Strategists Differ

Strategists Differ

Herbert Hoover is the only living ex-President of the U. S. Alfred Landon is the latest Republican President-reject. As such they are the titular leaders of their party. Unfortunately for their party, however, they have taken such bad political beatings that their prestige is badly battered. And to make matters worse, they last week made manifest how much they are at odds.

Month ago at the Sinnissippi farm of onetime (1917-21) Governor Frank Orren Lowden, near Oregon, Ill., the two Republican chieftains met and announced that they were "in agreement on every essential problem." This meant that they were not prepared to disagree in public. However, last fortnight in Topeka, Alf Landon called a national radio mass-meeting, spoke his mind on the state of the Union for half an hour (TIME, Nov. 1), without so much as a lukewarm mention for Herbert Hoover's biggest political plan. Last week, addressing a meeting of 3,000 Republicans in Boston and a nation-wide radio audience, Herbert Hoover assaulted the ears of Republicans with his Plan.

This Hoover plan is to hold a Republican convention to draw up a platform-- just as is done in Presidential elections-- before next year's Congressional elections. Some Republican Congressmen, and presumably Alf Landon, fear that votes may be lost locally by a platform assaulting the New Deal. Herbert Hoover brushed this aside.

Doing a far better oratorical job than Landon had done the week before, he drew applause from his audience by promising that he wanted no public office for himself in 1940. Attacking the New Deal with the sarcasm that began to appear in his public utterances after he left the White House, he spoke of "balanced abundance" that "seems to recall the trapeze." Of the Liberalism of the New Deal he remarked: "Its folds can apparently even be entered through the Ku Klux Klan. . . . When you deal with other people's money, the word is conservative, not liberal, especially with a capital L."

The shortcomings of the New Deal he classified in "five great categories": "moral integrity . . . personal liberty . . . financial and economic policies . . . aid for the less fortunate . . . relations to other nations." He saved for his peroration his retort to those, including Alf Landon, who lack enthusiasm for his proposed "intellectual session" of the G. O. P.:

"If the Republican Party has not learned the lesson that it must produce principles and program besides being against and joyriding on mistakes, it has not read history. . . . There is talk of fusion and coalition. Let me make but one remark on that. It is a result devoutly to be wished for. But the people fuse or coalesce around ideas and ideals, not around political bargains or stratagems. If the Republican Party meets the needs and aspirations of the people who are opposed to the New Deal, they will fuse and coalesce and not before. They only join in the march if they know where we are going. ..."

At Chicago this week the Republican National Committee will ponder and decide between the Hooverian and Landonian plans of campaign. Last week a United Press poll of committee members showed 32 in favor of the Hoover plan, 18 noncommittal, one opposed.

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