There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every political meeting.
II
The West has never lost its early admiration for oratory, whether from the hustings, the pulpit, or the lecture-platform. Many of the pioneer preachers of the Ohio valley were orators of distinguished ability, and their frequent joint debates on such subjects as predestination and baptism drew great audiences from the countryside. Both religious and political meetings were held preferably out of doors to accommodate the crowds that collected from the far-scattered farms. A strong voice, a confident manner, and matter so composed as to hold the attention of an audience which would not hesitate to disperse if it lost interest were prerequisites of the successful speaker. Western chronicles lay great stress upon the oratorical powers of both ministers and politicians. Henry Ward Beecher, who held a pastorate at Indianapolis (1839-47), was already famed as an eloquent preacher before he moved to Brooklyn. Not long ago I heard a number of distinguished politicians discussing American oratory. Some one mentioned the addresses delivered by Beecher in England during the Civil War, and there was general agreement that one of these, the Liverpool speech, was probably the greatest of American orations—a sweeping statement, but its irresistible logic and a sense of the hostile atmosphere in which it was spoken may still be felt in the printed page.
The tradition of Lincoln’s power as an orator is well fortified by the great company of contemporaries who wrote of him, as well as by the text of his speeches, which still vibrate with the nobility, the restrained strength, with which he addressed himself to mighty events. Neither before nor since his day has the West spoken to the East with anything approaching the majesty of his Cooper Union speech. It is certainly a far cry from that lofty utterance to Mr. Bryan’s defiant cross-of-gold challenge of 1896.
The Westerner will listen attentively to a man he despises and has no intention of voting for, if he speaks well; but the standards are high. There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every political meeting, composed of veterans who compare all later performances with some speech they heard Garfield or “Dan” Voorhees, Oliver P. Morton or John J. Ingalls deliver before the orator spouting on the platform was born. Nearly all the national conventions held in the West have been marked by memorable oratory. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll’s speech nominating Blaine at the Republican convention of 1876 held at Cincinnati (how faint that old battle-cry has become: “Blaine, Blaine, Blaine of Maine!”) is often cited as one of the great American orations. “He swayed and moved and impelled and restrained and worked in all ways with the mass before him,” says the Chicago Times report, “as if he possessed some key to the innermost mechanism that moves the human heart, and when he finished, his fine, frank face as calm as when he began, the overwrought thousands sank back in an exhaustion of unspeakable wonder and delight.”
Even making allowance for the reporter’s exuberance, this must have been a moving utterance, with its dramatic close:
“Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the maligners of his honor. For the Republican party to desert this gallant leader now is as though an army should desert their gallant general upon the field of battle.... Gentlemen of the convention, in the name of the great republic, the only republic that ever existed upon this earth; in the name of all her defenders and of all her supporters; in the name of all her soldiers dead upon the field of battle, and in the name of those who perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at Andersonville and Libby, whose sufferings he so vividly remembers, Illinois, Illinois nominates for the next President of this country that prince of parliamentarians, that leader of leaders—James G. Blaine.”
In the fall of the same year Ingersoll delivered at Indianapolis an address to war veterans that is still cited for its peroration beginning: “The past rises before me like a dream.”
The political barbecue, common in pioneer days, is about extinct, though a few such gatherings were reported in the older States of the Middle West in the last campaign. These functions, in the day of poor roads and few settlements, were a means of luring voters to a meeting with the promise of free food; it was only by such heroic feats of cookery as the broiling of a whole beef in a pit of coals that a crowd could be fed. The meat was likely to be either badly burnt, or raw, but the crowds were not fastidious, and swigs of whiskey made it more palatable. Those were days of plain speech and hard hitting, and on such occasions orators were expected to “cut loose” and flay the enemy unsparingly.
Speakers of the rabble-rouser type have passed out, though there are still orators who proceed to “shell the woods” and “burn the grass” in the old style in country districts where they are not in danger of being reported. This, however, is full of peril, as the farmer’s credulity is not so easily played upon as in the old days before the R. F. D. box was planted at his gate. The farmer is the shrewdest, the most difficult, of auditors. He is little given to applause, but listens meditatively, and is not easily to be betrayed into demonstrations of approval. The orator’s chance of scoring a hit before an audience of country folk depends on his ability to state his case with an appearance of fairness and to sustain it with arguments presented in simple, picturesque phraseology. Nothing could be less calculated to win the farmer’s franchise than any attempt to “play down” to him. In old times the city candidate sometimes donned his fishing-clothes before venturing into country districts, but some of the most engaging demagogues the West has known appeared always in their finest raiment.