Wisconsin Primaries

CAMPAIGN Wisconsin Primaries

President Roosevelt's fever came down (from 99.2DEG to normal). Back at his big desk again for a morning's work, he lunched with Wisconsin's trapmouthed Senator Robert Marion La Follette Jr.

Whereupon everyone else's fever went up. For on April 2 some 750,000 voters in Wisconsin will swarm to polling-booths in a Presidential primary, will then & there settle the political hash of GOPresumptives Arthur Vandenberg or Thomas E. Dewey. Senator La Follette last week had become "Good Old Bob," a man whom many new friends were trying to influence. Representing a rock-bottom (1938) legion of 353,000 Progressive voters in a wide-open primary, his nod might mean the difference between success & failure to hundreds of big & little shots.

In what direction would he nod? Guesses: 1) toward the pro-Roosevelt Democratic slates, 2) toward Arthur Vandenberg. No one expected him to come to the aid of "Buster" Dewey. First guess seemed the best, for Bob La Follette is a veteran New Dealer, strong for every fibre of the President's domestic program, against him on only two major matters: La Follette is isolationist, believes fanatically in an if-you-can't-pay-don't-go fiscal policy. Messrs. Roosevelt & La Follette pair naturally, and each is beholden to the other. Yet Vandenbergers kept up their hopes, issued brave statements in Wisconsin that Vandenberg & La Follette are as close as identical twins.

Meantime aggressive Mr. Dewey moved toward Wisconsin, routing defeatism as he went. Handsome, happy, healthy as a horse, Tom Dewey celebrated his 38th birthday last week, laid out a speechmaking path that would whirl him through the Badger State in a two-day, 20-stop gale just before Primary Day.

Alarmed Vandenbergers begged their chief to make a stand against this onslaught-- one speech, only one. But the Senator stood pat on his let-it-come-to-me position, wrote to friends: ". . . The Presidential decision this year is too desperately important. . . . The choice of the convention should flow from the deliberative judgment of the American people and not from the transient impulse of a campaign tour."

One thing seemed clear: to remain visibly in the race, either Mr. Dewey or Mr. Vandenberg must beat the other by a whacking majority. A close margin should cancel them both out, leave the real contest between Ohio's Robert A. Taft and assorted dark horses.

The ballot that confronted Wisconsin voters was a complex maze. For Roosevelt there were two slates: one an anti-Hoover-Democrat group headed by Gustave Keller, Appleton lawyer, chummy with La Folletteers; one a "Roosevelt-Farley" ticket, headed by Charles E. Broughton, Sheboygan politician, made up of machine Democrats. For John Nance Garner was a slate bossed by John J. Slocum, Assembly clerk, expected to attract many an anti-Term III voter who would rather protest a Roosevelt re-election than choose between Messrs. Dewey and Vandenberg.

A mouse in a labyrinth could not be more confused than many a voteful Wisconsin citizen, thus confronted with a dizzying array of blanks for his X. But out of Wisconsin's confusion the U. S. hoped to make a pattern of political sense.

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