I arrived at Chicago the day before the convention and, going at once to
our state headquarters in the Great Northern, shut myself in with Doc
Woodruff. My door-keeper, the member of the legislature from Fredonia,
ventured to interrupt with the announcement that a messenger had come
from Senator Goodrich.
"Let him in," said I.
As the door-man disappeared Doc Woodruff glanced at his watch, then said
with a smile: "You've been here seven minutes and a half--just time for
a lookout down stairs to telephone to the Auditorium and for the
messenger to drive from there here. Goodrich is on the anxious-seat, all
right."
The messenger was Goodrich's handy-man, Judge Dufour. I myself have
always frowned on these public exhibitions of the intimacy of judges in
practical politics; but Goodrich had many small vanities--he liked his
judges to hold his coat and his governors to carry his satchel. One
would say that such petty weaknesses would be the undoing of a man.
Fortunately, we are not as weak as our weakness but as strong as our
strength; and while the universal weaknesses are shared by the strong,
their strength is peculiar and rare. After Dufour had introduced himself
and we had exchanged commonplaces he said: "Senator, there's a little
conference of some of the leaders at headquarters and it isn't complete
without you. So, Senator Goodrich has sent me over to escort you."
"Thank you--very courteous of you and of him," said I without
hesitation, for I knew what was coming as soon as his name had been
brought in, and my course was laid out. "But I can't leave just now.
Please ask him if he won't come over--any time within the next four
hours." This blandly and without a sign that I was conscious of Dufour's
stupefaction--for his vanity made him believe that the god the great
Dufour knelt to must be the god of gods.
There is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with
men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in
his very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there--by going
to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by
compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the
concession of going. I had two reasons for thus humiliating Goodrich,
neither of them the reason he doubtless attributed to me, the desire to
feed my vanity. My first reason was his temperament; I knew his having
to come to me would make him bow before me in spirit, as he was a
tyrant, and tyrants are always cringers. My second reason was that I
thought myself near enough to control of the convention to be able to
win control by creating the atmosphere of impending success. There is
always a lot of fellows who wait to see who is likely to win, so that
they may be on the side of the man in the plum tree; often there are
enough of these to gain the victory for him who can lure them over at
just the right moment.
As soon as Dufour had taken his huge body away I said to Woodruff: "Go
out with your men and gather in the office down stairs as many members
of the doubtful delegations as you can. Keep them where they'll be bound
to see Goodrich come in and go out."
He rushed away, and I waited--working with the leaders of three
far-western states. At the end of two hours, I won them by the spectacle
of the arriving Goodrich. He came in, serene, smiling, giving me the
joyously shining eyes and joyously firm hand-clasp of the politician's
greeting; not an outward sign that he would like to see me tortured to
death by some slow process then and there. Hypocritical preliminaries
were not merely unnecessary but even highly ridiculous; yet, so great
was his anger and confusion that he began with the "prospects for an
old-time convention, with old-time enthusiasm and that generous rivalry
which is the best sign of party health."
"I hope not, Senator," said I pleasantly. "Here, we think the fight is
over--and won."
He lifted his eyebrows; but I saw his maxillary muscles twitching. "We
don't figure it out just that way at headquarters," he replied oilily.
"But, there's no doubt about it, your man has developed strength in the
West."
"And South," said I, with deliberate intent to inflame, for I knew how
he must feel about those delegates we had bought away from him.
There were teeth enough in his smile--but little else. "I think Burbank
and Cromwell will be about even on the first ballot," said he. "May the
best man win! We're all working for the good of the party and the
country. But--I came, rather, to get your ideas about platform."
I opened a drawer in the table at which I was sitting and took out a
paper. "We've embodied our ideas in this," said I, holding the paper
toward him. "There's a complete platform, but we only insist on the five
paragraphs immediately after the preamble."
He seemed to age as he read. "Impossible!" he finally exclaimed.
"Preposterous! It would be difficult enough to get any money for
_Cromwell_ on such a platform, well as our conservative men know they
can trust him. But for _Burbank_--you couldn't get a cent--not a damn
cent! A rickety candidate on a rickety platform--that's what they'd
say."