Cat's Cradle

Next week Republican voters of Illinois will have a good chance to eliminate either Senator Borah or Publisher Knox from future consideration as a GOPossibility for President. Democratic voters will have a juicier morsel waiting them on primary day: the opportunity of lopping off political heads, of wrecking a great political machine and even of settling the results of next autumn's State election.

Illinois politics is a cat's cradle of cross-purposes and cross-alliances hanging between metropolitan Chicago and rural downstate. The four chief candidates for Governor--two in each party--are only four of the numerous pins from which the cradle hangs. On the Democratic side Pin No. 1 is Governor Henry Homer, a lawyer whose enterprise and honesty landed him on the Cook County Probate bench in 1914. There his work put him in touch with many of Chicago's most influential families, who came to esteem him as highly as he was held among his fellow Jews. In 1932 the Roosevelt boom put him in the Governor's mansion at Springfield. But stocky Governor Horner did not find his task easy. Strictly a good-government man, he supported an Honest Elections Bill which was opposed by old Boss Patrick A. Nash's Democratic machine, vetoed another measure which would have empowered Chicago's Mayor Edward J. Kelly to license race-track handbooks.

Pin No. 2 is Herman Niels Bundesen. Born in Berlin in 1882, Herman Bundesen was growing up to be a Chicago street Arab when, as the story goes, a kindly Reformed Episcopal bishop, whose silk topper young Herman had smashed with a snowball, took him to Sunday school, reformed him. While Herman's two closest boyhood chums applied themselves to prodigal careers which subsequently landed them in jail for life for murder, Herman worked his way through Northwestern University Medical School, winding up on the Chicago Board of Health. As the Board's publicity-loving chief during the regimes of Mayors William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson and William Dever, Dr. Bundesen had a ringside seat at a memorable political show. When Mayor Thompson ousted him in 1927, he started a medical column in the Daily News, got on the Sanitary District's pay roll and four years later had back his old job as Health Board president. By adroit soft-pedaling Dr. Bundesen weathered the scandal surrounding Chicago's amebic dysentery epidemic during the 1933 Century of Progress.

On the Republican side Pin No. 1 is Lawyer C. Wayland Brooks, who as an assistant State's Attorney helped secure the conviction of Leo Brothers for the murder of Jake Lingle, Chicago Tribune reporter. Pin No. 2 is onetime (1921-29) Governor Len Small, who ruled Illinois as head of a malodorous Republican machine, but to whom the farmers of Illinois are still grateful for the concrete roads he built.

Chicago's Mayor Kelly and Boss Pat Nash long ago agreed that Henry Horner was not to have another term in Spring field if they could help it. They were grieved that he had appointed Republicans and fellow-Jews to office and had re mained notably cool to their demands for patronage. Of his Honest Elections Bill Oldster Nash snapped: "It would cost the organization 250,000 votes." Hence last January, at a party conference where the Democratic Governor's name was not even mentioned, Mayor Kelly's henchmen picked Dr. Bundesen to be the Democratic candidate.

After discarding Governor Horner like an uncomfortable shoe, the Chicago Democratic machine found it had made a mistake. On its foot he pinched; off its foot he kicked back. Downstate Democrats rallied to him with new enthusiasm. When it began to look as if Governor Horner might win the Democratic nomination anyway, Mayor Kelly took alarm for the future of his machine. Nightly in Chicago he took the stump to attack the Governor. "What's the matter with Horner?" he demanded. "I'll tell you what I said to him. I told him that he had been a good judge, but that as a Governor he was a good hod carrier."

Governor Horner answered by radio: "When I opened my campaign ... I stated plainly the issue. ... I said it's the primary voters of Illinois against Boss Kelly. . . . Something has happened in Chicago, just as it has happened downstate. I knew what had happened. But I didn't know the boss would find it out, surrounded as he is with his little court of sycophants and parasites who try to keep him from hearing unpleasant things. Apparently the courtiers could not keep the sad news from the boss, and he became panicky. So, out he came, leading with his chin. . . . He's out in the open, and I'm going to keep him in the open, for when he's in the open he's just as harmless as any other species that can't stand the light of day. . . ."

Candidates Horner and Bundesen opened their campaign downstate. While Governor Horner flayed Mayor Kelly, Dr. Bundesen toured with a motorcade of paunchy politicians, who at every hamlet where they stopped sacrificed themselves on the altar of political expediency. In chorus, they asked for milk, drank it, asked for more. Then Dr. Bundesen made a little speech on the benefit of drinking milk.

By way of more direct action, State Treasurer John Stelle, a Kelly man, last week refused to give 32,000 State employes their pay checks. His reason: "We have found 3,000 men and women employed who are doing no State work, only political duties. This thing may go to the courts."

Said Governor Homer: "A cheap political trick, typical of those who are perpetrating it!"

Last week, as the campaign moved to Chicago, the real battleground, Mayor Kelly injected religion into it when he cried to some 500 Jewish politicians assembled in the Morrison Hotel: "It will be a sad day in Illinois for the Jews if it is apparent in the face of the election results that the Jews voted for Horner because he is a Jew. . . . When Henry Horner was nominated in 1932 the Irish went to the front for him and they battled side by side with the Jews to elect him. Now we're fighting Horner. ... I don't want anything I'm telling you here to get in the newspapers. ... I admire the man who declares his religion. Why I would kiss the Cardinal's ring at State and Madison Streets at broad noon. I'm proud of being a Catholic but religion has no place in a campaign. . . ."

That Horner would carry downstate by a huge majority no one doubted. His managers claimed his downstate majority would roll up to 300,000, but the question was whether 300,000 votes, or any majority from downstate, could match the Chicago machine's efficient vote-making equipment. Dispassionate observers believed that the machine could count 300,000 votes by the "endless chain system'" alone. This device requires the theft of only one blank ballot by each precinct captain and absolutely insures that all votes bought are delivered. The blank ballot is marked and given to a hired voter who puts it in his pocket, takes it into the polling place, receiving another blank as he enters. In the booth he puts the new blank in his pocket, takes out the marked ballot and, emerging, drops it in the ballot box. By delivering the new blank to his employers he proves his honesty, collects his fee, supplies them a new ballot to mark and continue the chain.

Against such odds there was doubt whether even popular Governor Horner could win. But excitement was high because more hung on the primary than the fate of Horner and the Kelly machine. Two more big pins in the cat's cradle of Illinois politics are Colonel Knox, publisher of Chicago's Daily News and Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of Chicago's Tribune. Both men and both sheets are Republican. Both are interested in the gubernatorial fights in both parties. Both are at swords' points on all points. The News has attacked vice and misrule under the Kelly regime in Chicago. The Tribune has supported Mayor Kelly, was rewarded when the city changed its clocks to Eastern Standard Time to give the morning Tribune a circulation advantage over the evening News (TIME, March 9 et ante). The Tribune backed Dr. Bundesen and when Kelly said Horner was a hod carrier, the News published a cartoon of the Governor showering bricks on the Mayor.

On the Republican side, the Tribune, grateful to Candidate Brooks because of the Lingle case, supports that candidate in the primary. Len Small jumped on the

Knox-for-President bandwagon, much to Colonel Knox's embarrassment for he could not afford to repudiate Len Small's support even if the Tribune would not let him forget Small's unsavory reputation. Result of all these conflicting interests and alliances was to make Illinois voters aware that their primaries are the first act of a rousing melodrama of political intrigue, a melodrama with four possible outcomes: 1) If the Democrats nominate Dr. Bundesen and the Republicans nominate Len Small, the Republican Tribune can be expected next autumn to join the Kelly ma chine in pulling for the Democratic nom inee. 2) If the nominees are Dr. Bundesen and Lawyer Brooks, it is not unlikely that Henry Horner may cross party lines to support the Republican candidate against the Kelly machine. 3) If the nominees are Horner and Small, Mayor Kelly, much as he hates Horner, can hardly lend his support to the Tribune's enemy. 4) Should the nominees be Horner and Brooks, Mayor Kelly would have a double reason for changing sides. No certain gainer is there in any of these combinations except curly-haired C. Wayland Brooks, who, if he wins the nomination, can almost certainly count on the support of a disgruntled 'faction of Democrats.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.