From 19th- and early 20th-century publications
The Greenbrier Independent (Lewisburg, WV), January 2, 1920, in a column headlined “This Week Thirty-Two Years Ago” ran the following story. Supposedly this is actual news, not a joke. Decide for yourself.
 
“The Point Pleasant Gazete (sic) reports that in Wood county (sic) Miss Jennie Corn was married to Mr. Henry Wheat. The spectators present were convulsed when the church choir sang, “What Shall the Harvest Be”?”

Be brave, my friends. There are only about six weeks left of name-calling, mud-slinging political ads. Then we’ll get a break for a week or so before the next campaign begins.

A favored campaign tactic is to claim a candidate said or did something in the past that is contrary to what that candidate is saying now. ‘Tain’t nothing new. In fact, some delegates to the 1912 Democratic presidential nominating convention in Baltimore really got into William Jennings Bryan’s face over what they regarded as hypocrisy or worse.

Bryan was one of the nation’s foremost progressives in an era when the winds of social change were howling. Between 1913 and 1920 four amendments—authorizing income tax; providing for the election of U. S. senators by direct vote of the people; prohibiting the manufacture, sale or transportation of liquor; and providing women the right to vote—were added to the Constitution, the most in such a short period since the Bill of Rights was added in 1791.

At the 1912 Democratic Convention, which began June 25, Bryan was determined to see a progressive candidate nominated by what was at the time the more conservative of the two parties. His reasons were his personal beliefs and a desire to keep former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt from running as a third-party progressive. The leading contenders for the Democratic nomination were James “Champ” Clark of Missouri, named Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives the preceding year, and Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey.

Bryan and Clark had been friends for many years. Furthermore, Bryan was a member of the Nebraska delegation, which had been instructed to vote for Clark. But on June 30 Bryan publicly criticized his old friend for taking a neutral stance in the election of a convention chairman—Bryan had led the fight against New York’s Alfred Parker—and for letting his (Clark’s) managers cooperate with “reactionaries,” the moneyed interests and conservatives in the party.

The next day, following the 33rd ballot in a deadlocked convention, the Missouri delegation unfolded a “flaring oilcloth sign,” according to a wire story of July 1. The sign said, in bright letters:

“I have known Champ Clark for 18 years. He is absolutely incorruptible. His life is above reproach. Never in all these years have I known him to be but on one side of a question and that was the side that represented the people.
(Signed)
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN”

The Missourians carried the banner to where Bryan was sitting with the Nebraska delegation and demanded, “Here is what you said. Now, what are going to do about it?”

Outraged, Bryan rushed to the stage and demanded to speak but was denied.

The next day former Missouri governor Davis R. Francis apologized to Bryan, saying the “banner was an indignity,” and he felt that had he been present the incident would not have occurred.

Woodrow Wilson went on to win the nomination and the presidency. The Bryan-Clark friendship was no more.

Clark, by the way, was a native Kentuckian who got his college degree in West Virginia and was president of Marshall College for a time. I intend to write more about him in a future volume of the West Virginia Histories series.

For a full account of the contentious 1912 convention see “Bryan at Baltimore, 1912; Wilson’s Warwick?”