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 Brackett 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.”

On this day in the early weeks of the Fifty-first Congress the Speaker had determined to put into effect a plan on which he had long deliberated, had consulted no one, and had risked his political future. 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. Without a flicker of expression on the great white moon face, “the largest human face I ever saw,” as a colleague described it, without any quickening of the drawling voice, he announced a certain new ruling to the Clerk. Instantly, according to the reporter for the Associated Press, “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.

The system Reed had decided to challenge was known as the silent—or disappearing—quorum. It was a practice by which the minority party could prevent any legislation obnoxious to it by refusing a quorum. A quorum was presumed to be present unless questioned, but the rules permitted a roll call upon demand of a fifth of the membership. Minority members would demand the roll and then remain 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. For nonpartisan matters the quorum would reappear, only to vanish again as soon as a vote was asked on any pending bill opposed by the minority. The process could be repeated interminably until the majority dropped the bill.

So practiced had members become in what Reed called “this peculiar art of metaphysics which admits of corporeal presence and parliamentary absence” that the previous Congress had been held absolutely stationary

for two weeks by such tactics. During the last session there had been four hundred roll calls, of which Reed calculated that three hundred were deliberately obstructionist and amounted to “spending a whole month of our time calling over our own names.” The result was a “demoralized” House and “legislative anarchy.”

The silent quorum had had a progenitor as strongwilled as its now would-be executioner. John Quincy Adams, when he entered the House in 1832 after leaving the White House, became the first member ever to violate the House rule requiring members to vote when present. Though warned that he might be setting a dangerous precedent, Adams remained adamant for the rest of his term and thereafter the practice grew until it became more blighting than the Senate filibuster because it was so effortless in comparison. Whereas senators had to stand up and talk a bill to death, representatives had only to sit back in their seats and be silent. As a cure for the evil a proposal had twice been made in earlier Congresses to establish a quorum by actual count of those present instead of by yea and nay response to a roll call. Reed himself had denounced this plan when it was proposed in 1879 by John Randolph Tucker of Virginia, a distinguished constitutional lawyer but regrettably a Democrat. The awful consequences of declaring a quorum on any other basis than a viva-voce yea and nay were prophesied by that other remarkable man from Maine and then Speaker, James G. Blaine.

“Gentlemen,” he had warned, “the moment you clothe your Speaker with power to go behind your roll call and assume that there is a quorum in the Hall, why, gentlemen, you stand on the very brink of a volcano!”

But Republican circumstances were now so different that Reed was ready to dare the brink, indeed had to if his term as Speaker were not to be squandered in futility as a prisoner of the minority. The recent election of 1888 had been a Republican victory in which for the first time in sixteen years one party controlled both Executive and Congress. But by barely a hair. The dour Benjamin Harrison was a minority President who had lost to Cleveland in popular vote and sat on that unstable throne so oddly carpentered by the Electoral College system. The Re- publican majority in the House was a mere eight, 168160, only three more than a quorum, which was set at 165. To pass any party legislation, especially the Mills bill for a protective tariff, which was the cherished Republican goal and burning issue of the decade, the whips would have to round up and keep in their seats the whole Republican membership at every session, with no more than three absences allowed for sickness, traveling, lobbying, constituent-greeting, or any other activity. Outside of a prison such control of the inmates was impossible. Already by early January one Republican had died,

several were ill in bed, and one had gone home to attend a dying wife.

The Democrats had already served notice that they intended to obstruct legislation when, on the opening day, they had demanded tellers for adoption of the Rules, normally a routine matter. Their policy was not simple negativism but a stern setting of ranks against enactment of the Mills bill as well as the Force bill for supervising elections (a measure directed against the poll tax and other southern devices). The Democratic minority was equally determined to prevent a vote on the seating of four Republicans, two of them Negroes, in contested elections from southern districts.

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.

What use were elections if, as he later said to his constituents, nothing could be done that the beaten party would not have done itself? Why should statesmen battle for “power with responsibility” if their defeated opponents could have “the same power without responsibility?” He quoted the Koran: ’“Dost thou think, O Man, that we have created the heavens and earth in jest?’ Are elections a farce and is government by the people a juggle? Do we marshal our tens of millions at the polls for sport? If there be anything in popular government it means that whenever the people have elected one party to take control of the.House or the Senate, that party shall have both the power and the responsibility. If that is not the effect, what is the use of the election?”

To be sure, the issue had been less clear to Reed when the Republicans had been in the minority, but he had been moving toward this moment of resolution since his first nomination for the Speakership in 1885. Defeated at that time by the Democratic majority, he had since then been leader of his party in the House and now was leader of the House. In those days it was a post of tremendous influence. Since the Speaker was ex-officio chairman of the Committee on Rules, whose two Republican and two Democratic members cancelled each other out, and since he had the right to appoint all committees, the careers of members and the course of legislation depended on his will. In Reed’s hands was now the “power with responsibility,” and, notwithstanding a famous dictum, power has other effects

than only to corrupt: it can also enlarge the understanding. It sometimes begets greatness. The Speaker’s office, which the Washington Post called “no less consequential than the Presidency,” could be a steppingstone to that ultimate peak. Reed was not the man either to miss his opportunity or to meet it feebly.

He had sprung from the rib of that hard northern corner of New England with the uncompromising monosyllabic name. When he was born in 1839 his ancestors had been living in Maine for two hundred years. Through his mother he was descended from a Mayflower passenger and through his father’s mother, from George Cleve, who came from England in 1632, built the first white man’s house in Maine, and was founder of the Portland colony and its first governor. The Reed who married Cleve’s great-great-granddaughter came of a fishing and seafaring family. Never landed in a large sense nor wealthy, these forebears and their neighbors had striven over the generations to maintain a settlement on the rock-ribbed soil, to survive Indian attack and isolation and snowbound winters. The habit of struggle against odds was bred into Thomas Reed’s blood. His father, captain of a small coastal vessel, had mortgaged his home to send his son to Bowdoin. To maintain himself at college Reed taught school, walking six miles to and from his lodgings each day. The sons of Portland families went to Bowdoin not to satisfy social custom but to gain a serious education. As most of them were situated in circumstances like Reed’s, the semesters were arranged to allow for teaching school in winter. Reed intended himself for the ministry but, sitting up nights on the bed in his attic room reading aloud with a college friend Carlyle’s French Revolution , Goethe’s Faust and Werther , Macaulay’s Essays , and the novels of Thackeray and Charles Reade, he formed religious convictions that were too individual to submit to a formal creed. After graduating in 1861 he studied law while continuing to teach for twenty dollars a month and “boarding round” in local families.

The Civil War did not engulf him until 1864, when he joined the Navy and saw service of a none-too-bellicose nature on a Mississippi gunboat. He was commissary officer and would freely admit in later life that he had never been under fire. The usual aura of glory and glitter of gallantry that gradually encrust most wartime memories were no part of Reed’s. “What a charming life that was, that dear old life in the Navy,” he would say when others took to recalling the war, “when I kept grocery on a gunboat. I knew all the regulations and the rest of them didn’t. I had all my rights and most of theirs.” He was to repeat the method in Congress with similar result.

When admitted to the bar in Maine in 1865 Reed was a tall, strong young man

of twenty-five with a square, handsome, hard-boned face and thick blond hair. During the next ten years he served as city counsel for Portland, was elected to the state legislature and then to the state senate, was appointed attorney general for Maine, married, became a father, and grew fat. His hair thinned until he was almost bald, his figure bellied out until, as he walked down the streets of Portland, he resembled “a human frigate among shallops.” Silent, impassive, with an inward-turned eye, noticing no one, he moved along with the ponderous, gently swaying gait of an elephant. “How narrow he makes the street look!” a passer-by once exclaimed.

In 1876, the year of the contested Hayes-Tilden election, when partisan animosity was at its bitterest since the war, Reed at thirty-six was elected to Congress in place of Blaine, who moved up to the Senate. Appointed to the committee formed to investigate the Democrats’ charges of electoral fraud, he cross-examined witnesses with such suavity slashed by sudden rapier cuts that the performance drew spectators for its forensic artistry and made him nationally prominent. In subsequent Congresses he became a member of the all-important Rules Committee and chairman of the Judiciary Committee while, session by session, perfecting his knowledge of House procedure and parliamentary device.

A body of rules had grown up “calculated better than anything else,” as a colleague said, “to obstruct legislation,” a body as full of “intricacies and secrets” as the armamentarium of a medieval cabalist. Reed mastered it. “In my opinion there never has been a more perfectly equipped leader in any parliamentary body at any period,” said a professional observer, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Reed not only knew parliamentary practice and law but “understood as few men do the theory and philosophy of the system.” Whether consciously or not, he was preparing for the time when as Speaker he would be able to impress upon the House a sense that no one on the floor could compete with the Chair in command of the rules.

With this alone he could not have imposed his authority if he had not also been “the finest, most effective debater,” in Lodge’s opinion, “that I have ever seen or heard.” He never used an extra word, never stumbled in his syntax, never spoke, even extemporaneously, in other than perfectly formed sentences. To listeners these seemed to fall from his lips “of their own accord”; in fact they were the product of a lifetime’s reading and a feeling for the rhythm of English prose that was natural in an admirer of Macaulay. Reed was instant in rejoinder, never at a loss, never forced to retreat or modify a position. He was terse, forcible, 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.

His epigrams were famous. “All the wisdom in the world consists in shouting with the majority,” was one. Another was his reply when asked to define a statesman: “A statesman is a politician who is dead.” 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 hardly 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: 76 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 highminded 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.

After his first term, his nomination as representative L 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.” “He suited the taste of New England,” said Senator Hoar of Massachusetts. “The people liked to hear him on public questions better than any other man not excepting Blaine or McKinley.” The reason was perhaps the same as that given by an Englishman to explain the secret of Palmerston’s popularity: “What the nation likes in Palmerston is his you-be-damnedness!”

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 practice.” 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’s 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: “What I admire about you, Theodore, 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, Roosevelt proved politically useful to Reed in his intra-party contest against McKinley, Joe Cannon, and two others for the Speakership. Now that his party would control the new House, Republican nomination was no longer an empty

honor but conferred the office itself. The struggle was intense. At the same time the two Dakotas, Washington, and Montana were to enter the Union, and Roosevelt, while ranching and hunting in the Northwest, campaigned vigorously—and with success—to ensure that their representatives in the next Congress would be Republicans. On his return to Washington he opened personal headquarters in a back room of the old Wormley Hotel, where he “rounded up” the new men’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. In those days the lame-duck session still met from December to March and a new Congress did not convene until the following December, thirteen months after its election. Reed took up the gavel in December, 1889.

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. Although his decision to attack the silent quorum was made on principle, he well knew that the fight would focus upon him the nation’s attention and also that if he failed, his congressional career would be over. But, as another senatorial observer, Tom Platt of New York, said, he was “supremely fearless.” He reached his decision and planned his campaign alone, partly because no one else would have thought there was a chance of success and partly because he was not sure that even his own party would support him.

There were indications that they might not. Because of the Republicans’ wafer-thin majority and Reed’s known views on the silent filibuster, it was clear that quorum-counting would be an issue in the new Congress. Rumors of coming battle rumbled over the Hill and in the press. REED WILL COUNT THEM, predicted a Washington Post headline, and the story beneath it said that even Mr. Cannon, Reed’s closest lieutenant on the Rules Committee and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was opposed to such a course. The Democrats were manning their defenses. Ex-Speaker Carlisle let it be known that any legislation enacted by a quorum which had not been established by “recorded vote” would be taken to court as unconstitutional.

Reed had carefully examined the constitutional and legal aspects in advance and satisfied himself that he would be upheld if it came to law. On the attitude of his own party he was prepared to gamble. He shrewdly judged that if the Democrats in their rage took, and he allowed them, sufficient liberty of invective, they would provoke the Republicans to rally to his support. When the first of the contested elections, Smith vs. Jackson of West Virginia, appeared on the schedule for January 29, he was ready. Shortly before noon he summoned the members of the Rules Committee, including McKinley and Cannon, to the Speaker’s room

to inform them of the “outrage” he was about to perpetrate. A messenger came to say that it was twelve o’clock just as one of the committee asked Reed when he was going to launch his offensive. “Now,” said the Speaker, and went into the chamber.

As expected, when a vote was called on the case of Smith vs. Jackson, the Democrats raised a cry of “no quorum” and demanded a roll call. It produced 163 yeas, all Republican, two less than a quorum. Reed’s moment had come. Looking squarely at the faces in front of him, he drawled, “The Chair directs the Clerk to record the names of the following members present and refusing to vote,” and began reading off the names himself.

The House erupted in uproar, some Republicans wildly applauding, all the Democrats “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. Unruffled, expressionless, the Speaker continued his counting, “Mr. Blanchard, Mr. Bland, Mr. Blount, Mr. Breckinridge of Arkansas, Mr. Breckinridge of Kentucky…”

Up jumped the Kentuckian “famous for his silver hair and silver tongue.” “I deny the power of the Speaker and denounce it as revolutionary!” he called.

The resonant twang from the Chair continued unregarding, “Mr. Bullock, Mr. Bynum, Mr. Carlisle, Mr. Chipman, Mr. Clement, Mr. Covert, Mr. Crisp, Mr. Cummings,” through hisses and catcalls and cries of “Appeal!” irresistibly rolling down the alphabet. ”…Mr. Lawler, Mr. Lee, Mr. McAdoo, Mr. McCreary…”

“I deny your right, Mr. Speaker, to count me as present!” bellowed McCreary.

For the first time the Speaker stopped, held the hall in silence for a pause as an actor holds an audience, then blandly spoke: “The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it?”

He went on with his count, unmoved by the protests, denials, cries of “Order!” that rose to bedlam, through the S ’s and T ’s to the end. Then suddenly, seeming to gather all the power of his huge body, projecting all the force of his commanding personality, and raising the voice that could fill any hall when he wanted, he announced that he would now state his reasons and pronounce his ruling. The House fell quiet, as a cat quiets with twitching tail before its spring.

Reed cited the constitutional power of the House to compel attendance of members by a sergeant at arms. This power was meaningless, he said, if members refused, though present, to be counted toward a quorum. Within the intention of the Constitution, “attendance is enough. If more were needed the Constitution would have provided for more.”

“The Chair thereupon rules that there is a quorum present within the meaning of the Constitution.”

Tumult even worse than before followed. Breckinridge of Kentucky demanded a point of order on the ground that the Chair had no right to make such a ruling. “The Chair overrules the point of order,” declared Reed coolly.

“I appeal the decision of the Chair!” shouted Breckinridge.

“I move to lay the appeal on the table,” quickly interposed an alert Republican, Payson of Illinois. As this motion, if carried, would have shut off debate, the Democrats foamed with rage. A hundred of them “were on their feet howling for recognition,” wrote Dunn of the AP. Little Joe Wheeler, a famous former Confederate cavalry general, unable to reach the front because of the crowded aisles, came down from the rear, “leaping from desk to desk as an ibex leaps from crag to crag.” As the excitement grew wilder, the only Democrat not on his feet was a huge representative from Texas who sat in his seat significantly whetting a bowie knife on his boot.

Upon Payson’s motion another Republican, Butterworth of Ohio, said he believed “we should have debate” on such an important matter. He was supported by McKinley. Although there was a real possibility that tradition-tied members of his own party might desert, Reed allowed it. The debate was to last four days, with the Democrats fighting every inch of the way, insisting on readings of every word of the Journal, on appeals and points of order and roll calls, each of which was met by Reed imperturbably counting off the silent members as present and evoking each time further infuriated defiance. Tension broke briefly when Representative Spinola of New York, pointing to a picture of the siege of Yorktown on the wall, accused the Speaker of counting the Hessians in the background to make up his quorum. Otherwise, “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, even threatening to pull him bodily from the chair. “Decorum,” lamented a reporter, “was altogether forgotten.” The clamor of the Democrats moved one Republican, Landis of Indiana, to suggest that if members across the aisle “shouted until the acoustics bled, it was prima facie evidence that they were in the vicinity and could be counted.” 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. Whatever their initial doubts, Republicans, stung to partisan emotion, cheered and applauded and whistled as each tactic tried by the Democrats was ruled out of order by Reed. The angrier they became, the cooler he 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 after, 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.

It did more than soothe: it gave him an imbedded strength that men who fear the worst, or will yield principles to avoid the worst, can never possess. It endowed him with a moral superiority over the House which members, without knowing why, could sense in the atmosphere.

Gaining the floor, Crisp of Georgia opened the debate with a massive attack on the proposal to establish a quorum by “ocular demonstration.” How would anyone know that the Speaker would not see forty more members than were actually present? “Who,” he thundered, “will control his seeing?”

“The majority,” neatly put in La Follette of Wisconsin, “by sustaining or refusing to sustain his decision.” This interruption failed to stem a torrent of oratory in which Crisp invoked “our ancient usages and customs…opinions of the Fathers…sacredness of the Constitution and rights of the American people.” Next, Springer denounced the Chair’s ruling as “tyranny, simple and undiluted, an outrage upon the House and the American people.” Breckinridge denounced it as “clearly corrupt,” evoking howls of approval, and delighted with the effect of his accusation, embellished it. “Both usurpatory, revolutionary, and corrupt,” he charged. From then on Reed’s accusers invoked the alternate images of revolutionist and tyrant, preferring on the whole the latter. “I denounce you,” shrieked Bland of Missouri, “as the worst tyrant that ever presided over a deliberative body.” O’Ferrall of Virginia warned that the people’s representatives were not to be silenced “by the gavel of a tyrant and his cold and freezing eye.” Improving even on this he added, “It has been reserved for the year 1890 and the Fifty-first Congress to produce the first dictator since the head of British tyranny was bruised.” Among all the variations 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.

Exhausted, the House adjourned, only to reopen next day in immediate uproar over conflicting motions

to adjourn, to approve the Journal, to raise the “previous question” and as many other delaying points of procedure as the Democrats could devise. Still outwardly tranquil, Reed caught each parliamentary ball, batted each pitch, declared fouls, and umpired his own decisions, always maneuvering the proceedings from mere battle over procedure to debate on the issues. His own cohorts were rallying to the defense. It was an absurdity on the face of it, declared Butterworth in a brilliant speech, if a member “by merely closing his mouth becomes constructively absent.” The silent quorum, he said, hurling back upon the opposition their own word, “is the weapon of the revolutionist. It is the weapon of anarchy.”

“The Speaker sees you,” he went on, “we see you, nay the country sees you. Yet the country starves to death by your inaction.” The minority claimed it was “not participating” if silent. “Why, the distinguished Speaker might as well sit down upon my lean friend from Alabama and against his protest say, ‘I am not participating.’ ” Butterworth was sure that “the brother thus sat upon would have the liveliest sense of the fact that the Speaker was aggressively participating though he were silent as a millstone.”

Somewhat less effective was Representative McKinley, who, striving to please as usual, inadvertently yielded the floor, and had to be prompted by Reed, “The gentleman from Ohio declines to be interrupted.”

“I decline to be interrupted,” echoed McKinley, valiantly closing the breach.

As, at each juncture, Reed implacably counted heads and repeated his formula, “A constitutional quorum is present to do business,” the fury and frustration of the Democrats mounted. Maddened beyond discretion, Bynum of Indiana burst out against “the arbitrary, the outrageous, the damnable rulings of the Chair” and was ruled subject to censure for unparliamentary language. Ordered to stand before the bar of the House, he was followed down the aisle by the entire Democratic membership breathing maledictions and demanding to share Bynum’s censure in a body. To a spectator “it looked for a moment as if they intended to mob the Speaker.”

Gazing at them coldly, Reed waited in silence. When he judged he could be heard he said simply, without accusation or argument, “Mr. Bynum, I now pronounce the censure of the House upon you.” So unexpectedly unprovocative was it that the tumultuous mob of Democrats was suddenly deflated and dispersed to its seats.

At this point their strategy changed. It having become evident that Reed could and would establish a quorum on every count, the Democrats decided to absent themselves in actuality, counting on the inability of the Republicans to round up a quorum of themselves alone. As one by one they slipped out, Reed, divining their intention, ordered the doors locked. At once there followed a mad scramble to get out before the next vote. Losing “all sense of personal or official dignity,” Democrats hid under desks and behind screens. Representative Kilgore of Texas

kicked open a locked door to make his escape and to make “KiIgore’s Kick” the delight of cartoonists.

On the fifth day, Monday, February 3, the Democrats absented themselves altogether, and when a vote was called on Smith vs. Jackson the Republicans were still short of a quorum. Two of their number were brought in on cots from their sickbeds. There was still one too few. One member was known to be on his way to Washington. Suddenly a door opened, as a reporter told it, and “there was a flash of red whiskers and a voice saying, ‘One more, Mr. Speaker.’ ” Sweney of Iowa was counted in, the quorum was filled, and Smith vs. Jackson settled by a vote of 166-0. The battle was over. Democrats sullenly filed back to their seats. The Rules Committee reported out a new set of rules, composed, needless to say, and imposed by Reed.

Known thereafter as Reed’s Rules and adopted on February 14, they provided among other things that: 1) All members must vote; 2) 100 shall constitute a quorum; 3) All present shall be counted; 4) No dilatory motion shall be entertained, the definition of what was dilatory to be left to the judgment of the Speaker.

When a subsequent act of the Fifty-first Congress was tested in the Supreme Court on the ground that it had been passed by a quorum unconstitutionally established, Reed’s ruling that all present may be counted was upheld by the Court’s decision of February 29, 1892 ( U.S. v. Ballin ).

Five years later Theodore Roosevelt wrote that in destroying the silent filibuster, Reed’s reform was of “far greater permanent importance” than any piece of legislation it brought to enactment at the time. Reed knew this as soon as he had won. In his speech closing the Fifty-first Congress he said “the verdict of history” was the only one worth recording and he was confident of its outcome “because we have taken here so long a stride in the direction of responsible government.”

More immediate than a verdict by history—and then widely considered its equivalent—was a portrait by Sargent. Commissioned as a tribute to the Speaker by his Republican colleagues, it was a memorable failure—although the painter and his subject, recognizing in each other two superior personages, felt mutually attracted. “His exterior does not seem to correspond to his spirit,” complained Sargent, voicing a difficulty frequently felt by others. “What is a painter to do? I could have made a better picture with a less remarkable man. He has been delightful.” Confessing himself under the “dreadful thrall” which overcame all Mr. Sargent’s subjects, Reed refused to be in the least disturbed by unkindly comment on the portrait. When it was hung in the Speaker’s Lobby one critic observed, “He is supposed to be in the act of counting a quorum but in fact has just been inveigled into biting a green persimmon.”