"You're Another"

There are three Robinsons--Joseph Taylor Robinson, senior Senator from Arkansas, Democratic leader; Theodore Douglas Robinson, nephew of the late Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; and Arthur R. Robinson, whom discredited Governor Jackson of Indiana chose out of his Klannish entourage in 1925 to fill out the term of the late Samuel M. Ralston as Indiana's junior Senator.

Of these three, the last and least, Indiana's Robinson, has participated most obscurely in governing the U. S., until last fortnight. Then, thinking he saw a chance to drag the Democratic Party into the Oil Scandal, he stood up in the Senate and falsely imputed a relation with Oilman Sinclair to Governor Smith of New York. "Birds of a feather!" he jibed. Democrats soon stuffed Indiana's own jailbirds and Klan feathers down Senator Robinson's throat (TIME, April 2).

Last week he tried again, this time remarking, with carefully prepared smirks and innuendos, that members of the Wilson Cabinet had entered the employ of Oilmen Sinclair and Doheny after leaving office; that Senator Walsh had praised Oilman Doheny when the latter gave advice on the legislation that made the Oil Scandal possible.

"The 'conspiracy' was formed," said Senator Robinson, "not at the Chicago convention in 1920 but in Washington, during the Wilson Administration, participated in by high officials of that administration and aided and abetted by still other Democrats of high standing." Senator Robinson pictured the late Franklin K. Lane, onetime (1913-20) Secretary of the Interior, as "the originator of the proposal to lease naval oil lands to private interests to be exploited by them."

Virginia's hard-working little Carter Glass, now in the Senate, was one of the late Mr. Lane's closest friends and served with him in the Wilson Cabinet. Now, at Senator Robinson's remark, Senator Glass sprang up, storming: "Does the Senator mean to suggest that Franklin K. Lane ever accepted a bribe from Mr. Doheny? If he does then I denounce him here upon this floor as a slanderer!"

Robinson: "I do not mean to reflect on Franklin K. Lane."

Glass: "Yes, that is exactly what the Senator means and the denial simply accentuates his moral turpitude in doing it."

Robinson: "... I think Franklin K. Lane bore a very high reputation . . . but Senators on the other side of the Chamber have not hesitated to go down into the tomb for Republicans who have passed away. . . . Democrats attempt to smear oil all over dead Republicans. But if we merely mention a man who perchance happens to be a Democrat, then something is wrong. . . ."

Glass: "The question here is, what does the Senator mean by accusing Franklin K. Lane?"

Robinson: "I am not charging him with bribery."

Glass: "The Senator is not doing it outright. He is doing it by the meanest kind of insinuation."

Robinson: "In my judgment, it was a breach of the proprieties for all those Cabinet officers to go out and accept oil employment immediately after leaving the Cabinet."

Glass: "My judgment is that there is no kind of cowardice on this earth that is worse than an insinuation against an honest man who because he is dead, cannot defend his own character."

Senator Caraway of Arkansas: "I would like to inquire if the Senator from Indiana thinks they ought to have stayed in office and taken the employment?"

Senator Robinson did not reply. Instead he left the floor and did not return until the end of a long, frigidly polite, painstaking speech by Senator Walsh who, with maps hung on the Senate walls to make it clearer, demonstrated that the oil laws and leases of the Wilson regime were executed to save the Navy's oil in a field that was "leaking." As everyone knows, the leases under the Harding regime took away from the U. S. naval oil fields that were intact.

The public, of course, did not see Senator Walsh's maps nor hear his explanation. What would be popularly understood was that Senator Robinson had "smeared" the Democratic Party. Accuracy counts for little in politics. The Robinson speeches were something of a G. O. P. triumph.

When parties triumph through one man's work in Congress, his colleagues usually crowd around to shake his hand. That was a curious thing about the Robinson episode last week. When he sat down, when he went out, when he returned, observers noticed that no other Republicans went near him.