A Saratoga senator who led a governor’s impeachment

After 20 rounds of balloting, delegates from Washington, Saratoga and Schenectady counties remained deadlocked as they attempted to nominate a candidate for New York’s newly redrawn 28th Senate District, with each county’s delegates backing their own favorite son.

Schenectady County, with five delegates, consistently voted for Austin A. Yates at the Republican nominating convention, which was held Aug. 1, 1895 in Ballston.

Washington County, with eight delegates, voted for L.M. Howland. The county’s delegates pushed for adherence to the unwritten “rule of rotation,” a tradition in which the honor of being the home county of the region’s senator rotated between counties. It was Washington County’s turn, they argued.

Saratoga County voted for Edgar Truman Brackett, having earlier rejected three-term incumbent Republican Sen. Harvey J. Donaldson of Saratoga County, who wanted to run again.
“The backers of Harvey J. Donaldson in Saratoga County now concede that the nomination for a fourth term, which he greatly desired, will be refused him with unanimity, and it is thought by many that Edgar J. Brackett of Saratoga Springs will secure the plum,” the Mechanicville Mercury had reported on June 22, about six weeks before the Aug. 1 convention.

On the 21st convention ballot, Schenectady County shifted its vote to Brackett.
A ceremonial vote was taken to make it unanimous, and the campaign was under way.
The next week, on Aug. 9, The Granville Sentinel published a satirical poem,

 

“Senate Convention,” about the nomination contest:
Howland laid down
With a terrible frown
And Hobbie wept,
While Burleigh slept
As all were lying
Baker decrying
And frowning
And weeping
And sleeping
And dreaming.
The “boys” were cleaning
And screening
And dividing
The ten thousand golden eggs
Pulled off Howland’s leg
Without any racket
Each filling a jacket
To nominate Brackett.

 

(H. G. Burleigh of Whitehall and I.V. Baker of Comstock were Republican political bosses in Washington County who were often at odds with one another. William Hobbie of Greenwich was a Republican state assemblyman.)

Brackett went on to win the general election easily against Democrat Charles Oscar McCreedy of Ballston Spa by a vote of 18,558 to 10,117.

McCreedy, a lawyer, was a former Ballston postmaster, former secretary of the state Forestry Commission and former Saratoga County Democratic chairman. At the time of the election, he worked in the postal printing office in Washington, D.C.

Brackett spent $2,028.90 on his campaign, the equivalent of $76,244 in today’s dollars.
A lawyer and businessman, Brackett was born in Wilton in 1853, and spent many of his childhood and teenage years in Iowa. He returned to Saratoga County in 1872 to open a law practice in Saratoga Springs.

He founded Adirondack Trust Co. in 1901 and founded McGregor Links, a prestigious golf course in Saratoga Springs, in 1921. He also was a founding director of Adirondack Electric Power Co. in 1911.

Brackett’s philanthropy included contributing the organ at the Saratoga Springs Methodist Episcopal Church; $30,000 to endow a department chairmanship at Cornell College, his alma mater; and funds to construct an arch on the Cornell campus in memory of his mother.
He served in the state Senate from 1896 to 1906 and from 1909 to 1912. He was elected Senate minority leader in 1911-12.

His elevation to leadership of his party’s Senate caucus made national news, but not for his political wisdom. The Birmingham Age-Herald, and possibly other newspapers, published a humorous, slightly exaggerated anecdote about Brackett’s receding hairline.

“If there is the slightest element of jealousy in Senator Edgar Truman Brackett, Republican leader of the upper house, it will doubtless crop out during this session to the legislature. There is every reason why it should,” the Alabama newspaper wrote.

“Seated only two chairs from him is William Pierson Fiero, a gentleman of the old school, whose hair sweeps down the sides and back of his head in such profusion that it looks like a silvery waterfall,” the report continued. “Senator Brackett, whose years number the same as the newcomer in the Senate, years ago lost his last lock, and all his coaxing and urging have failed to bring back any of the lost strands.”

Brackett had a reputation as a long-winded but compelling speaker with boundless energy.
“Born a debater, his experience has given him a breadth and depth that qualify him to contend with the best, while as a parliamentarian, no one who witnessed the Constitutional Convention of last fall, where for days he matched the best in the state, will for a moment place him in the second class,” the Mechanicville Saturday Mercury reported on June 15, 1895.

Brackett “was perhaps more largely quoted in the newspapers for years than any other public man,” The Glens Falls Times reported after his death.

Brackett tested the waters for a run for governor in 1906, initially drawing strong support. But the Republican nomination went to Glens Falls native Charles Evans Hughes, who defeated the Democratic nominee, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.

Brackett was noted for his role as Senate prosecutor in the impeachment trial of Gov. William Sulzer, a Democrat, in 1913. It was Sulzer’s own party that had pushed for his impeachment after Tammany Hall became disenchanted with the governor because of his push for reform.
Sulzer was removed from office on charges he diverted campaign funds to buy stocks and that he committed perjury.

Brackett died Feb. 27, 1924.
“In his early manhood he shared an aptitude for politics, and his ability as a politician soon brought him to the front ranks of the Republican Party in Saratoga County and the state,” the Ballston Spa Journal reported the next day.

“For a quarter of a century he has been recognized as one of the big men of the Republican Party and as one of the most able lawyers in the state,” the Ballston Spa Daily Journal wrote in an editorial. “He was a man firm in his convictions and, once he believed he was right, he backed the opinion with all his dynamic energy.”

It was said by one Tammany Hall politician that Brackett could “handle thirty bills at once and not lose his head,” The New York Times wrote on Feb. 29.

“Edgar Truman Brackett should have come out of a book, but no novelist could have created him,” the Times wrote in its tribute. “Long a god of the machine in Saratoga, he had strong bursts of independence; and there were Governors with whom, it seemed, he loved to pick a quarrel.”

Maury Thompson was a reporter for The Post-Star of Glens Falls for 21 years before retiring in 2017. He now is a freelance writer focusing on the history of politics, labor and media in the region.