The Sun & W. Wilson 1912 with a Mencken sub-plot

By G. Jefferson Price III

Late last month, The Sun op-ed page published an article marking the 100^th anniversary of the Democratic Party Convention in Baltimore (June 25 to July 2, 1912) that nominated New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson on the 46^th ballot. The article, by Stan M. Haynes, a Baltimore lawyer, ignores one very important development in the story of that convention and another quite hilarious development. Both developments related directly to The Sun.

The serious one was The Sun’s decisive role in putting Wilson over the top. The hilarious one was a bit of mischief by The Sun’s editor, Charles Grasty in which Grasty tried to get Henry L. Mencken’s name on the list of candidates for vice president in the hope of embarrassing Baltimore’s mayor, James Harry Preston, who hoped to get the No. 2 slot. Grasty’s hatred of Preston was visceral and occasionally overwhelmed good sense.

On the serious side, Wilson’s victory over his closest rival, Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the product of the fulminations of The Great Orator, William Jennings Bryan, and forceful editorials in The Sun and The Evening Sun portraying Clark as a tool of Wall Street and New York’s Tammany Hall bosses. The closer Clark got to the required two-thirds majority of votes, the more passionately Bryan and The Sunpapers argued that if he were to win, progressive Democrats would bolt the party in favor of Theodore Roosevelt, who had thrown the Republican Party into disarray by splitting off with his own progressive Bull Moose Party. Only Wilson could lead the Democrats to the victory as a real progressive, The Sun declared.

Immediately after winning the nomination, Wilson sent a telegram of gratitude to the newspaper: “I want you to know how warmly and deeply I have appreciated the splendid support of The Sun.” Wilson’s campaign manager, William F. McCombs, followed up with a letter in which he wrote, “The Sun . . . has been one of the most effective agencies in bringing about (Wilson’s) nomination for the Presidency.”

This combination of praise and gratitude turned into something of an embarrassment as stories began to circulate that Wilson would reward Grasty with an appointment as Ambassador to France.  So great was the embarrassment over this innuendo that The Sun published a denial and denunciation under the headline: “The Sun will send no bill to Governor Wilson for services rendered.”

(There was another local angle in Wilson nomination. He held his doctorate from Hopkins University).

Grasty’s mischief in trying to interfere with Mayor Preston’s vice presidential ambitions was only the latest in the longstanding hatred that existed between the two men. Grasty’s dislike of Preston stemmed from the Mayor’s association with the Gorman-Rasin machine. He missed no opportunity to tear down Preston. Preston responded in kind, taking valuable municipal advertising away from the paper while his lieutenants spread the  vilest rumors about Grasty’s personal  life, including that Grasty “had been  run out of Kansas City (where he formerly lived) for a series of adulteries of  a grossly Levantine and brutal nature,”  as Mencken described it in a recollection first published in The New Yorker magazine 30 years after the event, republished in Mencken’s  “Heathen Days“ under the title “A Dip Into Statecraft.”

 Mayor Preston supported Champ Clark, who came to Baltimore as the favored candidate for the nomination. The two men had an understanding that Preston would be Clark’s choice for vice president. Grasty knew of this arrangement and he found a way to make some trouble about it. The way existed in the Maryland law requiring  candidates for the presidency and the vice presidency who wanted the votes of Maryland’s delegates to file their names in Annapolis along with a fee of $270 no later than the first Monday in May preceding the convention. If no one filed, the delegates were free to cast their votes as they pleased. But if only one filed, the state’s delegates were obliged to vote for that one.  Grasty calculated almost accurately that Preston, assuming he would be the only candidate for the vice presidency, would not bother to file or to pay the hefty fee.

Grasty summoned Mencken to tell him that at the last minute he would send an agent to Annapolis to file Mencken’s name as candidate for vice president along with the required $270 fee. Grasty saw no problem in the fact that Mencken was about to embark on a visit by boat to Europe.

Here is Mencken’s recollection of Grasty’s glee:

“Go back to your office,” he instructed me, “and write a letter of acceptance. Say in it that you are sacrificing yourself to save the country from the menace of Preston. To be sure, you’ll be in the middle of the Atlantic when the time comes, but I’ll send you a wireless so you’ll know what to say when the New York Herald reporter meets you at Cherbourg. The joke will wreck Preston and the shock may even kill him. . .  Now get busy with your letter of acceptance before I laugh myself to death.”

And it probably would have worked if Grasty “so taken with the ingenuity and villainy of his scheme” had not repaired to the Maryland Club “for his daily ration of Manhattan cocktails” and boasted of his plan at the bar. A friend of Preston’s got wind of it and when Grasty’s agent arrived in Annapolis to file Mencken’s name he found Preston’s agent already there filing the mayor’s name and forking over the required $270.

“Everything is off. Say nothing to anyone.”  read the cable that Grasty sent to Mencken as he proceeded across the Atlantic. “I thereby missed my purple moment and maybe even immortality,” he joked. In the end he noted, he was only 31 years old when all this happened and thus four years younger than the Constitution required of a vice president.

A couple of other interesting things were missing from The Sun’s account last month. One was the weather which was infernally hot 100 years ago as it was this past week, and the Fifth Regiment Armory, where the convention was held, was hot as a Turkish bath. The other was the sub-plot of the convention: the showdowns between the anti-saloon leaguers and the imbibers, the Wets and the Drys, as it were.

Even after Champ Clark went down to defeat, Preston allowed his name to be presented to the convention as a vice presidential candidate, possibly thinking why waste that $270 filing fee.

According to an account of the event in the history of the first 100 years of the Sun (1837 to 1937), Clark picked “a gentleman with a weakness for strong drink” to present his name. The fellow was quite drunk and the anti-saloon leaguers “made violent whoopee over the speech and poor Preston went down to the tune of hoots and cat-calls. He received 58 votes on the first ballot, including Maryland’s 16. On the second he withdrew his name.”