Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/448



Among those who were present and spoke were Robert K. Murphy and William Barnes, the latter of whom became so potent a factor in the politics of New York. I have no personal acquaintance with Mr. Barnes, but there are two Americans who have given their lives in the main to political activities whose utterances always give indications of the ability to think with accuracy and clearness. They are Barnes of Albany and Lane of Philadelphia.

About this time I became associated with Alton B. Parker, who ran against Roosevelt for the presidency; Richard Olney, Mr. Cleveland's attorney general; Nicholas Longworth, Roosevelt's son-in-law; Frederick B. Niedringhaus of St. Louis; General Benjamin F. Tracy; Thomas B. Wanamaker; George Gray of Delaware; and others, in an effort to change the management of the New York Life Insurance Company and the New York Mutual Life Insurance Company. Samuel Untermyer of New York was the underlying influence of the movement, and there were a number of meetings in his office. Like many such efforts, it did not succeed, and also, like many of them, it produced results.

On the 26th of June I made an address at Fredericksburg, Virginia, at the dedication in the park there of the monument to the One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Regiment, which was commanded in that battle by my old colonel, William W. Jennings, and as it happened, it was the forty-third anniversary of our engagement at Gettysburg. 430