The citizen-Republican. (Scotland, Bon Homme County, S.D.) 1???-19??, 1911-08-03
The President
and the Cranks
From the Philadelphia Ledgcr,

ats the one best het that the president
q the most worried man In the United
States" said an attachc at the White
House between whites, land It's not Cana
liam reciprocity treaties and tariff bills
ana such like big things tina cause tho
Very, That's KS business; he was elect
ri because he was fitted to wrestle with
lust that sort OF work. and of course he
expects It.
"Bu it's the cranks that furnish him
his real. Fostering Worries: craniss or
al manner Of subjects from all parts Of
The union Every crank in the country
that doesn't know what fool thing to do
with himself gets on the train and tells
the conductor to put him off at Washing
: ton-thinks ne must see the president. If
the wheels IN the head of some lunatlc IN
Bangor. Me, or Tombstone, Ariz., get to
working overtime he heads for Washing
ton to show the president the mechanism.
II some long-haired lunatic in Oshkosh
builds q wheelbarrow out of a soap box
.nd a sitter rim he won't be happy till he's
trundled 1t cross country to Washington
and has the president come out on the
front porch to look at it.
Every summer. before the president
leaves, there's q perfect deluge of cranks
hat ave ridden horseback from Dawso
City or driven an OK team from some
Eage-brush town out beyond the Rockies.
lust last week we had two of these idiots
n one day-three, to be exact. One was
2 mar riding q burro from San Diego to
Soston on a bet, and the other two were
q man and his wife from some insane
place out west. They had sworn on the
kones OF the saint or something that
they would walk into every state in the
union within a 12-month; they had al
ready been in IT, and having thus &C
autred fame, came 70 Washington TO SHOW
themselves to the president.
Then there's the lunatic who tramps
across country on a wager t::at io can go
from ocean to ocean on a dollar and 81
cents. There must be a hundred of him
every year, and he generally brings a let
ter to the president from the mayor of the
little cow-town he comes from. And these
are just q few of them; if Ia put down the
names of all this breed of cranks that turn
Up here to see the president in six months
1t would be longer than the list of appli-
2ants for a vacant consulship.
The trouble is, the president, in many
instances, can't get out Of seeing the
crank. With the cunning of his kind, he
generally goes straight to one of the local
papers. The paper takes him up, prints
his photograph, and publishes his vain
glorious interview about his eccentricities.
In which he always states that he's going
to see the president at a certain time. It's
wired to every paper in the state the luna
tic hailed from by their Washington cor
respondents. and, of course, printed there.
If the president refuses to see the crank,
that's wired, too. and then the papers have
a chance to fall afoul of the administra-
ton and howl about the man whose
naughty eNclusiveness m~isrepresents the
great democratic spirit of the nation
which doesn't help a man any in a politi-
cal way. SO, oftentimes, the president
must take his mind from important mat
ters to shake hands with some paretic
who ought to be over in st. Elizabeth's
insane asylum instead of buzzing around
g. busy president. Yes, he's a much wor~
ried man"