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A special train took the Speaker home to Cincinnati. Into ivy-clad "Rookwood," the old-fashioned family residence on a green knoll, was carried the grey casket. Waiting there was Mrs. Longworth's stepmother, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. Also there was a little girl with flaxen curls. Paulina could hardly understand when Mother took her in her arms, told her gently that Father was dead. ... To the house came the President of the U. S. who bowed his head and moved his lips silently. Also came the Vice President,* members of the Cabinet, a dozen Senators, nearly 100 members of the House. At Christ Church, too small for everybody, Bishop Coadjutor Henry Wise Hobson conducted the brief Episcopal service. At Spring Grove cemetery near the Longworth shaft of granite the Speaker was laid away in the ground while an airplane etched against a very blue sky dropped roses.
Rarely, if ever, has a U. S. statesman, in Death, evoked such widespread and sincere expressions of personal regret as Nicholas Longworth. Behind the trite formality of eulogies-for-the-Press was a ring of honest mourning. The nation had lost its Speaker but there would be others; a multitude of people, high and low, had lost a charming friend who could not be replaced. The range of his friendships was reflected in the long list of honorary pallbearers, including William ("Wild Bill") Donovan and Cornelius Vanderbilt Sr., Joseph Leiter and Efrem Zimbalist, Will Rogers and Clarence Mackay, Albert Lasker and Percy Rivington Pyne.
No man grieved more deeply at the Speaker's death than his fiercest political foe in life, short, ruddy Congressman John Nance ("Jack") Garner of Texas, onetime cowboy, leader of the House Democrats. Tears filled his blue eyes when he heard the news. "My closest, my best-loved friend!" he exclaimed. "Mr. Longworth was an aristocrat. I am a plebeian. Perhaps the very fact of our different rearing intensified our interest in each other." As rival leaders of the House Garner and Longworth had joked over the Speaker's official automobile, called it "our car" (TIME, Nov. 17). After House hours they amicably reviewed the day's events, planned for the morrow. So close in fact was their association that some Democrats grumbled that their leader was being "taken into camp" by the Republican Speaker.
Mourned President Hoover: "His happy character, his sterling honesty, his courage in public questions endeared him and held the respect not alone of his myriad of friends but of the country at large. His passing is a loss to the nation."