Minneapolis Mayor

Two years ago a rift within Minneapolis' Farmer-Labor Party permitted Republican Alexander Gilberg ("Buzz") Bainbridge to slip into the mayor's chair (TIME, June 26, 1933). Pudgy Mayor Bainbridge, for a generation manager of the local Shubert Theatre, proved himself nothing if not a good showman. He sponsored a move to raise $25,000,000 by voluntary subscription, distribute it among farmers to revive their purchasing power. When Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows came to town, he had himself photographed on the lap of the midget who had sat on the lap of J. P.

Morgan. But during his term Minneapolis had a long, ugly truck strike about which Mayor Bainbridge seemed able to do practically nothing (TIME, Aug. 13). "Buzz" Bainbridge did not even get the Republican nomination to succeed himself this spring.

Consolidated under round, hefty, grey-haired Thomas Erwin Latimer, the Minneapolis branch of Minnesota's dominant and unique political party ousted Republican jobholders right & left at the municipal elections last week, amassed the biggest city council majority for the

Farmer-Laborites since 1923, voted Mr. Latimer into Showman Bainbridge's office. Mayor-elect Latimer's victory speech pledging "a clean administration," pleading "let's all work for Minneapolis," was strangely commonplace considering his astonishing personal career.

Born 56 years ago on an Ohio farm, he vainly sought his fortune thrice in Alaska; served as Engineer John Hays Hammond's assistant in the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho silver fields; was jailed as an agitator by U. S. troops after Big Bill Haywood's radical Western Federation of Miners bombed the Bunker Hill mine in 1899. In Montana he was a cowpuncher. In Sonora a peevish Mexican with a knife nearly cut his thumb off. At Seattle he entered the University of Washington, staying out one term to earn expenses as a lumberjack, graduating in 1908 with varsity football letters and a Phi Beta Kappa key. He picked up more education at the Uni-versity of Illinois, where he lingered to teach economics. Still more he got at the University of Minnesota's Law School, passed the bar in 1914 and hung out his shingle. Long a liberal and labor lawyer, Mayor-elect Latimer's legal monument is his work in the Minnesota "gag" law case, which began when County Attorney Floyd

B. Olson, now Minnesota's Governor, suppressed a Minneapolis weekly (on the grounds that it was a public nuisance and under Minnesota's Constitution could be enjoined from publication). With funds from the vigilant Chicago Tribune, Lawyer Latimer fought his defense all the way to the Supreme Court where he was sustained in a precedent-making opinion.

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