While the Cat's Away

The men left behind by Harold Stassen who were supposed to keep his political fires burning, lost control last week of Stassen's home state of Minnesota. A dirt-farming back-country legislator named Roy Dunn took over as the state's Republican boss.

This was the big news out of Minnesota's state G.O.P. convention, although the headlines went to the election of delegates pledged to Stassen for President. The delegates are pledged to Stassen all right--just as long as he has any chance. But instead of being bitter-end Stassen supporters, the delegates are now committed to Stassen only until Boss Roy Dunn sees a winner elsewhere.

Roy Dunn, 57, a big (235 lb.), easygoing citizen of Pelican Rapids (pop. 1,560), is a longtime member of Minnesota's Republican Old Guard. In his home province of Otter Tail County he farms 240 acres and runs a $100,000 fishing resort he built mostly with his own hands. In the state legislature he has risen in 18 years to be majority floor leader and chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee. So long as silo-tall Harold Stassen was on the scene in person, Dunn was a secondary figure. But when Stassen went off to war as a lieutenant commander in the Navy, Stassen's deputies were no match for Roy Dunn.

Dunn's big moment came in an off-day session of the 1943 legislature. The back-countrymen were up to their usual sport of baiting the big city--Minneapolis. Up rose Farmer Dunn to say, amid general astonishment, that he had heard enough: Minneapolis was a fine city--the whole state was proud of her. Never had such words been heard from a dirt-farmer legislator. Minneapolis' Mayor Marvin Kline wrote a friendly letter--and so began a beautiful friendship.

In the state convention three weeks ago, friendly Mayor Kline handed Farmer Dunn the big city's 100 votes in one package. With this potent aid, Roy Dunn captured control of the state's 25 delegates, and Boss Dunn even hand-picked six of the seven delegates-at-large. The seventh place, which he left open, fell to U.S. Senator Joe Ball, a loyal Stassenite --who ran behind the Dunnsters. And as the coup de grace, R. C. Radabaugh, Stassen's No. 1 political handy man and state G.O.P. chairman, could get elected to the convention only as an alternate.

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