Candidates Row

Last week Candidates' Row got a recruit and he was:

Mr. Walsh. Thomas and James are his first names, reversing the order of the names of his embarrassing colleague in the Senate, James Thomas Heflin. Another distinction between these two--who are the Senate's most complete opposites except for the label on their politics--is that Senator Walsh, from rocky Montana, is the outstanding Roman Catholic Senator, while, as everyone knows, Senator Heflin from swampy Alabama mortally hates and fears the Roman Pope.

Senator Walsh has a brain, too; a patient, unbending, inexorable instrument in which he takes a chill delight when he brings it to bear on an Oil Scandal or a Power Probe. Unbending, unemotional, he has been called unique: "an Irishman without a sense of humor." Not until the past few years has he shown ambition nor, until very recently, even sufficient self-consciousness to trim up his Montaneering mustache of iron grey.

There are a number of reasons why this greying ramrod of a public servant has waked up, a popular one being that his prosecution of the oil gangsters excited the admiration of potent political patronesses, such as Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, president of the Women's National Democratic Club, who in turn have taught Senator Walsh to appreciate himself. Another theory is that, after his wife died in 1917 towards the end of his first term in the Senate, he turned to politics with fresh concentration as other bereaved men will turn to business, pleasure or a new wife. He started life as a school teacher. Lately he has become more and more a political disciplinarian: grim, Dry, statuesque.

The transformation of Senator Walsh from a granitic moral asset of his party to an actual candidate was a William Gibbs McAdooing. Ever since he magnanimously withdrew his own name, for the alleged sake of party harmony, it has rankled with Mr. McAdoo that Candidate Smith did not do likewise. Mr. McAdoo is so Dry that he has sworn he would do almost anything to make Candidate Smith bite the dust: "I don't care what happens to me but--." What better agent for this purpose could Mr. McAdoo have found than a Dry and a Catholic whose prestige began to surpass his own as long ago as the 1924 convention? At that convention, Senator Walsh waved aside sure acclamation for the Vice Presidential nomination. Last week, he accepted with dignity, pride and an accent already presidential, the news that a band of California delegates, headed by Mr. McAdoo, had declared for him and wanted to enter his name in their primary. Said he: "I was importuned some time ago to allow my name to be used and I simply said I would not veto it." News followed that Walsh movements were afoot also in Wisconsin and South Dakota. Said Mr. Walsh: "I have no campaign plans and no thought of quitting my duties here [in Washington] to promote my candidacy, if such it may be called. If my services to the party have been such as to entitle me to consideration . . . I dare say the rank and file are not ignorant of the fact."

Mr. Reed. Candidate Reed stumped into California just in time to hear the Walsh boom begin. He had come, after a week in his own Midwest, from the wide Southwest, including Phoenix and Albuquerque. In the latter city, he had flayed New Mexico's defamed and pining Albert Bacon Fall and New Mexico's brusque, new, young figure, Senator Bronson Murray Cutting. His ire at Senator Cutting was aroused by the latter's voting to seat Senator-suspect Smith of Illinois. In the midst of a tirade, he was cut short by a heckler, Editor E. Dana Johnson of Senator Cutting's Santa Fe New Mexican (daily). Cried Editor Johnson: "Why didn't you tell him to his face?"

"I'll be glad to tell it to his face," snarled Candidate Reed, and flayed afresh.

Next day the New Mexican carried a screamer: "YELLOW . . . Rampageous Wild Ass of Missouri Brays When Called." It was real, old time, Southwestern politics--but it was nothing compared to the heckling Candidate Reed received from a wider press as the result of later speeches.

In Dallas and Denver, which are Wet, he had cried out on "spies and snoopers." In Los Angeles, which is Dry, he explained that he, if President, would enforce the Volstead Act justly, faithfully and that Democrats had "bigger fish to fry than the red herring of Prohibition."

"Foreign invasion" seemed to him a timely topic in California and he pictured for an audience which had dreamed in childhood of the "Yellow Peril," the ease with which oceans can be crossed, coasts shelled, bombs dropped by little yellow men or big white men. He clarioned the need for a potent standing Army, a potent Navy. Then he tore into his surest spellbinder, G. O. P. iniquities. He called Secretary Mellon a blasphemer and Candidate Hoover a Britisher. Raising his hand with terrible deliberation, he intoned: "I charge President Coolidge with misfeasance in office. . . . He kept this arch criminal Harry Daugherty at the head of the Department of Justice . . . Calvin Coolidge has done the bidding of the selfish interests every moment of his public life."

Mr. Coolidge. The "Coolidge-anyway" movement, revived last fortnight as a local expedient in Illinois by Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago, drew another breath last week when National Republican Committeeman Charles Dewey Hilles of New York stepped out of President Coolidge's study one day and said: "Mr. Coolidge will be voted for in the Kansas City convention whether he is placed in nomination or not." President Coolidge did not call Mr. Hilles back to reprove him, nor was any quietus put upon the transparent ballyhoo in Chicago, the immediate purpose of which was to strengthen a State ticket frogged up by Mayor Thompson and his discredited comrade-in-expediency, Governor Lennington Small.

Woman. Many a politician smiled sympathetically, pityingly, upon Vice Chairman Emily Newell Blair of the Democratic National Committee, who betrayed her ignorance of the ineffable mysteries of national politics by declaring: "If I were writing the Democratic platform for 1928 there wouldn't be any. I would issue a short statement, brief and to the point, that platforms are out of style; either they mean something and are a target or they mean nothing and are a camouflage; in the one case dangerous and in the other case dishonest. Besides, they're boresome; they take up time in campaign speeches that ought to be given to electing the nominees."