Massachusetts Portent

For all their pretensions of wisdom, politicians are comparatively ignorant of what the great inarticulate mass of U. S. voters think about their manner of government. Jobholders from the President down ache for signs and portents. They watch the tall immobile grass of democracy for surface stirrings. Last week out of Massachusetts came an important sign and portent, a shrill whistling wind, like the first ominous pipings of a hurricane, which swayed the tall grass violently for all to see.

The scene of this political augury was the Second Congressional District, carved crudely out of the counties of Hampshire and Hampden 39 years ago. In it lie bustly Springfield and somnolent Northampton, home of Citizen Calvin Coolidge.* This district has never sent a Democrat to the House. For 30 loyal years it blindly chose Frederick Huntington Gillett as its Representative until his sheer weight of service carried him to the Speakership, whence he went to the Senate. Last December its Congressman William Kirk Kaynor was killed in an airplane accident (TIME, Dec. 30). Last week it held a by-election to choose his successor. Candidates: Republican Frederick David Griggs; Democratic William Joseph Granfield.

Mr. Griggs, long a docile Dry, switched to Wetness just before the election, said that though he believed in Prohibition, he would vote to repeal the 18th Amendment if his district so desired. Obvious to all was his straddle. Mr. Granfield was 100% Wet. Republican Senator Gillett asked voters to elect Candidate Griggs as an endorsement of President Hoover. Democratic Senator Walsh asked them to elect Candidate Granfield as a repudiation of President Hoover's do-nothing policy on unemployment and industrial depression.

Result: Democrat Granfield, 31,170 votes; Republican Griggs, 23,749 votes.

A Democratic victory of 6,421 votes in such a traditionally Republican district set political soothsayers to work. Republicans, badly jolted, attempted, in an awkward unconvincing way, to belittle the election's significance, to explain it away as a local prohibition contest unreflective of national sentiment toward the Hoover administration. Democrats in Washington minimized Prohibition, their party's rock of schism, joyfully saw in the election only an uprising against an outworn partisan cry of "Hoover prosperity," symptomatic of a major economic revolt against Republican diddling on the tariff and unemployment. Wets naturally could see nothing but a resounding whack delivered to the 18th Amendment.

Impartial observers agreed upon the significance of the Massachusetts by-election, predicted, among other things, that: the State would elect a Wet Democratic Senator and perhaps Governor next November; it would vote to repeal its local Prohibition enforcement law--a wet step toward defeating the 18th Amendment already taken by New York, Nevada, Wisconsin, Montana, Maryland; the November Congressional elections would disclose an economic unrest in the tall grass, due to industrial depression, far deeper and darker than G. 0. Politicians now dare admit.

*Last week Citizen Coolidge was journeying from Florida to California. Arrived at New Orleans hotel he could find in his bag only pajamas in which he never sleeps. After one bad night, he despatched a hotel bell boy to fetch him a stock of night shirts like the one he was wearing that August night in 1923 when he came downstairs in his Plymouth farmhouse to find himself President of the U. S. So eagerly did officials turn out to greet him, so readily did crowds gather to cheer him that some political observers thought they saw the germ of a presidential campaign in his transcontinental junket.

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