 Chapter 6 Part 1 of 20 Years of the Republic, 1885-1905 by Harry Thurston Peck This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Election of 1892, Part 1 After witnessing President Harrison's inauguration, Mr. Cleveland had left Washington and presently became a resident of New York City where he resumed the practice of law as an associate of the firm of Bangs, Stetson, Tracy and McVeigh. In the eyes of the professional politicians of both parties his public career seemed to have ended and to have ended in utter failure. He was regarded as one who had by an accident of politics attained a transitory greatness to which he had proved to be personally unequal. His dogged determination in forcing an apparently unpopular issue almost on the eve of a presidential election and merely as a matter of conviction had been quite incomprehensible at the time and the result appeared to justify the contempt which partisans such as Senator Gorman and Governor Hill confidentially expressed to their intimates. They felt that Mr. Cleveland had now been eliminated from national politics. He had settled down as an everyday lawyer in a great cosmopolitan city where the complexity of life and the clash of material interests reduced even the most eminent of its citizens to comparative obscurity. Mr. Henry Watterson rather complacently remarked at this time, Cleveland and New York reminds me of a stone thrown into a river. There is a plunk, a splash, and then silence. The ex-president accepted this verdict with philosophical good humor. He had nothing to regret. He had acted in accordance with his sense of right and had done what he believed to be the best both for his country and for his party. As he said a little later at a banquet given in his honor, note 1, page 253. We know that we have not deceived the people with false promises and pretenses, and we know that we have not corrupted and betrayed the poor with the money of the rich. By his savings and by judicious investments in real estate Mr. Cleveland had already secured a modest competence. As a lawyer his professional labors yielded him a generous income. He practiced little in the courts, but important cases were often referred to him by the sitting justices while his unquestioned integrity and conscientiousness led many prospective litigants to submit their interest to his arbitration. There was one kind of legal practice which he persistently refused to undertake. No persuasion could induce him to accept retainers from the great corporations. Note 2, page 253. Mr. Cleveland was convinced that the moneyed interests had already become a menace to the welfare of the nation, and with them he was unwilling to associate himself in any fashion whatsoever. In the message which he sent to Congress soon after his defeat for reelection he had pointed out the perils which he saw in vast and irresponsible aggregations of wealth whose possessors felt themselves to be above the law. The fortunes realized by our manufacturers are no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight, but they result from the discriminating favor of the government and are largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people. The gulf between employers and employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful while in another I found the toiling poor. As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trust, combinations and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people are fast becoming the people's masters. The existing situation is injurious to the health of our entire body politic. It stifles in those for whose benefit it is permitted all patriotic love of country and substitutes in its place selfish greed and grasping avarice. Devotion to American citizenship for its own sake and for what it should accomplish as a motive to our nation's advancement and the happiness of all our people is displaced by the assumption that the government instead of being the embodiment of equality is but an instrumentality through which a special and individual advantages are to be gained. Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government, but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness which insidiously undermined the justice and integrity of free institutions is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which exasperated by injustice and discontent attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule. Note 3, page 254 But although Mr. Cleveland was no longer an object of interest to the politicians, there were many quiet indications that the great mass of his countrymen had not forgotten him. Invitations came to him continually from professional, commercial, religious, educational and civic organizations which sought the honor of his presence at commemorative banquets and other public gatherings. Note 4, page 254 When his engagements permitted he exceeded to these requests, for as he said on one occasion he had no sympathy with those good souls who are greatly disturbed every time an ex-president ventures to express an opinion on any subject. Not infrequently he spoke at length to interested listeners, and what he said was always sensible and wise and sometimes pregnant with suggestion. As a public speaker Mr. Cleveland was far from attaining brilliancy, even his warmest friends could scarcely claim that he was an orator. His manner and his style alike were heavy. He had a strong preference for polysyllabic words and for sentences so involved as to be John Sonion in their ponderosity. He had probably never heard the dictum of the French stylist who said, L'Ajectif c'est le plus grand ennemi du substantif. For almost every noun was coupled with an adjective and these adjectives were frequently applied in pairs. Moreover, like many another statesmen, he often took refuge in the baldest truisms which were seldom freshened up by originality of phrasing. Mr. Abrames Hewitt once said of him, in a tartly cryptic epigram which may be interpreted as conveying either praise or censure, Cleveland is the greatest master of platitudes since Washington. It is likely, however, that Mr. Cleveland's oratorical deficiencies were on the whole a distinct advantage to him. The American people at that period still held to the conservative tradition which viewed exceptional accomplishments in public men if not with suspicion, at least with a certain amount of caution. Brilliancy might rouse admiration, but it could not inspire confidence. In the long run it was the safe man rather than the showy man who secured the highest honors from the electorate. Clay and Webster and Blaine had won the frantic applause of millions, yet they had all failed to achieve the one great prize on which their hearts were set. No president had ever been an orator of the first rank save only Lincoln and Lincoln's great political addresses represented the oratory of reason rather than the oratory of emotion. And hence in Mr. Cleveland's case, even when his utterances were very tame and his sentences quite commonplace, they appealed to the multitude as embodying sound morality, conservative opinion, and what General Grant was fond of calling, good horse sense. Mr. Cleveland's lines therefore at this time were cast in pleasant places. Successful in his profession and respected by those whose personal esteem was worth the having, he enjoyed a period of tranquility that must have been most grateful after his stormy years of public office. He spent his summers at a charming country seat upon the Massachusetts coast to which he gave the name Grey Gables. There he entertained his intimate friends with a genial friendly hospitality, and there as an angler he won a reputation which he was said to value quite as much as any public honors that he had ever gained. It was an ideal life for a retired statesman, a life that he would gladly have continued to enjoy unvexed by the strife and din of party politics, but the fates had decreed it otherwise. The discussion of the McKinley Bill in 1890 and the overwhelming Republican defeat in the congressional elections which followed close upon the passage of that measure brought Mr. Cleveland once again into a prominence such as he was far from seeking. It was he who in his bold message of 1887 had first raised the tariff issue. It was he who had forced the Republicans to adopt a policy which had ended in their utter route. Though he had at the time failed of reelection he had nevertheless inspired his party with aggressiveness and confidence. Many Democrats now began to ask whether anyone was so well fitted as he to lead the party back again to power. The campaign of education begun in 1888 was commencing to bear fruit. Looking forward to the coming struggle for the presidency popular feeling instinctively went out to Mr. Cleveland as the logical candidate for 1892. Yet although this sentiment was beginning to pervade the rank and file of the democracy it was most distasteful to the party managers. In a phrase of their own choosing they had no use for Mr. Cleveland. To them he had always shown himself intractable and they had been pleased at what appeared to be his permanent elimination from politics. It was not agreeable to think of him as likely to become again a candidate. Therefore they took no notice of the popular feeling in his favor but endeavored to ignore him and to speak of him in public with a studied indifference as of one whose day was over and who had become politically a back number. Most of the party organs refrained from mentioning him in connection with the presidency. Some of them endeavored to discredit him by a systematic press campaign of defamation. Conspicuous in this was the New York Sun at that time under the editorship of Mr. Charles A. Dana. Charles Anderson Dana was undoubtedly the most remarkable figure that had yet arisen in the history of American journalism. Born in 1819 and educated at Harvard he was a careful student and an omnivorous reader with a memory so tenacious as to place at his command a vast array of facts which his quick wit and literary skill enabled him to use with singular effectiveness. As a very young man he had joined the four year rights for a time in the erratic though memorable experiment at Brook Farm. A little later he was engaged in miscellaneous writing for the Boston newspapers. In 1847 he joined the staff of the New York Tribune in whose office he developed a pungent style which was afterward to make him feared and famous. Here too he came into contact with all the most important public men of the antebellum period. A violent dispute with Horace Greeley over the latter's unfortunate, on to Richmond, editorial led to Dana's retirement from the Tribune in 1862. Note 5, page 258. And in the following year he was made Assistant Secretary of War. In this capacity he rendered highly important service to his Chief Stanton who sent him upon confidential missions to the headquarters of the army with instructions to report upon the character and conduct of the leading generals. Dana's knowledge of human nature, his grasp upon essentials and his power of going to the very heart of things made his reports invaluable both to the Secretary and to Mr. Lincoln. It was due to Dana's favorable judgment that General Grant was not relieved of his command in 1863 but was upheld by the administration in the teeth of the fiercest criticisms. In 1864 however Dana left the War Department and returned to journalism editing for a while the Chicago Republican. In this he failed completely. Discouraged and uncertain of his future he came to New York where he established himself in 1868 as editor of the New York Sun. It was the year of Grant's first election to the presidency. Dana, remembering the service which he had done the general and having, besides a real liking for the man, wrote a life of Grant which he intended to be a sort of campaign biography. For it was highly eulogistic and was written with an intimate knowledge of its subject. Political usage and personal gratitude might have suggested to the new president the bestowal of some reward on one whose ability was so exceptional as Mr. Dana's. Yet for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained, Grant absolutely ignored the claim. It was Dana's desire to be made collector of the Port of New York but the office was given to another. And by this act Grant made an enemy whose unrelenting hatred pursued him to the grave. With an almost frantic eagerness Dana said about destroying every copy of the life upon which he could lay his hands so that today the book is practically unattainable outside of a few libraries. Then in the columns of the sun he waged upon Grant a war of slander which for sheer malignity has never been surpassed. Dana knew quite well that Grant was honest, clean living, patriotic and sincere. Note 6, page 254. Yet now with a perversion of facts that was infernal in its ingenuity he painted him as a corrupt and brutal scoundrel, one who used his office for his personal enrichment, a tyrant, a vulgar ruffian and a common drunkard. Everyone connected with the president, even his wife and family came in for a share of Dana's wrath or ridicule. At one time the editor was indicted in the District of Columbia and an attempt was made to have him removed to Washington for trial. Over such a prospect Dana was almost beside himself with fear. His hysterical editorials made it plain that had his case been actually tried in Washington he must have gone to prison. But Judge Blatchford, sitting in New York refused the change of venue. In consequence the case was dropped and Dana continued to lash the president with even greater fury than before. After Grant's retirement to private life the attitude of the sun remained the same. Even when the hero of the Great War was awaiting burial and when all other criticism was stilled in the presence of death Dana launched a poisoned shaft to those who loved Grant best. The sun published an account of an undertaker's bill which the general's family had very properly refused to pay but which Dana himself had settled with an ostentatious show of hypocritical benevolence that was absolutely devilish. The change in Dana's attitude toward Grant in 1868 was however only a single aspect of a change which had altered his entire nature. Until then he had been genial and fair-minded with a touch of something like idealism in his view of things. He had associated with honorable men and his life had been a useful one. But as he now looked back upon it that life appeared to him a failure. Uprightness, optimism and a regard for others had not paid. Both in journalism and in public life he had somehow missed success and he was now in his fiftieth year. And so he seems to have said to himself that henceforth in his career as journalist he would take no heed of right or wrong but would gain a certain sort of fame and assure material reward by throwing overboard all principle. From that time he was thoroughly a cynic and a pessimist. In his charming home at Roslyn and to a very few intimate friends he still showed himself to be a genial, cultivated gentleman interested in his books and flower gardens and with a genuine enthusiasm for rare pottery of which he was a connoisseur. But as editor of The Sun he played consistently the part of devil's advocate. He set himself to jeer at whatever was best and noblest to degrade and burlesque whatever decent men respected to defend or palliate the base and to treat corruption as an admirable joke. Thus he supported Tammany in the days of its worst offenses. He was the apologist of Tweed. He warmly commended the proposal to erect a public monument to that notorious malefactor. On the other hand every attempt to improve political conditions such as the reform of the civil service and the movement for an honest ballot was greeted by Dana with an outburst of derision. He used his newspaper also as a weapon to avenge his personal dislikes and whoever incurred his enmity or roused his prejudice was spillereed in the columns of The Sun. Had Mr. Dana been a journalist of the usual type his hatreds and his expression of them would soon have ceased to be of any interest and would most probably have proved the ruin of The Sun. But the man was a genius in his way. His rhetoric was superb and even those who most disliked him were reluctantly compelled to own the power of his invective. He had an unerring instinct for touching his victim on the raw and his ingenuity in giving pain was marvelous. Furthermore there was something tricksy, something impish even in his malevolence so that outrageous though he was his outrageousness had an indefinable quality which raised it far above the level of vulgarity. To him might well have been applied the description which Disraeli once gave of Lord Salisbury. A master of jibes and flouts and jeers. A careful student of his editorial work once wrote of him. He had a gift for making men seem hateful or contemptible or ridiculous and he used his talent most unsparingly. His nicknames and epithets stuck like burrows to those at whom he hurled them. Who cannot recall the score of these appellations? Note 7, page 262. Every one of which conveyed to the mind the suggestion of something ludicrous. And quite apart from its editorial page The Sun was managed with great ability. It was then perhaps the most readable newspaper in the United States. Its news was collected with the utmost accuracy. Its reporting was often done with a skill and cleverness that gave it a distinctly literary quality. Its editor was regarded with intense admiration by journalists throughout the country and he became the founder of a journalistic cult. Dana was ostensibly a democratic partisan. His friends asserted that at election time he had always voted the Republican ticket. If so, this was a characteristic example of his cynicism. For in his editorial columns, everything Republican was anathema. Most probably he preferred to be in opposition because such a role gave fuller scope to his peculiar gifts. Indeed, in 1880, when the September election seemed to indicate that the Democratic candidate, General Hancock, was likely to be chosen president in November, Dana deliberately wrote a double-lettered editorial in which he sneered at Hancock as a good man weighing 250 pounds, a jive which greatly delighted the Republicans. The only note of sincerity in Dana's writings was found in his support of Mr. Tilden, who was his personal friend. When Mr. Cleveland was elected governor of New York, Dana at first was favorable to him, but presently he became inimical for reasons that are variously given. Some say that as Mr. Tilden's liking for Governor Cleveland cooled, Dana took his own cue from Tilden. Others assert that Mr. Cleveland rejected certain overtures that were made to him by Dana and declined to invite the editor to Albany in answer to a hint. Note 8, pages 263 and 64. However, this may be, the Sun soon raged itself among the anti-Clevelan journals, and in 1884 it supported the greenback nominee, General B. F. Butler. It was exceedingly like Dana to advocate the election of this brazen charlatan, who holds in history the bad eminence of having been the only conspicuous northern commander in the Civil War, against whom charges of personal corruption were practically proven. Note 9, page 264. Throughout Mr. Cleveland's presidency, Dana maintained a sort of malevolent neutrality, giving many a satirical thrust at the man whose reforming spirit was obnoxious to the presiding genius of the Sun. On the day after Cleveland's defeat in the election of 1888, Dana printed without comment an entire column of quotations from medical and physiological works on the subject of obesity. Thereafter, the Sun ignored the ex-president until once more he loomed up as a possible candidate. Now dipping his pen in vitriol, Dana outdid himself in running the entire gamut of abuse from ridicule to excoriation. To him Mr. Cleveland became the perpetual candidate and later the stuffed prophet. Some of these editorials were masterpieces of malignity and as such they are almost worthy of permanent preservation. They served no end, however, safe to draw increased attention to his enemy's political availability. It was Mr. Cleveland himself who, in the judgment of many persons, deliberately ruined his own prospects by an utterance which he made at this time upon a question which had been violently injected into national politics. Before narrating the occurrence it is necessary to give a brief account of the growth of the silver movement in the western states. In the early years of its existence the Republican Party had been dominated by one controlling purpose, the destruction of slavery. The issue which gave it birth was distinctly a moral issue and the enthusiasm which inspired it was a moral enthusiasm. Its first declaration made at Jackson, Michigan on July 6, 1854 declared that the Republican Party was battling for the first principles of Republican government and against the schemes of an aristocracy. All Republicans were pledged in this declaration to act cordially and faithfully in unison, postponing and suspending all difference with regard to political economy or administrative policy. Note 10, page 265. The Republican Party therefore was distinctly not a party of caste or of class, but preeminently a party of the people devoted to the cause of human freedom. In those days the power of wealth and the pride of birth were equally arrayed against it. The rich merchants and bankers of Boston, New York and Philadelphia viewed this new party as a menace to political tranquility and vested interests. They joined hands gladly with the aristocratic planters of the South in seeking to stamp out so strange and disquieting a fanaticism. It was the most respectable citizens of Massachusetts who ostracized Charles Sumner, who broke up anti-slavery meetings, who mobbed garrison and threatened to lynch Whittier. The Republican leaders boasted that their party was not one of wealth and privilege, but of intelligence and moral worth. Clergymen, teachers, writers and small professional men joined its ranks, which were still further recruited from the agricultural portions of the country. The great strength of the Republican Party lay not in the eastern states, but in the young Commonwealths of the West, in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The first Republican president was the very incarnation of democracy, so plain and manner, so simple in life and so ruggedly sincere as to seem to the fastidious denizens of the East a mere barbarian. It was, therefore, as a party of the people that Republicanism first won its way to political power. When the Civil War ended, the great purpose of the primitive Republicans had been achieved. Slavery was abolished forever. The feudalism based upon it was annihilated. Every inch of American territory had become free soil. As we now look back upon that period with a sense of true political perspective, it is plain that the old Republican Party really died in the year 1866. The party which afterwards continued to bear its name was altogether different from that which had rallied around Fremont in 1856 and which had twice elected Lincoln. It was different in its aims and aspirations, different in the character of its leaders, and different in the influences which shaped its policy. Its years of almost irresponsible power had utterly transformed it. Controlling the national finances with an overwhelming majority in Congress and having in its gift not merely office and opportunity, but every sort of legislative favor, it drew to itself the support of every interest which ten years before had been arrayed against it. It was now the party of the bankers, the manufacturers, the lords of commerce, and all those active, restless, scheming spirits who had learned that great fortunes were to be made in other ways than by legitimate industry. The true citadels of the Republican Party were now the crowded centers of the East while the agricultural states received but slight consideration. The continuance of the war tariff which enriched a comparatively few interests at the expense of the entire population was the most striking factor in the development of this new republicanism. The farmer was compelled to pay tribute to the manufacturer and so the Republican Party in this second phase of its existence became a party of class as truly as the Democratic Party had ever been in the days before the war. The West was slow in recognizing the significance of this change but as time went on financial conditions operated to cause serious distress. In the first place the gradual appreciation and the value of the paper dollar pinched the debtor class severely. The farmer for example who in 1863 had mortgaged his farm for 5000 paper dollars worth perhaps not more than half that sum in gold, found that he must repay the loan in dollars worth nearly twice as much and therefore representing twice as much economy and diligence and labor. The resumption of species payments in 1879 though a triumph of financial management did nevertheless inflict a serious hardship upon all men who had borrowed money at a time when the paper currency of the United States was worth much less than its face value. This hardship was of course inevitable but it was nonetheless a hardship and it is not surprising that those who suffered from it should have tried to seek a remedy. Hence arose the so called Greenback Party which as early as 1876 nominated candidates for the presidency and vice presidency on a platform which demanded the repeal of the act for resuming species payments and which advocated the issue of United States notes as a sole currency of the nation. Upon this platform Peter Cooper of New York received in that year a popular vote of 81,000 while in 1880 another Greenback candidate James B. Weaver of Iowa pulled a vote of over 300,000. This movement however represented only one form of popular discontent. There were other grievances more irritating and apparently more easily remediable. One was the manner in which the railways of the country had monopolized the public lands. Note 11, page 268. Barring great tracks to settlers while refusing to comply with the conditions under which the grants of land had been bestowed. Another grievance was the discrimination in railroad rates by which the small shipper was forced out of business by powerful corporations. Note 12, page 268. Still another was the working of the tariff laws which had steadily discriminated against the most widespread of all American industries, agriculture, while forcing it to bear the greater burden of taxation. It came at last to be widely asserted and believed that the government of the United States was becoming a creature of the corporations, that Congress was failed with corporation agents, railway senators, and trust representatives, and that even the judges on the bench were often men whose antecedents as corporation lawyers discredited their judicial decisions. All these and still other reasons for public discontent first found expression in isolated political movements throughout the West. Besides the Greenback or National Party, there arose the so-called Anti-Monopoly Party, which held its first convention at Chicago in 1884. In 1888, two labor parties appeared, each with a different set of grievances. The so-called Granger movement was another evidence of the popular discontent. The Grangers, or as they were officially styled, the patrons of husbandry, were an organization of which the founder was one O. H. Kelly, a clerk in the Bureau of Agriculture. Their general aim was to unite for self-protection all who were actually engaged in agricultural pursuits. By 1875, the Grangers, who then numbered more than 1,500,000 men and women, had definitely formulated certain measures which they hoped to have embodied in both state and national legislation. Like the Knights of Labor, they advocated women's suffrage and the regulation of railway rates. This organization afterwards grew into the Farmers' Alliance just as the Knights of Labor grew into the American Federation of Labor. And as both of them had many aims in common, they affected a coalition in 1889 when they agreed upon a common platform of principles demanding the abolition of national banks, an increased issue of government paper, and the government ownership of all means of transportation and public intercourse. By this time, the Western states were in a condition of political ferment. As yet, there was no general cohesion or agreement between the different factions and parties. They lacked a leader. They had not as yet developed any political machinery. In the East, little notice was taken of them. The newspapers treated them with easy ridicule and described the intensely earnest men and women who composed them as cranks and calamity howlers. Many of them were indeed unintelligent fanatics. Many of their wrongs were fanciful. Many of their remedies were quite impossible. Yet there did remain a very solid substratum of reason for these various movements and the discontent was not without substantial justification. The epithets so sneeringly applied to the rank and file of the new parties recall the no less sneering epithets that had been hurled at the Republicans in the days of their anti-slavery crusade. They too had been described as wild men and fanatics and enemies of public order. They chose it as an instrument for turning out the Republicans who were held to be primarily responsible for existing conditions. The reason was that both of the old parties were now almost equally distrusted. Both were regarded as being under the control of the money power. During Mr. Cleveland's administration from 1885 to 1889, it had been made clear that the trusts were quite as influential and democratic as in Republican politics. Mr. H.B. Payne, for whom the Standard Oil Company had bought the Ohio legislature, was ostensibly a Democrat. It was charged also that Secretary Whitney, Mr. Cleveland's closest advisor, was dominated by the same sinister influence. Senator Hoare had asked, is it the Standard Oil Company represented in the cabinet at this moment? Note 13, page 270. And the question had rassed the nerves of the entire nation. Therefore, these new factions that were springing up in the West and in the South felt that a clean sweep must be made and that both of the old parties must be driven out. Succeeding Republicans in the West declared themselves to be reverting to the earlier Republicanism of Lincoln while in the South those who had once been Democrats professed to be reviving the democracy of Jefferson. All of them wished to get back to simplicity, honesty and economy and government to secure a fair field for all, to resist commercialism, to oppose the money power and the general corruption and cowardice of the old parties. Party conventions and organizations were now mere machines for winning elections and keeping control of the offices. They were unscrupulous oligarchies controlled by the rich. The few astute and wealthy managers and magnates called businessmen controlling the party managers as their henchmen set things up in private conferences while the masses were being fooled and manipulated like voting herds. Then the business magnates who dictated the nomination of the candidates and furnished the sinews of war for the campaign were of course to conduct the government. And equally, of course, the laws were to be made and administered in such a way as to take good care of these managers' business interests. It was felt that if any president or senator or congressman began to urge honestly and effectively that the great mine owners or railroads or trust combinations, the moneyed forces that controlled the money, land and transportation of the people, should be actually brought face to face with the enforcement of just and equal laws, then some silent but powerful influence within the parties would retire such public servants to private life. Note 14, page 271. The storm center of this third party agitation was the state of Kansas. In September, the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor assembled in convention there and nominated a full state ticket and also candidates for Congress. In the October elections, this ticket was elected and out of the seven congressmen allotted to Kansas, the new party elected five while the state legislature sent to the Senate a country editor, Mr. William Alfred Pfeffer, who had been a leader in the movement. In the following year, a general fusion took place of the different factions representing both the industrial and agricultural interests, now uniting for the first time as a definite political party under the name of peoples' party or populists. Their first national convention was held at Cincinnati in May 1891 and it drew up a platform which demanded the free and unlimited coinage of silver. The issue of paper money which should be loaned to the people at not more than 2% per annum on the security of non-perishable agricultural products, the national ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones and steamship lines, a graduated income tax and the election of United States senators by popular vote. Note 15, page 272. It was the financial part of this platform that was most immediately important. The demand for the free coinage of silver represented a general belief which had permeated the minds of the western people. They had come to entertain what is known as the quantitative theory of money believing that an increased supply of money would raise the prices of farm products. It was a matter of indifference to them how this increase of money was to be affected, whether by the issue of irredeemable greenbacks or by the unlimited coinage of silver. They would have preferred if left to themselves to substitute paper money for a metallic currency of any sort. But here came in another influence which for some time past had been at work. The price of silver as compared with that of gold had for a long time while been steadily falling. In consequence the great mine owners of Nevada, Colorado and other western states found the production of silver ceasing to be profitable. They had therefore as early as 1877 secured the passage of the bland silver law directing the government to purchase silver bullion and to coin each month not less than 2 million or more than 4 million silver dollars. Note 16, page 272. In 1890 this act had been repealed and in place of it the so-called Sherman Silver Law had been enacted directing the government to purchase every month 4,500,000 ounces of silver and to issue it against legal tender notes redeemable on demand in coin, either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury. Note 17, page 273. These two laws although afterwards attacked by the Republicans involved a logical application of the doctrine of protection. Silver was an American product and the mine owners as representing an American industry demanded legislation which should make their industry a profitable one. As the tariff could not affect this it was accomplished by forcing the government to provide an artificial market for the product of the silver mines. The Sherman Law was passed in the hope of propitiating the adherence of silver in the West but it failed entirely of its object. It did not go far enough to please the silver men while it alarmed the conservative financiers. What the populace now desired was to make the coinage of silver an unlimited one so as to render money plentiful and cheap to drive gold out of circulation and thus to secure artificially a general increase in the values of agricultural products. The silver propaganda was received with great enthusiasm in the West. Meetings were held in thousands of country schoolhouses to hear this new gospel of prosperity proclaimed by perforbid orators. The movement threatened to demoralize both of the old parties for it was felt that the silver vote would be able at the next election to turn the scale in favor of whatsoever candidate should show himself to be most truly a friend of silver. It was while this agitation was at its height that the Reform Club in New York City, note 18, page 274, held a meeting to voice the opposition of New York businessmen to the free coinage of silver. An invitation to be present was sent to Mr. Cleveland. When this fact became known, many of his friends urged him to stay away and to keep to himself his opinions on the silver question. They knew that he was inflexibly opposed to any increased silver coinage. His messages to Congress had shown this very plainly. But they pointed out to him that by keeping silence he might let it be supposed that he had changed his mind or that at least he was willing to approve a compromise. To offend the silver men was, they said, to throw away his chances for the presidency. He could not possibly receive a nomination if it were known that he was not a friend of silver. The West would be solidly against him. It was a time to temporize and to exercise a little diplomacy both for his own sake and for the welfare of his party. Mr. Cleveland listened to this talk without saying very much. His engagements made it impossible for him to attend the Reform Club meeting. But he wrote a letter to the chairman which on the following morning appeared in every newspaper throughout the United States. In it he said, It surely cannot be necessary for me to make a formal expression of my agreement with those who believe that the greatest barrel would be invited by the adoption of the scheme for the unlimited coinage of silver at our mince. And in the last sentence of his letter he spoke of the dangerous and reckless experiment of free, unlimited and independent silver coinage. Note 19, page 274. These bold, uncompromising words created an immense sensation. Mr. Cleveland's enemies read them with exaltation. Cleveland was out of the race at last. He had once more played the fool and made himself a political impossibility out of sheer pigheadedness. At last he was in reality a dead one. So thought the cynical Mr. Dana of the Sun and so thought all the leading Democrats who had been nourishing presidential ambitions of their own. Admirers of the ex-president admired him more than ever, yet they could not repress a feeling of regret that he had spoken out so freely and as it seemed to them so unnecessarily. For they too viewed this Reform Club letter as putting an end to the movement for his re-election. Such was in fact Mr. Cleveland's own belief, yet in his heart there lurked no shadow of regret. An intimate friend who met him on the day after the letter had been published spoke to him ruefully about the matter. Mr. Cleveland's only answer was to throw out both his arms with the gesture of one who casts away a heavy burden. Oof! said he. And then with a gleeful look at his friend's troubled face he went on to talk about his summer plans. Yet neither his enemies nor his friends nor he himself had accurately gauged the effect of this act of defiant frankness. Beyond the haunts of the scheming politicians who managed caucuses and PAC conventions the pregnant sentences of that letter were read with an electric thrill of joyful recognition. Here at last was a man, one who knew his own mind and was not afraid to speak it, one who would not trim and shuffle to win votes, one who would kick aside a nomination for the presidency rather than wear a muzzle even for a moment. A shrewd English observer was once asked to explain the secret of Lord Palmerston's unbounded popularity. Why? said he. What the nation likes in Palmerston is his you bedendedness. It was something of the same quality in Mr. Cleveland that caused the American people at this moment to let their hearts go out to him. For the American people admire courage in their public men in exact proportion to the infrequency with which they have a chance to see it. Instantly from having been merely a logical candidate for the presidency Mr. Cleveland became the inevitable candidate. The stampede of Democrats to the ranks of the populace was checked at once. All through the west the party lines were closed up solidly once more. While in the east conservative men Republicans and Democrats alike rejoiced over the growing influence of this dominant personality. It was only among a small coterie of professional politicians that the new aspect of affairs produced a feeling of anger and consternation. Before the appearance of the Reform Club letter there had been several aspirants whose chances for the next Democratic nomination were seriously considered. One was Mr. Horace Boyce of Iowa an earnest able leader with convictions and a reputation for intelligence and integrity. He had fought a hard fight on the tariff issue ever since Mr. Cleveland's message of 1887 had brought that question to the forefront. And in the campaign which followed the passage of the McKinley bill he had wiped out the vast Republican majority in Iowa and had been elected governor. He was a man of the people in the best sense of the term representing new issues and new blood and he had always been consistently a Cleveland Democrat. Mr. Isaac Pussy Gray of Indiana was an old school party leader not conspicuous for his mental attainments but popular in his own state of which he had been governor. It was thought that he could carry Indiana and he had the negative qualification of having made no important enemies in the party. Still another receptive candidate was Mr. Adelaide Stevenson of Illinois who had been assistant postmaster general in Mr. Cleveland's administration. His partisanship while holding that office, note 20 page 277, had highly commended him to the petty spoilsman of the democracy and they pictured to themselves with rare enthusiasm the liberal fashion in which if elected president he would deal out offices to faithful henchmen. In the background alertly watching every opportunity was Senator Arthur P. Gorman of Maryland. Senator Gorman was one of the most astute and subtle of all the Democratic leaders. A virish dissent and humble origin he had as a boy been a page in the Senate chamber. In after years with a truly Celtic genius for political intrigue he had made himself master of the party organization in his own state and an important personage in the national councils. Smooth, bland and insinuating he resembled both in appearance and in manner a typical Italian ecclesiastic and his adroitness and inscrutability fully carried out the same resemblance. Mr. Gorman had kept on good terms with Mr. Cleveland during the latter's presidency. For his sake the administration had incurred the odium of retaining Mr. Eugene Higgins in office. Note 21, page 277. Against the protest of the Maryland civil service reformers and had given aid and comfort to Mr. Gorman in his local party fights. Senator Gorman however was always at heart absorbed in his own ambitions. He had many private interests and personal associations not known to the world at large. He spun webs of exceeding fineness that were invisible even to his nearest friends and while he was all things to all men, oily of speech and propitiatorian manner he nourished ambitions for which he would sacrifice unsparingly whatsoever person interfered with them. The effect of Mr. Cleveland's outspoken letter on the silver question had been to eliminate these four would-be rivals from immediate consideration. There still remained however one who was rightly regarded by the Cleveland Democrats as a very formidable obstacle in the way of their candidate's success. This was Mr. David B. Hill who had been chosen Democratic governor of New York in 1888 receiving for that office some 18,000 votes more than were given to Mr. Cleveland at the same election. Note 22, page 278. Governor Hill now stood forth conspicuously as the only person who could possibly rest the next Democratic nomination from Mr. Cleveland and therefore around him there rallied all who represented machine politics, hatred of reform and the worship of the great God expediency. Together it was such as entertained a personal dislike for the only Democrat who had been inaugurated president since 1857. Mr. Hill was a lawyer who had attained to his prominent position by the most meticulous attention to the minutiae of New York politics. His private life was as blameless as his public record was vulnerable. He had no personal vices even of the minor sort. He neither smoked nor drank. To the society of women he was utterly indifferent. He cared nothing for money and earned a moderate income by hard professional labor. His one joy in life was found in political strategy and intrigue to which his heart and mind and soul were unstintedly and absolutely given. Over great questions of public policy he wasted no reflection. He seemed to have had at this time no serious convictions on such national issues as the tariff, finance or foreign relations. It was the machinery of politics that absorbed his whole attention, the manipulation of primaries, the arrangement of slates, the elaboration of deals, the word juggling of party platforms, the carrying of elections. He knew the pettiest details of New York state politics by heart. Nothing was minute enough to escape his microscopic eye. He mistook in fact political myopia for statesmanship and the march of great events bewildered him. But in his own sphere he was unsurpassed as a wily, patient and hitherto successful plotter, a consummate artist and intrigue. During his two terms as governor Mr. Hill had devoted all his powers to building up an organization in New York state which should have the efficiency of an absolutely flawless machine and he had succeeded to a marvelous degree. Every local leader was a partisan of Mr. Hill, taking orders from him alone and executing them implicitly. An alliance with Tammany Hall gave him support of that well-drilled and disciplined organization. In short, Mr. Hill was now absolute master of the New York political engine and this fact gave him an undoubted claim upon the attention of the Democratic Party throughout the nation. Mr. Hill's friends said with an air of finality, Hill carried New York state in 1888, Cleveland lost it, you can't win without New York? Hill is the man who can surely give you New York's 36 electoral votes. This boast, however, was heard by many Democrats with the deepest anger and resentment. They said, yes, Cleveland lost New York and Hill carried it, but why? Because Hill sold out Cleveland and made us lose the presidency in order that he might gain the governorship. Do you think that we have forgotten this and that we are going to give the highest honors of the party to the man who openly betrayed it? But Mr. Hill cared little for mere talk. He said about giving the party and the country an object lesson of his grip upon New York. He remarked to a friend of his, presidential nominations are not handed out on silver solvers in these days. In January 1892, the Democratic National Committee issued a call for the convention of the party to be held in Chicago on June 21st. Within a few days on January 25th, after this call had been promulgated, the New York State Committee at Mr. Hill's dictation summoned a state convention to meet in Albany on February 22nd for the purpose of choosing New York's delegates to Chicago. The Democrats of New York were startled, never had a state convention been called so early, four full months before the National Convention. It was clear that Mr. Hill intended to steal a march upon the Cleveland men to pack the state convention and to secure for himself the delegates from New York. A burst of indignation and of angry protest came from every quarter against the attempt to force a snap judgment from a snap convention. But the Hill machine worked smoothly and began at once to grind out delegates to Albany. Democrats friendly to Mr. Cleveland refused to take any part in the district caucuses and so a solid body of snappers, as they were called, poured into Albany on the 22nd to do the bidding of their master. The convention met, organized and finished its entire business in two hours and a half. Only three speeches were made, all carefully revised beforehand. Mr. Cleveland's name was not so much as mentioned. A delegation to Chicago was selected, pledged to Mr. Hill, who was then summoned from the Delevin House where in tweed's old headquarters he had been waiting for his followers to do their work. He spoke briefly and in a perfunctory sort of way and the gathering then adjourned. The only spontaneous applause which had been heard there on that day was given to Mr. Richard Croker, the new head of Tammany Hall. Once more than Mr. Cleveland was thought to be out of the running. His own state had apparently declared against him and no candidate had ever received a nomination for the presidency without the support of his home delegation. Whether Mr. Hill should win or not, he seemed to have it in his power to defeat his quiescent rival or failing that to give the nomination to anyone with whom he could make the best political bargain. The Cleveland men in New York called a convention of their own alleging that the gathering at Albany had not been truly representative. These anti-snappers chose a Cleveland delegation for Chicago, though there was practically no chance of it securing recognition there. Note 23, page 281. For the moment this star of Mr. Hill was undoubtedly in the ascendant. In the meantime the Republicans, though outwardly harmonious, were on the verge of serious dissension. President Harrison's administration had, on the whole, been satisfactory to the masses of his party, but the president himself had not been able to inspire any marked devotion to his own person. Everyone admitted his integrity, his good judgment, and his ability. He had gained the respect even of his opponents. Nowhere, however, was there the slightest enthusiasm for him or for his administration. The feeling of the Republican managers toward the president was not so tame a one as that of the rank and file. It had, in fact, become one of positive and intense dislike. Quite typical was the changed attitude of two very conspicuous leaders, Mr. Thomas C. Platt of New York and Senator Matthew Stanley Key of Pennsylvania. Mr. Platt had, at the beginning of President Harrison's term, expected to receive either a cabinet office or some other high appointment. It was he who as head of the Republican state organization in 1888 had presumably arranged the bargain with the Hill Democrats by which Hill had been chosen governor while the electoral votes of New York were cast for Harrison. Mr. Platt, however, had been thwarted in his hope. He had received no appointment to office, though a certain amount of federal patronage had been placed at his disposal. Mr. Platt was a secretive, silent sort of person and he accepted what was given him. He was not, however, satisfied and he felt that he had been treated with ingratitude. Furthermore, the president showed no great liking for his company nor did he receive Mr. Platt's advice with any perceptible cordiality. Therefore, Mr. Platt, in his subterranean fashion, set himself to undermine President Harrison with the party as a whole. The case of Mr. Key was somewhat different. In his private life this man had many attractive qualities. He was genial and sympathetic in manner and was always doing little acts of spontaneous courtesy to those about him. He had a scholar's tastes and an Elsevier Horace was his constant companion. But in his public career he was one of the most depressing illustrations of triumphant baseness in all American political history. He perpetuated in Pennsylvania the corrupt traditions of Simon Cameron who had been forced to leave President Lincoln's first cabinet because he had used the War Department's funds and private speculations. Key was a man without honor, without principle and without shame. He began his political life by the betrayal of his friends for a money bribe and this first act of his career was typical of all the rest. His audacity, however, and his skill in appealing to the lowest motives of the men about him had given him almost absolute control of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, his only rival being another able boss, one Chris McGee. Key had at first secured a share of President Harrison's favor and was rather ostentatiously his supporter, but in 1890 something happened which affected the president very deeply. In that year Mr. H.C. Lee, a very eminent and influential citizen of Philadelphia, published certain charges against Senator Key which if true made it clear that Key's proper place was not in the Senate of the United States but in the penitentiary. Mr. Lee declared and his assertion was corroborated by a vast amount of testimony that Key, while Secretary of State for Pennsylvania had misappropriated the sum of $260,000 which he had lost in speculation. And that while state treasurer, he had used $400,000 of the public funds in stock gambling which amount was subsequently replaced. These charges were repeated in the House of Representatives by Mr. R. P. Kennedy of Ohio, but by a party vote the Republican majority refused to let Mr. Kennedy's speech appear upon the record. Key, with his wanted shamelessness, allowed the charges to go unanswered and though they were published all over the country he remained silent with regard to them. The immediate result was an overwhelming Democratic victory in Pennsylvania in that year and the election of Mr. Robert E. Patterson as governor. That Key was guilty of common theft was accepted as a fact not merely by the people at large but by the president whose sturdy honesty made him shrink from all association with a felon even though that felon had escaped unwipped of justice. Key's anger was extreme. In private he accused Mr. Harrison of profiting by his services and then repudiating him under fire. There were many other malcontents who Mr. Harrison had either knowingly or unknowingly offended, some by his cold unsympathetic manner, others by his refusal to appoint them to office. All these men flocked to Platte and Key as natural leaders and plotted with them to prevent the president's renomination. It was plain enough that under ordinary circumstances the party was bound to make Mr. Harrison its candidate a second time. Not to do so would be to declare that his administration had been a failure and thus to stultify Republican professions. But if for him there could be substituted a still more eminent leader, one of unquestioned supremacy and of unchallenged claims, then this action would not necessarily put the party upon the defensive. That Mr. Blaine was such a leader could not be disputed. And so the Republican opponents of President Harrison begged the great secretary for permission to use his name. Mr. Blaine's position was a very delicate one. He had become almost as unfriendly to the president as had Messers Key and Platte, though for very different reasons. His personal and official intercourse with Mr. Harrison had grown more and more distasteful to him. The two men were temperamentally anti-pathetic. Blaine, ardent, impulsive, abounding in original ideas, a man of imagination. Harrison, cold, sluggish, matter-of-fact, inhospitable to suggestion. From the beginning the seeds of an estrangement were sown by the refusal of the president to appoint Mr. Blaine's son Walker to be assistant secretary of state. This refusal constituted a personal, a family grievance. Note 24, page 285. And other causes of a gradual alienation were presently not wanting. During the Chilean crisis the divergent views of the two had strained their relations nearly to the breaking point. At one of the cabinet meetings Mr. Blaine's excited opposition to the president's opinions became so violent as to induce an attack of vertical and an illness of several days. Not from love of his chief therefore did the secretary of state reject the advances of Key and the anti-Harrison leaders, but because of the fact that Mr. Harrison was indeed his chief. Political etiquette and even common decency forbade a member of the cabinet to intrigue against the president who had appointed him and of whom he was the official advisor. But, urged the plotters, why not resign the cabinet office and announce frankly that you are a candidate? Then another and an even stronger reason became known. Mr. Blaine, in very truth, was sick of party strife. For thirty years he had toiled and fought. He had received high honors even though he had failed of his supreme ambition, but now he was weary of it all. The noise, the turmoil, the intrigues and the lying, the seething mass of mean ambitions, the bold eyed greed, the insolence of vulgar curiosity, the steam of sweating mobs, and all for what? Mr. Blaine reviewed it with a sense of true perspective which comes to men with years, and in his very soul he loathed the thought of dragging once again his weary limbs down into that reeking, roaring hell of all the evil passions. His strength was spent. Though still apparently in perfect health, there was lurking somewhere in his system an obscure disorder that was draining his vitality. His chosen biographer tells us that he had become a hypochondriac given to morbid brooding over his condition and to the use of many drugs. Nothing, not even the presidency seemed any longer worth his while. And so he wrote an open letter declaring that he would not, under any circumstances, consent to be a candidate. Key and the other plotters, therefore, turned away from Mr. Blaine and shaped their plans to give the nomination to ex-speaker Reed, who had also become estranged from President Harrison. The week sped on. The Republican Convention at Minneapolis had been summoned for the 7th of June. On June 4, three days before the convention met, the country was amazed to learn that Mr. Blaine had written a curt note to the president, resigning the secretarieship of state and asking that his resignation take effect at once. Note 25, page 286. Intense excitement ran through the ranks of the Republicans. What was the meaning of this sudden act? Had Mr. Blaine's health really broken down? Had he quarreled with the president? It was felt that no matter what the ultimate cause might be, the time chosen for the resignation made it an act of obvious unfriendliness to Mr. Harrison. Senator Key sought to rouse the all-time Blaine enthusiasm among the delegates, but the effort was in vain. Some believed that their former hero's health was now completely shattered. Others resented the confusion and bewilderment caused by the letter of resignation. Mr. Blaine is playing fast and loose with us. He will ruin himself by his duplicity, said Mr. Depew, until then his devoted admirer. The plumed knight now carries a broken lance, said Mr. New of Indiana. The anti-Harrison leaders came to the convention with divided councils. The Harrison forces were compact and confident. The former fought for delay in order to form new combinations, and for three days the sessions were devoted to the platform and to trivial details. The reed movement did not appeal to very many, and the delegates from Mr. Reed's own section failed to stand by him greatly to the disgust of several of his ardent friends. Mr. then-governor McKinley of Ohio had been made permanent president of the convention, and the enthusiasm which his appearance called forth led the opponents of Mr. Harrison to, boom, the high tariff advocate, though soon they returned once more to Mr. Blaine. Finally, on June 9, in the midst of the flurry, a vote upon the admission of a contesting delegation afforded a fair trial of the relative strength of the two factions. The Blaine men controlled 423 delegates, the Harrison men 463. Instantly there was a break in the ranks of the opposition. It was plain that Harrison must win. All the time-servers at once flocked to him. On the following day after the usual speechmaking, Mr. Harrison, who had been put in nomination by Mr. Depew, was chosen on the first ballot with 535 votes or 82 more than were required. Mr. Blaine received 182 votes and Governor McKinley precisely the same number. On the following day, Mr. White Law Reed, the editor of the New York Tribune, was nominated for the vice presidency. When Mr. Blaine learned of what had happened, he wrote an open letter urging his friends with all the loyalty of a veteran to support the Minneapolis ticket. But Mrs. Blaine remarked in the presence of a large gathering, I am sick and tired of the whole thing. It was in truth upon Mrs. Blaine that the responsibility of this rather pitiable dinouement rested. No authorized explanation of Mr. Blaine's sudden retirement from the cabinet has ever been put forth, yet it was perfectly well known to many at the time that this step, so ill-advised and so contrary to Mr. Blaine's own judgment, was taken because of his wife's insistence. Mrs. Blaine was a very masterful, high-spirited woman, unblessed with tact and far too prone to interfere with her husband's political concerns. More than once in his career this interference had caused him great embarrassment, though matters had always been arranged in such a way as to avoid anything like an overt S. Clanthor. But when Mr. Blaine entered President Harrison's cabinet, his political difficulties were heightened by domestic complications. Almost at the outset a coolness arose between the wife of the Secretary of State and the wife of the President, and this coolness increased until it became at last a positive antipathy. Mrs. Blaine was far too conscious of the fact that her husband might have been elected President in place of Mr. Harrison had he chosen to accept the nomination in 1888, and she let this consciousness be felt in many of the irritating little ways which feminine ingenuity so easily devises. Mrs. Harrison not unnaturally resented this with a result that can be imagined. When therefore Mr. Blaine was urged to let his name be used in opposition to the President, Mrs. Blaine became an active ally of the anti-Harrison politicians. For a long time she was unsuccessful, but age and illness had sapped her husband's power of will and had perhaps obscured his judgment, so that finally he yielded to incessant domestic pressure and took the step which resulted so disastrously. From that moment his political career was ended. He retired to his home in Maine and after a lingering illness died early in the following year. Note 26, page 289. There is something infinitely pathetic in a survey of Mr. Blaine's remarkable career. With so many qualities, with such high ambitions and such splendid opportunities, he never reached the goal upon which his gaze had been continually fixed and toward which he had struggled with such dauntless hope and energy. It is not too much to say of him that for resourcefulness and for that sort of imagination which enters into constructive statesmanship he had had no equal since the days of Jefferson. He possessed every gift that goes with supreme leadership save only one. He lacked that higher moral sense without which in the last and crucial test a statesman's strength is turned to weakness. As was said of him at the time, he reflected accurately the influences that were in the ascendant throughout the Civil War amid whose storm and stress his political character had been molded. The ardent patriotism, the fiery courage, the intense devotion to a cause which made that period memorable were his. But through all those years he had seen about him the play of meaner motives and the inevitable jobry and corruption which are the accompaniment of war and long familiarity with these had blunted a naturally fine sense of honor and had led him to set expediencies sometimes in the place of right. The most serious charges brought against him were undoubtedly untrue, but he had so acted as to justify them in the minds of millions of his countrymen and he was forced to pay the penalty of his indiscretion. Yet whatever were his faults he was a very great American and when he bad fare well to public life even his political opponents thought of him was something more than kindness. At a democratic mass meeting held at Chicago in the campaign which followed a speaker chance to mention Mr. Blaine. At once the great audience sprang to its feet and thundered forth its uncontrollable applause. When it subsided the speaker said, Blaine seems to have more friends here than he had at Minneapolis and a voice replied amid a second tempest of applause. We were all his friends. End of Chapter 6 Part 2 Chapter 6 Part 3 of 20 years of the Republic 1885-1905 by Harry Thurston Peck. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Election of 1892 Part 3 The Democratic National Convention met at Chicago on June 21 with Mr. William L. Wilson of West Virginia as its permanent president. Events had taken an unexpected turn. Senator Hill's SNAP Convention of the preceding February had proved to be a political boomerang. Its action, so far from coercing the Democrats of other states, had inspired them with indignation toward Mr. Hill and with enthusiasm for Mr. Cleveland. They regarded the maneuver as a most unworthy trick. The prominence of Tammany in the whole proceeding had repelled them, for Tammany had always been mistrusted by the democracy at large, particularly in the West. Therefore a very strong drift had at once set in toward Mr. Cleveland's candidacy. In the words of General Bragg, uttered in 1884, men loved him most of all for the enemies that he had made. State after state had instructed its delegates to vote for him, and it was already plain that he would have a sure majority in the convention at Chicago. Democratic usage, however, required a two-thirds vote to affect a nomination, and therefore Senator Hill did not yet despair. He might not himself win, but he felt that he could at least defeat his rival and give the nomination to another candidate. Even Mr. Cleveland's friends were still afraid to hope. Mr. Tracy of New York met Colonel Morrison of Illinois in Washington a day or two before the convention had assembled. Morrison, said he, we are going to nominate Cleveland or die. Maybe, returned Morrison, but are you certain that you are not going to do both? When the convention met, however, the tide for Cleveland was running like a mill race. His portraits were displayed all over the city. His badges were on the breasts of more than half the delegates. His name alone seemed to be in the mouth of everyone. A feeling of buoyant confidence inspired the great crowds which poured into Chicago. A sense of coming victory was in the air. The democracy was at last in fighting trim and had fixed upon a leader of whose invincibility no doubt was felt. Ex-Secretary Whitney was in charge of Mr. Cleveland's canvas. He had come to Chicago expecting to make an uphill fight, but he found himself at once the master of the situation. I can't keep the votes back, said he to an intimate friend. They tumble in at the windows as well as at the doors. On June 20, the day before the convention was opened, even the New York Sun grudgingly admitted that Cleveland's nomination was quite probable. The immense wigwam at Chicago with its amphitheater roped off like a prize ring was packed to suffocation. Mr. Wilson, whose voice was weak and whose presence was unimpressive, could not control the delegates who sang and cheered and had things holly their own way. In the committee which drafted the platform, there was a sharp struggle over its tariff plank. The conservatives of the committee inserted a shifty and ambiguous declaration such as had been usual in other years and being in the majority they had adopted it. No sooner had it been read to the convention, however, than it was greeted with tempestuous derision. The delegates were in an aggressive mood, they would have no compromise, no evasion of a dominant issue, and so by a great majority the plank as reported was stricken out and a substitute adopted, bolder than any declaration on the subject of the tariff which a democratic convention had ever ventured to put forth. It began. We denounce Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few. We declare it to be a fundamental principle of the Democratic Party that the federal government has no constitutional power to impose and collect tariff duties except for the purposes of revenue only. And we demand that the collection of such taxes shall be limited to the necessities of the government when honestly and economically administered. In vigorous phrase it went on to speak of the McKinley tariff law as the culminating atrocity of class legislation. It pledged the party to give the people free raw materials and cheaper manufactured goods. It declared that since the McKinley tariff had gone into operation wages had been lowered in many trades with resulting strikes in general distress. It called attention to the fact that after 30 years of high protection the homes and farms of the country have become burdened with a real estate mortgage of over $2,500 million and it denounced a policy which fosters no industry so much as it does that of the sheriff. The convention had now taken the bit between its teeth and was beyond control. The Hill leaders fought vainly to secure delay. The discussion of the platform had lasted until nearly midnight and an attempt was made to adjourn the convention until the following day. The motion was shouted down amid indescribable uproar. The delegates refused to adjourn before the candidates were nominated. The customary nominating speeches were then made. Mr. Cleveland's name was presented by Governor Abbott of New Jersey and the name of Senator Hill by Mr. William C. DeWitt of New York. Other candidates were put in nomination among them Governor Boys of Iowa, Senator Gorman of Maryland and Mr. Stevenson of Illinois. It was now two o'clock in the morning but the convention showed no signs of weariness. The vote was certain to be taken before daybreak. The friends of Mr. Hill therefore played their trump card, the threat that Mr. Cleveland could not possibly be elected without the vote of his own state. To drive home the assertion with all possible point and power they had reserved their ablest speaker until this moment. At 2.15 a.m. the bulky form of Mr. Bork Cochrane was seen emerging from the mass of delegates and moving toward the platform. Mr. Cochrane was an Irishman by birth who had come to New York as a young man and had been admitted to the bar achieving great success as a jury lawyer. Fluent of speech, witty and adroit he was a natural rhetorician and could be either denunciatory or persuasive with great effect. In after years he received the nickname of the Mulligan Guard Demosthenes because his eloquence was almost always at the disposal of Tammany Hall. Nevertheless he was a superb stump speaker and even the Cleveland men became hushed and silent to catch his opening words. Mr. Cochrane had some of the gifts of a very clever actor. As he faced his audience he seemed languid, heavy-eyed and utterly exhausted. A feeling of sympathy won him the goodwill of the convention before he spoke a word. Then in a voice that was rich and resonant he uttered an earnest plea for harmony making it appear that harmony could be achieved only by dropping Mr. Cleveland as a candidate. Here he spoke with perfect tact, anxious to offend no prejudice. For the personality of Mr. Cleveland he entertained, so he said, the most profound respect. I feel for him a personal friendship. I oppose him in this convention solely because he stands between the Democratic Party and the light of victory. He spoke of the great tidal wave of 1890 which had overflowed the force-bill and repudiated McKinleyism. He alluded to the service which Mr. Hill had rendered in that fight and to the importance of New York as a factor in the election which was imminent. Pennsylvania boasts, he then went on, that she has never made a threat in a convention. I ask you, what could Pennsylvania threaten? Pennsylvania in November with her thirty-two electoral votes will thrust the democracy of New York into the ditch dug for it here. I believe that Mr. Cleveland is a popular man. Applauds. A most popular man. Increased applause. Let me now add that he is a man of most extraordinary popularity on every day of the year except Election Day. Uproar. He is popular in Republican states because his democracy is not offensive to Republicans. I oppose him in this convention because his candidacy imperils the success which now comes to us with bright alluring prospects. I appeal to you to pause now before this contemplated action is taken, before this invasion is made complete. Build a gentleman, build your hopes of success, not upon the shifting sands of political professions. Build it upon the solid rock of Democratic harmony, of Democratic unity, and of Democratic enthusiasm. Then the people in whom you have trusted will repay your confidence with majorities so decisive that Republican prospects throughout the Union will receive a completeer check even then they have received in the state whose triumphant democracy now asks you only for a moment. I offer permission to win for you a Democratic victory in November. Note 27, page 295. But Mr. Cochran's eloquence was unable to stem the tide. In the early hours of the morning the role of the convention was called. And long before the last delegation had responded it was plain to everyone that Mr. Cleveland had secured not merely a bare majority but more than the two-thirds necessary to make him his party's candidate. The record showed that 617 votes were cast for him, ten more than were required, while Senator Hill received only 114, Governor Boyce 103, and Senator Gorman 36. Amid a scene of tumultuous enthusiasm with bands blaring and banners waving the galleries joined with the excited partisans upon the floor enchanting a song which had struck the fancy of the public. Note 28, page 295. Grover, grover, four more years of grover, in he comes out they go, then we'll be in clover. On the following day to please the old-fashioned party men Mr. Adley E. Stevenson of Illinois was nominated for the Vice Presidency. Another candidate was said to be more acceptable to Mr. Cleveland but just before the balloting began a serious personal scandal regarding him became known to the delegates and served to prevent his nomination. It was characteristic of Mr. Cleveland that on the night when his political fate was hanging in the balance he should have been chatting quietly in a friend's library, far distant from the telegraph wires and quite out of reach even of his own excited partisans. When the news was brought to him the next morning he received it with the same tranquillity that had marked his bearing ever since his retirement from office. The same news was heard in a very different spirit by Mr. Dana of the Sun. He had pinned his faith on Hill up to the last moment hoping against hope. In his paper for June 22 he had styled Hill that heroic and powerful statesman a faithful fearless and successful champion. Now that Mr. Cleveland had been nominated Dana was in a dreadful quandary. He hated Cleveland and everything for which Cleveland stood yet not to support the nominee of the Democratic Party would probably mean for himself and for his paper financial ruin. Furthermore there was no other party open to him and so he reversed himself in a fashion so awkward and so insincere as to excite the mirth of everyone. Pretending that Republican success would mean the enactment of a force bill he came out for Cleveland on June 24th saying that the one supreme issue was. The question whether those southern states which have inherited a Negro population surpassing the number of their white citizens shall by federal law and federal military force be subjected to the political domination of the Negroes to Negro legislatures, Negro governors and Negro judges in their courts or whether they shall continue to be governed by white men as now. Better vote for the liberty and the white government of the southern states even if the candidate were the devil himself rather than consent to the election of respectable Benjamin Harrison with a force bill in his pocket. And so throughout the ensuing campaign Mr. Dana devoted himself to writing vociferous leaders around his watch words no force bill no Negro domination. The populists held their national convention at Omaha on July 2nd and nominated for the presidency General James B. Weaver of Iowa. Note 29, page 297. And for the vice presidency Mr. James G. Field of Virginia. Their platform accused both of the older parties of subserviency to the capitalists declaring that, from the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes of tramps and millionaires. It demanded among other things the free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the ratio of 16 to 1, the graduated income tax, the establishment of postal savings banks and the ownership by the government of railroads, telegraphs and telephones. Few political campaigns in American history have been conducted upon so high a plane as that which followed in the summer and autumn of 1892. President Harrison said in a spirit that did him honor, I desire this campaign to be one of republicanism and not one of personalities. A very dignified campaign it was. Even the speakers upon the stump alluded to their opponents in terms of personal respect. No scandals were unearthed and no sensational episodes occurred like that of the Murchison letter. The main fight between the two great parties was fought out upon the issue of the tariff. For the first time in its history the republican party was on the defensive. In 1884 it had been obliged to defend the record of Mr. Blaine but its own pass was held to be unassailable. Now the inequalities of the McKinley tariff were vigorously attacked by every democratic speaker and the explanation and defense of them taxed the ingenuity of the republicans. Higher prices and lower wages were indeed strong democratic arguments. President Harrison's own contribution to political discussion consisted of the sapient remark, a cheap coat means a cheap man under the coat. An epigram which was about as convincing as Dr. Johnson's burlesque line, who drives fat oxen must himself be fat. By tacit consent both republicans and democrats had very little about the silver question. The populace on the other hand preached the doctrine of free silver with great vigor and enthusiasm. In some states of the west and south coalitions were made with the populace party. Thus in Louisiana the republicans divided their electoral ticket evenly with the populace. In Oregon one populace elector was placed upon the democratic ticket and in Minnesota both democrats and populace united upon four electors. In five states Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota and Wyoming the democrats nominated no electoral ticket at all but voted for the populistic candidates. The object of this was not merely to defeat the republicans at the polls. It was thought possible that enough populace electors might be elected to prevent any party from having a clear majority in the electoral college. In that event the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. Note 30, page 299, voting by states in which case the democrats would have a clear majority. As the summer drew near its end both parties were hopeful yet both believed that the result would be very close. One feature of the election would be novel. For the first time it was recognized that money could no more be used in directly bribing voters. Of the 44 states of the union 35 had adopted some form of the Australian ballot thus enabling the voter to cast his vote in secrecy. As was written at the time No blocks of five can be marched to the polls on election day with their ballots held in sight of the man who has bought them till they are dropped into the ballot boxes. What the same isolation will accomplish in great manufacturing centers is equally obvious. No working man need fear laws of employment if he votes in accordance with his own beliefs and against the interests of his employer for his employer cannot see how he votes. In the list of the 35 states which have the new systems are to be found all the so-called doubtful states and all those states in the Northwest in which the tariff reform sentiment has made such havoc with old time Republican majorities. In the great cities of the land there is another gain from the new system which is as important as that of the secret ballot. Trading and deals would be practically impossible because of the difficulties which are thrown in the way. Other agencies for securing votes must be sought and other managers and professional corruptionist and traders must be put at the head of the party organizations to conduct the campaign. Note 31, page 299. Something which occurred in Pennsylvania during this year did much to endanger the prospects of Republican success. In June, the Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead reduced the wages of its employees. A trade organization known as the Amalgamated Steel and Workers sought to intercede. But the Carnegie Company refused to recognize it and soon afterwards ordered a shutdown and closed its works throwing thousands of men out of employment. These men, a majority of whom had served the company long and faithfully, were not strikers. They were summarily deprived of their employment for the sole reason that they were members of a union. The intention of the company was to reopen the mills with non-union men. Anticipating trouble, the Carnegie managers of appealing to the authorities for legal protection employed a force of armed men to act as a garrison for the mills. This small army was placed in armored barges and brought to Homestead by the river. As they neared their destination, the men who had been locked out fired upon them and were met by a counter-fire. A sort of battle took place lasting for nearly two days and involving the use of cannon and of burning oil with which the river was flooded. Seven of the Carnegie army were killed and a much larger number wounded. The loss of their assailants was even greater. In the end, the men in the barges surrendered and were badly treated by a mob and finally state troops were sent to Homestead and restored order by the establishment of martial law. In various ways this incident was unfortunate for the Republicans. In the first place, here was a highly protected industry cutting down the wages of its workmen at the very time when Republican orators were proclaiming the blessings of the McKinley bill. In the second place, the country beheld a very striking instance of the lawlessness of corporations. These great steel magnates, so said the Democrats, were acting precisely after the fashion of feudal barons, maintaining private armies, disdaining the protection of the law and shooting down citizens without any legal warrant. The employment of armed men by corporations had already attracted the attention of Congress and the bloody affair at Homestead made the private malicious system exceedingly unpopular. Another cause of concern to the party and power was the condition of the national treasury. The billion-dollar Congress had not only wiped out the surplus but had authorized expenses which it was practically impossible to meet. For the six months ending December 31st, 1891, the treasury had paid out 86 million dollars less than was called for by the existing laws. This sum had not been paid for the excellent reason that the funds were lacking. The customs revenue had fallen off. Expenses had increased. And now the government of the richest nation in the world was in the position of a hard-up debtor postponing from day to day the payment of its bills and living as it were from hand to mouth. On the whole, then, the Democratic chances seemed very good. Only in one state, but that a most important one could danger be detected. This was in New York. Mr. Hill and his followers had returned from the National Convention in a sullen mood. They had no idea what was going on and had no idea what was going on. In a sullen mood, they had been soundly beaten by the Cleveland element. Would they take their revenge upon Election Day? This was a question which perplexed the Democratic managers and most of all Mr. W. C. Whitney who felt himself responsible for the result in his own state. The most dangerous element of opposition as in 1884 was to be found in Tammany Hall. John Kelly had died and had been succeeded by Mr. Richard Crocker who now wielded a power far greater even than that of Kelly. Crocker was an Irishman by birth who had been brought to the United States when he was two years old. He had been a machinist and then a fireman and had gradually worked his way into local politics advancing from one position to another until in 1886 he became the head of one of the most formidable political organizations in the world. He was a man of immense force of character, illiterate, but shrewd. In many of his personal traits as in his physical appearance he was the most powerful grant having the same taciturnity the same grim dogginess of purpose the same iron strength of will. The vote of New York City was in his gift and he had been consistently opposed to Mr. Cleveland. Nevertheless it was known that Tammany Hall was anxious not to be regarded as disloyal to the party. Years before Crocker had been accused of murder and among his counsel had been Mr. Whitney. For him ever since that time Crocker had entertained a kindly feeling. Upon this feeling Mr. Whitney diplomatically worked until Crocker agreed to meet his party's candidate and come if possible to an understanding. He not unnaturally supposed that Mr. Cleveland would give promises in exchange for Crocker's own promise to make his men vote straight. Mr. Cleveland however showed no inclination for an interview with Crocker. It was only as a personal favor to Mr. Whitney that he at last consented and the three men with a second Tammany chief dined together in a private room at Mr. Whitney's house. When the political conversation began Mr. Cleveland took a line that was most unexpected. Instead of suggesting conciliation and speaking smoothly he squared his shoulders and gave Crocker such a talk as he had never listened to before. He told him what he thought of Tammany Hall of Tammany politics and of Tammany men. As he towered above Crocker punctuating his remarks with heavy blows of his fist upon the table he nominated the great boss who in reply could merely iterate his hope that matters might be arranged between them. In the end Mr. Cleveland said that what had happened in the past would not influence him in his future actions and with this very meager concession Crocker had to go away content. Mr. Cleveland in fact meant to win the presidency if he won it at all without giving pledges to any human being. Among the many interesting anecdotes then current regarding him followed by a distinguished man of letters who had long been his intimate personal friend there was a certain rich contractor a Blaine Irishman a liberal employer of labor who because of his own ancestry was thought to have great influence with the Irish voters in New York. Just at that time the Irish vote in New York was a very uncertain element in democratic calculations. Therefore it occurred to the literary gentleman who happened to know the contractor very well and ended a good turn by bringing the two men into personal relations. So it came to pass that one evening they met in the poet's library without the least suspicion on their part that the interview had been pre-arranged. After a few moments their host made some excuse for slipping out of the room. Returning at the end of half an hour he found Mr. Cleveland and the contractor chatting very amicably together. A little later the ex-president having finished his call departed. Well, said the host the contractor's face fairly glowed. Ah, sure said he slipping into his native brogue he's the greatest man I ever saw he's a fine man a grand man he wouldn't promise to do one d blank d thing I asked him and from that time until election day no one worked harder for Mr. Cleveland than the man who had failed to extort a single promise from him. The November election of the most astonished Democrats, Republicans and populists alike Mr. Cleveland swept the country of course the southern states were solidly for him but in addition he carried all the doubtful states Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey and New York while to the amazement of the political profits California, Illinois and Wisconsin gave him their electoral votes Michigan cast five of its nine votes for him and even Ohio and only returned one Democratic elector in the electoral college Cleveland and Stevenson had 277 votes against 145 for Harrison and Reed Note 32, page 304 even had Mr. Cleveland lost New York the presidency would still have been his own a very startling result of the election was the enormous strength displayed by the populace throughout the west not only did their candidate vote he actually carried four states Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and Nevada receiving also one electoral vote in Oregon and one in North Dakota for the first time since the birth of the Republican Party a third political organization was represented among the presidential electors Note 33, page 305 it is true that the vote given to the populace was an exaggeration of their actual numbers because in all but one of the states had no nominations but nonetheless the election figures were indicative of an immense popular upheaval that was ominous for the future of the older parties meanwhile, Mr. Cleveland had won an extraordinary personal triumph disliked by all the politicians nominated against the protest of his own state and opposed by the powerful corporate interest throughout the country he had nevertheless been carried into the presidency with confidence because they felt that in him they had found a leader courageous enough to defy coercion and of moral fiber strong enough to resist those other influences which are only the more dangerous because insidious he received the presidency for the second time bound by no pledge save that contained in the declaration of his party to govern honestly to reduce the tariff and to curb the trusts end of chapter 6