Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 30 · column 4 of 5 · from the scan, no model involved
James K. Polk, who came out of nowhere to win the Democratic presidential nomination on the ninth ballot at the party’s convention in 1844, usually is described as the first dark horse candidate, but it is not known if the term was applied to him at the time. He is referred to as a “dark horse” in S.M. Welch’s “Home History. Recollections of Buffalo During the Decade from 1830 to 1840,” but this memoir was not published until 1891, after the political sense of the expression was well established.
The oldest known specific reference to a political dark horse comes from a tub-thumping speech by New York’s Hamilton Fish in 1860 in support of Abraham Lincoln: “We want a log-splitter, not a hairsplitter; a fiat-boatman, not a flat statesman; a log cabin, coon-skin, hard cider, old Abe and dark horse — hurrah!” (“American Political Terms,” 1962) — not the kind of oratory that one expects from staid and dignified Republicans today. — From “Devious Derivations,”
by Hugh Rawson
91.1%