I remember vividly the Democratic Convention held during the presidential campaign of 1924. For over two weeks during the hottest July on record the convention was deadlocked. The convention marked the first appearance of the radio in political history. Each ballot was laboriously presented over the air. We didn't have a radio in our house, but Mr. Westerman, the grocer, had a little crystal set on a chair by the front door. I can hear that roll call yet. "Alabama casts 24 votes for Underwood." For over a hundred ballots they were hopelessly deadlocked until they finally came up with an unknown West Virginia lawyer, John W. Davis. The country was still in an uproar over the Teapot Dome scandal, fed up with politics in general, and Republican Calvin Coolidge won with a bid yawn.
I do remember a daily column that Will Rogers carried in the newspapers that summer. He told a great many stories about his friend Calvin Coolidge. One that I remember: It seems that the president was an exceedingly taciturn man. Rogers tells that one day he came home from church, and Mrs. Coolidge in trying to start a conversation, asked what the sermon was about. "Sin," says the president. After moments of some silence Mrs. Coolidge asked, "What did the minister say about it?" "He was against it," answered Calvin.
I have been for many years a teacher of algebra and geometry. My friends have a right to suspect that I translate many mathematical teachings and principles into my philosophy of life. Perhaps, you might suspect that I attach significant importance to the arithmetic approach - that I lose sight of the subjective, the finer things, esthetics.
I must admit that for many years I was convinced that all of life's problems could be solved by the "one and one makes two" method. I was pleased with the symmetry of the straight line, the simplicity of arranging facts categorically and marching straight to a positive conclusion. I was certain that we cluttered our reasoning with "extraneous roots" and that the wise man could see clearly that right was right and that wrong was wrong. There was no doubt that white was white, that black was black, and that grey only resulted from disorderly thinking.
As I grow older, I am not so sure. Although I still cling to the arithmetic approach, I believe that there are extraneous roots, unpredictable events, in daily living. It is clear to me that often facts do not arrange themselves categorically, that there are parts to every problem that Euclid or Descartes hadn't considered.
When I was in college, I encountered nickel and dime poker. The game fascinated me from the start. Here was arithmetic in its most enticing form. Here was "one and one makes two" at its very best. I soon discovered the relationship between drawing to an inside straight and going broke. I learned that I had nine chances out of 47 of improving a four flush, and that if it cost more me more than a dime to get into a 40-cent pot, I was a sucker to stay. I became familiar with the odds for filling an open-ended straight, and computed the chances of winning against any opener. I learned to fold any hand that couldn't open in a six hand or less jackpot game. I discerned the mathematical fallacy of keeping a "kicker." I even coined an axiom, "If you can't raise, get out." All this was straight from a sixth grade math text book.
I became a consistent winner. My own fraternity brothers got sick of my winning and I was barred from the Sigma Chi house, the locale of the most active porker game. The word got around and I was poison all over the campus. I was turning a game of chance into a mathematical certainty. I was better at arithmetic than my cohorts and I convinced them and myself that I knew all there was to know about poker.
One of the highlights of my college life was a semi annual invitation to the Columbia Club in downtown Indianapolis for lunch. An established businessman, John Spiegel, would tender these invitations to students, and afterwards he always went to the card room for an hour or two of table stakes poker. Of course I kibitzed the game, and though my eyes almost popped out of my head at the size of the bets, I followed the game closely and soon became convinced that these bankers and lawyers didn't play too hot a game of poker. Some of the arithmetic I saw was terrible. Basic theory was ignored. I saw a man spend $20 in a $60 pot to draw to the 10-Jack-Queen of clubs. A couple of times a year all through college, I kibitzed this game and longed no end to get into it. I knew I could win. Of course the size of the stake made it out of the question. But I dreamed of the time when I could sit in it, and planned carefully that someday I would.
It was the Christmas after I graduated that I came back to Indianapolis for a vacation and I received an invitation from John to lunch at the Columbia Club. Over coffee, I got around to the suggestion that I'd like to sit in with him at the game in the back room.
"No, I don't think so," he said. "This game is a little too rich for your blood."
"But look," I answered. "I've got a pocket full of money," and I pulled out my ninety dollars that I had carefully accumulated for this killing.
"Put your money in your pocket, son. I don't want you in this game. You'll get hurt."
"But John, you've sat in games with us at the house. You know I can play as well as these people."
But plead with him as I would, he wouldn't listen, so I assumed my usual kibitzer's seat, completely crestfallen. The game had gone on for ten or fifteen minutes when a porter came up to John and whispered in his ear that he was wanted on the telephone. John excused himself and asked to be dealt out for a few hands. He'd no sooner left the room than I took a deep breath and slid into his seat. I moved his money over, and placed my ninety bucks nonchalantly in front of me. There was a moment's hesitation, a grin or two, and then the cards were dealt, and I was in. The game was straight stud and how I loved it. The first few hands there was no action and I folded worthless cards, and nothing seemed to materialize. Then on the fourth hand, just as I sensed John return and quietly sit in the kibitzer's seat, I was dealt the high card. There were seven men in the game and my king was high.
"The king bets two dollars" I said with a catch in my throat. Three men stayed in and the cards were dealt. No one was helped till it came around to me when a great big gorgeous king of Spades took its place beside the one-eyed diamond king. There was a slight quiver in my voice when I placed a five-dollar bill in the center with the announcement, "The pair bets five dollars." The next two men folded and it was up to the fat judge across the table whose last card was an ace. He looked at his hole card again, deliberately took a tighter grip on his cigar, and through a cloud of smoke said, "Young fellah, how much money have you got in front of you?".
What was he up to, I wondered? I answered "Oh around eighty dollars."
"Then I'll call your five dollars bet, but if you want to see another card, it'll cost you eighty dollars." He lackadaisically counted out a five and four twenty-dollar bills and tossed them in the center of the table.
There was a dead silence around the table. Everyone was looking at me except John who was looking between his knees at the floor. Sweat popped out on my forehead. My hands got wet. My tongue went dry. It was up to me.
The thing that happened to me in those few seconds, I never want to have happen to me again. Here was a situation that I had never encountered before. Here was something I didn't understand. Nothing that I had ever found in an arithmetic book would tell me whether that pompous judge with the thick lips had an ace in the hole or not. Whether I called the judge or picked up my money and stumbled out of my seat is not important. The important fact is that I learned the hard way that there was another side of poker besides arithmetic. Though the years since then, I have been wary of concluding I know all the answers. Life is many-faceted. Sometimes it is not black or white. Sometimes it is shades of grey.
I blush when I remember the election of '28. This was my first crack at the ballot box and it should be memorable. I was 23 years old, full of vim and vigor, and was teaching at a fashionable private school just outside of Chicago. Somehow I became acquainted with a young lady whose father was an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She introduced me to a group of young intellectuals at the University, called the "Dill Pickle Club." They talked knowingly and very convincingly about almost everything. I was soon reading Karl Marx, H. L. Menken, the American Mercury and talking as knowingly as the rest of them. I might even have been known in some circles as a "parlor pink."
Small wonder that when that gay caballero from New York's East side, Al Smith, was nominated by the Democrats, all my years of training as a loyal Republican fell to one side and I became an avid supporter. Besides, Marjorie suggested quite strongly that if I wanted to continue in her good graces I'd better lose my stodgy Republican background. Then too, Al Smith was an easy guy to go all out for, the happy warrior. He advocated abolition of the 18th Amendment, and believed in "personal liberty" in all forms.
Looking back on this aberration, I can't say that I regret it. As Uncle Cloyd reminded me. "Everybody's entitled to one mistake."
Late one afternoon in June 1932, my wife, my two year old daughter Anne, and my six month old Scotch Terrier puppy Cricket went for a picnic. We found a lovely spot at Indian Ladder about half way between Schenectady and Albany, in upstate New York. Now Cricket was a well-behaved little pup - inclined to mind her own business and almost never barked. But then she wandered off after a bit, and we didn't miss her till we heard this furious barking and carrying on in the spot adjacent to ours. I pushed through the bushes and found a man seated on a blanket beside a black Cadillac. There was a state trooper and a chauffeur with him. The man had braces on his legs and was using a folded up newspaper to ward off this furious barking growling monster, Cricket. She was charging this way and that and seemed determined to annihilate this strange man on the blanket. I quickly gathered up the dog and apologized for her behavior. The governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, (for it was he) said, "Feisty little bitch, isn't she?"
We later figured out that Cricket who had been housebroken by repeated whacking with a rolled up newspaper was resentful of FDR's newspaper. On investigation we discovered that this dog who had never barked, nearly went out of her mind whenever you approached her with a newspaper. The next step was quite simple, hand a newspaper containing a picture of Roosevelt to a friend and ask him to show it to Cricket. All hell would break loose. I became known all over town as the man who owned the dog that couldn't stand Roosevelt. Cricket lived about as long as FDR, and she never failed to give a perfect demonstration to my anti Roosevelt friends. It's about all we had to laugh about during the depression.
Those of us who feared Roosevelt's galloping socialism felt sure that he himself would not be a candidate, that his own party would not buck the third term tradition. That if he became a candidate, the American people would not accept this evidence of the desire to be king.
But where to find a candidate to lead America into some middle ground? A political phenomenon occurred. Wendell Wilkie, a man unknown to the country at large in 1939 - a man with no political affiliation - with absolutely no votes at the beginning of the convention - stormed through and received the nomination on the fourth ballot.
Wilkie was an Indiana boy - graduate of Purdue and Indiana Law School - worked his way up to be president of Common Wealth and Southern, a huge utility combine. He was famous for his handling of labor problems - had become the voice of the opposition to that huge government grab, the Tennessee Valley Authority. He was a tireless campaigner - lost his voice in October and finished the campaign in a hoarse whisper.
Wilkie excited me because he sold a proposition that made sense. For three years the country had been told that we "can't compete with Germany" We were losing our market in South America. Germany was selling tractors to the Argentines cheaper than we could produce them. Roosevelt filled us with conversation about Hitler's slave labor, obviously they could undersell us. He continued, "we must fight against this marauder - this enslaver of people", etc., etc.
But Wilkie said, "Listen to me - we can beat Hitler at his own game. The German nation is working 8-10-12 hours a day. We can outsell them in the Argentine with our American ingenuity, our great untapped resources, if we'll go to work. Let's roll up our sleeves and remember how to sweat. Let's forget the WPA and cradle to the grave paternalism. Let's forget the dole and weekends from Thursday to Monday. Let's go to work. It will take guts, but in this direction lies our salvation."
Roosevelt sneered, and made wise cracks about the bare foot boy from Wall Street. Republican confidence rose, and the Democrats were worried. Republican orators lost no opportunity to point the long line of Roosevelt attempts at intervention in the foreign war. Wilkie himself avoided this charge, but the country was aware of the situation. Ten days before the election the polls showed a probable Republican victory. The New York Times in an editorial conceded the probability.
And then on the Saturday night before the election, Roosevelt spoke from Boston to a nation wide radio hookup. The greatest radio voice of all time outdid himself. It probably was the best speech I ever heard.
"Mothers, sisters, wives, sweethearts of America, I say to you again and again and again, that your American men will never fight on foreign soil."
It was the great lie. Roosevelt knew that it was the great lie. It had to be made to win the election, and it did.
When I first came to Blair Academy, I was the coach of the lightweight football team. What a team that was! You'd have thought that our defensive line had on roller skates. I'll never forget our first home game. We played it on the Varsity field, and the cheering section was overflowing with a half dozen wise cracking Sophomores.
My vision with these bifocals was just good enough to spot this one boy, who on three successive plays found himself flat on his back 15 yards behind the line of scrimmage. To no one in particular I demanded "Who the hell is number 30". Well the sophomoric hooligans in the bleachers seemed to think this was very funny. They took up the chant and in unison wanted to know "WHO-THE-HELL-IS-NUMBER-THIRTY". I thought they never let go of it. And it was only then that I noticed, at the far end of the field, the head master. He didn't seem to think it was very hilarious.
Even when the team on the field called a timeout, they continued until the object of their attention, the overweight boy with the big thirty on his back, came over and inquired "Did you want me, Coach?"
Copyright © 1996, Jonathan Paul