Wooing of the West

Last week Republican National Chairman John Hamilton, accompanied by a dozen assistants and reporters, boarded a chartered plane in Chicago, set out on a twelve-day trip through 16 States west of the Mississippi. Like a swiftly moving piece upon a checkerboard, the plane zig-zagged across Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and settled down one afternoon last week at Salt Lake City.* Thus the campaign manager of the Presidential nominee who had declared for a sound currency "convertible into gold" arrived in the heart of the silver country.

Every local newshawk who gathered around the GOP manager had silver on the tip of his tongue. John Hamilton, deciding that discretion was the better part of politics, promptly produced for them a compromise interpretation of Governor Landon's gold standard:

"The mere establishment of the gold standard does not imply that a fair price cannot be maintained for silver and that some arrangement cannot be made in regard to silver.

"Neither the Republican platform's monetary plank nor Landon's telegram to the National Convention interpreting the Party's money declaration as meaning currency based on gold would preclude consideration of the silver problem."

He went on to call attention to Governor Landon's proviso on the gold standard, that it "must not be made until and unless it can be done . . . without injury to our producers of agricultural products and other raw materials." And after all silver was a raw material.

Shocked was every orthodox economist who had considered the Landon stand a firm promise to end the New Deal's ill-starred silver policy. Not shocked at all were practical politicians who realized that Republican Hamilton was simply playing the old game of wooing the West.

What the GOP is up against in this particular courtship was indicated last week when U. S. silver production figures were released for the first six months of 1936. By order of President Roosevelt the Treasury has been buying for the past two years all the silver freshly mined in the U. S. For this the Treasury paid a fictitiously high price--78-c- per oz. last week. If this same silver had been sold in the world market, it would have brought the current world price--45-c- per oz. last week. Under the stimulus of this 33-c- Government bounty, U. S. silver production rose from 16,742,000 oz. during the first half of 1935 to 29,852,000 oz. during the first half of 1936. To win the silverite West away from the New Deal, the GOP, as Manager Hamilton well knew last week in Salt Lake City, has to promise Western silver producers something to take the place of their Treasury-financed prosperity.

*In this citadel of Mormonism, Chairman Hamilton was pleased to have it whispered in his ear that the Mormon Church is almost solidly against the New Deal--Brigham Young having been an ardent opponent of charity.

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