sixty-six years old at the time of the convention, he would die the following year. The nomination, stripped of all honor, finally went to Davis, a compromise candidate who won on the one hundred and third ballot after the withdrawal of Smith and McAdoo. Davis had never been a genuine dark horse candidate; he had almost always been third in the balloting, and by the end of the twenty-ninth round he was the betting favorite of New York gamblers. There had been a Davis movement at the 1920 San Francisco convention of considerable size; however, Charles Hamlin wrote in his diary, Davis "frankly said ... that he was not seeking [the nomination] and that if nominated he would accept only as a matter of public duty." For Vice-President, the Democrats nominated the able Charles W. Bryan, governor of Nebraska, brother of William Jennings Bryan, and for many years editor of The Commoner. Infamously loquacious, Bryan attacked the gas companies of Nebraska and had attempted controversial projects such as a municipal ice plant for Lincoln. In 1922 he had won the governorship by promising to lower taxes. Bryan received little more than the necessary two-thirds vote, and no attempt was made to make the choice unanimous; boos were sounding through the Garden. The incongruous teaming of the distinguished Wall Street lawyer and the radical from a prairie state provided not a balanced but a polarized ticket, and because the selection of Bryan was reputed to be a sop to the radicals, many delegates unfamiliar with Davis's actual record came to identify the lawyer with a conservatism in excess even of that considerable amount he did indeed represent. In his acceptance speech Davis made the perfunctory statement that he would enforce the prohibition law, but his conservatism prejudiced him in favor of personal liberty and home rule and he was frequently denounced as a wet. The dry leader Wayne Wheeler complained of Davis's "constant repetition of wet catch phrases like 'personal liberty,' 'illegal search and seizure,' and 'home rule'." After the convention Davis tried to satisfy both factions of his party, but his support came principally from the same city elements that had backed Cox in 1920. Progressive Party nomination The movement for a significant new third party had its impetus in 1919 when John A. H. Hopkins, earlier a prominent member of the Rooseveltian Progressive Party, organized the Committee of 48