My Story by Elizabeth J. Hauser

meeting in Cooper Union. Of this attempt Louis F. Post generously wrote some years later, “He spoke for possibly five minutes, timidly and crudely but with evident sincerity, and probably could not have spoken ten minutes more had his life been the forfeit,” but his private assurance to me was that it was without exception the worst speech he had ever heard in all his days. I am sure he has never heard anything to match it since. I know I never have.
    But this unpromising beginning didn’t discourage Mr. George and it made the next trial a little easier for me; and by and by I was speaking with him at various public meetings. I recall one especially large and successful one in Philadelphia.
    Some five or six years later, perhaps, in a great meeting in Chickering Hall, New York, my part on the programme was to answer any questions which might be put by the audience. This was usually done by Mr. George, and though I had tried my hand at it several times before this was the first time I had attempted it when Mr. George was present. When the meeting was over we left the hall together and walked some blocks before a word was spoken. I had gotten on very well in my own estimation, but Mr. George’s continued silence was raising doubts inmy mind. When he did speak, he laid his hand on my arm and said,
    â€œI am ready to go now. There is someone else to answer the questions.”
    With Mr. George and Thomas G. Shearman of New York, I went before the Ohio legislature and advocated a change in the tax laws.
    In the winter of 1895–96 a newspaper called the Recorder was started in Cleveland. At Mr. George’s suggestion Louis F. Post, then of New York, came to Cleveland and went onto the paper as an editorial writer. Hoping that the Recorder might prove a truly democratic organ and thinking it might become self-supporting if it did not have too hard a struggle at the start, I, voluntarily, at first without Mr. Post’s knowledge, and later, against his advice, made good the weekly deficits. First and last I contributed eighty thousand dollars to this enterprise. Regarding this purely as one of my contributions to our cause I took no evidence either of debt or ownership consideration. An effort to throw the paper against Mr. Bryan was prevented by Mr. Post. In 1897 I was pretty badly hit by the panic and had to withdraw my financial assistance with only a week’s warning. Mr. Post left the Recorder at about this time and the paper was obliged to abandon the regular newspaper field, though it continued as a kind of court calendar.
    In the readjustment I was compelled to pay an additional twenty thousand dollars, the courts maintaining that I was a stockholder. I did not mind having put in the eighty thousand, but I always considered the enforced payment of that additional twenty thousand a great injustice.
    Subsequently Mr. Post established The Public in Chicago.To this truly democratic weekly journal it has been my privilege to give some support.
    In such ways as these I was helping Mr. George’s cause and it was my ambition to become able to do all the outside work, the rough and tumble tasks, leaving him free and undisturbed in his most useful and enduring field of influence, that of writing. It was my privilege to be partly instrumental in making it possible for him to write his last book — a privilege for which I shall never cease to be profoundly grateful.
    A warm friendship sprang up between my father and Mr. George and the latter built a house at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, next to my father’s and my brother Albert’s and very near the summer home of my family at the same place. Together my father and Mr. George selected family burial lots adjoining each other in Greenwood Cemetery and overlooking the ocean. Here as time goes on members of our respective families are gathered to their final rest.
    I was with Mr. George a great deal in the Fort Hamilton days when his home was the