"When we were first married," he went on presently, "she said, 'It seems
to me, if I were a public man, I should keep everything relating to
myself--every speech, all that the newspapers said, every meeting and
the lists of the important people who were there, notes of _all_ the
people I ever met anywhere, every letter or telegram or note I received.
If you do, you may find after a few years that you have an enormous list
of acquaintances. You've forgotten them because you meet so many, but
they will not have forgotten you, who were one of the principal figures
at the meeting or reception.' That's in substance what she said. And so,
we began and kept it up"--he paused in his deliberate manner, compressed
his lips, then added--"together."
I opened one of the filing-cases, glanced at him for permission, took
out a slip of paper under the M's. It was covered with notes, in Mrs.
Burbank's writing, of a reception given to him at the Manufacturers'
Club in St. Louis three years before. A lot of names, after each some
reminders of the standing and the personal appearance of the man.
Another slip, taken at random from the same box, contained similar notes
of a trip through Montana eight years before.
"Wonderful!" I exclaimed, as the full value of these accumulations
loomed in my mind. "I knew she was an extraordinary woman. Now I see
that she had genius for politics."
His expression--a peering through that eternal pose of his--made me
revise my first judgment of his mourning. For I caught a glimpse of a
real human being, one who had loved and lost, looking grief and pride
and gratitude. "If she had left me two or three years earlier," he said
in that solemn, posing tone, "I doubt if I should have got one step
further. As it is, I may be able to go on, though--I have lost--my
staff."
What fantastic envelopes does man, after he has been finished by
Nature, wrap about himself in his efforts to improve her handiwork!
Physically, even when most dressed, we are naked in comparison with the
enswathings that hide our real mental and moral selves from one
another--and from ourselves.
My campaign was based on the contents of those filing-cases. I learned
all the places throughout the West--cities, towns, centrally-located
villages--where he had been and had made an impression; and by simple
and obvious means we were able to convert them into centers of "the
Burbank boom." I could afterward trace to the use we made of those
memoranda the direct getting of no less than one hundred and seven
delegates to the national convention--and that takes no account of the
vaster indirect value of so much easily worked-up, genuine, unpurchased
and unpurchasable "Burbank sentiment." The man of only local prominence,
whom Burbank remembered perfectly after a chance meeting years before,
could have no doubt who ought to be the party's nominee for President.
The national machine of our party was then in the custody, and
supposedly in the control, of Senator Goodrich of New Jersey. He had a
reputation for Machiavellian dexterity, but I found that he was an
accident rather than an actuality.
The dominion of the great business interests over politics was the rapid
growth of about twenty years--the consolidations of business naturally
producing concentrations of the business world's political power in the
hands of the few controllers of the big railway, industrial and
financial combines. Goodrich had happened to be acquainted with some of
the most influential of these business "kings"; they naturally made him
their agent for the conveying of their wishes and their bribes of one
kind and another to the national managers of both parties. They knew
little of the details of practical politics, knew only what they needed
in their businesses; and as long as they got that, it did not interest
them what was done with the rest of the power their "campaign
contributions" gave.
With such resources any man of good intelligence and discretion could
have got the same results as Goodrich's. He was simply a lackey,
strutting and cutting a figure in his master's clothes and under his
master's name. He was pitifully vain of his reputation as a Machiavelli
and a go-between. Vanity is sometimes a source of great strength; but
vanity of that sort, and about a position in which secrecy is the prime
requisite, could mean only weakness.
Throughout his eight years of control of our party it had had possession
of all departments of the national administration--except of the House
of Representatives during the past two years. This meant the
uninterrupted and unchecked reign of the interests. To treat with
consideration the interests, the strong men of the country, they who
must have a free hand for developing its resources, to give them
privileges and immunities beyond what can be permitted the ordinary
citizen or corporation--that is a course which, however offensive to
abstract justice, still has, as it seems to me, a practical justice in
it, and, at any rate, must be pursued so long as the masses of the
voters are short-sighted, unreasoning and in nose-rings to political
machines. A man's rights, whatever they may be in theory, are in
practice only what he has the intelligence and the power to compel.
But, for the sake of the nation, for the upholding of civilization
itself, these over-powerful interests should never be given their heads,
should be restrained as closely as may be to their rights--their
_practical_ rights. Goodrich had neither the sagacity nor the
patriotism--nor the force of will, for that matter--to keep them within
the limits of decency and discretion. Hence the riot of plunder and
privilege which revolted and alarmed me when I came to Washington and
saw politics in the country-wide, yes, history-wide, horizon of that
view-point.
Probably I should have been more leisurely in bringing my presidential
plans to a focus, had I not seen how great and how near was the peril to
my party. It seemed to me, not indeed a perfect or even a satisfactory,
but the best available, instrument for holding the balances of order as
even as might be between our country's two opposing elements of
disorder--the greedy plunderers and the rapidly infuriating plundered.
And I saw that no time was to be lost, if the party was not to be blown
to fragments. The first mutterings of the storm were in our summary
ejection from control of the House in the midway election. If the party
were not to be dismembered, I must oust Goodrich, must defeat his plans
for nominating Cromwell, must nominate Burbank instead. If I should
succeed in electing him, I reasoned that I could through him carry out
my policy of moderation and _practical_ patriotism--to yield to the
powerful few a minimum of what they could compel, to give to the
prostrate but potentially powerful many at least enough to keep them
quiet--a stomachful. The world may have advanced; but patriotism still
remains the art of restraining the arrogance of full stomachs and the
anger of empty ones.
In Cromwell, Goodrich believed he had a candidate with sufficient hold
upon the rank and file of the party to enable him to carry the election
by the usual means--a big campaign fund properly distributed in the
doubtful states. I said to Senator Scarborough of Indiana soon after
Cromwell's candidacy was announced: "What do you think of Goodrich's
man?"
Scarborough, though new to the Senate then, had shown himself far and
away the ablest of the opposition Senators. He had as much intellect as
any of them; and he had what theorists, such as he, usually lack, skill
at "grand tactics"--the management of men in the mass. His one
weakness--and that, from my standpoint, a great one--was a literal
belief in democratic institutions and in the inspiring but in practice
pernicious principle of exact equality before the law.
"Cromwell's political sponsors," was his reply, "are two as shrewd
bankers as there are in New York. I have heard it said that a fitting
sign for a bank would be: 'Here we do nothing for nothing for nobody.'"
An admirable summing up of Cromwell's candidacy. And I knew that it
would so appear to the country, that no matter how great a corruption
fund Goodrich might throw into the campaign, we should, in that time of
public exasperation, be routed if Cromwell was our standard-bearer--so
utterly routed that we could not possibly get ourselves together again
for eight, perhaps twelve years. There might even be a re-alignment of
parties with some sort of socialism in control of one of them. If
control were to be retained by the few who have the capital and the
intellect to make efficient the nation's resources and energy, my
projects must be put through at once.
I had accumulated a fund of five hundred thousand dollars for my
"presidential flotation"--half of it contributed by Roebuck in exchange
for a promise that his son-in-law should have an ambassadorship if
Burbank were elected; the other half set aside by me from the "reserve"
I had formed out of the year-by-year contributions of my combine. By the
judicious investment of that capital I purposed to get Burbank the
nomination on the first ballot--at least four hundred and sixty of the
nine hundred-odd delegates.
In a national convention the delegates are, roughly speaking, about
evenly divided among the three sections of the country--a third from
east of the Alleghanies; a third from the West; a third from the South.
It was hopeless for us to gun for delegates in the East; that was the
especial bailiwick of Senator Goodrich. The most we could do there would
be to keep him occupied by quietly encouraging any anti-Cromwell
sentiment--and it existed a-plenty. Our real efforts were to be in the
West and South.
I organized under Woodruff a corps of about thirty traveling agents.
Each man knew only his own duties, knew nothing of the general plan, not
even that there was a general plan. Each was a trained political worker,
a personal retainer of ours. I gave them their instructions; Woodruff
equipped them with the necessary cash. During the next five months they
were incessantly on the go--dealing with our party's western machines
where they could; setting up rival machines in promising localities
where Goodrich controlled the regular machines; using money here,
diplomacy there, both yonder, promises of patronage everywhere.
Such was my department of secrecy. At the head of my department of
publicity I put De Milt, a sort of cousin of Burbank's and a newspaper
man. He attended to the subsidizing of news agencies that supplied
thousands of country papers with boiler-plate matter to fill their
inside pages. He also subsidized and otherwise won over many small town
organs of the party. Further, he and three assistants wrote each week
many columns of "boom" matter, all of which was carefully revised by
Burbank himself before it went out as "syndicate letters." If Goodrich
hadn't been ignorant of conditions west of the Alleghanies and confident
that his will was law, he would have scented out this department of
publicity of mine and so would have seen into my "flotation." But he
knew nothing beyond his routine. I once asked him how many country
newspapers there were in the United States, and he said: "Oh, I don't
know. Perhaps three or four thousand." Even had I enlightened him to the
extent of telling him that there were about five times that number, he
would have profited nothing. Had he been able to see the importance of
such a fact to capable political management, he would have learned it
long before through years of constant use of the easiest avenue into the
heart of the people.
He did not wake up to adequate action until the fourth of that group of
states whose delegations to our national conventions were habitually
bought and sold, broke its agreement with him and instructed its
delegation to vote for Burbank. By the time he had a corps of agents in
those states, Doc Woodruff had "acquired" more than a hundred delegates.
Goodrich was working only through the regular machinery of the party and
was fighting against a widespread feeling that Cromwell shouldn't, and
probably couldn't, be elected; we, on the other hand, were manufacturing
presidential sentiment for a candidate who was already popular. Nor had
Goodrich much advantage over us with the regular machines anywhere
except in the East.
Just as I was congratulating myself that nothing could happen to prevent
our triumph at the convention, Roebuck telegraphed me to come to
Chicago. I found with him in the sitting-room of his suite in the
Auditorium Annex, Partridge and Granby, next to him the most important
members of my combine, since they were the only ones who had interests
that extended into many states. It was after an uneasy silence that
Granby, the uncouth one of the three, said:
"Senator, we brought you here to tell you this Burbank nonsense has gone
far enough."