Death of Walsh

One rainy evening last week a Baltimore & Ohio special chuffed into Washington's cavernous Union Station bearing Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the Presidency. An hour later an Atlantic Coast Line train rumbled in from the opposite direction bearing the body of Thomas

James Walsh who was to have been the new President's Attorney General.

In Havana five days prior. Senator Walsh had married Senora Mina Perez Chaumont de Truffin, a wealthy Cuban widow (TIME, March 6). For all his 73 years and a stiff back the grim, grey Montanan was feeling fine & fit for a short honeymoon. From Havana he flew with his plump bride, 20 years his junior, to Miami where he received official notification of his appointment to the Roosevelt Cabinet. He called at the hospital where Chicago's Mayor Cermak lay close to death. Going on to Daytona Beach Senator Walsh, an honest Dry, told newshawks that under him the Department of Justice would enforce the 18th Amendment up to the hilt until the repeal resolution is duly ratified.

After dinner in Daytona, he felt a sudden stab of pain in his abdomen, thought it was indigestion. He took some soda, paced about the hotel corridors with his wife. Later that night a doctor found the Senator's blood pressure was 182, with symptoms of angina pectoris. Advised to stay over and go to bed, Mr. Walsh replied that he had to get on to Washington for the inaugural. Next day he and his wife started north in a drawing room on Atlantic Coast Line's train No. 72.

Mrs. Walsh's account in broken English of what happened thereafter:

"I took his fever. It was normal. I fixed the Senator some orange juice. I put it in bathroom to keep it from spilling. He was like a baby--wanted to go sleep. He turned over in bed once. I tuck him in. I went to sleep. I knew nothing--then the light started in the window. I look in his bed. He is not there. I thought he was in bathroom and call like this, Who-ooo-ooo Tom! Whoooo, Tom! He did not answer. I jump out of my bed. When I did I saw something on the floor--it was him.

"I tried like this and could not lift him. Then I started screaming and ringing the bell. The porter, he came. We lifted the Senator into the berth. I lifted his arms up and down. I patted his body all over. I opened his eyes. I blew in his mouth. Then some doctor come. He push me aside. I want to do anything to bring life to the Senator.

"But there he was--dead."

Mrs. Walsh's cries sent the porter scurrying for Conductor Herbert Weathersbee who rushed through seven Pullmans to reach the drawing room. He held the Senator's wrist, felt his heart's final flutter. Dr. Richard J. Costello of Cambridge, Mass., who was a passenger in the same car, pronounced Senator Walsh dead. A priest was routed out of his berth to administer conditional absolution and the sacrament of extreme unction. At Wilson. N. C., Dr. Malry Alfred Pittman boarded the train, gave a sedative to hysterical Mrs. Walsh, had her and her husband's body removed at Rocky Mount, N. C.

There Senator Walsh was embalmed and dressed in his wedding attire. The death certificate was filled out: "Cause unknown, possibly coronary thrombosis." Mrs. Walsh's emotional state caused her to suffer a slight heart attack. In a daze she accompanied her husband's coffin on to Washington where his funeral in the Senate chamber was attended by President Roosevelt. Plans were made to bury him at Helena, Mont, beside his first wife who died in 1917. Mr. Roosevelt was breakfasting in his Manhattan home when word was brought to him of the death of his Attorney General. He declared: ". . . A grievous loss to the whole country. . . . He was one of my oldest and most trusted friends. . . . While properly to till his place in my Cabinet will be difficult, to fill his place in the circle of my friends will be impossible."

Tears streamed down the ruddy cheeks of Arkansas' Robinson as he announced the news in the Senate. Virginia's little Glass crumpled up with grief in his seat. Both houses of Congress adjourned, gladly sacrificing a precious legislative day for a Senator who had served his State and country so long and so well. For 20 years the country had followed his steady rise in the Senate until he attained the austere eminence of an Elder Statesman, a fair and fearless legislator on the liberal side of every public question. A stirring memory was his relentless and single-handed onslaught upon the naval oil leases. Twice the country had seen him preside firmly over turbulent Democratic national conventions.

Life began for Thomas Walsh at Two Rivers, Wis., where, son of poor Irish immigrants, to put himself through school, he earned $1.50 per week lighting the town's oil lamps. He taught at Sturgeon Bay, later went to the University of Wisconsin. His law degree he framed under glass, kept it always near. Before his first marriage he migrated to Redfield, S. Dak. His clients were mostly freeland settlers. Later he moved to Helena, became a popular champion against powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Co. Anaconda tried in vain to buy off this rugged western lawyer with his glittering blue eyes, his black handlebar mustachios and broadbrimmed felt hat, by offering to make him its regular counsel. "Copper counties" beat him on his first race for the House. "Copper counties" beat him on his first run for the Senate. But the third time he was invincible. Happiest was he at his summer home in Glacier National Park, a bower for which he once had to fight stubbornly in the Senate (TIME, Feb. 18, 1929).

It was realized that for legal lore, for private integrity and public highmindedness, President Roosevelt could not duplicate Senator WTalsh as an Attorney General. Nor did Mr. Roosevelt at first try. He appointed Connecticut's Homer Stille Cummings, 62, only as a stopgap, to have a full Cabinet slate at the inaugural. A Yaleman (1891), Mr. Cummings began his legal career in populous, wealthy Fairfield County, served three terms as Mayor of Stamford, today lives in Greenwich. Tall (6 ft. 3 in.), broad-shouldered, partly bald, he first came into national view as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1919-20). Since then he has made unsuccessful attempts to get into the House and Senate from a dominantly Republican State. He was an early and ardent Roosevelt boomer. A good lawyer if not a great one, he will become Governor General of the Philippines as soon as President Roosevelt finds some one nearer the Walsh calibre.

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