too vividly impressed upon the popular mind to need more than
mention.
During his public career Mr. Reed has manifested in a score or more of
verbal hand-to-hand conflicts his ability to meet an emergency to the
best advantage of his side. Always upon his feet when he scents
danger, he is as quick to scent it as any politician who ever occupied
a seat upon that floor. He is at all times as truly the master of all
his resources as ever Mr. Blaine was in that same tempestuous arena of
the House.
From the first he has shown himself that _rara avis_, a born
debater--aggressive and cautious, able to strike the nail right on the
head at critical moments, to condense a whole argument with
epigrammatic brevity. He has shown, to my judgment, better than any
parliamentarian living, how the turbulent battlings of great
legislative bodies, so chaotic in appearance, are not chaos at all to
one who has the capacity to think with clearness and precision upon
his feet. Such a man assimilates the substance of every speech and
judges its relative bearing upon the question. At the beginning it is
hard to tell where a discussion will hinge, but gradually, as the
debate goes on, the two or three points which are the key of the
situation become clear to the true _debater_. As I understand the art
of the _debater_, it is as if logs were heaped in confusion before
him, and the thing to do was to single out the one log which, when
removed, starts all the others flying down stream--an easier thing to
conceive than to accomplish, and which demands an alliance of widely
diverse qualities. I remember telling Mr. Reed once that it seemed to
me as if there must be in the temperament of the debater something of
the artist's nature--a little of the same instinct to inspire and
guide him. And I added: "Don't you, like the artist, draw for material
everywhere, from friend and foe alike, from things bearing directly
upon your subject as well as from things that are apparently more
removed from it? Don't you have something akin to inspiration?"
"Well, perhaps so," Mr. Reed answered, "and an anecdote occurs to my
mind which you may think fits your theory. An obscure chap got up once
and went for me in what was evidently a six months' laboriously
prepared invective. I hardly realized what he was about, except that I
had an impression of the man using words in the same frantic fashion a
windmill uses its arms in a blow. All the same, when he had finished
pitching into me, I could not but get up and return the compliment. I
had no more idea of what I was going to say than he had, when, by a
hazard, my eye caught in the sea of heads before me the face of
another representative from his State--a man who was one of the
leaders of his party--and instantly the answer flashed in my mind. I
had begun with something like 'This is only another echo of the
minority of the Fifty-first Congress, whose echoes are dying, not
musically, but dying. Gentlemen,' I continued, 'it is too much glory
for a State to furnish us with two such eminent representatives, the
one to lead the House, the other to bring up the rear.'
"But I want to tell you, while we are on this subject of the artist
and the orator," Mr. Reed continued, "that I believe there is as
much of a rhythm in prose as there is in poetry, and if a man has not
the intuitive feeling of that subtile thing, rhythm, he can never
amount to anything as an orator. Certain books of George William
Curtis--'Prue and I,' especially--have helped me as much as anything
to realize how delightful a quality rhythm is."
There is a side to Mr. Reed which few people suspect. He is a lover of
good novels, especially such novels as those of Balzac and Thackeray,
which present human nature in a rugged, truthful manner. I should
think that Mr. Reed would have about as much respect for a namby-pamby
novel as he has for a wishy-washy politician.
Of the English novelists he likes Thackeray by far the best.
"Pendennis," "The Adventures of Philip," and "The Virginians" he
esteems as his most interesting works, though Thackeray reached
high-water mark, in Mr. Reed's opinion, in "Vanity Fair." Charles
Reade, too, has found in him an assiduous reader. He thinks "The
Cloister and the Hearth" the finest and truest picture that has been
made of life in the fifteenth century, and that Charles Reade is the
best story-teller that ever wrote English.
In poetry his preference is for Tennyson, but he is a constant reader
of Browning, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier also. "Would you mind,"
said Mr. Reed, while talking of poets, "if I descend from the great
names and say that I have a great liking for the rhymes of a Kansas
lawyer, Eugene F. Ware, who writes over the nom-de-plume of
'Ironquill'? They are so direct; they present a moral in so few and
so strikingly well chosen words; and then they have just enough of
that quality of language which is always attractive because it is
language in the making. How do you like this example of Mr. Ware's
sturdy popular muse?
"'Once a Kansas zephyr strayed
Where a brass-eyed bull-pup played;
And that foolish canine bayed
At that zephyr in a gay,
Semi-idiotic way.
Then that zephyr in about
Half a jiffy took that pup,
Tipped him over wrong side up;
Then it turned him wrong side out.
And it calmly journeyed thence
With a barn and string of fence.