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By Root 1215 0

lucid. He could state a case unanswerably, illuminate an issue, destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. “Hardly time to ripen a strawberry,” he said to describe a lapse of two months. He had a way of phrasing things that was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own. In an argument over which of two fellow members, Berry or Curtis, was the taller, he asked them to stand up and be measured. When Berry uncoiled slowly to his full height, Reed said, “My God, Berry, how much of yourself do you keep in your pockets?” His epigrams were famous. “All the wisdom in the world consists in shouting with the majority” was one. “A statesman is a politician who is dead” was another. He rarely made a gesture when speaking. “When he stood up,” said Lodge, “waiting for an opponent to conclude, filling the narrow aisle, with his hands resting upon the desk, with every trace of expression banished from his face and looking as if he had not an idea and barely heard what was being said, then he was most dangerous.” After one retort which left its victim limply speechless, Reed, looking about him sweetly, remarked, “Having embedded that fly in the liquid amber of my remarks, I will proceed.”

His lucidity and logic were particularly effective under the “five-minute” rule. “Russell,” he said to a Representative from Massachusetts, “you do not understand the theory of five-minute debate. The object is to convey to the House either information or misinformation. You have consumed several periods of five minutes this afternoon without doing either.”

Reed made his point by narrating, not orating. Once when engaged in his favorite sport of baiting the adjoining chamber for which he felt a profound disrespect, he described a Presidential election fifty years in the future when by Constitutional amendment the President would be selected from among and by the Senators. “When the ballots had been collected and spread out, the Chief Justice who presided was observed to hesitate and those nearest could see by his pallor that something unexpected had happened. But with a strong effort he rose to his feet and through a megaphone, then recently invented by Edison, shouted to the vast multitude the astonishing result: seventy-six Senators had each received one vote.”

Discussing economic privilege during a tariff debate he told how, when walking through the streets of New York and contrasting “the brownstone fronts of the rich merchants with the unrewarded virtue of the people on the sidewalk, my gorge rises,… I do not feel kindly to the people inside. But when I feel that way I know what the feeling is. It is good honest high-minded envy. When the gentlemen across the aisle have the same feeling they think it is political economy.”

When word ran down the corridors that Reed was on his feet, about to speak, gossiping groups dissolved, members hurried to their seats, boredom and inattention vanished as the House listened expectantly for the sculptured prose, the prick of sarcasm and the flash of wit. Every member coveted the notoriety of debating with Reed, but he refused to be drawn by the “little fellows,” reserving himself only for those he considered worthy opponents.

Reporters, in the hope of eliciting a witticism, were always asking him for comments on the news of the day. They were not always successful. Asked to comment on a Papal message, he replied, “The overpowering unimportance of this makes me speechless.” Asked what was the greatest problem confronting the American people, he replied, “How to dodge a bicycle.”

After his first term, his nomination as Representative of Maine’s First District was never afterward contested. Elections were another matter and he almost lost the one of 1880 when he refused to compromise or equivocate on free silver despite strong “greenback” sentiment in Maine. He kept his seat on that occasion by only 109 votes. But as his fame grew he generally ran ahead of his ticket in the biennial elections. Even Democrats confessed to “voting for him on the sly.