Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [79]
Though Reed scorned fence-building and never encouraged familiarity with the public, among intellectual equals “no more agreeable companion ever lived.” In the small world that was then Washington’s elite he was a jovial and radiant personality, a poker-player, storyteller and sought-after dinner guest. At one dinner party when the conversation turned on gambling, another famous raconteur, Senator Choate of New York, remarked somewhat unctuously that he had never made a bet on a horse or card or anything else in his life. “I wish I could say that,” a fellow guest said earnestly. “Why caaan’t you?” asked Reed with his peculiar twang. “Choate did.”
His table talk was enriched by the resources of a cultivated mind. His favorite poets were Burns, Byron and Tennyson, his favorite novel Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. He habitually read Punch, and Balzac in the original, of whom he said, “There is hardly a book of his which is not sad beyond words.” He had learned French after he was forty and kept a diary in that language “for practise.” The existence of a national library is owed to Reed, whose persistent and eloquent insistence finally wore out the natural parsimony of the House to secure adequate funds for the Library of Congress.
“No one was ever better to listen to or a better listener,” said Lodge, “for his sympathies were wide, his interests unlimited and nothing human was alien to him.” “We asked the Tom Reeds to dinner,” wrote a young friend of Lodge from New York, “and he was delightful.” Shortly afterward Reed, an advocate of civil service reform, obtained for the young man a post in Washington on the Civil Service Commission and thereafter, whenever the new Commissioner needed help on the Hill, Reed was ready to give it. Later when the young man from New York bestrode the national scene, Reed composed probably the most memorable tribute ever made to him: “Theodore, if there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” With a little less prescience he had also said, “Theodore will never be President; he has no political background.”
In 1889, however, Theodore Roosevelt proved politically useful to Reed in his intra-party contest against McKinley, Joe Cannon and two others for the Speakership. While ranching and hunting in the Northwest, Roosevelt campaigned vigorously, and with success, to ensure that the four new states which had just entered the Union—Washington, Montana and the two Dakotas—would send Republicans to the next Congress. On his return to Washington he opened personal headquarters in a back room of the old Wormley Hotel where he “rounded up” the new Congressmen’s votes for Reed. Although, to the despair of his supporters, Reed refused to fish for votes with the bait of promised committee appointments, he won nevertheless.
He now occupied the highest electoral office in the gift of his party next to the Presidency. “Ambitious as Lucifer,” in the opinion of Representative Champ Clark, who knew him well, he did not intend to stop there. He was determined, on taking up the gavel as Speaker, to put into effect a plan on which he had long deliberated, consulting no one, and on which he risked his political future. He knew that the fight would focus upon him the nation’s attention and also that if he failed his Congressional career would be over. The stakes were high: he would either break “the tyranny of the minority” by which the House was paralyzed into a state of “helpless inanity,” or he would resign.
The system Speaker Reed had decided to challenge was known as the silent—or disappearing—quorum. It was a practice whereby the minority party could prevent any legislation obnoxious to