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aristocrats, at least not in my off-hand view of them as I met them. It didn't seem to me that they were. However, Al analyzed this as the same elements who so vociferously and insistently defeated him for the nomination in '24 in the Madison Square meeting having a stronger clutch on the Democratic party than we realized. They represented the attitudes of the voting strength. The hordes of people in the great cities who were Democrats represented the Democrats he knew and who accepted him, and of whose life he was a part. But he had not been fully accepted by the others.
He knew that it was on religious grounds, too, but he understood also that whereas the “canal boy” could be President and the “silver tongued orator of the Platte” could be accepted, the slum boy from the city streets was another party. They were not prepared to accept that. He knew, of course, that it wasn't just Republicans who had voted against him. It was Democrats and independents who in the Wilson period had had Democratic leanings, and had even defeated Charles Evans Hughes for Wilson, which was a very hard choice, because Hughes was a very admirable and able candidate. There, as Al pointed out to me, was there not only no religious separation from the great bulk of the American voters, but there was no separation from them in
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