"Can Roosevelt Be Beaten?"

"They apparently had us on the run a short time ago, but I am glad to see that now, all over the country, Republicans are plucking up courage and are back on the firing line." Such were the words, prescient of Democratic defeat, spoken at the East Side High School at Paterson, N. J., by Republican Walter Evans Edge who, as a U. S. Senator (1919-29) used to flap his elbows up & down like a buzzard in flight every time he made a speech. Date of the utterance: a fortnight before that November day in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt carried 42 of the 48 states of the Union.

Since that time much water has gone under the bridge and Mr. Edge has gone over the dam into history as Herbert Hoover's Ambassador to France. Last April he and his pretty young wife returned from a world cruise in time for the asparagus season. Last week, the season of his favorite vegetable having closed, he sailed to enjoy the grouse season in Scotland. Standing on the deck of the Normandie, he swelled his chest, flapped his elbows and spoke once more of the firing line: "I want a month's rest so that I can come back to help straighten out the madhouse in Washington. When I return I will stay in Washington for the winter and get on the firing line. The situation looks more & more encouraging for the Republican Party." Walter Evans Edge is one of the worst prophets in the Republican Party. Nevertheless, his words last week had a ring of truth about them. Year ago, to the question "Can Roosevelt be beaten in 1936?", the only sensible answer seemed to be an emphatic "No!" By last week many of those who year ago had answered with such conviction were tentatively replying with another question: "Do you think he can?" Professionals. The simple fact that people were asking "Can Roosevelt be beaten?" stirred Republicans with hope.

If the public is of the opinion that a candidate may be defeated, then, in the lexicon of politics, it becomes a possibility that he can be beaten. Last fortnight the silver-haired ex-diplomat, Henry Prather Fletcher, who has been far from a diplomatic success as Republican National Chairman, marched to the microphone, as he has not done in months, and cried over the air: "It has been wisecracked that you cannot eat the Constitution. You can't, nor can you eat the Bible, or the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments, or the deed to your property, or your life insurance policy. . . ."

Robert H. Lucas, oldtime G. O. P. wheelhorse whom Herbert Hoover had for executive director at Republican National Headquarters, brushed aside the cobwebs of obscurity and dashed off an 800-word letter to 3,000 Republican county chairmen, 450 city leaders and 800 "Young Republicans," polling them on their preferences for Republican nominee in 1936, exhorting them: "All this scared-rabbit talk about 'You can't beat a man with four billion dollars' is just the kind of propaganda weak-kneed Republican leaders have been swallowing for five years A lot of hooey! Let's get behind a leader with some guts for the fight and in 90 days you'll see a reborn Republican Party in this country . . . and with the battle cry 'Save the Constitution' sweeping all before it. Just remember Valley Forge!"

And in Puerto Rico, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. homing from the jungles of Brazil where he has been shooting jaguars, felt the same urge. When reporters asked him whether he thought fifth Cousin Franklin was a failure as President, he replied : "A failure? Why if I only called Franklin Roosevelt a failure, he'd think I was complimenting him." By the time he reached Miami he had taken a resolution: "I'm going hunting for betrayers of the Democratic platform."

Amateurs. Professional politicians are quick to articulate their dislikes. Not a few thousand professionals, however, but some 30,000,000 amateurs ultimately decide U. S. elections. Because amateurs are seldom articulate, disinterested observers today agree on only one thing: the Roosevelt tidal wave has receded, how far no man knows. One extreme view: the wave is going out as rapidly in 1935 as it came in in 1933. The other extreme view: only the articulate froth has blown off -- business men, intellectuals, uppercrust Tories -- whereas Labor, farmers, the great bulk of plain people are stronger than ever for their leader.

Certainly the articulate froth has been badly blown. Businessmen in city after city have vented their feelings against the New Deal by sending chain letters quoting Roosevelt of 1932 against Roosevelt of 1935. Walter Lippmann, ablest amateur New Deal apologist, has grown critical.

Last week in response to Franklin Roosevelt's objections to allowing corporations to make tax-free gifts to charity. Pundit Lippmann wrote in a fashion calculated to strain his relations with the White House: "Mr. Roosevelt says that the stockholders' money should not be spent for them by directors in order to obtain good will. What business is that of Mr. Roosevelt's? Where did he obtain the authority to say how stockholders or directors shall spend the money of corporations? Who appointed him the guardian of the stockholders and the arbiter of corporate expenditures? It is absurd. . . .

"Governments ought not on purely theoretical grounds, wantonly disturb a custom of the people. Now it is a fact, established by usage, that private charity depends for more than a fifth of its support on corporations. . . . Custom and usage are entitled to respect. To disrupt them simply because someone in authority happens to have a personal dislike of them is a kind of irresponsible meddling which no seasoned public official would contemplate. . . ." But outside the articulate froth, only small straws indicated how 30,000,000 political amateurs felt. In Washington it was reported that after Father Coughlin joined the President in attacking the Supreme Court's NRA decision, that Catholic priest's fan mail and contributions slumped sharply--a clue to the public reaction to Presidential policy. Only Father Coughlin knew whether the reports were true and he was not telling.

Question. Frank R. Kent, anti-New Deal Democratic columnist, was last week vacationing in Europe but his opinions, written before departure, were still being published in the Baltimore Sun. One of them: "The incontestable fact is that the Republican Party, terrifically split by Prohibition and other issues in 1932, is now reasonably well united. The so-called Progressive Republicans--the Norris-La Follette-Brookhart type--are off the reservation. But then they always have been.

On the other side, the Democrats, who in 1932 were more solidified and single hearted than they had been since 1912, are today split into two factions separated by what appears to be an unbridgeable gulf.

. . . And the reason this is specially significant is that the Democrats, under normal conditions, are the minority party, the Republicans the majority. Minorities cannot afford to split." Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley, on his way to vacation in Hawaii, paused in San Francisco last week long enough to say that Franklin Roosevelt's re-election was "a certainty." New Dealer Raymond Moley returning from a vacation in Bermuda, told ship newshawks in Manhattan: "There is not a doubt but that Mr. Roosevelt will be returned to office by an overwhelming vote." Such statements were small, unconscious answers to the large conscious question "Can Roosevelt be beaten?" And last week the answers that were being made by the President's friends and enemies were of much less importance than the fact that the question was being asked day after day by big men and little from coast to coast.

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