Harlem Prodigy

Of 103 piano pupils who entered the annual tournament conducted in Manhattan by the National Guild of Piano Teachers, youngest this spring was Philippa Duke Schuyler, 4, a Negro child who blithely played ten compositions, six of them her own. Reward for superior playing is a gold seal certificate, a place on the Guild's national roll of honor. Seven of the contestants were so rated last week and among them 4-year-old Philippa Schuyler.

Prodigious at more than music is this Harlem-born daughter of a white mother and a coal-black father (TIME, Aug 26). Mrs. Schuyler paints, writes for Negro newspapers. George Schuyler was a day laborer and a dishwasher before he became a novelist (Black No More, Slaves Today), a contributor to American Mercury and Saturday Evening Post. All three Schuylers subsist on raw vegetables, raw meat, a diet which Mrs. Schuyler claims is largely responsible for her daughter's precocity. At two Philippa amazed the neighbors by reading, writing her name, spelling 150 long words. At four her spelling is up to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoniosis.* She is keen at mathematics, reads fourth-grade books, writes poetry, draws and paints, turns out neat letters on her father's type writer.

Judges at the recent piano tournament were impressed by the facility with which she played Mozart's Minuet in G, the imagination shown in her original pieces. Best was a Nigerian Dance which she wrote when a Nigerian friend sent her a mahogany elephant. Others were: Rolling Home on My Roller Skates, Pansy Bells, The Butterfly, The Wolf (inspired by Little Red Ridinghood&), Golden Fish in Silver Waters, the result of a visit to the Aquarium.

"Susanna" v. "Happy Days"

Whether or not he is elected 33rd President of the U. S., squinty-smiling Governor Alf M. Landon of Kansas was last week indelibly imprinted upon his countrymen's memory as The Man Who revived the tune Oh! Susanna as a national theme song. In the course of six days at Cleveland, bands at the Republican National Convention played Oh! Susanna 1,800 times by official count. Into a class with The Sidewalks of New York and California, Here I Come passed the old banjo ballad written by Stephen Foster nearly 100 years ago and first sung into U. S. tradition by the gold-rushing Forty-Niners.

The tune of Three Blind Mice became paired with Oh! Susanna as a major overtone of 1936 only by accident. The rhythm of Senator Steiwer's keynote phrase, "Three long years!" automatically evoked the old nursery jingle. Prompt to answer the Republican parody were Democratic versions recalling the twelve long years of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. But Oh! Susanna was not revived by accident. Governor Landon's efficient handlers had searched carefully for a tune to set him to, a tune that could surely be plugged into another Banana Song. After discarding a "We Want Landon" chant and the somewhat tedious Kansas University song, The Crimson and the Blue, the Landonites studied the merits of I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby but finally passed it up as dangerous, catchy though the air is. Official campaign words for Oh! Susanna, with their phrases about "regimented Bunk" and "the dear old Constitution" (TIME, June 15) were turned out by Win Williams and Romney Gifford of the Landon publicity staff.

Campaign songs excoriating the opposing party are as old as U. S. politics. Of all U. S. Presidents, George Washington alone escaped. After his unanimous election he was hailed by a happy populace singing Yankee Doodle and Welcome, Mighty Chief. Back-biting and banner-waving came in with Adams and Jefferson. The New Englander was a "Monarchist," the Virginian a "maniac who sympathized with the French Revolution." In 1797 Adams voters paraded to Hail Columbia! and Adams and Liberty! Four years later the Jeffersonians were crying:

In spite of fraud, chicane and every art

That could be practiced on the human heart

The man of science, morals and good will

Must the first station in the Union fill.

Henry Clay never reached the White House, but in the course of his career there were Henry Clay marches and a song called, Here's to You, Harry Clay, published with his picture on the cover and glowing words inside about "the cheerful Whig who didn't care a fig what Locos block the way. . . ."

Political songs and torchlight parades raged throughout the 19th Century. Peak came with the Log Cabin-Hard Cider campaign (1840) conducted by the Whigs in behalf of General William H. Harrison, hero of Tippecanoe, and his running-mate, John Tyler. Opponent was Democrat Martin Van Buren of New York, who prompted the Whigs to sing:

Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine,

And lounge on his cushioned settee,

Our man on his buckeye bench can recline

Content with hard cider is he. . . .

"Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too" became such a catchphrase that children named pets for the pair while campaigners sang:

No ruffled shirt, no silken hose,

No airs does Tip display

But like the 'pith of worth' he goes

In homespun 'hoddin-gray!'

Abraham Lincoln took his share of ridicule as a poor railsplitter, prompting the Stephen Douglas followers to intone monotonously:

Tell again about the cordwood,

Seven cords or more per day;

How each night he seeks his closet

There alone to kneel and pray.

Lincoln's backers retorted at Douglas:

His principles were weak, but his spirits

they were strong,

For a thirsty little soul was he.

The theme song of the Spanish-American War, A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, lent itself naturally to the 1904 campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, but eight years later, for his Bull Moose campaign at "Armageddon," his marching song was Onward Christian Soldiers. In the intervening campaign, won by Taft in 1908, his lady admirers sang: Taft for Me, Taft for Me to the tune of Tammany. Woodrow Wilson scorned campaign songs, but in 1916 he was forced to listen often to I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.

Campaign songs lapsed for a time thereafter. Harding had no outstanding song. Coolidge boosters worked on "It's Coolidge and Dawes for the Nation's Cause. . . ." But the tune never caught on. Seldom were two campaign songs more evenly matched in popularity than the Smith-Hoover clash of Sidewalks and California. This year, Oh! Susanna will be pitted against the old F. D. Roosevelt reliable, Happy Days Are Here Again.

*Inflammation of the lungs caused by inhaling sandy dust, e.g., silicosis.

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