Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [103]
He reached a crescendo as he took Bryan’s famous speech from the Chicago Convention and turned it on its head. “To him we say, in the name of humanity, in the name of progress, ‘You shall neither place a crown of thorns upon the brow of labor nor lay a scourge upon his back. (Applause) You shall not rob him of any one advantage which he has gained by long years of steady progress in the skill with which he exercises his craft and by efficient organization among those who work with him at the same bench. You shall not obscure the golden prospect of a further improvement in his condition by a further cheapening in the cost of living, as well as by a future appreciation of the dollar in which his wages are paid.’ (Applause).” Cockran had masterfully turned Bryan’s words against him, added the allusion to sound money through the “golden prospect” facing workers with a strong dollar, and in only an hour established Bryan as the enemy of the workingman.
It was a thrilling moment and the height of Cockran’s oratorical career. While he would go on to speak to many large urban crowds in the weeks that followed, leading up to the election, never again would he speak to so large a crowd. Indeed, as Roosevelt would comment to his friend Lodge, few Americans not running for or holding political office would have been able to attract such a crowd. And Cockran was enormously successful in exactly the same place where Bryan had failed so miserably.
The speech caused an outpouring of praise from all quarters, as some even suggested it turned the tide of the election itself. Others echoed the Sun in seeing Cockran’s effort as above partisan politics and serving the larger, national good. Just after the election a Philadelphia paper said, “Bourke Cockran’s Madison Square Garden speech lifted the canvass to that moral plane where thousands of Democrats afterwards stood, and in it may be discovered the characteristic that carried the great orator beyond the environments of the political organization with which his first triumphs were associated.” Republican boss Thomas Platt said, “It was the greatest speech I ever listened to. McKinley’s election is now assured.” Speaker of the House Thomas Reed wrote Cockran, “After your most noble effort last evening you are entitled to the highest honor the nation can bestow upon you.” Roosevelt described the speech to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge as “a phenomenon.” “It is extraordinary that a mere private citizen should be able to gather such an enormous crowd,” he observed, “a crowd quite as large inside the Madison Square Garden and almost as large outside, as that which came to hear Bryan, the candidate for the Presidency. Cockran made a first class speech. I cannot but believe that the tide is beginning to flow against the free silverites.”
From abroad, the twenty-one-year-old Winston Churchill offered congratulations on a speech the future prime minister called “not only a rhetorical triumph, but also a moral victory.” Any change in currency policy, Churchill wrote, should be slow and cautious. “What Bryan is doing is like an inebriate regulating a chronometer with a crowbar.”
Perhaps inevitably, hoping to enlist a promising candidate in their ranks, city Republicans made an offer to Cockran to run for Congress as a Republican from the Twelfth