Bachman's Wake

Nathan Lynn Bachman, junior Senator from Tennessee who died of heart disease in Washington (TIME, May 3), was last week laid to rest in his native Chattanooga. His funeral was attended by a host of friends from Washington and all over Tennessee. The assemblage was not only sorrowful. It had some of the exhilaration of an oldtime Irish wake, and the chief intoxicant was politics. In hotel lobbies, even in the church, mourners peered at their fellows and whispered in little groups. "Who is So-&-So backing?" "There's Such-&-Such--what does he want?" The Chattanooga News with unwonted journalistic frankness said that the city was the scene of a three-day unofficial Senatorial convention.

Most popular mourner naturally was Governor Gordon Browning, who will appoint Senator Bachman's successor. Governor Browning, elected last autumn with the support of Boss Edward Hull Crump of Memphis (TIME, Aug. 17), had had his own eye on Senator Bachman's seat, which was occupied by Cordell Hull until he moved into the Cabinet. Gordon Browning, in fact, lost the seat to Nathan Bachman in the primaries of 1934. Knowing that the public does not like a Governor who resigns in order to be appointed to the Senate, he firmly announced last week that he would not take it now.

Last week before the funeral Governor Browning had a telephone call from Charles West, Under Secretary of the Interior who runs many of Franklin Roosevelt's errands at the Capitol. Mr. West gave him to understand that the President wanted to see him right away before he appointed a new Senator. Governor Browning was going to Washington anyhow to attend a conference of Southern Governors and utilities commissioners. When he shook off the crowd of politicians at the funeral and boarded his train East, whom should he find but one of the mourners. Representative Samuel D. McReynolds of Chattanooga, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee--one of those prominently mentioned for Senator--as his traveling companion. When his train arrived in Washington, Governor Browning dashed through a crowd of importuning politicians, one of whom almost tore his coat off, and sped to the Wrhite House. There the President, in the midst of preparations for departure (see p. 15), kept him waiting two and a half hours. Afterwards Governor Browning refused flatly to tell what the President had said, but newshawks guessed: Senator Bachman had opposed the President's Supreme Court proposal and the President wanted a loyal New Dealer who would give him another vote on that issue. When Governor Browning left the White House his troubles were not over. At his hotel he found many messages. A big batch of them from labor unions urged the appointment of that eminent owner of a 30,000-acre Tennessee farm and hanger-on of the New Deal, Major George Leonard Berry, president of the International Pressmen's Union and Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Coordinator for Industrial Co-operation." Another batch of telegrams favored Mr. McReynolds and, strangely, many of them came not from Tennessee but from Manhattan. If Governor Browning wondered why, friends in Washington soon told him. Representative Sol Bloom, who five years ago as head of an official commission celebrated George Washington's Bicentennial almost singlehanded, has as his constituency the upper part of Central Park and neighboring parts of Manhattan. If Mr. McReynolds becomes a Senator, Sol Bloom will succeed by seniority to the high post of Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Governor Browning never got to the conference of Southern Governors. Next day. besieged by politicians, he fled back to Tennessee. At Knoxville, his first stop, he was of course reminded that Knoxville's Captain A. Mitchell Long, lawyer and politician, would make a fine Senator. The newspapers told him that Nashville's Albert H. Roberts, ex-Governor of Tennessee, had publicly proposed himself for the job. Many others pressed claims privately. At week's end Senator Bachman's sudden taking off was mourned by no one more than Governor Gordon Browning.

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