Jerry Wallace offers this gem. Too good to leave in the comments:

Jim Reed throws his hat in ring. Most viewers, I suspect, have never heard of this politico. Who was he?

James Alexander Reed served as a United States Senator from the State of Missouri from 1911 to 1929. He was a Jeffersonian Democrat with a pronounced libertarian bent from Kansas City and, like Harry Truman, who would later follow him into the Senate, part of the Pendergast machine.

Reed, who in his day was very much a mover and shaker, is overlooked and forgotten today. This is unfortunate and unwarranted. It is probably due in large part to his negativism on major issues and his hostility towards opponents, regardless of party affiliation, along with his vanity and arrogance. I imagine that if you had asked Harry Truman about him, old Harry would have frankly described Reed as a SOB. And that pretty much sums it up. It is worth revealing that at the time of Reed’s death, not one Senator rose to mourn his passing or pay him a word of tribute. I look on Reed as counterpart of H. L. Mencken in the world of American politics in the 1920’s.

For those interested, below is a short biographical sketch of Senator Reed that I wrote a few years back. It will give the reader a general idea of what he was about.

I should mention that James A. Reed would make an excellent subject for a biography, of which he is much in need. Moreover, no meaningful account of the politics of the 1920’s can ignore him and the significant role he played in the Democratic attack on the Coolidge Administration. Whatever else you say about him, Reed was an intelligent and capable man, a very successful lawyer, and a forceful and courageous figure in the politics of his day.

As for research material on him, there is a biography by Lee Meriwether, Jim Reed “Senatorial Immortal” (Webster Groves, MO: International Mark Twain Society, 1948). It is a favorable account by a long time acquaintance, who was assisted in his labor by the second Mrs. Reed. Reed’s extant papers, such as they are, are housed in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection—Kansas City. I believe there is correspondence between Reed and H. L. Mencken, who was a long time friend and supporter, to be found in the latter’s papers on deposit at the New York Public Library. Reed family members may also have material on him.

Finally, the cartoon displayed here comes from the National Archives. However, researchers interested in the Clifford K. Berryman political cartoon collection should be aware that it is located in the Prints and Photograph Division of the Library of Congress.

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JAMES ALEXANDER REED

By

Jerry L. Wallace

James Alexander Reed is almost forgotten today. Jim Reed, as he was popularly known, was born in Ohio on November 9, 1861, but grew up and was educated in Iowa. For a profession, he chose the law for which he was particularly well suited: He had a commanding appearance, spoke well, loved to debate, and was fierce on the attack. “His language,” Senator George W. Pepper observed, “was blistering, devastating.” “When Reed attacked an opponent, it was almost as if he threw acid upon him.” Above all, he favored the role of the underdog. He always welcomed the opportunity to stand apart.

After his admittance to the bar in 1885, he soon developed a successful practice in Cedar Rapids. Politics—with its issues, debates, and battles on behalf of the people—attracted him from an early age. In his politics, he thought for himself, always marching to his own drummer. While his family was Republican, he declared himself a Democrat. By 18 years of age, he was chairman of his county’s Democratic committee.

Reed life changed dramatically in 1887 when, at 26 years of age, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri. This took place shortly after his marriage to Lura Mansfield Olmsted, who had been divorced by her husband after he had learned of an affair she was having with Reed. The unhappy circumstances underlying their marriage would haunt the couple throughout their life together. Indeed, their marriage stands as an example of the high price extracted for adultery in XIXth Century mid America.

In Kansas City, Reed rose to become a successful and prosperous attorney. In time, Reed entered politics, joining hands with “Big Jim” Pendergast. Throughout his long political career, he would maintain his ties with the Pendergast machine.

Reed’s first post was as Counselor of Kansas City (1897-98). He was then chosen prosecuting attorney of Jackson County (1898-1900), winning, as he was always proud to point out, 285 convictions out of 287 cases brought to trial. He went on to win election as mayor of Kansas City on reform platform, serving two two-year terms (1900-04). He took on the powerful, privately own street railways and the electric and telephone companies. He ended their abuses of the public and city government. His successes were hard won and made him enemies, but they gained him the respect and support of a grateful people. Reed opposed building parks and boulevards, considering them unneeded luxuries. He removed August R. Meyer, the “Father of the Park System,” from the park board. Tom Pendergast served as his Superintendent of Streets.

In 1904, Reed attempted to enter State politics, but failed in his bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. In 1911, however, Reed was elected to the United States Senate by the Missouri State Legislature, defeating the powerful former Governor David R. Francis. He was thereafter re-elected twice in 1916 and 1922 by popular vote. His greatest electoral triumph—a stunning victory, demonstrating his courage and political skills—occurred in the 1922 Democratic primary. At that time, overcoming great odds, he defeated by 6,000 votes Breckinridge Long, a former Wilson Administration official, who had the backing of former President Wilson and most of the party establishment. He then went on to sweep the general election with a majority of 44,000 votes. (In 1948, as they plotted political strategy for the presidential election campaign, Harry Truman and his advisor, Charles G. Ross, would recall Reed’s impossible electoral feat.) Not seeking renomination, he retired from the Senate on March 4, 1929, having served a total of 18 years.

In the Senate, the cigar-smoking, tobacco-spitting Reed was a much-feared opponent, and justly so. He considered himself an “independent legislator,” whose credo was individual liberty. Party loyalty meant little to him; for instance, he denounced Wilson’s League of Nations and declined to endorse the Cox-Roosevelt ticket in 1920 because of their support of it. Once he became fixed on issue, he hit at it unceasingly and did whatever was necessary to bring it down. In debate, his attacks could be mean spirited and personal in tone. Throughout the Coolidge Administration, “Fighting Jim” Reed often led the Democratic opposition to it. Truly, he was a thorn in its side.

He was a man made for opposition. One can say he thrived on it. Among the issues he took on were the Federal Reserve Act, the League of Nation, Woman Suffrage, Prohibition, Four Power Naval Limitation Treaties, World Court (Permanent Court of International Justice), Foreign Debt Settlements, and even the Child Labor Amendment. He also had no hesitation in denouncing organizations, such as the American Protective Association, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Semitic groups, that preached racial and religious hatred, adding, no doubt, a star to his crown. On a more constructive note, being a sportsman, he did good work in securing legislation for the protection of migrating birds.

Reed never met a President—the party label made no difference—who he did not oppose. “He who demands that Congress shall obey the President stands for despotism,” he said. This won him the title of “fearless critic of Presidents.”

Mr. Coolidge, it seems to me, suffered less from Reed’s verbal blasts than did his two predecessors, Wilson and Harding, and two successors, Hoover and Roosevelt. This may have had something to do with President Coolidge’s rule of minding his own business; that is, not meddling in Congress’s affairs. However, Coolidge’s Vice President, Charles Gates Dawes, did arouse Reed’s ire with his attack on the filibuster. Reed went on to lead the battle against Dawes’s attempt to change the Senate’s rules.

In the 1920’s, Reed was one of the staunchest opponents of Prohibition, who concentrated on showing the public its ineffectiveness and negative results. A collection of his speeches on the subject, The Rape of Temperance, was published by Cosmopolitan books in 1931. He had a passionate dislike for Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, going back to the Hoover’s day as Food Administrator during the Great War. He attacked him without mercy whenever possible. He also liked to make life miserable for Andrew Mellon, Coolidge’s Secretary of the Treasury.

In March 1925, Reed delivered Mr. Coolidge once of his most embarrassing Senatorial defeat, when he led the attack that resulted in the rejection of Charles Beecher Warren, Mr. Coolidge’s nominee for Attorney General. This was the first rejection of a Cabinet nominee since the days of Grant. This infuriated the President. He must have wondered why the good citizens of Missouri chose to elect such a man to high office.

Reed was one of the central figures in the Senate in blocking the entry of the United States into the World Court. To him, the Court meant “submitting our destiny to alien judges.” By no means was he alone in the Senate in his opposition to the Court—but in that body, there was no other more prominent, vigorous, violent, and consistent opponent of the Court than the Senior Senator from Missouri. His attacks upon the World Court dated from the 1919 debates on the League of Nation, of which the Court was its legal arm, and continued without letup until he left the Senate in 1928. During much of that time, he was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

On Armistice Day 1926, President Coolidge came to Kansas City to dedicate the Liberty Memorial, a monument to those who had served in the Great War. In his speech that day, the President announced the failure of the protocol ratification process that temporarily ended the effort to bring the United States into the World Court. It was fitting that he made this announcement in the hometown of Fighting Jim Reed. (Reed himself was absent from the platform that day but Mrs. Reed was there to represent him. Lura Reed, by the way, was as cantankerous as Reed himself.) After he left the Senate, Reed continued his opposition to the Court, which ultimately went down to defeat in the Senate in early 1935.

During his career, Reed was a delegate to several Democratic conventions. In 1900, while Mayor, Kansas City hosted the party’s quadrennial gathering. At Baltimore, in 1912, he had the honor of placing House Speaker Champ Clark, a fellow Missourian, in nomination against Woodrow Wilson. Reed himself was a serious contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1928 but garnered few delegates; his name was mentioned in connection with the nomination in both 1924 and 1932.

After leaving the Senate, Reed resumed his practice of law. He never lost his interest in politics. In later years, he became a staunch opponent of the New Deal, rejecting its “paternalism” and “socialist and regulatory schemes.” He threw his political support to Landon and Willkie. He also helped establish an anti-New Deal group known as the Jeffersonian Democrats and served as its honorary head. After his wife’s death in 1932, he married Nell Donnelly, the creator of the “Nelly Don” dress, who he had helped rescue from kidnappers. Reed lived on until September 8, 1944, when his heart gave out.

Coolidge accepts the 1924 GOP nomination. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

On June 12, 1924, delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio nominated Calvin Coolidge for president. He faced no challengers and won the nod on the first ballot, with 1065 of the 1109 votes cast.

The convention was the first to be broadcast on radio, and Coolidge was an eager listener. “President Coolidge spent practically all of the time the convention was in session ‘listening in’ upon the convention proceeds over his radio set,” the New York Times noted.

But Coolidge followed the proceedings in private, listening with his wife Grace and only one aide. He worked hard to maintain his image of inscrutable calm.

“It was not noticeable that the President became excited when word was sent to him in his office that if he wanted to hear the nominating speech he had better hurry,” the Times reported. “He methodically put some papers on his desk in order and with equal calmness walked to his study where the radio had been tuned-in and was giving out the proceedings in Cleveland.”

Later, Coolidge was having lunch when an aide arrived to tell him of the convention’s final vote. “He is reported to have nodded his acknowledgement of these tidings and resumed his meal,” the Times said.

Indeed, Coolidge was silent about his nomination for weeks afterward, awaiting formal notification by the party. (This was customary until Franklin Roosevelt broke with tradition in 1932 and addressed a convention directly.) Notification was originally scheduled for July 24 but was delayed after the president’s son, Calvin Jr., died unexpectedly on July 7. The ceremony was rescheduled for August 14, and Coolidge delivered that day a formal acceptance speech at Washington’s Constitution Hall. Like the convention, the acceptance speech was broadcast by radio (reportedly to a large national audience, although audience measurements were more impressionistic than scientific in those early days of radio).

Andrew Kostanecki of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation offers an audio commentary on Why Coolidge Matters Today.

The Democrats' crowded field in 1924. Image courtesy of the National Archives

In 1924, as Coolidge prepared for his first presidential campaign (having run for vice president in 1920 and later succeeding to the  presidency upon the death of Warren Harding), he faced a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls. This drawing by the famed political cartoonist Clifford Berryman pokes fun at the proliferation of candidates.

The Democrats suffered through a bruising convention in New York. When the dust finally settled, John W. Davis got the Democratic nod, but only on the 103rd ballot (making this the longest deadlock in convention history, if I’m not mistaken).

Lots of good it did them: Davis lost badly to Coolidge in the general election.

But there’s lots more to learn about the 1924 Democratic convention. And about Clifford Berryman, who did some damn fine cartoons over a very long career. Good stuff.

The first presidential “talkie” was recorded August 14, 1924 by Calvin Coolidge. Not surprisingly, it features CC talking about taxes, spending, and governmental thrift — his favorite subjects. Filmed during the run-up to the 1924 election, it marks a turning point in presidential communication.

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Coolidge's shoes.

The 1930s obscure the 1920s and much of what the country believed before the New Deal. In the 1920s, private property was still holy; so were contracts. In the 1920s progressivism was evolving, but traditional liberalism was respected as well. The idea of this blog is to think about the 1920s, and especially the decade’s great president, Calvin Coolidge, Silent Cal. Joe Thorndike and I are both trying to figure out more about that America of the 1920s. Welcome to our new page!

Silent Cal seems to us especially mysterious. People think they know him — “Silent Cal” — but they don’t necessarily. Coolidge was actually quite talkative. While governor of Massachusetts, he took some steps that could be called progressive. This site is dedicated to getting to know Calvin. It’s not just about Joe and me getting to know him. It’s also about giving some space to the many people who have something to share about Coolidge — a document, a thought. In any case, we hope to look at Calvin from new angles and we hope you’ll join us in doing so.

Like from the shoes up.

This pair of Coolidge’s shoes lives at the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation in Calvin’s home town, Plymouth Notch, Vt. They were photographed by Andrew Kostanecki, who serves on the board of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation.

Coolidge placed great faith in the notion of the “common good.” Good government, in the Coolidge style, did not involve any sort of brokering between special interests. Rather, the wise leader worked assiduously to identify a “common interest” and pursued it doggedly. As he said in one of his most famous speeches:

This Commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man’s dividends is the suspension of another man’s pay envelope.

This was an attractive and widely shared view in 1919, when Coolidge offered it up. As CC biographer David Greenberg has observed:

This view, quite prevalent at the time, was not a reactionary position but a mainstream conservative one — and not too far even from Progressive orthodoxy. Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson tended to believe that the proper goal of politics was to satisfy a “general interest,” and not the special interests of any particular groups.

But of course, one man’s common good was another man’s factional interest. Political leaders could — and did — disagree on the meaning of this vague but powerful notion.

For Coolidge, the most dangerous threat to the common good often came from those trying to pit one class against another. More particularly, it came from those who would demonized business and wealth, ostensibly in the service of labor and hard work.

The common good, Coolidge believed, was wholly consistent with a free and vibrant economic system. Indeed, it required economic freedom. He used an analogy to make the point:

Diffusion of learning has come down from the university to the common school—the kindergarten is last. No one would now expect to aid the common school by abolishing higher education … It may be that the diffusion of wealth works in an analogous way. As the little red schoolhouse is builded in the college, it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people.  Large profits mean large pay rolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service; in no land will the work of a day bring so large a reward in material and spiritual welfare.

Coolidge’s notion of the common good — and the policy implications that flowed from it —  were central to his political career.

Welcome to SilentCal.com, a blog on the life and times of President Calvin Coolidge. Written by Amity Shlaes and Joe Thorndike, posts here will be broadly  historical, rooted in the words, pictures, and sounds of the Coolidge era. But they will also — at least occasionally — venture from the past to the present, exploring the legacy that Coolidge and his contemporaries bequeathed to later generations.

Amity and I will write a lot about politics, of course. But we also hope to situate the vibrant political debates of the 1920s in a broader social, economic, and cultural context. Indeed, the 1920s are probably better known for their pop culture than their politics (think flapper dresses, speakeasies, and the like). Understanding the decade means understanding all of it, including public policy.

Calvin Coolidge may be the most forgotten president of the twentieth century (although William Howard Taft and Warren Harding might give him a run for his money). But no politician is more central to our understanding of the 1920s. And that decade, in turn, is vital to the political and economic watershed that followed on its heels. For the past two years, the economic crisis has fostered renewed interest in the New Deal (and Amity’s book on the topic, The Forgotten Man). But to really grasp the events of the Great Depression, we have to first wrestle with the legacy of the Great Prosperity.

So let’s get on with it.