WOMEN: Widow

“I choose to run for the Republican nomination for Congressman-at-large from Illinois in the April primary of 1928,” said Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, among other things, last week.

Widow of the late Senator Medill McCormick, she, aged 47, has lived and breathed politics since she was old enough to realize that her father, the late Mark Hanna, was a very important man. When Mark Hanna was in the U. S. Senate, she, a smart bud, fresh from Dobbs Ferry and Farmington, was there too, at work in his office. She says: “If I wanted to dance until four o’clock in the morning, well and good, but I had to be in the office just the same at nine o’clock and be good-natured about it.”

Having married politics, she rose to enjoy a prestige in the capital second only to presidents’ wives and to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whose father was often at loggerheads* with Mrs. McCormick’s father. When Miss Hanna first saw Miss Roosevelt, the latter had just “burst upon the world as Princess Alice.” Miss Hanna thought Princess Alice a harum-scarum. Princess Alice thought the young lady who presided over the griddle cakes and corned beef hash at Senator Hanna’s political breakfasts in Lafayette Square, a superb prig.

Later, after Princess Alice married the dapper Ohioan, Nicholas Longworth, who became Speaker of the House, Mrs. McCormick and Mrs. Longworth formed the friendship that is now said to be one of the strongest influences keeping Mrs. McCormick in politics. Other influences are Mrs. McCormick’s unboastful estimate of her own undoubted political acumen; her experience since 1924 as Republican National Committeewoman from Illinois; and heredity. In Illinois, she will run for nomination as the protegée of well-entrenched Mayor William Hale Thompson of Chicago, against Congressman Henry R. Rathbone who did not support Mayor Thompson in his loud “100% American” campaign last year, and against Congressman Richard Yates.

Three years ago Mrs. McCormick was shouting from Illinois platforms against the Small-Thompson combination, which helped Charles S. Deneen take her husband’s Senatorship from him shortly before he died in 1925. Her cry then was: “Turn the rascals out!” Her explanation for associating herself with Mayor Thompson, and his friend, Governor Lennington Small of Illinois, now is: “Party regularity was a Hanna creed, you know.”

* On the way from Buffalo to Washington in President McKinley’s funeral train, Mark Hanna exploded: “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia. I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die. Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States!”