THE CONGRESS: Bucking Female

In her campaign in Illinois to be the first woman elected to the U. S. Senate, Republican Nominee Ruth Hanna McCormick last week found herself confronted by three adversaries instead of one. They were: 1) James Hamilton (“J. Ham”) Lewis, Democratic Senatorial nominee; 2) Mrs. Lottie Holman O’Neill, independent dry candidate; 3) the Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures chairmanned by North Dakota’s 37-year-old Senator Gerald Prentice Nye. Adversary No. 3 furnished the week’s melodramatics.

After Mrs. McCormick had won the Republican nomination in last April’s primary, she filed with the Senate committee what she claimed to be the most complete and accurate statement of campaign expenditures ever made by a candidate. Her listed spendings: $252,000. Subsequently it was discovered that some $67,000 had also been spent in her behalf, bringing the total up to $319,000. The Senate committee, suspicious of such outlay, began its own investigation. While they investigated, Mrs. McCormick’s office at Byron, Ill. was broken open and her private files ransacked. A woman was found hiding in the closet of her hotel suite in Chicago after a campaign conference there. Her telephone wires were tapped. She assumed that the Senate investigation was responsible. She marched into the W. C. Dannenberg Detective Agency in Chicago, put down $1,500 as a retainer, hired sleuths to trail Senator Nye and his investigators. Fortnight ago Senator Nye discovered he was being shadowed (TIME, Sept. 8). Last week he held committee meetings in Chicago to inquire into Nominee McCormick’s counterespionage.

Mrs. McCormick made no bones about what she had done. Said she: “Senator Nye wants to know who did it. I did it. I am still doing it. . . . Prosecution became persecution. . . . I have acted in self-defense. If Senator Nye is indignant, so am I. . . . What is Senator Nye going to do about it?”

Pressmen waited for Senator Nye thus challenged to make a hot denial of responsibility for the ransackings and riflings. But Senator Nye made no denial. Instead he interrogated Dannenberg detectives, was told that his own investigators had tried to bribe the private sleuths to betray their employer. A roll of money was thrown down on the committee table as evidence of the bribe. Declared Chairman Nye:

“. . . While admitting that there might be truth in one individual’s alleged prophecy that when this private investigation of myself was finished ‘Nye would be selling papers on the depot platform at Fargo, N. Dak., or grinding a hand organ for a dancing monkey,’ my answer to the question as to what I shall do about it is only this:

“No matter how unpleasant or dis tasteful, I shall continue to guide the investigation in Illinois along those same lines thus far followed . . . and with continuing instructions to our very small staff of assistants to use none but clean and honorable methods in ascertaining facts. . . .”

Chairman Nye departed on a vacation to Wisconsin. Nominee McCormick took to the stump with the claim that the Slush Fund Committee episode had won her 50,000 Illinois votes. Whether it had or not, it certainly won her the sympathy of Citizen Calvin Coolidge who said in one of his syndicated articles:

“The senatorial committee investigating campaign expenses is not a dignified spectacle. . . . For a legislative committee … to direct a force of detectives against candidates as though they were suspected of criminal action does not comport with the dignity of a great deliberative body. . . .

Pleased though her friends might have been at her brave defiance of the Senate committee, Mrs. McCormick’s strategy, it was conceded, did not improve her chances of getting a Senate seat, if elected. Many a Senator privately viewed her possible presence in his clublike chamber as a rank intrusion and hoped that last week’s disclosures, together with the size of her campaign expenditures, would serve as a pretext for excluding her. Male prejudice against her in the Senate was heightened because, instead of trying to enter by means of feminine flattery and political soap, she was bucking against the chamber portals like a brawny man, fighting mad.

But Nominee McCormick’s political troubles last week were larger than her controversy with the Senate Slush Fund Committee. Long a Dry, she had shifted her Prohibition stand last month at the Republican State Convention by declaring that if Illinois voted Wet on this year’s referendum, she would accept the majority mandate and vote Wet in the Senate (TIME, Sept. 1). Outraged Drys denounced her as a traitor. The Christian Century referred to her “crafty trick,” declared she had won her Senatorial nomination “under false pretenses.” Last week the Anti-Saloon League put into the field against her (as well as against Democrat Lewis, picturesque thoroughgoing Wet) Mrs. Lottie Holman O’Neill, State Representative and ardent Prohibitor. Old and bitter was the political feud between the two women. Observers thought last week they saw how in November bushy-bearded, gallant Democrat Lewis would win the election on Wet votes, Nominee O’Neill would gather in most of the Dry votes and Nominee McCormick would fall to defeat because of her Prohibition straddle. But Mrs. McCormick was born a Hanna, accustomed to success.