We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
HISTORY hangs in the balance whenever politicians congregate, and never more than in that dramatic hour when presidential candidates are chosen.
Party delegates from every state meet in national conclave to select the man for whom Joe Average will presently be privileged to vote. Opposing motives, purposes and ambitions haul this way and that. Surface excitement is tremendous. But beneath that surface, even greater things transpire.
The decision of the upcoming Democratic National Convention appears to be clear-cut — but not so the Republican. The several outstanding and loudly-bruited Republican candidates are scrapping toward what may well be a deadlock, and many old-time politicos are hinting that next summer's Republican Convention will perhaps run in striking parallel to a convention of 28 years ago, when a political nonentity won the nomination in a thirteenth hour decision.
A half-dozen strong aspirants had tossed their hats into the 1920 presi
dential ring. Each was well-backed, and the steadfast refusal of the supporting delegates to concede in favor of any single candidate resulted in the nomination of a rank outsider — Warren G. Harding.
From the political chess game of that 1920 Republican convention — which witnessed such names as General Leonard Wood and Illinois1 Governor Frank Lowden being used as pawns in the hands of a powerful behind-the-scenes oligarchy — came the legend of the "smokefilled room'" — the tale of the too-congenial Ohio Senator who became President of the United States by a series of incredible coincidences.
But rumbling beneath the discord of that convention, bubbling sporadically to the surface only to be suppressed by the powerful men who felt its eruption would be the end of their stranglehold on the party, were the hopes, dreams and expectations of an honored Republican progressive who might have swept the convention before him had his backers seized the opportunities presented them.