Orders

With the nomination of presidential candidates only nine months away, G. O. Potentates have begun setting in motion the wheels of their 1932 campaign. If not now, very soon will be the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ernest Lee Jahncke has swung through the West bearing the message of Hooverism. Recently the Federal Farm Board sent a letter into Missouri, where a special election was to be held in the 7th Congressional district, outlining the blessings which have accrued to agrarians from the Republican Agricultural Marketing Act. Gruff, chunky Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, President Hoover's chief political aide in the Cabinet, went a step further last week. Addressing a convention of the National Association of Postmasters at Omaha, Neb., he delivered a speech which only said one thing to his listeners: get busy and stump for the ticket. Coming from the Postmaster General to his postmasters it contained the implicit footnote: orders is orders.

"As the period approaches which comes every four years, when public attention is focused for a time upon national politics," said Mr. Brown, looking sharply through his octagonal spectacles, "spokesmen for themselves and for various groups, partisan and otherwise, are prone to be generous with their observations with respect to the duties, obligations and limitations in matters political. The indisputable fact is that the laws of our land place no restrictions upon Presidential officers, a term which includes postmasters of the first, second and third classes. The statutes which forbid political activity on the part of governmental employes are limited in their application to members of the classified civil service. They have no relation whatever to executive officials who are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.

"It is desirable that the principal officers of the Government should be in every respect representatives of the Administration which the people have placed in charge of their Government; that they shall be wholly in sympathy with the policies and political views of the man whom the people have elected as President and shall work wholeheartedly to make his Administration a success. Beyond all question, the best politics is the best public service."

Immediately there blew up a storm of Democratic protest. ''He is practically ordering postmasters to devote their time to furthering the Administration in the next campaign, and I think such remarks will be generally condemned," declared Senator Cordell Hull of Tennessee, one-time (1921-24) chairman of the Democratic National Executive Committee.

Chairman Jouett Shouse of the Democratic National Executive Committee deplored ''the cynical frankness of the President's Postmaster General in issuing his orders to the Hoover postmasters to get busy in order to save the Hoover political scalp."

Two days later another G. O. P. rallying cry went up. Fussy little Chairman Simeon Davison Fess of the Republican National Committee officially keynoted the party's autumn campaigns. His objects were three: to insure Republican success in scattered municipal, State and Congressional elections (notably those in Ohio and Wisconsin); to replenish the party war chest; to renominate and reelect President Hoover. The Fess keynote address appeared to be in the key of C: no sharps, no flats, just straight eulogy of Republicanism and straight condemnation of its opponents.

Chairman Fess traced national economic ills to the War, felt that people would come to respect "the remarkable efforts of our great President" to get the nation out of Depression, was sure that he would be "unanimously nominated, overwhelmingly elected," warned against unscrupulous politicians offering "quack remedies."

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