What About That Toga?

Curlyheaded Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago had waited a good while for his reward. He didn't ask much. All he wanted was a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Somewhere along his rise from sewer worker to political boss of Chicago, Edward Joseph Kelly learned not to drop his gs, acquired a hard, shining polish. To his machine's reputation for ballot-stuffing, patronage-grabbing, "muscling" the votes of prostitutes and gamblers, there still clings a sewer-like smell. But the sanctified odor of a Senatorial toga, thought Ed Kelly, might cover that.

It was Boss Kelly who organized the Democratic convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt for a third term in 1940. Pushing levers back in the wings, while frail Harry Hopkins did the stage-managing, Boss Kelly made the convention run like a 60-ton tank through a shantytown.

For his pains, he figured, he deserved something. Last fall, when he was reported to have given the President a good, two-fisted talking-to about the loose political rails gaping open in defense, some people suspected that Ed Kelly might be slated for a better political job. But nothing came of that.

Last month Ed Kelly dropped in again at the White House. When he got home, he told newsmen he had talked about Illinois' November Senate election. Did he mean to run against Senator Charles Wayland Brooks? Said Ed: "The President is the commander in chief, and I will do everything my commander in chief tells me to do--even to scrubbing floors."

This Moses-meek reply sounded like the start of the oddest Senate campaign in Illinois history. Democrat Kelly is a close friend of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the politically potent Chicago Tribune. But Republican Brooks--an isolationist until Pearl Harbor, and the man who got a conviction for the alleged murderer of Tribune Reporter Jake Lingle--is the Tribune's darling.

The Kelly machine rolls up Chicago votes in billows--but downstate its endorsement is the kiss of death. How could downstate Democratic leaders, after damning Kelly for years, find an excuse to back him now?

In the midst of all this speculation, Ed Kelly got a phone call from the White House. In 20 minutes he was on a train, bound for Washington. He edged into the White House by the family entrance, talked with Franklin Roosevelt for almost an hour. What they said was a darker wartime secret than the President's conversation with Winston Churchill. But when Ed Kelly left the White House, he looked as if his commander in chief had told him he could go on scrubbing floors.

Back in Chicago next day, Boss Kelly let one reporter in his office. Said he: "I was in Washington on Government business. . . . There was nothing political about my trip." Had he talked to President Roosevelt again about the Senate? Answered Ed Kelly, with an icy stare: "I didn't say I saw the President."

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