In the Midlands

(See front cover)

Nominee Smith, with a formidable collection of advisers and impediments, entered the Midwest last week on the first militant move of his campaign (see Democrats). Missouri's inflammatory Senator James A. Reed was about to pass through to arouse the Northwest. Democratic money was pouring into Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas. The Brown Derby was out to line up the 1924 LaFollette vote.

Nominee Hoover, having paid his respects to the Midwest on his return from Notification (TIME, Sept. 3), and having inspected the work that has been done for him there, was content to leave the region's defense to his Chicago headquarters and to Nominee Curtis, who set out from Washington to criss-cross the trails of Smith and Reed for 5,000 miles. Nominee Hoover gave his own attention to the East. Red fire and amplifiers were in readiness for him at Newark, N. J. His Eastern managers redoubled their efforts in very dubious New York and dubious Massachusetts.

Dr. Hubert Work, National G. O. P. Chairman, is charged with Hooverizing all the land. Under him in the East, definitely restrained and subordinated, is ebullient Senator George Higgins Moses of New Hampshire. At Chicago, Dr. Work's name appears in handsome letters in the Hoover offices at 333 North Michigan Avenue (20th and 21st floors). But the pink-white-and-gray man in the office is only formally subordinate to Dr. Work. After seeing how ably the Midwestern cornerstone of his vote was being swung into place and how carefully the cement was being mixed, Nominee Hoover gave pink-white-and-gray James William Good implicit freedom and full control at Chicago. When Dr. Work goes to New York he feels free to issue suggestions and vetoes to Senator Moses. When he goes to Chicago, as he did on the eve of the Smith invasion, he just sits and listens to Mr. Hoover's Good.

The eleven States of the Midwest with their 149 electoral votes are to the G. O. P. what the eleven States of the South, with 124 electors, are to the Democracy. They are the cornerstone, the bulwark, among which "bolts" and "splits" and outright transitions occur far less frequently than among the eleven Western States, the eleven Eastern States, the four Border States.

This year the Midwest loomed more important than ever because it was throughout the Midwest that the Hoover nomination was most bitterly opposed. In Ohio there was Willis; in Indiana, Watson; in Illinois, Lowden; in Nebraska, Norris; in Kansas, Curtisall, except Lowden and Curtis, more downright anti-Hooverish than outright ambitious.

That there would be a scramble in the midlands over the 1928 nomination was visible a year ago. Herbert Hoover began looking around for a Midwestern manager. It was natural for him to ask James William Good, a onetime (1909-1921) Congressman from Iowa. Secretary Hoover had known Congressman Good as an able legislative Committeeman. He came from Cedar Rapids, near the Hoover birthplace (West Branch). Above all, he was the man who had organized the Midwest for Calvin Coolidge in the 1924 campaign.

Stories to the effect that James William Good is one of Mr. Hoover's "discoveries," one of his Bright Young Men, are absurd. Mr. Hoover was lucky to get him and he probably owes getting him to Calvin Coolidge. After "I do not choose," Mr. Good dropped in at the White House one day and told President Coolidge he again felt like organizing the Midwest for some one, perhaps his fellow townsman of Evanston, Ill., Vice President "Charlie" Dawes. President Coolidge froze. Mr. Good departed. Later he returned and said he might organize for Secretary Hoover. President Coolidge unfroze, said that might be a good idea.

It is now an old story how "Sir James," as he was called during the Anglophobe phase of the anti-Hoover campaign in the Midwest, bravely sowed seeds of Hooverism from the Alleghenies to the Ozarks; how, at and after Kansas City, first the blade and then the ear, then the whole Corn Belt appeared, a party united again in time for the Hoover harvest-home at West Branch last month.

It was generally predicted that Mr. Good would be National Chairman. Why he was not is still a mystery. Perhaps the explanation is that a shirt-sleeve diplomat who can harmonize the anti-salooners, dirt-farmers, public utilitarians, idealists, Klansmen, social leaders, social climbers, sound businessmen, magnates, housewives and mugwumps that comprise the G. O. P. in the Midwest, would be wasted as a figurehead at a big shiny desk in Washington, shaking the hands of ladies and lame ducks, reading workers' reports and issuing national propaganda.

The Good office in Chicago is by far the .busiest focus of the Hoover campaign. To it go all Republican bigwigs on their to's and fro's through the land. To it go all political pundits and special correspondents for the .most commanding view of the G. O. P.'s condition throughout the nation. There the Northwest hears what is being done on the Border and in the South; the Far West hears about the East; the Farmer about Wall Street, the cotton-grower about the New England mills. There Mr. Good summons or receives men from leagues around to tell him things or get orders. His calling list in the two weeks alone included four cabinet members (West. J. J. Davis, Wilbur, Jardine) ; National Committeemen from North Dakota, Utah. Montana, Colorado; the Wisconsin gubernatorial nominee, Walter Jodok Kohler, and friends; Theodore Roosevelt the Younger; Nominee Curtis; Chairman Work. Senator Watson telephones constantly from Indiana. Senator Brookhart bustles in and out from Iowa. Senator Deneen of Illinois pokes in, by letter or in person, to complain that Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, the party's nominee for Congressman-at-large, is being given undue advantages by the national organization, advantages that may help her oust Senator Deneen and take his seat in 1930.

The Good offices resemble those of any orosperous corporation -walnut furniture and woodwork, glass partitions, trim stenographers, pictures of the company's products -Hoover , Curtis, Coolidge, Dawes, McKinley, Taft, Roosevelt, Mrs. Hoover, Mrs. Coolidge, James William Good. ... As in most G. O. P. offices this year, there is no picture of Product Harding. ... A telegraph instrument chatters with nervous importance down the hall. There are private wires, telephone as well as telegraph, to both Washington and New York. . . . Throngs of people, some important, some trying to look important, "confer" in standing groups of two, three, four. , . . Throngs of Mr. Good's assistants come, go, confer. One is named Hainer Hinshaw. The office believes he is a distant relative of the Nominee. . . . One of the department heads is Col. Hanford MacNider. who resigned last winter as Assistant Secretary of War and in June got mentioned for the Vice Presidency. Another (Oh. shrewd Mr. Good) is Farmer Lowden's good friend, James G. Oglesby.

Conversation is drowned out now and again by grainboats whistling for bridges in the Chicago River, beneath the windows -insistent voices of the Farm Problem.

A drove of little elephants ornaments Mr. Good's personal office -on inkstand, bookends, paperweights His complexion remains that of a hard indoor worker. It has been organization and politics with him all summer, with only a few games of golf mixed in even on Sundays. When he does get off he goes to the Glen View Club, oldtime haunt of the late Fred W. Upham, treasurer of the Harding campaign.

Wisconsin and Minnesota are the Midwestern States which the Democrats have been claiming most persistently. Mr. Good was frank to say last week that "an educational campaign on the farm problem is essential." He arrives at decisions like this by forming Hoover-Curtis clubs throughout a State and from their reports compiling a cross section of the State's sentiment. He then prepares material, inspects the local machinery for distributing it and fires away.

He is more chary than less experienced organizers (viz. Raskob) about making claims of States or predictions of majorities. But he yields to no man as a writer of propaganda. In a bulletin which he composed last week he pictured Nominee Hoover as virtually the sole author of Coolidge Prosperity and the latter as a "world wonder." Money is what counts in an election but fine phrases help and James William Good knows it. It is very much like being an apostolic missionary. Sometimes you have to wrestle for a man's political soul for hours and hours. Sometimes you can win him in a trice with a ponderous period. And tiresome though it is to turn out ponderous periods, life is often brightened by the gorgeous retorts of the heathen. For example, this is the answer one Hooverizer got when he approached an insurgent South Dakota editor: "I am for Hoover just about as far as you can throw our party elephant by the pin feathers with your arm broken in four places!"

Colonel Mann. Nominee Hoover has a Moses, a Good, a Work and a Mann. The four names might be worked into a campaign jingle, but for the fact that Mr. Hoover's Mann is very seldom officially mentioned in the party. After he has performed in the East and Nominee Smith is through in the Midwest, Nominee Hoover is going to make a trip unprecedented in G. O. P. history. He is going into the mountainous, Dry, Protestant, eastern end of Tennessee, up among the hillbillies, to small Elizabethton. He will go not so much as the G. O. P.'s nominee but more as a distinguished citizen seeking his fellow citizens' votes for the Presidency. There are a lot of Republican voters in Eastern Tennessee and the Democrats there are Jackson Democrats. That means dry, rural, Protestant, and every one knows that Citizen Hoover's opponent is Wet, urban, Roman Catholic. Citizen Hoover will stand there on the mountains and address all the anti-Smith Democrats in the South. It was an idea of Col. Horace A. Mann's.

Col. Mann is a Tennesseean of obscure origin, no relation of the late great educator, Horace Mann.* Republicans know, however, that Col. Mann is a considerable educator himself.

He is a lawyer. He used to play poker with President Harding. He turned up at the Kansas City convention last June with even more pledges and proxies of Southern delegates and alternates than Virginia's wily C. Bascom Slemp had collected. He helped the Hoover nomination, more covertly but little less substantially than James William Good. Then he dropped out of sight until last month, when it became apparent that he had been commissioned by Nominee Hoover to work, independently of the National Republican Committee, for a fusion of the South's anti-Smith Democrats and the Southern G. O. P. It was Col. Mann's idea that the Negro element of the Southern G. O. P. should be so far as possible eliminated, especially from the electoral tickets. As a result there is not a single Negro elector on a Southern ticket this fall. Anti-Smith Democrats, appreciating this courtesy, have flocked to accept nominations as Hoover electors.

The New York World sent an investigator to Col. Mann's office in Washington, which is maintained a mile from Republican headquarters and saves Dry Democrats the embarrassment of being seen crossing the party line. The investigator asked for campaign material "suitable for distribution among the women who would not be interested in economic matters." The investigator reported, and later swore, that one of Col. Mann's assistants offered to take her to the office of The Fellowship Forum, Ku Klux Klan sheet, published in Washington. There the investigator found that, for nominal prices, bales of stuff could be had attacking Nominee Smith for Popery. "Who pays the Klan?" asked the World.

Col. Mann contradicted the World investigator's affidavit. She had, he said, hung around his office and pestered for scurrilous material, although repeatedly told there was none to be had. Going to The Fellowship Forum was her own idea, said Col. Mann.

* Horace Mann, first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837-41), created a system of public schools which served as a model for many another state.