Sadler in the Saddle

POLITICAL NOTES

The word in Texas last week was that President Roosevelt has picked a baby-kissin', snuff-dippin', vote-gettin' man to replace Mayor Maury Maverick of San Antonio as front man for the New Deal forces working against John Nance Garner on his home base. This snuff-dippin', vote-gettin' man: Railroad Commissioner Gerald Anthony Sadler.

Green-eyed, 31-year-old Mr. Sadler is an East Texan whose mother sold her chickens to give him a start when oil was discovered in the great East Texas field nine years ago. Hustling Jerry Sadler worked at odd jobs and high wages, saved his money and studied law. Last year, still a political unknown, he ran for a place on the important Texas Railroad Commission (which regulates Texas oil production). Weeks before Governor Wilbert Lee ("Pass the Biscuits, Pappy") O'Daniel started to campaign with his Hillbilly Band, Jerry Sadler was touring Texas with the Sadler Stringsters, whooping it up in folk-song and endearing himself to the no-collar vote.

His prime attraction was his snuff. Jerry Sadler's desk is littered with empty Garrett Snuff cans and adorned with a tarnished silver snuffbox. Last July he told a snuff-dippers' convention: "Every old-line politician lined up against me. But I had one advantage . . . I was a snuff dipper. As a boy it was sometimes my duty to go cut a black gum toothbrush for my Grandmother, who was a snuff dipper. Practically all the elderly Christian mothers and grandmothers of that community (Hickory Grove, Texas) were snuff dippers. These modern women with one baby and a cigaret could learn a lot from these pioneer women. Snuff dippers don't talk much. . . so they do considerably more thinking. Smoke is the ghost of tobacco. Chewing tobacco is its body, but snuff is the soul of nicotine . . . the mark of men with hair on their chests and women who raise breast-fed babies that make the nation's statesmen and soldiers."

Statesman Sadler won in a walk-away with his slogan: "Sadler in the Saddle." He now shares top place on the mighty Railroad Commission with its once all-powerful Colonel Ernest O. Thompson, who is no slouch on slogans himself. Col. Thompson is gunning for the Governorship, with a plan to tax oil for old-age pensions ("A Nickel a Barrel for Grandma"). Governor O'Daniel, who said he would pass the biscuits to all the old folks when he was Governor, is still trying to get his hands on the dough.

Ex-Governor James V. Allred, now a U. S. district judge, is debarred from anti-Garner campaigning by the Hatch Act (no politicking for Federal employes). The most sincere New Dealer of the lot, Maury Maverick, has got himself into political trouble in Texas by espousing free speech for Communists and letting the home folks think he has "gone national." This week Mr. Maverick got into his worst trouble yet. Along with a local official and a former business agent of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, he was indicted by a Bexar County grand jury charged with using union contributions to pay poll taxes for some of his Labor voters.

So the story that Franklin Roosevelt has given Jerry Sadler a New Deal saddle makes sense to many a Texas politico. If Mr. Sadler is worried by his well-night impossible assignment--to stop Cactus Jack Garner in his native State in 1940--he airily conceals his state of mind. Said he last week, in an announcement which few Texas politicians would dare to make: "I ain't for Garner."

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