democraticnationalcommittee

Connecticut State Attorney Homer Stille Cummings (1870-1956) prosecuted Mrs. Helen M. Angle in her March, 1915, trial for manslaughter in the death of her friend Waldo R. Ballou in Stamford, Connecticut in June, 1914. Cummings was assisted at trial by Albert Phillips of Stamford, former secretary of state for Connecticut (1913-1915).

Homer Cummings was appointed State's Attorney for Fairfield County, Connecticut, on July 1, 1914, and his first official act was to take up the inquiry into the death of Waldo Ballou. Cummings served as State's Attorney for ten years from 1914 to 1924.

The Government did not prevail in its case against Helen Angle. For more details of the Helen Angle trial see the Bain/LOC photo of Mrs. Helen Angle on Flickr.

 
In 1893, Cummings graduated from Yale Law School in New Haven. He was elected mayor of Stamford, Connecticut three times from 1900-1906. As mayor, in 1905, Cummings appointed William H. Brennan as Chief of Police for Stamford. Brennan would later investigate the case against Helen Angle and testify against her.

Homer Cummings founded the legal firm of Cummings & Lockwood in 1909. He later served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee between 1919 and 1920. He went on to serve as United States Attorney General for Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1939.

"In 1947 Hollywood made a motion picture called "Boomerang" about Cumming's early career as a prosecutor in Connecticut. This was a sensational murder case that also included a dramatic courtroom scene where Cummings had a live gun aimed at his head at a certain angle and fired. This was to show that the gun could indeed fire but not at the angle a witness said it was used. In this trial Cummings also turned around to prove the man he was prosecuting was innocent after he found evidence to that effect. "Boomerang" became a landmark motion picture for its fully dramatic but documentary style where Cummings real name was not announced till the end of the film which starred Dana Andrews as Cummings"  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

 
There is another Bain/LOC photograph of Homer S. Cummings here:

Wow, I wonder if that's Sea Girt, NJ.

Yes, the N.J. one: query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D03E7D61E3CE6...

Seems like William Jennings Bryan or Woodrow Wilson should be there but I don't see them.

The principal task of the National Committee's delegates was to write a party platform for the national convention, every four years. During the year 1912, the National Democratic Party Chairmen were Norman E. Mack (outgoing) and William F. McCombs (incoming), both of whom happened to be from New York State. Perhaps one or the other of them is in this photograph.

Although the 1912 Democratic Convention had been held in Baltimore, the Democrats' Executive Committee subsequently established the National Headquarters in a suite of ten rooms on the fifth floor of the Fifth Avenue Building in New York City, with frontage on 23rd Street. This photo probably shows us one of those palatial paneled rooms. New York Times story (with a photo of Mr. McCombs and other executives gathered around a table), July 30, 1912: query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E02EFDD1630E2... [Others in the NYT photo include A. Mitchell Palmer, who became Wilson's Attorney General, Josephus Daniels, who became Secretary of the Navy, and William McAdoo, who became Treasury Secretary and later Wilson's son-in-law. The blind Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma is there, too: he was Vice President Al Gore's great-grandfather.]