The Thunderer

Millions of Americans remember him best as a television star, a skinny, wrathful old man with the fervor of an evangelist. For weeks in 1951, as the Kefauver crime investigation held the U.S. public spellbound before their TV sets, New Hampshire's Senator Charles William Tobey stole scene after scene from Estes Kefauver, Rudolph Halley and the parade of squirming gangsters and sweating politicians. Tobey's righteous anger touched a responsive public nerve. Most of the watching public wanted, as Tobey did. to cut the gangsters down to size. His Yankee homilies, Bible quotations and Latin cliches were from another era, a fresh New Hampshire breeze in the midst of the sordid drama.

"It Is High Time." Glaring from under his celebrated green eyeshade, Tobey looked like a New England schoolmaster, scolding his knuckleheaded pupils. "Fairy tales! More fairy tales!" he snorted. "Smells unto heaven." "You're playing ducks and drakes with us!" When he wanted to, Tobey could be withering. Gambler Frank Erickson was goaded by Tobey's needling into admitting that he was a bookmaker--an admission that led indirectly to Erickson's jail sentence. And Frank Costello was all but beneath Tobey's frosty contempt. "What have you ever done for your country?" Tobey thundered--and listened contemptuously to Costello's halting reply: "I pay my taxes."

When Tobey exhorted the nation to rise above sin and return to its virtuous old ways, he evoked the faint tinkle of a Salvation Army tambourine. "When the hearts of men and women are touched," he cried, "they take their inspiration from the Master of Men, and then we will have . . . in this nation a nation in which dwelleth righteousness--and before God it is high time." No one doubted Tobey's sincerity; he spoke from the heart. Once, he was so moved by his own eloquence that he burst into tears.

A true son of New England, Tobey became a chicken farmer in Temple, N. H. a few years after leaving the Roxbury (Mass.) Latin School in 1895. On winter mornings he sent his four children off to school with fresh-baked potatoes clenched in their hands to ward off frostbite. Summer afternoons Tobey invited his neighbors over for an outdoor hymn-sing, which he always led, pounding the old upright piano and rolling out the words in a stentorian baritone. In 1910 in Boston, after hearing Charles Evans Hughes denounce political corruption, Tobey was so impressed that he followed Hughes's carriage around the city in a daze. Then & there he decided to leave the chickens and go after the dragons of politics.

"If He Tells the Truth." He never lost an election. For two of his six years in the state house of representatives, he was speaker; for both of his two years in the state senate, he was senate president. In 1930, when he was governor, Tobey uncovered a scandal (the widespread practice of corporal punishment) in a New Hampshire asylum for delinquent girls and deposed the institution's board chairman. In 1933 he went to Congress, moved up to the Senate in 1939. When Senator Tobey blocked the appointment of Oilman Edwin Pauley as Under Secretary of the Navy, Harry Truman wrote him an angry letter, scrawled "Come and see me" across the bottom. "Who does he think he is?" sputtered Tobey. "Mae West?"

Despite a cerebral hemorrhage two years ago, Tobey continued to scold and thunder for the ways of righteousness. Last week in his Senate office, just two days after his 73rd birthday, he collapsed with a heart attack. In the hospital a few hours later he died peacefully, in his sleep. "No man need fear God or the devil," he once said, "if he tells the truth."

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