Hamlets

As part of the great political drama presented every Presidential election year, a half-dozen Hamlets last week rushed to the national footlights, threw out their chests, opened their mouths in mighty soliloquies. Who was to be or not to be President after Jan. 20, 1937 was the question.

Genesis. Week before, at the Washington dinner of the American Liberty League, Alfred Emanuel Smith had violently condemned the New Deal, threatened to "take a walk" on Election Day (TIME, Feb. 3). The official comeback to this blast was delivered last week by the Happy Warrior's old political pal Joseph Taylor Robinson, the Vice- Presidential stub to the 1928 Democratic ticket. Since that luckless campaign. Arkansas' senior Senator had acquired in Franklin Roosevelt a new master to serve and revere.

"I shall take for my text tonight," broadcast Hamlet Robinson, "Genesis, the 27th chapter, verse 22: The Voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. Alfred E. Smith sought the Presidency in 1928, when a man who raised his voice on behalf of the great causes of social justice and Democratic principles was regarded by the stock-ticker patriots with smug toleration or as a potential enemy of his country. . . .

"What is our amazement to find Governor Smith enthroned in the camp of the enemy, warring like one of the Janizaries of old against his own people. . . . The Brown Derby has been discarded for the high hat. . . . Yes, Governor Smith, it was as difficult to conceive you at that Liberty League banquet as it would be to imagine George Washington waving a cheery good-by to the ragged and bleeding band at Valley Forge while he rode forth to dine in sumptuous luxury with smug and sanctimonious Tories in nearby Philadelphia. . . . You approved NRA, you approved farm relief, you urged Federal spending and public works, you urged Congress to cut red tape and confer power on the Executive, you urged autocratic power for the President. . . . The New Deal was the platform of the Happy Warrior. The policies of the Liberty League have become the platform of the Unhappy Warrior!"

"Poor Joe" About to depart for a vacation at Palm Beach, Hamlet Smith took a brief curtain to reply to Senator Robinson. As if weeping over the skull of a departed Yorick, he lamented: "Poor Joe --I'm sorry for him; they put him on a tough spot. He did the best he knew how, but it was no answer. As I said in my speech . . . there is only one man who should try to answer me. . . .* I was an 'Unhappy Warrior' to hear him read off a speech over which he stumbled so that I felt sure it was canned and did not come from the heart of the Joe Robinson that I have known." Borah in Brooklyn. Meanwhile in Brooklyn, a Republican performer who has for years been packing the U. S. Senate's galleries made another oblique bid for the Presidency. Well equipped for the role, with locks as long as Booth's, 70-year-old Hamlet Borah began with the candid remark: "I do not natter myself that I can bring to you any new or startling message. "I am not going ... to indulge in what must be a pleasant pastime, that of regaling one's personal qualifications for [the Presidency]," continued the Senator from Idaho. "But . . . that brings up the most important pre-convention question that we can consider, and that question is : 'Who is going to determine the [candidate's] fitness and how is it going to be determined?' " A political lone wolf who has spent a lifetime shunning partisan alignments, Senator Borah naturally feared that the Republican nominee might be chosen "in secret conclave behind closed doors long after midnight." "This," he warned, "is not a very good year . . . for exclusiveness in the matter of selecting a candidate for the Presidency."

Just how seriously Senator Borah's candidacy was to be taken became a question when his Ohio backers last week admitted that it would be useless to put his name in that State's primary. And from Washington onetime Governor Gifford Pinchot announced that he had advised Senator Borah "not to go into the fight for delegates" in Pennsylvania "for the reason that more money would be required than is available." "Kansas Coolidge." Managers of Governor Alfred Mossman Landon of Kansas now claim that their candidate will go to the Republican National Convention at Cleveland in June with at least 182 pledged votes. Last week Governor Landon took the occasion of the festivities at Topeka commemorating 75 years of Kansas Statehood to deliver his most pretentious address to date on national issues.

No heir to the sensational tradition of Carry Nation, "Sockless Jerry" Simpson and John Brown of Osawatomie, this "Coolidge of the West" discoursed for 40 minutes on safety & sanity. The scholarly editorial board of the New York Times heard the address by radio, soberly pronounced: "He impresses you as a man of sound judgment and moderate opinions. . . . Inevitably he utters commonplaces, but some are not 'glittering generalities.' "

Landonisms:

After all, experience is still the greatest teacher.

A nation will survive to correct its political mistakes. But if an unsound financial program is coupled with them, the nation faces destruction.

Change does not necessarily mean progress.

There are people today calling themselves liberal who regard any suggestion of economy as reactionary. They seem to think willingness to throw other people's money around without any consideration of value received is a peculiar sign of a pure heart. We must subordinate material rewards and enthrone the things of the spirit. "I am for Landon," declared William Allen White. "As a young man he followed my banner and as an old man I am going to follow his." "Stirring!" cried Steelmaster Ernest Tener Weir. "An important contribution to American history!" exclaimed Ogden Mills. "HE BELONGS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!" screamed the Hearst Press, Governor Landon's chief journalistic support to date. Some weeks ago imaginative observers began suggesting that the Kansas Governor's self-chosen appellation of Alf M. Landon might prove as distasteful to fastidious voters in 1936 as J. Cal Coolidge and Herb Hoover would have been in 1924 and 1928 (TIME, Dec. 23). Last week Aspirant Landon arrived at the same conclusion by a different route, let it be known around Topeka that, "perhaps I shall have to learn to adopt my christened name. ... If I stuck to 'Alf I am afraid some critics might think I was doing so for political effect."

"Businessman." One political effect of Republican enthusiasm over Governor Landon was to cast a shadow over another Midwesterner also entirely available for the Republican nomination. Still pursuing an unspectacular program, Publisher William Franklin Knox of the Chicago Daily News was scurrying around through the midlands rallying small groups to his support. Concentrating last week on Ohio, he joyfully told diners at the 33rd annual McKinley Day banquet of the Tippecanoe Club of Cleveland that a "cataclysmic division" was rending the Democracy which "will be fatal to the Democratic success in November."

In a different vein, two days later, this time before McKinley banqueters in Dayton, Frank Knox solemnly warned: "Businessmen have to get into politics--or get out of business!" "Goober Democrats." "Put the Communist out of the White House and never let him return!" was the keynote of the week's most extraordinary political spectacle, a gathering at Macon of some 3,000 Georgians and about 150 professional soreheads from elsewhere in the South. It was jointly called by Georgia's Governor Talmadge and an old Texan named John Henry Kirby, who sponsors a tip-top protective tariff for the South. The red-white-&-blue invitations bore the name of The Southern Committee To Uphold The Constitution. The Macon meeting soon acquired other names, including "Southern Grassroots Convention," "Dixie Democrats," "Jeffersonian Democrats" and, because the peanut-producing states were among those 17 vaguely represented, "Goober Democrats." Unorganized and self-appointed, the "delegates" were willing to do anything from fighting the Civil War again to nominating "Gene" Talmadge for President. Net result of the one-day encampment was: 1) to ballyhoo Governor Talmadge's bitter feud against the New Deal and 2) to disgorge an unconscionable amount of barbecue oratory blackguarding a Democratic President. A distinguished speaker was North Carolina's Thomas Dixon. Author Dixon's literary fame rests on two novels, The Clansman (filmed as The Birth of a Nation) and Leopard's Spots, glorifying the original Ku Klux Klan. Still Ante-Bellum politically, Thomas Dixon rose beneath a huge Confederate flag to denounce the New Deal for the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill ("The most brazen attempt to outrage states' rights by placing Federal bayonets at our backs!") and Mrs. Roosevelt for encouraging the Southern Negro to embrace the tenets of collectivist philosophers. Tops for tirades was the utterance of Huey Long's old Share-the-Wealth organizer, the Rev. Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith of Shreveport, La. "Roosevelt," bellowed Preacher Smith, "is rapidly be coming the most despised President in the history of the Country. . . . He gave us the Russian primer and cursed the Bible. . . . He and his gang are in the death rattle. We have only to put the cloth of the ballot over his dead mouth!" Longster Smith's harangue was climaxed when a tobacco-stained oldster loped wildly up to the platform, planted a slobbery kiss on his sweaty face. "Give it to 'em, Gene!" roared the assembled Crackers when Governor Talmadge was introduced. "Pour it on 'em, brother!" Governor Talmadge's address was, for him, notably temperate. He did not remove his green coat or once snap his red suspenders. And while he referred generally to the Roosevelt Administration as a collection of cheats, racketeers and madmen, he never came near topping Preacher Smith's vituperation. As to his own Presidential aspirations, all Gene Talmadge would say was that a man was insane who turned down a chance at the White House job--and he was not insane. Of his immediate plans to make it hot for Franklin Roosevelt at the Philadelphia Convention, Georgia's Governor talked at length with visiting Yankee newshawks. "You city folks think in your citified way that Jim Farley can buy the nomination for President Roosevelt. . . . If you want to know which way the wind is blowing, don't ask a city man. Get the opinion of a Ruben."

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