Frank B. Brandegee Quotes
There ain't any first-raters this year .... We don't have any John Shermans or Theodore Roosevelts. We've got a lot of second-raters and Warren G. Harding is the best of the second-raters.
Frank B. Brandegee, 1864-1924, U. S. Congressman & U. S. Senator (Republican, CT, Remark to caucus of party leaders, Republican National Convention, Chicago, IL, June 1920
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The professor had done some historical research on Harding's ancestry going back to the seventeenth century and claimed that Harding had Negro blood. One Ohio newspaper carried the information and the Harding forces bought up most of the copies and suppressed the story. There has been no subsequent confirming research.
The Chairmen of the Committees then had tremendous, almost unilateral power. The chairman reached seniority by being elected over and over and had little opposition. At the time they were almost all older Democratic Congressmen from the "Solid South", very conservative and still racists despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were outraged when a Freshmen member of Congress who rarely made a public statement, took on the most powerful members of the House and wanted to reform the Seniority. But Ms. Chisholm was a teacher in her professional life, and by challenging the seniority system and attracting the enmity of most of the Chairmen, the media and the public started to cover the dispute and Chisholm explained to America exactly how the system worked and how undemocratic and racist it was. Her effort put the Seniority System on the public agenda, and reforms evolved over the next decades." She was the first Black woman to be elected to Congress and was the first Black woman to actively campaign for the Presidency
Although obvious oversimplifications, these were key strategic elements of these Presidential campaigns.
The feeling was mutual. These two men hated each other as much as any two individuals in politics.
Frank Bosworth Brandegee was a United States Representative and Senator from Connecticut.
