The House of Representatives was broken. The minority party had mastered the art of obstruction. The Speaker had nearly autocratic powers, but the opposition could use the rules to paralyze legislation. And it did. On controversial issues it would effectively shut down the House. Those issues included voting rights. Those issues included racial justice. It was the 1880s, and Southern racists were using poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and violence to prevent blacks from voting. This was before the realignment of the political parties, and on racial issues, in particular, it was the Democrats who were obstructing progress, the Republicans who were trying to move the country forward.
At six-foot-three and nearly 300 pounds, Thomas Brackett Reed was a giant of a man. He once was described as "a human frigate." He had been a teacher and an attorney before embarking on a steady ascent through the political ranks of Maine. Once elected to Congress, he quickly proved a master of both policy and procedure. He came to be known as the sharpest debater of his era, if not the entire history of Congress. As described by Edmund Morris:
Indeed, there was little to be said when the big man had the floor, for he gave off such waves of authority that few men dared contradict him.
An intellect who enjoyed Burns, Byron, Carlyle, Goethe, Tennyson and Thackeray, Reed kept a diary in French (which he had learned in his 40s), and read Balzac in the original. He played a key role in getting Congress to fund the construction of the modern Library of Congress. His acidic sarcasm didn't endear him to many, but among his friends were the formidable Henry Cabot Lodge and the young Theodore Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt's influence with the Congressmen from the new states of Washington, Montana and the Dakotas that in 1890 secured Reed the Speakership over William McKinley and Joseph Gurney Cannon. Barbara Tuchman:
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."
When asked about a Papal message, he responded, "The overpowering unimportance of this makes me speechless." When asked about Republicans possibly nominating him for the presidency, he remarked, "They could do worse, and they probably will." When refusing to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he added, "but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it." On a separate occasion, he wryly observed that, "A statesman is a politician who is dead."
The 51st Congress began with Democrats trying to block the seating of four Southern Republicans who had won hotly contested House seats. Two of those Republicans were black. Among the bills Democrats would oppose (not all of them good) would be Lodge's Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which would have strengthened the 15th Amendment by allowing federal courts to intervene if it was deemed that the state officials who always had been responsible for protecting voting rights weren't doing so. In the South, that would have meant federal safeguards against local officials who were intent on disenfranchising rather than protecting black voters. The Republicans controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress, but House Democrats had the means of preventing motions and legislation from even coming to votes. But Reed planned to change the nature of how the House did and didn't function.
Tuchman:
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 it by refusing a quorum, that is, by demanding a roll call and then remaining silent when their names were called. Since the rules prescribed that a member's presence was established only by a viva voce reply to the roll, and since it required a majority of the whole to constitute a quorum, the silent filibuster could effectively stop the House from doing business.
It needs be emphasized that Reed did not know if he would be successful. He did not count the votes or poll opinions before moving ahead. It was an enormous political gamble, and he was willing to take it, risking his career, in the process, because he knew it had to be done.
Tuchman:
To Reed the issue was survival of representative government. If the Democrats could prevent that legislation which the Republicans by virtue of their electoral victory could rightfully expect to enact, they would in effect be setting aside the verdict of the election. The rights of the minority, he believed, were preserved by freedom to debate and to vote but when the minority was able to frustrate action by the majority, "it becomes a tyranny." He believed that legislation, not merely deliberation, was the business of Congress. The duty of the Speaker to his party and country was to see that that business was accomplished, not merely to umpire debate.
Reed's solution was as simple as it was revolutionary. Sean Dennis Cashman:
On January 29, 1890, Reed instructed the clerk to record members as present even if they refused to respond to the quorum call.
Tuchman has the reaction:
Instantly, according to a reporter, "pandemonium broke loose. The storm was furious . . . and it is to be doubted if ever there was such wild excitement, burning indignation, scathing denunciation and really dangerous conditions as existed in the House" during the next five days. Republicans were wildly applauding, all the Democrats were "yelling and shrieking and pounding their desks" while the voice of their future Speaker, Crisp of Georgia, boomed, "I appeal! I appeal from the decision of the Chair!" The explosion was "as violent as was ever witnessed in any parliament," a member recalled later.
Reed calmly continued counting the role. When one Democrat shouted that the Speaker had no right to count him as present, the unfazed Reed responded, "The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it?" At the end of the count, and with the House still in an uproar, Reed roared above it that a Constitutionally defined quorum was present. The furor grew worse. The aisles were so crowded that one Democrat who had been a Confederate general leaped from desk to desk, to reach the front. Another Democrat remained in his seat, whetting a knife on his boot. At the request of a Republican, Reed allowed the House to debate the ruling, and for four days the tumult continued.
Tuchman:
A group breathing maledictions advanced down the aisle threatening to pull him from the Chair and for a moment it looked to a spectator "as if they intended to mob the Speaker." Reed remained unmoved. Infected by the passion on the floor, visitors and correspondents in the galleries leaned over the railings to shake their fists at the Speaker and join in the abuse and profanity. "Decorum," lamented a reporter, "was altogether forgotten. Members rushed madly about the floor, the scowl of battle upon their brows, . . . shouting in a mad torrent of eloquent invective." They called Reed tyrant, despot and dictator, hurling epithets like stones. Among all the variants on the word "tyrant," "czar" emerged as the favorite, embodying for its time the image of unrestrained autocracy, and as "Czar" Reed, the Speaker was known thereafter. The angrier the Democrats became, the cooler Reed remained, bulking hugely in the chair, "serene as a summer morning." Although his secretary saw him in his private room, during an interval, gripping the desk and shaking with suppressed rage, he never gave a sign in the hall to show that the vicious abuse touched him. He maintained an iron control, "cool and determined as a highwayman," said the New York Times.
The secret of his self-possession, as he told a friend long afterward, was that he had his mind absolutely made up as to what he would do if the House did not sustain him. "I would simply have left the Chair and resigned the Speakership and my seat in Congress." He had a place waiting for him for the private practice of law in Elihu Root's New York firm, and "I had made up my mind that if political life consisted in sitting helplessly in the Speaker's Chair and seeing the majority helpless to pass legislation, I had had enough of it and was ready to step down and out." Coming to such a decision, he said, "you have made yourself equal to the worst" and are ready for it. This has a very "soothing" effect on the spirit.
The media were merciless, and the controversy contributed to the Democrats' success in that year's elections. With a majority large enough always to be able to call a quorum, they repealed Reed's Rules. But when their own majority was whittled down in the next round of Congressional elections, Reed was ready. His stand had been principled, not partisan.
Tuchman:
Over and over he demanded roll calls and when Bland of Missouri stormed against this "downright filibuster," he countered instantly, "Downright? You mean upright." His control over his party, as minority leader no less than as Speaker, remained total. "Gentlemen on that side blindly follow him," Speaker Crisp said wistfully. "You will hear them privately saying, 'Reed ought not to do that,' or 'This is wrong,' but when Reed says 'Do it,' they all step up and do it." When at last the Democrats had to give way, and for the sake of their own program, re-adopt his quorum-counting rule Reed refrained from crowing. "This scene here today is a more effective address than any I could make," he said. "I congratulate the Fifty-third Congress."
The point was made. So was history. A 1910 revolt against Cannon would strip the Speaker's autocratic powers, but there would be no return to the silent quorum. In the House, an obstructionist minority could not overturn the results of an election. A united majority could pass its agenda. Of course, the Senate was a different matter, as it continues to be. In fact, the 1890 Senate compromised away the Elections Bill, which delayed the protection of voting rights until the 1960s.
Despite the media hyperventilations about his having supposedly destroyed his party, Reed got another chance to sit in the Speaker's chair. The Panic of 1893 led to the realignment election of 1894. It was the economy, stupid. As explained by Charles W. Calhoun:
The election of 1894 proved to be a turning point in American political history. The Republicans gained the most from the voters' repudiation of the Cleveland administration. They picked up 117 seats in the House of Representatives while the Democrats dropped 113 seats. The largest transfer of strength from one party to another in the history of the United States had taken place. In the Senate the GOP added five seats to its total. Even these figures disguised the extent of the Democratic disaster. In twenty-four states, no Democrat won election to a national office.
The election of 1894 produced one of the most crucial results in a nonpresidential race in the history of the country. The outcome put an end to the stalemated politics that had emerged during the 1870s. In fact, the Republicans had established an ascendancy with the American voter outside the South that would endure for a generation, until Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
But Reed's own political career soon would end. In 1896, Lodge and Roosevelt tried to win him the Republican nomination to the presidency, but their efforts were thwarted by McKinley's fixer, Mark Hanna. But Reed soon broke with Lodge and Roosevelt over the jingoism that led to the Spanish-American War. Reed saw it as a blatant move toward imperialism, something the United States had until then largely avoided. Unlike many, he was not excited by George Dewey's naval victory at Manilla Bay, recognizing in it an ominous portent. He opposed military intervention in Cuba. He tried to block the annexation of Hawai'i. But he knew this was one political battle he could not win. Evan Thomas:
Reed knew that his intransigence was untenable. A decade earlier he had built his name and his power arguing the unfairness of the minority thwarting the majority to smash the old silent filibuster. Now he looked like a single man defying the will of the many.
He dropped his opposition, and the House voted to annex Hawai'i. Reed had lost his passion for politics. In 1899, when the House approved the Treaty of Paris, which gave the U.S. sovereignty over the Philippines, Reed was done.
Tuchman:
To retain office as Speaker would be to carry through a policy in the Philippines abominable to him. It would be to continue as spokesman of the party of Lincoln, which had been his home for so long and which had now chosen, in another way than Lincoln meant, to "meanly lose the last best hope of earth." To his longtime friend and secretary, Asher Hinds, he said, "I have tried, perhaps not always successfully, to make the acts of my public life accord with my conscience and I cannot now do this thing."
When Congress closed session that April, he put out word that he would be resigning both as Speaker and from Congress, to pursue a career in law. Later that year, while traveling in Europe, he arrived unannounced to lend moral support to American negotiator Andrew Dickson White, at the international First Peace Conference, at The Hague.
Reed couldn't prevent America's developing overseas expansionism and militancy, but because of him, the House of Representatives remains a much more democratic institution. In their definitive history of the filibuster, Gregory J. Wawro and Erick Schickler summarize what Reed accomplished, and what the Senate continues to avoid:
This "revolution"—which reversed decades of prior practice—had profound consequences for obstruction in the House, virtually ending its viability as an effective strategy for opposing legislation in that chamber (see Schickler 2001). The severe limitations on individual prerogatives that were imposed in the House demonstrated the possibility that a similar approach to curtailing obstruction could have been pursued in the Senate (cf. Koger 2002). In fact, while the counting of quorums (i.e., counting legislators who are present even though they do not respond to a call of the roll) is more closely associated with Reed's attempts to crack down on obstruction in the House, several rulings in the upper chamber established precedents regarding the counting of quorums long before Reed's revolution. It was clear to senators that they had the option of pursuing a Reed-like solution to problems caused by obstruction in their own chamber.
The Senate didn't pursue it then, and as the past year has proved, the nation continues to suffer for it. In the next Congress, we need the Reed-like solution to be emulated as a Reid-like solution.