Nominee No. 1

Nominee No 1.

Last week in Omaha was made the first formal nomination for President of the U. S. in the campaign of 1936. Maker of the nomination was one Roy Harrop's Farmer-Labor Party.* Favorite candidate of most delegates was Huey Long but he lost the nomination by his absence from the convention. Therefore the party renominated its 1932 nominee, Jacob Sechler Coxey, who three years ago took 7,309 votes from Roosevelt, Hoover and Thomas, who four years ago was elected Mayor of Massillon, Ohio (TIME, Nov. 16, 1931), who 41 years ago led his "Army" of 356 unemployed to Washington and got arrested for walking on the grass.

At Omaha in the convention hall, a bedroom in the Castle Hotel, newshawks found only about 20 delegates, including a half-dozen from Omaha, eight from Minnesota, one from Texas, one from Arizona, one from the Republic of Mexico, and one --"General" Coxey--from Ohio. The platform was what Jacob Coxey always has campaigned for: greenbacks to put the unemployed to work. Only difference was that in 1894 he advocated half a billion in greenbacks to cure depression; in 1920, five billion; in 1935, 50 billion.

No sooner was General Coxey, 81, nominated than he started on his campaign--in the vehicle by which he had arrived, a patent medicine truck, from which he sells a concoction of his own making called "Cox-E-Lax" for $1.25 per bottle (see cut). Heading in the general direction of the Pacific Northwest, he promised in the 16 months before election to peddle "Cox-E-Lax" in every one of the 48 States, talk "mostly on money."

*Not to be confused with Minnesota's potent Farmer-Labor Party.

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