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Pandemonium dinned from incessantly sounded motor horns, blared from brass band, split the welkin with shrieks of "Al! Al! We're for you, Al!" While Mrs. Smith beamed and threw kisses by the hearty handful, the Governor seemed to grow at last almost awed with the frenzied multitudes. Like a magician's wand his small brown hat seemed literally to conjure cheers. He was supremely happy, but perhaps amazed.
At New Haven, where the Smith Special briefly halted, hundreds broke police lines, swarmed over the railroad tracks, stopped all other trains. From the high trestled station at Bridgeport the Derby waved above a packed sea of thousands. Red torches flared. Nearing Manhattan at 11:30 p.m., the special was cheered as it coasted through the Republican town of Mt. Vernon by 2,000 people who had been on the platform since 9 p.m. The Candidate had not been scheduled to stop, didn't stop. From Grand Central Station a double line of policemen elbowed and pummeled back the people, forming a lane to the Biltmore Hotel.
There, after a demonstration such as only Bryan, Roosevelt and Wilson have evoked in recent years, Alfred Emanuel Smith sought bed, perhaps to dream of crowds and mobs and multitudes: THE PEOPLE.
What are "the people," anyway? Are their cheers like the illimitable lapping laughter of the sea—cruel, meaningless and vain? Gloria in excelsis! Perhaps glory is a ripple on the human sea. Wherever the hero appears the ripple rises mightily around him, spreads, widens, dissipates and soon subsides. Or perhaps the voice of the mob speaks truest, having no restraint or fear.
When ten or fifty thousand souls suspire in unanimous awesome shouts of "Al!" or "Hoover!" or "rah! rah!" is that or is it not a mighty fraction of the VOICE OF GOD? Or was Alexander Hamilton sneering close to the truth when he exclaimed "Your people, sir, is a great beast!"
Perhaps such thoughts did not perplex the matter-of-fact brain under the Derby, yet when Manhattan correspondents gathered at the Biltmore next morning, Gov. Smith looked baffled when asked how the people's cheers made him feel. He said: "It gives a fellow a kind of feeling of satisfaction and a feeling of reward when you see so many thousand people stand for hours in a crowd just to wave their hands at you. It looks like there is something in the air.
"It was certainly very encouraging. It cannot be that these people cheer the way they do and then vote the other way. I could not understand that!"
On skimmed the Derby—to Pennsylvania, where no Democratic presidential candidate has seriously campaigned since Bryan in 1896. Camden, N. J., was cool; but Philadelphia acclaimed. Throngs, a carnival of ticker-tape, speculators hawking tickets to the Smith rally—unauthorized and illegally, of course. Finally an audience of 13,000 which assembled three hours before the Candidate was expected incessantly cheered his speech and booed with ferocity every reference to Pennsylvania's traditional Republicanism.