Speech in Osawatomie

In Osawatomie, Kansas, U. S. history has on several occasions been made.-- Last week in Osawatomie, U. S. Senator James A. Reed of Missouri made a speech on which he informally opened his campaign for the Democratic-Presidential nomination. Under a blue and windy sky the farmers who had come to town for the annual Farmers' Union munched hot dogs or cones and stood on their feet with their hands in their pockets. Their wives, many with yowling babies in arm, soon strolled away from the platform. The voice of Mr. Reed sounded incongruously vehement in the placid, warm afternoon, but the farmers and press correspondents (who were sitting just below the speakers' stand) listened carefully. Said Senator Reed: "Some of you farmers think agriculture is sick. Drs. Coolidge and Hoover, however, assured us the entire country is prosperous. If this species of absent treatment were effective, everybody would be happy." Senator Reed began to talk about the Federal Reserve Act; said he: "The credit for this great banking system must be given largely to Senator Glass and to Woodrow Wilson. ... I did some work, which, whether valuable or not, I would rather have appraised by others." At this the farmers nodded sagely. Not so the pressmen. They, more canny critics, immediately began to reflect upon Mr. Reed's latest remark. In 1922 ex-President Wilson, irate because the Demo-crat Reed had helped smother the Versailles Peace Treaty in the Senate had written a letter to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in which he said:". . . [Reed] is incapable of sustained allegiance to any person or any cause. . . has forfeited any claim to my confidence that he may ever have been supposed to have. ... [I] will never willingly consent to any further association with him. . . ." To onetime Governor of Missouri Stephens, ex- President Wilson had written in 1922, when Senator Reed became a candidate for re-election to the U. S. Senate: "I shall hope and confidently expect to see him repudiated by the Democrats at the primaries. Certainly Missouri cannot afford to be represented by such a marplot."-- Now in Kansas, once a strong Wilson state, U. S. Senator Reed praised Woodrow Wilson, implied his association with the onetime President in the passage of a popular law. Newsgatherers smiled as they wired the material out of which editors could snip sharp editorials.

--In 1856, one John Brown, after murdering five exponents of Negro slavery. shut himself up in a garrison at Osawatomie and was later taken prisoner, tried found guilty, executed, made the subject of a song. In 1859 at Osawatomie, famed Horace Greeley addressed the convention which was beginning to organize the Republican Party in Kansas. In 1910 at Osawatomie, Theodore Roosevelt, back from hunting wild animals in Africa, made a speech on "New Nationalism," which loudly thumped the doings of his former proteg; William Howard Taft, and led to the forming in 1912 of the Progressive or "Bull Moose" party. --One who by officious interference defeats another's plan.