Poetry Is Not Enough

"It's all been arranged for us.

"His views will be ours,

"We shall pervade the earth like an attar . . .

"Smelling of Fish . . .

"Of hail-fellow straw-hat pomposity, passing out hot dogs and free seeds with a glad hand . . .

"For us . . . the hair shirt, the crown of poison ivy, the shame . . ."

So wrote Playwright Maxwell Anderson last May, in a bitter poetic outburst for which the New Yorker paid him $180. What had moved Maxwell Anderson to sad song was a piece of gerrymandering. By redistricting, Anderson's South Mountain Road home in the Hudson River valley had suddenly become a part of Congressman Ham Fish's constituency.

Other expatriate Manhattan intellectuals along wooded South Mountain Road felt equally bitter, if not so poetic. Among them: Artist Henry Varnum Poor, Cartoonist Milton Caniff (Terry & the Pirates), Composer Kurt Weill (Lady in the Dark). So did Helen Hayes, who lives down the river a way. So did several hundred less glamorous citizens--Italian and Polish truck gardeners behind the Hudson Highlands, and rock-ribbed Republicans who peacefully dairy-farm and grow cauliflower in the blue Catskill hills. Each did something about it in his own way: Playwright Anderson used his $180 from the New Yorker as a campaign contribution to beat Fish; Helen Hayes gave the voters a touch of histrionics-on-the-hustings; the hillside folk simply went to the polls. But all of their ballots and all their spirited poetry, and all the opposition of such "outsiders" as Wendell Willkie and Tom Dewey were not enough. The people simply would not rouse.

The vote was very light. The three new counties voted almost 2-to-1 against Fish. But Ham Fish still had enough of his old-line strength in populous Orange County, which had helped send him to Congress twelve times before. Orange County gave Fish a 5,000 majority, enough to win him the Republican nomination over earnest, clean-cut Lawyer Augustus Bennet, 46.

Third-Act Miracle. Playwright Anderson & Co. believe they can still beat Ham Fish in the finals, next November, but their plans are as confusing as the unravelings of a fifth-rate play. Candidate Bennet, who lost on the Republican ticket last week, will run in November on a party ticket of his own--the Good Government Party, with the endorsements of the Democrats and the American Labor Party. (If elected, he has vowed to serve as a Republican.) To accomplish this, Lawyer Bennet must pull a better third-act miracle than any Playwright Anderson ever carried off on the stage. For Ham Fish, no hero to the nation at large, had proved again last week that 24 years of handshaking, letter-writing and asking-about-Aunt Minnie still went big with the folks.

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