National Affairs: Political Notes: Jun. 11, 1923

Keziah Duff of Lansing, Mich., told a banker in Wichita, Kan., that Edsel Ford told him that Henry Ford seriously planned to make a race for the Presidency in 1924.

Henry Ford, asked by reporters whether he would run for President, said: ” I feel fine this morning. I arose early and rode horseback from six to seven.”

“The two biggest national problems we have at this time,” said Henry Ford, ” are the railroads and the judiciary. The railroads should be under one head. Judges should have more pay.”

William Randolph Hearst is pro-Jew and attacked Ford as an anti-Semite in Hearst’s International magazine. Yet at New Orleans Mr. Hearst told reporters: ” If the Presidency of the United States were to be settled by popular vote today, Henry Ford would be President, and I am with him because of this. . . . But the only way Henry Ford can ever run for the Presidency will be to run as an independent candidate.”

Anti-Hearst papers remark that if Hearst thought a third party had a chance to win he would be advocating not Ford but Hearst to lead it.

The Jewish Tribune (New York) published an open letter to Mr. Hearst: “Surely you must know that Mr. Ford has not yet rid himself of the ‘Jewish peril’ obsession. How can you, who have so repeatedlycondemned this monomania, now seriously propose for President of the

United States a man who regards with suspicion and hatred 3,000,000 of its inhabitants ? ”

William Jennings Bryan is planning to go to Europe to preside at the International Economic Conference at Gothenburg, Sweden, on July 12 and 13. He does not expect to return to the United States until August.

It is reported that Mr. Bryan is seriously considering not being a candidate at the Democratic Convention in 1924, because of Mrs. Bryan’s ill health.

Mrs. John Weeks, wife of the Secretary of War, is convalescing from an attack of blood poisoning. After her sea voyage through the Panama Canal with the Secretary, she traveled directly to Chicago from San Francisco, while Mr. Weeks stopped in Utah to inspect army posts.

Senator Borah is broadminded and an advocate of the direct primary. Being so, he accepted and quoted a definition of a Republican presented by an Idaho paper:

“Any man who can carry a Republican primary is a Republican. He might believe in free trade, in unconditional membership in the League of Nations, in States’ rights and in every policy that the Democratic Party ever advocated; yet, if he carried his Republican primary, he would be a Republican. He might go to the other extreme and believe in the communistic state, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the abolition of private property and in the extermination of the bourgeoisie; yet, if he carried his Republican primary, he would still be a Republican.”

An obliging Republican Congressman from Ohio, Martin L. Davey, made public a suggestion from a constituent that the Federal Government establish a bureau of population to advise people not to raise largefamilies and to prevent overpopulation. The constituent gives figures to prove his case: In 1776 this country had a population of 3,000,000. In 1923 (147 years later) its population is 108,000,000 (36 times as great). In 2070 (147 years later still) its population will be 3,888,000,000 (36 times again as great).

The Civil Service Law of the United States calls for retirement of civil servants at the age of 70—with pensions not to exceed $72 a month. Largely on account of Congressional pressure it has never been strictly enforced. Secretary Weeks is understood to have issued orders for forced retirement of septuagenarians from the Bureau of Pensions. Other Departments are expected to follow.

The State of Wisconsin several years ago appropriated money to pay for a portrait of Senator La Follette to hang in the state capitol. Mr. La Follette is so busy that the artist has never caught him. The most the artist has achieved is permission to place his easel in the Senator’s office.

“I have heard nothing and I know nothing of reports published in Ohio that I am to resign. I feel better and I am better than since I was taken ill last winter. . . . The frequency with which these reports that I am to resign spring up in certain quarters is’ certainly strange”— so said Harry M. Daugherty, Attorney General, on returning to Washington with Mrs. Daugherty. They had been in Ohio for several weeks recuperating from their respective illnesses.