Thrice a Senator

The Republican Senatorial candidate friendly to President Coolidge lost his race in the Illinois primary. The Republican Senatorial candidate friendly to President Coolidge lost his race in the Pennsylvania primary, and in the Iowa primary, the Oregon, the South Dakota. Last week he lost also in the North Dakota primary. Of all insurgent Republicans none is better pleased than 33-year-old Gerald P. Nye. It was he who beat the President's friend, the President's good friend and one-time campaign manager, Louis Benjamin Hanna, in North Dakota. Mr. Nye, who is already Senator Nye, having been appointed last autumn by the Governor of North Dakota to fill the late Senator Ladd's seat (TIME, Nov. 23), and who is also Editor Nye, of a Non-Partisan League newspaper--was doubly pleased because he won not only the nomination for a six-year term but also a simultaneous election for the remainder of the late Senator Ladd's term. At 33 he is, in a sense, thrice a senator: once by appointment, once by election, once by nomination, which, when it is Republican, is as good as an election in North Dakota.

Thin, tightlipped, square-shouldered, undistinguished outwardly save as young editors sometimes look alert and vigorous, Gerald P. Nye has done very well for himself without any of the paternal glamor that has assisted Robert Lafollette, aged 31, Nye's only rival for "youngster of the Senate." All things being equal, doubtless Senators Nye and Lafollette will reminisce together some decades from now in the august Chamber, over episodes of the mid-Nineteen-Twenties, which no one else then present will come any where near remembering.