The Pot Boils

The campaign moved into high gear. The U.S. people, big & small, prominent and nameless, began to make up their minds, choose sides, form organizations, collect funds, hurl epithets.

P: For nine weeks the Chicago Tribune had run colored front-page cartoons built around a campaign jingle: "BACK TO WORK QUICKER WITH DEWEY AND BRICKER." But the New Deal-hating Tribune had puzzled its readers. It had failed to find a four-color jingle lampooning Franklin Roosevelt. Last week a braying Democratic jackass appeared on Page One, bearing aloft a banner: "BACK ON RELIEF WITH THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF."

P: South Carolina's lame duck Senator Cotton Ed Smith galumphed into Washington, vowed he could wreck Term IV. He organized a National Agricultural Committee, set out to "deliver the nation's farm vote" to Tom Dewey in the next five weeks. Roared metaphor-mixing Cotton Ed: "We have taken a nose dive into hell! I have great hopes that a miracle will gird up its loins and try another deal." Next day, the committee folded up.

P: Wealthy, black-haired J. Louis Reynolds, vice president of Reynolds Metals Co., whose plants have been fabulously expanded by war contracts, called on U.S. businessmen to rally behind Franklin Roosevelt. Said he: "Business had its sad experience with The Great Engineer and now it doesn't want to take any chance with The Great Prosecutor."

P: Even Moscow took sides. War and the Working Class, which always states official Communist views, charged that Tom Dewey's nomination was promoted by "the most reactionary elements" in the Republican Party. Roared W.W.C.: "Through it [the G.O.P.] defeatists and appeasers, even Hitlerite agents, are seeking access to the political arena."

P: Harold Ickes lit into Dewey in characteristic vein. "Four years ago,"he cracked, "I observed that Mr. Dewey had thrown his diaper into the ring. At Los Angeles on Friday night, when he upbraided the New Deal for not being New Dealish enough, he threw the sponge after his diaper. . . ."

P: An Oyster Bay Roosevelt came out for Franklin D. She was the widow of Teddy's son, Major Kermit Roosevelt (who died last year while on active duty in Alaska). Said she, offering her services to the Democratic National Committee: "I'll do anything, even lick envelopes."

P: Mrs. Crystal Bird Fauset, onetime friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, onetime member of the Pennsylvania Legislature (its first and only Negro woman), quit the Democratic National Committee's offices in Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel, walked two blocks up Madison Avenue to join the G.O.P. at the Roosevelt Hotel. Said she: "Bob Hannegan is a dictator--a man who is not willing to deal democratically with Negroes."

P: Democrats and Republicans simultaneously discovered that the other party is sending out campaign literature along with servicemen's ballots. At Miami, a sailor reported that his ballot was accompanied by a plea for the re-election of Michigan's Republican Governor Harry F. Kelly. At Guadalcanal, a soldier opened his ballot, found a letter from Chicago's Democratic Mayor Edward J. Kelly, urging him to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. The two Kellys reacted differently. Governor Kelly denied everything; Mayor Kelly announced that he had sent, not one, but 150,000 letters. "It's legal," he explained happily. "We're on our toes here."

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