POLITICAL NOTES: In Iowa

June 7 is a great day for Iowa—the day of its Senatorial primary— the day in which it will have a chance to tell how it feels. Iowa wants to tell because Iowa feels aggrieved.

The way that Iowa will speak is in the choice of her Republican nominee for Senator—because Iowa is normally Republican. There are three candidates.

The first of them is Albert Baird Cummins, venerable senex, first sent to the Senate in 1908 as a volcanic Progressive, now about as regular as any politician is likely to be in these days, a learned lawyer, devoted nowadays to judicious action.

The second is Smith Wildman Brookhart, whom Iowa sent to the Senate in 1922, as a loud-speaking, bad-dressing, pseudo-hog-raising Progressive. The difference between the two is that Brookhart is still snorting—at Wall Street, at the Administration. He wants Iowans to know that he is the only pure-bred farmer bull snorting in political pastures. He snorted so loud in 1924 for LaFollette against Coolidge that he was beaten by a narrow margin for reelection. Only recently (TIME, April 19, CONGRESS) he was ousted from the Senate in favor of his opponent, Democrat Dan Steck, after a recanvass of the votes two autumns ago. Being ousted, he promptly announced himself a candidate against Mr. Cummins this year.

The third candidate is lawyer-banker Howard J. Clark of Des Moines, of whom more anon.

Iowa’s chief grievance is the farm situation. Iowa feels that the “eastern viewpoint” is predominant at Washington, that there are favors for everybody except the farmer.

Mr. Brookhart has been stumping Iowa telling it just that, saying that Wall Street put him out of his seat, saying that Wall Street defeated the Haugen farm relief bill, saying that Wall Street put over the Esch-Cummins railway bill and the farmers are paying (through freight rates) the dividends on watered stock, saying that the farmers are enriching Wall Street because they have to buy under the protective tariff, saying Wall Street and the Administration are hand in glove, and mentioning incidentally that he voted against World Court adherence.

So far as he can arouse the farmers against the railroad law, he scores against Mr. Cummins whose name is attached to it. So far as he scores against the Administration, he injures Mr. Cummins who is reckoned its supporter.

Mr. Cummins has probably pursued the wisest course. He has conducted a quiet “personal” campaign, without rushing out to his constituents with wild alarms. His supporters have told Iowa that it must choose “Cummins or Communism.” But on the whole they have not done much speechmaking. On the main issue, farm relief, the Senator made a speech last week in the Senate declaring:

“That agriculture needs the aid which the Government alone can give is agreed upon everywhere and by every person. . . . There may be—indeed, there is—wide difference of opinion with respect to the measures that ought to be employed.”

He went on to declare for the principle of the defeated Haugen bill—to this extent aligning himself against the Administration. He said that the proposed board to buy up farm surpluses in this country and sell them abroad to prevent domestic low prices was no larger interference in the business of agriculture than the functions of the Federal Reserve Board are in commerce and industry or of the Interstate Commerce Commission in transportation. He declared that in the long run the scheme would not cost the Treasury a dollar. That stand should be of material aid to him in Iowa.

The developments of the campaign have been peculiar. The bitterness between the partisans of Cummins and of Brookhart has grown steadily, yet there have been few visible signs that either of them is arousing Iowa.

The third candidate, Howard J. Clark, is of course fully in favor of farm relief. His supporters argue for him that he is the one possible compromise nominee—that if Cummins or Brookhart were nominated, the embittered supporters of the other would turn to the Democratic nominee, with the possibility that the Republican state of Iowa would elect a second Democratic Senator. But in proportion as the partisanship between Brookhart and Cummins increases, the likelihood of Iowa’s turning to an innocent bystander, however well thought of, decreases.