Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1920-06-15
only Spontaneous Outburyt
OF the C0nUentl0nW ent TO
Herbert H00ver, Says Cobb

away, and how the restaurant prices
went up and up and still ever up
ward.
After San Francisco, it will be
four long years before our eyes may
hope again to look upon scenes such
as these. In those four years new
figures will arise on the national
horizon, new issues will come forth,
new slogans be raised to dim the
ears of the groundlings and through
those four years the great army of
the convention hangers-on, the has
beens, the never-Weres and the hope
to-bes will await the bugle call for
their quadrennial resurrection.
Broken Political vessels
Every national convention brings
them forth. There were hundreds of
them here during the week now
ended. There will be hundreds more
of them, of different political COM
plexion but wearing the same com
mon aspect, at San Francisco when
we go there on the 2Sth. They are
the shards and the sherds, the pot
sherds and the broken vessels of 9TH
er political days This one here, in
a federal judge. That one with him.
the one with the Wistful eye and
the white side whiskers, attained the
proud eminence of being national
committeeman away back yonder in
1884. The one over yonder. was min
lister to some banana republic under
Rutherford B. Hayes.
The world moved off and left them
stranded long ago. They lost their
prominence, they lost their influence.
many o. them almost lost their iden-
titles. They are the broken white
chips of the cruel, greedy game call
ed politics.
But once every four years-when
national convention meets-they
emerge from their several obscurities
crumbling log in the woods and they
assemble in the convention city.
Faded, unknown, withered, uncon-
sidered figures, they linger about
new generation will confer with
| them, praying that some young COM
mander of the forces will remember
them and bestow upon them the pre-
cious boon of word Or handshake
or a pat upon the back. And then.
| turn to their burrows under the
chips in the woods to moulder for
! four years more, the while they
await the resurrection call of the
next convention of the party which
so long. ago sucked them dry of
their juices and tossed them aside.
| They are the living tragedies Of ma
| tional politics and Chicago this week
has fairly crawled with them.
1t was hard week upon them, too,
WIdI Will Tic neat dHu Inc jams AM
the man-killing Chicago taxicabs and
worst of all, the absence from his
| former favorite haunts of old John
| Barleycorn. The brass rails upon
which they might have rested their
| tired old inStepS have vanished and
the cooling scuttle of suds has be-
come but a fond, sweet, sad mem
DRY. I think know now why this
convention, as measured by the COM
parative standards of it's predeces-
sors here and elsewhere, seemed
generally speaking, so listless, so
apathetic and SO lacking in the old
bally-hoo stuff. The saloons being
gone, the run of the delegates had
rest their faces and hands and their
legs. 1t was not lack of belief in
| their cause or lack of hope or
victory in the fall which dispirited
them. 1t was because their feet hurt
| them.
The most consistent example of pa
t1ent endurance and suffering hero
ism which the convention offered was
not presented on the floor Of the
now all dismantled and empty, nor
yet in the hotel Hobbies. It was pre-
scented just outside the Coliseum,
where, all day long every day, the
embattled suffragette pickets stood
on the sunny side of the blistering
Wabash avenue holding aloft their
banners. protesting against the po-
litical discrimination still practiced
against their sex in certain states.
They maintained their convictions,
did these martyred brave ladies, but
their compilations are total loss.
Copyright. 1920, Bell Syndicate,
TTn1