Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [99]
At the convention, Cockran sat with Irish-Catholic Tammany delegates, led by boss John Kelly, all of whom were hostile to Grover Cleveland’s nomination. Their opposition had led to rumors that Cleveland was anti-Catholic. Cockran rose to defend Tammany’s position, decry the invocation of religion in the proceedings, and affirm the ultimate unity of the Democratic Party. Cockran called for calm and unity among the bitterly divided delegates:
If my word of warning be heeded, you will find that every element of contest will be stilled; that although we may have been divided by the wild waves of factional tumult, as soon as the gavel of the chairman declares the nomination made we will become calm and placid as the bosom of the lake in summer. Though we may have been divided before we entered these halls, we are but the countless rivulets that go to make up a mighty stream, and which though turbulent and violent while they are flowing in their separate courses, after they have passed the point of confluence, merge together and roll their united course to the sea in a majestic tide, all powerful in its strength and restless in its force.
Even the Cleveland supporters in the galleries joined the ovation that followed his speech. Cockran had scored a personal and political triumph that would lead the New Yorker to Congress.
Reading Cockran’s 1884 speech, it might very well have been uttered by Bryan. There was the alliteration that both men employed at every turn. Bryan, too, favored the watery metaphors that Cockran used; in 1893 Bryan told the House of Representatives that Cleveland could not “measure the ocean’s silent depths by the foam upon its waves.” Both men used overt and unapologetically religious language to powerful effect. Indeed, Cockran’s 1884 speech had a tremendous impact on Bryan. He had listened to Cockran in awe of his words and power over his listeners. In such oratory Bryan found something of the divine.
Cockran’s speech was the making of Bryan the orator. True, Bryan had become a competent debater in college. As a young man he had listened to the speeches of Robert Ingersoll, Henry Ward Beecher, and Wendell Phillips, three of the greatest orators of their day. Still, the great model for Bryan’s own political oratory, the father of the western Boy Orator, was none other than an Irish-born New Yorker, William Bourke Cockran. And Cockran was about to help destroy his own creation.
Even as they skewered Bryan after his speech, the New York press eagerly awaited Cockran’s response. The Post claimed that Cockran should be grateful for the “manifest delivering of a Philistine into his hands” and gleefully anticipated “the sport which the lively Irish orator and pungent reasoner will make when he answers Bryan.” The Times claimed that Cockran “has not a superior as a public debater and orator in this country. He has both logic and fire, and appeals to both the reason and the highest sentiment of his hearers.”
Only two days after Bryan’s speech the Gold Democrats had announced Cockran’s own Madison Square Garden rally. It was a move calculated to draw attention and support away from the Democratic nominee for the presidency. It worked. News of the Cockran speech filled the papers and drew national attention. Demand for tickets was so great that the Gold Democrat organizers anticipated a full house. The New York Stock Exchange alone had requested 500 seats. Appeals for tickets were arriving from the neighboring states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut. To make sure that average New Yorkers could hear the speech, only about 8,000 seats were reserved, while the rest would be available to the public. Recalling the spectacle of the police line surrounding the Garden for Bryan’s speech and turning away the thousands who held no tickets, a Gold Democrat spokesman said that police would turn no one away from Cockran’s speech, for which 4,000 more chairs would