National Affairs: Hubble Bubble

By last week, U. S. interest in the campaign had taken a noticeable trend away from the five-dollar words of high argument and seemed to be heading toward the two-cent simplicities of Zowie! and Wham! (TIME, Oct. 14). For the first time, a public debater made a direct hit on Wendell Willkie, with a tomato. Many a verbal tomato, many an ancient egg, whizzed through the air.

Tomatoes & Eggs. While Wendell Willkie stormed through New England, hoarsely lambasting “The Third Term Candidate” and the New Deal, other G. O. P. stalwarts marched up & down the land echoing or outdoing him. William Harrison Fetridge, managing editor of The Republican, thought the welkin was ringing too loudly, wrote: “The time has come to talk plainly to a lot of Republicans. . . . Quiet, thoughtful, reasonable talk will win more votes than all the bombast you can muster.” New York’s Congressman Bruce Barton, candidate for the U. S. Senate, nailed a thesis on Mr. Roosevelt’s front door charging the President with most of the political crimes in the calendar. Suggesting that Roosevelt planned a Hitlerized U. S., he accused the President of secretly planning work camps, waiting only for re-election to put them in force. Said Barton: “It will mean that your son and daughter at 18 will be lifted out of school or convent and put into a Government camp supervised by an impersonal and irreligious Government bureaucracy.”

In the Senate, Republicans got an unexpected ally in loudmouthed, gummy-grinned lame duck Rush Holt (Dem., W. Va.), who rose to flay New York’s Democratic Governor Herbert Lehman, who (along with Henry Wallace) had suggested that the Axis powers wanted Roosevelt beaten. Lehman himself was fanning a war hysteria, said Holt, in order to swell the dividends of Lehman Corp., of which his cousin is president, and which, said Holt, holds shares in Bendix Aviation, Vultee, Stinson and Lockheed Aircraft, Hercules Powder, Dow Chemical, New York Shipbuilding, Freeport Sulphur, and Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown and U. S. Steel.

Republicans in Washington hissed that WPA relief rolls were taking a suspicious pre-election jump, that AAA, in violation of the Hatch Act, was politicking in the Middle West, that a booklet entitled Millions for Defense, prepared by the Federal Works Agency and paid for by the U. S. Government, was being used by the Democratic Party as campaign material.

Eggs & Tomatoes. Democrats replied in kind. As Publicity Director Charles Michelson handed them up, National Chairman Edward Flynn grabbed them and tossed them out: Republicans were trying to “buy” the election. Republicans were operating in direct violation of the Hatch Act.

A whispering campaign which had its origin among a group of Democratic businessmen in the South was set loose to crawl across the country. Some of the whispers: Willkie spends an hour every week having his hair marcelled. Willkie privately damns Labor.

Smear of the week was a pamphlet issued by the Colored Division of the Democratic National Committee.

Offended by the growing rancor of the campaign, Columnist Walter Lippmann lectured: “Bitter partisan attacks do not help to win Presidential elections.” To appear before undecided voters “shrieking that one of the candidates is a rascal and a traitor and what not strikes them as a reflection upon their own judgment and character. . . . My impression is that in a campaign of this sort it is not the winner who knocks out the loser. It is the loser who defeats himself.”

>Republican hopes of “reforming” Jersey City got a plexus-punch when voting-machine companies announced unanimously that it would be impossible to install their machines in Boss Frank Hague’s machine-made Hudson County in time for the election. Hudson County reported last week a record-high registration. Republican leaders charged that 60,000 names had been listed illegally, promised to cross them off.

> A miniature locomotive and caboose skittered around the State of New York, uttering no honest locomotive choo-choos, but squawking out canned political speeches made by Democratic Senator James M. Mead. Senator Mead’s excuse: he had once been a water boy on the Lackawanna.

> Republicans began distributing a record of the voice of New York Attorney Edmund Thomas Delaney imitating the voice of the President, quoting from speeches Roosevelt has made in the past eight years. Excerpt from the disc, which sells at 35¢ a record: “I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national Government.”