REPUBLICANS: In the Stars

Last week was historic in U. S. politics. It was the week when the candidates for the U. S. Presidency defined different, but equally new, relationships with their parties. Franklin Roosevelt irritably relegated the Democratic Party organization to the bottommost column of his cam paign calculations (see col. 1). Wendell Willkie in Colorado Springs cordially received G. O. P. politicos, listened politely, sent them away knowing that to him as well the Republican Party’s formal, professional organism would be incidental in the 1940 campaign.

Westward to get this news flew a covey of G. O. P. professionals: National Chairman Joe Martin, General Counsel Henry Prather Fletcher, Executive Director John D. M. Hamilton, several others. They found Wendell Willkie on the sixth floor of The Broadmoor hotel, having the time of his life. In shirt sleeves, crinkled trousers, bedroom slippers he worked, read, chatted amid a continual clatter of a dozen typists (two days behind on 600 incoming wires and letters per day), incessant callers, whanging telephones (The Broadmoor had to install a special Willkie switchboard). He left his spacious suite (three rooms and a sun porch) just once a day, to swim at 6 a.m. in The Broad-moor’s indoor pool.

Messrs. Martin and Fletcher did not have such a good time. Joe Martin wanted to subordinate bumpity young Oren Root Jr.’s 600 independent, crassly amateur Willkie-for-President Clubs to the regular G. O. P. organization. Lawyer Fletcher had a plan to get around the Hatch Act’s $3,000,000 limitation on national-campaign expenditures by splitting up contributions among various candidates and State, local, national committees.

With Jovian forbearance, Mr. Willkie reiterated his intention to keep total G. O. P. expenditures well below the legal maximum, otherwise refrained from rebuking Henry Fletcher in public. That privilege was reserved for Democratic Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, who opined in Washington that Mr. Fletcher’s device was illegal.

Joe Martin undoubtedly had in mind reports that while Mr. Root’s clubs were doing very well, Mr. Root himself was not doing so well as a campaign organizer. Nominee Willkie announced after his conference with Messrs. Martin, Fletcher, Root, et al. that some bugs had been smoothed out. But he went out of his way to congratulate Oren Root for “a magnificent job.” More important, Wendell Willkie pointedly indicated that his campaign will be kept in three distinct channels: 1) the Root clubs, with their appeal to the mass of non-partisan independents who twice elected Franklin Roosevelt, will again elect a President in 1940; 2) a rapidly developing organization for Democratic bolters (see col. 2); 3) Congressman Martin’s national committee.

Wendell Willkie also:

¶Proudly showed the rough draft of his acceptance speech to Editor William Allen White (Emporia Gazette). Sage Mr. White announced that Wendell Willkie’s victory was “in the stars,” told a story: “In 1936 I told Alf Landon that he wasn’t going to carry Kansas . . . But this year it’s different, and Mr. Willkie is going to carry Kansas.”

¶Jubilantly read in a Gallup Poll that if the U. S. had voted last week, he would have carried not only Kansas but 23 other States, defeated Franklin Roosevelt by 27 electoral votes. At once promising and sobering to Wendell Willkie was the fact that he led by 52% in crucial New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan (102 electoral votes), by a tenuous 51% in six others (Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Connecticut, Rhode Island). Sobering also was the memoryof Alf Landon, who led the Gallup Poll for nine weeks after he was nominated in 1936.