CAMPAIGN: Open Season

Almost every year, when the leaves and the ballots are falling, the U. S. Government takes out a license, takes down a fowling piece, and goes gunning for election frauds. The bag is never very notable, but the bang-bang is heartening and salutary. Last week the loudest shooting came from New Jersey, where vote frauds shook every clump of underbrush.

Beaters for a Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee, stationed in Newark, flushed one witness after another to tell what he knew about the partridge dances in neighboring Hudson County, where Democratic Committee Vice Chairman Frank Hague is boss of the bush. The Committee’s valiant Republican Senator Charles W. Tobey watched and listened, with blunderbuss at the ready. Beside him sat his colleague, Senator Alva Adams, little, solid and Democratic, who would rather be off hunting in Republican-controlled South Jersey counties.

Senator Tobey was all set to blaze away, but it looked as if he would have no chance. Just before he took position, it was announced that a county official had burned the Hudson County 1936 and 1937 poll books (which voters must sign as they vote and which were said to contain evidence of forgery). But Senator Tobey’s beater, Investigator H. Ralph Burton, did his best to give the Senator something to shoot at. Burton scared up many a gamy allegation. Samples:

Hudson County ballot boxes sometimes contained from five to 20% fraudulent votes. Hudson County voters were moved temporarily into hotels and rooming houses to vote in districts where it would do the most good. In “a tremendous number of instances,” signatures in the registration book differed from signatures in the 1938 and 1939 poll books. One woman whose signature appeared in the poll books swore to Mr. Burton she had not voted “in many years.” She was blind.

After getting Charles F. Stoebling, former county commissioner of registration, to concede reluctantly that it was a “fraud” for three men to write in the same name 60 times in the poll books, Senator Tobey let go with both barrels, roared:

“After all this was over, didn’t you burn with righteous indignation? Didn’t every fibre of your being vibrate with rage? How did you react to the horror, the heinousness, the chicanery and the utter fraud that was done, Mr. Stoebling?”

» Meantime, in Illinois, the Committee’s Senator Clyde M. Reed, Republican, stalked the Kelly-Nash covert, with a reluctant Democratic Senator, Lister Hill, at his side. Senator Hill can outbay a Baskerville hound on occasion, but this was not one of them. While witnesses came forth to say that politicians bought the vote of flophouse residents for 25¢, 50¢ or a shot of liquor, cynical Chicagoans watched with only half an eye. Too many times they had seen that covert drawn blank.

» Committee Chairman Senator Guy M.

Gillette, Democrat, hallooed investigators into the thicket of Republican-controlled Philadelphia. Other fraud hounds were whistled back to Washington from New Mexico to tell what they knew about alleged vote juggling there. Witnesses complained to the committee in Washington that Democratic ward heelers in New York City were putting the squeeze on relief workers to force them to vote for Roosevelt. Attorney General Jackson appointed one man in charge of the nationwide hunt: Maurice M. Milligan, U. S. attorney for western Missouri (who helped put Boss Pendergast of Kansas City in the clink). Lean, Lincolnesque Mr. Milligan was put in charge of a special Justice Department unit to look into election complaints, bring criminal charges.

At week’s end, when the smoke and the banging had died away, the hunters’ bag was visible, but only just: an AAA field agent in Iowa, discharged for soliciting funds for the Democratic Party and conducting a political poll on the Government’s time.