Pumps & Polls

Just how to lend & spend $2,816,905,000 to halt Depression II was the main subject before the Senate last week. Mississippi's Bilbo explained for four hours how to end Depression II by sending the South's unemployed Negroes back to Africa. Illinois' J. Ham Lewis, the Administration's whip, created a minor sensation by crying: "How can we continue the present state without completely exhausting the Treasury? Such a program [of relief] will not only exhaust the Treasury but will exhaust the capacity of the taxpayer to pay further." But the pump-priming debate was soon drowned out by a poll-priming wrangle.

Montana's bitter, nasal Wheeler announced he had just learned that Harry Hopkins, Works Progress Administrator, dispenser of one-half of the billions in the Lend-Spend bill, had announced his choice for Senator in Iowa's impending primary election. Said Mr. Wheeler: "I was shocked. . . . Members of the Senate, and myself, frequently have denounced corporations which place slips in the pay envelopes saying, 'You should vote for such & such a candidate.'

"Mr. Hopkins, for whom I have always had a high regard, is supposedly carrying out a Governmental relief program on a non-partisan and non-political basis. Yet his statement says in effect to the relief workers in Iowa: 'You people ought to vote for Mr. Wearin and vote against Senator Gillette.' . . '.

"Congress in appropriating for the relief of the underprivileged never intended that those funds should be utilized to slaughter a member of this body. . . . Has the Congress builded a Frankenstein over which it has no control?* Is this a robot which is to trample roughshod over its creators, just because one of the cogs or buttons that animate it does not like the color of a Senator's hair?"

While other Senators joined the hue & cry. Majority Leader Barkley got in touch with Harry Hopkins. That very day the campaign manager of Governor "Happy" Chandler of Kentucky (a candidate this year for Barkley's Senate seat) had published a letter to President Roosevelt in which he charged, with affidavits to match, that WPA jobs in Kentucky were only for Barkley voters. Said Mr. Barkley, specially anxious to quell the storm of poll-priming indignation:

"Mr. Hopkins in my judgment did not volunteer that statement in order to influence a vote in Iowa, but simply made it in reply to an inquiry from a newspaper man. The Senate will realize how difficult sometimes it is to avoid answering a newspaper inquiry. . . ."

But soon all Washington learned just how hard Harry Hopkins had tried to "avoid" his predicament.

Otha Donner Wearin is a 35-year-old farmer from the Vale of Nishna near Hastings, Iowa. He wears a permanent red necktie, has some ability at hog-calling, writes for farm papers. In the Roosevelt avalanche of 1932 he slid into the House but was not conspicuously New Dealish (he voted against AAA and NRA) until lately, when he has run with Maury Maverick's "Young Turks."

Aspiring to contest the Senate seat of Iowa's Guy Mark Gillette, Otha Wearin was encouraged when that handsome statesman fell into bad repute with the White House by voting against the President's Supreme Court bill last year. He was further encouraged by certain Administration lieutenants who believed that if they could get a Wearin nominated for the Senate in so pivotal a State as Iowa, it would put the fear of F. D. R. into Democratic Senators even more recalcitrant than Gillette.

One day last week, Otha Wearin called the press to tell them the Administration was for him. Prove it, said the press. Ask anybody--ask Harry Hopkins, said Mr. Wearin. To Mr. Hopkins went the press, but he would say nothing. Then Mr. Hopkins changed his mind. Washington newshawks were fairly well satisfied that he had been spoken to by adroit, finagling Tommy Corcoran of the President's political staff. His pressagent called in able Correspondent Richard L. Wilson of the potent Des Moines Register and Tribune. Wilson wrote out what Mr. Hopkins said to him and handed it back for approval: "If I were still voting in Iowa,I would vote for Wearin on his record." Mr. Hopkins, not quite sure if he had ever voted in his native Iowa, struck out "still," gave Wilson his release.

The Significance. Depending on their sympathies, observers regarded the poll-priming furor as either: 1) the beginning of a hard-boiled Party purge which by 1940 might result in a serious Democratic schism; or 2) the pained but pointless howling of anti-New Dealers who, if driven into the wilderness, would have no other place to go.

*The Senate must confirm the appointment of any WPA appointee whose salary is $5,000 or more per year.

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