Part 48

Garfield made a great impression at one of these State dinners, so did Foraker, and at the last dinner of the Ohio Society the star was Senator Warren G. Harding. On one occasion, when McKinley and Garfield were present, in the course of my speech I made a remark which has since been adopted as a sort of motto by the Buckeye State. Ohio, I think, has passed Virginia as a mother of presidents. It is remarkable that the candidates of both great parties are now of that State. I said in the closing of my speech, alluding to the distinguished guests and their prospects: "Some men have greatness thrust upon them, some are born great, and some are born in Ohio."

One of the greatest effects produced by a speech was by Henry Ward Beecher at an annual dinner of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. At the time, the Home Rule question was more than ordinarily acute and Fenianism was rabid. While Mr. Beecher had great influence upon his audience, his audience had equal influence upon him. As he enlarged upon the wrongs of Ireland the responses became more enthusiastic and finally positively savage. This stirred the orator up till he gave the wildest approval to direct action and revolution, with corresponding cheers from the diners, standing and cheering. Mr. Beecher was explaining that speech for about a year afterwards. I was a speaker on the same platform.

Mr. Beecher always arrived late, and everybody thought it was to get the applause as he came in but he explained to me that it was due to his method of preparation. He said his mind would not work freely until three hours after he had eaten. Many speakers have told me the same thing. He said when he had a speech to make at night, whether it was at a dinner or elsewhere, that he took his dinner in the middle of the day, and then a glass of milk and crackers at five o'clock, with nothing afterwards. Then in the evening his mind was perfectly clear and under absolute control.

The Lotos Club has been for fifty years to New York what the Savage Club is to London. It attracts as its guests the most eminent men of letters who visit this country. Its entertainments are always successful. For twenty-nine years it had for its president Mr. Frank R. Lawrence, a gentleman with a genius for introducing distinguished strangers with most felicitous speeches, and a committee who selected with wonderful judgment the other speakers of the evening. A successor to Mr. Lawrence, and of equal merit, has been found in Chester S. Lord, now president of the Lotos Club. Mr. Lord was for more than a third of a century managing editor of the New York Sun, and is now chancellor of the University of the State of New York.

I remember one occasion where the most tactful man who ever appeared before his audience slipped his trolley, and that was Bishop Potter. The bishop was a remarkably fine preacher and an unusually attractive public speaker and past master of all the social amenities of life. The guest of the evening was the famous Canon Kingsley, author of "Hypatia" and other works at that time universally popular. The canon had the largest and reddest nose one ever saw. The bishop, among the pleasantries of his introduction, alluded to this headlight of religion and literature. The canon fell from grace and never forgave the bishop.

On Lotos nights I have heard at their best Lord Houghton, statesman and poet, Mark Twain, Stanley the explorer, and I consider it one of the distinctions as well as pleasures of my life to have been a speaker at the Lotos on more occasions than any one else during the last half century.

In Mr. Joseph Pulitzer's early struggles with his paper, the New York World, the editorial columns frequently had very severe attacks on Mr. William H. Vanderbilt and the New York Central Railroad. They were part, of course, of attacks upon monopoly. I was frequently included in these criticisms.

The Lotos Club gave a famous dinner to George Augustus Sala, the English writer and journalist. I found myself seated beside Mr. Pulitzer, whom I had never met. When I was called upon to speak I introduced, in what I had to say about the distinguished guest, this bit of audacity. I said substantially, in addition to Mr. Sala: "We have with us to-night a great journalist who comes to the metropolis from the wild and woolly West. After he had purchased the World he came to me and said, 'Chauncey Depew, I have a scheme, which I am sure will benefit both of us. Everybody is envious of the prestige of the New York Central and the wealth of Mr. Vanderbilt. You are known as his principal adviser. Now, if in my general hostility to monopoly I include Mr. Vanderbilt and the New York Central as principal offenders, I must include you, because you are the champion in your official relationship of the corporation and of its policies and activities. I do not want you to have any feeling against me because of this. The policy will secure for the World everybody who is not a stockholder in the New York Central, or does not possess millions of money. When Mr. Vanderbilt finds that you are attacked, he is a gentleman and broad-minded enough to compensate you and will grant to you both significant promotion and a large increase in salary.'" Then I added: "Well, gentlemen, I have only to say that Mr. Pulitzer's experiment has been eminently successful. He has made his newspaper a recognized power and a notable organ of public opinion; its fortunes are made and so are his, and, in regard to myself, all he predicted has come true, both in promotion and in enlargement of income." When I sat down Mr. Pulitzer grasped me by the hand and said: "Chauncey Depew, you are a mighty good fellow. I have been misinformed about you. You will have friendly treatment hereafter in any newspaper which I control."

The Gridiron Club of Washington, because of both its ability and genius and especially its national position, furnishes a wonderful platform for statesmen. Its genius in creating caricatures and fake pageants of current political situations at the capital and its public men is most remarkable. The president always attends, and most of the Cabinet and justices of the Supreme Court. The ambassadors and representatives of the leading governments represented in Washington are guests, and so are the best-known senators and representatives of the time. The motto of the club is "Reporters are never present. Ladies always present." Though the association is made up entirely of reporters, the secrecy is so well kept that the speakers are unusually frank.

There was a famous contest one night there, however, between President Roosevelt and Senator Foraker, who at the time were intensely antagonistic, which can never be forgotten by those present. There was a delightful interplay between William J. Bryan and President Roosevelt, when Bryan charged the president with stealing all his policies and ideas.

If the speaker grasped the peculiarities of his audience and its temperament, his task was at once the most difficult and the most delightful, and my friend, Mr. Arthur Dunn, has performed most useful service in embalming a portion of Gridiron history in his volume, "Gridiron Nights."

Pierpont Morgan, the greatest of American bankers, was much more than a banker. He had a wonderful collection in his library and elsewhere of rare books and works of art. He was always delightful on the social side. He was very much pleased when he was elected president of the New England Society. The annual dinner that year was a remarkably brilliant affair. It was the largest in the history of the organization. The principal speaker was William Everett, son of the famous Edward Everett and himself a scholar of great acquirements and culture. His speech was another evidence of a very superior man mistaking his audience. He was principal of the Adams Academy, that great preparatory institution for Harvard University, and he had greatly enlarged its scope and usefulness.

Mr. Everett evidently thought that the guests of the New England Society of New York would be composed of men of letters, educators, and Harvard graduates. Instead of that, the audience before him were mainly bankers and successful business men whose Puritan characteristics had enabled them to win great success in the competitions in the great metropolis in every branch of business. They were out for a good time and little else.

Mr. Everett produced a ponderous mass of manuscript and began reading on the history of New England education and the influence upon it of the Cambridge School. He had more than an hour of material and lost his audience in fifteen minutes. No efforts of the chairman could bring them to attention, and finally the educator lost that control of himself which he was always teaching to the boys and threw his manuscript at the heads of the reporters. From their reports in their various newspapers the next day, they did not seem to have absorbed the speech by this original method.

Choate and I were both to speak, and Choate came first. As usual, he threw a brick at me. He mentioned that a reporter had come to him and said: "Mr. Choate, I have Depew's speech carefully prepared, with the applause and laughter already in. I want yours." Of course, no reporter had been to either of us. Mr. Choate had in his speech an unusual thing for him, a long piece of poetry. When my turn came to reply I said: "The reporter came to me, as Mr. Choate has said, and made the remark: 'I already have Choate's speech. It has in it a good deal of poetry.' I asked the reporter: 'From what author is the poetry taken?' He answered: 'I do not know the author, but the poetry is so bad I think Choate has written it himself.'"

Mr. Choate told me a delightful story of his last interview with Mr. Evarts before he sailed for Europe to take up his ambassadorship at the Court of St. James. "I called," he said, "on Mr. Evarts to bid him good-by. He had been confined to his room by a fatal illness for a long time. 'Choate,' he said, 'I am delighted with your appointment. You eminently deserve it, and you are pre-eminently fit for the place. You have won the greatest distinction in our profession, and have harvested enough of its rewards to enable you to meet the financial responsibilities of this post without anxiety. You will have a most brilliant and useful career in diplomacy, but I fear I will never see you again.'"

Mr. Choate said: "Mr. Evarts, we have had a delightful partnership of over forty years, and when I retire from diplomacy and resume the practice of the law I am sure you and I will go on together again for many years in the same happy old way."

Evarts replied: "No, Choate, I fear that cannot be. When I think what a care I am to all my people, lying so helpless here, and that I can do nothing any more to repay their kindness, or to help in the world, I feel like the boy who wrote from school to his mother a letter of twenty pages, and then added after the end: 'P. S. Dear mother, please excuse my longevity.'"

Where one has a reputation as a speaker and is also known to oblige friends and to be hardly able to resist importunities, the demands upon him are very great. They are also sometimes original and unique.

At one time, the day before Christmas, a representative of the New York World came to see me, and said: "We are going to give a dinner to-night to the tramps who gather between ten and eleven o'clock at the Vienna Restaurant, opposite the St. Denis Hotel, to receive the bread which the restaurant distributes at that hour." This line was there every night standing in the cold waiting their turn. I went down to the hotel, and a young man and young lady connected with the newspaper crossed the street and picked out from the line a hundred guests.

It was a remarkable assemblage. The dinner provided was a beautiful and an excellent one for Christmas. As I heard their stories, there was among them a representative of almost every department of American life. Some were temporarily and others permanently down and out. Every one of the learned professions was represented and many lines of business. The most of them were in this condition, because they had come to New York to make their way, and had struggled until their funds were exhausted, and then they were ashamed to return home and confess their failure.

I presided at this remarkable banquet and made not only one speech but several. By encouraging the guests we had several excellent addresses from preachers without pulpits, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients, engineers without jobs, teachers without schools, and travellers without funds. One man arose and said: "Chauncey Depew, the World has given us such an excellent dinner, and you have given us such a merry Christmas Eve, we would like to shake hands with you as we go out."

I had long learned the art of shaking hands with the public. Many a candidate has had his hands crushed and been permanently hurt by the vise-like grip of an ardent admirer or a vicious opponent. I remember General Grant complaining of this, of how he suffered, and I told him of my discovery of grasping the hand first and dropping it quickly.

The people about me were looking at these men as they came along, to see if there was any possible danger. Toward the end of the procession one man said to me: "Chauncey Depew, I don't belong to this crowd. I am well enough off and can take care of myself. I am an anarchist. My business is to stir up unrest and discontent, and that brings me every night to mingle with the crowd waiting for their dole of bread from Fleischmann's bakery. You do more than any one else in the whole country to create good feeling and dispel unrest, and you have done a lot of it to-night. I made up my mind to kill you right here, but you are such an infernal good fellow that I have not the heart to do it, so here's my hand."

On one occasion I received an invitation to address a sociological society which was to meet at the house of one of the most famous entertainers in New York. My host said that Edward Atkinson, the well-known New England writer, philosopher, and sociologist, would address the meeting. When I arrived at the house I found Atkinson in despair. The audience were young ladies in full evening dress and young men in white vests, white neckties, and swallow-tails. There was also a band present. We were informed that this society had endeavored to mingle instruction with pleasure, and it really was a dancing club, but they had conceived the idea of having something serious and instructive before the ball.

Mr. Atkinson said to me: "What won me to come here is that in Boston we have a society of the same name. It is composed of very serious people who are engaged in settlement and sociological work. They are doing their best to improve the conditions of the young women and young men who are in clerical and other employment. I have delivered several addresses before that society, and before the audiences which they gather, on how to live comfortably and get married on the smallest possible margin. Now, for instance, for my lecture here to-night I have on a ready-made suit of clothes, for which I paid yesterday five dollars. In that large boiler there is a stove which I have invented. In the oven of the stove is beef and various vegetables, and to heat it is a kerosene lamp with a clockwork attached. A young man or a young woman, or a young married couple go to the market and buy the cheap cuts of beef, and then, according to my instructions, they put it in the stove with the vegetables, light the lamp, set the clockwork and go to their work. When they return at five, six, or seven o'clock they find a very excellent and very cheap dinner all ready to be served. Now, of what use is my five-dollar suit of clothes and my fifty-cent dinner for this crowd of butterflies?"

However, Mr. Atkinson and I made up our minds to talk to them as if they needed it or would need it some day or other, and they were polite enough to ask questions and pretend to enjoy it. I understand that afterwards at the midnight supper there was more champagne and more hilarity than at previous gatherings of this sociological club.

During one of our presidential campaigns some young men came up from the Bowery to see me. They said: "We have a very hard time down in our district. The crowd is a tough one but intelligent, and we think would be receptive of the truth if they could hear it put to them in an attractive form. We will engage a large theatre attached to a Bowery beer saloon if you will come down and address the meeting. The novelty of your appearance will fill the theatre."