Random Recollections Of An Old Political Reporter

RECOLLECIONS OF AN Old Political Reporter By WILLIAM C. HUDSON Author of J. Percy Dunbar, Problems of Insurance C c Staff Writer for forty-four years on political and economic subjects in tbe Brooklyn Daily Baffle WITH INTRODUCTION BY ST. CLAIR McKELWAY, LL. D. CUPPLES LEON COMPANY 443-449 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK 1911 COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE CONTENTS PAGE Introduction. By St. Clair McKelway, LL. D 5 Authors Preface 14 Kate Chase as a Politician, 17 Bribery at Albany in Tweed Days 24 Boss Tweed and Governor Hoffman 30 Tilden and the Young Reporter 36 Tildens Wide Information 42 Tilden and the Canal Ring 48 William Dorsheimers Great Triumph 53 The Penalty Paid for Success 60 A Sensational Episode 66 Proffered Sale of Louisiana . 72 How Grant Was Won 78 The Contests of Tilden and John Kelly 85 Senator Conkling and Chester A. Arthur 93 Lucky Guessing 100 How Tilden Lost the Cincinnati Convention 106 End of the Bloody Shirt Issue . 112 Making Senators at Albany 119 The Conkling-Aithur Quarrel 125 The Emergence of Grover Cleveland 131 How to Get Rid of Undesirables 137 Theodore Roosevelt in the Making 144 Setting Clevelands Feet on the Presidential Path 150 Turning Close Corners 155 By What Small Chances 162 Mannings Masterly Management 168 3 CONTENTS PAGE Public Office is a Public Trust 1 175 How Cleveland Dealt with a Elaine Scandal 184 A Mysterious Foreign Mission 192 Conklings Hostility to Elaine 199 The Phrase tiiat Cost Elaine the Presidency 205 Election Night Telegrams Caught on the Wing 213 Grover Clevelands Resolve 221 The Ifs of the Cleveland Campaign 228 Clevelands Resentment of Obligation 236 Guarding a President-Elect 245 The Rise of David B. Hill 252 How Hill WonMcLaughlin 260 Hills Use of Political Power 267 BROOKLYN EAGLE PRESS. Introduction By ST. CLAIR MCKELWAY, LL. D. The writer of the articles within this volume first called them the Random Recollections of an Old Political Reporter He did so for the purpose of giving to himself freedom in his statements of experience and of the impressions which men and subjects covered by him might suggest. Who An Old Political Reporter was could not be successfully concealed. There were those who knew it from the first. Even were they desirous to maintain reserve about the identity of the man, that could not be done, for any other man, such as the late Edgar K. Apgar and the late Daniel S. Lamont, who might have shared in a degree the knowledge and the labor involved in these statements, had passed out of life before the statements appeared, while most of the men involved, such as Samuel J. Tilden, Grover Cleveland, David B. Hill, A. S. Hewitt and others, with Daniel Manning, had also joined the majority. From a variety of causes and under a variety of pressures, the identity of William Cadwalader Hudson as the Old Political Reporter has been disclosed. His was not the case of military and polit ical interviewers and correspondents in times before the period he covered. Of them, publication was INTRODUCTION the object. Of them, journalism was the medium of expression. Between them was simply the ri valry of full, complete and prompt publication, with a preference of each man to be first and most full in statement. The purpose of Mr. Hudson in ac quiring the experience which his articles set forth was different from the purposes of the others. The purpose of Mr. Hudson was public service. His clientsand confidants were public men whose public objects he wished to conserve and whose public action he wished to forward, to defend and to com mend in a way best fitted to effect results, and de fend them from criticism and to remove misunder standing of them and of their purposes from the path they were treading. The trust reposed in Mr. Hudsons discretion had to be complete and was deserved. The task laid upon him to ascertain facts, explain purposes, allay misgivings and soften rivalries was not slight, but was successfully accom plished...