Long Ago & Far Away

(See front cover)

Late one afternoon last week a lone man, following a porter carrying his bags, traipsed through Washington's Union Station among the crowd hurrying to catch the 6 o'clock train to Manhattan. In his seat in the parlor car he was just one more traveler. Those who failed to recognize his square-cut features, his shag of greying hair, his solid bulk, little dreamed that they were witnessing the departure of a famed citizen on the greatest adventure of his life. William Edgar Borah, after 30 years of uncertain thought, was for the first time actually starting out to try to make himself President of the U. S.

After 21 hours Senator Borah, who can not sleep well on trains and will not fly, completed a long detour around Pennsylvania's floods, detrained wearily at Youngstown, Ohio. There were seven inches of snow. There were 75 greeters to meet him. There was a room in Youngstown's second-best hotel. There was a dinner of Young Republicans, attended by about half the expected number of guests. There was a police escort. There was a speech in Stambaugh Auditorium.

Ohio Gun. As the opening gun of the Borah campaign in the Ohio primary (May 12), the Youngstown meeting was important if not very inspiring. Snow kept away several hundred reserved-seat holders. Instead of the 4,500 people expected, 2,400 were in the audience. Worse still, Candidate Borah was in need of the night's rest he had lost on the train. Final damper was the Machine Age. Like many another politician, Senator Borah has accepted the adage that modern campaign is a duel by radio. In one of his first major radio trials, in Brooklyn last January, his friends found the great orator from Idaho far from impressive. The trouble was, he thought, that he had to pause too often to consult his manuscript. To Youngstown he went with no manuscript. For 80 minutes he spoke extemporaneously. Those who went to hear him in the expectation of being deeply stirred by the fervor of his words, left Stambaugh Auditorium inexplicably disappointed.

Two days later Candidate Borah was in Chicago to try again. With $500 from his own pocket, Edgar John Cook hired Chicago's great Civic Opera House for Senator Borah's Illinois opening. Only 1,000 people turned out to listen, but Orator Borah did far better than at Youngstown. Said he:

"In the last campaign, in 1932, about a million Republican voters in the State of Illinois left the Republican Party and went over to the Democratic Party. Over ten million of Republican voters left the Republican Party throughout the nation.

. . . And if you will look at the organization in the State of Illinois and the men who are leading the organization, you will recollect every face of those who drove them out of the Republican Party, and if they are sitting in the front row at the Cleveland convention and dominate the platform and name the candidate, that ten million never will come back and other millions will go with them."

With this fling at his Party's Old Guard, the Presidential candidate became once more the Borah of long ago, the defender of the Constitution, the enemy of Monopoly.

Face to Dawn. For nearly three decades Senator Borah was the noble insurgent tail of the great conservative dog of the Republican Party. Then came 1932 and the great dog was soundly whipped. At last, the Idaho statesman figured, the hour had arrived when the whipped dog must answer to its tail. Two months ago the Senator publicly proclaimed the fact: "Nothing much is going to be taken for granted in this campaign. Everything will have to be tested and approved, from platform to candidate."

In Senator Borah's mouth this proclamation meant only one thing: The Republican platform must be written, the nominee must be picked, with due consideration for the liberal principles which he for a generation had espoused. Said Candidate Borah last week in Youngstown: "It is a question of the performance of the highest duty offered Republican citizens and you may forget me, if you desire, but not certain men, whose faces are toward the dawn, who believe in progress, who believe in liberalism and who want to return their Republican party to power."

Senator Borah became a candidate because he could not detect a reflection of his liberal dawn on the faces of such men as Herbert Hoover, Kansas' Governor Alfred Mossman Landon or Publisher William Franklin Knox of the Chicago Daily News as they turned toward the Republican convention in Cleveland on June 9.

Unfortunately for his plan to make the Republican pre-convention campaign a testing ground for his liberal principles, the other candidates, anxious to avoid Republican dissension, refused to engage in primary rough & tumble with him or even with one another. If primaries selected only uninstructed delegates or delegates pledged to hopeless favorite sons, the Republican candidate would certainly be picked by political horse-trading at the convention. Sure that no dawn-lit face would emerge from a smoke-filled hotel room after midnight, Senator Borah set out to force the issue.

Non-fighters. He broke the ice with a thump, announcing that he would run in the Ohio primaries (TIME, Feb. 17). As an attempt to force a fight on Candidates Knox or Landon, it was a failure. Both declined to enter Ohio after his announcement. He was left facing a favorite son. highly respectable Robert Alphonso Taft, son of the late Chief Justice, shrewdly picked by Ohio's Boss Walter Folger Brown to head the regular Republican ticket. With their candidate strongest in the Cleveland-Akron-Youngstown area, Borah managers will consider themselves lucky to win half of Ohio's 52 convention delegates. Not more than ten are conceded to him by the opposition. Last week before the Senator arrived in town the Youngstown Vindicator took a straw vote. Result: Landon, 542; Borah, 322; Hoover, 175; [Roosevelt 1,280].

In Illinois Candidate Borah forced Candidate Knox to fight, for the Chicago publisher could not stay out of the primary (April 14) of his home State. Senator Borah had two advantages in Illinois: 1) He was born on a farm near Fairfield 70 years ago; 2) He had indirect support from the Chicago Tribune which cannot see the publisher of the rival Daily News in the White House. But Publisher Knox has virtually a complete slate of 57 would-be convention delegates in the field, whereas Senator Borah has only twelve. Illinois also conducts a separate statewide Presidential preference vote which is purely to advise the convention delegation. Conceivably Candidate Knox might win the delegation and still lose the preference primary to Candidate Borah.

Governor Landon, however, was harder to catch. Kansas selects its delegates by convention, has already instructed them for Landon. Into Nebraska, where Landon has strength, Borah plunged, hoping his rival would follow. The Kansas candidate stayed away. Fortnight ago, however, when a slate of Landon delegates was picked for California's primary, Borah petitions were placed in circulation within 24 hours.

Left boxing with the shadows of his rivals. Senator Borah made their failure to fight his second issue. Scathingly he cried in Chicago: "In this state the primary would have gone by default had it not been for the fact that I had the temerity to come in here and file, and I am going to give you an opportunity to exercise the blessed privilege of helping to select the nominee for the Presidency upon the Republican ticket."

Borah v. All. Hoover, Landon, Knox take as their issue the New Deal. Their rival takes as his issue Borah-against-the-field. By last week he was entered in Illinois, Nebraska (April 14), Pennsylvania (April 28), Ohio. Delegates were running for him locally in New York and Wisconsin. He was expected to enter in Maryland (May 4), California (May 5), Oregon (May 15).

For this elaborate pre-convention campaign his equipment consisted of a five-room headquarters in Washington's Willard Hotel, little or no money and an organization made up mainly of William Edgar Borah. One eager volunteer came around early in the campaign: snaggle-toothed Representative J. Hamilton Fish of New York. No candidate's dream of the ideal political ally is "Ham" Fish, the butt of many a Congressional jest, the ardent runner-down-of-Reds. The statesman from Idaho warily shook Mr. Fish's large, aristocratic hand, accepted his services but offered him no official campaign post.

Yet a campaign manager was needed, reluctant as Senator Borah might be to accept assistance. Mr. Fish found onetime (1925-33) Representative Carl George Bachmann of West Virginia, dragged him back from his law practice in Wheeling. Manager Bachmann, blue-eyed, husky, bald, collects the small change which falls in a scanty shower from admirers of the aging statesman from Idaho. Biggest receipt so far has been $500 from an anonymous donor. This rivulet of cash Mr. Bachmann diverts to Borah posters, Borah buttons, rent, telegrams, petty cash.

Add to Ally Fish and Manager Bachmann, onetime Congressman Royal Johnson and Publisher Frank Gannett, whom Candidate Borah took as his running mate in Ohio and who has hardly been heard from since, and the roster of the Borah organization is virtually complete. For William Borah's campaign is managed inside his well-worn black fedora and he counts his strength not in his organization but in his reputation.

Hurdling History. Oldest man ever elected President was William Henry Harrison, who was 68 at his inauguration. Since the Civil War no man over 56 has ever become a tenant of the White House. The argument that William Edgar Borah, who will be 71 next June, is too old for the job is one which the Senator is doing his best to bury. But a Senatorial career stretching from Roosevelt I to Roosevelt II has done more than the mere passage of 30 years to make his candidacy an obstacle race.

One obstacle is a persistent doubt, even among his admirers, that his Presidential intentions are now in earnest. Trying to silence it, the Senator said last week in Youngstown: ". . . If I can be nominated by any honorable means I am going to take the nomination. And I am going to use all honorable means that I know of in order to secure it." Possibly Senator Borah may not think he will be nominated, but those who know him in Washington are convinced that his intentions are sincere and his hopes are on the White House.

Another obstacle is his heterodoxy in money matters. It dates back to the turn of the Century when he first ran for Congress as a "Silver Republican." Because of his long alliance with Washington's Silver Bloc, because of his vote for the greenback Bonus Bill in 1935, the hard-money East distrusts his economic views. To calm the East he announced briefly at Youngstown: "I am not in favor of inflation and never have been and neither do I favor deflation. I should like to see a stable dollar." What sort of dollar that might be he was not ready to specify.

First question popped at him from the audience when he finished his Chicago speech last week was whether he favored the pending Frazier-Lemke Bill to pay off farm mortgages by printing more money. Candidate Borah weaseled: "It should be allowed to reach the floor of the House."

Third major obstacle to the Borah candidacy is the Senator's firm belief that a Federal anti-lynching law is clearly unconstitutional and any Republican attempt to enact such a measure would be an insincere political gesture. To offset the hostility created by this stand among voting Negroes of the North the Senator's supporters tell the following story: In 1903 young Attorney Borah chartered a locomotive and a coach, sped 20 miles out of Boise to the town of Nampa, where one Jim Quarles, a Negro bootblack, who had stabbed a white man at a baseball game, was in danger of being lynched. Out of the empty coach, whose shades were drawn, stepped Borah, bluffed the mob before the jail into believing that he had militiamen hidden in the coach, carried Jim Quarles in safety to Boise.

Second question popped at Candidate Borah after his Chicago speech was whether he favored the pending Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill. He answered: "It violates the Constitution."

The third question asked him at Chicago was on another touchy subject, the Townsend Plan. His answer: "I favor old age pensions of $60 a month." Then he laughed, "You've asked me all the hard ones. Now give me something easy."

Grey of Years. A long public career also works in Senator Borah's favor. He is the only colorful contender for the Republican nomination. Part of this color, however, is too greyed over by the years to be of use in 1936. Forgotten is the picture of the young politician who in 1894 helped elect William John McConnell Governor of Idaho and promptly married the Governor's daughter Mamie. Forgotten is the young attorney who in 1907 prosecuted William ("Big Bill") Haywood and two others of the Western Federation of Miners for instigating the fatal bombing of ex-Governor Frank Steunenberg. Forgotten is the fact that Prosecutor Borah lost the case to a defense attorney named Clarence Darrow.

The Borah of today has not even a home in Idaho. When he goes West he is obliged to rent office quarters and live at the homes of his friends or at a hotel. Nor is he any longer the Westerner on Horseback who used to canter through Washington's Rock Creek Park. He has not ridden since he had an operation on his prostate gland at Johns Hopkins in 1933. His home is nine rooms in a large apartment building on Connecticut Avenue. Unless he borrows his wife's 1931 La Salle, he strolls to his office about 11 o'clock each morning. In the long corridors of the Senate Office Building his door can be identified by several Poland Water bottles on its threshold. He drinks four quarts of this a day, no tea, no coffee and, for the last 50 years, no alcohol. His office is staffed entirely with Idahoans. He spends an hour at his correspondence before going to the Senate floor at noon. At 6 p. m. he usually busses home, goes out nowhere socially in the evening, except to an occasional formal function at the White House. Of a fortune of perhaps $100,000 which he had acquired before his election to the Senate, he has spent during the last 30 years some $50,000 in addition to his salary.

Fame & Force. If the Republicans at Cleveland should nominate Idaho's Borah, the G. O. P. would be putting into the field the most famed Senator of this century. Yet in that fame many a voter would doubtless find something old and outmoded, a far-away-&-long-ago quality ill-suited to an up-to-date campaign against the most up-to-date campaigner in Democratic history. For a generation Borah was the great Moral Force of the Senate, the one member who could arise and deal with Right & Wrong in an electric way. Now the conscience of the country has been placed in other pockets. No Senator gave longer and more loving thought to the Constitution and its preservation as a source of righteous power. Yet during the last three years of New Deal tinkering, Senator Borah's voice has rarely risen above the Washington hubbub in constitutional warning or criticism. After he had helped to keep the U. S. out of the League of Nations, world governments learned that the ursine Senator from Idaho was a potent person to be reckoned with in their dealings with the U. S., that, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he had an authority comparable to that of the Secretary of State himself. Now Senator Borah has lost his Committee chairmanship, and the New Deal goes its international way without his aid or advice. When Monopoly was the great issue under Roosevelt I, Senator Borah was in the thick of the fight. Since then political ideology has moved on into fresher fields, more social than economic, with the result that the Idahoan of 1906 is left battling a foe which to 1936 liberals is but hollow husk.

Significance. Senator Borah may not succeed in testing the strength of his rival candidates. But one test he has made certain. The primaries he has entered will test to the full the popular strength of William Edgar Borah and his brand of liberalism. If he cannot make a handsome showing in such states as Illinois and Ohio, even his friends admit that he may as well start for Idaho to begin his Senatorial campaigning for certain reelection.

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