National Affairs: Hoovarette

From Philadelphia issued an announcement: “Miss Beatrice Vare, daughter of Senator-elect William S. Vare, will take the stump for Herbert Hoover.”

The day, last year, when Senator-elect Vare was pronounced Senator-suspect by the Senate and asked to wait outside, Miss Vare sat in the Senators’ gallery, dressed to the nines, eager, nervous. Many another Republican celebrity’s relatives were there—Mrs. Hiram Johnson, for example, and Mrs. Nicholas Longworth—but they did not act any more cordially towards Miss Vare than did the gentlemen of the Senate towards her flushed, strained, humiliated father downstairs. His disgrace was hers, not only because he was her father but because she had campaigned for him.

Now. no matter what they might say about Senator-suspect Vare, Boss Vare, Vare the Impudent, who spoke before Secretary Mellon at Kansas City, his daughter would be a Hoover speaker and then they would have to recognize her.

Coincident with Miss Vare’s resurgence,

Fate laid a finger on another famed Pennsylvania daughter. Miss Agnes Hart Wilson was the daughter of null Democrat William B. Wilson,* whom Senator-suspect Vare defeated (unless the count is corrected) in the famed 1926 election. Miss Agnes Wilson was the Democratic candidate for the House seat now held by Representative Edgar R. Kiess in Pennsylvania’s 16th (North central) District. Last week, following an operation, Miss Wilson, 42, died in Blossburg, Pa.

*William B. Wilson was Secretary of Labor under Woodrow Wilson.