SOCIAL SECURITY: Men Under the Moon

(See Cover)

The late, lion-maned Robert Marion La Follette once lectured on Hamlet at Ann Arbor, Mich. As he sonorously analyzed the Ghost Scene, across the stage behind him suddenly spooked a figure. It was not the Ghost. It was a young male embodiment in long knitted underwear. The audience guffawed. Old Bob did not see the apparition and the audience recognized it only as some University of Michigan fraternity neophyte. This year that ghost is the prime champion of human derelicts in U.S. politics, and he is recognized as Sheridan Downey, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in the great and screwy State of California.

Sheridan Downey was raised from Virginia stock in Laramie, Wyo. He returned there after learning the law at Ann Arbor. He tried to reform Laramie politics and, when he failed, joined his brother in lucrative law practice (mostly land cases against the Interests) at Sacramento, Calif. He stuck to the law—with a side-trip in 1919 to hunt monkeys in India—until 1934 when his hobby of reading economics led him to the Pasadena study of Upton Sinclair.

Author Sinclair had just launched EPIC* and Sheridan Downey—though he did not claim to be another Old Bob La Follette—had contracted a social itch, had to do something about Depression I. He and Upton Sinclair sat down, talked for seven days. No stenographer took down their scintillating exchanges, but Downey says now that he disagreed with Sinclair’s absolute faith in production-for-use, clung then to the profit system, blamed excess savings† rather than excess profits for drying up the economic well. He says he just sympathized with Author Sinclair’s objectives. But he agreed to run for Lieutenant Governor on the EPIC ticket.

One of Sheridan Downey’s campaigning topics was old age pensions. The yearning throngs of oldsters who were beginning to cluster around Dr. Francis E. Townsend heard him lecture, by invitation, at their meetings. Mr. Downey liked the Doctor’s monthly-spending provision—to speed trade velocity. When EPIC crashed, Sheridan Downey became attorney for the Doctor and his Plan. The Doctor’s subsequent flirtations with Father Coughlin, Gerald Smith (inheritor of Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” movement) and Representative William Lemke cooled Attorney Downey. He and the Doctor drifted apart.

But Sheridan Downey had been bitten hard by the bug of social uplift and his activities had been noticed by politicians. These men, plus Sheridan Downey’s middle-aged social inspiration, plus the Moon, have made him a significant character in the transitional political year of 1938.

Tides in Men. It used to be that when U.S. citizens aged, they had earned and saved their competence, or their kin kept them. The New Deal changed all that. The New Deal quoted technologists to show that the enormous and soulless modern industrial machine (about which Engineer Herbert Hoover used to worry) throws oldsters on an “economic scrap-heap.” Like the New Deal Mr. Downey had an inspiration to do something on behalf of what he calls, for campaign purposes, “our senior citizens.” It came at a very timely hour when far cannier politicians were beginning to see the possibility of making pensions for senior citizens a juicier political racket than the ancient political exploitation of pensions for war veterans. Sheridan Downey won California’s Democratic nomination for Senator from Senior Citizen William Gibbs McAdoo, 75. The manager of that performance was one Jackson Elliott.

Mr. Elliott of Los Angeles is a political hack, unillusioned, practical, alert. He managed Senator McAdoo’s successful campaign in 1932. Perceiving how ebullient Sheridan Downey from northern California (Atherton, hard by Herbert Hoover’s Palo Alto) had run ahead of Author Sinclair in the EPIC campaign, Jackson Elliott cocked an eye at him for 1938 because he knew where lay the biggest unstaked bloc of votes for that year—among EPIC and Townsend-conscious oldsters.

Franklin Roosevelt refers to the leaders of such movements as the “lunatic fringe.” Their lunacy, if such it is, is ever among human beings, the urge of Something for Nothing. The moon which causes that lunacy may be the earth’s satellite or human evolution, but the moon is powerful. It has created a tide in the affairs of men which this year crested in California under the name of “Thirty Dollars Every Thursday,” alias “Ham & Eggs.” Under this scheme the State would give everyone aged 50 or more $30 of State scrip every Thursday and retire the scrip with a 2¢ weekly stamp tax on every warrant issued.

Across the country, as smart Jackson Elliott could see, the pension wave had lesser crests, and in California spring tide seemed at hand. California the wonderland, California the rugged and golden, lies at that edge of the continent where the migrations that made the nation ended. There the last vanguard of pioneers halted and the rearguard of sick, halt, lame, blind, crooked and crazy have caught up. It is a home of saints and scoundrels, heroines and houris. There since Depression I has grown up a strange society in which men born in the great open spaces and hardshells with their feet two generations planted were artificially mixed with sunkist visitors and moonstruck social freaks.

Green Cheese. If the political potency of pension promises is the result of lunacy, then California is not alone in being moonstruck. Lee (“Pass the Biscuits Pappy”) O’Daniel demonstrated the stump value of old age pensions in winning the Democratic nomination (virtual election) for Governor of Texas. Colorado is going gently broke because its promisers tried to give the oldsters too much ($45 a month). Last week Franklin Roosevelt, the smartest politician in the big U. S., recommended that the Social Security Act should be revised to extend its benefits to another 16,000,000.

But the good eyesight of basically healthy California appeared already to be discovering that the overfull moon which hung above the State was made of green cheese. Dopesters give the “Ham & Eggs” one chance in three of winning. Pathetic appeared the lot of those who have spent their pennies supporting it, but tragic will be the political fate of Sheridan Downey and his managers if, having won nomination through “Ham & Eggs,” they are swamped by reaction against it.

Sheridan Downey knows all this and since getting nominated has backed away from “Ham & Eggs” as gracefully as possible. The scheme, he says, is a local effort to solve the “senior citizen” problem to which, if he gets to the Senate, he will bend his best talents on a national scale. He will vote for it, he says, “as a Californian,” but he has made his peace with Franklin Roosevelt who has condemned “Ham & Eggs” in no uncertain terms.

Mandolins & Pistols. The ebb tide against which Mr. Downey now fights is led by another lawyer and reader of economics, a man whose father sold the University of California its history library and who was known in his younger days as a Progressive: Philip Bancroft, a harmless-looking but sharp-spoken gentleman-farmer from in back of Mount Diablo near Oakland.

If Philip Bancroft is elected a California Senator this year, a main reason will be because Sheridan Downey is oversold as a Ham & Egger. Candidate Bancroft’s father left him and his brother enough money and land in and around San Francisco for Philip, returning unwell from the War, to give up lawyering in the city and go to raising walnuts and pears (at which he is a champion), and practicing leadership at farmers’ association meetings. A quiet, pipe-smoking type who (like Downey) really wants the results more than the office, Philip Bancroft talks sharply about the “racketeering” of city labor organizers who “stir up hate” among his Mexican pickers and Japanese packers. He has made overtures to the A.F. of L. but hedged by asking why farm labor must be regimented anyway.

At Harvard, where he took a law degree, he was pistol champion as well as a mandolin player. Mandolins and pistols would be a good accompaniment for the speeches in which he seeks to be a reasonable Progressive at the same time he is being a firm landholder. His title to “Progressive” dates from Bull Moose days (1912) which makes him, in the eyes of today’s Liberal, a rank Tory.

Today Philip Bancroft is well hated in his own Contra Costa County, but well backed by the forces who feel Candidate Downey must be beaten. He has Herbert Hoover actively behind him, and also Senator Hiram Johnson who regards Sheridan Downey as too “shifty.”

In the backwash of its major pension battle Californians are waging not only a fight for a Senate seat but for their Governorship. Centre of the Governorship battle is:

Culbert Levy Olson who in 1920 moved to Los Angeles from Salt Lake City, already rich and confident of his prowess as a lawyer, banker, politician. From his father, a furnituremaker, restless but shrewd Danish blood moved slowly in his veins; from his mother, the blood of Rufus King who signed the Constitution. The silver crest that he wears today covers a head that has revolved Democratic nostrums since Bryan’s first (“Cross of Gold”) Presidential campaign in 1896. He warned the Democratic convention of 1920 (which nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for Vice President) that unless it became progressive, the third party almost produced by Roosevelt I would arise.

Old Bob La Toilette’s party arose four years later, but shrewd Culbert Olson stuck to his law practice until he saw Franklin Roosevelt’s second and greater star on the horizon in 1932. He stumped for him, in 1934 toyed with the idea of running for Governor, instead filed for State Senator from Los Angeles and waited for offers of endorsement from the Democratic State factions which were squabbling over Upton Sinclair’s howling EPIC. The EPICs chose him (not he them, he insists) but that did not poison him for the McAdoo-Creel faction, who compromised on him for chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee.

When Senator McAdoo and George Creel lost control to Upton Sinclair, and while the latter was being strangled at the polls, Candidate Olson made Democratic friends across the State, entered the State Senate. That was his groundwork for this year’s race for Governor. EPIC and the later Townsend Plan were, to him, passing fancies to be saluted diplomatically, not embraced.

Meantime, he voted for increased State old age pensions, the Central Valley Water Project (Shasta Dam—TIME, Sept. 19), utility cooperatives, a labor relations act like the Wagner Act. And, as a professional oil lawyer, he dived into the fierce fight over the State’s subsea oil fields at Huntington which were being tapped by private companies from shore. His bill to stop this or collect big royalties was displaced last spring by a counterbill of Republican Governor Merriam, but is up for referendum this election and affords Mr. Olson an issue with unhappy Mr. Merriam far clearer than the Pension plan. Californians understand that Culbert Olson intends to pardon Convict Tom Mooney right after the election.

Frank Finley Merriam, 73, is a stodgy Iowa product who tasted politics there before the turn of the century and who crawled up to California’s Governorship through both its legislative houses (five terms in the lower) while learning, in journalism, real estate and banking, what California’s entrenched but now outnumbered families wanted. This year while Culbert Olson was strong enough to avoid openly committing himself to $30 Every Thursday, Mr. Merriam has been in an uncomfortable spot. Having four years ago been the conservative champion against EPIC, this year he felt impelled to promise a thorough hearing for the Townsend Plan.

Too crass a character for Herbert Hoover to stomach, he has popularized himself by making the rounds of the State at rodeos and fiestas in a ten-gallon hat (he has covered 720,000 miles by automobile in four years). His play with the oil interests on the tide-line leases he laughs off as no Teapot Dome but a teapot tempest. Culbert Olson, if elected, will be California’s first Democratic Governor since James Budd (1894), but Governor Merriam was last week rated a certain loser. If this was strange it was no stranger than another fact: although pensions are the strongest political medicine of the 1938 campaign, in California where pensions are strongest, they no longer are rated as a moonstone of political success.

* “End Poverty In California”—a production-for-use scheme whereby idle industrial plants were to be turned over to idle workers to work for their own salvation.

† For a parallel belief harbored by New Deal Economist David Cushman Coyle see p. 59.