The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10Brann, William Cowper
General
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
There was a celebration. Troops came and marched from many
states. Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic tramped along
and the people cheered them. I suppose that one quarter of the
heroes who are drawing $160,000,000 a year in pensions from the
government were on hand. I have been unable to find out anything
that "Black Jack" did, other than the fact that he came back from
the front in 1863, and legged for Abraham Lincoln, thereby
getting into politics and staying in until he died. Also he
scoured the country carefully and found everybody that was
connected with him by blood or marriage and put him or her into
office. At one time Logan and family were drawing enough money
from Uncle Sam to draw a respectable navy. As the orators were
orating and the cannon were barking and the sweating people on
the sidewalks were shouting, they knew not and cared not for
what, I thought of some lines which opened a Washington letter in
the Boston Globe many years ago, when John A. Logan was in the
United States Senate. There was a tariff discussion on and he
took a part. These were the lines: "Pranced there in, on the
arena of the great debate, like a trick mule in a circus or a
spavined nightmare on the track of a beautiful dream, Logan of
Illinois." They fitted him.
A part of that celebration consisted of fireworks which were
given at the Coliseum, a large building which stands in the
southern part of the city and is used as a place of
entertainment. John T. Dickinson, formerly of Texas, and now of
the earth, is the president of the Coliseum Company, and
engineered the display. It takes money to have fireworks and the
company of "big-bugs" who bossed the entire marksman's contest,
told him so. With that hustle which made him a marked man in
Austin and other large cities in which he lived before he broke
into Chicago, Dickinson rushed out and raised the money. He got
subscriptions from prominent merchants, collected the funds and
turned them over to William R. Harper, who was chairman of the
committee on arrangements and committee on glory and pretty
nearly everything else. The fireworks were touched off and fizzed
and banked and spluttered, and the people cheered some more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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