Marse Henry (Volume 2) - An Autobiography by Henry Watterson
page 74 of 208 (35%)
page 74 of 208 (35%)
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Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time.
He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge Douglas I was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine in leadership might be called negligible. Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at least seemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures. Each had gone, as it were, "through the flint mill." Born to good conditions--Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears--each knew by early albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay, nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made for a subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate had condemned them. II In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had arrived at the front of affairs. The Democrats, after a rule of more than half a century, had been out of power twenty-four years. They could scarce realize at first that they were again in power. The new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity than had been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a life-long crony, had brought the two of us together before Cleveland's election to the governorship of the Empire State as one of a group of attractive Buffalo men, most of whom might be said to have been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a delightful halfway stop-over in my frequent migrations between Kentucky and the Eastern seaboard. As in the end we came to a parting of the ways I want to write of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a critic. |
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