“Then what are you thinking?”
Still giving me that quizzical look over the top of his glasses, and dropping his voice to the very bottom of his diaphragm, he rumbled, “I was thinking it’s blanked funny!”
Some time after our first meeting I called on Mr. Page at Garden City, and told him I was now ready to immerse myself completely in the campaign; and some months after this William G. McAdoo invited me to join him at a luncheon with William F. McCombs, who was then in full charge of Wilson’s campaign for the nomination. I then agreed to subscribe a substantial sum, and, also, to undertake raising money from others. They accepted both offers gladly. I found the first by far the easier to make good. To redeem the second was a very different matter: my friends in the business world looked upon me almost as one who had lost his reason. “Why,” they asked me, “should any one who has property be willing to entrust the management of the United States to the Democratic Party? How can a reasonable man hope for Wilson’s nomination against veterans like Bryan, Clark, and Underwood? And how can any Democrat hope for victory against the intrenched Republicans?”
It was the hardest proposition that I ever undertook to sell, but we managed somehow to meet our financial emergencies as we came to them.
Meanwhile, the other candidates were busy. William Jennings Bryan had been, for years, at once the prophet and the Nemesis of the Democratic Party. He controlled its national machinery. Thrice he had led it to defeat, and now, for the fourth time, he aspired to lead the charge. Party politicians, who knew that Bryan’s economic heresies were fatal to the party, did not dare call together the national committee, where his discipline ruled their actions. The only other place where party councils could be taken was in the National Capitol. For this reason, the cloakroom of the House of Representatives became the whispering gallery of other aspirants. The House developed two candidates for the nomination: Champ Clark, the genial Speaker; and Oscar Underwood, the popular and substantial floor leader of the majority.
Nevertheless, we adherents of Wilson were not dismayed. Our plan of action was to secure a few state delegations, and, for the rest, to concentrate our energies upon creating, through the press, a sentiment among the Democratic masses, which, we hoped, at the end would prove irresistible in the Convention.
The first great test of our success (and, what was more important, of Wilson’s capacity to grow to national stature) came on the occasion of the Jackson Day dinner at Washington on January 8, 1912. This classic festival of Democracy has, every quadrennium, a special and a solemn significance for candidates for the Presidency. It is somewhat like the opening day of the Kentucky Derby at Louisville, when the favourite horses are led out before the first race for the inspection of the spectators. A seat at this dinner is as much prized by Democratic politicians as a grandstand seat is at the races. The candidates and their managers are as much excited as are the horse owners and their trainers. Upon the showing made at this preliminary try-out depends much of the crystallization of the sentiment amongst the politicians in favour of one special candidate.
Our first experience with this dinner was a disappointment. We men who were active in Governor Wilson’s behalf had our headquarters at the New Willard Hotel; and we had gone there a day earlier to make arrangements for more than one hundred of the leading Democratic politicians and citizens of New Jersey who were coming on to Washington the next day, to back up Wilson’s aspirations. Imagine our dismay when we found that, of the sixty-five tickets for the dinner to which New Jersey was entitled, fifty had been given to Mr. Nugent instead of to Mr. Grosscup, the chairman of the state committee. Mr. Nugent was one of Governor Wilson’s bitterest opponents, and well enough we knew that we could not get back the tickets from him.
News of this blow came to me at 11 o’clock at night, just as I was turning out my light preparatory to retiring. My telephone rang. I heard the excited voice of Judge Hudspeth, the national committeeman from New Jersey, exclaiming: “Come right over to our room! We need you at once!” “But,” I protested, “I am just getting into bed for the night.” “Haven’t you learned yet,” he cried impatiently, “that politicians never sleep?”
Reluctantly, I got back into my clothes and went to his rooms. There I found McCombs, Congressman Hughes, Mr. Grosscup, Joe Tumulty, and others. They were angry at the miscarriage of the tickets, which they attributed to trickery; and gloomy at the thought of the poor showing we would make to our hundred and more friends from New Jersey who were coming down to the dinner, and who would charge us with lack of influence in the higher councils of the party.