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But nominations are only the beginning of the contest, and obviously caucuses and conventions cannot conduct campaigns. So from the beginning these nominating bodies appointed campaign committees. With the increase in population came the increased complexity of the committee system. By 1830 many of the States had perfected a series of state, district, and county committees.
To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking and fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had lived too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and altogether too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward politics and caucuses and conventions.
Certain officers nearing certain camp-fires felt caucuses dissolving at their approach into an innocence of debating societies engaged with Fabius Maximus or Scipio Africanus. Certain sergeants and corporals dreamed bars instead of chevrons, and certain high privates, conscious of merit, saw worsted chevrons, silk chevrons, and gold bars all in one blissful night.
We must arrange how to meet privately at Lansmere, if necessary. I'll see to that. I shall go down this week. I think of taking a hint from the free and glorious land of America, and establishing secret caucuses. Nothing like 'em." "Caucuses?" "Small sub-committees that spy on their men night and day, and don't suffer them to be intimidated to vote the other way."
Formerly we had a Union which transacted business for us, secured the payment of our debts, and made us appear formidable abroad while it corrupted and betrayed us at home, a Union of colporteurs, and caucuses, and drummers of Southern houses; not a Union, but a long coffle of patriotic laymen, southerly clergymen, and slaves.
The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade from his benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles against human inequality however constituted; had to end the list of instances without going outside the literary class Hamlin Garland for its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race.
The railroad politicians send word to the town rings to hold snap caucuses' when they hear I'm coming into a town to speak, and the local politicians give out notices only a day before, and only to the voters they want in the caucus. In Hull the other day, out of a population of two thousand, twenty men elected four delegates for the railroad candidate."
"You know me not. I shall not become a pirate but a Congressman!" Jenkins and Chitterlings turned pale. "I have already organized two caucuses in a baseball club, and bribed the delegates of another. Nay, turn not away. Let us be friends, pursuing through various ways one common end. Farewell!" They shook hands. "But where is Pirate Jim? "asked Jenkins.
A clever politician, who knew more of ward meetings, caucuses, and the machinery of conventions than he did of history books, and who was earnest for the renomination of President Arthur in 1884, said to me, in the way of clinching his argument, "That administration will live in history." So it was, according to Amyot, in the olden time.
"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol while other men struggle for civic decency." "Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?" "If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."
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