Job & Suite

No Republican Vice President has ever been reelected. This profound historic fact Vice President Curtis has long and silently pondered. Should he try to be original? Or should he announce simultaneously his retirement and his candidacy lor his old Kansas seat in the Senate? Looking for an answer, Charles Curtis, who sits in the Cabinet by presidential courtesy, last week journeyed back to Kansas to canvass. Not until next winter, though, would he announce his plans.

Vice President Curtis likes presiding over the Senate. The grandson of an Indian squaw, the onetime jockey-boy enjoys the social prestige that goes with his position, the public salutes, the dinners out. He would, if he could, keep the job he now has. But, more important, he would keep a job, a fact which amply explains his present uncertainty of mind.

If he were dead sure a Hoover-Curtis ticket would be re-elected next year, he would defy Republican tradition and run again. But he knows as well as any man that G. O. P. victory in 1932 is far from certain. What G. O. P. leaders fear most is that his withdrawal from the Vice-Presidency would be widely interpreted as an admission that President Hoover cannot be reelected.

In Washington, Mr. Curtis makes his home in an eleven-room suite at the swanky Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue. Ordinary tenants would have to pay $150 per day for these quarters; the Vice President gets them for $5.53. The Mayflower is controlled by the American Bond & Mortgage Co. of which short, stout, thick-necked William J. Moore, 65, is president.* Since last autumn the Department of Justice has been investigating American Bond & Mortgage. Thousands of investors have complained that this company gobbled up their money, returned them nothing. Charges have been made in court that Mr. Moore had a technique of financing a new construction, letting it slip close to bankruptcy and then somehow emerging as its sole owner.

Lurid stories have got into tabloid print as to how he and his associates gave whoopee parties with show girls to dazzle public officials and promote their questionable bond sales. Their inflation of real estate values was denounced in the Senate.

Last month a minority Mayflower interest, led by Mabel Walker Willebrandt, managed to put the hotel into receivership (TIME, June 1). Last week a higher court took it out again only after receivers had reported a shocking state of financial affairs. The hotel company filed suit for heavy punitive damages against the minority stockholders on the ground that the hotel's reputation had been damaged and its credit impaired.

Vice President Curtis found himself mixed up with this sorry affair in two ways: 1) His cut-rate Mayflower residence led to a suspicion that Mr. Moore was trying to use him for political protection; 2) the 1928 Curtis-for-President campaign was conducted from headquarters in the Mayflower where one Al Gross, who served a term in Sing Sing for robbery, was active enough to get his picture taken with Candidate Curtis. Always touchy on the subject of his Mayflower residence, the Vice President of late has been flying into a blazing rage at any query about his connection with Mr. Moore.

*Other American Bond & Mortgage ventures: Brookline's Longwood Towers, Manhattan's Park Central Hotel, Brooklyn's Leverich Towers, Palm Beach's Whitehall.

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