Of Yesteryear

Scribbling on a tavern table, inflamed with love and drink, the great scamp of poets, null Villon, asked: "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" A political observer might be tempted to ask the same question, with some-what less of pathos and something more of irony: "Twenty months ago a struggle for the Presidency commenced. But where are the men, the issues, of that yesteryear? Then was the springtime of political hope. Now is the autumn of political fruition. But where are the snows whence sprang this herbage?"

Under the Old President. Warren Gamaliel Harding was President in that March of 1923, when the 67th Congress was passing and the prospect of the 1924 election was first discussed. He had swung the Limitation of Arma ments Conference to rather more than expected success -- a great achievement whose limitations were not yet perceived. However, the kindhearted, human Harding-- cabineted by Secretaries Hughes, Mellon, Hoover, on the one hand; by Fall, Daugherty, Denby, on the other -- had not found all his road smooth. Congress-- the Congress with Senator Knute Nelson, Samuel E. Nicholson, La Baron B. Colt, Frank B. Brandegee, Wm. P. Dillingham-- all missing now -- had made him trouble. It he had had to veto ; it had turned down his ship subsidy ; and when he surprised it in its closing hours with a proposal in its closing hours with a proposal that the U. S. should enter the World Court with reservations, the Senate had refused to agree by a two to one vote. Indeed, the Senate had adjourned without the customary vote of thanks to the rather insignificant, the entirely silent, the "stern and rockbound" Vice President. Senator Heflin, the ebullient Alabaman, had prevented it because the Vice President had sustained a point of order of the learned senior Senator Lodge from Massachusetts and had, thereby, as Mr. Heflin put it, "participated in a rape of the rules of the United States Senate." But nobody cared greatly; even the Republicans were inclined to the opinion that they would "ditch this dumb Vice President" when they came to making up their ticket for 1924.

That same Congress was passing; and the presidential timber was beginning to put forth its springtime tendrils. Senator Oscar W. Underwood sailed for Europe, saying that he would consider his candidacy when he returned. Hopeful Senator Hiram W. Johnson went overseas--looking perhaps for ammunition to fire at President Harding's foreign policy. The name of Henry Ford was on the tip of many a tongue. William G. McAdoo was paving his path to the Democratic Convention. President Harding, bent on a deserved rest, turned south to Florida; and Senator William E. Borah, going home to Idaho, stopped at Akron, Ohio, to remark that a third party in 1924 was "not impossible, not even improbable."

On the front pages of the press, the subject of discussion was the President's World Court proposal, the suggestion that it might split the Republican Party. Interspersed with this matter were accounts of the President's vacationing in Florida--his trips aboard the Pioneer (the houseboat of Edward B. McLean), his foursomes at golf with Mr. McLean, Albert D. Lasker (the then Chairman of the Shipping Board), and Charles G. Dawes (the former Director of the Budget). Before the vacation was over, Harry M. Daugherty, Attorney General, caused a small furor by announcing that Mr. Harding's hat was in the ring for 1924.

Then came the final, fatal trip, the journey of President and Mrs. Harding westward across the Continent, leaving the White House in the process of renovation--not knowing that the mansion was being made ready for a new tenant. As Elbert H. Gary gave word that the steel mills were going to give up their 12-hour day, as Edward W. Bok offered a prize of $100,000 for a practical peace plan and announced a committee in charge of the award, including as a member one John W. Davis, quondam Ambassador to the Court of St. James--speeding west beyond the Mississippi, in sweltering June and July, President and Mrs. Harding were entertained by farmers, Mormon elders, cowboys, pioneers, Indians--as far as Alaska. There Mr. Harding became ill--the first untoward event of the trip. Then homeward they came; a glorious stop at Vancouver; a collision at night with a destroyer in the mists of Puget Sound; a review of the fleet; a terribly strenuous day in Seattle; indigestion; bronchial pneumonia; abrupt termination of the trip at San Francisco; a stroke of apoplexy--death. (TIME, Aug. 13).

Thus, with tragic swiftness, came the ending of the first chapter of the tale.

Under the New President. Abruptly, the scene shifts from the Golden Gate to the hills of Vermont. Reporters in automobiles rushing over country roads; a knock at the door of a white farmhouse in the little hamlet of Plymouth; oil lamps lit, dispelling the darkness; telegrams read by their glow; a brief statement of mourning; an oath of office taken at dawn and the next chapter is inaugurated.

The silent Vice President travels as he has never traveled before. Accompanied by his wife and by Frank W. Stearns, the Boston business man, he travels by special train to the Capital.

Every presidential aspirant began to count his fingers and then his toes. "The race of 1924 is open to all," said he, "Gird on my sandals."

President Coolidge went quietly to his old Vice Presidential home at the New Willard. He saw numbers of notables and said little. The members of the Cabinet sent their resignations-- Secretaries Hughes, Mellon, Weeks, Daugherty, New, Denby, Work, Wallace, Hoover, Davis. All were refused. The Cabinet would stay on. The old regime would continue.

Gradually the country quieted. There were to be no disturbances. Mr. Stearns, the veteran business man, was joined at the President's side by Mr. Slemp, the veteran politician. Other acquisitions came--an Airedale, a fox terrier, a collie and finally William M. Butler, the Campaign Manager.

There was a diversion caused by a threatened anthracite strike. The President turned to Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania for a solution of the problem. Mr. Pinchot worked out a solution and reveled somewhat in the temporary fame it brought him, barking at the Administration about the coal situation, about prohibition enforcement. But his voice brought him comparatively little attention.

Within four weeks, the new President seemed the most favored contender for the Republican nomination--that is, if he would display some individual initiative, something that would make him a figure in his own right, not a mere shade of Mr. Harding. Other candidates likewise were getting their plans under way. Senator Underwood was at work; Senator Hiram Johnson and Mr. McAdoo were preparing their plans. Finally, on the same day, the latter two announced their candidacies. Both announced themselves as Progressives-- contrasts to Mr. Coolidge. Mr. McAdoo was for remaking the railways; Senator Johnson was for remaking foreign policy on strictly isolationist lines. Mr. McAdoo's effort grew, although politicians shook their heads and muttered : "He will never be able to win the necessary two-thirds of a Democratic convention." Senator Johnson's candidacy was on the wane from the first; since he belonged to the same Party as Mr. Coolidge, the President's accretion was his diminution. And the President's following increased.

Then suddenly, in early November, less than a month before the assembling of Congress--the Congress which was to be the test of the new President --Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, injected a new issue into the contest. He published a plan for tax reduction--not simply an idea, but a plan worked out in all its details (TIME, Nov. 19 et seq.). Tax reduction was the one suit which politicians had not expected to play. They were as startled as auction bridge players hearing a bid of nullo. What surprised them at first was the avidity with which the public took to the notion of tax reduction. The Congressmen, who were at first noncommittally opposed, soon turned lukewarm, later hot.

This was the situation when the 68th Congress assembled for its first session. The country waited to see what the new President had to offer in his premier--his first message to Congress.

Under the New Congress. New faces came to Washington: the broad beaming face of Magnus Johnson; the sharper face of his fellow Farmer-Laborite, Shipstead; the keen, shrewd face of Wheeler and the rounder face of Dill, two "progressive" Democrats from the Northwest. Robert M. LaFollette had greatly strengthened his insurgent contingent. At once, there was a deadlock over the election of officers; and the awaited Presidential message was delayed until there could be compromises.

The message came. (TIME, Dec. 17). It was characterized as "unequivocal" by most of the press. The Opposition called it reactionary. But, in the main, its reception was favorable. It came forward strongly for tax reduction, for economy; it advocated restricted immigration and, in one brief sentence, tersely gave the President's adverse opinion of a soldier bonus. It put Mr. Coolidge into a new stage of his career. At first, he was considered "safe" because he was as Mr. Harding. With this message he won confidence by his individual attitude.

But troublous times were ahead. For the time, tax reduction was the sole major issue; and Congress quarreled over Democratic versus Republican details of the measure. The bonus followed more quietly in tax reduction's wake. And, in the the midst of all, burst Teapot Dome. Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior in Mr. Harding's Cabinet, was cast in the shadow, if not of crime, at least of grave impropriety in dispensing leases of the Naval Oil Reserves. The Senate went into "hysteria"; the scandal drove two members, Denby and Daugherty, from President Coolidge's Cabinet (TIME, Mar. 17, April 7). But Mr. Coolidge, either indecisive or unwilling to be hurried, was slow in bringing about changes.

All winter and all spring the Opposition and the Administration struggled over three chief issues: the bonus, which was passed, vetoed and passed over the veto; the Mellon tax plan, which with considerable Democratic alterations was passed and signed; and the question of corruption which, like a volcanic disturbance, rumbled and shook and erupted time after time, burst out again and again in fiery rhetoric and finally settled in the scoria of public distaste and weariness.

During the contest, William G. McAdoo and Hiram W. Johnson acclaimed themselves and the bonus; and the latter, struggling till his voice gave out, lost every primary fight, save in South Dakota; Henry Ford surrendered unconditionally in support of President Coolidge, who left his campaigning to his managers and turned himself to the struggle with Congress and the season's entertaining. Mr. Coolidge's nomination was assured two months before the Republican National Convention. A month before the Convention, Senator Johnson withdrew; Mr. McAdoo took most of the South away from Senator Underwood, who had denounced the Ku Klux Klan. But other Democratic aspirants appeared: Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, Senator Ralston of Indiana, ex-Governor Cox of Ohio, Senator Robinson of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, the great prop of the Democratic party, Woodrow Wilson, died (TIME, Feb. H). The world fliers had hopped off across the Pacific (TIME, Mar. 24). President Coolidge had suffered on the Pacific Coast by opposing the Japanese exclusion section of the Immigration Bill. The final passage of the bill, however, relieved the tension--so far as Mr. Coolidge's internal politics were concerned.

June came again. A disgruntled Congress, nursing a feeling that it was disliked by the public and that it was imposed upon by an inferior type of man at the White House, stalked off to its conventions. But, ere it went, most of the issues that it had fought for were dead or dying. Tax reduction and the bonus had been largely "killed" as campaign issues by their enactment. The corruption issue had been impaired in its virility by the Senate, which had pursued it to the verge of sadism, to the point of public exhaustion. The guerdon of the struggle remained the same; but, by the beginning of the last scene, most of its contenders and nearly all of their weapons had been altered.

Under Party Banners. In June and July, there were three conventions. First, the Republican which met at Cleveland (TIME, June 23), with only one thing to decide--whom it should nominate for Vice President. The. Coolidge organization, which handed the Convention a ready-made candidate and a predigested platform, was dubious about its choice for Vice President. Mr. Butler thought that a western Progressive--not insurgent--should be chosen. He considered Judge Kenyon and picked Senator Borah. Mr. Borah, inconsiderately, on the morning of the day on which he was to be nominated, refused. Taking advantage of the unexpected, the Old Guard named Frank O. Lowden, onetime Governor of Illinois. Mr. Lowden refused. The Old Guard again overruled Mr. Butler and named Charles G. Dawes. Thus was it done in spite and chiefly without premeditation.

The Democratic Convention opened second--in Manhattan--but closed last (TIME, July 7 et seq.). Here nothing was predigested or ready made. Nearly all the candidates--almost a score including favorite sons--were on hand to cook the broth. Mr. McAdoo came with almost half the strength of the Convention; but against him were arrayed a group of anti-Klansmen and more-or-less Wets, united on one thing: that they could not have loved their several candidates so much save that they hated Mr. McAdoo more. For four days the groups fought bitterly over the platform. For two and a half days they made fiery nomination speeches. For nine days they balloted before being able to nominate their ticket leader. For 98 ballots, Mr. McAdoo clung desperately to his delegates, scoring from 400 to 530 (his high mark), making the pace all the way. Then, physically exhausted, he gave up and pattered off the stage. Samuel M. Ralston, the good-natured, the kindly, the inoffensive old Senator from Indiana, might have had the nomination then, but just previously he had insisted on withdrawing. The contest was then between John W. Davis, Senator Underwood and Edwin T. Meredith, onetime Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Davis led and, in the last spurt to end the terrible ordeal, he was nominated.

It was a surprise--in the phrase of the day--that a man "so much a statesman and so little a politician" should have been chosen. It was almost unprecedented. Mr. Davis, at hand in Manhattan, looked over the Vice Presidential timber and nodded to Charles W. Bryan, Governor of Nebraska. It was a stroke aimed to tie up the West with his cause and to pacify the Bryan element in the Party. As matters developed, it also helped to alienate part of the East.

The third convention, or rather conference, met at Cleveland--the Conference for Progressive Political Action (TIME, July 14). Senator LaFollette was the apple of its eye. But it did not name Senator LaFollette. He handed it a platform. Having surveyed the Republican Convention and most of the Democratic and deeming the time favorable, he nodded to the Conference, saying: '"You may endorse my independent candidacy." So 'twas done. The Socialists, too, endorsed him; and, taking his own time, he picked, a few days later, his running mate, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a nominal Democrat, as he himself was a nominal Republican. Together they set forth under the title of the "Progressive ticket."

It was only after all this had happened that the issues of the campaign began to develop. The physical arrangements were simple. President Coolidge sat at his desk, silent, while Mr. Dawes stumped about mainly between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Mr. Davis made two trips, one as far West as Denver, one as far as St. Louis, but spent most of his time in the East. Mr. Bryan did almost as little as President Coolidge. Senator LaFollette, late in the campaign, started on a trip from the East to the Northwest and then back. Mr. Wheeler, beginning in New England, stumped all the way across the country to the opposite coast and back again.

Meanwhile, the issues were developing. President Coolidge chose for his own -- economy. A weakness was found in Senator LaFollette's armor in the proposal that Congress should be allowed to override decisions of the Supreme Court. Mr. Dawes hammered that. The Republicans held themselves up as defenders of the Constitution. They also capitalized the existence of the third ticket, the radical ticket, to gather all conservative support and the support of those who feared the possibility of the election being thrown into Congress, of a deadlock in the House; of the radical member of the Democratic ticket, Mr. Bryan, being elected President by the Senate.

Mr. Davis hammered on the corruption issue, calling for a change of administration, denouncing the "robber" tariff, of the Republicans. In regard to Senator LaFollette, he took the tack opposite to the Coolidge group, and belittled the third ticket. He aimed at President Coolidge; and President Coolidge sat as immobile as a sphinx, repeating with the persistency of Poe's raven: "Economy and more economy."

Senator LaFollette attacked the "special privilege" which "honeycombed" the old Parties. Mr. Wheeler stung the personal records of Coolidge and Dawes. But in part, at least, LaFollette and Wheeler were kept on the defensive about their Supreme Court proposal, about Government ownership of the railways. Yet they made a brilliant campaign.

In the strategy of the struggle, the Republicans had all the best of it; more able management than had Mr. Davis, much more money than any of their opponents. They kept the "lead" in the public mind. They kept all eyes focussed upon themselves. They talked about themselves as economists and preservers of the Constitution. Others talked about them as crooks and the puppets of Wall Street. But everyone talked about them. It was good strategy, whether or not all of it was intentional.

The last stroke of the campaign was struck by the Republicans. Secretary of the Treasury Mellon ordered that the gross amounts of tax returns by individuals and corporations should be made public. The law which made this possible was passed over the Administration's protest by Democrats and insurgents. A howl of rage went up from business men everywhere. Perhaps Secretary Mellon meant to suggest by his gesture: "You may expect more of this if you support our opponents."

Then came Hallowe'en with pumpkins and practical jokes; and after Hallowe'en, election day. Warren G. Harding and Hiram W. Johnson, William G. McAdoo, Oscar Underwood, Henry Ford, who began the contest, had departed the field. The ship subsidy, the World Court, the bonus, tax reduction--great issues earlier in the fight--were lost or had dwindled into insignificance for the most part.

There was a trace of the truly scientific mind in that scamp of a poet when he asked: "Where are the snows of yesteryear ?"