Gnome v. Soldier

By Franklin Roosevelt's definition, the nation's choice is between men with social conscience and men without. Maryland has a choice at next week's Democratic primary between Senator Millard E. Tydings, 48, and Representative David John Lewis, 69, for the former's Senate seat.

Though they contrast as sharply as any two political opponents seen in many a year, each has a social conscience, each has striking individual gifts. And Mr.

Roosevelt's choice of "Davey John" Lewis to oust "Militant Millard" Tydings was testimony to the calibre of both.

For the New Deal's urgent purposes, David Lewis, despite his age, is a natural.

He was the Forgotten Man's friend when Franklin Roosevelt wore short pants. Like John Llewellyn Lewis, he is a Welsh miner's son. He dug coal, aged 9, in the pits of Pennsylvania. A Sunday school teacher taught him to read. A parson and a lawyer helped him get learning and law, at night. He settled and practiced in Cumberland, a western Maryland mining town. He reached Congress in 1911.

When Franklin Roosevelt introduced him at Denton, Md. last week as the "father" of Social Security, Workmen's Compensation and Parcel Post, the President barely sketched his works. David Lewis also: got labor unions exempted from the anti-trust laws; wrote the guts of the Guffey-Snyder coal act; handled telephones & telegraphs during the War-- (and would have been President Wilson's Postmaster General but for political exigencies); has fought Inflation and the Bonus. Churchmouse poor, erudite and intellectually passionate, he dares to do what other Congressmen would tremble at: shut himself up in his office and refuse to see constituents.

Standing 5 ft. 1 in., he looks like a good grey gnome.

Because Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Tydings both belong to the upper class their fight is the Purge's most bitter. Son of a marine engineer who worked at the Army's Aberdeen proving grounds, Millard Tydings became a mechanical engineer, studied law, practiced in Havre de Grace, enlisted as a private the day the U. S. entered the War. He came out a Lieutenant-Colonel.

D. S. M. and D. S. C. After being Speaker in the Legislature and State Senator he went to Congress, to the U. S. Senate in 1927. His voting record suggests eccentricity yet shows a pattern: against war, racial injustice, Prohibition, Bonus, tariffs & embargoes, depreciated currency. War debts. He voted against the Wagner Act, the Guffey Coal Act, the Utilities bill, AAA, TVA, NRA, Cotton Control; for SEC, Neutrality, Pump Priming, fathered the Miller-Tydings Act for price control of trademarked goods. In this campaign, his most vulnerable spot is his failure to vote on Social Security.

His biggest value to the Senate is as an acute critic, rapid analyst of legislation.

The Senate's best-dressed, most socially polished Senator, he gave up bachelorhood in 1936 to marry Ambassador Joseph Davies' chic daughter Eleanor, Mrs.

Thomas Cheeseborough. Lithe, chiseled, erect, he looks more snobbish than he is, but like a soldier and individualist still disdains cheap politics. "If I can't vote my convictions here," he once said in the Senate, "to hell with this job!"

--Low night rates resulted from his of wire traffic loads.

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