SILK STOCKINGS AGAINST HIM.
Friends, we have against us also, I am sorry to say, 95 per cent of the respectable, amiable, silk-stocking vote. [Laughter.]
And it is amusing to see how exactly the conditions now parallel the conditions 55 years ago, when Abraham Lincoln was making his fight for the Union and for freedom.
After his defeat by Douglas in 1858, in November of that year, he wrote a letter to a friend, dating the letter at Springfield, Ill. It’s a letter I should like to have framed at this moment in every house in the Back Bay. [Laughter.] He said:
In the late contest we had with us a considerable proportion of the plain Democracy, but we lost almost all the old silk stocking, exclusive Whigery. I do not mean that we lost all the Whigs, but only those of the nice, exclusive, silk-stocking type. [Laughter.]
Now that was written by Abraham Lincoln 54 years ago, and it has just happened in your own city, and in mine, and in the country generally at the present moment.
In consequence, friends, we have against us the money; we have against us the politicians; we have against us every newspaper that can be reached or controlled [hisses] by the money power [cries of “right,” and applause]; we have against us the timid silk-stocking element—understand, not the silk-stocking man who feels competent to hold his own in the turmoil of actual life, not the silk-stocking man who is content to go out into the world and take his chances as any other man takes his.
We have got that man with us. We have got that man with us. [Applause.] We have against us only the silk-stocking man who is not quite confident enough in himself to believe in himself, who is not quite confident enough in himself to believe that he can hold his own with the rest of his fellow-Americans without advantage on his part. [Applause.]
We have these men that I have spoken of against us, and we have not got anybody with us except the people. [Great applause.] And on next Tuesday I want the people—I want you—to go to the polls and vote the same way you shout. [Cries of “you bet, you,” and applause.]
In Massachusetts, as in Illinois, and as in most other States this year, it is such a contest in the civic field as you saw in the military field in 1775 and 1776.
It is a contest between the Minute Men and the mercenaries. [Applause]. And I want to show that in civic life you are competent to do the work that your forefathers have done; done with honor in the past. [Applause.]