William Bourke Cockran, commonly known as Bourke Cockran, was an Irish-American politician. His name sometimes appears as Burke Cochran in contemporary newspaper reports. He served as a United States Representative from the East Side of Manhattan for seven terms. Cockran switched parties four times, but is best known as a Democrat. He was a leading orator of the late 19th and early 20th century, and an important influence on British statesman Winston Churchill, who noted that Cockran was a pacifist and capitalist, who vigorously fought against socialists, silver inflationists and advocates of high tariffs.
Beginning in 1886, Cockran, a Democrat, was a frequent candidate for the US House of Representatives and won several times; he served a number of non-consecutive terms. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1884, 1892, 1904, and 1920. At the 1920 convention, he delivered the nominating speech for Al Smith. Cockran was a member of the commission to revise the judiciary article of the New York Constitution in 1890. Cockran publicly broke with his party in 1896, opposing the Free Silver platform of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Cockran campaigned instead for Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, which helped bring Gold Democrats over to McKinley's winning coalition. In 1900, Cockran returned to the Democratic Party, supporting Bryan's second presidential campaign. Cockran returned to Congress in 1904 after he won a special election to fill the seat of George B. McClellan Jr., who had resigned to become mayor of New York City. He served his final years, 1921–1923, as a congressman, dying in Washington, D.C. He is buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Hawthorne, New York. Cockran, a friend of Britain's Churchill family and reputed one-time lover of Jennie Churchill, introduced her 20-year-old son, Winston Churchill, to American high society during Churchill's first trip to New York in 1895. Years later, Churchill credited Cockran as his first political mentor and the chief role model for his own success as an orator. Churchill wrote in the 1930s that Cockran was, "A pacifist, individualist, democrat, capitalist, and a 'Gold-bug'....He was equally opposed to socialists, inflationist, and Protectionists, and he resisted them on all occasions." Churchill never became a pacifist but he did adopt all the rest of Cockran's stances during his own political career, and carefully read and reread his speeches for oratorical advice. Churchill quoted Cockran in his 1946 "Iron Curtain speech" recalling: “words which I learned 50 years ago from a great Irish-American orator, a friend of mine, Mr Bourke Cockran: ‘There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother. She will provide, in plentiful abundance, food for all her children, if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.’” Alice Roosevelt Longworth provides recollections of Cockran in her early autobiography "Crowded Hours". As she recalls, Cockran was "an Anglophobe in public and an Anglomaniac in private."
