Welcome to constitutionally speaking, a podcast about the United States Constitution,

early American history and political philosophy.

My name is Jay Cost, and with me is my co-host, Luke Thompson.

And this week, we are continuing our look at the United States Congress through history.

This is sort of our third episode looking at the history of the House of Representatives.

First episode in this big mini series on Congress. We looked at the earliest Congress,

and then last week we looked at the Congress

during the Jeffersonian, Jacksonian ages.

Now we're going to sort of shift into looking at the Congress

as it developed over the course of the 20th century.

When we begin to see a lot of changes in the way Congress is organized,

and in a lot of respects, Congress kind of does a very interesting U-turn, for lack of a better word,

where we see the emergence of strong party leadership, particularly in the

house, that then is beaten back with reform movements, but then by the 1970s, you see strong party

leadership emerge again. And this is an era where we're going to be talking about, um,

the first character that we're going to be talking about is, uh,

Thomas Reed,

who was Speaker of the House from, uh, 1895 to 1899.

Luke,

why don't you give us a little overview of, uh,

Thomas Brackett Reed?

Well, we, so Reed actually serves two ten terms in the house.

...