of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 147

what is now the Democratic Party. More specifically, however, we grasp the
opportunity to renew our allegiance to those principles of government he so
ably and fully exemplified in his career and in his beliefs, which beliefs he
put into practice in his life, examples which we can admire and can emulate
with profit to the nation whose course he helped to chart.

This seasoned old warrior, who could not be stopped nor swerved from
his appointed course either by his opposition or by the bullets of his adversaries,
had an abiding faith in his own kind—the common people of the country. He
came up from among them. The son of a pair of Scotch-Irish immigrants—
the father, a landless farmer, the mother a linen weaver—his boyhood was
hard and his advantages few, indeed. What he knew he learned from life
rather than from books. He afterward was ready for the call of his Country,
either to fight her enemies in the field or to serve in the guidance of her desti-
nies. And yet, from his humble beginnings, he became Judge, member of the
House of Representatives, Senator and President. Throughout this memorable
career, his course was always straight and direct; guided by his belief in what
he thought was right, pursuing it undeviatingly to the end.

He knew calumny and treachery from those he thought to be his friends,
and the bitter opposition of those who fought his policies as President. But
he did not swerve a hair's breadth from his way, which intuitively he knew
to be in the interest of the kind from which he had sprung, even if those policies
conflicted with the tenets of the aristocracy of his day represented by the Clays,
the Calhouns and the Websters.

He was what in these days would be called "a rugged individualist, " and
he was an individualist to the core. He believed in his Country and its Constitu-
tion and in the guarantees of that Constitution to the masses of its people and
to the minorities. He did not propose to see those guarantees impaired by
persons he regarded as nullificationists. He fought them at every turn
and they fought him. In one of the greatest crises facing the youth-
ful nation in his day, he took hold of the situation and showed his teeth
and proved his mettle. That was the instance when a mighty financial
and monetary institution, the Bank of United States, dared to assert its superi-
ority over the agencies of government itself. I might be pardoned for referring
specifically to this momentous event because it was with the backing counsel
of Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland, his Cabinet Officer and later to become
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, that Jackson struck
down and crushed this engine of special privilege, convinced that it discriminat-
ed against the people in favor of particular classes and interests. It was but
another expression and application of Jacksonian Democracy exercised to re-
lieve the masses of people from exploitation and plunder by favored classes.

He believed in the freedom of the individual to work out his own destiny.
All he asked was a fair field and no favor and with that, under the Constitution
he loved, he felt that any man with the right stuff in him could make his own
way. And was he, himself, not proof of this? Hard work, a willingness to
fight for what he thought to be right, and an inflexible purpose to succeed, had
taken him, a poor, unlettered boy from the hills of Tennessee, to the White
House. He asked neither the government nor anyone else to do for him what
he could do for himself. But in doing for himself, he proved what America
offers by way of opportunity, and he demonstrated that democracy as a phil-