Mr. Speaker! by James Grant

Author:James Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Great Plains Land Bubble

REED WAS WORRYING about the 1888 elections even before he was officially in them. News that the hometown Republicans had selected him as their candidate for the seventh consecutive season reached him in Washington in the first week of May. The nominee picked the item out of a newspaper. “[N]o one sent me a single telegram!” he marveled, then mused: “It is always like that. The District and I don’t bother each other.” 1

Reed, along with much of the rest of America, had Blaine on his mind. Would the Plumed Knight make another run for the presidency? The nomination was his for the asking, such authorities as former president Rutherford B. Hayes and former senator Benjamin Harrison agreed. 2 None of the other aspirants—neither John Sherman, the “Ohio Icicle,” nor Chauncey Depew, the railroad president and Fourth of July orator, for instance—commanded anything like Blaine’s worshipful following. “In the spring of 1887,” relates a modern historian, H. Wayne Morgan, of the 1884 Republican standard-bearer, “his head-cold rated front page discussion. Reporters trailed him in Europe like spies in a Balkan war, donning servants’ costumes, bribing grooms and butlers for gossip from the coach and table.” 3

“Blaine can be nominated by acclamation …” acidly remarked Roscoe Conkling, his blood enemy, “and be defeated in the same manner.” 4 Neither had Blaine ever worked his charms on Reed, though few seemed to know it. Most assumed that the younger man was the elder’s protégé. En route to Alaska the summer before, Reed was constantly presented with the rumor that he was traveling as Blaine’s political agent. 5 On the contrary, Reed believed—however implausibly—that Blaine had opposed him from the time he ran for attorney general of Maine. “[H]e is a capable man, a man of genius,” Reed confided to his diary of his supposed mentor in October 1887, “but he is a liar, an egoist, without moral principles. It is true, undoubtedly, that all great men have had in their makeup a bit of the charlatan, and that it is not possible, even though it might seem so, to govern men at a level of moral perception of the greatest men, but Mr. B. is surrounded by a crowd of corrupt and corrupting men.” Reed went on to describe an investment Blaine had made in a Hocking Valley, Ohio, coal venture. To attract other investors, the statesman had allowed the company to say that he, Blaine, was a stockholder. But when the venture failed, Blaine turned out to occupy a more senior, and therefore a safer, position in the capital structure. To the surprise and dismay of those who thought they had invested alongside him, the Plumed Knight was revealed to be a creditor, a status sealed in a secret agreement that he had negotiated with management. “But without doubt, that doesn’t mean much,” Reed ironically wound up the story. “Great men are above morality.” 6

Whatever Blaine did in 1888, it looked to Reed like trouble. If he ran and won, he could damage Reed from the White House.

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