Showman and Scholar in Idaho

The two Idaho Democrats fighting for the Senatorial nomination in next week's primaries are a cowboy crooner and a scholarly country doctor.

Glenn Taylor calls himself Cowboy Taylor. Idaho never was much of a cowboy State, but it has a cowboy cult. Cowboy Taylor rides from town to town on horseback (rumor has it that he motors over the lonely stretches where voters cannot see him). He rides, says he patriotically, to save tires and gas.

His wife, Dora, and their son, Arod, travel ahead in a sound truck, to act as circus advance men. They all put on a show: Glenn sings hillbilly songs, then starts his spiel. A rank isolationist in 1940, he plumps now for total war. In 1940 he called Franklin Roosevelt a bankers' tool; now Cowboy Glenn has nothing but praise for the President. The Cowboy wants a just peace, a planned post-war America.

Glenn Taylor toured the State 15 years ago with a tent show, playing hick dramas to hick audiences. But he boasts that he made better money campaigning for Senator in 1940 (when he won the Democratic nomination but lost the election to Republican John Thomas for the late, great William Borah's seat) than he ever did in show business.

Owen Stratton, his opponent, is 75. He lives in a brick house at the foot of the Continental Divide, practices medicine when it suits him, collects his accounts if he feels his patients are able to afford it, devotes eight hours a day to reading and quoting Adam Smith, Paracelsus', John Stuart Mill.

Dr. Stratton's platform is a supplement, on post-war problems of the U.S. and Britain, to the May issue of FORTUNE, which he mailed to every important Democrat in Idaho. During three terms in the State Senate, he never attended a lobbyist's party, never asked a fellow Senator for a vote, and passed three controversial issues by the main strength of his eloquence.

In dry 1932. in driest Idaho, he courageously ran for Senator on a repeal platform. Although he comes from silver-mining country, he steadily, firmly condemns the Silver Purchase Act as economic idiocy. He was Democratic county chairman in 1940 when Glenn Taylor won the nomination and at once resigned in disgust, announcing that he would support the Republican nominee, who was, said he, an economic illiterate but not quite a complete imbecile. He calls Cowboy Taylor a "goddam pettifogging demagogue."

Newshawks' prediction: Cowboy Glenn Taylor will get the nomination.

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