The Proud Tower (26 page)

Stern on dignity and decorum, he permitted no smoking or shirtsleeves and even challenged the cherished privilege of feet on desk. A member with particularly visible white socks who so far forgot himself as to resume that comfortable posture, received a message from the Chair, “The Czar commands you to haul down those flags of truce.”

With no favorites and no near rivals, he ruled alone. Careful not to excite jealousy, he avoided even walking in public with a member. Solitary, the stupendous figure ambled each morning from the old Shoreham Hotel (then on Fifteenth and H Streets), where he lived, to the Hill, barely nodding to greetings and unconscious of strangers who turned to stare at him in the street.

He had a kind of “tranquil greatness,” said a colleague, which evolved from a philosophy of his own and left him “undisturbed by the ordinary worries and anxieties of life.” Reed gave a clue to it one night when a friend came to discuss politics and found him reading Sir Richard Burton’s
Kasidah
, from which he read aloud the lines:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
  from none but self expect applause,
He noblest lives and noblest dies
  who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

Secure in his self-made laws, Reed could not be flustered. Once a Democratic member, overruled by Reed on a point of order, remembered that the Speaker had taken a different position in his manual,
Reed’s Rules.
Hurriedly, he sent for the book, leafed through its pages, pounced on the relevant passage and marched to the rostrum in anticipatory triumph to lay it before the Speaker. Reed read it attentively, cast a glance down at the man from his glowing hazel eyes and said with finality, “Oh, the
book
is wrong.”

During the Venezuela crisis he said little publicly, kept the Republicans in the House under firm control and trusted to Cleveland’s basic antipathy for foreign adventure, which he shared, to withstand the Jingoes’ eagerness to annex this and that. Reed was unalterably opposed to expansion and all it implied. He believed that American greatness lay at home and was to be achieved by improving living conditions and raising political intelligence among Americans rather than by extending American rule over half-civilized peoples difficult to assimilate. To him the Republican party was the guardian of this principle and expansion was “a policy no Republican ought to excuse much less adopt.”

The year 1896 was a Presidential one and Reed wanted the nomination. With the Democrats torn by their discords, chances of a Republican victory looked favorable and the nomination was a prize worth fighting for. “He is in excellent health and spirits,” reported Roosevelt, and “thinks the drift is his way.” Appearing with his moustache shaved off, Reed seemed to one reporter to feel the “necessity of taking himself seriously,” which tended to muffle his wit. As a contender for the nomination his position was complicated by the fact that the most vigorous campaigners on his behalf were Lodge and Roosevelt, whose views on expansion were fundamentally opposed to his own, although this had not yet become a touchstone. “My whole heart is in the Reed canvass,” said Roosevelt.

Reed would not go out of his way to build up support for himself by the usual methods. When members demanded private appropriation bills for their districts without which they feared they would be unable to cultivate sentiment for his nomination, he was unmoved. “Your bill will not be allowed to come up even with that Reed button in your coat,” he said to one member. When the railroad magnate, Collis P. Huntington, of the Southern Pacific, three times asked to see Reed’s campaign manager, Representative F. J. Aldrich, Reed said yes, Aldrich might call on him, “But remember, not one dollar from Mr. Huntington for my campaign fund!” Aldrich, who went to see him anyway, confided that Reed would not permit any but a few donations from personal friends and had collected a total of $12,000. Disgusted, Huntington disclosed that Reed’s rivals were not so particular about money. “The others have taken it,” he said, revealing that he had placed his bets across the board.

Another man was spending money liberally on behalf of a rival candidate. Mark Hanna, the boss of Ohio, had cast a President-maker’s eye on Reed in the previous campaign but had found him too sardonic, his oratory too Eastern and his personality hardly amenable. As Henry Adams said, Reed was “too clever, too strong-willed and too cynical” to suit the party chiefs. Since then Hanna had found his affinity in a man the antithesis of Reed—the amiable, smooth-speaking, solidly handsome McKinley, of whom it was said that his strongest conviction was to be liked. He was a man made to be managed. He had never made an enemy and his views on the crucial currency question, as a biographer tactfully put it, “had never been so pronounced as to make him unpopular” either with the silver wing or the gold-standard group. Reed now had cause to regret that in naming McKinley chairman of the Ways and Means Committee he had opened his path to prominence as sponsor of the McKinley Bill on the tariff. Since the Fifty-first Congress, when McKinley had ventured some objections to the Speaker’s methods in the matter of the quorum, Reed had had little use for him. He considered him spineless, an opinion to which he gave immortal shape in the phrase, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.”
*

Hanna saw in McKinley less an eclair than a kind of Lohengrin and felt sure he could secure his nomination as long as McKinley’s rivals remained divided and did not unite behind any one of themselves, especially not behind Reed, the only one who had the stature for the Presidency. Hanna shrewdly judged Reed too inflexible, however, to be willing to bend for the sake of gaining the others’ support. He was right. Eastern leaders, finding the Reed camp dry of inducements, pledged their votes elsewhere. Reed was not making it easy for would-be supporters. When a political chieftain from California asked for a promise of a place on the Supreme Court for a man from his state, Reed refused, saying the nomination was not worth considering unless it were free of any deals whatsoever. The California chieftain was soon to be seen basking in Hanna’s entourage. When Governor Pingree of Michigan, who controlled the delegates from his state, came to Washington to see Reed, Aldrich had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to leave the Chair and come down to his office where the Governor was waiting. When at last he did, Pingree held forth on his views on free silver, which were obnoxious to Reed, who immediately said so. “Pingree wanted to be for Reed,” reported Aldrich helplessly. “He went away and espoused the cause of McKinley.”

Reed could see the trend but he could not have changed himself. “Some men like to stand erect,” he once said, “and some men even after they are rich and high placed like to crawl.”

When in a masterly speech he tore, trampled and demolished free silver, which was less a question of currency than of class struggle, Roosevelt, filled with enthusiasm, wrote him, “Oh Lord! What would I not give if you were our standard-bearer.” At times, however, Roosevelt confessed to being “pretty impatient” with Reed, who would not satisfy his insistence on support of a big navy. “Upon my word,” he complained to Lodge, “I do think that Reed ought to pay some heed to the wishes of you and myself.” It was a vain hope to express of a man who was not given to “heeding” anyone’s wishes. To Lodge’s annoyance, Reed also refused “to promise offices from the Cabinet down or spend money to secure Southern delegates.” Hanna, well supplied with funds, was busy in the South collecting white and Negro Republican delegates who were for sale. “They were for me until the buying started,” Reed said.

He was not sanguine and already, in a letter to Roosevelt before the Convention met, talked of retiring to the private practice of law. “In a word, my dear boy, I am tired of this thing and want to be sure that my debts won’t have to be paid by a syndicate [a reference to McKinley’s].… Moreover the receding grapes seem to ooze with acid and the whole thing is a farce.”

At St. Louis in June, Lodge made his nominating speech. Reed received 84 votes on the first ballot in comparison to 661 for McKinley and the grapes receded beyond reach.

President Cleveland likewise was rejected by the Democratic Convention in favor of an ambitious thirty-six-year-old Congressman from Nebraska, known for his crowd-catching oratory, who treated the Convention to the most memorable rhetoric since Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. “Clad in the armor of a righteous cause … a cause as holy as the cause of liberty.… You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” When the hysteria was over, Governor Altgeld turned a “weary face and quizzical smile” to Clarence Darrow and said, “I have been thinking over Bryan’s speech. What did he say, anyhow?”

The campaign roused the country to extremes of emotion and reciprocal hate. It was Silver against Gold, the People against the Interests, the farmer against the railroad operator who siphoned off his profits in high freight charges, the little man against the banker, the speculator and the mortgage holder. Among the Republicans there was real fear that a Democratic victory, coming after the violence of Homestead and Pullman, would mean overturn of the capitalist system. Factory owners told then men that if Bryan were elected “the whistle would not blow on Wednesday morning.” Even the
Nation
supported McKinley. When he won, business settled back in its seat, reinforced in its rejection of social protest. “Mark Hanna’s era,” wrote a contemporary looking back, “marked a climax of this easy defiance by the strong. I well remember the charming bulldog manner in which Hanna took up defense of unlimited private monopoly.… It was a note that can never be sounded quite so fearlessly again.”

The arena was now cleared for a different battle, in which Reed’s fate and his country’s were to be decided. Cleveland had refused to be budged when Congress passed a resolution which by recognizing the Cuban rebels as belligerents would have permitted the sale to them of arms. The resolution was “only an expression of opinion by the eminent gentlemen who voted for it,” he said, and since the power to recognize rested exclusively with the Executive he would regard it “only as advice,” which left “unaltered the attitude of this Government.” Now he was replaced by McKinley, who, though personally opposed to war with Spain, was unpracticed in the art of living up to his convictions. In Spain Premier Canovas was dead, leaving weaker hands in control. In New York William Randolph Hearst, having bought the
Journal
, was adapting himself to the dictum of the editor of England’s first halfpenny paper, the
Daily Mail
, who on being asked what sells a newspaper, replied, “War.” Hearst was helping to manufacture a war by horrendous stories of Spanish cruelties, Cuban heroism, American destiny and duty, empurpled by the demands of a circulation battle with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
World.

A new factor in the world was the victory of Japan over China in their local war of 1895, which caused a sudden recognition of Japan as a rising power in the East and startled Kaiser Wilhelm II into coining a phrase,
die Gelbe Gefahr
—“the Yellow Peril.” The rise of Japan gave urgency and cogency to the demand for the Isthmian Canal and to Captain Mahan’s contention that Cuba in the Caribbean as well as Hawaii in the Pacific were necessary for the Canal’s strategic defence. In a number of articles appearing in 1897 Mahan showed that the Carribbean was a vital military crossroads which could be controlled either from Jamaica or Cuba, and he set about proving professionally and unanswerably that Cuba from the point of view of situation, strength and resources was “infinitely superior.”

His voice echoed in the Senate through Lodge, who repeated the argument that the Canal would make a Cuba a “necessity.” As extra inducement to Senators more materially than strategically minded, he expanded on how that “splendid island … still sparsely settled and of almost unbounded fertility” offered great opportunities for the investment of American capital and as a market for American goods. Roosevelt, although he had no such forum, was earnestly pleading the same cause wherever he had a hearing. The vociferous campaign he and Lodge were waging reached an august listener who was not pleased.

President Charles William Eliot of Harvard, the “topmost oak” of New England, speaking in Washington on the much-debated issue of international arbitration, denounced the doctrine of jingoism as “offensive.” Associated with countries where there had always been a military class, it was, he said, “absolutely foreign to American society,… yet some of my friends endeavor to pass it off as patriotic Americanism.” He then laid down firmly the principles which he believed made America different from the old nations. “The building of a navy and the presence of a large standing army mean … the abandonment of what is characteristically American.… The building of a navy and particularly of battleships is English and French policy. It should never be ours.” The American policy was reliance upon strength in peace, whereas Jingoes were a creation “of the combativeness that is in man.” He specifically identified Lodge and Roosevelt as Jingoes and privately, it was learned, called them “degenerated sons of Harvard.”

Eliot spoke with unmatched authority. Descended from Eliots and Lymans who had been settled in New England since the Seventeenth Century, he belonged to a group who felt themselves the best. “Eliza,” protested Mrs. Eliot when a friend joined the Episcopal church, “do you kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner? Neither I nor any of my family will ever do that!” His father, a mayor of Boston and a Congressman, was also, as treasurer of Harvard, a member of the seven-man Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, which an English observer called “government by seven cousins.” His own quarter of a century as president of Harvard had been an unremitting battle against the traditionalists to transform the college from an Eighteenth Century backwater into a modern university. During that time he had, as President Hyde of Bowdoin said, been “misunderstood, maligned, misrepresented, hated,” and Eliot himself confessed that in all his public appearances during those years, “I had a vivid sense that I was addressing a hostile audience.” Being a fighter, this did not halt him. He was not naturally an ingratiating man. Over six feet tall, with “an oarsman’s back, a grave and sculptured head,” he was a “noble presence” born to command. A strawberry birthmark which covered one side of his face and pulled a corner of his lip into a seeming superciliousness had set him apart from boyhood and given him a quality of loneliness. With this to overcome and the additional handicap of being, as Professor of Chemistry, a scientist, he had nevertheless been named president of Harvard at thirty-five. His ideal of behavior, in his own words, was that of “a gentleman who is also a democrat.” He was inflexible about what he thought was right. When a star baseball player was left off the Harvard team because of low marks, Eliot was heard to remark that this was no loss because he was a player who resorted to deception. “Why,” he explained, “they boasted of his making a feint to throw a ball in one direction and then throwing it in
ANOTHER
!”