James Alexander Reed was born on November 9, 1861 in Richland County, Ohio, near Mansfield, the second among five children and second of three sons of John A. Reed, a farmer, and Nancy (Crawford) Reed. His parents moved in 1864 to Linn County, Iowa, where the boy worked on the family stock farm and attended district school during winters. When he was eight his father died.
Reed graduated from the Cedar Rapids high school in 1880. After a "special course" at Coe College in Cedar Rapids.
He read law at night and was admitted to the bar in 1885.
In 1887 he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, which remained his home thereafter. In Iowa, Reed had been chairman of the county Democratic committee at the age of eighteen. Courageous and eloquent, he entered Missouri political life with a forthright attack on the anti-Catholic American Protective Association. For ten years Reed combined a rapidly growing law practice with energetic work in Democratic politics, the latter bringing him into close association with the political organization headed by Thomas J. Pendergast and his brothers.
Reed's first public post was city counselor (1897 - 98), followed by election as prosecuting attorney of Jackson County, which included Kansas City. In two years he tried 287 cases and obtained convictions in all but two. With this remarkable record, he swept into the mayor's chair in 1900 as a reform candidate. Leading a consumers' war on street railway, electric, and telephone utilities, he won reelection in 1902. He was a delegate to his first national Democratic convention in 1908, and at the 1912 convention he placed House Speaker Champ Clark in nomination against Woodrow Wilson.
Although in 1904 he had unsuccessfully opposed the popular Joseph W. Folk for the Democratic nomination for governor, Jim Reed, as he was invariably called, was elected to the United States Senate in 1910 over David R. Francis. The last Missouri Senator to be chosen by the legislature, he was reelected by statewide vote, with increasing majorities, in 1916 and 1922.
In the Senate, Reed generally supported the Wilson administration's New Freedom legislation and its foreign policies, including the declaration of war against Germany in 1917. But he soon turned against wartime measures, especially economic controls. When Herbert Hoover was appointed Food Administrator, Reed attacked the Lever Food Act as "vicious and unconstitutional, " denounced its enforcer, Hoover, as the "arch gambler of this day, " and sent his constituents a letter so bitterly critical of food controls that Wilson described it as "perfectly outrageous".
Condemning the dispatch of conscripted troops to Europe, Reed protested the 1917 draft act and proposed as a substitute a volunteer defense system. Reed's criticism of the conduct of the war, however, paled beside his utterly uncompromising stand against the Versailles peace treaty and in particular against the covenant of the League of Nations, which he labeled "the product of British statesmanship. "
He not only came out flatly against ratification but joined Republican Senators Hiram W. Johnson, William E. Borah, and Medill McCormick in trailing Wilson with counterarguments during the President's speaking tour of September 1919 to present the treaty directly to the voters.
Reed put through a Congressional resolution for the early recall of American soldiers from garrisons in Germany, and nearly a decade after the armistice he continued to inveigh against the World Court. He likewise opposed the war's debt settlements and the four-power treaty proposed by the Washington Conference on arms limitation in 1921.
Reed's course caused a grave breach in the Democratic party. When the Senator sought to justify his position before the Missouri legislature in 1919, Wilson supporters first walked out and later passed a censure resolution. The next year the state Democratic convention repudiated Reed's stand and denied him a delegate's seat at the national convention in San Francisco. After seeking unsuccessfully to get James M. Cox, the Democratic presidential nominee, to back his anti-League position, Reed declined to endorse the national ticket. Two years later, when Reed ran for a third Senatorial term, Woodrow Wilson, then one year out of the White House, called him "my implacable opponent in everything that is honorable and enlightened" and "a discredit to the party to which he pretends to belong".
Reed countered by declaring that the conflict arose from Wilson's mistaken insistence on "personal allegiance, " and maintained that each Senator was an "independent legislator, " to be tested not in terms of the British plan of "responsible party government" but by votes "in accordance with sound public policy. "
At the outset of the 1922 campaign, Reed seemed to face certain defeat. The press scored him harder than ever. Wilson Democrats organized "Rid-us-of-Reed" clubs and staged a mock funeral. The cigar-chewing, tobacco-spitting Senator, however, waged an intense battle and achieved a double triumph.
He won the primary race by 6, 000 votes over a fervent Wilsonian, former Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, and then gained reelection by 44, 000, his largest lead. Aided by popular dislike for federal prohibition, which he condemned as unconstitutional, Reed garnered the ballots of thousands of wet Republicans, in addition to urban, anti-League Irish and German groups. It was a stunning personal victory for one virtually read out of his party only two years earlier.
During his last Senate term Reed was a bitter critic of the successive Republican administrations and of such leaders as Hoover and Andrew W. Mellon.
His long tenure in the Senate had brought him memberships on both the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees. No aspect of Senatorial service was more to his liking than the investigative function. In his first term he had opposed shipping company practices and exposed the operations of Washington lobbyists.
In 1926 he headed a committee investigating illegal campaign expenditures; as a result of its work the Senate refused to seat Frank L. Smith of Illinois and William S. Vare of Pennsylvania. Reed also helped probe the Anti-Saloon League's political activities, as well as the sugar industry's connections with Charles B. Warren, who was rejected by the Senate for Attorney General.
He died in his eighty-third year, of myocarditis and bronchopneumonia, at his summer estate near Fairview, Michigan, and was buried in Mount Washington Cemetery, Kansas City.
Not all of Reed's positions appeared to square. Thus while he opposed the protective tariff and economic monopoly, he objected to most government regulation. Similarly, though he espoused individual liberty and heaped scorn on the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Semites, he rejected woman suffrage and the proposed child labor amendment. Reed made a serious bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1928, and consequently did not run for reelection to the Senate. Upon leaving Washington, he resumed his law practice in Kansas City.
Increasingly opposed to government "paternalism" and "socialist or regulatory schemes, " he became a foe of the New Deal and of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936 he organized the National Jeffersonian Democrats and stumped for Alfred M. Landon; four years later he again supported the Republican nominee, Wendell L. Willkie.
Quotations: "I decline, " Reed said on September 22, "to help set up any government greater than that established by the fathers, greater than that baptized in the blood of patriots from the lanes of Lexington to the forests of the Argonne. " The determination and passion of Reed and his colleagues caused them to be known as "irreconcilables" and "bitter-enders. "
A tall, straight figure of a man, with flashing eyes and ruddy complexion, Reed had what was described as a Grecian face, set off in later life by white hair.
Quotes from others about the person
The journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, who found in Reed a resemblance to Andrew Jackson, called him the Senate's "roughest and hardest hitter, " capable of "profound public service. "
Another seasoned observer, William Hard, credited Reed with rising to "heights of sublimity which it is difficult to believe have ever been surpassed in parliamentary history". But Mark Sullivan said that "in debate, he is violent, vituperative, and unfair".
The New Republic called him "an actor" who "always dramatized every struggle in which he was engaged", and Collier's went so far as to say that he was "never really dedicated to any cause except the cause of Jim Reed".
Though other judgments might differ, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat spoke well when it said that in more than forty years of public life, Reed "never dodged a fight or asked for odds".
He married Lura Mansfield Olmsted, daughter of a Cedar Rapids physician, on August 1, 1887. Reed's first wife died August 12, 1932, and on December 13, 1933, he married Mrs. Nell (Quinlan) Donnelly; there were no children by either marriage.
