I personally fall somewhere in between.  Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot (yes, technically a Missourian; he adopted his droll RP in mid-life) were better, more important poets.  Matthew Arnold and Hart Crane have probably been more influential.  And the Beats were certainly cooler.

But for getting poetry into the hearts and minds of  people who don’t generally read poetry, you can’t beat Robert Frost.

Frost was, if anything, a master propagandist.  He came to represent the quintessential New Englander:  reserved, witty, dripping with common sense and the sort of bootstrapping hardy Americanism also exploited by Norman Rockwell.   His poems generally rhymed and were tailor-made for school room recitations.  And he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory at Kennedy’s inauguration, even though the sun’s glare that day prevented him from reading the poem he had specially composed for the occasion.

But anyone so well-loved in this country will inevitably be deconstructed, and whole books have been devoted to undermining the image Frost so carefully cultivated.  Various biographers have portrayed him as a cruel philanderer, an uninvolved,  un-loving  father, and,  according to Jeffrey Myers, a “mean old bastard.”  The cult of hatred for Robert Frost is, in literary circles, about as popular as his cult of personality is outside them.

Frost wrote prolifically, and although a great deal of his work was published, not all of it  is worth reading.   Fame can work against a writer; some things should not be rushed to print.   But poems like “Home  Burial“  and “After Apple  Picking” are sublime.  In my humble opinion, anyway.

In any event, if there is a poet to associate with Christmas, and particularly a New England, Currier and Ives sort of Christmas, it’s Frost.  Read carefully, though, these poems are not as greeting-card cheery as they initially  appear.  Enough has been written about the dark, suicide-y side of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  For this Monday Morning Hearsay instead, a  poem about the deceptiveness of worth.

Christmas Trees

(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”

 

“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.

 

                                                 He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

 

 

Robert Frost, “Christmas Trees,” from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Edward Connery Lathem,  ed.) Henry Holt & Co.  (1969)

The novel was serialized in the United States beginning in 1922 but, as the story goes, some woman, somewhere, read what we suppose was the Nausicaa scene and complained to a state’s attorney in New York. This attorney, like any good small-minded politician, prosecuted the publishers of the small Chicago-based literary magazine in which the episode had appeared. The court considered only the installment which had appeared in that particular month, with that particular scene (and if you are unfamiliar with the novel, think Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates and you’ll be right on board), and called it the work of a “disordered mind.” The publishers were convicted and fined, and the threat of prosecution dissuaded others who might otherwise have released the completed novel.

United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was a classic First Amendment test case.  Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House and eventual game show gadfly, wanted to publish the novel but was afraid to make the capital expenditures necessary to print the book without knowing whether it could be legally sold.  He devised a plan to “noisily” import the French edition of the book so it could be seized at the Port of New York.  It almost didn’t work. The customs inspector initially refused to seize the books because, he claimed, “everyone” brought them in. But the inspector relented, and the case made its way to the federal court in Manhattan.

Woolsey was the son of a carpetbagger, one William W. Woolsey, who purchased a plantation in South Carolina in 1870. Judge’s Woolsey’s maternal grandfather was an Ohio Supreme Court judge, and his uncle was Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins University. When William Woolsey became a Confederate sympathizer,  Judge Woolsey’s mother left him and moved with her son to Englewood, New Jersey (home of Woolsey’s contemporary, Upton Sinclair).   Woolsey attended Phillips Academy, Yale, and Columbia Law School, where he co-founded the Law Review.   After entering private practice, he was a regular at Delmonico’s where, in 1906, Harry Thaw shot Stanford White.

In 1929, Woolsey was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of New York by President Herbert Hoover. By all accounts he was an exceptional and hard-working jurist.   (According to lore, he took the Ulysses case because he had just ended a 100 day fraud trial and wanted to read the book while he “rested”).   His opinion in the Ulysses case,which appears at 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933), was affirmed in an opinion authored by the Honorable Augustus Hand.   Sadly, although Learned Hand was a member of the Second Circuit at the time, he remains outside the reach of my little Six Degrees of Separation game here.

Cerf ensured Judge Woolsey’s celebrity by including a copy of the opinion in every copy of Ulysses sold in the United States. Fitting, since Woolsey’s opinion is as much literary critique as legal analysis:

Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become its satellites. The study of Ulysses is, therefore, a heavy task.

The reputation of Ulysses in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written, for, of course, in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.

If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic, that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.

But in Ulysses, in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.

In writing Ulysses, Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks, not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the city bent on their usual occupation, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Joyce has attempted— it seems to me, with astonishing success— to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affect the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film, which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.

To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of Ulysses. And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce’s sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.

If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in Ulysses, the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.

It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.

The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.

I am perpetually awed by what a very small number of people  can do with words and chords.  Not chords, even.  Sequences of notes.  How???  How do they do this???  And it’s not as though somebody lucky happens upon a good song once in a blue moon.  Dylan wrote “Like a Rolling Stone” and kept going.

Seriously, how do you write something like that and not say, “Well, that’s one for the ages, now I can catch up on my Netflix queue?”  (Yes, I know there were no Netflix queues in 1965, don’t you ever quit?  Jeez.)

You will be shocked to learn that I play a little trumpet – an instrument that is bombastic,  brassy, and of fairly limited range, who would think?  – and my experience of music playing is sufficient to assure me that I am not one for music writing.   I’m not wired that way, and neither, I suspect, are most people.  Songwriters are a rare breed.  But they do need to eat.

If we wish to avoid a world in which all songs are written and performed by Rebecca Black [shudder], we must address the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and soon.  Passed in 1998 when we were but Internet babes, this statute has laid waste to the music industry (meaning the people who create the stuff) while fattening the coffers at Apple and YouTube and Google.  Robert Levine takes on these and other media distributors in his new book, “Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.”  He argues that in Europe, policies that American conservatives ridicule as protectionist have nevertheless saved independent book stores without restricting content.  Basic market principles, he states,  favor the sale of blanket licenses  to users, rather than distributors, a step that would eliminate the parasitic middlemen.

Which leads me to another point, since the holiday season has begun:  you’re going to buy things and give them away, so please consider supporting your local arts community when you shop.  If you can’t make it to a gallery or show in person, here are a few sites worth checking out: Novica.com; Fab.com; Etsy.com; ArtFire.com.

And now for the hearsay part:

Which brings me to this Monday Morning Hearsay’s tidbit.  In the article, Governor O’Malley’s spokesperson is quoted as saying, about a letter written to the law school:  “He wrote the letter.  He said his peace.”

Can you say your peace?  Instead of holding it?

I would have written, “He said his piece.”  As in, a piece of his mind, or “reading Safire’s piece on Vonnegut is like watching the scene in Being John Malkovich when Malkovich enters his own head.”   Something like that.

So which is it, piece or peace?  These are the  silly things I busy my mind  with while others, you know, find cures  for cancer and so forth.

According to Webster’s, you speak your piece, not your peace, which to my mind makes sense.  Peace connotes silence, which may also be held but may not be  spoken.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the same.   The OED, of course, is the product of centuries of accumulated vernacular. When James A.H. Murray undertook in the mid-nineteenth century to curate the authoritative dictionary of the English language, he relied on volunteers who collected and sent to him, on  scraps  of paper, words taken from hundreds of publications.   (Check out The Professor and the Madman or The Meaning of Everything, both by the wonderful historian Simon Winchester, for more on this if you’re  interested.)

My point being that language evolves, and perhaps now, in the age of Internet and memes, it evolves more quickly than ever before.  A  quick Google  search yields more than a few examples of spoken peace, rather than piece, along with a healthy dollop of grammar snark.

Whether it will be possible, at some point in the future, to give someone else a peace of one’s mind,  Zen-style, remains to be seen.

Some background for readers who are (1) not from  Baltimore or (2) not  John Waters fans.   A “Hon” (pronounced like “hun” with a funny  “y”-ish sound in the middle, you have to hear it to know what I mean) is, in the narrowest sense, a woman from one of a couple of neighborhoods in Baltimore – Locust Point, Hampden, Highlandtown, Pigtown, etc.  The “Hon”  in popular culture – and for this, see, oh, any John Waters movie, but if you’re squeamish see “Hairspray -  has big hair, often rendered as a bee hive;  cat eye glasses; heavy make-up;  and often a scarf tied at the neck.  Bubble gum is usually in evidence with a good deal of popping and snapping.  Throw in your obligatory “down de Ocean” with the classic  Baltimore O and a reference to steamed crabs and you have your archetypal  Hon.

That is NOT me, although I have had to work really hard on my O’s, and I occasionally slip a casual “Bawlmer” in when I’m not paying careful attention.   Three years of being tortured on a daily basis by my law  school friends has made me gun shy.  (Though, I have  to say, watching a bunch of New Yorkers and one Rhode Islander (hi Vinnie) try to pick crabs one year more than made up for that.)

Where am I going with this?  The past year here in my beloved hometown has  seen a tempest in a crab pot  by way of  a certain restaurant called  Cafe Hon.  Historically it’s been  much-loved for its celebration of Hon culture coupled with the annual  “Honfest“  in Hampden.  Until Denise Whiting, the owner of the cafe, filed an application to trademark  the word “hon.”   She already owned the rights to “Cafe Hon” and “Honfest”  and various derivatives, but when she moved to trademark the word itself, a lot of people got very upset about it.  There were some really snarky newspaper articles and editorials.   Local politicians and “community representatives” came out of the woodwork to wax self-righteously about the sacred nature of the Hon, and to condemn anyone who  might seek to remove the word from the public domain. Which isn’t, in fact, what the trademark would have done,  and some of  the lawyers who were coming out against the trademark conveniently overlooked that part of the discussion, but, I digress.

The “debate” was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.  Okay, maybe not the stupidest because I do get FearNet on my Verizon Fios cable.  But definitely one of my top ten stupidest.

Now I’m going to  say this: I would sort of like to see the pink beehived, bespeckled pop culture Hon fade away.  It’s a caricature, and a silly  inaccurate one, of women who deserve better.

Let me tell you about Hons because I come from a long line of them.   My Hon grandmother,  Margaret Simpson Uttenreither, took the bus – long before they gave it a cute  “Charm City” name – damn near every day of her life to her job at one of the neighborhood markets.  Maggie kept a bowling pin just inside the door of her home  on Streeper, and God help the stranger who didn’t get on Maggie’s good side real quick.   You best kept your feet squarely planted on those marble steps, my friend.   She once – somewhat famously – ran off a would-be robber who made the mistake  of coming to her market stand.  I have heard conflicting versions of the story,one involving a cleaver and the other a  butcher knife.   Suffice it to say, she took no crap.  My grandmother cooked a sauerbraten you would not believe, and raisin cookies that I have been trying unsuccessfully for years to recreate, but she was stubborn and she took all her recipes with her when she passed.   She got to see me get married and in law school and I’m glad of that.

My mom is  also a  Hon.  She was the only girl in a family with three brothers and when she was growing up money was not to be wasted on things for girls.  So she made her own opportunities.   She put herself through college and then through graduate school and taught generations of young women at the Institute of  Notre Dame on Aisquith Street.   She was, I think, heartbroken when I chose a different high school, but I grew up understanding that education was everything if you didn’t come from money so I got one.   I like  to think  that I’m a Hon too.

The pink boa-fication of women like my Mom and my Grandmom makes for good media but not much else, so when men  – yes, weirdly, mostly men – started bitching about  the trademark I was just a little taken aback.  They wouldn’t know a Hon if they stepped on her (and some of them probably have).   A real Hon is  made of uncommonly strong stuff;  you can put a beehive on a Guilford-ite and she ain’t never gonna be a Hon.

So, as  far as I’m concerned, Hon Cafe  and Honfest and other things Hon are cute and playful and represent the means by which people can make money from a mostly inoffensive,if inaccurate, cultural stereotype.  I’ve always liked Hon Cafe and I’ll keep eating there.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the Hampden boys who jumped up and down when they found out about the trademark application were just ticked off not to have gotten there first (and beaten by a woman,  damn it!)  And my East Bawlmer  sisters will be just fine.

I am half way in the work . . . .  It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — and to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.

Herman Melville, on writing Moby-Dick, in a letter to Richard Henry Dana,  Jr., dated May 1,1850.

Melville’s masterpiece was  published on this day in 1851.  Nobody bought it.  In 1865, Melville took a  job as a customs inspector and began to  concentrate on poetry, eventually cranking out the longest poem in American literature.  Rumors of his insanity circulated, and he drank  too much.   The story that on his death the New York Times memorialized him as Henry Melville, however, is an urban myth, no doubt perpetuated by generations of writers, good and bad, hoping that life-long obscurity would open the door to the American literary canon.

We need more lawyers who are willing to provide pro bono legal services. Period. The need is great, especially now. Attorneys are needed to represent parties in foreclosure proceedings, work outs, bankruptcies, domestic cases, tax cases, guardianship proceedings. We need more experienced attorneys. We need less experienced attorneys. We need retired attorneys.

And there are plenty of reasons for doing it. I’m just going to tell you about one, because for me it’s the best.

Five or six years ago I was representing a defendant in a multi-party case pending in a circuit court in Maryland. Somehow or other, a hearing notice came into my office and was mis-calendared. It shouldn’t have happened, blah blah blah, but in my fourteen years of practice it’s the only time it’s ever happened.

Anyway, on the morning of the conference, which I didn’t know about since it had been entered on my calendar for the same date in the following year, I received a call from Judge So and So’s chambers, wanting to know where I was. I was horrified and apologetic. Luckily the courthouse was two minutes from my office. I ran. I arrived sweaty and out of breath in Judge So and So’s courtroom.

At which time Judge So and So launched into a tirade the likes of which I hope never to witness again. This judge berated me. This judge berated my poor secretary. This judge berated my mother for bringing me into the world. Meanwhile, my colleagues stood by, embarrassed (for me), and waited for it to be over. It went on for a good five minutes.

Then, when this judge was finished with me, this judge concluded the business of the case, which was minor and could have been conducted in my absence, frankly. I was instructed, again in open court, to take a seat and wait for the conclusion of the other matters before the court,so that the court could have another go at me.

So I sat. As I sat I took out a legal pad. On my legal pad I started making of list of the pro bono cases I have handled over the course of my career, what they were about, how they were resolved.

When the last case was done I was called into chambers for another go round. I took my pad with me. It was brutal. I kept my eyes on the pad.

And when I left the courtroom I took it with me too. I took it back to my office. I placed it in a drawer. When I left that firm the pad came with me. It’s here, in my desk drawer, now.

It’s not very often that a lawyer gets to confront a judge about his or her inappropriate behavior. Few situations rise to the level of a complaint to the Judicial Disabilities Commission, but let’s face it: the members of the bar know that certain judges, on certain days, or every day, are going to be difficult. I personally believe that the behavior of the judge in my case was horrible. I hope that no one in the courtroom that day was an unrepresented lay person. I hope that no one walked away from that morning believing that this is how our judiciary works. But this judge – and others like this judge – will go on behaving in this fashion and there’s very little we can do about it.

But I have my list. On my legal pad. In my desk. And I know that on that morning, as I stood with dignity and respect before a judge who was not treating me with dignity or respect, that I was a better person, and a better professional. That’s why I do pro bono work, or one reason,anyway. And if you need one, it can be yours too.

You may have noticed that I have moved my practice to a new firm, Leitess Leitess Friedberg + Fedder. It’s been a fantastic transition and I just couldn’t be happier. The move was part of a change of my practice focus over the past few years to business and commercial litigation. I’m very excited about it and look forward to posting some UCC bits and pieces going forward. I’m thinking Bleak House meets Article 9. And Wallace Stevens ought to have a place here, I think, too. Thirteen Ways of Looking at (a Contract), or something.

Happy weekend, everybody! See you Monday.

I lied.

I mean, technically speaking, you’ve been reading my work on this blog thus far, right?

Someone very talented recently offered to read some of my poems if I posted them.  It really is time I stopped being such a ‘fraidy cat about it.  The last time I submitted was in college, and when I got a slew of rejection slips I stopped.  So consider this my cautious dipping of toe into the water.

And remember one thing, because it will keep you honest: A critic is someone who walks onto the field after the battle and shoots the soldiers who are still alive.  I think Anne Lamott said that.  Clearly she is a very wise woman.

Teaching, Said Mr. S., is Nothing More Than Witchcraft

(For Dad)

And with that he lit a match.

His face was all glowing with spooky smiles, and, well,

There was the light of the bonfire, too.
Term papers. And let me tell you –
There’s no smoke so acrid as loose leaf.
I heard him muttering softly, and though hard to make out,
I caught the words Gatsby and darkling and “rocking horse winner”.
Oh, I said, you must teach . . .?  And then,
His laugh was hideous, until
He returned to the lyric of his spell,
Leaping left and right ‘round the fire,
When – all of a sudden, I shudder to write this –
A little spark caught the cuff of one polyester’d pant leg,
Reducing the wizard, in the blink of an eye,
To a yelping – yawping? – pup.
And he ran off, I suppose,
To cool his skin in the snow.
Whose woods these are I think I know,
But his house is in the village.

 

 

 

Metronome

 

 

In the year since then I’ve sold the piano.
If you had seen them haul the weight
Down two floors, where it perched above the sidewalk,
A queer black bird,
Suspended on wire.

I thought when you left I wouldn’t mind too much.
I thought I would find a new means
Of occupying my time. Instead of your bookshelf,
A rubber tree plant. I don’t miss the piano.

I don’t mind the space. A throw rug does wonders
Though I still step around the place where the bench used to be.
The girl downstairs made a card for your birthday
And she skips the thirteenth step,

Everytime,

Like you taught her.

The color I painted the kitchen would not agree with you.
I made a patch for the spot on the sofa.
You wouldn’t know this, you left so much behind.
Things I can’t change or paint or sell.
The place you touched your hand to when
Ginsburg died.
The bare spot on the floor that you paced into the wood,
Waiting to hear. 

 

 

 

 

 

On Coleridge

When the divine wind blows, there’s no stopping
Where it goes. So says the man in his armchair scheming,
Who puts pen to paper despite the interruption
Of his dreaming by a person on inconvenient business and with most
Inconvenient timing. Still, the Fragment makes it way onto the page,
Then pages, books, anthologies, bibliographies, biographies
Until it belongs to us entire (and we call this man a sage).
The same wind, what’s more,
Sunk the same Emperor’s fleet five centuries before,
On churning water. The men who stood upon the decks
Of ships that wrecked
Were unprepared to fight this sort of war
And died within a mile of the shore,
While the intended casualties of the siege looked on, and blessed
The wind. Kubla Khan, it seems, in his haste
To lay his enemies to waste
Launched flat-hulled river boats upon a sea
Made treacherous by an inconvenient wind.
It spelled the end of Khan’s excursions, sent him fleeing
To the safety of his dome, where he learned
To bless his home and curse the wind.

Not we, though, in our chairs, said he
Who launched a hundred ships into the wind.
We emperors of oceans making boats both frail
And fit. We loosen moorings, pray for wind to hale
These ships, these paper boats adrift
On endless seas.

 

 

Reed was a Republican in the days when Republicans were all about big government.  (Yes, really.  And get this: he was from Maine!)  He served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1889 to 1891, and again from 1895 to 1899.  Although he is not well-remembered today, he was one of the most influential Speakers in history. 

He came to Congress shortly after the controversial 1876 election, in which the electoral votes of several states were disputed (and yes, Florida was one of them).  Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was named the winner, and Democrats, led by Hayes’ opponent, Samuel B. Tilden, cried foul.  The Potter Commission was established to look into allegations of election fraud, and Reed, a lawyer, was named to the Commission.  No doubt the Democrats expected to roll over Reed, then a freshman; to their surprise, his cross-examination of Tilden was so devastating that, even though he was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, Tilden’s reputation was forever damaged.   

Reed’s tenure as Speaker was marked by simmering hatred between the North and South (Hayes effectively ended the Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from the Southern states), railroad strikes, and wars in South America.  His greatest contribution to politics was his insistence that reason and order govern Congressional proceedings.  Before he took the helm, it was common practice for Congressmen to remain silent during quorum call.  Even though they were physically present, if they did not announce themselves a quorum could not be declared and the House could not continue with its business. 

On January 28, 1890, the motion to seat the newly elected Republican Representative from West Virginia was passed by 161 to 1 votes.  165 votes were needed to form a quorum, and Reed undertook a roll call of the Congressmen present.  When the Democrats refused to answer, Reed directed the Clerk to indicate that they were present.  When the Democrats began making for the exits, Reed had the doors locked.  Some of them hid under their desks.  Reed rooted them out.  And the gentleman from West Virginia was eventually seated. 

His realpolitik approach to governance was memorialized in his book, “Reed’s Rules: A Manual of General Parliamentary Law.” 

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

Thomas Brackett Reed (from Gordon Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, The Harper Book of American Quotations (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)