Politician Extraordinaire: The Tempestuous Life and Times of Martin L. Davey by Frank P. Vazzano

Author:Frank P. Vazzano [Vazzano, Frank P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political
ISBN: 9780873389204
Google: 92F3AAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2008-01-15T12:30:56+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Governor!

CONSTANTLY IN THE public eye, Martin by the 1930s began to loom larger than life to ordinary Ohioans. No matter how hectic a campaign might be, no matter how repetitious a memorized stump speech might be, no matter how tired he was, Martin tried to appear indefatigable, resilient, and enthusiastic. He bounded up to a podium, arms skyward in triumphant acknowledgement of the crowd, a smile always on his face. He was a celebrity and in public he was always on.

Martin had wearied of all this forced enthusiasm while campaigning against Myers Cooper in 1928. Running for governor was draining and, as he admitted, he had too many irons in the fire to concentrate on winning. He was bone tired afterward and glad that it was over. Certainly he preferred victory over defeat, but the gubernatorial race in 1928 in that respect was a pretty close call. For his psychological and physical health, it was probably better that he lost.

Martin’s supporters, though, had no sense of how their man really felt. Less than a year after his loss to Cooper, speculation arose that he would run for the governorship in 1930. By September 1929, Cleveland Democratic leaders, always a potent force in Ohio politics, were bandying his name about, claiming that he was entitled to a second chance.1

Martin had thought about running in 1930, but merely contemplating a campaign two years after the first was enough to dissuade him. Just the thought of another gubernatorial race kept him awake nights. If even thinking about running was that troublesome, he knew enough to stand aside. After all, he was only forty-six and just entering the prime of his political life. Ohio’s center stage could be temporarily surrendered to someone else, and if the political gods ordained it, there would still be opportunities for Martin L. Davey.2

There was no shortage of men who wanted the job anyway, one of them Marietta’s George White. Born in Elmira, New York, in 1872, White and his family in 1873 moved to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where White’s father worked as a watchmaker and jeweler. After graduation from high school, the younger White went to Princeton University, taking a class under Woodrow Wilson. In 1895, the new Princeton graduate shunned traditional Ivy League vocations in commerce and law and instead roughed it in a lumber camp and as an oilfield roustabout in Pennsylvania. He taught school briefly, but that was too mundane, and when gold was discovered in the Klondike, White joined thirty thousand other hearty souls in the rush north in 1898. Digging for riches in Canada and Alaska provided White with a wealth of stories afterward, but he found far more glitter than gold and lamented later that all he got for his trouble was enough money “to buy a silk hat and a suit of clothes to get married in.”

He returned to Titusville, married Charlotte McKelvy in 1900 (she died in 1929), and by 1902 moved to Marietta, which he considered home for the rest of his life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.