USA > New York > Westchester County > Westchester county in history; manual and civil list, past and present. County history: towns, hamlets, villages and cities, Volume III > Part 3
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At a special election held February 23, 1904, Mr. Cockran was elected to the Fifty-eighth Congress, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of George B. McClellan, elected Mayor of New York city, and to the Fifty-ninth Congress, and re- elected to the Sixtieth Congress, terms expiring March 3, 1909.
During his Congressional experience he was ever a recognized leader and orator representing the Democratic party, and for a greater part of his stay in Congress was admittedly the most distinguished orator in either branch of the Nation's legislature.
In two National Conventions he was easily the leading figure. His speech against the nomination of Cleveland in 1884 raised him at once to national prominence. In 1892 he again opposed the same candidate in a speech delivered at three in the morning to a convention which had been in continuous session for over four-
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teen hours and which had refused to hear any other speaker, which is still remembered as one of the most remarkable achieve- ments in that forum of debate.
His speech in closing the great debate on repeal of the Sher- man Silver Purchase Law in the special session of 1893; his speech in favor of the Wilson Tariff in 1894, and his subsequent address against the proposed income Tax during the regular ses- sion, were the most widely reported of the time. After his return to the House in 1904 his speech against executive usur- pation, his philippic against the proposed ship subsidy, his controversy with Rep. Dalzeal, his address on insurance scan- dals, and his speech on the Hepburn railway rate bill were notable utterances which are still quoted as examples of patriotic eloquence.
As evidence of Mr. Cockran's continued popularity with residents of Westchester County, mention is made of the fact that he is called upon at the beginning of every season to deliver the opening address at the New Rochelle Forum, attended largely by people coming from every section of the county.
On June 27, 1913, he was orator of the day on program arranged for the celebration of the 225th anniversary of the founding of New Rochelle by the French Huguenots, refugees from La Rochelle, France.
Mr. Cockran is a member of the following clubs : Metropolitan, Meadow Brook, Larchmont Yacht, The Brook, Lambs, Catholic, Riding, National Arts, Lotos (New York city) ; Country, Metro- politan, Chevy Chase (Washington, D. C.).
He has his law offices at No. 31 Nassau street, New York city. Mr. Cockran's active service in municipal, State and national politics is justly appreciated, and constant demands upon him for " talks," here, there and everywhere, are more than the ordinary mortal man would be physically able to satisfy. Evi- dently the people do not tire of listening to his voice.
As a finished and classical scholar, possessed of natural wit and enchanting oratory, he is as well known in prominent Euro- pean cities as he is known in this country.
His running as a candidate for Congress in the First Con- gressional district, or Long Island district, in 1912, on the National Progressive ticket, was to please his close personal friend ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, and without the slightest expectation of election. The vote he polled was so flattering
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that the result is regarded by his friends as a victory rather than a defeat.
Biography has a two-fold office. It is a narrative of facts, and a teacher of the lessons of life. It shows where and how men have made battle with discouragements, and its teachings are lamps to guide the feet of those still struggling for success. Mr. Cockran's career shows what is possible for a determined young man to accomplish in this country, though he be a stranger in a strange land. Young Cockran, as he was entering his teens, set his face toward the far distant America, and the city of New York, as the goal of all his hopes. Discouragements were . plentiful; like many of the country youths who go to cities, he found it difficult to succeed without friends and influence. The subject of our sketch was fortunate in falling into the hands of such a good samaritan as John Berry proved to be and who continued Cockran's lifelong friend. The manhood of a boy attracts friendship that in many instances proves everlasting. Encouragement in the way of a helping hand develops the true man in the youth.
William Bourke Cockran to reach the enviable position he to-day holds, to retain and enjoy the esteem of people whose esteem is well worth possessing, had to work, and work hard, finding, as he did, in his pathway many obstacles which had to be overcome. To the unceasing endeavors of an energetic Irish lad who possessed little more than determination to win and the confidence of youth, is due the very apparent success of the subject of this sketch.
Mr. Cockran modestly says, what he has accomplished is not unusual, but what any young man can do, if he sets out deter- mined to conquer.
It has been truly said, that the men whose personal history the world needs are not those who, by some successful venture, burst suddenly into fortune and fame; nor, indeed, those who, by shrewd calculations and spider-like patience, devote life to the attainment of wealth. Nor does it need even the history of genius, brilliant as may be its story and dazzling its work. The first excite to unhealthful ambition, to the planting of the crown of life upon a brow of gold. They subordinate the elements of a true character which gather to it as its prime necessities a regnant fidelity to truth, a fellowship with purity, a sympathy with all who struggle, an ambition to brighten life for others.
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The latter has the attraction only of a picture which we may admire but cannot imitate. The exceptional nature of genius robs it of stimulus. It is beyond reach. Men of genius are like " stars who dwell apart." They resemble the stars in their coldness, their distance, and their sheen. The true man is to be sought for less high. He is to be found where the masses of men are, toiling with them, helping them, devising plans which touch the springs of human interest, seeking success through honor and persistent labor. Such men, haply, are multi- plying. The world needs them. To record any such man's history is alike a duty and a pleasure. For such a reason we write this sketch.
HELEN MILLER GOULD, philanthropist, eldest daughter of Jay and Helen Day (Miller) Gould, was born June 20, 1868, in New York city. Since childhood she has been a resident of this County a great part of the year, dwelling in the palatial residence of her father on the banks of the Hudson river, in Irvington, in the town of Greenburgh. This residence now belongs to her and is by her maintained as her summer home. Her winter residence being at No. 579 Fifth avenue, New York city.
She is one of the most prominent wealthy American women of the present age, devoting her life to the promotion of many objects intended for the improvement of the condition of her fellow creatures. Identified with many benevolent works, she has a world-wide enviable reputation.
She who became world-wide famous as Helen Gould, was married on January 22, 1913, to Finley J. Shepard. The ceremony taking place at "Lyndhurst," Miss Gould's summer home in Irvington, in presence of immediate relatives and inti- mate friends only.
Miss Gould's fortune has been estimated at from $20,000,000 to $30,000,000. She inherited about $10,000,000 from her father. She has conducted her affairs with much shrewdness and good judgment, and it has often been said that she has trebled the money which came to her. It is estimated that Miss Gould has given about $5,000,000 to charitable, religious, education and public uses.
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Miss Gould (now Mrs. Shepard) is a women of very decided views and absolutely set principles. Among her beliefs is the doctrine that persons of wealth owe distinct duties to their less fortunate fellow beings. She once set out her ideas in this way :
"The Christian idea that wealth is a stewardship or trust and not to be used for one's personal pleasure alone, but for the welfare of others, certainly seems the noblest, and those who have more money or broader culture owe a debt to those who have had fewer opportunities. And there are so many ways one can help. Children, the sick and the aged especially claim our attention, and the forms of work for them are numerous.
"Earnest workers who nobly and lovingly give their lives to promote the welfare of others give far more than though they had simply made gifts of money, so those who cannot afford to give largely need not feel discouraged on that account. After all, sympathy and good will may be a greater force than wealth, and we can all extend to others a kindly feeling and courteous consideration that will make life sweeter and better.
"Sometimes it seems to me we do not sufficiently realize the good that is done by money that is used in the different indus- tries in giving employment to great numbers of people under the direction of clever men and women, and surely it takes more ability, perseverance and time to manage successfully such enterprises than merely to make gifts."
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HORACE GREELEY, the editor, philosopher, statesman, philanthropist, Westchester County's adopted son and worthy citizen. It will doubtless be admitted that no history of West- chester County would be complete without mention of this dis- tinguished personage, who lived and died in the County. True, our County was not his place of birth, but he loved it equally as well. His writings referring to his farm home among us, to enjoyed hours stolen from a busy life and spent here, and his publication as to " What I know about Farming," made not only his farm but the modest hamlet of Chappaqua equally as well known and rendered it quite famous. His unsparing recommendation of the County as a place in which to dwell, made others desire to take up a residence here. He ever had at heart the best interests of Chappaqua, and was one of the organizers and first president of the Village Improvement Society. He took a becoming interest in everything that tended to benefit and advance the prosperity of his neighbors and make surroundings attractive.
As early as 1850, he decided to become a resident of West- chester County, when he joined with other New Yorkers in forming an Association to purchase land in the town of East- chester this county, to organize a village, which village was finally named Mount Vernon. In 1858 he concluded to settle in Chappaqua, in the town of New Castle, where he could buy a farm desired.
When twenty years of age and a struggling printer's appren- tice, Mr. Greeley arrived in New York city, in 1831; he married five years later. He remained a resident of the city twenty years, when he decided to " go back to the farm," to change a city existence for a country life. In speaking of his deciding to make this change, he said: " I had been some twenty years a resident of the city, and fifteen the head of a household. Six children had been born to me, and four of them had died- as I am confident some of them would not so prematurely have done had they been born and reared in the country. I had earned and bought a small satisfactory house in the very heart of the city; but who, if he has any choice, prefers to grow old and die at No. 239, unknown to, and uncared for by, the denizens of Nos. 237 and 241? For my family's sake, if not for my own, a country home was required ; so I looked about and found one. The choice was substantially directed by my wife, who said she insisted on but three requisites-1. A peerless spring of
HORACE GREELEY
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pure, soft, living water ; 2. A cascade or babbling brook; 3. Woods largely composed of evergreens. These may seem light matters ; yet I was some time in finding them grouped on the same small plat, within reasonable distance from the city. I did find them, however, in the charming locality known as Chappaqua, in nearby Westchester County; and those who object to my taste in choosing for my home a rocky, wooded hillside, sloping to the north of west, with a bog at its foot, cannot judge me fairly, unless they consider the above requirements. My land was previously the rugged, mainly wooded, outskirt of two adjacent farms, whereof my babbling brook formed the boundary."
Residents who were his neighbors remember him as a kind man; though he may have been considered " singular." He was a genius, and this fact may account for his being at times misunderstood as to his modes. He had a great heart. The poor, the sick, the despised and the unfortunate never appealed to him in vain. It used to be said of him, owing to his careless way of dressing, that he was " fearfully and wonderfully clad." He was certainly no Beau Brummel, nor was he a " fashion plate " dude. What was far better, he was a man of brains. The writer remembers him as he used to be seen plodding his way along to the railroad station from his Chappaqua home; head down, engaged in profound thought, the benefit of which many thousands of the readers of his great newspaper received.
Like Lincoln, Greeley was born in poverty and reared in obscurity. Like that other illustrious printer, Benjamin Frank- lin, he was self-educated. Everything he acquired intellectually came by hard and prodigious efforts. Thought to be not bright in early boyhood, he nevertheless persistently pursued knowledge until his was a consummate mental mastery. With a thirst for knowledge, inherited from his mother, one of his most striking characteristics was correctness of spelling, and an everlasting desire to associate with those who could not spell. When he was ten years old, he had borrowed, read and returned every book within seven miles of his father's house. He was not a college-bred man, and he used to say: " Of all the horned cattle, a college graduate is the worst in a newspaper office." His father's family was so poor that a neighbor once found them all living upon milk and bread. As a boy he persistently dressed in the most awkward country style, and his mother once stated that it cost less than three dollars a year to clothe him.
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The habit of dressing awkwardly continued with him to the last. Born in poverty and obscurity he faithfully worked at whatever came to his hands and never relaxed until things more profitable and congenial came into his life.
When fifteen years of age he was apprenticed to a printer in Poultney, Vt., for six months for his board and $40 per annum. He learned to set type in one day as well as the average appren- tice could in one month. He gave no time to play; he worked with a will, and soon became a fair compositor. When copy ran out he began to construct news items at the case, and as they went into the paper he soon found himself composing edi- torial paragraphs, which also went in. In the five years of his apprenticeship he never had a new suit of clothes; he walked home, five hundred miles away, twice in that time to see his mother. On one of these trips, when he passed through Sara- toga, N. Y., he wrote his first newspaper article, which was pub- lished in his newspaper when he returned to work. He was twenty years old when he became a journeyman, and then worked in the smaller towns of the north, going to New York city. He entered New York by a towboat down the Hudson, with ten dollars in his pocket, and first stopped at a small lodg- ing house at 168 West street, where he was charged two and a half dollars a week for his board. The only work he could get was to set up an agate edition of a pocket Testament, which all other printers refused to work on. He was never a swift com- positor, but was assiduous and correct, and made only five dollars a week by working fourteen hours each day. He looked so much like a block-headed countryman that he was discharged from the New York Evening Post composing rooms simply on that account. He then worked on the Commercial Advertiser, and in 1832 he secured a position as compositor on the Spirit of the Times, and to keep this place he condescended to change his homespun suit of clothes for a five dollar second-hand suit he got in Chatham street. He was saving of his small earnings and could always lend his fellow-printers money. He had a natural repugnance to luxury and wealth.
His first experience in daily newspaper publishing came in 1833; when he was part owner of a little job printing office, there came along a man who professed he had quite a sum of money to expend in establishing the first cheap daily newspaper to appear in New York; Greeley and his partner contracted to print the paper, which was to sell for one cent, probably the
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first paper in the world attempted to be sold at that price. It took just three weeks for the paper to die; for the want of funds. The attempt to help out the would-be publisher threw Greeley into debt, which hard work on his part was necessary to pay.
Mr. Greeley was married on July 5, 1836, five years after reaching New York, to a school teacher, who was attracted to him by reading one of his poems; and at the marriage ceremony he broke a custom of his previous life by wearing socks.
His next newspaper venture was the starting of a weekly publication, " The New-Yorker," which ran along three years and succeeded in securing a large circulation, but many of its patrons proved too slow in " paying up," and as Greeley lacked necessary capital to keep matters rolling, he had to succumb to fate and suspend publication. He said he would have been willing to give the right to publish the newspaper away, and pay anyone $2,000 cash for relieving him of the burden and freeing him of its debts, but there were no takers; and as a result, after the suspension, he found himself $7,000 on the wrong side of the ledger. After much privation and stinting, he succeeded in paying every cent of this debt. He next was drawn from his humble printing shop by an invitation to go to Albany and edit a Whig campaign newspaper, with offices in the latter city and New York.
Mr. Greeley had succeeded by this time in getting deeply interested in politics, on the Whig side; and had published and edited several political campaign newspapers to aid his friends in the city and state elections.
On the tenth of April, 1841-the day on which New York city held its great funeral parade and pageant in honor of Gen. William H. Harrison, President of the United States, who had died six days before-a day of most unseasonable chill and sleet and snow-the first number of Mr. Greeley's " New York Tribune " was published.
The New York Tribune, which Mr. Greeley founded, was his supreme opportunity. Here he made the editorial anvil ring and there he sent his intellectual sparks outward and upward in a veritable shower. Other men have owned newspapers in America; others have wielded the pen for themselves and employed the pens of others for the enrichment of the columns of their papers; but only one Horace Greeley ever passed this way, and when he departed he carried with him much of the glory of his beloved New York Tribune.
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Mr. Greeley held at least one political office, that is known.
In 1848, he was elected a Representative in Congress from a New York city district, to fill a vacancy, the unexpired term of three months, as a Whig. Of this experience he said, in 1868: " I believe it was just 7 A. M. of the 4th of March, 1849- the day of General Taylor's inauguration-when the two Houses, having finished all the inevitable business of the session, were adjourned without day, and I walked down to my hotel, free thenceforth to mind my own business. I have not since been a member, nor held any post under the Federal Government; it is not likely that I shall ever again hold one; yet I look back upon those three months I spent in Congress as among the most profitably employed of any in the course of my life. I saw things from a novel point of view; and if I came away from the Capitol no wiser than I went thither, the fault was entirely my own." In Congress, as well as elsewhere, Mr. Greeley advocated and fought for principles most dear to him.
He held no other public office, though he was years active in National and State politics, and worked loyally to aid friends who were constantly seekers after political preferment. Thurlow Weed, the acknowledged party " Boss," William H. Seward and Greeley were the acknowledged leaders of the Re- publican party in this State. Greeley later complained to Seward, when the latter was Governor, that Weed and Seward took what they wanted in the way of good patronage, State and Nation, and forgot him, caring little whether Greeley was clothed or fed -no office was offered Greeley. The letter Greeley wrote to Governor Seward, in 1854, dissolved the partnership in the firm of " Seward, Weed and Greeley," as the latter intended. When it came to nominating a Republican candidate for President in 1860, Greeley was in the convention as a delegate from Oregon, by request of the party in that State. Seward was the choice for President of the New York delegation. Greeley favored another man, Edward Bates of Missouri; later he supported Lincoln and helped nominate him, thus scoring against his former associate, Seward.
He frequently stated that he was not desirous of holding public office; but the fact that office was not tendered him was what cut him deeply; as it showed base ingratitude on part of pretended friends whom he had helped to get what they wanted.
Among other things commendable, Mr. Greeley was a strong
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champion of temperance, and delivered many lectures upon the subject; he says he first met the lady who later became his wife, at the home of a Dr. Sylvester Graham, who first appeared in New York city as a lecturer on temperance; and as his wife she continued a strong advocate of temperance, and in years of extreme poverty kept her house in strict accordance with her convictions.
He was ever proud of the fact that he was born in poverty and that he had to earn his own way in life, that he had to work hard to make ends meet. On one occasion he wrote: "Above all, be neither afraid or ashamed of honest industry; and if you catch yourself fancying anything more respectable than this, be ashamed of it to the last day of your life. Or, if you find yourself shaking more cordially the hand of your cousin, the Congressman, than of your uncle, the Blacksmith, as such write yourself down as an enemy to the principles of our insti- tutions, and a traitor to the dignity of humanity." Nobody hated injustice more than he. All his life through he battled against those who practiced persecution. Tyranny in every form was repugnant to him. His voice was ever raised in Free- dom's cause, even unto the uttermost corners of the earth. He passed out of this world eternally true in heart.
A lover of his country, when the war was over, he pleaded as earnestly for justice to the South as he had patriotically labored for the North when the Civil War was progressing. Nothing pleased him more than to learn that his enemy of yes- terday had become his friend to-day. He could fight, and for- give and forget. Though a reformer by nature, he happily avoided the spirit which seeks victory rather than truth. To the glory of Horace Greeley it can be truthfully said that he never crucified an adversary on the specious theory that he was laboring for the public weal.
In 1872 Horace Greeley became a candidate for election as President of the United States. He had for his opponent Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Canvass the Nation over and two men more unlike than Greeley and Grant could not be found. Each in his own way was a majestic character. Grant, who had served one term as President, for various alleged reasons, had antagon- ized certain men prominent in his own political party. These were opposed to his re-election. The idealists and reformers in the Republican party were destined to early discover that President Grant was more soldier than statesman. Obscure
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and unsuccessful in private life, though marvelously successful in his eight years of military endeavor, President Grant had little taste or aptitude for purely administrative affairs.
In the last half of President Grant's first term the Republi- can opposition to the President took tangible form. In January, 1872, a mass meeting was held in Jefferson City, Missouri, and a call was issued for a national convention of so-called Liberal Republicans. This Liberal Republican Convention was duly held in Cincinnati on May 1st following. From the beginning to the end, it was an intense anti-Grant demonstration. The delegates came from all over the Union. They represented in themselves and their associates at home the patriotic element of the Republican party. Scores of statesmen who had taken prominent part in the formation and perpetuation of the Repub- lican party in its early days joined in the crusade to give their political organization a rebirth.
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