"New Era of Humanity"

In Roanoke, Va., stands a good-sized city market. Above the market is an auditorium. The smell of meat and fish often seeps up from below. One day last week a tropical sun blazed through the auditorium's huge uncurtained windows upon some 800 cheering, jostling, excited men and women. The weather made these Virginians uncomfortably hot. Thoughts of Alfred Emanuel Smith and John Jacob Raskob as leaders of the Democratic party made them hotter.

Anti-Smith Democrats, they were gathered in their first State convention to put an independent ticket into the field against the regular Democratic organization led by Governor Byrd, Senators Glass and Swanson.

This Roanoke gathering was the political child of Bishop James Cannon Jr. of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, arch-enemy of the Smith-Raskob leadership. In a public letter a few weeks before he had summoned it to overthrow the Byrd-Glass-Swanson organization which had supported Nominee Smith and was "defeated, discredited . . . still unwashed and still unrepentant." When Hoovercratic Virginians obeyed the call and met at Roanoke, Bishop Cannon sent them his son David, a 6,000-word platform, a special message and his blessing. But he stayed away himself.

The convention:

1) Nominated by acclamation Prof. William Moseley Brown for Governor and Capt. C. C. Berkeley for Attorney-General. It left the nomination for Lieutenant-Governor open, in hopes the state Republicans would choose that candidate, thus permitting the two groups to coalesce against the regular Democrats. Nominee Brown, a 35-year-old professor of psychology at Washington & Lee University, was described as the state's "most cantankerous and catamountish campaigner," but when led to the platform he turned out to be a mild-mannered polite gentle man, still trailing a classroom atmosphere after him as he pleaded against bitterness, called the conventioneers "pioneers in a new era of humanity."

2) Voted to establish Washington head quarters to spread the anti-Raskob gospel into other states.

3) Cheered mentions of Senators Heflin, Simmons, Blease; denounced Congressman Tinkham.

4) Adopted the Cannon platform in which Prohibition was called "the high-water mark of civilization." All resources were pledged to up-to-the-hilt enforcement.

5) Collided with the race issue as the result of specific demands for a denunciation of Mrs. Hoover's White House reception of Mrs. Oscar De Priest, wife of Illinois' Negro Congressman. I. C. Trotman of Suffolk, who had telegraphed Mrs. Hoover that her act had cost the Hoovercrats 25,000 votes in Virginia, resigned in protest from the executive committee when the convention only declared: "We stand for racial integrity and while official relations must be maintained, we deplore any social relationship between whites and blacks." Later, as the convention was going home, it was disturbed to hear that President Hoover had appointed as postmaster at Blenheim, Va., one Thornton Nightingale, Negro Republican.

6) Denounced stockmarket gambling. A few days later Bishop Cannon himself was disclosed as a buyer and seller of stocks on margin in Wall Street. While not denying the facts, he loudly complained it was all "a contemptible Tammany trick" to discredit him at the opening of his Virginia campaign.

With the convention over, observers waited to see whether the political hatreds and animosities of last year's national campaign could be successfully transposed to a state election in the South.