Iowa Microcosm

Political lightning struck Iowa when Harry Hopkins, boss of WPA and a sitter on the New Deal Olympus, flatly plumped for Representative Otha Donner Wearin in this week's Democratic Senatorial primary (TIME, June 6). What would otherwise have been a routine performance amid the fields of waving corn, with Senator Guy Mark Gillette walking sedately off renominated, was instantly transformed into a microcosm of the national political situation, a furious hurly-burly involving scores of participants far beyond Iowa's borders.

Senator Gillette, backed by the State machine of his colleague Senator Clyde Herring and Governor Nelson G. Kraschel, backed also by Catholics, the A.F of L. and reputedly by Boss Jim Farley, stormed up & down the State denouncing "this gang of political termites . . . boring from within . . . planning on taking over, if possible, the control of the Democratic party organization in 1940." Along with' Harry Hopkins he damned Tommy Corcoran, Congressman Maury Maverick of Texas, Homer Martin of the C.I.O. and Communist Earl Browder as other non-lowans who had unrighteously butted in by endorsing Mr. Wearin. He referred to his vote against the President's Supreme Court bill as "my crime . . . which has brought down upon me and my candidacy this pack of political wolves from all over the United States."

Otha Wearin, meantime, was playing up the Hopkins endorsement for all it was worth. It made him, he insisted, manifestly the anointed choice of the White House. Scornfully he exposed an effort by Senator Herring to get him to sign a post-primary peace agreement with Senator Gillette. This, he said, was an insidious effort by the Senators to suggest that

President Roosevelt was more interested in party unity in Iowa than in the primary's outcome. Two days before the polls opened, he suddenly was able to play a political trump almost as big as the Hopkins endorsement. To his friend, Lawyer Ed G. Dunn of Mason City, came this telegram:

"Dear Ed:

"I am informed that a story is being circulated that I canceled a trip I proposed to make in Iowa in behalf of the candidacy of Otha Wearin during my recent visit to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester. Minn.

"This is a deliberate misrepresentation intended to injure my friend, Otha Wearin.

"I had no such plans to come to Iowa because my doctors would not have permitted them.

"If I had such plans, you may be sure I would have kept them.

"You have my full authority to use this statement.

"James Roosevelt"

Triumphantly "My Friend Otha" concluded his campaign: "The issue is clear. It is simply a question of whether Iowa wants to go forward with Roosevelt or backward with his enemies!"

Thus it was that when Iowa's votes were counted, it seemed to matter little that a lot of other candidates were nominated for a lot of other offices; that former Senator Lester Jesse Dickinson beat Representative Lloyd Thurston for the Republican nomination for Senator. Looming with a significance precisely equal to what others of other States might read into it was the Democratic Senatorial result: Gillette over Wearift by about 2-to-1. Three other Democratic candidates polled negligible votes.

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