In Congress the charge against empire was led by the speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, a Republican from Maine. Reed was witty, principled and—at six-foot-three, three-hundred pounds—imposing. He ruled the House with an iron fist. Said one contemporary, “He commands everything by the brutality of his intellect.” Democratic opponents took to calling him “Czar Reed”—an epithet, quips Reed’s biographer James Grant, that he didn’t seem to mind.
The great historian Barbara Tuchman notes that as House speaker, Reed was “unalterably opposed to expansion and all it implied.” He believed that “American greatness lay at home and was to be achieved by improving living conditions,” rather than by embarking on adventures in Venezuela, Cuba, Hawaii and elsewhere.
But by 1898 the war fever was catching. Two months following the explosion, in February, of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba, McKinley declared war on Spain. Like too many progressives in present-day Washington who have spent the last three years plastering yellow and blue flags onto their bumpers, progressives in Reed’s day, including William Jennings Bryan, Albert J. Beveridge and New Republic (some things never change) founder Herbert Croly, all eagerly jumped aboard the pro-war bandwagon. “I would like to see Spain swept from the face of the earth,” said suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Reed knew that, despite his best efforts, he could not hold back the tide of empire in the House for long. He penned an article for the magazine Illustrated American titled “Empire Can Wait” and he held off legislation authorizing the annexation of Hawaii for as long as he could. The final straw for Reed was the Senate’s approval, by a 57-21 margin, of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded control of the Philippines (for $20 million), Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States.
An America-First foreign policy, properly understood, is one that eschews imperial conquests. Reed knew this intuitively but ultimately lost the debate to McKinley, Roosevelt and their pro-expansionist supporters.
At the time of Reed’s death, on December 6, 1902, his successor, Joe Cannon, eulogized him as having "the strongest intellect crossed on the best courage of any man in public life I have ever known.” Today, however, Reed is the unjustly neglected founder of America First.