The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 2, Harry Furniss [affordable ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Harry Furniss
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It is at the two gigantic Conventions at which the rival candidates are nominated that the artist finds material for his pencil, the satirist for his pen, and the man of the world food for reflection. By all accounts, these Conventions baffle description. Everything is sacrificed to spectacular effect. They take place in huge buildings decorated with banners, emblems of all kinds, startling devices, transparencies, and portraits of the candidates. Bands play different airs at the same time; processions are formed and marched all over the hall, carrying emblems and portrait banners, the State delegates carrying the State standards in front of each procession to the cheers and yells of their supporters. Similar demonstrations are carried on in the galleries. Girls dressed symbolically representing silver or gold, or some topic of interest in the election, wave flags and lead demonstrations, perhaps acting as an antidote to the less attractive surroundings.[Pg 116]
The election being a purely commercial question, I attended the meetings held in commercial districts, where the excitement ran high. During the lunch hour crowds attend the political gatherings held in the centre of the business districts in large stores turned into halls for speechifying and demonstrations, and great as the subject is, and grave as is the issue, the ludicrous is the first feature to strike the stranger. A great empty store, running the whole length of the ground floor of one of the monster ten, twenty, or what you will storied buildings, was appropriated for the purpose. The bare walls were draped with stars and stripes, and innumerable portraits of McKinley and Hobart confronted you on every side. In the centre was a roughly-constructed platform; on this a piano and seats for the orators. At 12.30 sharp (the business lunch hour) a crowd surged in; bankers, brokers, dry goods merchants, clerks, messengers, and office-boys, straight from the Quick Lunch Counters—a great institution there—filling every corner of the hall. An attendant carried the inevitable pitcher of ice water to the orators' table; a "Professor" hastily seated himself at the piano and played a few bars; a solemn-faced quartette took its position in front of the rostrum, and the meeting was opened.
THE POLITICAL QUARTETTE.
The campaign songsters had taken a leaf from the Salvation Army, and appropriated all popular airs for political purposes. Praises of Sound Money and Protection were sung to the air of "Just tell them that you saw me," and denunciations of[Pg 117] Bryan, Free Silver, and all things Democratic to the tune of "Her golden hair was hanging down her back!" The quartette aroused the greatest enthusiasm. An aged Republican seated immediately in front of the platform, who had voted every Republican ticket since Lincoln was elected, waved his stick over his head, and the crowd responded with cheers and encores. The quartette retired, the chairman advanced, motioned with his hand for silence, and announced the name of the first orator of the occasion, who happened to be a clergyman—a tiresome, platitudinous person. Somehow, clergymen on the platform can never divest themselves of their pulpit manner. They bring an air of pews and Sabbath into secular things. The minister denounced Bryan and Democracy in the same tones he used in declaiming against Agag and the Amalekites on Sunday. At last he brought his political sermon to a close, and the quartette again came to the front, sang a few more political adaptations of popular songs, and the chairman announced the next speaker, a smart young lawyer of the Hebrew persuasion. After him, more songs and more speakers of all kinds, and at half-past one the meeting came to an abrupt conclusion. The crowd vanished like magic, the hall was empty, the lunch hour was over!
When night fell, oratory was again rampant in all parts of the city. At every street corner one saw a waggon decorated with a few Chinese lanterns and covered with portraits of the candidates. In front the orator shouted to the casual mob, and at the tail end his companion distributed campaign literature. One crowd exhausted, the waggon drove on, and gathered more listeners at another stand. In this way, in strolling through the streets, one was met with a fresh line of argument at every turning. Republicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, Socialists, etc., all had their perambulating orators. It was as if all the Sunday Hyde Park orators had taken to waggons, and were driven about through all quarters of the town, from Whitechapel to Kensington. At one street corner a Catholic priest was rallying his Irish compatriots to Tammany and Bryan, and urging them to shake off the fetters of the bloated British capitalist; and at[Pg 118] the next a Temperance orator was pleading the hopeless cause of the Prohibitionist party.
The campaign was not so much a fight between Silver and Gold as between Sound Money and Sound Lungs.
Bryan's Campaign.It would be impertinent on the part of any English journalist to use the ordinary language at his command to describe that scene. Let him copy the headings of those who have given the people of the United States a language of their own:
A Hundred and Twenty Thousand Men March with Old Glory up Broadway.
GRANDEST PARADE IN ALL HISTORY.The Great Thoroughfare a Tossing Sea of Red, White, and Blue and Gold.
Cheers and Music fill the Air with Melody.
Legions Marshalled for the Honor and Safety of the Union and the Prosperity of the People.
PATRIOT ARMY'S GLORIOUS MARCH. WARRIORS OF PEACE, BATHED IN GOLDEN SUNLIGHT, PASS THROUGH STAR-SPANGLED LINES. PARADE'S RECORD-MAKING FIGURES.[Pg 119]
No pen or pencil could give any idea of the intense feeling and excitement over that election. To realise its effect one must have seen the faces of business men in cities like New York—faces pallid with care, eyes restless with inquiry and uncertainty, mouths twitching with anxiety. To them Bryan spelt ruin. You could read that in the faces of every one of responsibility.
We had huge meetings and long speeches from morning to midnight. In the churches the pulpits were turned into hustings, and for the moment ministers preached the Gospel and McKinley in equal proportions. Miles of sound money men paraded the streets, and at night the rivers north and east were given over to political aquatic demonstrations. Huge banners flaunted the sky, and tons of party literature strewed the floors of every house; but the whole story was better told and more impressively demonstrated in the faces of those united in commerce—99 per cent. of the better class in the city. They looked worn and anxious; their words were words of confidence, but expressed with an uncertainty and reserve which were significant.
One day I met a prominent citizen—an ardent Republican—and I asked him how he thought the elections were going. He said, "I feel like the old woman Ingersoll tells of, who did not believe in ghosts, but was terribly frightened of them." This reminds me that the Free-thinking Ingersoll had been stumping the country, and clergymen, such as Dr. Parkhurst, had been turning their pulpits into political platforms to bring their influence to bear on the voters. To all those who were in New York during that momentous time the scene will linger in their memories when the names of Bryan and McKinley have ceased to interest them.
And the curious thing is that this is no exaggeration. To see, as I did, thousands of well-dressed city men marching past at quick time, with martial tread, to the music of innumerable bands, from half-past ten in the morning till seven o'clock at night, is a performance that Englishmen can hardly realise, and one that they will certainly never see in their own country.[Pg 120] Its very seriousness, simplicity, and impressive monotony made it all the more striking. Not a soldier to be seen, no triumphal cars, no break in the stream of respectability mechanically moving throughout the day. In England, on public demonstrations, one goes to look at the crowd, but here the crowd was the procession. This political fever seemed to work up the enthusiasm of every man, woman, and child when the march was over, on, I may tell you, a bright, hot Indian summer's day in November.
AFTER THE GREAT PARADE: "AM I TO SIT ON AN ORDINARY SEAT TO-NIGHT?"
Crowds of the paraders continued to march in smaller squads through the side streets for their own enjoyment, and overflowed into hotel lobbies and restaurants, covered with emblems, flags, gold bugs, and chrysanthemums, which were brought into the city by thousands for the occasion. And then some humour was imported into the serious business of the day. One youth strolled into a café, and when he was offered a chair by the waiter, he drew himself up, and said, "Am I to sit on an ordinary seat to-night?" They blew their tin horns, rattled their rattles, and waved their flags in and out of every place until late at night, and they were still singing and demonstrating[Pg 121] in the morning, but with that extraordinary common-sense which is characteristic of Americans, the Bryanites and the McKinleyites shaking hands and setting about their business with redoubled energy, having another crisis in the country to record as a landmark in the history of the republic.
On the last day of my first visit to America I found myself in the head depôt of the New York detective force. The courteous and talented presiding genius of that establishment had left his busy office to show me over their museum, a chronicle of the city's crime, and as I was thanking him afterwards, he said:
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
"Well," I replied, "I have seen the best side of life in New York, now I should like to see the worst."
"The very worst?"
"The worst you have."
The worthy officer eyed me up and down as if he were going to measure me for a suit of clothes.
"Very well," he replied, seemingly satisfied with my resolute bearing and undaunted mien and determined visage, which showed my daring and enterprise. Beside me a Stanley or a Burton would have looked effeminate. "A detective will be at your hotel at ten o'clock to-night."
And he was.
I had just come in from dinner, and had changed my clothes for an old suit that had braved the weather in crossing, and was consequently well salted by Atlantic brine.
"May I offer you a cocktail?" I say.
"No, thank you," he replies.
(His nerve doesn't want fortifying, evidently!) Mine does, so I have a Manhattan as I hastily pencil a line to my wife to be sent to England in case I do not leave by the Majestic next day.
"Now, then, what's your programme?" said I in an airy way, as we reached the street.
"Trust to me," said the "'tec," "interfere with no one, and keep your pencil and your notebook in your pocket till I tell[Pg 122] you. Keep your mouth shut and your ears and eyes open, and as they say in the pantomime, 'you shall see what you shall see.'"
We were soon whizzing along the elevated railway, and I was trying to impress my guide with stirring tales of midnight meanderings in the greater city, London. I left out any mention of Dublin, for my companion rejoiced in a truly Milesian cognomen, and still bore strong evidence of his native country in his accent, mixed with a good dash of American.
"Guess you're a pretty 'cute Britisher, and shure it's the likes of you I'm mighty glad to strike in this tremenjious city!"
I felt somewhat flattered by this encouraging condescension, and I admit now that I did not feel particularly happy
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