Raskob's Turn

Democratic delight at having put Claudius Hart Huston. Chairman of the Republican National Committee and President Hoover's friend, into a bad hole by exposing his stock trading on lobby funds, began to diminish last week (TIME. March 31). The reason: Republicans were actively on the move to put John Jacob Raskob, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in almost the same hole. If both party leaders were thus beclouded, the political score would be evened.

The Senate Lobby Committee had supplied Democrats with the machinery for discrediting Mr. Huston. Indiana's Republican Senator Arthur Raymond Robinson, a lobby chaser, a Huston friend, announced his intention of summoning Mr. Raskob before the same committee and interrogating him sharply as to his contributions to the association against the 18th Amendment and his activities in behalf of Wet legislation. For months the Democratic hue and cry against Mr. Raskob as a Wet Catholic has been quiescent. Party leaders have tried to forget Prohibition, to weld the wings of Democracy together again for the 1930 campaign. Shrewd Republican politicians saw the advantages in breaking the rival party once more by the simple method of putting Mr. Raskob into the lobby spotlight, examining him on Prohibition. Even if he has done no lobbying, his appearance before the Committee would serve to remind Dry Democrats throughout the land that they still had a Wet leader, to rekindle the old fires which gutted the party homestead in 1928.

Meanwhile Mr. Huston clung stubbornly to his chairmanship. His friends implored him to resign for the party's good, which he vehemently refused to do. He kept far away from the White House, perhaps lest President Hoover see him, demand his resignation. In the Senate, Democrats primed their fowling pieces to blaze away at Mr. Huston when Muscle Shoals legislation, on which he had lobbied, came up there this week.

When Joseph Randolph Nutt, Treasurer of the Republican National Committee, resigned his post as President of the Cleveland Union Trust Co., Washington bubbled with reports that he was preparing to step into Mr. Huston's place at the head of the committee. What gave substance to this rumor was the high favor in which Mr. Nutt is held by all factions of the G. O. P. A peerless campaign cash collector, a potent businessman of discretion and sense, Treasurer Nutt conferred long and feelingly with President Hoover a fortnight ago about Mr. Huston's predicament and the possible reluctance of Big Business to contribute to G. O. P. campaigns under the Huston leadership.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.