Borah to His Tent?

Last week President Hoover paused in the midst of his labors for the national welfare to attend to his own political pepticity. From an abusive communication directed at him by his lone opponent for his party's Presidential nomination, onetime Senator Joseph Irwin France of Maryland, who bitterly proclaimed that President Hoover had caught him "off guard" by registering late in Maryland primary, thus winning the State's 16 convention votes, President Hoover could draw amusement rather than chagrin. If the President needed any further confirmation of his inevitable renomination at Chicago next fortnight, it came last week from Texas where 49 more Hoover-pledged delegates brought his total assured votes to 621--43 more than required.

Iowa's Senator Dickinson, temporary convention chairman, was to make the keynote address and Joseph L. Scott, Los Angeles lawyer, was selected to place California's Herbert Hoover in nomination. Lawyer Scott was not selected casually. He is a Roman Catholic charitarian who received Notre Dame's Laetare medal in 1918. He seconded the nomination of Vice President Curtis four years ago. Active about "Boys' Week," grey-haired with colossally beetling black eyebrows, he says: "Just a plain homespun American, that's how my friends know me. From the sidewalks of New York, too, for I have carried the hod in New York City back in 1890 for 20-c- an hour. And in Massachusetts I worked in the paper mills for 12 1/2-c- an hour." New York and Massachusetts, with strong Roman Catholic, sidewalk votes, are States doubtful for Hoover.

But President Hoover's chief concern last week was not with people who would be at the convention. He suddenly had cause for worry about someone who said he would not be there. Idaho's ursine and eloquent Senator William Edgar Borah, ever independent, ever eager to make his independence felt, announced that he would not go to Chicago. His reason was his distrust of his party's attitude on Prohibition.

For the past two weeks President Hoover, egged on by his Wet political strategist Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown and harkening to what he believed was a turn in public sentiment, had been toying with the idea of a platform plank on Prohibition less Dry than last time. Such a plank, according to word from the White House last week, would be a miracle of political delicacy--"a safe & sane declaration on the controversial question [which] would not go so far as to drive away fair-minded Drys from the party in November." Indicated was some sort of promise for a popular referendum on Prohibition.*

With grizzled Senator Borah sulking in his tent, the spectre of a Third Party momentarilv loomed. No man has been talked of more often than Senator Borah as the possible leader for such a movement. Only the week before he had ominously remarked: "I cannot conceive of the two old parties going to their conventions without any program to take care of the [unemployment] situation. . . . If anything would call a third party into existence, or a political revolution, that would." Prohibition added to Unemployment would, if embodied in planks of a Third Party led by anyone of stature and skill approaching Senator Borah's, constitute a wedge sure to split the G.O.P. vote beyond repair next November.

But after a breakfast at the White House Senator Borah hinted that he might yet go to Chicago to fight for a Dry plank. The President was reported inclined to take Calvin Coolidge's advice not to attack Prohibition. But James R. Garfield, chairman of the resolutions committee, who will write the platform, announced that in the absence of "orders" from Mr. Hoover he favored a plank for "resubmission in a constitutional way."

* There being no provision for such a referendum in the Constitution, another Amendment would have to be enacted to make possible this action. The Constitution does provide for a Constitutional convention to draft amendments but there is no legal means of limiting such a convention to one subject.

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