Bedside Bargain

On election night last November Charles Wayland Bryan, younger brother of the late Great Commoner, took to his bed with pneumonia but also with the knowledge that he had been elected Governor of Nebraska a third time. After his lungs cleared, heart trouble kept "Brother Charley" on his back until last week. In March died Robert Beecher Howell, Nebraska's Republican Senator, but Governor Bryan was too ill to appoint a Democratic successor; the State had to get along month after month with George William Norris as its lone Senator. Ambitious to sit in the Senate, "Brother Charley" pondered ways & means of appointing himself to the vacancy. His doctors told him he would never reach Washington alive, and the Senate would not swear him in in his bedroom at Lincoln. A bitter party feud between the Governor and Arthur Mullen, Democratic national committeeman, also helped to stalemate the Senatorial choice. Democrat Mullen wanted to consolidate his grip on Federal patronage by getting his friend Gilbert Monell Hitchcock, one-time (1911-23) Senator, back into his old job. But Governor Bryan was in no mood to foreclose his own chance of going to the Senate.

Last week "Brother Charley" called newshawks around his big walnut four- poster. To demonstrate his improvement, he stepped out and stood up in his muslin nightshirt, a pale, bald, old man doggedly fighting for a physical and political comeback. Then he announced Nebraska's new Senator -- white-haired William Henry Thompson, a good party friend whom he had put on the State Supreme Court. Born in a Ohio log cabin 79 years ago, son of a blacksmith, Senator Thompson had served on the commission that built Nebraska's new $10,000,000 Capitol.

Democrat Thompson becomes the Senate's oldster, taking that distinction from Wyoming's Kendrick by four years. His age. however, was his chief recommendation for office in the Governor's eyes. His Washington service will be brief (the term expires 1935) and quiet. "Brother Charley" has ample assurances that he will step aside next year for a Bryan-for-Senator campaign.

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