Again the epitaph had to be erased. He was so far from being extinguished that he became the dominating force of the convention of 1912. There is no doubt in the mind of the writer, who was there, that Bryan had given up all hope of running for President, because, as he expressed it in a thrilling midnight speech at that convention, he recognized at last that he had too many enemies ever to expect to win. But he did determine to be a king-maker if he could not be a king, and king-maker he was. Not even the convention of 1904 showed Bryan in better light as a fighter than that of 1912. He was determined that the reactionaries should not control the convention. At the beginning he was defeated, but defeat never affected Bryan in the least in all his life, and this time, as usual, he only went on fighting. When the convention rejected him for Temporary Chairman and elected Parker, the embodiment of all he opposed, he merely took a fresh hold and fought harder. When he swung Nebraska from Champ Clark to Wilson he had won, and thereafter Wilson's nomination was only a question of time. He was the centre of violent scenes, as when maddened men swept down upon him and shook their standards in his face and seemed on the verge of assaulting him. When he tried to get a hearing and the opposition shouted him down, he simply climbed up on the platform beside the Chairman and forced them to hear. Once, while the whole convention seemed to be yelling at him, and he stood in the midst of a whirlwind of angry noise, ex-Governor McCorkle of West Virginia, jumping up and facing him, shrieked in a voice heard above the cyclone: "Are you a Democrat?" "My Democracy has been certified to by six and a half million voters. But," pointing his palm-leaf fan at McCorkle, with magnificent contempt, "I will ask the secretary to record one vote in the negative if the gentleman will give me his name." He won; Wilson was nominated. He brought his great following into line for an Eastern man, and Wilson was elected. The new President, following a precedent set by Taylor, Garfield, and Harrison, made him Secretary of State.