Word: lowden
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Eight years ago Mr. Lowden had his job as able, wartime Governor of Illinois to finish, to seem wholly preoccupied with. Now, as a humble Cincinnatus, he bides on his Sinnissippi Farm at Oregon, Ill., refusing to be called from the plow until the psychopolitical moment. With much honk and ceremony, a large motorcade of his admirers drew up at Sinnissippi last month. Mr. Lowden had known in advance that they were coming, but when he strode out on the porch in riding boots, his greeting to them was an indefinite gesture. Instead of a destination, he gave them...
Minnesota blacksmith's son, Iowa farm boy, teacher-lawyer, able attorney, Spanish-War officer,* son-in-law of George Mortimer Pullman (sleeping cars), thrice a Congressman (1906-11), firm and constructive Governor,† grand-scale agriculturalist-Mr. Lowden is a pleasant, capable, 66-year-old city-man-turned-squire who stands looking at the Presidential chair with ambitious interest but with a gentlemanly restraint. He would not think of trying to climb up and sit in the chair without a genuine invitation...
While Mr. Lowden has stood thus, he has been shouldered aside by a burly, blatant, sideshow barker from the city, whose ambition is not to sit in the chair himself but to call the crowd, direct the act and lead the ballyhoo. Mr. Lowden's enemy of old, Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago, has spellbound the bystanders and gained mastery of Illinois, and perhaps a lot more Lowden territory, by an opportunism from which gentlemanliness is omitted with a frank grin. Nor is the Thompson grin as foolish as it looks...
Mayor Thompson's dislike of Mr. Lowden goes back at least to the Chicago "peace meeting" which Mayor Thompson tried to hold in 1918. Citizens cried out upon this "pro-German" demonstration. The soldier-Governor asked Mayor Thompson to stop it. Mayor Thompson said he had no such authority. Governor Lowden sent militia. There was no meeting...
...power that Mayor Thompson now holds over Mr. Lowden is proportionate to the power of the Mississippi Flood over the farmlands of its basin, plus the power of many a steamboat. Mayor Thompson literally took the Mississippi Flood at its crest. He was cruising downstream with brass bands to popularize the Lakes-to-Gulf waterway when the rains descended. He changed his commercial cruise into an "errand of mercy," swung Chicago and himself into leadership of the flood-control movement, by no means neglecting to keep the Lakes-to-Gulf project stoked up and steaming along behind...