Warrior

September began to wane and the friends and enemies of The Happy Warrior* agreed that, so far, he had not got off the defensive.

First there was Charles C. Marshall, in the Atlantic Monthly of March 1927, on Roman Catholicism. The Warrior answered that.

Then there was the Dry bloc at Houston. The Warrior surmounted it, but not without losses.

Then there was William Allen White and Vice. The Warrior enmeshed Mr. White but came out under the sign of the saloon.

Then there was Preacher Straton and more Vice, more saloons. The Warrior was so vexed that he "dignified an insect with an incident."

Then there was extravagance. The Warrior answered Under-Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Livingston Mills, but not so bravely but that Mr. Mills could still rebut with a semblance of conviction. The Warrior's terms as Governor of New York had been costly, perhaps for good reasons. But the Warrior did not restate the reasons. Instead he shifted "blame" to the Republican Legislatures that had voted appropriations under him. It was defensive move Number Five.

Finally, culminating last week when (the Warrior was starting West, there was the Whispering Campaign -on Roman Catholicism (again), Drunkenness, Social Eligibility (TIME, Sept. 17). It was mean. It was poisonous. It was unworthy of the Nominee it helped. But it persisted and the Warrior's friends grew wroth. Chairman Work of Hooverism disowned the Whispers. But Chairman Work, perhaps forgetting President Roosevelt's historic misunderstoodness about liquor, could not refrain from adding: "Why is it necessary for a man's friends to deny that he is intoxicated?"

In the last week of preparation for his first national appearance, the Warrior tried to point at a specific Whisper and track it down. A man named Keenan in Parkersburg, West Va., had written him that a woman named Bauer in Parkersburg was passing around word that a woman named Sanford in Syracuse, N. Y., had written her that she had seen the Warrior "disgustingly intoxicated" at the Syracuse, N. Y., State Fair. It was just the sort of story that is heard at least weekly by most of the Warrior's friends and foes alike.

The Warrior got an exoneration from a New York State Senator who had been with him constantly at the Syracuse fair. He got a denial of the letter from its alleged writer and an evasion from its alleged recipient. Then he issued a document entitled: "Nailing a Lie in the Whispering Campaign."

The effect on Smith sympathizers was one of satisfaction. But nailing a lie in a whispering campaign is much like nailing an ant on a rotten plank. The hammer blows shake out a lot of other ants and start them swarming furiously. A lot of the Brown Derby's best friends wished that the unhappy Warrior would leave lienailing to his assistants and confine himself to constructive campaigning.

The Post Office Department (Harry S. New of Indiana, Postmaster General) made a gesture in answer to the charge that, by laxity, it was aiding the Whispering Campaign. At Baltimore, Postmaster Benjamin F. Woelper seized 100 anti-Smith postcards which Postmaster General New later pronounced the work of "a depraved and degenerate mind."

...

Clarence A. Barnes, a Republican candidate for Attorney-General of Massachusetts, annoyed the Happy Warrior by picking up some New York State talk about a gambling pool on major league baseball games which operated "in the shadow of the Capitol" at Albany. Nominee Smith had declared himself technically impotent to act in this matter (there undeniably was a gambling pool) when Col. Roosevelt the Younger stumped around making the same charge.

Nominee Smith invited Mr. Barnes to Albany to point out physically and prove legally the existence of the devilish pool. Mr. Barnes wrote back and set a date, Sept, 19. The Nominee replied again and sarcastically regretted that he would be out of Albany then, but recommended Mr. Barnes to the Albany County District Attorney. Again, somehow, this was inconclusive, savoring of defense.

...

Yet one more Whisper arose to offend the Warrior. Alfred Emanuel Smith Jr. is an up-and-coming young lawyer in Manhattan. The local Institute for Public Service last week popped out with the report that Lawyer "Al Jr." had received 38 "professional opportunities," i.e., assigned law cases, from Tammany judges whose duty it was to appoint a defender, receiver or referee. The Smith son-in-law, Lawyer Francis J. Quillinan (lately married to the Warrior's daughter Catherine) was shown to have received 22 cases. The unfairness of the thing was that the number of cases assigned to other young lawyers was not mentioned for comparison. Nor was the ability of the young lawyers in question evaluated. The embarrassing feature for the Smiths was that of the several judges who made the assignments. two (the Hons. Joseph M. Proskauer and Bernard L. Shientag) were to accompany the Warrior on his campaign and a third, the Hon. Thomas C. T. Grain, was getting himself considered last week (among others) as a candidate to succeed the Warrior as Governor. All this led to a further question of propriety: should judges enter so actively into politics?

...

Came a bright September evening and the Warrior sprang from the defense into militant campaigning. In a new brown derby, with Mrs. Smith on his arm, he boarded an elaborate eleven-car special train at Albany. As it sped westward, a big red bull's-eye sign on the back platform announced: "Smith-Robinson Special -the Victory Ticket."

On board were four tons of campaign literature, a reference library. 43 newspapermen, eight photographers and a group of the Nominee's best friends and advisers. He was bound, via Chicago, for Omaha to speak out on farm relief. He was going into nine states, carefully selected on the basis of their presidential vote in 1924. It was a dash and a drive to capture Kansas and Colorado which Calvin Coolidge carried by large majorities; Minnesota and Wyoming, which Calvin Coolidge carried by small majorities; Montana, North Dakota and Nebraska, which Calvin Coolidge carried with fewer votes than Democrat Davis and Progressive La Follette divided between them; Oklahoma and Wisconsin, which Calvin Coolidge did not carry. ... In Manhattan, Lawyer Frank P. Walsh, one of the late La Follette's campaign managers, now chairman of a Progressive League which is working for the brown Derby, claimed 90% of La Follette's 5,000,000 votes in 1924 for Smith in 1928.

-"Victory is his habit -the happy warrior -Alfred E. Smith." (Franklin D. Roosevelt in his nominating speech.)