Livingstone's Travels

Early last week dispatches from a vacation spot in Colorado began to rustle through the becalmed leaves of the nation's Press. These remote stirrings indicated that an answer would soon be forthcoming for Columnist Westbrook Pegler, who last week treated his Scripps-Howard readers to the following sarcasm:

"Considerable mystery surrounds the disappearance of Alfred M. Landon of Topeka, Kans., who has been missing from his regular haunts for some time. The Missing Persons Bureau has sent out an alarm bulletin bearing Mr. Landon's photograph and other particulars, and anyone having information of his whereabouts is asked to communicate direct with the Republican National Committee. . . .

"The bulletin describes Mr. Landon as follows:

"Height, average.

"Weight, average.

"Complexion, average.

"Habits, average.

"Distinguishing characteristics, scars, birthmarks, etc., average."

Since his nomination for the Presidency in June Alf Landon had appeared just once in the national eye. That was on the hot July evening he made his safe & sane acceptance speech in Topeka. Since then his prolonged absence from the headlines had prompted the pressagents of the Democratic National Committee to chide the pressagents of the Republican National Committee with having failed to mention the GOPresidential nominee for a whole week. Undisturbed by this critical clamor over his whereabouts, Governor Landon stayed on at Estes Park, nursed a cold that left him a painful trace of pleurisy.

Last week, however, the hour struck for Nominee Landon to march back onto the front page. At Denver was assembled a very special train of nine cars, the last of which was named David Livingstone, after the eminent missionary-explorer who disappeared for five years in Africa, to be found by Journalist Henry Morton ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume") Stanley. Reserved for the Republican nominee, this private Pullman was equipped with microphones, loudspeakers, floodlights for rear platform campaigning.

At 9:30 one morning last week this special chuffed north from Denver to end the great Republican silence. An hour later at La Salle, Governor Landon swung aboard and the GOP campaign was off in a burst of cheers. A few minutes later the nominee's numerous aides and advisers were in consternation when it was discovered that the man in charge of baggage had left standing on the La Salle platform a small bag containing the manuscripts of Alf Landon's speeches.

First stop was at Fort Morgan, Colo., where a thousand people and a brass band surrounded the rear platform. Carefully primed as to his whereabouts, Governor Landon declared: "I am very glad to have the opportunity of starting my campaign in this splendid Republican county of Morgan. . . . There are many things which I would like to talk to you about but time is short. . . ." Chuff-chuff--and the special was on its way to Sterling, where another crowd and another brass band turned out at the station. With "sugar beets" ringing in his ears, Nominee Landon stepped out on the rear platform to declare: "I know this is one of the fine agricultural counties of Colorado and of the western section of the country, and that the beet industry is the nucleus of your prosperity in this county; and I want to say to you that that is one of the crops we can grow in America, and I am in favor of giving it every protection." Fort Morgan and Sterling set the pattern for Governor Landon's rear-end appearances as his special carried him eastward. At State lines droves of local politicians got off and got on the Landon train, each with his message of good cheer and GOP success in November. If possible, at each stop Governor Landon tried to say something of folksy local interest. At Lexington, Neb., for instance, he recalled that he was in the hometown of Footballer "Swede" Berquist who used to knock holes in the Kansas line. Promptly Mr. Berquist surged forward out of the station crowd to shake the Landon hand as Lexingtonians whooped with pride, A driving rainstorm beat the Landon special to Omaha by a few minutes. Leaving his private car, the Kansas Governor climbed up on a baggage truck and shouted above the din: "This is a grand welcome and this rain is the finest thing I've seen this summer."

That night he bedded in Omaha's Fontenelle Hotel. By the time he woke his bag of speeches had been found and had caught up with him. At breakfast with 1,000 Nebraska and Iowa Republicans, he got a laugh as he squirmed to his feet, and said: "I drew a leg at this table. I always seem to draw a leg at every table that I sit at." Back aboard the David Livingstone he made 16 rear-platform appearances while crossing Iowa and Illinois. At Council Bluffs, he lost his Masonic ring while trying to shake a hundred upstretched hands at once. It was found later in the cinders of the road bed. At Cedar Rapids he announced again that he would accept President Roosevelt's invitation to confer on Drought next week, declared: "No individual and no organization should meet this problem from the point of view of politics. I am not concerned about where the credit goes in the solution of the problem of our drought just so we meet it in a humane, constructive, sensible way." That night Nominee Landon slept in the Chicago railroad yards while the David Livingstone was shunted from one carrier to another.

Next morning in Ohio the Landon special stopped at Lima, Ada, Bucyrus, Crestline, Mansfield (which the Republican nominee did not forget "was the home of John Sherman," sponsor of the Anti-trust Law), and Canton ("The home of truly beloved William McKinley"). Crossing into Pennsylvania, the train, now fairly bursting with local bigwigs, ground to a stop at West Middlesex, where in a small frame house Alfred Mossman Landon was born 49 years ago. Out hopped the spry Governor and strode down the cinder platform to the automobile in which he was to ride with rich and handsome Mrs. Worthington Scranton, Republican National Committeewoman and dowager of Pennsylvania politics. Past West Middlesex' dozen stores and between its few blocks of houses they sped amid shouts of "Hurrah" and "Come on, Alf!" (A few indelicate Democrats yipped, "Hurrah for Roosevelt.") Beyond the town the road was lined with more cheering people. Alf Landon wriggled up to perch on the back of the tonneau, wave his straw hat and shout back while Mrs. Scranton clutched his coattails for fear that she might lose her favorite candidate overboard.

At the first hole on the Tam-0'Shanter Golf Course 75,000 Pennsylvanians and Ohioans were gathered to hear the first Landon campaign speech in the East. While Nominee Landon was shaking hands with his relatives of all degrees and kissing his 83-year-old great-aunt so lustily that he knocked her hat off, the crowd was treated to another spectacle: Onetime Senator David Reed and onetime Governor Gifford Pinchot, Republican arch-enemies in Pennsylvania, marched out on the speaker's platform, shook hands and were photographed together. Harvey Taylor, Pennsylvania's Republican Chairman, introduced the speaker as a man "sane, sound, sensible and sincere." Alf Landon stepped forward to explain his ideals to his home folks:

"It is with real happiness that I return today to see again the place of my birth. I have come back to this part of the country almost every summer for 30 years. I still send to Crawford County every winter for maple syrup [laughter']. ... I feel that I am visiting with old friends, discussing common difficulties in an effort to find a real and common-sense solution for them. . . .

"Our people have been free to develop their own lives as they saw fit. ... They have been encouraged to start any honest enterprise that would enable them to support their families, give the public the goods and services it wanted and make jobs for themselves and others. . . . Now I take it that we Americans lived that way because we wanted to live that way. We still like it better than any other way. We know there are wrongs to right. Only the misguided will claim that this system is perfect. . . . The record proves, however, that our system gives the most personal liberty to human beings and offers on the whole the highest possible standard of life to the greatest numbers.

"Some people, now say that the America we have built no longer meets our needs. They point to the unemployed. They cite examples of special privilege. They say that these are the inescapable by-products of our system of free enterprise and of our form of government. They recognize, as all of us do, the lack of balance in our economic structure. . . .

"The remedy for unemployment is not a permanent dole. Of course, relief must be continued as long as the need for it exists. The American remedy for unemployment is real work at good wages. It is clear that limitation of production and destruction of crops is not going to provide this kind of work. "The remedy for monopoly and special privilege is to do away with them. This must be one of our first objectives. One of the chief causes for our economic difficulties is the tendency of monopoly to fix prices and retain special privileges.

"Great markets yet to be developed lie within our own borders and across the sea. The frontier of new wants points this way to a better standard of living in this country. Even in our most prosperous days many of our people did not live well enough. How can it be said that we have overproduction when so many Americans are badly fed, badly clothed and badly housed? How can it be said we have overproduction when large groups of our fellow citizens are neglected, underpaid, or unemployed? How dare we talk about overproduction when the evil effects of these conditions run beyond the tragedy of stunted lives and challenge the welfare and the honor of the nation? . . .

"So here at the place of my birth, I have sought to make clear what I believe to be the choice now before our country. It is the choice between the pig-in-the-poke policies of the present Administration and those American institutions under which we have enjoyed more liberty and attained a higher standard of living than any other people in the world."

That night Alf Landon's special train took him a few miles south to New Castle, where he dined in the Scottish Rite Cathedral with 2,000 Republicans, where he spent the night at the home of his old friend DeGrimm G. Renfro. Sunday morning he was back in West Middlesex to go to church with his uncle William T. Mossman, pressagent of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., in the old red brick Methodist Church where his grandfather, the Rev. William H. Mossman, once was pastor. The Rev. Henry G. Shilling (a registered Democrat who is going to vote for Landon) preached for 40 minutes. Having put a dollar bill in the collection, Nominee Landon departed for Sunday dinner with his great-aunt, his old nurse "Aunt" Mary Baird and others who cared for him in infancy. Finally he went to the parsonage, his birthplace, took a nap in Preacher Shilling's Study.

Entraining next morning at New Castle, he headed north to Chautauqua. N. Y., where his parents used to take him every summer, where he met his first wife. After dinner with a dozen old friends, he motored to the familiar grounds and in the opensided amphitheatre delivered his second political speech, interjecting a new issue in the campaign. Excerpts: ''In view of the great contribution Chautauqua has made to American Life, I was glad to accept your invitation to speak.

The dangers that face free education to-day were an added incentive. . . . Free-dom of educational opportunity has been one of the priceless assets of American life. ... It has helped to train the people for our kind of government. It has maintained Democracy at the grass roots.

... In every sense this movement for free public schools came from the people themselves. . . . This is largely the reason why, next to our government, our educational system is our greatest public effort. It has been well termed our outstanding success. The development has taken time, it is true. The processes of a democracy are always slower than those of an all-powerful government. But they are likely to be more certain of good results. . . .

"Danger from propaganda is now present. It is more serious than the danger of our teachers becoming propagandists. It concerns widespread use of the machinery of the Federal Government to maintain the present administration in power, and to bring into question the faith of the people in their way of life and in their form of government. When money is forcibly taken by Government from citizens and used to tear down those things most precious to our people, we see propaganda in its most shabby form. . . .

"We must ever remember that academic freedom, political freedom, religious freedom and freedom of opportunity, are all bound together. Infringement upon one will soon lead to infringement upon the others. In fighting to maintain our freedom, we will make greatest progress by fighting for the freedom of all.

"We should not overlook the fact, however, that today, both at home and abroad, men are striving for power through leadership of the mob. Because of this, I believe that our educators should make a more than normal effort to see that our youth is given a background of our heritage and tradition--a fundamental under-standing of the form and philosophy of our government. If this is done, we need have no fear of allowing our youth to study any and all systems of government to which their curiosity leads them. Only through ignorance or bigotry can we be destroyed. With understanding and intelligence, our future citizens will be able to separate truth from the ever increasing amount of propaganda.

"We American are still in control of our own destiny. We can remain so only through the processes of sound education."

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