Victor Murdock

              Victor Murdock


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Exclusive Management 
The Coit Lyceum Bureau,
 Cleveland

ARTHUR C. COIT, President
LOUIS J. ALBER, Gen'l Manager




Hon. Victor Murdock



T
O VICTOR MURDOCK more than to any one man is due the credit for the present progressive movement.  He was the first Insurgent; he, more than any other one man, brought about the elimination of Cannon and the revision of the Rules of the House.  He heartened others who were more timid than he.  With pen and voice he attacked the czar rule of Cannon in the House:  he wrote articles for many magazines including his 
A Congressman's First Speech
 and 
A Congressman's First Bill
, which appeared in the 
American Magazine,
 effectually exposing, as nothing else could, the power of Cannon in the House in stifling legislation; he carried his fight direct to the people on the Lyceum and Chautauqua platform; he formed organizations in the House, worked eighteen hours a day getting the movement on its feet.  And the result at the beginning of the Sixty-first Congress, by reason of the activity of the Insurgents, among whom none was more active than Murdock, was a contest not surpassed for excitement in Congress in twenty-five years, resulting in the complete elimination of Cannon as Speaker and the amendment of the arbitrary Rules of the House.




As the Insurgent movement grew into a progressive movement, culminating in the formation of a third party—the Progressive Party—Victor Murdock continues one of the chief leaders in this movement.




He saved the people of the United States at least $5,000,000 a year through his reforms in the weighing of the mails; he has been doing things during all the four terms he has served in the House.  His reelection last fall was hailed with delight by progressives all over the country.




As an orator, the Kansas City 
Star
 has this to say:


The 'gift of tongues' is Victor Murdock's, but with it he associates that rare quality in orators, sincerity and strong common sense.  He is likewise good to look at.  He is a superb specimen of youthful manhood, permeated through and through with fine Western magnetism.  He has a wholesome, gracious personality that makes one think of ripe, blooming peaches.  He has an ample equipment of what cultivated people in Kansas speak of as 
bonhomie.
  He is strong and hopeful and effective.  And he is full of sentiment.  That's what folks like in him better than anything else.  Not that he is not practical.  But if there is a leaf or a flower peeping out anywhere among the brick and mortor, Victor will see the leaf or the flower first.




He has been a big success in the Lyceum for three seasons—he has learned how 
to put it across,
 as the slang phrase has it.  And this season will find him at the height of his power on the platform.  His lectures deal with the problems of the times.





LECTURE SUBJECTS



Marching with the New Crusaders


Insurgency






MURDOCK, the RED INSURGENT

By
 W. S. COUCH, in Cleveland 
Plain Dealer


M
URDOCK is built like a foot ball tackle, with a sunflower attachment.  Which is appropriate, since Kansas is the Sunflower State.  Murdock has leather lungs, a gift of sarcasm and a drawling delivery which seems to rub the acid of his words into the scars left on the regulars by his performances.  After Murdock makes a speech, 
Uncle Joe
 loses regularly at poker for a week.




Murdock is a satirist by nature.  His method is to get the loud laugh on the old shams, which makes the old shams furious.  They shiver at the first sound of Murdock's drawling tones.  This is the unforgivable crime of Victor Murdock.  It is this trick of his which causes the old guard to denounce him as a more 
dangerous
 man than LaFollette.  Neither Aldrich nor any of the Senate regulars refuse to speak to LaFollette.  Indeed, Aldrich delights to cross stings with the Wisconsin wasp in private conversation.  But Murdock—well, that is another matter.




Alfred Henry Lewis
—
Fine, over-wrought, Mr. Murdock is like a Toledo sword blade.  He is clean, keen, utterly tempered, holds an edge.




Representative F. J. Garrett of Tennessee
—
Victor Murdock of Kansas—red-headed, stubborn, unyielding—a man of few words but who puts every word where it tells.




The Independent (New York)


—
Victor Murdock is on the firing line for keeps and has plenty of friends who are ready to cheer his efforts whether they agree with him or not, he is so magnificently sincere about it.  And behind it all Victor Murdock is a right good fellow, quite capable of solving his own problems without following established solution and of standing by his conclusions without fear or favor.




Baltimore News


—
Even the most cordial enemies of the fiery-haired rustler from the Sunflower state are willing to confess that he is one of the livest wires lying around in the city of Washington.




Colonel Lafe Young in Des Moines Capital
—
Kansas loves an insurgent and Victor Murdock is the most popular man in Kansas.




La Follette's Magazine


—Murdock is big, rotund and orotund.  He has about the liveliest pair of eyes that you ever looked into and his mien is one continuous glow of enthusiasm.  Murdock is not merely energetic; he is dynamic.  From the soles of his feet to the topmost of his parted-in-the-middle auburn curls, he enjoys being alive.




Saturday Evening Post


—Murdock couldn't help being an insurgent if he tried, and he never did try very hard.  He is a professional Kansan and he is red-headed.  Temperament and environment combined in producing an aggressive young man who, while he doesn't take himself so seriously as some other professional Kansans that might be named, operates along Kansas slants to a considerable advantage to his own reputation and to much discomfort to the men who rule the House.




Savoyard
 in Kansas City Star


—
He is a strong character.  He is a force in Congress.  He is the Murat of the insurgent squad.  He is intrepid and relentless.  He cares not a rap for defeat.  It only makes him the more resolute for another assault.  He has been a power for good and has accomplished reforms undreamed of only some few years ago.




Pennsylvania Grit


—It is Victor Murdock, the hard-driving, the oratorical-plunging, straight-to-the-point Kansan to whom is due much of the credit for bringing before the public the theories and aims of the insurgents.




James Hay, Jr., in Popular Magazine


—He is the only real stick of dynamite ever projected from the ballot-box into Congress.




New York Globe


—It should not be forgotten that it was Murdock who made such a nasty, personal, onery fight a couple of years ago that the railroads were forced to carry the mails for something like $5,000,000 less than they had been overcharging the government for the service.





MURDOCK SCORED HIT



At Banquet attended by 500 at Grand Rapids—Among Brilliant List of Speakers, Leader of Insurgents was one of the Greatest




H
ERBERT HOUSTON, once cub reporter in Kansas along with Victor Murdock, now widely known leader of the Insurgents, writes thus entertainingly to the Topeka 
Capital
 from New York, concerning his former associate:




Kansas probably doesn't realize the distinctive, almost unique, place that Victor Murdock is making for himself away from home.  I was reminded of this at a great banquet of advertising and newspaper men—over 500 of them—in Grand Rapids the other night.  The speakers were of par-excellent quality; it would be hard to match them in the country.  There was the brilliant governor of Michigan, Chase Osborn, traveler, scholar, orator, who, with the great progressive Episcopal bishop of Michigan, Williams, and the sturdy new senator, Townsend, has lifted the state from a 
standpatism
 that has marked it from the time of Zach Chandler; there was Elbert Hubbard, half dreamer, but all wizard in the use of words; there was Melville E. Stone, probably the greatest newspaper man of his time, incisive in speech through long training and scholarly in thought through long study; and there was 
Vic
 Murdock.  And the greatest of these was 
Vic.




It has been a long day since the Ingalls-Peffer legislature, and it was hard for me to transform the stripling from Wichita into the portly Congressman before me.  But he was one and the same, especially the merry eyes and the red thatch above them.  As he spoke there was a charm of manner, a genial camaraderie that won his hearers at once.  In a fine spirit of raillery he asked a lot of questions about widely known modern advertisements, searching but full of humor, that brought everyone to keen attention.  He would lean his chin in his right hand, a Mephistophelian twinkle would play in his eyes, and everyone would be on the qui vive, as if it were a Herman or Keller doing a new trick; and then a ringing query would dart forth to baffle and amuse.  Even Hubbard did not approach his manner of the showman, exhibiting his ideas and words, which the vigorous Kansan wore as a mantle.




But now a change came.  Quick and vivid as a lightning flash, the thunder of insurgency rolled.  First it beat against the archaic customs of the postoffice department, a present and pressing tyranny based on outworn and haphazard precedents, then it rushed head on against the express monopoly of the postal business in packages, which of right belonged to the government; next it sounded alarms against big business that would wrest from the people the power to rule and make of it a vested privilege.  It was a great sight, for it was full of the spirit of the time.  In a truly remarkable way this crusading Congressman seemed to embody that spirit in his own insurging personality.  Put in the vernacular of advertising he stood there, the vital trademark of his day.  And the people acclaimed him in a mighty shout.




Then he concluded his remarkable address in a burst of eloquence that was an apostrophe to progress.  It was a song of victory after battle, vibrant with aspiration and full of the final triumph of the people.  As I sat there, rapt as were all my fellow diners, I thought, what a wonderful interpretation of the temper and spirit of the age, what a story of the triumph of progress, as men ascended 
ad astra per asperam.
  And the speaker had been a Kansan.




The Independent (New York), says:


V
ICTOR MURDOCK is simply one who cannot be bought, borrowed, or kidnapped, which renders him unattractive to the opposition.  His face is full of mischief—his eyes fairly scintillate with it—and half of the trouble into which at sundry times Murdock has plunged Uncle Joe and his cohorts is really the outgrowth of this spirit of mischief, aiding and abetting the deepest convictions which have controlled his political career—convictions that the rules and the autocratic power of the Speaker are a combination which ought not to be.


Murdock is a tall man, solid and strong, with tight curling hair, a genial face, voice which can be heard above a tornado—whether it ever succeeds in 
catching the Speaker's eye
 or not.





CHAS. LEZIUS PTG. CO. CLEVELAND, O.