Wilderness Voice

Kansas this week approached her primary elections (August 2) as embarrassed as a family whose freak son is the only one who ever gets his picture in the newspapers. Numerous normal politicians were running for office but the only candidate whose name the rest of the country heard was Rev. Gerald Burton Winrod. He is 39, a grey-eyed, deep-voiced radio spellbinder from Wichita, with black hair like William Jennings Bryan's, an evangelist whose congregation is "the entire United States and Canada." Because it looked last week as though Mr. Winrod might win the Republican nomination for Senator from three less colorful opponents, Chairman John D. M. Hamilton of the Republican National Committee clarioned:

"Once again intolerance has raised its head in the midst of our political picture. ... If Mr. Winrod is nominated for the U. S. Senate, it will again be injected into the national campaign and our party in Kansas will be on the wrong side of a vital issue. . . . Disastrous effects!" Candidate Winrod, in his weekly radiorations over two Kansas stations and in his monthly magazine, The Defender, has made noises like a fascist : taken slaps at Jews and Catholics, gone hard after all Communists. Vowing that he is no fascist, he says: "Fascism is the illegitimate child of Communism. ... It is part of Communistic propaganda to smear every man opposed to Communism as a Fascist."

Son of a saloonkeeper who became a preacher after his saloon, ''Old 410" (No. 410 East Douglas Street, Wichita), was smashed by Carrie Nation on one of her first rampages, Gerald Winrod was obscure until 1935 when, after a trip to Germany, he blossomed out as proprietor of the Capitol News & Feature Service of Washington, D. C., alleged by proletarians to be financed by German Nazi money and watched over by the German Embassy. Through The Defender (organ of Winrod's "Defenders of the Christian Faith"), which now claims 110,000 circulation, and his own big personal mailing list, Mr. Winrod does a fat mail-order business in religious tracts.

In politics, Gerald Winrod's fame dates from a day in 1937 when, driving his wife to Mexico for her health, he heard of Franklin Roosevelt's Court-packing plan over his automobile's radio. Immediately he telephoned back to Wichita, released a flood of anti-Court Plan pamphlets, threatened to snow Congress under with a million petitions.

Most likely beneficiary of this year's Winrod campaign appears to be colorless Democratic Senator George McGill. If Mr. Winrod wins the Republican nomination and leads what Kansas calls its "Brinkley vote"* through the wilderness, many a disgusted Kansas Republican would vote Democratic in November.

*After Dr. John R. ("Goat Gland") Brinkley, who left Kansas discredited for fraudulent medical practice.

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