INDIANA: Homeric Feast

To a hayfield in lower Indiana, dotted with 29 blue-&-white striped tents, last week went 70,000 steamer clams, 4,250 milk-fed chickens, 900 watermelons, three truckloads of roasting corn, 60 chefs, 250 waiters, 36 bands, 8,200 personally invited Republicans from twelve States and 11,000 uninvited Republicans. Formal purpose of the occasion was to launch the Republican Congressional campaign of 1938. The host, who laid out $30,000 for the party, was buoyant Homer E. Capehart, “the daddy of the electric automatic phonograph,” now vice president & sales director of Rudolph Wurlitzer Co., after building up his own Capehart Corp., which now runs without him.

Mr. Capehart recently returned from a transcontinental tour, with banquets and floor shows in 21 cities to pep up his dealers about Wurlitzer’s nickel-in-the-slot music machines. Of his expensive clambake he said: “I can’t afford it, but we can’t beat those Democrats with firecrackers. . . . The New Deal : . . will fall of its own weight, but we must get in and pitch today and kill it before it kills us.”

In the big main tent, when the eating was over, the orthodox Republican audience received orthodox Republican pabulum. Chief speakers were New York’s Representative (former Senator) James W. Wadsworth and National Chairman John D. M. Hamilton. Excerpts: Mr. Wadsworth—”Wherever we turn, we are confronted with Federal money, billions of it. It is used brazenly in tempting the States and their subordinate municipalities into acquiescence. To put it boldly, much of this tempting should be called bribery—the bribery of an unsuspecting people into acquiescence.” Mr. Hamilton—”In less than four years Congress has appropriated for WPA use alone the gigantic sum of $6,000,000,000.

Well, if this money has not been spent to relieve genuine distress, how has it been spent? . . . What has Mr. Roosevelt, who likes to talk so much about morality in ‘ government and politics, to say to this picture of jobless, hungry people eating out of garbage cans while his henchmen, in his name, use relief funds to buy their wav back into office?”