{"product_id":"2940012860002","title":"The Speaker Who Locked up the House: a novel about Tom Reed and the raucous 51st Congress","description":"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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt 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.","brand":"Joseph Wilkins","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47078964297968,"sku":"2940012860002","price":4.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012860002_p0.jpg?v=1763573168","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012860002","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}