Part 37 (2/2)

”Senator Cullom.

”Dear Sir:

”I did not think the blow would be a cyclone when I saw you just before the election. I knew that a storm was coming, but did not dream that its severity would be so dreadful.

”The thing to do this Winter is to repeal the McKinley bill, and strengthen the reciprocity scheme by giving Blaine the sugar duties to work on--freeing no sugar before reciprocal equivalents are secured from respective cane-sugar tropical countries; or (2) fail to pa.s.s the chief appropriation bills, so that an extra session of the Dem. Congress would be called, and that party must deal with the tariff and be responsible for their action or failure to act; or (3) pa.s.s the apn. bills; adjourn; next year, have the Senate defeat the Dem. tariff bill, or the President veto it, and go before the people in 1892 on the issue of standing by the McKinley bill till overwhelmed and wiped out in Nov. of that year, as the Whigs were in '52 when standing by the Forsythe-Stone Law of Fillmore and Clay.

”The last course I presume is the one that will be pursued. When men who are statesmen of the Quay-Reid-McKinley calibre start in wrong their pride keeps them in the same downward path till they tumble the whole outfit into the bottomless pit.

”I do not consider a Presidential nomination for any man worth a nickel on the issue of standing by the McKinley bill. The fate of Gen. Scott in '52 surely awaits him.

”Either of the other mentioned courses might give our party a fighting chance. But it won't get it, if the perverse members who have landed us in the ditch have their way.

”Read the suggestions from the article in _The N. Y. Times_ for Republicans.

”Yours truly, ”(Signed) J. Medill.”

I was elected to the Senate, the fourth time, in January, 1901.

This time I had a very serious contest. More opposition had developed, and there were more strong men against me, than at any previous election. This was largely the outgrowth of the opposition of the late Governor Tanner, who had just completed his term as Governor of Illinois, and who had announced he would not be a candidate for renomination, but would be a candidate to succeed me. I believe it was mainly through the efforts of Governor Tanner and his friends that the Hon. Robert R. Hitt, the Hon. Joseph G.

Cannon, and the Hon. George W. Prince were induced to become candidates, in the hope of weakening me in their respective districts.

I do not believe that either Mr. Hitt or Mr. Cannon was a party to any particular scheme to defeat me. They were candidates in good faith, and aspired to the office of United States Senator, but neither of them had any desire to defeat me unless he could get the office himself.

The campaign continued for a year or more. My friends were active, as were the friends of Governor Tanner. He had a horde of office- holders whom he had given places while Governor, who had been more or less actively working for him as my successor almost from the very time that the Governor entered that office. The bitter personal attacks made on me by the Governor and his friends did not help him, but tended rather to help me.

The preliminary contest was in the State Convention held at Peoria in 1900. There were a number of candidates for Governor before that convention. The Hon. Walter Reeves, the Hon. O. H. Carter, and Judge Elbridge Hanecy were the leading aspirants. My friends had insisted that I should be endorsed for re-election by the State Convention, and my friends controlled the organization of the convention and elected the Hon. Charles G. Dawes temporary chairman and the Hon. Joseph W. Fifer permanent chairman.

Governor Fifer has always been my friend, as I have always been his. He was a brave, gallant soldier in the Civil War, in which he served as a private until he was so badly wounded that his life was despaired of. He has been forced to go through life under exceptionally difficult circ.u.mstances, never fully recovering from his wound. He is ent.i.tled to far more than ordinary credit for the success which he achieved in life. He is an able lawyer, and as State's Attorney he was one of the most vigorous of prosecutors.

He was nominated and elected Governor, and gave the State an honest and capable administration. He was renominated, but local questions in the State, combined with the Democratic landslide of 1892, resulted in his defeat. President McKinley, on my recommendation, appointed Governor Fifer a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, in which position he served with credit for some years.

He resigned voluntarily and returned to his home in Bloomington to resume the practice of law. I have always liked Governor Fifer, and consider him one of the foremost citizens of the State living to-day.

Returning to the Peoria Convention, over which Governor Fifer presided, I will only say that Mr. Reeves had the votes in that convention to be nominated; but for reasons I do not have to discuss, he did not secure the nomination, and the Hon. Richard Yates became the nominee. I was endorsed by the convention as the candidate of the Republican party to succeed myself as United States Senator.

The opposition to me in the convention was by Governor Tanner and his friends, he being the only avowed candidate against me. I thought that the endors.e.m.e.nt of that convention should have settled the matter; but the contest went on, and Messrs. Hitt, Cannon, and Prince entered it actively. Several others were standing around waiting for a chance, and this continued to be the situation until the Legislature met in January. A sufficient number of the members of the Legislature to elect me had pledged themselves in writing to stand by me as long as I was a candidate. The other candidates, probably aside from Governor Tanner, did not believe I had these written pledges. I told them so, but they did not believe me.

Governor Tanner and his friends realized that I would have a majority of the caucus, and they then began scheming for the purpose of having a secret ballot in the caucus, hoping that if certain members who had been pledged to me would not have to vote openly, they would go back on the pledges and vote secretly for one of the other candidates, thus defeating me. I had enough votes to defeat the secret ballot proposition, as many of the supporters of Tanner were really in favor of my re-election. Hon. Fred A. Busse, one of the most influential members of the State Senate at that time, and more recently Mayor of Chicago--one of the best the city ever had--and who has long been my personal friend, was pledged to vote for the Governor, but at heart was strongly for me. With many others, Busse would not consent to a secret caucus, and this really ended the contest. Tanner, after trying to induce the other candidates to unite on him, or on some one else to defeat me (which proposition Mr. Cannon and Mr. Hitt rejected), announced that he would withdraw.

Friends of the Governor in the Legislature came to me and announced that Tanner had quit the race, and later Mr. Cannon and Mr. Hitt came to my room and announced their withdrawal.

This ended the contest; my name was the only one presented to the caucus, and I was the only Republican voted for in the joint session of the Legislature. It was an interesting fight, and as it may well be supposed, the result was very satisfactory to my friends and to me.

When I returned to Was.h.i.+ngton after having been re-elected, I was warmly greeted by my colleagues in the Senate who had been watching the contest; and I recollect that Senator Hanna was particularly warm in his congratulations, and remarked that it was the prettiest political fight he had witnessed in a long time.

I want to say something in reference to the Hon. Joseph G. Cannon, who was a candidate against me at this time, and who is now, as he has been for years past, the leading member of the Illinois delegation.

I regard him as my personal friend, and was very glad indeed to support his candidacy for the Presidency in 1908, I being chairman of the Illinois delegation to the Chicago convention that year.

At the time he entered the contest against me, he had long been one of the leaders of the House of Representatives in Congress.

After refusing to enter the scheme of Governor Tanner to defeat me, as I have stated, he retired from the contest, was soon re- elected to Congress, and almost immediately elected as Speaker, in which position he continued for a larger number of consecutive terms than any statesman in our history. He is a strong, courageous man, and a man of splendid ability. He had rather a stormy career as Speaker, but he controlled the situation all the time. During his last term as Speaker he might have gotten along with the House a little more smoothly, and at the same time just as satisfactorily to himself, if he had yielded a little to his colleagues in his party who differed from him. If he had been disposed to do so, much friction could have been avoided, and at the same time he would have had his own way in caring for the interests of the country. I have believed in him and have stood by him through thick and thin, and I know he has done nothing but what he himself believed right.

Joseph G. Cannon has his own notions of what is right and what is wrong, and fearlessly follows what he thinks is right, without reference to what anybody else may think or say. The apparently determined effort on the part of the ma.s.ses of the people, and especially the newspapers, to discredit the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Bill resulted in the Democrats carrying the House in the campaign of 1910 with the result that in the Sixty-second Congress the Democratic party has a substantial majority, causing the retirement of Mr. Cannon from the Speakers.h.i.+p.

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