Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [75]
3
End of a Dream
THE UNITED STATES: 1890–1902
3
End of a Dream
IN THE United States on the opening of Congress in January, 1890, a newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives was in the Chair. A physical giant, six feet three inches tall, weighing almost three hundred pounds and dressed completely in black, “out of whose collar rose an enormous clean-shaven baby face like a Casaba melon flowering from a fat black stalk, he was a subject for a Frans Hals, with long white fingers that would have enraptured a Memling.” Speaking in a slow drawl, he delighted to drop cool pearls of sarcasm into the most heated rhetoric and to watch the resulting fizzle with the bland gravity of a New England Buddha. When a wordy perennial, Representative Springer of Illinois, was declaiming to the House his passionate preference to be right rather than President, the Speaker interjected, “The gentleman need not be disturbed; he will never be either.” When another member, notorious for ill-digested opinions and a halting manner, began some remarks with, “I was thinking, Mr. Speaker, I was thinking …” the Chair expressed the hope that “no one will interrupt the gentleman’s commendable innovation.” Of two particularly inept speakers, he remarked, “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” It was said that he would rather make an epigram than a friend. Yet among the select who were his chosen friends he was known as “one of the most genial souls that ever enlivened a company,” whose conversation, “sparkling with good nature, was better than the best champagne.” He was Thomas B. Reed, Republican of Maine, aged fifty. Already acknowledged after fourteen years in Congress as “the ablest running debater the American people ever saw,” he would, before the end of the session, be called “the greatest parliamentary leader of his time,… far and away the most brilliant figure in American politics.”
Although his roots went back to the beginning of New England, Reed was not nurtured for a political career by inherited wealth, social position or landed estate. Politics in America made no use of these qualities, and men who possessed them were not in politics. Well-to-do, long-established families did not shoulder—but shunned—the responsibilities of government. Henry Adams’ eldest brother, John, “regarded as the most brilliant of the family and the most certain of high distinction,” who made a fortune in the Union Pacific Railroad, “drew himself back” from government, according to his brother. “He had all he wanted; wealth, children, society, consideration; and he laughed at the idea of sacrificing himself in order to adorn a Cleveland Cabinet or get cheers from an Irish mob.” This attitude was not confined to the rather worn-out Adamses. When the young Theodore Roosevelt announced his intention of entering politics in New York in 1880, he was laughed at by the “men of cultivated and easy life” who told him politics were “low” and run by “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors and the like,” whom he would find “rough, brutal and unpleasant to deal with.”
The abdication of the rich was born out of the success of the American Revolution and the defeat of Hamilton’s design to organize the State in the interests of the governing class. Jefferson’s principles and Jackson’s democracy had won. The founding fathers and the signers of the Declaration had been in the majority men of property and position, but the very success of their accomplishment ended by discouraging men of their own kind from participating in government. With the establishment of universal manhood suffrage, men of property found themselves counting for no more at the polls than the common man; being far outnumbered they retired from the combat. No President after the first six came