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The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed The Man Who Broke the Filibuster
Simon & Schuster
May 2011
On Sale: May 10, 2011
448 pages
ISBN: 1416544933
EAN: 9781416544937
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
James Grant’s enthralling biography of Thomas B. Reed,
Speaker of the House during one of the most turbulent times
in American history—the Gilded Age, the decades before the
ascension of reformer President Theodore Roosevelt—brings to
life one of the brightest, wittiest, and most consequential
political stars in our history. The last decades of the nineteenth century were a volatile
era of rampantly corrupt politics. It was a time of both
stupendous growth and financial panic, of land bubbles and
passionate and sometimes violent populist protests. Votes
were openly bought and sold in a Congress paralyzed by the
abuse of the House filibuster by members who refused to
respond to roll call even when present, depriving the body
of a quorum. Reed put an end to this stalemate, empowered
the Republicans, and changed the House of Representatives
for all time. The Speaker’s beliefs in majority rule were put to the test
in 1898, when the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana
Harbor set up a popular clamor for war against Spain. Reed
resigned from Congress in protest. A larger-than-life character, Reed checks every box of the
ideal biographical subject. He is an important and
significant figure. He changed forever the way the House of
Representatives does its business. He was funny and
irreverent. He is, in short, great company. “What I most
admire about you, Theodore,” Reed once remarked to his
earnest young protégé, Teddy Roosevelt, “is your original
discovery of the Ten Commandments.” After he resigned his seat, Reed practiced law in New York.
He was successful. He also found a soul mate in the
legendary Mark Twain. They admired one another’s mordant
wit. Grant’s lively and erudite narrative of this tumultuous
era—the raucous late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—is a gripping portrait of a United States poised
to burst its bounds and of the men who were defining it.
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