CABINET PUDDING

On the fourth day of March, 1921, Woodrow Wilson, pathetic stood before the Capitol in the last act of his official life. Nearby, the saddened members of his Cabinet stood, saw their leader broken by struggle and paralysis; heard a man they did not admire take the oath of office of President of the U. S. Through their minds must have flashed memories of the glorious days of 1913, when the party of freckle-faced Jefferso and hard-cider Jackson came back to power. Happy days. . . . Josephus Daniels laughing in the first meeting of the Cabinet "Isn't it great! Isn't it wonderful!"

Wilson went to No. 2340 S Street to die. His Cabinet scattered to their distant homes whence they had been so glamorously summoned. Mild-mannered Albert Sidney Burleson, Postmaster General (1913-21) was off to Austin, Tex., to build up & neglected law practice; behind him he left the days when he was overlord of mails, telephone and telegraph, when cables could be confiscated at his command. Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy (1913-21), no longer master of Admirals, went back to the sleepy North Carolina town of Raleigh. There he shifted from cutaway to a well-worn coat, settled down to the life of a small-town editor that he had known from his 18th year. Newton Diehl Baker, Secretary of War (1916-21), that short, slim, dark man whom Democrats call the "fighting pacifist" is too good a speaker to withdraw from the public rostrum, but his efforts were concentrated on earning fat legal fees from Cleveland industrialists. Thomas Watt Gregory, Attorney General (1914-19), prosecutor of trusts, had resigned two years before the end came. He returned to Texas; legal fees consoled him, too.

Meanwhile, Lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo, Secretary of tha Treasury under Wilson (1913-18), began not only to earn money but also to snatch for the mantle hia father-in-law had dropped. He missed it, rent the Democratic party. That other William, Bryan the Great Commoner, died in Dayton, Tenn., still denying his descent from long-tailed ancestors; with him vanished a sonorous power, which, for nearly 30 years had sometimes led and had always disturbed the Democratic party.

Last week Wilson's Cabinet seemed all at once to emerge from the shadows. From his engrossing paper, the Raleigh News and Observer, Josephus Daniels came, an infectious farmer-boy grin on hia gentle face, his thin unruly hair waving more thinly than of yore. In Washington to attentive audiences he propounded Democratic doctrine while he told them how to make an enlightened choice of a Presidential nominee. He said: "Fashions change in candidates as in dress. It is not probable we will go back to the Jefferson knee breeches or to Jackson in his fighting clothes, but the fashion next year will be the composite of the only three Democratic Presidents elected in the last 50 years--Tilden,* Cleveland and Wilson. Is there any significance in the fact that they all went from the Gubernatorial chair to the Presidency?

"No word painting can fit the candidate. We must incarnate the philosophy of Jefferson and the invincible courage of Jackson. The same issues exist today as when Tilden, Cleveland and Wilson were elected. The tariff then as now was building up a privileged class, With the exception that today schedules are made in secret and our policy has caused European Governments to raise high walls against American manufacturers. Corruption then as now had driven men from Republican Cabinets, only then despoilers were pikers who lined their pockets with thousands, while in our day the booty has gone into millions. Privilege then extorted hundreds from the pockets of taxpayers instead of the thousands now demanded and given."

Characterizing the candidate who tries to serve both progressive and conservative masters as one who "gives conversation to the people and the plums to the interests, Orator Daniels continued:

"He must be known to be a Progressive with a big P, free from ambiguous associations. He must be free from sectional and sectarian appeal, free from religious or political narrowness."

Editor Daniels named no prospect, pushed no man's cause unless it were his own. But in Texas his Cabinet-mate, Albert Sidney Burleson, returned to pristine vigor, gave Democrats a Cause and a Man. Texan, Dry, Protestant, he called on his party to nominate Governor Alfred E. Smith, New Yorker, Wet, Roman Catholic. To newsgatherers he said: "If Smith is nominated, he will be elected. . .. Governor Smith stands for the same things that Woodrow Wilson stood for. Wilson stood for enforcement of law, and so does Smith. Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act and Smith is against it and in favor of amending it for the same reasons that Wilson vetoed it. I don't want to question the motives of some of the prominent men of the Democratic party who are opposing the nomination of Smith for President, but I am quite sure that if the real truth was known it is not because he is 'a Wet,' as they claim, but it is for some other reason. ... Of all the people on earth, those of the South should not raise the religious issue against Governor Smith because he is a Roman Catholic, or against any other man because of his religious faith. . . . During the dark and trying days of reconstruction when the Democratic party of the South was on the verge of dissolution it was the Irish Catholics of the North who held the party together. . . . We should all be free from religious bigotry and intolerance. ... I am of Protestant faith, and I, like many other Protestants, inherited prejudice against the Catholic Church. I am thankful to say that that feeling of intolerance no longer exists with me. It has no place in the United States. I dare say that the Pope will be kept busy enough during the next four years dealing with Mussolini and conditions in Mexico without paying attention to what is going on in politics in the United States. He wouldn't have time to give us any attention, even should he want to."

Thomas Watt Gregory, scholarly, reticent, made no statement. But he told friends that he favored Smith and would give him his wholehearted support. In Manhattan (busy with the many-million-dollar Goodyear case) Newton Diehl Baker peered at newsgath erers through horn-rimmed spectacles. With great precision he remarked: "Of course I know both Mr. Burleson and Mr. Gregory intimately. . . . Their stand for Governor Smith is extremely interesting. . . . But 1928 is a long way off."

* Just as many an Englishman generations after the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty toasted the bonny king over the water, so staunch Democrats insisted that Samuel J. Tilden was rightfully President from 1877 to 1881. In the election of 1876, Tilden received 184 undisputed votes in the electoral college, Rutherford B. Hayes, 165. The 20 disputed votes, of which Democrat Tilden needed only one to win were all awarded to Hayes by a Republican-dominated commission.