The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 91

Vage Pour Antic Governor Cole Blease Sent to Senate; Capital Keeps Eye on Constitution Smasher But this is only one man's opinion and in spite of his "To Hell with the Constitution" speech, Blease is still one of the greatest living South Carolinians. He was elected Governor in 1910 and was re-elected in 1912. In his second campaign every newspaper of wide circulation fought him bitterly, the ministers were almost unanimously opposed to him, the professions were overwhelmingly against him, the man Of affairs in the main dreaded him. His opponent was a man of political importance and experience. Despite all this he won; narrowly, it is true, but he won.

The campaign was the bitterest in the memory of South Carolina. Men lost all sense of humor. Columbia, South Carolina, never went to sleep that election night Governor Blease was relentlessly fought, and violently he fought back. Men talked and papers wrote his record. Comments from the press written by local editors (who forgot that outside opinion is rarely if ever a political asset) made Blease "the center of Southern' thought.

The campaign quickly became one of mud slinging and of personalities. Each was ami something. But Blease fol Holds Record For Pardoning Prisoners; Has Released 1,500 During His Four Years As Governor; Broke Up State Con vict System lowed in the wake and his two sturdy administrations louowea. i-ie followed no one record. For nearly nine years Coleman L.

Blease struggled in political harness to slide into the Senate. He finally took his seat in the upper house the same day that Chief Justice Taft administered the oath of office to Calvin 0 idge. South Carolina, as well as other States, are watching closely every movement of Blease. If he can "put it over" in Washington, the people will keep him in the Senate for life. His chances in the United States Senate are considered good, for Blease steps forward again with the stage all set for him to play the role of the frenzied friend of the poor man.

He comes when men, having tasted and felt of luxury in the boom years of the war, are now reconciled to normalcy. It can be reckoned that Blease will fight hard the reactionaries in the Senate. He will voice sentiments that are in the breasts of the obscure men. He is a devil-may-care talker and his observations are acute. So far he has openly opposed the League of Nations.

He eschewed the works of Woodrow Wilson generally. Perhaps his old pardoning record will be brought up again. This, however, was never a powerful count against him because, while squandering pardons with a lavish hand, he broke up a notorious convict system in the South Carolina State penitentiary, a reform freely admitted even by his enemies. Blease went to the Senate with only 150 votes ahead of his opponent. He won the fight for which he had waited nine years.

What will "Coley" now do? There are eleven million idle acres in South Carolina awaiting the coming of industrious hands. The coastal occupations are scarcely scratched on the surface. Charleston is still asleep, Columbia is just an overgrown country town, Greenville has a Chamber of Commerce and a few cotton mills. The State's salvatiton will come through the leadership of some powerful constructionist, and that man the people of South Carolina believe to be Coleman Livingston Blease. Senator Coleman Livingston Blease A Boulevard in Havana 3 more culprits on January 25, 1914, and cleared the entire prison by February that same year.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1914, seventy-five convicts went free. Eight more received freedom as a Christmas present that year and fifty-five as a New Year's present. And did the "pardon me, suh," spirit cease? No sir-ee, bob! The good work or bad, you may think continued. While Governor of South Carolina Blease stopped a rigid fist fight on a train, and did it successfully, too. Ludwig Lewisohn once said that Blease had "a touch of consciousness, almost staginess, the typical leader of the Democracy of the new South; large black wool hat, dark, rather fierce eyes, heavy black mustache, gaudy insignia on a heavy watch chain, a man who radiated or wanted to radiate a constant ferocity against the irreligious, the aristocrats, pap Yankee intellectuals, a son of the soil and of the mob, with a chip on his shoulder.

His conversation had a steady note of the belligerent and the self-righteous, a noisy, astute, yet hectic obscurantist. He might have been born in Georgia or Mississippi. He despised Charleston (for its aristocracy, I suppose) with a touch of inverted envy." Mr. Lewisohn, however, does not know the real Governor Blease, for in South Carolina Blease has been a politician. In South Carolina politics is more than politics.

It is a recreation, a part of life, a thing in which all are interested, a medium through which men express themselves. A political meeting in a "Blease year" is to be anticipated as would be the coming of Ringling Brothers circus. Men gather at the county seat, which is ucually the county court house, from villages and farms miles away to hear Coley shout his political evangelism. The parking spaces are filled with buggies, wagons, Fords, trucks, with and without licenses. The stage is all set for the campaign, and one of the participants tells in his own language how the Fourth of July spirit eclipses the poor farmer and the mill worker as well as the city man: "The time arrives for Blease to speak.

There is a wave of animation. Any stranger can pick out the Blease men from those who oppose him, for their faces are red in expectancy. 'Tell 'em, Coley! shouts a man out of the crowd; 'Gosh mighty, ain't he a man?" said another. "Blease pulls up his sleeves, looks over his audience, and launches into his speech. He denounces his enemies, sticks to his friends, declares he has nothing to explain and nothing to apologize for, hits hard at the hostile press, attacks high taxes and those in office who imposed them, gives his opinion of the creation of new offices to be filled with political declares his devotion to the working man's cause, and so on until the driving, dynamic concluding rhetoric is drowned in cheering.

He knows the chords to play upon. He knows the popular mind and the little things that affect it He can be serious or can laugh, can be sentimental or vitriolic, according to the subject in hand. He can express the grouches, the hopes, the irritations, the ambitions of those who believe in him." By L. S. Cassel COLEMAN LIVINGSTON BLEASE, the most talked-of, best loved and worst hated man South Carolina has produced in a generation, has attained his every political ambition.

He was twice elected Governor of the Palmetto State. On March 4, 1925, he took his seat in the United States Senate by a squeeze Blease is used to this, he is a fighting man. Chief among the causes of his popularity is his personality. His talents ft in well with the social and economic history of the State and with the quaint manner in which the Democratic (the only) party conducts its political campaigns. "Coley," as he is called by his friends and enemies, turned nearly fifteen hundred inmates loose from the South Carolina State penitentiary during his two-term reign from 1911 until 1915.

He pardoned the sinner, forgave the murderer, and paroled and set free those that were left in the shadow of doubt. But the people still continued to love him; he was a marked man. Blease was "corn fed and country bred." He was born of humble parentage in Newberry County, South Carolina, October 8, 1868, just thirty-five miles from the Governor's manion, which was his aim during his struggle at school and later at the bar. South Carolina's antic Governor never education, but received considerably higher training at Newberry College and at Georgetown University, District of Columbia. His personality, which always stood him in good stead, practically admtited him to the Bar in 1889.

Then he became a Representative in the Stare Legislature in 1S90. After being tossed back to Newberry, he became city attorney, then mayor of the town of his youth. hat could be more tantalizing to his aristocratic cp pnnent. Riehard I. Manning, than his resigning five days before his second term as Governor ended, so that Lieutenant Andrew J.

Bethea, follower of Henry Ford's Peace Expedition, became Governor of the rebel State for only 120 hours! V'hen Blease wanted New York newspapers to scare up another big story about him all he had to do was to announce the fact that he "hoped to clear the South Carolina penitentiary by freeing 400 more convicts by February 8, Pardoning 400 wrongdoers at one clip was a small matter for His Excellency. On November 25, 1913, he freed 100 convicts at one time. He commuted the sentence of fourteen Erf fjfe" fci i.