Word: cannoneer
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When Commodore Vanderbilt, a smart railroad buccaneer himself, got a court injunction against the unholy three, they scooped $6,000,000 in cash out of the Erie treasury, scuttled across the Hudson to Jersey City. To keep Vanderbilt at bay, Fisk mounted three 12-lb. cannon on the docks outside the Erie's transplanted headquarters, donned an admiral's uniform to stage-dress his defiance. Meanwhile, foxy Jay Gould bribed the New York state legislature with $1,000,000 to legalize the fraudulent stock certificates...
...cuspidor planted on his library rug, and he could make it chime like a bell. Ladies covered their ears at his "hells" and "damns," but everybody agreed he was a stout old character. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives and his full name was John Joseph Gurney Cannon, but Americans called him "Uncle...
Rather, as Uncle Joe saw it, the U.S. got out of step. McKinleyism suited him fine, but Teddy Roosevelt's "Square Deal" was a devil's brew. Beginning in 1906, when he was already a man of 70, Joe Cannon set himself to use every power of the Speaker's office to stifle the reforms demanded by younger men. From liberals of that time he earned a new and bitter nickname: "Cannon the Strangler." The debatable thesis of Blair Bolles's Tyrant from Illinois is that Cannon was the conservative grit that irritated a goodly part...
...ruled by bottleneck. Reform bills were killed or emasculated in committee. So many died in the Judiciary Committee that it came to be known as "the Morgue." Immigration control, income tax, tariff revision and currency reform were strangled or mangled beyond recognition. "Not one cent for scenery," snorted Cannon when his own party proposed forest conservation...
...Speaker Yields. "You must lay down on Uncle Joe," Teddy Roosevelt was advised. "It will be a good deal like laying down on a hedgehog," grinned T.R. One day in 1910, nonetheless, the opposition did lay down on Uncle Joe for keeps. With some of Cannon's standpatters absent on a long weekend, Republican George Norris introduced a resolution shearing the Speaker of most of his vast powers. For three days, Cannon fought the inevitable, then yielded. His four-year "experiment with personal power," as Author Bolles calls it, was over...