Part 2
In 1873, after the war and emancipation of the slaves, I found myself associated with the first gentile paper in Utah--_The Salt Lake Tribune_. About that time the railroad had reached Zion, and there was a tremendous influx of gentiles. We had territorial officers who could not be used by the Mormons, and there was considerable excitement. President Brigham Young and several Mormon leaders were put under arrest. There were so many gentiles that they could not possibly find accommodations at the hotels, and Brigham Young proclaimed to his people that they could open their houses and receive them as boarders, and that a fair price for their board--not exorbitant, but a fair price--should be charged. He thought three dollars a week a good price for board. He admonished his people that they must not forget that they were all missionaries.
It happened that a Methodist minister (the Rev. C. C. Stratton) and his wife obtained board with Ann Eliza Young, then Brigham Young’s last and nineteenth wife, who was keeping house by herself in a small cottage, not far from the Lion House. Ann Eliza was born in Mormonism and reared in Utah by her mother, who was an educated woman and one of the first converts of Joseph Smith, living in Nauvoo, Ill., for several years before they migrated to Utah. Ann Eliza was a very intelligent woman, but her whole life was circumscribed by Mormonism. She had never attended any other church, and never read any other literature than Mormon books. She was a conscientious woman. It was through this Methodist minister and his wife that she apostatized.
One evening it was arranged that Ann Eliza should tell her story to the guests of the hotel (the Walker House), where she had taken refuge under the protection of the officials of the territory--Governor Woods and Chief Justice McKean, who lived there. I was there also and had something to do with making the arrangements. She did give her story--the most interesting and thrilling story that anybody ever heard. That speech was telegraphed to the Associated Press, and the next day came telegrams from theatrical managers, showmen, and speculators from all parts of the country. One was from P. T. Barnum and another from James Redpath, the owner of the Lyceum Bureau, in Boston, whom I had met and known in Kansas in 1856. It asked her to lecture.
Our people decided that if Ann Eliza could tell that story in Washington, we would get some attention and legislation. Up to that time we had been able to get little attention and no legislation. I happened to be available and went to Washington with her. I made a proposition that if she would go on a lecture tour I would manage it. She accepted it. That’s where I first became a manager.
Although she was to speak first in Washington, they were determined to hear her in Laramie and Denver en route. I got the schoolroom in Laramie, charged $1.50 a ticket, and sold four hundred tickets, and took in $600 that evening. Next, in Denver, she spoke in the New Baptist Church, the largest auditorium in the city at that time. I remember the night she was to appear in Denver I went to the Inter-Ocean Hotel where she boarded, to escort her to the church, and did not know her. She was dressed up, and--well, she looked very pretty. The leading Methodist minister--she had been converted by a Methodist, and they claimed her--introduced her to one of the largest audiences ever assembled in Denver.
Armed with letters of introduction to Speaker James G. Blaine, President U. S. Grant, and many members of Congress, we reached Washington, where we got into the Speaker’s room and she sent her card to Speaker Blaine. He was in the speaker’s chair. He came out and shook hands with her and was half tempted to be a little bit funny and jocose, but he discovered at once that she was a lady, a woman with a cause, and an earnest one, and in a moment his attention was riveted. He did not go back to his chair but sent word to somebody else to take his place, and in a few minutes _somebody_ else came into the speaker’s room, and in not over twenty minutes that room was packed with members of Congress. There was a stampede on the floor, and she held an ovation for two hours. Everybody wanted to see and hear her. Two days after that she did tell her story in Washington. Forty-eight hours later the Poland bill for the relief of the oppressed in Utah was a law.
I will say now that in all my experience I have never found so eloquent, so interesting, so earnest a talker. I have heard a great many, too. She had a cause. She was in dead earnest. She could sway audiences with her eloquence. She was able in two years from that time to leave Utah with her children and her family, and she never returned.
I took a desk in Mr. Redpath’s office in Boston and booked Mrs. Young’s time in New England and the Eastern States, while, with an Eastern lady as chaperone, she travelled and lectured nightly to as large audiences as were being drawn by the most popular lecturers of that period, such as Gough, Phillips, Anna Dickinson, and Mary A. Livermore. At the end of the season she had earned over $20,000.
I have frequently visited Utah on tours with some of my celebrities, and have found amongst the Mormon people as intelligent and interested listeners as are to be found in any other part of the United States. I do not believe there is a more critical or appreciative public in America. From the time of my first visit to Utah I have known and respected the Mormon people, and some of the best friends I now have are among them. I have always made it a rule to make special terms and prices for that public because of its universal intelligence and appreciation.
In the spring of 1899, it was my privilege to place F. Marion Crawford with the Brigham Young Normal College at Provo, where I found over six hundred young men and maidens studying to become teachers and missionaries for the Mormon church. The president of that college, Mr. Cluff, I had known when a boy living near the spot where the college now stands. His uncle, David Cluff, was a customer of mine in 1868. He kept a furniture store and was undertaker for the town of Provo. He had three wives living under the same roof. Over his store he had an assembly hall where the young people gathered for dancing, theatricals, and other amusements. I attended one of these dances while a guest of Mr. Cluff and was introduced to his wives and several of his children, a cousin of whom is now president of this great collegiate institution. Mr. Cluff, senior, had come originally from Vermont. His first wife was also a New England girl. I think that I was the only gentile in Provo that night. I had driven forty miles by team from Salt Lake City the day before. I was made to feel perfectly at home in this Mormon family and met with all comforts of a home that reminded me of the old-time pioneer households in Western New York and Wisconsin. When the party assembled in the ball room, before the music started--the band was made up entirely of members of the Cluff family--Mr. Cluff opened the proceedings with prayer, as is the custom on all public occasions among the Mormons.
One of the faculty of the Brigham Young College, a lady, is Mrs. Susa Young Gates, a daughter of Lucy and Brigham Young, one of the most prominent women in Utah and editor of _The Young Woman’s Journal_ of that State. I had never met Mrs. Gates until on this occasion, but she has been one of my correspondents in Utah for a number of years. She is well known as one of the leaders among women, and is identified with all the discussions and movements for their progress in the United States. I had thought favorably of trying to induce her to come East and lecture to women’s clubs and associations. When we met, naturally the memory of Ann Eliza, who was my first star, was still green in this community, and she gently took me to task for having been opposed to her people and religion. To show that Ann Eliza had inflicted an injury to the cause and faith she believed in and followed, I submit the following extract from a letter Mrs. Gates wrote to me while I was in California with Mr. Crawford, shortly after leaving her:
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“Major Pond--I like the frank and manly way in which you speak of the unfortunate past and of your wish to help my people in the future. I applied to you simply as the greatest manager on earth; and perhaps had resolved that all transactions should be kept on the strictest impersonal and business basis. But I became convinced after a few conversations with you that you had played an unwitting part in the great harm that Ann Eliza did my father and the whole people. I have been closely observing you, Major, while you were studying me. And I understand how with your generous and chivalrous disposition you could champion the cause of one you esteemed at that time to be an oppressed woman. But Ann Eliza was untruthful. She was a jealous and unscrupulous woman! God forgive her and let Him deal with her. I have no bitterness in my heart for her. I love my religion too well to hold enmity to any one, however wilful and wicked they may be. My dear father was one of the purest and most unselfish of men as well as one of the greatest; and you, Major, who are such a lover of heroes, would revere my father more and more if you would study him more. Yes, I accept in good faith your candid offer, and will let God and the future prove if a Mormon’s friendship is not as high and noble as that of any one on earth. My husband was very favorably impressed with your whole-hearted generous praise of all that you saw, and he stands with me in this offer to ‘smoke the pipe of peace.’”
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It was while engaged in the Redpath Bureau in Boston, booking Ann Eliza’s time, that I became enamored of the business, and a year later, with Mr. George H. Hathaway, chief clerk of the bureau, bought out James Redpath and assumed the management of that fine business. After four years’ most pleasant partnership, Mr. Hathaway and I separated, he retaining the Redpath Lyceum Bureau and its good name, and I moved to New York and established a bureau of my own, put my sign in the window, where it has remained twenty-two years and will probably stay as long as I care to work.
I have endeavored to tell of the famous men and women, who have been lyceum favorites, that I have known and managed since I began with Mr. Hathaway in Boston in March, 1875, and most of whom, it has been my pleasure to call my friends.
Since I started out as a journeyman printer in 1856, I have realized that the best and most useful advice ever given to me was that of my employer whom I was about to leave. In bidding me good-by, he said: “Now, Jim, you are starting from this minute out into the world to look after yourself. Let me give you some advice. Always associate with people from whom you can learn something useful. The greater a man is, the easier he is of approach. You can choose your companions from among the very best, and a man is always known by the company he keeps. It is much easier to ride than to carry a load.”
This advice I never forgot. It was worth more to me than any I ever had. It has helped me always when I set out to try to secure some celebrity, and has invariably proved true. I have never felt the slightest hesitancy in approaching any famous man or woman, and it never took long to ascertain whether the man was a gentleman or the woman a lady.
In preparing this book I have told of the people as I knew them, and shall avoid any attempt to over-estimate or to belittle their genuine characters.
ORATORS
ECCENTRICITIES OF GENIUS
THE TRIUMVIRATE OF LECTURE KINGS.
The great triumvirate of lecture kings consisted of Gough, Beecher, and Wendell Phillips. Other men for a season, and sometimes for a few years, were as popular as any of them, but it was a calcium-light popularity, whereas the popularity of the “Big Three” endured for their entire lives.
Phillips held his place the longest, beginning lyceum work about 1845, and continuing it to his death nearly forty years later. Gough was the most supremely popular--not the greatest of the three intellectually, but most level to the largest number of the plain people. Beecher came parallel with him and had a higher influence. His position during and after the Civil War reached the altitude of world influence. His command of the Plymouth pulpit was the most enormous mental leverage. Theodore Parker said of it as early as 1856, that its “sounding board was the Rocky Mountains”--the auditorium therefore was the continent. Beecher touched the hearts of men; Gough held to the fear of the effects of wrong-doing; Phillips, through the intellect, reached the conscience of his generation. He was a name in Great Britain, a power in the Northern States. Beecher was a power on both sides of the ocean, a person beloved on all sides. Who shall name other men who have filled the last half of the century with such enduring recognition?
John B. Gough deserves the title of King of the Lecture World, if popularity be made the sole test, and only Mr. Beecher and Wendell Phillips had any claim to contest the title with him, if eloquence--the power to hold and charm audiences--be made the test.
Mr. Gough was a more popular lecturer for a longer term of years than any other favorite of the lyceums. He was a born orator, with great dramatic power. Men of greater culture but less natural ability used to be fond of attributing his success to the supposed fact that he was the “evangelical comedian,” that the unco’ good, whose religious prejudices would not suffer them to go to the theatre, found a substitute in listening to the comic stories and the dramatic delivery of Gough.
This theory does not suffice to explain the universal and long-continued popularity of this great orator. He never faced an audience that he did not capture and captivate; and not in the United States only, not in the North only, where his popularity never wavered, but in the South, where Yankees were not in favor, and in the Canadian Provinces, where they were disliked, and in every part of England, Scotland, and Ireland as well. He delighted not only all the intelligent audiences he addressed in these six nations--for during most of his career our North and our South were at heart two nations’ making with Canada three nations on our continent, and the three distinct nationalities on the British Islands making up the six--but he delighted all kinds and conditions of men. He was at his best before an educated audience in an evangelical community. But when he addressed a “mission” audience in North Street, Boston, or in the Five Points in New York, he charmed the gamin and the poorest classes who gathered there as much as he charmed the cultivated assemblages in Music Hall, Boston, then admitted to be the finest audiences that Boston and its suburbs could turn out.
Mr. Gough never asked a fee in his life. He left his remuneration to the public who employed him. It rose year after year, beginning with less than a dollar at times, until, when the bureau did his business for him, it reached from $200, the lowest fee, to $500 a night. In the last years of his life his income exceeded $30,000. He did more to promote the temperance cause than any man who ever lived. It is strange, but it is a fact, that although Gough never broke down in his life as an orator, and never failed to capture his audience, yet he always had a mild sort of stage-fright, which never went off until he began to speak.
To get time to master this fright was the reason why he always insisted on being “introduced” to his audiences before he spoke, and he so insisted even in places where the absurd custom had been abandoned for years. When the chairman was introducing him, Mr. Gough was “bracing up” to overcome his stage-fright. And let me say right here that the phrase “bracing up” has two meanings; that the slanderous statements often started against Mr. Gough, that he sometimes took a drink in secret, were wholly and wickedly untrue. In his autobiography Mr. Gough has told the true story of his fall, his conversion, and his one relapse, and he has told it truthfully. He was absolutely and always, after his first relapse, a total-abstinence man in creed and life. There never lived a truer man.
For forty years he held the reputation as first in the land as an orator and champion of temperance. He probably delivered more lectures than any man who has lived in the present age. From a carefully kept record we find that from 1842 to 1852 he lectured on an average of 300 times a year, making 3,000 lectures. From 1862 to 1870 he averaged 260 times a year, or 2,080 lectures on temperance. Of these, 1,160 were delivered in Great Britain. After 1870 Mr. Gough lectured on miscellaneous subjects. Each year he prepared a new lecture upon a fresh topic. Among the most taking were: “Eloquence and Orators,” “Peculiar People,” “Fact and Fiction,” “Habit,” “Curiosity,” “Circumstances,” “Will It Pay,” “Now and Then,” “Night Scenes,” “Blunders,” which was his last. From 1861 to the time of his death, February 11, 1886, he delivered 3,526 lectures, making in all 9,600 addresses before 9,000,000 hearers.
Mr. Gough was a charming man personally: modest, unassuming, kind-hearted, and sincere, always ready to help a worthy cause or a needy friend. He was a zealous Christian, but he never obtruded his religious belief offensively on others. One needed to see him in his home to know what a devoted Christian he was.
John B. Gough was among the heroes of the nineteenth century. The incalculable good he did to his fellow-men can never be known. It is no idle statement when we say that he was the direct means, under God, of raising tens of thousands from degradation to be law-abiding men and women. It was my privilege, in 1879, to see in Mr. Gough’s library four large books containing the names of over 140,000 men, women, and children who, by his own personal efforts, had been induced to sign the pledge.
It was the habit of John B. Gough, for forty years, to carry two overcoats on his lecture tours. After his lectures he put both of them on--the first, a light one, which he buttoned up tight, and the second, a very heavy one, a sort of combination of heavy ulster and the regulation overcoat.
His two-hour lecture was an unbroken succession of contortions and antics that left him dripping with perspiration. It required all this covering to protect his body from the air before he changed his wet clothing for dry.
On his return to his hotel, Mrs. Gough was always in waiting with fresh clothing. A valet at once set to work rubbing him down, exactly as is the custom of grooming a racehorse at the end of the heat. After this process he appeared apparently as fresh as ever. He would eat a bowl of bread and milk, and always wanted an old-fashioned bowl.
Mrs. Gough was his constant companion, but did not attend the lectures. During the last twelve years of their travel together she did not hear him once.
Gough was a man of the people, the son of a workingman and himself a workingman, self-educated but not what is technically called a scholar.
Wendell Phillips was the bluest of the blue blood of New England. His forefather came over in the _Arabella_, the vessel that followed the _Mayflower_, and there was a clergyman in every generation from the first immigrant to Phillips himself. They were always prominent people. Phillips studied for the law and there was a brilliant career open for him. When he was at college, he showed no sympathy with any radical movement. On the contrary, he was a member of an exclusive set known as The Gentlemen’s Club, and used to laugh at Sumner for taking Garrison’s _Liberator_. But he happened one day to attend a meeting in Faneuil Hall, and heard the Attorney General of the State vindicate the murderers of Lovejoy, in Illinois, and say that Lovejoy died as the fool dieth. Young Phillips sprang to his feet at once and delivered a short speech which placed him at the head of the orators of New England, a position he kept until he lay still in death. That incident made him an abolitionist for life. He abandoned all ideas of eminence in law or politics and determined to devote his whole life to the anti-slavery agitation.
He was the most polished and graceful orator our country ever produced. He spoke as quietly as if he were talking in his own parlor, and almost entirely without gestures, yet he had as great a power over all kinds of audiences as any American of whom we have any record. Often called before howling mobs, who had come to the lecture-room to prevent him from being heard, and who would shout and sing to drown his voice, he never failed to subdue them in a short time. These were occasions when even such men as Garrison and Theodore Parker were as powerless as children and were forced to retire. One illustration of his power and tact occurred in Boston. The majority of the audience was hostile. They yelled and sang and completely drowned his voice. The reporters were seated in a row just under the platform, in the place where the orchestra play in an ordinary theatre. Phillips made no attempt to address the howling audience, but bent over and seemed to be speaking in a low tone to the reporters. By and by the curiosity of the howling audience was excited: they ceased to clamor and tried to hear what he was saying to the reporters. Phillips looked at them and said quietly:
“Go on, gentlemen, go on. I do not need your ears. Through these pencils I speak to thirty millions of people.”
Not a voice was raised again. The mob had found its master and stayed whipped until he sat down.
He was open and sympathetic to all appeals and causes, and this made him accessible always to the poorest of men. I knew that in Boston among some of his most trusted intimates--men to whom he was always accessible--were workmen and laborers, who would hardly have been admitted at the kitchen doors of others of the “Brahmins” of that city.
George Lowell Austin, in his “Life and Times of Wendell Phillips,” says:
“Among all the noble men in Massachusetts who early came to the support of William Lloyd Garrison, in his war upon slavery, none came from a higher social plane, or parted with brighter prospects, or brought to the cause more brilliant abilities than did Wendell Phillips. He might have been congressman, governor, senator of the United States, and, possibly, have risen higher still, had he allied himself to either of the great political parties. In the Senate, had he reached that body, he would have ranked with Sumner and Conkling as an orator, and with Fessenden, Grimes, Douglas, and O. P. Morton as a debater.”
Eloquent as he was as a lecturer, he was far more effective as a debater. Debate was for him the flint and steel which brought out all his fire.
The memory of Mr. Phillips was something wonderful. He would listen to an elaborate speech for hours, and, without a single note of what had been said, in writing, reply to every part of it as fully and completely as if the speech were written out before him. Those who heard him only on the platform, and when not confronted by an opponent, have a very limited comprehension of his wonderful resources as a speaker.
In his style as a debater he resembled Sir Robert Peel, in grace and courtliness of manner and in fluency and copiousness of diction. He never hesitated for a word, or failed to employ the word best fitted to express his thought on the point under discussion.