James Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer will deliver the October Bradley Lecture.

Representative Thomas B. Reed of Maine, three times Speaker of the House of Representatives in the final quarter of the 19th century, stood for all the Republican verities but one: he could not abide his party’s imperialist agenda. The war with Spain, the annexation of Hawaii, and the conquest of the Philippines saddened and appalled him. Branded “Czar” by his Democratic opponents for the power he wielded from the Speaker’s chair, Reed could easily have set up parliamentary obstructions to the McKinley administration’s foreign policy. But as rock-ribbed a Republican as any of his time, he could bring himself to do nothing so disloyal. Rather, he registered his disapproval by silently resigning. “We are bound to say,” a newspaper editorialist commented shortly after his departure in 1899, “that of all the methods of attacking the great and good McKinley, which have been devised, that pursued by ex-Speaker Reed is the most ‘dastardly’ . . . . All that Mr. Reed does is to say that he believes in the Declaration of Independence and in the principles of liberty, self-government and the rights of man.”

James Grant founded Grant’s Interest Rate Observer in 1983 after an eight-year stint at Barron’s, where he originated the “Current Yield” column. He is the author of four books on finance and financial history: Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend (Simon & Schuster, 1983), Money of the Mind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), Minding Mr. Market (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993) and The Trouble with Prosperity (Times Books, 1996). A fifth book--John Adams: Party of One, a biography of the second president--was published in March 2005 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His column in Forbes appears monthly. His television appearances include the CBS Evening News, Nightly Business Report, and 60 Minutes.