Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/138

 CHAMP CLAEK 119 him to the nomination. But in 1844, when Martin Van Buren was a candidate for the presidency, some of the party leaders put through a rule that required that the candidate receive two-thirds of the votes of the Convention ; this was done solely to prevent Van Buren 's nomination, because he was opposed to the annexation of Texas. It served; he was defeated. That rule has since been the rule of Democratic Conventions, but had remained a dead letter for seventy-eight years until it was invoked at Baltimore in 1912 to defeat Mr. Clark. For many years it had been the custom, when a candidate reached a ma- jority vote, to withdraw the other candidates and give him the nomination. In this case when Mr. Clark had reached the ma- jority William J. Bryan arose and charged an alliance between the Clark candidacy and the * * reactionaries. ' * There was no foundation for the charge, as Mr. Bryan admitted in a signed statement made a few months later, but it struck Clark down. In that statement Mr. Bryan said : I was charging Mr. Clark with being in sympathy with any reactionary forces I am glad of the opportunity to correct any such misrepresentation of my words or action.** Mr. Clark maintained his majority on nine ballots, and led the convention on twenty-nine ballots, but after the Bryan speech his strength gradually waned and Mr. Wilson received the nomination. If Mr. Bryan saw any unfitness in Mr. Clark, it was of short life, for within a few hours he tendered Mr. Clark, through Senator Stone, the vice-presidential nom- ination, which was refused. The Speaker nevertheless entered the campaign and made a vigorous fight for the election of Mr. Wilson. When the newly elected president called the Sixty-third Congress in ex- traordinary session in the spring of 1913, Mr. Clark was again the unanimous choice of his party for the Speakership. In March, 1914, he led the spectacular fight against the repeal of the law which gave to American coastwise vessels the free use of the Panama canal. In all his long career Mr. Clark has stood four-square to all the winds that blew, and it is safe to say that when the day
 * If my language at Baltimore created any impression that