Mr. Pew at Valley Forge

(See Cover)

On primary election day last week the sun shone April-fresh on Philadelphia--clear and mild on the bright brass knockers and white Georgian lintels, on the upthrust fingers of factory chimneys above the staring ranks of grimy windows, on the ranked shabbiness of the miles of identical little houses, on the grey enormity of City Hall.

Spring breezes ruffled the sample ballots tacked (illegally) on doorways, fluttered the big tricolor badges of Senator Joe Guffey's busy Democratic heelers (mostly union men on holiday). But for the Republicans it was not a nice April day. Up & down Philadelphia, as all over the State, guttered a stream of G. O. P. grumbles.

Into the midtown back rooms and side-door polling places (Pine and Hicks and Camac and Panama Streets) went G. 0. P. workers with sour faces, empty pockets. For the first time in many a heeler's memory not one dollar had come from headquarters to pay the watchers & "workers" at the polls. Even the sample ballots had not been paid for; one ward leader had to meet a $117 printing bill himself.

To old Eighth Warders this parsimony verged on blasphemy. What would the Eighth's old saloon-frequenting boss, Good Time Buck Devlin, have said of this stinginess? Or Mr. Devlin's peers--Senator Boies Penrose, Senator Matthew Stanley Quay, "Iz" Durham, or the three Vare brothers from the Neck (South Philadelphia)?

No longer ago than 1938, "Market Street" had ladled out a plump $100 per division to knock out old Gifford Pinchot's third try at the Governorship; that fall, when Republican Arthur Horace (Breaker Boy) James tossed the Little New Deal of Governor George H. Earle III out of Harrisburg, Republican committeemen carried rolls of at least $100 per division. And in 1939's mayoralty fight, an alleged cascade of currency from the offices of G. 0. P. City Chairman Jay Cooke won the election between 4 and 6 p.m. with a $100-per-division allotment.

But to unpaid, disgruntled Republican workers last week went a reassuring whisper from the offices of Mr. Cooke: the pot was being saved for the November attack on the New Deal, would be all the bigger then. After all, the nomination of bald, affable Mr. Cooke for U. S. Senator was a cinch (result: Cooke, around 650,000; Albert H. Ladner, of Philadelphia, about 200,000).

Boss Pew had decided to hold a thrifty primary.

Joseph Newton Pew Jr. is a new kind of boss for Pennsylvania--and the Keystone State has seen all kinds. Like his lusty, finagling predecessors, Joe Pew is in politics because he wants something. What makes Oilman Pew different is that all he wants is a Republican U. S. Government.

King, Judge, Dukes. In 1860 a For-Lincoln-Before-Chicago man was James McManes, an Irish Presbyterian immigrant who politicked his way from cotton-mill bobbin-boy to the top of Philadelphia's "Gas Trust." In 1865 "King" McManes formed Philadelphia's habit of burying the Democratic Party. The political pattern in Pennsylvania was for 70 years after: 1) that old families, business and the Republican ticket were respectable, Democrats and reformers were not; 2) that Republicans were regarded as the guardians of the protective tariff and thus of the American way of life; 3) that Pennsylvania should always go Republican in national elections.

The "King" died a multimillionaire, happy in the fact that he had stopped a third term for Ulysses S. Grant. A onetime brickmaker's apprentice, genial "Judge" Israel W. Durham, took over, carried on the pattern until 1905, finally died of what was termed "paralysis of the heart"--which was no surprise to some cynical Philadelphia taxpayers. After him came "The Dukes," the three Vare brothers, sons of a South Philadelphia hog-breeder: 1) George, one of the "King's" lieutenants, a contractor; 2) Edwin H., an ashman who extended his control of the neck to most of Philadelphia, died in 1922 controlling most of Pennsylvania's politicos and courts; 3) William, the youngest, whom the U. S. Senate refused to seat (1927-29), on the ground that he had bought the election, although not many Senators could refute Mr. Vare's understandably angry argument that many of their elections had cost more per vote, more per capita, and more per voting district than his. It was Bill Vare's plump for Herbert Hoover in 1928 that nominated the Great Engineer at Kansas City.

Giants. Overlord of all Pennsylvania from the '80s until 1904 was Matthew Stanley Quay, a stocky strategist with miscast eyes who made greed a fine art. Matt Quay, who shared national Republican power with Ohio's Mark Hanna, had a simple philosophy: "When a politician dies he leaves only what is found on him.'' Boss Quay sold offices, gambled with public funds, looted banks, racketeered in public contracts, drove at least a dozen men to suicide, ran Pennsylvania with a precise regard for 1) personal pelf, 2) the Republican Party as the guarantor of the protective tariff, which in turn guaranteed more G. O. P. votes and more pillage. Dark, withered, saturnine, cautious. Matt Quay was the opposite in every way but ruthlessness to Boies Penrose, the arrogant, 6 ft. 4 in. aristocrat who was in turn Quay's protege, partner, successor.

Boss Penrose, who came from Good Time Buck Devlin's Eighth Ward, was that handsome that doors opened of them selves when he passed a lady's house (Mr. Devlin's own words--from Walter Daven port's Power and Glory). Penrose also had a simple credo: "The people will stand anything from a politician who refrains from annoying them." Boss Penrose, one of whose shoes was laced with a corset-string the day he met Matt Quay, despised personal graft as cheap pocket-picking, lived mostly for the pleasures of the flesh,* and for the perpetuation of high tariffs. Mr. Penrose was a member of the U. S. Senate from 1897 through 1920, but he never achieved his heart's desire: to be mayor of Philadelphia. His nomination was thwarted by a photograph which showed him leaving a celebrated brothel at daybreak.

More aptly than cold Quay or Rabelaisian Penrose, Joseph Ridgway Grundy, who lives in and owns Bristol, Pa., for 40-odd years has symbolized in Pennsylvania the well-fed forces of conservatism. Mr. Grundy, 77, still rosy of cheek and twinkly of eye behind round gold-rimmed spectacles, with his round, white-fringed face, round little body, is a combination of Pickwick and Foxy Grandpa. Last week Mr. Grundy was resting in Florida, but with the full onset of spring he is expected back soon in the once-beautiful riverfront village which industrialism has made into an ugly mill town.

The deceptively mellow Mr. Grundy--who falls into Quaker "thee"-saying if he is enraged--was the uncrowned King of Lobbyists in the U. S. from McKinley days until the New Deal years. His sincere passion is for government by a Republican who will interfere in business just enough, never too much. Every tariff bill since 1897 is marked with Joe Grundy's cunning hand. In nearly every smoke-filled room that nominated a G. O. P. candidate since that day, wise, cold, realistic Mr. Grundy has sat, filling the room with smoke and influence. His role in the Party was to collect the funds that subsidized heelers and won elections. He persistently opposed labor legislation, old-age pensions because such laws cost businessmen money. The Smoot-Hawley tariff bill he still regards as his masterpiece. A bachelor, he wears high button shoes, smokes Havana cigars, burns Texas oil instead of Pennsylvania coal in his plants because it's cheaper.

The Vares are out, Quay and Penrose are dead, Joe Grundy is superannuated. The man who ran the G. O. P. in Pennsylvania last week was Mr. Joseph Pew.

Boss: 1940 Type. Joe Pew, vice president of the $146,431,484 Sun Oil Co., the latest in the line of Pennsylvania bosses, is unlike these political ancestors in every respect but one: he too thinks the salvation of the U. S. is bound up with the Republican Party. (It is no contradiction in fact that he would accept, and be happy under, John Nance Garner as President.) Like his predecessors, Joe Pew is spending pots of money to bring about a G. O. P. victory. Unlike them, he spends his own money. Since 1934 Joe Pew and his immediate family (Brother John Howard, Sisters Mabel Pew Myrin and Mary Ethel Pew, Nephews Arthur E. Jr. and John G.) have anointed the Republican Party with an estimated $2,000,000. They expect to spend a great deal more before Nov. 5, and much of it outside Philadelphia, outside Pennsylvania. They do not regret one dollar.

The previous protectors of Pennsylvania were all take and no give; Boss Pew is just the opposite. This difference was important to all U. S. citizens last week, will be important to them from now on. For Mr. Pew is likely to have veto power on the G. O. P.'s Presidential nominee this year, and 1940, except for Franklin Roosevelt, daily looks more & more like a Republican year. Boss Pew has one major requirement of the GOPresidential nominee: he must damn the New Deal wholeheartedly.

The Pew family emerged in Titusville, Pa. in 1874, when Mary Anderson, whose family had pioneered in the oil fields, married Joseph Newton Pew (Welsh-English-Scottish-Irish, with a dash of Dutch and Palatinate blood), descendant of pre-Revolutionary traders, who had religious scruples against selling Indians fire water. After a massacre of settlers at Bushy Run, the early Pews developed practical scruples against selling Indians powder & shot. These scruples brought trade to a standstill, and the Pews became farmers. In 1859 they got in on Pennsylvania's first oil boom, struck it rich, stayed that way. Joseph Pew Sr. bought up oil properties right & left, moved to Philadelphia, died there in 1912, founder of Sun Oil Co., a Presbyterian bulwark, philanthropist, multimillionaire.

On Nov. 12, 1886, in a stone house on Pittsburgh's dourly fashionable North Highland Avenue, Joseph Jr. was born. There, in a city belching smoke, steel and dollars, he was brought up, educated at Shadyside Academy and Cornell. From 1908 to 1914 young Joe learned the oil business--five nights without sleep bringing in a new Illinois well, driving eight-ox teams with loads of pipe through West Virginia mud, laying a 20-mile stretch of solid-mahogany corduroy-road in Venezuela. During World War I he joined Sun Oil's Philadelphia office as aide to Elder Brother John Howard, who is a little taller, greyer, soberer. In 1916 Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. had been founded in Chester, Pa. largely to build oil tankers. Under shrewd Pew management Sun Shipbuilding became one of the biggest of its kind; money rolled in. Joe Pew married a Philadelphia girl, Alberta Hensel, quietly joined social life along the Main Line, raised a healthy brood, settled in swank Ardmore.

Education. Boss Pew still winces when he recalls that he "fell for" Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. He continued to support the New Deal until NRA tried to fix oil prices and regulate the ruggedly individualistic oil industry. This was too much for Joe Pew. Said he: "Price-fixing is an evil, wicked thing." Every time the price of gasoline is raised 1-c-, he figures, exactly 6 1/4% of the total business dries up. He believes that price-fixing and production-curtailment, beyond ordinary conservation, are sins against God and Nature.

Mr. Pew became convinced that the New Deal was a gigantic political scheme to raze U. S. business to a dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs. In this conviction he is deadly serious. He regards the New Dealers as brigands & thugs, intent on robbing U. S. voters of their precious heritage of independence, on stifling free enterprise --a band of evil men masquerading as humanitarians. If by some evil chance Roosevelt should be re-elected in 1940, it will mean, he thinks, the end of the road, the death of the American way. When he talks of this nefarious possibility, his big eyebrows twitch, his face darkens. Said he last week: "The Republican Party stands today where the Continental Army stood at Valley Forge, and if Haym Salomon and Robert Morris could empty their purses to keep that army alive, so can we." (Few days later, Governor Arthur Horace James used the same language in a speech at Indianapolis, Ind.)

NRA in oil made Mr. Pew mad; a practical man, he took his wrath to Republican headquarters in Washington to see how such nonsense could be stopped. Mr. Pew envisioned a big, bustling, businesslike office; instead, he found the office deserted except for underlings and one minor official who had dropped in to answer his social correspondence. Joe Pew was not only mad but disgusted. He entrained for Pennsylvania in the comforting belief that there at least the Republican Party could always be found at work. He couldn't find it. Mr. Pew put his convictions and dollars to work. He became Pennsylvania's G. O. P. boss by the simple but tremendous expedient of putting up the money.

He bought the Farm Journal (circulation, about 1,000,000), later merged it with The Farmer's Wife, pumped it full of Republicanism to recall the rural vote to its senses.

In 1935 he picked a candidate for mayor, thought the election was in the bag, and went salmon-fishing off Anacostia Island. When he got back, he found his candidate had been scared out of the race by the late Samuel Davis Wilson, a loud. belchy, vigorous, utility-baiting, renegade Democrat, who campaigned with such ear-catching phrases as: "Before I get through I'll take all the oil out of Pew--Pew . . .!"

That lesson cost Joe Pew an estimated $200,000, taught him never to go away till an election was safely over. In 1936 he had another setback as he helplessly watched Kansas' Alf Landon become the G. O. P. choice; loyally he bought tons of sun flower badges, tons of propaganda; bitterly he heard gentle Mr. Landon soft-pedal attacks on the New Deal. Today mention of Alf Landon is likely to make Mr. Pew sneer: "Is he a Republican?"

Professional. Two zeros in two innings only got Boss Pew's blood up. The turning tide of 1937's Supreme Court reorganization bill, the sit-down strikes, 1938's purge campaign, stiffened his sinews. For Governor of Pennsylvania Mr. Pew settled on an undersized, sorrel-shagged, boom-voiced judge from the hard coal fields, Arthur H. James, the Welsh "breaker boy."

Boss Pew went to work on Philadelphia with the substance ward-heelers understand best; Judge James took his corny, Bible-spouting technique upstate to the biggest crowds since Billy Sunday. Pennsylvania's voters, ignoring Judge James's canny tactic of holding on to his well-paid ($18,000) bench seat while campaigning,* elected him by the largest majorities in the State's history.

Five days after election day, Boss Pew sailed for Europe, telling Governor-elect James he wanted no voice in cabinet-naming, or in any other plush perquisite. Doubtless Messrs. McManes, Durham, Penrose and the Brothers Vare flopped over in their graves. They wouldn't have understood Mr. Pew.

Not satisfied with merely local efforts, Boss Pew also went after national reorganization of the G. 0. P. He upheld the hand of John Daniel Miller Hamilton as national Republican chairman, insisted on vigorous shaking-up all along the line. From the Washington Post he picked a Maryland Democrat, Franklyn Waltman, who had been cannonading the New Deal daily, gave him a three-year contract at $20,000 a year to become head GOPropagandist.

Impatient with bumbling Senator James J. ("Puddler Jim") Davis, Boss Pew this year determined to get himself a real voice in Congress. His eye fell first on Henning Webb Prentis Jr., Lancaster, Pa. linoleum tycoon. But Mr. Prentis preferred the presidency of the National Association of Manufacturers, whence he could denounce the Wagner Act without being interrupted. Jay Cooke IV, Philadelphia's Republican city chairman, was No. 2 choice.

On the first ballot in the Republican National Convention this year Joe Pew will cast his own vote, and dictate 71 others, for Governor James. He is not, however, committed to Mr. James, prefers to hold his 72 votes as a trading-point for a candidate who can win. He has long been interested in Ohio's cherubic Governor John William Bricker. He refuses to take seriously the candidacy of New York's hustling Thomas Edmund Dewey (he likes Mr. Dewey personally, contributed to the Dewey 1938 campaign for Governor, but is believed to view Dewey's backers with alarm). Mr. Pew, like all G. O. P. bosses, wants a man who can win. He thinks Ohio's Senator Robert Alphonso Taft would make a good President but only a fair campaign; he admires Michigan's Senator Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg but is convinced Mr. Vandenberg isn't trying.

At his side Boss Pew can count on Joe Grundy, Pittsburgh's Ernest Weir, New Deal-hating steelman whom Mr. Pew established as G. O. P. finance chairman (over protests of such liberals as Massachusetts' Joe Martin); Pittsburgh's Picklemaker Howard Heinz; Lancaster's Prentis; and not least, Mrs. Worthington Scranton of Scranton, the snap-eyed official convention hostess, who lately gave this zippy advice to Republican ladies, "Let's park the corset of hidebound policies, and vamp the voters of America." Mrs. Scranton, who sensibly has not parked her own corset, in June will initiate Republican outlanders into the joys of Philadelphia pepper pot, the shock of scrapple at breakfast.

Price. For his political power, Joseph Pew is paying a high price, not measurable in the $2,000,000-plus which he has given his party in the last six years. Scorned by his party's liberals, he is held up in the U. S. Senate as the personification of corrupt politics. Last week Wendell Willkie (see p. 19) told a Philadelphia reporter: "I don't know Joe Pew but I am 100% against his policy of turning the Republican Party back to the days of Harding and Coolidge."

But Boss Pew went on raking in money from oil wells and shipyards, shoveling it out to heelers and henchmen. Said he last week, as he often has before: "You can't get votes by advertising for them." In Sun Oil Co. there is prosperity, despite that man in the White House. Sun Oil's policy is generally anti-union but pro-employe ; there has never been a layoff. The wages of its 15,000 employes have steadily been increased, and the company has been in the van of technological progress in the oil industry.

Joe Pew's main job these days is poli tics, not business, and it is a fulltime job. When he can get away from his political muttons he likes to go to his magnificent 1,500-acre Warwick Farms in upper Chester County, where every prospect pleases.

There he weekended last week, driving up from Philadelphia through Valley Forge Park. There he looked over his stable of superb working Percherons (sired by mighty Fallowfield Buck, a pedigreed stallion bought from his friend Lammot du Pont) ; Brandy, his big Virginia hunter, favorite of his stables; dozens of new calves; his herd's milking records. He lunched with kindly, pretty Mrs. Pew in the mansion-house--a broad, yellowstone Pennsylvania farmhouse with a vast fireplace, beamed ceilings, wide-board floors. Over the rolling, spring-green hills he looked and said, with his quick, humorless smile: "I get about three tons of manure off the pasture every year. The New Deal can't take that away from me." And, with a twitch of his bushy eyebrows: "If I'm busted in November, and the Republicans have won, I'll be satisfied."

* Before breakfast, 1/2 gal. of buttermilk. Typical breakfast: 1 doz. fried eggs, a huge 1/2-in.-thick slice of ham, 1 doz. hard rolls, 1 qt. black coffee. Dinner: 1 doz. raw oysters, chicken gumbo, terrapin stew, two canvasback ducks, mashed potatoes, lima beans, macaroni, asparagus, cole slaw, stewed corn, 1 hot mince pie, 1 qt. coffee; 1 bottle sauterne, 1 qt. champagne, several cognacs. He particularly liked a 7-lb. beefsteak, 1 1/2-in. thick, so rare it was hardly warm.. * A violation of a major canon of the American Bar Association, which, however, never peeped until some time after Judge James had been safely elected.

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