Minority Platform

The black-furred cub of a silver-tipped sire, boyish Senator Robert Marion ("Young Bob") La Follette of Wisconsin, mounted the convention platform last week as his dead father had so often done before him, to voice the "conscience" of the G. 0. P. He followed Senator Smoot. He presented what has been called, since 1908 when the senior La Follette began the practice, "The Minority Report on the Platform."

The galleries wahooed. The stand-pattingest of the standpatters smiled indulgently. At one burst of applause, the young man bowed deeply and said: "It is so unusual for a Republican from Wisconsin to receive applause at a National Republican Convention that I thank you most sincerely." Then, lest politeness detract from potency, he asked that the remark be stricken from the record. But everyone remembered the politeness and before the young man left the platform he had cause to take more bows, hand over heart, actor-fashion. Everyone enjoyed it and the thunderous "No" that soon buried the Minority Platform had a chuckle in it.

Of the Minority Platform itself, people said that the voice was the voice of La Follette but the hand was the hand of Senator George W. Norris, the deep-eyed, thin-lipped Nebraskan who is guarding the elder La Follette's mantle until the son is sere enough to wear it. They guessed so partly, perhaps, from the difficulty the young man sometimes experienced shifting his document back and forth to facilitate gesturing; and from the unreality of the gesture which the young man made while saying, "We denounce." People who denounce in their own words do not need to study their gestures. Moreover, many a Norris phrase was there: "bankruptcy has stalked," "the spectre of peasantry," "fraught with peril," "free farms, free homes, and free men."

Upon less affable lips it would have been a tirade on Equality v. Privilege. It was not seriously a platform but an explosion under the platform. It sought to pledge the G. O. P. to a number of things which may, like many another "radical" plan, come about in time, but which at that writing were hopeless, wilful "heresies." Part of the Minority Platform of 1928:

That the McNary-Haugen Bill should be promptly enacted.

That Federal power developments and operation should be undertaken at Muscle Shoals and Boulder Dam.

Denunciation of the Coolidge policy in Nicaragua and of the Big Navy.

Denunciation of Oil Scandals.

Presidential elections by popular vote.

Approval of the often-beaten Norris amendment to abolish "lame duck" Congresses.

That the Volstead Act should be liberalized.

Denunciation of the Federal Reserve system's "conversion . . . into an instrument . . . of stock market speculators."