From the Hudson Valley, a prolific orator

The regularly scheduled 8:30 p.m. broadcast of The Navy Band on Schenectady radio station WGY was pre-empted on Saturday, May 2, 1925 by the 91st birthday celebration of one of New York’s most prolific public speakers.

“Chauncey Depew, nonagenarian, will address the audience of WGY, Schenectady, and WJZ, New York, Saturday evening,” The Glens Falls Times reported on May 1.

The speech was broadcast from a banquet held at the Montauk Club in Brooklyn to honor Depew, a lawyer and businessman who represented New York for two terms in the U.S. Senate.
Through the new medium of radio, “it is estimated that in a single evening the voice of Mr. Depew will reach more people than he has addressed in years of public and banquet speeches,” the newspaper wrote.

That seems hard to fathom, given the sheer number of political and civic speeches he gave over his lifetime.

Depew had an index of more than 1,500 after-dinner addresses he had given at one time or another, some more than once, The Granville Sentinel reported on Aug. 16, 1887. And his speaking appearances continued for another four decades after that. An anthology of his public speeches published in the early 1920s filled eight volumes.

“Mr. Depew could tell a story in such an amusing way as to win the attention of the most restless audience,” The New York Times wrote in obituary published April 5, 1928. “He probably made more and better speeches during the half century he was in his prime than any other American orator.”

Depew’s popularity was evident in news reports about his visit to what was then the village of Glens Falls in 1900. One newspaper described the community as “thronged with visitors” as Depew, two years into his first term in the Senate, came to town to get out the vote for the Republican ticket.

Special trains originating at Caldwell (now known as Lake George), Whitehall, Fort Edward and Saratoga Springs brought spectators. Others arrived early in the day, traveling from Warrensburg and “other points of interest,” according to undated Glens Falls Times and Messenger articles preserved in the Addison B. Colvin scrapbooks on file at The Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library.

The Glens Falls City Band circulated around downtown performing “enlivening music.”
“Glens Falls was in patriotic attire today,” the Times and Messenger reported. “Flags floated in the breeze, buildings were draped with the Stars and Stripes, and visitors wore the colors.”
Pictures of national and state Republican candidates were posted around downtown.
“Not in years has Glens Falls been so active with enthusiasm and not in years has this village entertained so many visitors,” the paper reported. (The village would become a city eight years later.)

Factories and businesses closed for the day so employees could be part of the memorable occasion.

Depew led a delegation that arrived at Glens Falls at 1:30 p.m. on a Delaware & Hudson Railroad train pulled by Engine 372. George A. Hydorn was the engineer and C. J. Downey the conductor. Others in the delegation were E.R. Gundy and Seward Simons of Buffalo, and William A. Perdergast of Brooklyn.

Glens Falls businessman, publisher and Republican leader Addison B. Colvin accompanied the delegation on the train from New York City. Meredith B. Little of Glens Falls and A.D. Wait of Fort Edward boarded the train at Fort Edward for the last stretch to Glens Falls.

“Our Chauncey” spoke to a capacity crowd at the 1,200-seat Empire Theatre on South Street and made a second speech from the balcony at Crandall Free Library for those who could not get into the theater.

The first part of his main speech focused on disputing the platform of Democrat presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, the challenger to incumbent Republican William McKinley.
“I have read every one of Bryan’s speeches and am doubtless the only man living who has done so,” Depew quipped.

The senator used marriage as a metaphor for the GOP policies of McKinley’s first term.
“While in attendance recently at a joyous wedding of a young relative, the thought occurred to me of the happy results for the entire American family of the nuptials between sound money and prosperity four years ago,” he said. “The paramount question with us today is, ‘Shall that couple be divorced?’”

Deriding Bryan’s promises as merely theoretical, he added, “The present campaign emphasizes the difference in practical life between a prophet whose predictions must stand the test of time and experience and the pledge of a party whose promises are based upon principles which have worked out in the past, the results which are guarantees for the future,” he said. “In other words, theory and experience are again, as in 1896, in hostile array.

“The election of McKinley and Roosevelt will be for the best interest of every man, woman and child in the country,” he concluded.

In addition to his role as a leading politician, Depew was a lawyer and business executive who devoted much of his career to the railroad industry, including a tenure of more than a dozen years as president of the New York Central Railroad, the crown jewel of the railroad empire built by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Depew went to his New York City office daily until just days before his death from bronchial pneumonia, just shy of his 94th birthday.

“Except for occasional colds, Mr. Depew’s health was remarkably good until his last illness,” The New York Times reported.
In politics, Depew served as a state assemblyman in 1862-63 and as the state secretary of state in 1864-65. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1898, the same year he stepped down from his railroad presidency, and won a second six-year term in 1904.

Depew attended every Republican National Convention from 1860 through 1920.
At the 1888 convention, he received 99 votes for the GOP nomination for president. Had Depew been nominated, his passion for telling stories about growing up on a farm in the Hudson Valley near Peekskill would have resonated with voters, one newspaper suggested.

“If the Republicans put up Mr. Chauncey Depew for President, their stump speaking will have plenty of desirable stories to tell about the valiant struggles of his early career before he was a success,” The Columbia Republican wrote on March 8, 1888. “Once upon a time he spoke on the subject himself before the Nineteenth Century Club. He pictured his boyhood days as a child of poverty when he lived up the Hudson, his years of hard work from dawn to nightfall.”

 

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.