Slump to Fight

With his thousands of national committeemen, State chairmen, State committeemen, county chairmen, county committeemen and precinct leaders lying like fever thermometers under the tongues of the body politic, a national Party chairman is supposed to know the curve of the nation's political temperature well in advance of lay observers. Last week, after consolidating the readings of his executive committeemen at a consultation in Chicago, Republican National Chairman John D. M. Hamilton announced that the national fever chart of Landon enthusiasm showed a slump during August, but was now displaying a hopeful rise. In that revelation he was one jump ahead of seasoned political writers, who, as the Presidential campaign rounded its Labor Day corner with only eight weeks to go, were agreed that GOProgress had definitely slacked off. Searching for reasons, they solemnly took stock of trends and events since the June night at Cleveland when John Hamilton's nominating speech sent the Landon candidacy off to a roaring start.

"Tails Up." The lithe, kinetic Republican chairman thinks that that able speech was the unluckiest thing that has happened to him in the campaign. It swamped him with 38,000 personal letters when all his abundant energy was needed for the enormous job of organization. Significantly, his Chicago headquarters was not even equipped to open the letters, much less read and answer them.

Political machines are fueled by jobs, oiled by the hope of jobs to come. After four years of jobs to burn, the firm of Roosevelt, Farley & Co. entered the 1936 campaign with a machine high-powered, smooth-running, up-to-date. To compete with it, the new firm of Landon & Hamilton inherited a 1932 model apparatus, battered by its last two collisions with the Democratic juggernaut, rusted by inaction and despair. John Hamilton's job came nearer to being one of rebuilding than of repair.

He set about it in a characteristic whirl of action. Without a pause after his day & night labors at the Cleveland convention, the new chairman sped to Chicago, to Topeka, to New York, to Washington; in July swung through New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. Back in Chicago, he set up a sketchy national headquarters, bundled his personal staff into a ten-passenger airplane, flew West. In 17 days, during which he averaged three speeches per day and four hours sleep per night, he swept 6,500 miles through 16 States.

In East and West his program was the same. The press reported his public speeches, gave the impression that he was simply stumping the country. But privately clean-cut, aggressive John Hamilton was hobnobbing with local bigwigs, pumping the hands of county chairmen and precinct leaders, fulfilling Nominee Landon's parting instructions to "give 'em hell and get their tails up."

For his pains. Chairman Hamilton came in for a storm of abuse from within and without the Party. His critics jibed that he was acting and talking as if he were the candidate. They complained that he was spending too much time stumping, not enough organizing. They compared his course unfavorably with the obscure but effective activities in 1932 of James A. Farley.

Having trailed Chairman Hamilton through five Western States, Political Reporter David Lawrence, who makes no bones of his antipathy for the New Deal, last month reported: "Uniformly there is the same story--he has pepped up the Republican organizations everywhere and done in a short time a job which could never have been done over the telephone, by mail or through lieutenants. . . . Mr. Hamilton has gotten a background on his present trip which will be invaluable to him when he gets back to headquarters.

For one thing, he has sat down with county chairmen of all kinds and he knows the kind of follow-up that will become necessary if he is to have an effective organization. . . . I will be very much surprised if this does not turn out to be about the best managed Republican national campaign since 1896." In his own defense, John Hamilton declares of his Western tour: "If I hadn't made the trip there wouldn't be a Republican organization in that section."

Machine After Men. Second complaint against the new chairman's junketing was that he had failed to organize his national headquarters properly before starting out. That charge was undisputed, even by John Hamilton. Unable to do two jobs at once, he decided to get the wheels of his machine turning before he had adequately manned the controls. Result was that when he returned to Chicago late last month he found things in a serious mess. Presenting the other side of Pundit Lawrence's picture, Scripps-Howard's Columnist Raymond Clapper reported from Chicago: "A vast organization, scattered among three office buildings, had been thrown together hastily. No one was in authority. Co-ordinate heads of divisions were glaring at each other like strange wildcats. They were quarreling over matters of jurisdiction. Campaign literature was being held up by inability to get final okays, or by stubborn refusals to agree to revisions."

One of the first things Chairman Hamilton did was to get out a memorandum detailing the exact duties and authority of every one of his division heads, naming Harrison Earl Spangler as Executive Vice Chairman to run things in his future absences. Vice Chairman Spangler, short, florid Iowa lawyer and gentleman farmer, as field marshal of Party organizers, aimed to have by Election Day one personal-pressure worker (Republican Volunteer) for every 30 voters in the land. Last week, when Chairman Hamilton sallied off to Washington and Manhattan, he left behind a functioning organization, notable for the facts that its members were: 1) mostly small; 2) mostly young; 3) mostly devoted to John Hamilton.

Director of Publicity Alfred Henry Kirchhofer, aloof, lantern-jawed managing editor and onetime Washington correspondent of the Buffalo (N. Y.) evening News, was turning out press releases by the thousand, buttons, sunflowers and windshield stickers by the million. Working boss of Hoover publicity in the 1928 campaign, Press-agent Kirchhofer announced when appointed to his current post: "The usual hokum won't go in this campaign."

A new campaign functionary was stocky, bespectacled Hill Blackett, president of the potent Chicago advertising firm of Blackett-Sample-Hummert, Inc. Titled Director of Public Relations, his job was to broadcast the Republican message by radio, cinema and billboard.

Under Yale Economist Olin Glenn Saxon, the Research Division was digging up the New Deal's past, present & future, grinding out scores of handbooks, pamphlets, leaflets, dodgers chiefly devoted to broken promises and taxes (TIME, Sept. 14). Within it nestled a special Landon speechwriting group, membership unrevealed. But busy at headquarters were Nominee Landon's onetime personal researchers, Charles Phelps Taft II, Earl Howard Taylor, Ralph West Robey, who were transferred from Topeka when the press spotlighted them as a Landon brain trust (TIME, Aug. 3).

Last week Chairman Hamilton turned his attentions briefly to Eastern headquarters in Manhattan, run by the Landon convention floor manager, Massachusetts' genial, bumbling Representative Joseph William Martin Jr. In the opinion of newshawks assigned to cover it. the No. 2 GOP headquarters could do with some of the jacking up which the chairman had furnished in Chicago. One major trouble, complained they, was that Joe Martin's assistant publicity man, onetime Hoover Secretary George Akerson, treated the press as though he were still in the White House.

Money. By Labor Day 1932 the Republican National Committee had spent $96,203 on its Presidential campaign, final cost of which was $2,611,380. Last week Treasurer Charles Barnett ("Barney") Goodspeed, husky Chicago socialite and charitarian, reported to the Clerk of the U. S. House of Representatives that the National Committee had this year received $2,050,655 between June 1 and Sept. 1, spent $1,787,811. Balance on hand was nearly half a million.* Donations of $100 or more accounted for $1,766,343.

Missionaries & money without a gospel, however, are no more effective than a gospel without money & missionaries. To most observers, trying to account last week for the Landon slump during August, the Republican gospel of salvation being preached by Alf Landon on one hand and that being preached by John Hamilton and Frank Knox on the other seemed about as dissonant and confusing to voters as the competing Christianities of a Boston Unitarian and a hard-shell Southern Baptist would be to Hottentot bushmen.

Passions & Prejudices. On July 2, 1936, at a Chicago Party banquet in his honor, new National Chairman Hamilton seconded Nominee Landon's call for a campaign of public education, declared: "We shall appeal throughout the campaign to the intelligence and not to the passions and prejudices of the citizens."

Up & down the land Chairman Hamilton thereupon proceeded to tear into the New Deal with both fists. He assailed "a personal government that has appropriated to itself more of other people's money than any other Administration in American history." He accused the New Deal of favoring big corporations at the expense of small business. He warned of the "makings of a dictatorship." He accused New Dealers of aiming to replace the Constitution with "some other mechanism" or simply with "the vague principles and aspirations of Franklin Roosevelt." "This is a campaign," trumpeted he, "to determine whether the American Government shall continue to be the concern of the American people . . . or whether it shall be surrendered to the sole concern of Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

No political philosopher is John Daniel Miller Hamilton, but in his attack on the Party of Jefferson the current boss of the Party of Hamilton even deserted his great namesake and sided with Alexander Hamilton's archfoe on the historic issue of State rights. Thomas Jefferson would have beamed as this 20th Century Hamilton declared in Democratic Texas last month: "We may not see on every hand proof that the powers of the separate States are being invaded, but all the same we have seen in the last two years set up in Washington a subsidiary central Government which has invaded every State. .

In the same speech, charging the New Deal with attempting to gain its ends "by trickery and force," Chairman Hamilton summed up three years of Roosevelt as follows: "What will the voter choose if he votes to support the Roosevelt Administration? . . . Will he vote for the revival of NRA, for a continuation of politics in relief, for increased and still increasing debt, for uncontrolled spending, for the complete cessation of the Civil Service in Government, for the total loss of all foreign markets, for the still greater increase in the importation of foreign foodstuffs, for Executive control over the value of money, and for complete control of the Government within the Federal Executive? These are the policies which make up the New Deal record."

Not Nice. All this, interspersed with relatively brief praise of Alf Landon as an experienced, economical, common-sense opposite of Franklin Roosevelt, may have been Chairman Hamilton's idea of an educational campaign devoid of appeals to passion and prejudice. Another explanation could be found in a speech which John Hamilton, then the comparatively little-known counsel for the Republican National Committee, delivered to Republican women in Manhattan in July 1935. Speaking from the experience of 22 years in the thick of Kansas politics, he postulated that Herbert Hoover had been beaten by "four years of vicious, dirty, low propaganda," and declared:

"You can't win the coming campaign by being nice. Those Republicans who say we should talk on constructive issues don't know their politics. You beat men in office, you don't elect men. . . . People vote their dislikes. It may not be sportsmanlike to work on that basis, but this is not the time to sit back and be nice."

Hardly had Chairman Hamilton settled down at headquarters last month when Vice Presidential Nominee Frank Knox rolled off by special train on a 22,000-mile swing around the land. Opening up with the thesis that "the New Deal candidate has been leading us toward Moscow," Nominee Knox had by last week grown so virulent against the New Deal that Pennsylvania's Secretary of Banking threatened to put the law on him.

"Turn the Rascals Out," is an ancient and honorable U. S. campaign theme.

But the Hamilton-Knox variations on it were sharply at odds with the strategy of Alf M. Landon.

Baby & Bath. Concluded the New York Herald Tribune's Columnist Dorothy Thompson, after reviewing the current political sentiments of mugwumps like herself: "On the whole they would like to see this Administration go out. They have thought that Governor Landon was their man. But they want to be sure that certain gains that have been made will be consolidated. And that is just what they are beginning to doubt. They are afraid that the baby is going to be thrown out with the bath."

It was at such moderates that moderate Alf Landon, on the counsel of such intimates as Lacy Haynes, Roy Roberts, William Allen White and Charles Phelps Taft, had aimed his campaign. Conservatives and other New Deal haters, he and his advisers figured, would be sure to vote for him in any event. To win, he needed the votes of the middle-of-the-roaders who liked much of the New Deal program but were uneasy about New Deal performance. On that assumption, Nominee Landon had up to last week pursued a campaign of sweet reasonableness, avoiding any violent or wholesale condemnation of the New Deal, endorsing outright or by implication many a New Deal policy, attacking other policies and performances not with specific proposals for reform but with generalities about economy, common sense, freedom and the American way. The only New Deal measure he had condemned specifically was the "cockeyed" corporation surplus tax. His only vigorous general complaint had been against New Deal spending. What he was offering the country, concluded wiseacres, was a cut-rate New Deal.

Trouble with this program was that it, combined with Nominee Landon's deficiency in oratorical fire, had failed to catch on, to kindle the nation's enthusiasm. After the strong beginning supplied by his pre-convention buildup, his bold convention telegram and his overwhelming nomination. Nominee Landon's first campaign tour had been accompanied by a Republican slump. Meanwhile John Hamilton and Frank Knox, both abler orators than the nominee, had been drumming into the country's head the idea that Republicans planned to throw out the New Deal bag & baggage, the baby with the bath. Also meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt, resting the New Deal's case on its popular benefits, its aspirations and the undeniable fact of Recovery, was proceeding with a "non-political" campaign which, as Lacy Haynes' and Roy Roberts' Kansas City Star conceded of his Drought trip, was "politically a huge success."

To Maine. Last week Nominee Landon had planned to advance his cause by receiving Young Republicans at a grand progressive jubilee in Topeka. Then the GOP high command met in Chicago, got Governor Land on the telephone, held long and earnest conversation. That night the Republican nominee abruptly canceled his Topeka jubilee, startled the nation with his most belligerent statement to date. "I am going to Maine," said he, "to help rededicate that State to the good government for which it has always stood and to participate in the first fighting repudiation at the polls of the kind of government this country has had for the last three years."

It was a new Alf Landon who set off for Maine at week's end. "This," he barked en route, "is going to be a fighting campaign. . . ."

In Portland, with a speech no more specific but considerably more pointed than his previous polemic, the nominee began to make good that promise. Plainly Chairman Hamilton had persuaded him that his path of the past three months was leading to defeat. Whether, in seven weeks, the new war-path-- "the fighting campaign" -- could take him to the White House, he would learn on the night of Nov. 3.

*In the same period the Democratic National Committee took in $1,081,768, spent $1,008,840, had $372,002 left.

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