ld
be to keep him occupied by quietly encouraging any anti-Cromwell
sentiment--and it existed a-plenty. Our real efforts were to be in the
West and South.

I organized under Woodruff a corps of about thirty traveling agents.
Each man knew only his own duties, knew nothing of the general plan, not
even that there was a general plan. Each was a trained political worker,
a personal retainer of ours. I gave them their instructions; Woodruff
equipped them with the necessary cash. During the next five months they
were incessantly on the go--dealing with our party's western machines
where they could; setting up rival machines in promising localities
where Goodrich controlled the regular machines; using money here,
diplomacy there, both yonder, promises of patronage everywhere.

Such was my department of secrecy. At the head of my department of
publicity I put De Milt, a sort of cousin of Burbank's and a newspaper
man. He attended to the subsidizing of news agencies that supplied
thousands of country papers with boiler-plate matter to fill their
inside pages. He also subsidized and otherwise won over many small town
organs of the party. Further, he and three assistants wrote each week
many columns of "boom" matter, all of which was carefully revised by
Burbank himself before it went out as "syndicate letters." If Goodrich
hadn't been ignorant of conditions west of the Alleghanies and confident
that his will was law, he would have scented out this department of
publicity of mine and so would have seen into my "flotation." But he
knew nothing beyond his routine. I once asked him how many country
newspapers there were in the United States, and he said: "Oh, I don't
know. Perhaps three or four thousand." Even had I enlightened him to the
extent of telling him that there were about five times that number, he
would have profited nothing. Had he been able to see the importance of
such a fact to capable political management, he would have learned it
long before through years of constant use of the easiest avenue into the
heart of the people.

He did not wake up to adequate action until the fourth of that group of
states whose delegations to our national conventions were habitually
bought and sold, broke its agreement with him and instructed its
delegation to vote for Burbank. By the time he had a corps of agents in
those states, Doc Woodruff had "acquired" more than a hundred delegates.
Goodrich was working only through the regular