David Aiken Reed was born on December 21, 1880 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of James Hay Reed and Kate J. Aiken Reed. His father was a law partner of Philander C. Knox, a federal district judge, a counselor and business associate of Andrew Carnegie, and an organizer and director of the United States Steel Corporation.
Reed graduated from Shadyside Academy in Pittsburgh (1896), Princeton University (1900), and the University of Pittsburgh Law School at the head of his class (1903).
After graduation from law school, Reed joined his father's firm.
He tried civil cases of all sorts - many involving industrial accidents - and was a leading defender of the United States Steel Corporation before the Supreme Court in a government antitrust suit that ran from 1915 to 1920. He also served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Industrial Accidents Commission (1912 - 1915) and helped shape and secure passage of that state's first workmen's compensation law (1915). An advocate of preparedness and war with Germany soon after World War I began, Reed spent the summers of 1915 and 1916 at the Plattsburgh officers training camp for businessmen and was appointed by Governor Martin G. Brumbaugh to plan the utilization of Pennsylvania's industrial resources for war.
After the United States entered the war, he served as a major in the field artillery and saw action near Verdun and in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. After his discharge Reed returned to Pittsburgh and the practice of law. A protégé of Andrew W. Mellon, Reed virtually inherited a seat in the Senate. His father had long been a power in Republican circles and an intimate friend of Mellon.
In 1922 Reed challenged incumbent William E. Crow, who was ill, in the Republican primary. Intraparty opposition to Reed evaporated following an April meeting of Republican factions at which the Mellon interests of Pittsburgh championed him and agreed to support candidates of the Vare machine in Philadelphia for state offices. Reed received the nomination, Crow died during the campaign, and on August 8, 1922, Governor William C. Sproul appointed Reed to fill the vacancy.
On November 7 he was elected to complete Crow's term and also to serve a new term beginning on March 4, 1923.
He chaired the committee investigating the Veterans Bureau (1923 - 1924), which produced enough evidence to convict its head, Colonel Charles R. Forbes, of fraud; but he consistently opposed a bonus for able-bodied veterans. Reed was hostile to generous government spending and endorsed Mellon's plan to reduce income taxes. In the struggle over the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930), he ably represented his personal as well as Pennsylvanian metallurgical interests, although the "ridiculous" high agricultural schedules nearly led him to oppose the bill.
Just before the national-origins clause went into effect in 1929, Reed foiled an attempt by President Herbert Hoover to destroy it. The national-origins idea, Reed declared less than a year before he died, "was one of the few wholly original ideas that I have ever had".
In 1928 he was overwhelmingly reelected to the Senate, but he failed to adjust to the Great Depression, and it eroded his political strength.
A few days before the 1932 presidential election he urged Pittsburgh businessmen to warn their employees against voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In May 1932, when Hoover was still in office, Reed had told the Senate "that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now", but he emphatically rejected President Roosevelt's attempts the following year to increase the power of the central government over industrial and agricultural production.
In 1934, although Reed defeated Gifford Pinchot in the primary, Democrat Joseph F. Guffey unseated him by a margin of 127, 000 votes. The Great Depression and, more specifically, Reed's party label, his reputation as "servant of money kings, " his attacks on the New Deal, and the hostility of organized labor had lost him 582, 000 votes since his 1928 triumph. Returning to his Pittsburgh law firm but not resuming a full-time practice, Reed remained active politically until 1940.
He attempted to regain his Senate seat but withdrew during the 1940 primary race. He chaired the isolationist America First unit in Pittsburgh prior to World War II.
He died while on vacation in Sarasota, Florida.
He enthusiastically supported the army general staff, and favored the use of poison gas and the drafting of capital in war.
Reed deplored sectionalism in the form of the farm bloc but embraced it to aid the Pennsylvania coal industry. He pressed the Interstate Commerce Commission to reverse its 1925 Lake Cargo Coal decision, and urged President Calvin Coolidge to appoint a Pennsylvanian to the ICC. Sympathetic with both the racial notions of nativists and the needs of industrialists for unskilled labor, Reed wished to encourage immigrants from northwestern Europe and limit the number from southeastern Europe. He proposed, and Congress accepted, the national-origins principle in the Reed-Johnson Immigration Act (1924). That principle sought to preserve the racial status quo by apportioning quotas to each "national stock" according to its representation in the American population in 1920.
Reed's foreign policy was "to mind our own business. " He opposed America's joining the League of Nations, but was a delegate to the London Naval Conference (1930) and enthusiastically supported the resulting disarmament treaty.
In 1931 he argued that a general sales tax would solve the nation's financial troubles. Reed viewed relief as a local problem, opposed lending the states federal money to help the unemployed, and opposed any loan or cash payment to veterans on their bonus certificates. On the international level, Reed opposed the reduction of German reparations payments and the cancellation of Allied war debts and did not want the United States even to participate in an international conference to discuss those issues.
He opposed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), recognition of the Soviet Union (1933), and the Trade Agreements Act (1934). He particularly abhorred the New Deal experiments with inflation.
In the Senate, Reed, who served on the Military Affairs (chairman, 1927 - 1933), Finance, Immigration, Foreign Relations, and Rules committees, was renowned as Mellon's spokesman; as an eloquent, well-informed, staunch conservative; and as the most tactless member of either house.
Reed was a wiry, stoop-shouldered six-footer with a smooth-shaven, deeply lined, long face, melancholy eyes, and thin, slicked-down brown hair. Despite a hot temper and a savage wit, he debated in conversational tones and tended to lecture his colleagues.
On November 12, 1902, he married Adele Wilcox of New York City; they had two children. On December 15, 1948, six months after his first wife died, Reed married her cousin, Edna M. French of Syracuse, New York.
