Practical Politics

WASHINGTON CALLING!--Marquis W. Childs-Morrow ($2.50).

Washington Calling! fictionally rakes old-fashioned muck-raking--dedicated to the subservience of politics to big business --but with an agreeable, new-fangled urbanity.

Ex-Senator Charley Squires of Mishawauka, the story's 59-year-old hero, had a private law practice in Washington which netted him $60,000 a year. He lived in a Tudor house, had a nice nestegg in a London bank, stood in well with his party's national committee, had built up good-will by planting the right people in every bureau and department in the Capital. A widower for many years, he let friendly rich widows assist with the social side of his career. At home he was pampered by his beautiful 27-year-old daughter Darnell, who traveled with the "sad young men in the foreign service--touched a little by reading Proust," slept with a handsome swimming instructor who "smelt like a spaniel that's just had a bath," brooded over missing out on a rich, titled Englishman. The Senator's sorrows were bad arteries, a dipsomaniac sister. President Winthrop's "New Age" amateurs swarming over Washington. In spite of the perfect April weather he got to his office in a fit of the blues, moped through the morning over the vanished glories of his past, looked sadly at his trout flies.

What raised his spirits was a telephone call from the Esterbrook brothers, who were in Washington to arrange a $64,000,000 Government loan to save their shaky railroad empire. They had the okay of the F. R. A. but needed one from the Federal court in their own district. Their regular judge had just died. Senator Squires' job would be to see that the right judge took his place. The Senator and Darnell visited the Esterbrooks' empire estate to arrange terms. Darnell discovered shy young Bob Esterbrook, whose reserve soon vanished on his later visit to Washington. The Senator got his $100,000 fee. a quarter down, the balance to be paid C. O. D. But delivering the goods was worth every cent of it. The first hitch was when old Senator Mayne of Mishawauka said the candidate was incompetent, refused to endorse him. Unexpected opposition came from influential Ferris Branolsky, a tireless fanatic in tracing the smells from big receiverships. The first obstacle to be removed was old Senator Mayne, who died of a stroke in a heroic but futile filibuster against a routine bill to pay foreign bond holders in present devalued currency. It took a good deal of very practical politics, but the appointment assuring Charley Squires' $100,000 was droned out unopposed in the hectic closing session of the Senate.

The Author. Son of a Clinton, Iowa, lawyer, 34-year-old, soft-spoken Marquis William Childs is a graduate of the Uni-versity of Wisconsin. He taught freshman English at the University of Iowa, worked for United Press in Chicago, Detroit, New York, St. Louis. On leave of absence from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to do Sunday articles on the Swedish co-operative movement, he later expanded his survey into Sweden: The Middle Way, published by the Yale University Press (1936), which immediately became a best-seller (25,000 copies sold to date). He thinks he must have written Washington Calling! in his sleep during the past year of heavy newspaper assignments over the U. S. His first published novel, it is his fourth try at fiction; of the three unpublished books, he hopes to salvage one. With his wife, a former St. Louis schoolteacher, and two children he lives in the Washington suburb of Somerset, Md. in an odd house copied from a German model in Hamburg. Unlike most authors, who never voluntarily stay long in Washington, he likes that city best of any he has seen.

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