• U.S.

THE CAMPAIGN: Alarums & Excursions

5 minute read
TIME

The progress of another week’s campaigning brought all candidates seven days nearer to the election.

¶ Calvin Coolidge sat tight and held his peace.

¶ Charles G. Dawes rolled out of Louisville on the Dawes special to Shelbyville, Frankfort, Lexington, Covington and sundry other centres. He stood on the back platform, cried: “Look out, citizens of Kentucky !” ; warned against LaFollette and the latter’s attitude toward the Supreme Court. Soon after, the citizens of Evanston, Ill., saw their townsman returning to his home to rest, to write speeches for an invasion of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and points East.

¶ Pulling out of the Indiana storm-centre, the Davis Special puffed across Illinois to Mattoon, Springfield, Quincy. At Mattoon, John W. Davis said: “We propose … no crooks inside and no petted favorites at the door.” At Springfield, he laid a wreath on Lincoln’s grave. Later, at a mass meeting, he described the whole duty of Governments: to be honest, to honor equality and justice, to be efficient and undivided. At Quincy, he spoke; crossed the Mississippi, spoke; recrossed, spoke again. Then back rolled the Special, through flat brown cornlands, into Chicago, where Mr. Davis entered the Auditorium and a heckler bawled out: “Where do you stand on the Ku Klux Klan?”

Said Mr. Davis: “I think I’ll answer the gentleman’s question . . . The fact that he asks it at all convinces me that there are still left in the United States some people who do not read the newspapers.” He “scored the Klan,” as public prints put it. Then he resumed a rebuttal of what Secretary Hughes had been saying in the East about a Democratic Party “cut to pieces in the West, honeycombed in the East.” “Surely,” said Mr. Davis, “either the gentleman is suffering from aphasia or —like some others—is not thoroughly in touch.”

Other Chicago audiences heard the Davis dicta before the Special puffed out again, southbound this time through East St. Louis, Ill., into Missouri. In East St. Louis, Mr. Davis paused long enough to tell 5,000 hearers that the election of Candidate Coolidge might well intensify public feeling so as to cook up widespread social revolt. In St. Louis, one riding a donkey led the parade into the Coliseum, where Mr. Davis promised tax reform.

¶ Tennesseewards puffed the Special, stopped at Nashville for the weekend, took on coal and puffed for Louisville. Evansville, Ind., and Cleveland were soon to see it, to hear its main passenger.

¶ At Nashville, Mr. Davis arose to notable heights of oratorical fury. In pulling to pieces Mr. Coolidge’s letter endorsing Navy Day, wherein the President referred to the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armaments as having marked “an epoch in which . . . the leading sea powers have united in an agreement that the U.S. is entitled to maintain a navy equal to that of any other power,” Mr. Davis exploded: “In the language of old Ethan Allen, ‘In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,’ when did we need an agreement with any power to maintain a navy such as we desired?”

¶ Next to nothing was heard of Demo-candidate Charles W. Bryan in his Nebraska haunts. One day William J. Bryan alighted from a train in Lincoln, was met with a motor by his brother, was driven to Seward and there spoke; another day it was announced that the candidate would soon set out upon a tour of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. However, the Democratic press helped keep Mr. Bryan in the public eye. One paper printed “an intimate view.” Said the biographer: “Mr. Bryan has a manner rather better than Vice Presidential ,and presence enough for any office. He is tall, big-framed, nervous and muscular, a cross between an urbane Kentucky colonel and a rough and restless Westerner ranger. Here on the home Axminster he towers and talks at ease. His polished, well-modeled head and flashing eyes give him a little the look of a large-size, unfinished Venizelos. . . . His own chauffeur by choice, he changes tires and drives at a terrific pace, shakes the insides out of his light automobile. . . . What a salesman he must have been in the early days when he sold soap and toilet goods!”

¶ Robert M. LaFollette continued his arousal of the Mississippi Valley. He dropped his notes and eyeglasses, shook his high silvery pompadour, shook his finger at the microphones, deserted his stand to pace the planks and extemporize as of old in splendid blazing bursts of oratory. His sons, Robert Jr., and Philip, sat on the platforms behind him, calming him discreetly, coaxing him back to his typewritten texts. Sometimes “Bob Jr.,” sometimes “Phil” opened the meetings. Invariably the Senator followed them in fighting mood. Leaving St. Louis after a stormy session, the father and his sons boarded their special train for Des Moines and the Northwest. The Federal Reserve Banks, the railroad interests, Dawes, Coolidge, Butler, Slemp, Wall Street —all received their weekly flayings in Des Moines and Minneapolis. “Attacks,” “scores,” “hits,” “accuses,” “challenges,” “condemns”—with such words did the press of all parties headline its reports of the candidate’s daily diatribes. Back southward went the Special to Sioux Falls, S.D., for a restful weekend; then on to Omaha, Neb.; then northeast into Illinois. At Sioux Falls, Senator LaFollette denied charges by T. V. O’Connor, Chairman of the U. S. Shipping Board, that Soviet funds had arrived via Mexico to aid the Third Party.

¶ Burton K. Wheeler busied himself arousing southern California, and raising campaign funds as he did so. Twelve thousand voters in Hollywood Bowl paid $7,500 to hear him; more voters, more dollars in a Long Beach auditorium. An express whisked Senator Wheeler across the Rockies to Kansas, where crowds in Wichita and Newton heard him denounce Big Business, promise good things to farmers.

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