The Speaker Who Locked up the House: a novel about Tom Reed and the raucous 51st Congress

The year is 1890, the place the House of Representatives in Washington where progressive Republican Speaker Thomas B. Reed presides over a Congress in which the dying embers of the Civil War flare up again as he confronts Southern White Supremacists in his determination to end their power. Told as a novel, it is a story of murder, romance, passions personal and political, wartime grudges and religious dilemma, told against the background of Washington’s marbled halls, desperate alley slums, elegant whorehouses, and spittoon-filled poolrooms along Pennsylvania Avenue, and in the small towns and remote farms of the deep South where lynching, murders and Winchester-carrying night-riders maintain white supremacy by relentless violence

It is also a story of a Congress whose pay was stolen by a House cashier who ran off with the money and his mistress; where the Speaker ordered the House doors locked to keep the members inside, only to have enraged ex-Confederate cavalry officers kick them open; where the Speaker has to order a lobbyist-organized whorehouse near the Ladies Gallery closed, and where a reporter from the Press Gallery shoots and kills ex-Congressman Preston Taulbee on the main staircase of the House wing, and is acquitted of the charge of murder by the jury. A skillful blend of historical research and dramatic writing, "The Speaker Who Locked up the House" is a riveting tale of the raucous 51st Congress of the United States.