Old Man Eloquent and the GAG RULE

“Order! Order!” The Speaker of the House punctuated his shouts with the banging of his gavel. Across the marble-columned U.S. House of Representatives, enraged southern congressmen howled and shook their fists. The object of their scorn was the slight form standing defiantly at desk number 203. Two and a half years after leaving the White House, John Quincy Adams was back.

Adams’s one-term presidency from 1825 to 1829 had been a struggle of partisan politics. His failed race for a second term had been bitter and nasty. His loss had convinced his family and colleagues that he had fought his last fight. Adams himself vowed “to go into the deepest retirement and withdraw from all connections with public affairs.” But