PENNSYLVANIA: Republicans’ Return

Mr. William Hall of No. 58 North 16th Street, Harrisburg, Pa. last week rented his old horse-drawn victoria for its quadrennial job: to carry Pennsylvania’s Governor to his inaugural. In the rented relic outgoing Governor George Howard Earle and incoming Governor Arthur Horace (“Breaker Boy”) James rode to the State Capitol, where Republicans formally retrieved control of the State from the Democrats who held it for four years.

An old-line Republican machine politician, Governor James’s first act after he took oath was to slap down a document on the inaugural stand, announce: “I herewith submit my resignation as a judge of the Superior Court. . . .” By waiting until then, he made sure that he would choose his successor on the bench. Then from his glassed enclosure on Third Street, he watched Jay Cooke, Philadelphia’s G. O. P. chairman, stride majestically along in the inaugural parade, saw pass the proud banner from Philadelphia’s 26th Ward: “Home Ward of Late U. S. Senator WILLIAM S. VARE Honoring His True Friend GOV. ARTHUR H. JAMES.”

That night Widower James’s dark-tressed, 22-year-old daughter Dorothy began her duties as Pennsylvania’s First Lady. To the inaugural ball in magnificent Zembo Mosque thronged Pennsylvania’s very fattest cats: ex-Senator Joseph L. Grundy, chairman of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association ; Oilman Joseph N. Pew Jr.; Publisher Moses Annenberg (who drank Coca-Colas with a pretty legislative secretary); John M. Flynn, who used to front for Joe Grundy at the State House. A figure new and interesting to Pennsylvanians was Colonel Carl L. Estes, a Texas publisher who was reportedly in the Pew family oil business (Sun Oil Co.), and who by Governor James’s first executive order became an Admiral of the Pennsylvania Navy. Admiral Estes has leased a home in Harrisburg, where the Pews can use a good lookout.

Governor James’s inaugural address told little of his plans. As an orthodox politician he is expected to turn out the Democratic rascals in droves, but for all Arthur James’s talk of economy and of firing 1,000 surplus State employes, his House of Representatives, like George Earle’s Legislature before it, immediately had to divert $12,000,000 from motor, liquor, insurance funds to finance relief.

Other new broom Republican Governors who last week swept with varying degrees of cleanness:

Ohio. In his second week as Governor, John W. Bricker (successor to Democrat Martin Davey) had fired 2,000 State employes. Ever a ready trough for jobbing politicos, the Highway Department supplied 1,310 of the dismissals. Politicians normally expect to slip in their followers after economy waves subside, but local dispensers in Ohio last week were actually worried lest John Bricker keep the vacancies vacant.

Massachusetts. Leverett Saltonstall, who came in after eight Democratic years, inherited an Augean mess from the Hurley-Curley administrations. He declared that no man who was doing a decent, necessary job need fear the ax, then proceeded to go after other jobholders (see p. 40). Of more concern to Massachusetts was his announced conviction that despite all economies the State tax on cities & towns would have to be upped from a record $17,000,000 last year to perhaps $30,000,000.

Wisconsin. Julius Heil after much talk of economy admitted that his Legislature must act to reorganize State departments before any substantial saving could be effected.

Connecticut. Raymond E. Baldwin, the State’s first G. O. P. Governor in eight years, resurrected “frugality in government”—a phrase seldom heard of late even in “frugal” New England. He submitted a balanced budget—but to do so, after eliminating two State normal schools’ two trade schools and 500 jobs, he had still to take $1,500,008 from the State building fund.