Pennsylvania Oracle

In booklike ballots the size of small-town telephone directories, Republican and Democratic voters of Pennsylvania last week made their choice of candidates for the November elections.

Democratic voters picked (387,000-to-99,000) State Boss Joseph Guffey over Roland Sletor Morris, onetime Ambassador to Japan, to run for Senator. George Howard Earle 3rd of Philadelphia easily won the Democratic nomination for Governor.

Out of a field of 16, Republicans chose William Abraham Schnader, State's Attorney General, as their favorite gubernatorial candidate. In the hottest primary contest, Senator David Aiken Reed, Old Guardsman seeking renomination, beat (587,000-to-483,000) Governor Gifford Pinchot, oldtime Republican insurgent.

Since Governor Pinchot had campaigned on a platform appropriated from his Democratic friend Franklin D. Roosevelt and since Senator Reed had spent most of his time on the hustings damning the Administration, the primary had been widely touted as the New Deal's first ordeal by ballot box. Day after the primary, Pennsylvanians woke to find that they had not only recorded their sovereign electoral will but had also been cast as a political oracle for the country. A host of strictly partisan interpreters at once gave tongue.

Interpretations. While Governor Pinchot was explaining that his defeat was largely due to his recent illness from shingles, Senator Reed crowed: "It means that in Pennsylvania we want neither the Old Deal nor the New Deal, but a Square Deal."

"The foibles of theorists no longer appeal," declared Delaware's Hastings for the delighted Republican Senatorial Committee. "Senator Reed's victory . . . definitely places on the downgrade the Administration and all its work and policies."

Democratic Senate Leader Robinson snorted: "It is difficult to comprehend the mental processes of those who reach such a conclusion."

Postmaster General Farley as his party's national boss professed to be amazed that anyone could suppose the Democracy was interested in the results of a Republican primary. "I do not regard the defeat of Governor Pinchot," said he, "as a New Deal test."

Upon learning that a regular Republican had won a nomination in a regularly Republican State. Democratic Senator Ashurst repeated the old aphorism: "The Dutch have captured Holland."

Meanwhile Boss Guffey hurried to the White House. There he took out pencil and paper, added his votes to Pinchot's votes, threw in, for no good reason, Roland Morris' votes and was able to show the President that the Pennsylvania primaries had really been a great "liberal" victory since the total overwhelmed Reed's ballots 2-to-1.

"You boys did a grand job," beamed the President.

Facts. In forming their interpretation of the first hard-fought primary since the New Deal went into office, impartial observers weighed these facts:

The Pennsylvania regular Republican machine, supposedly demoralized, had functioned amazingly well. In only one case, where a man was deliberately thrown overboard, did the regular Republican Congressional candidates fail to win renomination. In the opinion of the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune, the G. O. P. organization had worked too well. "What the rank and file of the normally Republican voters want is new blood, new leadership," it complained, "rather than a return to the old policies and old methods of the G. O. P."

Democratic "interpreters" made much of the fact that only 58% of registered Republican voters turned out for the primary. Fact remained that over 1,000,000 Republicans had voted as such, while less than 500,000 Democrats were in evidence. Since Roosevelt lost Pennsylvania by only 157,000 votes in 1932, it appeared that many a backsliding Republican was safely back in the party paddock.

That President Roosevelt would have been justified in accepting a Pinchot victory as a compliment to himself and his Administration, not even the staunchest Democrat could honestly deny. But the fact that Gifford Pinchot chose to identify, for lack of a more dramatic tag, his liberal politics with the New Deal did not alter the fact that he was still a Republican. The friendly bread-breaking with Governor Pinchot at the White House cost the President nothing. It is part of the Presidential policy to remain on good terms with Republicans of the Norris-Cutting-Johnson-Pinchot stamp, while always reserving the hope that a good Democrat may trim them in an election.

Non-partisans looked at the Pennsylvania Republican primary thus: a reaction against the Administration could scarcely be said to have set in in a State which had not voted for it, but some of the emotional impetus given the Democratic Party in the bloodless revolution of 1932 certainly appeared to have spent itself in Pennsylvania. "It is time," observed the New York Times, "for the two-party system to reassert itself . . . and nobody can know better than Mr. Roosevelt that the stand-together-brothers tableau is about over."

The tableau was not marred by the first results of a Literary Digest poll asking 15,000,000 1932 voters: "Do you approve on the whole the acts and policies of Roosevelt's first year?" Sixty-six percent of the 45,000 balloters (from New York, New Jersey & Pennsylvania) said Yes, whereas only 57% of the total Digest's straw voters had favored Roosevelt in the 1932 poll. Forty-one percent of the Digest balloters who had chosen Hoover two years ago now favored the President's policies.

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