"I Say Good-by . . ."

Wells Lewis, 22 years old, will cast his first vote for a President of the United States on Nov. 5. A graduate of Harvard, son of Novelist Sinclair Lewis, author of one novel (They Still Say No), he is a young man who grew up under the New Deal. A practicing newspaperman, he works for the Greenville, Miss. Delta Democrat-Times as a news editor at $20 a week.

Last week Wells Lewis went to Philadelphia to have a look at the Republican National Convention. One morning his crusading stepmother, Dorothy Thompson, donated her column in the New York Herald Tribune to Wells Lewis, urged him to speak his mind. Like many another youthful, non-political believer in Wendell Willkie on the eve of balloting, Columnist Lewis was gloomy.

Wrote he: "I have been extremely disturbed in this crisis by the . . . gross in efficiency which has been displayed not only by certain New Deal henchmen but by the President himself. ... I went to Philadelphia to see if, in the other camp, that executive upon whose efficiency the safety of this nation depends could be found. ... In Wendell Willkie ... I hoped to find the means for crystallizing the energies of this country. . . .

"Last night ... I concluded that if these speakers . . . were representative of the Republican Party, that party was as dead as the dodo. ... So I shall leave Philadelphia with hopes for Wendell Willkie. . . . But to the Republican Party as it sits in Convention Hall, I say good-by."

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