Makings of the 72nd (Cont.)

In Maine, New Jersey, Minnesota last week primary campaigns closed, candidates for the 72nd Congress were chosen. In Maine's four districts, only one incumbent was not renominated for the House but he, Wallace Humphrey White, was nominated for the Senate (see below).

Ten of New Jersey's dozen districts renominated their present representatives; in the third district regular Republican Thomas M. Gopsill is to run against Democratic William H. Sutphin, Wartime airman, onetime Mayor of Matawan (when aged 28). In the ninth district Peter A. Cavicchia, Newark lawyer and school board member, won the Republican nomination to succeed Franklin William Fort who was defeated in the Senate contest (see below). Onetime (1919-21, 1923-25) Democratic Congressman Daniel Francis Minahan will run against him.

In Minnesota, William I. Nolan won a hard fight in the fifth district against Walter William ("Pudge") Heffelfinger, oldtime Yale footballer.

These House contests were, however, dwarfed by Senatorial primaries:

New Jersey's race for the Republican Senatorial nomination was by far the most colorful and significant. In it four women --the wife of U. S. Ambassador to Mexico Dwight Whitney Morrow, the daughter and the wife of onetime Senator Joseph Sherman Frelinghuysen, the sister of Representative Franklin William Fort-- stumpspoke in the interests of their men. Candidate Frelinghuysen soon lost public interest, but the contest--gentlemanly and distinguished--between Dry Mr. Fort and Wet Mr. Morrow drew national attention. Yale's Professor Irving Fisher campaigned for Mr. Fort, Princeton's President John Grier Hibben spoke for Mr. Morrow. Beneath the high-toned surface, however, Dry leaders and Republican machine bosses, upset by the diversity of major candidates (one John A. Kelly also ran), battled for their political lives. The Anti-Saloon League, realizing that Candidate Morrow's reputation, coupled with his clearcut Wet stand (TIME, May 26) would make him a prime U. S. anti-Prohibition leader in Congress, waged a win-or-die fight for his biggest opponent, roused Protestant ministers and Y. M. C. A. men, made much of President Hoover's friendship for Representative Fort. To combat this, Senator David Baird Jr. announced: "I am able to assure you that President Hoover himself is intensely interested in seeing New Jersey send Dwight Morrow to the Senate." This drew from the White House a reiteration of its neutrality in primary elections.

On the night of the voting, Son-in-law Charles Augustus Lindbergh sat in the Morrow home surrounded by newsgatherers who showed scant interest in him. He clutched a private-wire telephone, received election returns. When these indicated the Ambassador's record-breaking plurality of more than 300,000 votes, Mr. Morrow closed a volume of Herodotus he had been reading in his library, made no quotable comment, went to bed.* Somewhere in the ballot-deluge which had nominated him was the first vote of Dwight Whitney Morrow Jr., just 21, studious Amherst son of a scholarly Amherst father.

If he was not excited, Wets everywhere were. They hailed the Ambassador-nominee as their protagonist, repeated that he is "presidential timber." Nevertheless many a Dry felt that Mr. Morrow's appeal was through his personality, agreed with Funnyman Will Rogers that "he could have run as a Bolshevik and won."

If it is true that President Hoover's attitude toward Prohibition is still one of laboratory neutrality, the Rogers' remark probably explained the following post-primary statement : "The White House will give every support. . . . The President and the Administration have every confidence that Mr. Dwight W. Morrow will be the next Senator. ..." This, the President's first official recognition of a candidate, certified Mr. Morrow as the first Senate nominee of national stature. Suspicious observers suggested that. President Hoover, perceiving in popular Mr. Morrow a potential ally if not rival, had the 1932 Presidential election in mind with his felicitations. The quizzically Democratic Baltimore Sun said: "Without knowing anything about it one might easily assume that Mr. Hoover has merely made an appropriate gesture toward a fellow tycoon. Whatever the ocular relation between a cat and a king, it is fitting that a Great Engineer should salute a former Morgan partner."

The New Jersey primaries involved nominations for two terms--the unexpired term of Walter Evans Edge, now Ambassador to France, and the regular long term of 1931-37. Mr. Morrow won both nominations. Democrats who will oppose him are: for the short term, Miss Thelma Parkinson, a political newcomer; for the long term, Alexander Simpson, State politician, Wet commoner.

Maine's Republicans pleased President Hoover but were rewarded by no open endorsement when they chose Representative Wallace Humphrey White Jr., grandson and onetime secretary of the late Senator William Pierce Frye, to run for the Senate against Democrat Frank H. Haskell. Defeated Republican candidates: onetime Governor Ralph Owen Brewster, Wet Dugald Blair Dewar.

Minnesota's renomination of blind Republican Senator Thomas David Schall, instead of a nomination for Governor Theodore Christiansen, terminated a campaign almost without issues. Senator Schall will face Einar Hoidale, unopposed Democrat, and Ernest Lundeen, Farm Laborite, in the elections, unless Minnesota Democrats get Lundeen to withdraw, uniting the minority parties.

*Mr. Morrow was reading the story of Hippoclides (chapter CXXVI through CXXIX) which describes the contest Clisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, held to choose a husband for his daughter Agarista. After a year of trial, he preferred young Hippoclides of Athens, but on the evening of the choice, Hippoclides drank wine, danced upside down on a table, disgusted Clisthenes who cried: ''You have danced away your wife!" "Hippoclides cares not," said Hippoclides.

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