My Memories of Eighty Years [137]
I again had a personal experience. The committee on resolutions, not being prepared to report, there was that interval of no business which is the despair of presiding officers of conventions. The crowd suddenly began calling for me. While, of course, I had thought much on the subject, I had not expected to be called upon and had no prepared speech. Happily, fifteen thousand faces and fifteen thousand voices giving uproarious welcome both steadied and inspired me. Though I was past eighty-six years of age, my voice was in as good condition as at forty, and was practically the only one which did fill that vast auditorium. The press of the country featured the effort next day in a way which was most gratifying.
Among the thousands who greeted me on the streets and in the hotel lobbies with congratulations and efforts to say something agreeable and complimentary, I selected one compliment as unique. He was an enthusiast. "Chauncey Depew," he said, "I have for over twenty years wanted to shake hands with you. Your speech was a wonder. I was half a mile off, way up under the roof, and heard every word of it, and it was the only one I was able to hear. That you should do this in your eighty-seventh year is a miracle. But then my father was a miracle. On his eighty-fifth birthday he was in just as good shape as you are to-day, and a week afterwards he was dead."
XXII. JOURNALISTS AND FINANCIERS
In reminiscences of my journalistic friends I do not include many of the most valued who are still living. Of those who have passed away one of the most faithful and devoted was Edward H. Butler, editor and proprietor of the Buffalo Evening News.
Mr. Butler began at the bottom as a newspaper man and very early and rapidly climbed to the top. He secured control of the Evening News and soon made one of the most, if not the most, widely circulated, influential, and prosperous papers of western New York. Personally and through his paper he was for many years my devoted friend. To those he loved he had an unbounded fidelity and generosity. He possessed keen insight and kept thoroughly abreast of public affairs was a journalist of high order.
It was my privilege to know Charles A. Dana very well. I first met him when he was on the New York Tribune and closely allied with Horace Greeley. He made the New York Sun one of the brightest, most original, and most quoted newspapers in the United States. His high culture, wonderful command of English, and refined taste gave to the Sun a high literary position, and at the same time his audacity and criticism made him a terror to those with whom he differed, and his editorials the delight of a reader.
Personally Mr. Dana was one of the most attractive and charming of men. As assistant secretary of war during Lincoln's administration he came in intimate contact with all the public men of that period, and as a journalist his study was invaded and he received most graciously men and women famous in every department of intellectual activity. His reminiscences were wonderful and his characterizations remarkable. He might have published an autobiography of rare value and interest.
When the elder James Gordon Bennett died the newspaper world recognized the loss of one of the most remarkable and successful of journalists and publishers. His son had won reputation in the field of sport, but his contemporaries doubted his ability to maintain, much less increase, the sphere of the New York Herald. But young Bennett soon displayed rare originality and enterprise. He made his newspaper one of national and international importance. By bringing out an edition in Paris he conferred a boon upon Americans abroad. For many years there was little news from the United States in foreign newspapers, but Americans crazy for news from home found it in the Paris edition of the New York Herald.
Mr. Bennett was a good friend of mine for half a century. He was delightful company, with his grasp of world affairs and picturesque presentation of them. A President of the United States