MONTANA: Beat Wheeler

Bald “baby” Representative Jerry J. O’Connell in Montana’s 1st Congressional District (western part of the State) was last week renominated by Montana Democrats. That event made little difference to most people except Montana’s Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Nationally famed as a “liberal” before Mr. O’Connell, now 29, was wearing long pants, Mr. Wheeler, 56, has been pilloried as a “reactionary” by O’Connell’s clamoring about the votes Burton Wheeler cast against the President’s Supreme Court plan and the Government Reorganization bill. Loud Mr. O’Connell, who got national publicity by baiting Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City about the latter’s suppression of C. I. O. (TIME, June 13), went around among miners, lumberjacks, smelter workers and farmers, declaring that Franklin Roosevelt had told him to “fight like hell to defeat Senator Wheeler’s machine so he wouldn’t be back in 1940.”

Jerry O’Connell was renominated by some 6,300 votes over Payne Templeton, Helena pedagogue. Burton Wheeler, who comes up for election in 1940, merely observed :

“Of course, President Roosevelt never told Jerry O’Connell anything of the kind.”