Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/169



I first saw Tom Johnson in the early nineties in Cleveland, at a Democratic state convention, where one naturally might have expected to see him. I had gone to Cleveland to report the convention for the Chicago Herald, and since it was summer, and summer in Ohio, it was a pleasant thing to be back again among the Democrats of my own state, many of whom I had known, some of whom I honored. And that morning—I think it was the morning after some frenzied members of the Hamilton county delegation had been shooting at one another in Banks street in an effort to settle certain of those differences in the science of statecraft which then were apt, as they are now, to trouble the counsels of the Cincinnati politicians—I was walking along Superior Street when I heard a band playing the sweet and somehow pathetic strains of "Home Again, Home Again." There were other bands playing that morning, but the prevailing tune was "The Campbells are Coming"; for we might as well have been Scotchmen at the siege of Lucknow in Ohio during those years that James E. Campbell was Governor of our state. We grew to love the tune and we grew to love him, he was so brilliant and human and affable; but he could not pose very well in a frock coat, and after he had been renominated at that very convention, McKinley defeated him for governor.

But as I was saying, it was not "The Campbells are Coming" which the band was playing that morn