DEMOCRATS: In the Bag?

Up to last week, Democrats had not even bothered to take their coats off. The Third Term was a cinch. The whole thing was just a killer. National Committee Chairman Ed Flynn had decided that he did not even have to leave The Bronx. If anybody wanted him, they knew where to find him. Mr. Roosevelt made a few remarks which he laughingly admitted were “political.” The only Democrat who seemed to take it seriously was Vice-Presidential Candidate Henry Wallace, who plodded up & down the land making earnest speeches to farmers.

Last week Mr. Wallace was still taking it seriously, making earnest speeches. From Indianapolis to Kansas City, following Willkie’s still-warm trail, he traveled, warning, “If peace comes there will be a day of reckoning” when the nation will need Franklin Roosevelt. In Topeka he reminded an audience of farmers that they had “the sympathy and understanding help of a friendly President, a friendly Department of Agriculture, a friendly Congress and a just Supreme Court.” In Woodward, Okla., he declared that Wendell Willkie would not be able to save the New Deal farm program—which he supports—from “its enemies in a Republican-dominated Congress.” In Gallup, N. M., where he made parts of his speech in Spanish, he declared. “The two Americas must become one America,” then moved on to California to spread the New Deal gospel in the same Hollywood Bowl where Willkie had attacked it.

Through Nebraska’s Senator George Norris, their octogenarian chairman, the newly organized Independent Voters for Roosevelt (TIME, Sept. 30), proclaimed that a Third Term was, “in this crisis . . . a relatively insignificant apprehension.”

Other members of the Independent Voters’ executive committee were announced: Cinemactor Melvyn Douglas, Harvard Law School’s Dean James M. (“Chink”) Landis, Novelist Fannie Hurst, Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, Williams College’s Professor Max Lerner, Thomas (“the Cork”) Corcoran, official committee agitator, bobbed into New York City to help Mr. LaGuardia. To Springfield, Mass. went handsome Paul V. McNutt, onetime Presidential aspirant himself, whose throat was last year neatly slit by New Deal candidate-assassins. Keynoting the Massachusetts Democratic State Convention, Mr. McNutt described the Republican policy as giving business complete license to operate any way it likes, denounced Willkie as a turncoat Democrat who has become “the Nation’s Number One Roosevelt Hater.” Even Boss Flynn finally announced he would emplane for the West Coast, see how things were going. In tones of ruthless triumph he thundered: “We must not only win, but win by so big a margin that it will be a long time before the opposition again insults the American people by nominating for the Presidency a representative of all those forces bent on destroying the gains for the ordinary citizen that have been made under our great Chief Executive.”

But most Democrats sat back with their feet up, cocked their thumb at the polls (Roosevelt in a landslide), the betting odds (Roosevelt 7-to-5), and waited placidly for Election Day. New York Democrats held their most listless convention in many a year and Chairman James Aloysius Farley never once mentioned President Roosevelt. The New Deal got no cheers.