All the Wisdom in the World...

The title of this blog is derived from the words of a man who should be better known than he is today.

His name was Thomas Brackett Reed.

The full quote, and believe me there are many others I could have chosen from, drips with irony.

"All the wisdom in the world consists of shouting with the majority."

Much of Reed's career was saturated with irony, both that which he tersely disseminated in impeccably conceived epigrams, and the unintentional, circumstantial variety of irony that the unkind would term hypocrisy. In his decades of service in the House of Representatives Reed was a strong voice for the right of the minority to strangle the legislative progress- while he was in the minority. Upon gaining the majority and taking up the mantle of leadership as Speaker of the House, despite his party receiving far fewer overall votes for its congressional candidates than the opposition, he became the personification of the right of the majority to strangle the minority. He pushed a bill through Congress that the majority of Americans wanted nothing to do with, and that his own party abandoned in the Senate and then took great pains to never mention ever again. He presented himself as a voice for the will of the people, but ignored them at a time of national crisis when they spoke with almost one voice in favor of Imperialism, until he was finally pushed aside by the explosion of the Maine. He spoke about fiscal responsibility but his Congress spent more money than any before it.

Employing the modern political vernacular and knowing no more than I have written above, you might term Reed an opportunist, a flip-flopper, a partisan hack who took whatever advantage he could.

And you would be right. Reed was an opportunist, he did flip-flop on his beliefs about the roles of the minority and majority when it was politically expedient, and he lived and breathed the rhetoric of the Republican Party.

However, every once in awhile there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. This moment is rarely apparent at the time, and it is often a fleeting moment, banished by cynicism and cowardice within moments of its appearance. After it has gone it often takes decades for this moment to be properly appreciated, but after the fact these moments are seen as crucial turning points: Lincoln's 272 words at Gettysburg, Churchill's stand against Fascism, Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Nothing in the cynical description of Reed that I provided above seems to provide such a transcendent moment.

His legislative accomplishments, while impressive, do not bear the stamp of universal approval, in his time or in the years hence. Upon taking the gavel of the Speakership in 1889, Reed upended the rules of the House of Representatives. Those rules he couldn't bend he changed, and he did it to pass a tariff bill, and a bill limiting the power of monopolies, and a bill coining more silver, and a bill protecting the right of African-Americans to vote.

It is in that last bill, called the Lodge Federal Elections Bill by its proponents, the Bill of Negro Domination or the Force Bill by its detractors, that provides the perfectly crystallized moment of an absolute right and an absolute wrong. But today it is neither known nor widely discussed even in scholarly circles, because the Federal Elections Bill, which would have returned the franchise to African-Americans seventy years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was never put up for a vote in the Senate.

Reed's 51st Congress was a moment in which there was an absolute right and an absolute wrong, and right lost.

Despite Reed's spectacular work in the House, and the wrangling of congressmen and senators like Henry Cabot Lodge and George Hoar, the rights of African-Americans were sold off for another doomed silver coinage bill.

Public opinion then turned massively against the already tattered Reconstruction project, and African-Americans were abandoned politically for another half century.

The moment has now all but faded from history, the Federal Elections Bill is best characterized as a moment whose time had yet to come. But from another perspective it is a tantalizing example of historical contingency- where but for the betrayal of a few senators from brand new states in the west, the names of Reed, Lodge, and Hoar would be synonymous with an early, if decidedly limited, embrace of Civil Rights.

The defeat of the Federal Election Bill can perhaps best be summed up by another Reed quote that, like the man himself, deserves to be better known:

"One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted."

(The necessary dash of irony here is that Reed was the closest thing to an atheist that a man could be in elective office at the time.)