Half-Free, Half-Open

The political news of the week was that Franklin Roosevelt had apparently been persuaded to let the Democratic convention choose its own candidate for Vice President. This decision was partly the result of relentless pressure from the Southern conservatives in his own party, partly the product of counsel from New Dealers who prize victory higher than Henry Wallace.

The new strategy, as it leaked out from high places: Franklin Roosevelt, after he himself has been renominated, is expected to let the convention know that, while Henry Wallace is his personal choice for the Vice Presidency, he will not insist on him. The convention may then pick anyone it wants.

Washington was full of rumors of what Harold Ickes said to Sidney Hillman, what the President told Claude Pepper, and the earnest confab between Jimmy Byrnes and Frank Walker at a Cabinet

meeting. All the comments were off-the-record, but the sum total of the rumors was: Henry Wallace is washed up.

The idea of a half-free, half-open convention got added confirmation from an unexpected source. Shrewd old Jesse Jones published a signed front-page editorial in his Houston Chronicle denouncing the recent anti-New Deal revolt in Texas. The wiseacres reasoned: Jesse had waited until .the Southerners had won their bargain, i.e., the dropping of Henry Wallace, before blasting the rebels, who are far closer to his heart than the New Dealers. In Columbus, National Chairman Robert Hannegan turned up with his own list of seven Vice Presidential possibilities. He then hurried to Washington and an hour-long conference with Franklin Roosevelt (of which not a word leaked).

The Old Faces. But one trouble with Bob Hannegan's list, and all the others put out by newsmen and dopesters, was that they all had the same old faces. Newest face was that of Oklahoma's rambunctious, New Dealing Governor Robert S. Kerr, who last week was busy trying out his convention keynote speech on his six-year-old son. (According to one dispatch, the son was bored.)

As for the rest, there was Missouri's Senator Harry Truman (who might help carry his Midwest border state); Speaker Sam Rayburn (who should please the South); Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd (who might attract a stray conservative vote); Senate Leader Alben Barkley, Economic Stabilizer Jimmy Byrnes, WMC Boss Paul McNutt and even such outsiders as Utah's Senator Elbert Thomas and Tennessee's Governor Prentice Cooper.

In the end the arguments in favor of each man boiled down to nothingness. But in the convention scramble, Henry Wallace, back this week from Siberia and China, would have considerable strength of his own. Cracked one high Administration official, himself a Vice Presidential possibility: "Nobody votes for a Vice

President. Go back to 1940. McNary was the Republican candidate and Willkie lost Oregon; Wallace was the Democratic, and Roosevelt failed to carry Iowa."

Meanwhile, convention plans went full-steam ahead. Massachusetts' tall, toothy Representative John McCormack was picked to head the platform committee; the added list of speakers included Hollywood's Helen Gahagan (herself a candidate for Congress) and beefy, bonhomous War Correspondent Quentin Reynolds. Washington gossip had it that Senator Claude Pepper and Postmaster General Frank Walker would be at the Chicago end of the White House telephone wire; that the President might not even make an acceptance speech, but just acknowledge his renomination at a regular White House press conference. And in Chicago, Ed Kelly's Illinois Democrats held their state convention, tried out some of 1944's slogans. Two of them: "Roosevelt, Savior of the Common Man" and "Our Boys Over There Want Roosevelt Here." Some preferred an earlier, Kelly-coined catch phrase: "Roosevelt and the World."

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