Gamblers: Note

After the death of Missouri's Democratic Representative John B. Sullivan last January, a young Republican lawyer named Claude I. Bakewell started campaigning for the vacant seat from St. Louis' Eleventh Congressional District. The Eleventh, containing most of city's Negro population nearly all its organized labor and some of its finest homes, had been almost solidly Democratic since New Deal days. One of the exceptions was in 1946, when Bakewell was swept into Congress for one term by the new Republican broom. This time, Candidate Bakewell had a ready-made campaign issue. He struck put at the city's powerful new Democratic machine, run by Lawyer Morris Shenker and his partner, Sheriff Thomas F. Callanan, an ex-bootlegger.

Ignoring the machine's candidate, he hammered away at Shenker, at gamblers, bosses, and rackets. He kept plugging the fact that Shenker is one of St. Louis' busiest criminal lawyers, that he represented such big-time gamblers as C. J. ("Kew-pie") Rich and Bookie James J. Carroll before the Kefauver Crime Investigating Committee (TIME, March 5). When Shenker announced that he would run his law practice to suit himself, Bakewell cried out that "a vote for Shenker is a vote for gamblers."

Last week, in a special congressional election, Lawyer Bakewell's campaign paid off. The day before election, St. Louis' Democratic Mayor Joseph M. Darst publicly repudiated Shenker; the C.I.O. Political Action Committee, which usually follows the Democratic line, refused to get out the vote. When the returns were in, Claude Bakewell had beaten the machine and Morris Shenker by 6,187 votes.

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