National Affairs: Messy Mass

Into the White House last week strode Senator George Higgins Moses of New Hampshire, brimming with big ideas. He had just been named head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee to maintain or augment a G. O. P. Senate majority in next year’s elections.

The messiness of G. O. P. politics in Massachusetts is due to jealousies and backbiting between leaders and senatorial candidates. The Senate seat now occupied by white-goateed Frederick Huntington Gillett is open to the 1930 election. Aged 78, an officeholder for a half-century, he is the Senate’s best contract bridge player but otherwise has left no large impress upon its history. Younger men want his place, but he has volunteered to step aside only for Citizen Calvin Coolidge.

Louis Kroh Liggett, drug tycoon, Republican National Committeeman for Massachusetts, contributed to the messiness of things Republican by charging that James Michael Curley, Democrat, had kept the religious issue alive during last year’s campaign by “dastardly work”— circulating anti-Catholic literature. Last week Boss Curley sued Boss Liggett for civil and criminal libel.

An eager candidate for the Gillett seat in the Senate is onetime Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller. Last week, disgusted with Committeeman Liggett’s inept maneuvre, he called him a “Jonah,” said he ought to be thrown “overboard.”

Massachusetts Democrats, elated at the “messiness” of Republican politics, sought out one Marcus A. Coolidge, Fitchburg manufacturer, asked him to stand for the Senate. Alive to the added danger of a Coolidge Democrat, Senator Moses at the White House declared: “The name of Coolidge is exclusively a Republican asset in Massachusetts.”