Windy Primary

Illinois' No. 1 Democrat, forceful Governor Henry Horner, has been four months sunning his bald head and nursing his ailing heart in Miami, where his entourage last week denied persistent reports that his health might prevent his return to duty. Henry Horner is Illinois' No. 1 Democrat by virtue of the drubbing he gave his erstwhile sponsors, Chicago's Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly and Democratic National Committeeman Patrick A. Nash, when those potent bosses tried to ditch him two years ago. Last week, with Ed Kelly's position as No. 2 Democrat and his chances of reinstating himself as No. i at stake, the hefty, curly-headed, 62-year-old mayor did valiant battle with another Kelly-Nash deserter.

The deserter was disgruntled, grandstanding State's Attorney Thomas J. Courtney, 44, who jumped on the Horner bandwagon when it invaded Chicago. Left stranded when Henry Horner patched up a truce with Bosses Kelly & Nash, Tom Courtney opposed Ed Kelly's renomination on his own hook, raised a hue & cry over Windy City corruption with the aid of Colonel William Franklin Knox's Daily News. Mayor Kelly got practically all other kinds of support available: C. I. O. and A. F. of L., Old Deal and New Deal, the Communist Midwest Daily

Record and the Red-baiting Tribune. This combination produced a Kelly steamroller of 604,000 votes that flattened Renegade Courtney 2-to-1.

Kelly had won short of half the 1,236,456 votes cast in Chicago that day, but Republicans, who cast 274,317 votes, nonetheless took hope for the election April 4. Reason: they had buried their worst local liability, clownish three-time Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson, who in an attempted comeback at 70, complete with sombrero, coonskin coat, open Cadillac but with no new tricks, polled only 62,000 votes. The rest of the Republican vote went to establish a fresher, more attractive party face, that of Lawyer Dwight Herbert ("Pete") Green, 42.

In 1927 Indiana-born Dwight Green went to work as an income-tax expert for U. S. Attorney George E. Q. Johnson, whom he succeeded in 1932. Dwight Green's biggest income-tax case sent Al Capone to prison. He later tried (and failed) to send venerable Samuel Insull to jail for mail fraud. By the time open-faced, athletic, prematurely grey Pete Green retired to his modest private practice (mostly utilities), he had made his way among the solid Republicans who belong to the Union League Club. When they drafted him to stop Thompson, Pete Green gave jowly Big Bill as good as he took.

Hailed by the Republican National Committee as "similar in type to ... Thomas E. Dewey" of New York, Republican Green is expected to give Kelly & crew at least a good workout before election day, April 4. Long-shot bettors pointed out that his primary vote (211,965) was almost as large as that polled by the late Democrat Anton J. ("Tony") Cermak when he upset Chicago's Republicans in 1931.

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