THOMAS B. REED; PARLIAMENTARIAN

By William A. Robinson. 421 pages. Dodd, Mead and Company.

In his recently published letters Major Archie Butt records President Taft, while performing one of the important duties of the presidency, namely the deposition of a wreath upon the tomb of some departed hero, as turning to his aide and saying, "How well McKinley used to do this. He was a born undertaker." In truth the last two decades of the nineteenth century were remarkable for the number of undertakers who attained prominence in our national life. Many of them were honest, some were less honest. There were, it is true, a lesser number of characters of brilliance and sparkle, and here again those of the less honest classification were not entirely lacking. No one, however, would rank Thomas B. Reed with the undertakers and no one ever justly impugned his honesty.

It is indeed an attractive figure which Professor Robinson has chosen as the subject of his study. Reed was a man of wide reading and broad intellectual sympathies. His mental processes were wonderfully quick and sure. He was scornfully intolerant of cant, pretence and hypocrisy. While not an orator in the classical sense, he was the most effective debater of his day. He was keen at grasping the essentials of a controverted question, reducing them to their simplest terms and stating them in the clearest and most succinct way. His courage was unquestioned. More than any leader of his party he possessed the qualifications of the presidency; less than any of them he possessed the qualifications necessary to be elected to that office. He was not enough of an undertaker and too much of an honest man to succeed in a pre-convention campaign. And finally, in the keenness of his wit and the depth of his satire, descending at its worst, it is true, to mere bludgeon play and abuse, but rising at its best to flashes so true and so apt that they have passed into history, he is a joy forever.

But too much credit should not be given him. Midway through his book and again in the very last sentence Professor Robinson asserts, "Thomas B. Reed was a statesman." Perhaps he was, but the evidence is not entirely convincing. In his early years in the House during his rapid rise to leadership he was obviously the party politician, with mind entirely set upon party advantage. In opposition to successive waves of Greenbackism, Populism and Free Silverism he was highly effective, but apparently with no comprehension that a genuine grievance lay back of these misguided movements. In his speeches he mingled the truths and the sophistries of the capitalistic conception of society and seemed to have no idea that truths and sophistries were mixed. Perhaps statesmanship entered largely into the revolution which, almost single-handed, he brought about in the rules of the House. It is true that that body was thereby converted from a dike which effectively blocked all business, to an open channel through which anything approved by the ruling powers would be sure to flow. It was ail enormous change, a change probably necessary to the conduct of the business of the country, which could hardly be carried out with two Senates in the way. But the result of it was to make the Speaker, although theoretically subject to the control of the majority of the House, as a matter of fact so much of a despot as to be overthrown only by a revolution (which eventually came about), to reduce the prestige of the House as a deliberative body to the vanishing point, and its importance in our government mainly to that dependent upon a show of hands. It is indeed interesting to observe that in 1890, after the bars to legislation had been removed, the first three important acts to pass the House were the McKinley Tariff Bill, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Force Bill; measures the subsequent history of which must have made both Reed and his associates somewhat regret that the bars had been lowered so soon. Perhaps he acted as a statesman in the wise use of the absolute power which he wielded as Speaker of the House, but few records exist to make the answer to that question clear. And finally he most signally failed to rise to the stature of a statesman when, in the end, hopelessly at odds with his associates on the question of Imperialism, he turned away from the opportunity of using his unquestioned prestige to advance the cause in which he believed because that action might result in the disruption of the party he had served so long. If what has been said is true, his elevation to the rank of the statesman can only be effected by the application to that term of his own famous definition, "a politician who is dead."

But whether he was a statesman or not, he was indeed a man. Professor Robinson's biography leaves us in no doubt upon that score. Wisely he lets Reed tell much of the story himself, but his own interpretations are based on sound sense, and his judgments, although not all of them may convince all readers, as in the case above, are thoughtful and penetrating. It is not impossible to write a dull and lifeless biography of a brilliant and sparkling personality, but in the present case the story of Reed is worthy of the life of which it tells.