Pennsylvania Primaries

A brown horse and a red-haired woman caused commotion in the streets of Philadelphia last week. Beauteous, impulsive Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, wife of Pennsylvania's Governor, gayly trotted through City Hall Plaza traffic in a jingling silvery sleigh on rollers. Mounted on the shafts were signs urging PINCHOT FOR SENATOR. Overhead fluttered a banner with this strange device: VOTERS--DON'T LET REED TAKE YOU FOR ANOTHER SLEIGH RIDE--VOTE FOR PINCHOT. "It's awfully silly," the Governor's ebullient lady confided, "but it makes a good picture." Political tricks and stratagems far craftier than this were going on all over the Keystone State where Democrats and Republicans were winding up their hottest primary campaigns in years. Having tasted blood in 1932, the Democrats were out to mass a thumping vote and carry the state for the first time in half a century. Badly demoralized by local defeats, the Republicans sensed their peril. Pennsylvania's voters prepared to go to the polls this week and select their party candidates for the November elections. For Governor-- The regular Democratic State Committee backed George Hansell Earle 3rd's gubernatorial candidacy. Candidate Earle, 43, is vice president of Pennsylvania Sugar Co. For 20 years he was one of the best polo players on Philadelphia's sporting Main Line. His grandfather presided at the first Republican National Convention, but Mr. Earle was early on the Roosevelt Bandwagon. For his campaign efforts the President made him Minister to Austria, a post he resigned last March to run for Governor of Pennsylvania. Last week he promised, if elected, to "go to Washington and borrow the well-known Roosevelt big stick" and crush "invisible government by lobbies" at Harrisburg. Mr. Earle's chief Democratic opponent is Charles D. Copeland, a Westmoreland County Judge. The Philadelphia Record, party organ in Eastern Pennsylvania, has damned Candidate Copeland as an anti-Rooseveltman and "Mellon's messenger boy." A Democratic ticket more comic than formidable is: William McNair, Mayor of Pittsburgh, for Governor; pugilistic Eddie McCloskey, Mayor of Johnstown, for Secretary of Internal Affairs. So badly disorganized was the Republican State Committee that it failed to back anyone's candidacy for the governorship. Chief contender appeared to be Attorney General William A. Schnader, endorsed by the Mellon-Vare machine. His motto: "I refuse to sell you a gold brick." Among the rash of twelve other Republican candidates, most promising was Lieut. Governor Edward C. Shannon, a conservative out-state farmer with veteran backing. For Senator, Joseph Guffey, Democratic boss of the state, was whooping up his own candidacy. In 1890 he went to Princeton, met and admired Woodrow Wilson, made money in oil in Pittsburgh. He persuaded John Jacob Raskob that he could carry his state for Smith in 1928 with half a million dollars. He lost the state by a million votes, but was left with an effective party machine. Although traditionally Republican, Pennsylvania's votes in the Democratic National Convention are surpassed only by New York's. This bloc was Franklin Roosevelt's nucleus when he went after the presidential nomination in 1932. Boss Guffey lost Pennsylvania for Roosevelt by only 157,000 votes. If he did not think there was an exceptionally good chance of being Pennsylvania's first Democratic Senator since President Hayes's time, he would not be running for the nomination. Only man of prominence in the field against Boss Guffey is Roland Sletor Morris, onetime Ambassador to Japan, Philadelphia lawyer, professor of international law at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Lawyer Morris' style is cramped because he was distinctly not a "For Roosevelt Before Chicago" man. Widest primary breach exists between Governor Pinchot and David Aiken Reed, fighting to succeed himself as Pennsylvania's senior Republican Senator. Before taking to the hustings, Mr. Reed had fortified himself in the Senate by embracing the American Legion's entire veterans' program. But his main issue was the unimaginative Republican one of anti-New Dealism. At Connellsville last week he stated it: "You have in this primary the first opportunity to express yourselves on the question of planned economy. Had these features been in the Democratic platform of 1932, that party would not have carried one state in the Union." In aiming at the Democrats in a Republican primary, Candidate Reed assumed that he was also shooting at Gifford Pinchot, whose exact political position lies camouflaged somewhere East of Democracy and West of the G. O. P. Nobody in Pennsylvania has ever succeeded in orienting the Pinchots. They have been borderland cases for years. Governor Pinchot's old Pennsylvanian family comes from Milford, across the Delaware from Port Jervis, N. Y. For generations their interests have lain cross-country and down the Hudson toward New York rather than down the Delaware toward Philadelphia. Cornelia Bryce Pinchot's money came from an old New York fortune. Snobbish Philadelphia hates the Pinchots because their social life centres in Manhattan, where Mrs. Pinchot, as a descendant of Peter Cooper, can indulge with impunity her eccentricities against a Colony Club background. It was to New York, not Philadelphia, that Governor Pinchot traveled last winter for hospital care when he was down with a painful case of shingles (TIME, Jan. 15).

His health and his struggles with Pennsylvania's relief funds, the last of which was exhausted last week, deterred 69-year-old Governor Pinchot from the sort of slashing personal campaign he generally makes. That did not impede energetic Mrs. Pinchot's activities in his behalf, as last week's sleigh ride testified. She has always been willing to dramatize the Governor's social welfare programs by picketing, speechmaking, visiting the slums. These activities, undertaken in a thoroughly genuine spirit, have resulted in considerable unpopularity for the couple among their own social set, but have created a large following among the poor.

In 1932, after a belated endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt, Governor Pinchot made alliances with certain local Democratic chiefs. His followers have called subsequent local Democratic victories, Pinchot victories. But there was a good chance that Governor Pinchot would be beaten in the Republican primaries this week. If so, he would get scanty backing from the State Democratic machine as an independent candidate in November, despite his warm personal friendship with President Roosevelt.

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