Judas and Johns

With sense really common and widely diffused, John Bull realized by the million last week that the British General Election Nov. 14 is a setup. John reacted with unprecedented apathy. To the acute distress of local candidates, John simply did not attend their meetings. Exactly 26 voters of whom 24 were women were all the audience Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare drew when he returned from Geneva, presumably with earth-shaking news about Europe's crisis. In all constituencies candidates bitterly complained that party leaders had "greatly overdone the wireless." John Bull, feeling that John Bullish Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was going to win the election anyhow, puffed his pipe at home while the flesh & blood candidate around the corner sulked. John got all the electioneering he cared to hear from broadcasts. In the famed "depressed areas" of Britain, where grinding poverty stalks and almost nobody has a radio, local candidates got all too much attention from the enraged but helpless proletariat. "Judas!" roared the miners of Seaham at snowy-crested Candidate James Ramsay MacDonald and broke up his meetings again & again. When Ishbel MacDonald. no longer apple-cheeked but pale with strain, tried to speak for her father, she too was jeered off the platform. So was onetime Engine Greaser James Henry ("Jim") Thomas, Dominions Secretary. At the famed waxworks of Madame Tussaud, where the National Government may be seen in session any day, the dummies most definitely slated to disappear were those of Ramsay and Jim. With unction rich, Prime Minister Baldwin took it upon himself to tell Demos that it was not being Democratic. "I have been a little anxious as a Democrat," said the Tory Leader at Leeds, "that the right of free speech has been denied to my friend MacDonald. . . . This shouting down of people and refusing to hear arguments ... is more than stupid. It is bad." Demos continued, however, to boo Stanley's friend Ramsay off the boards and the only speech Mr. MacDonald was able to finish last week he made in a soundproof broadcasting studio at Newcastle. Beside himself with worry, the pathetic Scot seemed to forget that it was Ramsay MacDonald who insisted on running at Seaham against the advice of friends & colleagues and blurted to a sympathetic wellwisher: "The National Government should never have put a candidate here. It will be a miracle if I am elected."

The Issues. After one look at the chief election poster of His Majesty's Government (see p. 19) and another at that of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition (see below) the apathy of John Bull seemed to do him credit. In so far as British Labor is articulate, the proletariat voted to go to war with Italy when the strongly anti-Fascist Trades Union Congress demanded that full military and naval sanctions be applied if necessary to whip Il Duce (TIME, Sept. 23). Yet last week Labor Party Leader Major Clement Attlee was imploring voters to "Stop War! Vote Labor!" In other words he thought that the mass of British voters could be duped by catch phrases and have no true, proletarian backbone. They have not and John Bull, in John's own expressive slang, is not going to let Labor "sell a pup." John would not be duped last week into anything so fancy as Socialism, the creed of the Labor Party.

The Conservative poster with its claim that jobs promised in 1931 by the National Government of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald were delivered and are now dependent on returning the National Government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was perfectly adapted to John Bull's psychology. Intellectually and idealistically the "National Government" may be the most bare-faced political swindle ever successfully perpetrated, but who wants to be intellectual? Those John and Jane Bulls who have ideals and voted 11,000,000 strong for the League of Nations in the recent British straw ballot have been taken care of by Squire Baldwin according to their taste. They never meant to vote for sanctions of blood & iron against sunny Italy, as the grim Trades Union Congress did. They wanted the idealistic thrill of not-too-dangerous sanctions imposed with much lofty claptrap and that thrill Squire Baldwin has delivered. If the claptrap scares Mussolini and he backs down, so much the better. If not, little or nothing has been risked in John Bull's opinion, and however dead the League of Nations may prove eventually it is not as dead today as it was before the fires of idealism were kindled by 11,000,000 British straw votes. In no other country could such a hodgepodge of considerations be called issues but in the United Kingdom these were issues last week and they were only part of a comfortable general hodgepodge from which no one bothered much to disentangle housing, the dole and other real issues. The harsh and ugly reality--the great issue of when Britain's proletariat will find leaders and strength to overwhelm "the Families" and the ruling class--is not to be faced this week. That this grim reality exists, that the comfortable figure of John Bull is himself no longer typical of a whole people, appears from the fact that John Bullish Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, while expected to win the election and five more years of Conservatives in power, is expected to lose to Labor, badly led though it is, enough seats to reduce the National Government's majority in the House of Commons from an overwhelming 415 to a safe hundred or two. When the campaign opened Squire Baldwin's headquarters predicted a National Government majority of 200. Last week they predicted 160, and spoke cheerfully of 100 as a "more wieldy majority" than the Prime Minister has led for some time. Blackshirts. The blackshirted British admirers of Benito Mussolini, Sir Oswald Mosley & friends, sloganed: "BLACK- SHIRTS WATCH THIS FUTILE FARCE--FASCISM NEXT TIME!" With British voters only a little more friendly to II Duce last week than they once were to the Kaiser, Sir Oswald put up not a single Fascist candidate but emphasized that his party has 482 British locals by staging numerous rallies at which he spoke in the vein of Adolf Hitler. Bawled Sir Oswald with arms akimbo beneath a draped Union Jack: "We denounce the present British party system. Jewish financiers control the Government!" Greenshirts. Two candidates were put up by British Social Crediteers, the green-shirted followers of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas "Father of the Social Credit Plan." Not troubling to campaign, Major Douglas continued to practice golf and tinker with yachts at his seaside home near Southampton. On the payroll of Alberta at $10,000 per year, he is in no hurry to go to Canada, where his doctrines are being effectively perverted by his paymaster, radiorating Premier William Aberhart (TIME, Sept. 2 et seq.}. Lady. As she does in every General Election Lady Astor, M. P. gave the world new ideas of what constitutes a lady. "Why don't you face the issues?" cried a poorly dressed woman at one of her meetings. Replied the Noble Lady, "Speaking of faces, why don't you use your face to shut your mouth?" Up shut the woman, but after Lady Astor had spoken at some length about how the National Government has given women jobs, a droop-mustached male voter boomed: "That's enough of your baloney! The failure of our Government to cure unemployment has forced many a British girl to take to the streets." "That's enough from you, Walrus!" replied Lady Astor (nee Langhorne of Virginia). "One thing I'm certain about is that no street girl would have lowered herself sufficiently to go with you. Now sit down, Walrus, and shut up!" Gentleman. Such "American sallies," as indulgent Britons call them, maintained the Astor reputation. In contrast Sir Samuel Hoare got off a characteristic British sally at all who feel that his policies often constrain him to lie like a gentleman.* Sallied the Foreign Secretary: "I am reminded of a saying of the Duke of Wellington soon after the Battle of Waterloo. "The Duke, at the height of his fame, was walking down Piccadilly when a gentleman came up, took off his hat and said: 'Mr. Brown, I believe?' The Duke's answer was simple and direct. It was: 'Sir, if you believe that you'll believe anything.' "

Propaganda. Labor was turning out about eleven tons of propaganda per day, National Government about 45 tons. In the Midlands billboarding firms refused to stick up Labor's baby-in-a-gas-mask poster at any price. With Conservative volunteers making 18,000 telephone calls daily in London alone and handing out 25,000,000 pieces of campaign literature, the Kingdom fairly weltered in British propaganda. Slickest was a tabloid called Popular Illustrated, which abruptly appeared with nothing in its first five numbers to indicate that its price "One Penny" was a blind and that the sheet was actually a National Government electioneering handout. In white letters on red at the masthead gleamed such enticers as "Free Knitting Pattern (see page 7)," "Special Article by Mr. Stanley Baldwin (see page 3)" and "200 Prizes for Children (see page 7)." Editorial content was about 80% pro-Baldwin propaganda. Picture content was 80% "human interest" with such captions as "A ROYAL LOVE MATCH," "TOYLAND PROMISES TO BE ALL-BRITISH THIS CHRISTMAS" and "WHERWELL, nestling in the Test Valley. This lovely Hampshire village, with its thatched roofs and old-world charm, enshrines the beauty of rural Britain, and symbolizes the peace and security of our country." In the next column Captain Eden and Sir Samuel Hoare were captioned: "WORK- ERS FOR PEACE."

*On the Continent last week British policy appeared so tortuous that the Paris weekly Aux Ecoutes was widely believed when it disclosed that at the close of a recent conversation between Sir Samuel and the envoy of a foreign power, the Ambassador urbanely murmured, "What a pity, my dear Hoare, that I cannot believe one word you say."

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