Champ Clark

Contents

PAGE

I. Ancestry 11

11. Childhood 22

Introduction

Champ Clark has been my friend for twenty-five years. In 1889 we were associates in the Thirty-ninth General Assembly of Missouri. He was connected with the Lower, I with the Upper branch of the Legislature. Since that time our lives have often touched.

Champ Clark is a typical Missourian, an ideal American. He possesses high character, distinctive ability, unusual courage and statesmanship.

Champ Clark is a progressive but not a demagogue. He is a safe and sane statesman. He is a progressive Avithout being a radical, a conservative without being a moss-back. He is an Abe Lincoln sort of a man in the constructive forces that make for greatness — honesty, originality, brains, and backbone. Lincoln and Clark were bom in Kentucky, early in life they turned their faces westward, Lincoln toward Illinois, Clark toward Missouri. Lincoln and Clark were both endowed with brawny bodies, determinant wills, keen senses of humor, story telling gifts, and aspirations to achieve along lines of public service.

Champ Clark is absolutely fair. While his birth, predilection, and training have been with and for the common people, yet his keen sense of justice and his RECORD demonstrate that he would not do a wrong to any legitimate industry, however large or small.

Champ Clark is a peacemaker and unifier of his party.

He Is a diplomat, and a bom leader of men. His long consistent public career, his achieving experience and efficient leadership qualify him for the Presidency.

Following his success in the Speakership, to assume the duties of the Presidency would be as natural as stepping from one room to another.

William McKinley owed much of his success in the White House to his sixteen years in Congress, to the knowledge gained and the friendships formed there. When he recommended legislation to Congress, he was suggesting it to his old friends and associates. Speaker Clark has served eighteen years in the House, and has reached the highest place in a body where every man sooner or later gravitates inevitably into the place for which he is fitted by nature and training.

I believe in Champ Clark.

Kansas City, Mo., May 27, 1912.