REPUBLICANS: Last Lap

In a logorrheic swirl of speeches, talks, statements, challenges and replies Republican Nominee Alf Landon thrust halfway across the continent and all the way back from coast to coast last week on the last lap of what he calls “this battle to save our American System of Government.”

Calling on New Mexicans at Albuquerque to rally in defense of their freedom, the Nominee proceeded to enumerate the liberties which Franklin Roosevelt proposed to destroy. They comprised the right to elect their own representatives, to talk politics on street corners, to march in political parades, to attend the church of one’s faith, to be tried by jury, to own property.

Issuing a challenge to Nominee Roosevelt to confirm or deny his son James’s intimation last fortnight that he intended to revive NRA, Nominee Landon rolled on to California. Detraining at Pasadena with Governor Frank Merriam, who had boarded his train earlier, he was met by a cheering crowd, bundled into an automobile to ride to Los Angeles. Shocking was his reception by that pro-Roosevelt city. On the outskirts a group of WPA workers leaned on their shovels, booed lustily as he passed. As his car continued down crowded Broadway the boos swelled into a great, derisive roar. There were cheers, too, sometimes rising above the boos, sometimes being drowned out. Alf Landon bore his mile-long ordeal with composure, but once inside his hotel he seemed, to members of his party, crushed.

That evening the huge Los Angeles Coliseum, 1932 Olympic stadium, was half-filled when Republican State Chairman Earl Warren arose to introduce Nominee Landon, who had not yet appeared. Spotlights picked out a distant gate, a band struck up Oh! Susanna, and into the stadium burst Alf Landon, upright in the back seat of an open car, waving his hat, grimacing under showers of confetti which pelted him as he circled the running track.

With his speech, the boos began again, creating a deep, ominous undertone in every burst of cheers. Nominee Landon fought back with loud voice and waving fist, hammering on nearly all his familiar themes the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the American Way, Spending, Regimentation, Relief Corruption, Taxation.

As the Nominee was being driven away, a liquor bottle crashed against the stadium wall, showered the running board of his car with splinters of glass. “I just couldn’t resist the impulse,” confessed 16-year-old John Dobbins to police.

Los Angeles’ weather, as well as its citizens, had given Alf Landon a chilly greeting, and, as the Sunflower Special sped eastward, the Nominee was nursing a cold and sore throat. But at Tucumcari, N. Mex., stung to fighting pitch by his Los Angeles booing and by recent Roosevelt speeches, disputing virtually every one of the President’s tax points. Alf Landon struck harder and straighter at Franklin Roosevelt than ever before, accused him of “misrepresenting” the facts, went on to assert: “He is using the people’s money directly and indirectly to secure his re-election.”

At El Paso, Tex. a physician boarded the train, ordered Nominee Landon to bed to save his throat for important speeches. Thereafter members of his party pinch hit before disappointed station crowds along the way, explaining that the Nominee was busy and “very tired.” After a day of that. Alf Landon allowed them to reveal the real reason for his nonappearance.

Onto his train at El Reno, immaculate in blue and with bristly hair well brushed, climbed Oklahoma’s gaunt, rustic William H. (“Alfalfa Bill”) Murray, who had promised to introduce him at Oklahoma City. Arrived at their destination, the onetime Democratic Governor and the Republican Nominee stepped off the train arm in arm. Alf Landon’s throat was scarf-wound against the cold and for further protection he was bundled into a closed car for the drive to the hotel. Friends offered the closed car as explanation of the appalling scene which followed. As Nominee Landon passed through Oklahoma City’s streets there rose from the crowd lined all along the way not cheers, not boos, but a great, cold, dead silence.

There were cheers in the local Coliseum when “Alfalfa Bill” Murray rose to introduce the Nominee as a composite of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. James A. Garfield and Calvin Coolidge “plus a pleasant personality.” Returning the compliment, Nominee Landon listed the onetime Governor first among famed anti-New Deal Democrats who had espoused his cause, called on “real Democrats” throughout the land to rally to him.

At Tulsa Alf Landon barked that “a member of my opponent’s immediate family” had been “guilty of peddling a lie.” The “lie” was the well-worn charge that Governor Landon had helped balance his budget by closing up 458 Kansas schools, thereby depriving 8,557 Kansas children of educational privileges. Fact was, declared the Nominee, that the closed schools had been sparsely attended, that all their pupils had been transferred to other schools, and that “not a single boy or girl in Kansas has been deprived of the educational advantages that are rightfully his.”

On his arrival in Indianapolis Nominee Landon was booed only in the city’s Negro section, heartily cheered elsewhere. That evening the Indianapolis Coliseum, was jammed to its 14,000-seat capacity. When the Nominee rose to speak he got the warmest ovation of his campaign. It was a full seven minutes before the wildly yelling crowd would let him begin his long-awaited pronouncement on foreign relations. Twenty-nine times in the course of the 24-minute speech, on which he and his advisers had been working all summer, his audience broke in with applause or cheers.

Alf Landon on War & Peace:

“In foreign affairs I do not propose to be a talkative President. But I do propose to appoint as Secretary of State a competent man grounded in sound American principles.”

“I shall encourage with all my power the cause of peace. I shall not merely talk about my hatred of war.”

“The League of Nations . . . has failed. . . . We cannot use the World Court.”

“It will be my purpose, when elected, to make the United States in reality a good neighbor to Latin America, to use John Jay’s term.”

“Isolation is unfair to our own people and impossible. . . . Specific pledges not to go to war under any condition risk encouraging belligerents to attempt aggression. . . .”

With the votes of New Deal haters in his pocket at the outset, Nominee Landon planned and began his campaign last summer as a temperate appeal to middle-of-the-roaders who liked most New Deal promises, were dissatisfied with New Deal performance. For a time his restrained New Deal criticism contrasted strangely with the rampant New Deal damnation of his Vice-Presidential running mate, his National Chairman.

Last September Republican managers, alarmed at an August slump in his popularity, persuaded Nominee Landon to begin a “fighting campaign.” Bit by bit his temper rose; his attacks grew stern, next vigorous, next angry. As the campaign entered its final week, they reached full fury. Not Frank Knox, not John Hamilton had ever shouted a blacker, more fearful prophecy of the doom in store for the U. S. if Alf Landon should fail of election than did Alf Landon himself when, at Baltimore this week, he cried:

“It is the essence of the New Deal that the Constitution must go in order to give men in Washington the power to make America over, to destroy the American way of life and establish a foreign way of life in its place. . . . They have the pattern of their planned economy before them. . . . Our homes, our communities, our jobs and our businesses are to be directed from Washington. The profit motive is to be eliminated. Business as we know it is to disappear.”