POLITICAL NOTES: Rich Widow

When Michigan’s Senator James Couzens died in 1936, leaving $34,000,000, the title “richest man in Congress” passed to Old-Guard Republican Congressman Chester Castle Bolton of Lyndhurst (suburban Cleveland), Ohio, son of the late, great Mark Hanna’s business partner. Mr. Bolton’s personal check for $125,000 assured Cleveland the 1936 Republican convention; his champagne reassured 500 Party bigwigs at the convention’s swankest reception. Chester Bolton, popular though rich, died last October.

In this week’s Republican primary to select a successor to Chester Bolton, his widow, Frances Payne Bingham Bolton, who campaigned for him since 1932, is unopposed. After the special election late this month observers expect the title “richest man in Congress” to pass to Frances Payne Bingham Bolton, 54, mother of three grown sons. Supposed to be even wealthier than her late husband, Mrs. Bolton is the rich and comely daughter of a pioneer Cleveland banker and industrialist, granddaughter of Senator Henry B. Payne. She gave $2,250,000 for Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Western Reserve University. Her philanthropy extends from backwoods Kentucky, where she financed a log-cabin nursery centre, to Palm Beach, Fla., where she contributes heavily to charity. She once took a flyer at improving the lot of chorus girls.

Pin money to Mrs. Bolton will be $10,000 tendered her by an act of Congress, “to supply urgent deficiencies.” Congress appropriated a like sum to each of six other widows of Congressmen, including Mrs. William E. Borah (see p. 38). The Act, passed by both Houses last week, awaited the signature of the President. Like her husband, whose 1938 campaign expenditures came to $120.94, Mrs. Bolton refuses to spend any more to get elected than the price of an evening out.

Mrs. Bolton has gone about her political career as quietly as she would order a dinner for eight. Three years ago, Congressman George H. Bender blasted away at “royalists of the Republican Party,” and “pocketbook domination of its councils.” Replied Mrs. Bolton: “None of us has any rights except those we earn.” To Boss Bender, Mrs. Bolton is now an “ideal candidate.”

> Newspapermen are notoriously bad prophets.* But when the mood is on them, they cannot refrain from prophesying. Last week two veteran political reporters, Jim Hagerty of the New York Times and Edwin S. (“Ned”) McIntosh of the New York Herald Tribune, thought they had found the dark horse of the Republican Convention in short, swart Joseph William Martin Jr., able minority leader of the House of Representatives. From Topeka, Kans., where Nominee Alf Landon performed the same function in 1936, Joe Martin keynoted at the famed Republican Kansas Day rally. Messrs. Hagerty & McIntosh reported that Republican leaders from all over the country were much impressed by popular, modest Mr. Martin, who offered as a platform the same twelve-point, help-business program he gave Congressmen a year ago. Joe Martin himself still says he’d rather be Speaker—which he will be, if Republicans win a majority in the House — than President.

> Two years ago brisk, paunchy Senator Joseph F. Guffey lost his grip on the Pennsylvania Democratic machine, which he had carefully tooled along through long years jammed with hostile Republican traffic. Instead of climbing down with a grin, he cocked a snook at the machine’s new leaders, put up a ticket of his own.

Result: the Democrats, split, lost the State, and bumbling Republican Arthur James took over the political mess known as Pennsylvania. This year Joe Guffey, to whom unkind fellows refer as “the greatest Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania in 60 years,”* is in an exceedingly tough spot. First, he must be nominated, and the machine leaders he defied two years ago will have none of him. Last week the Democratic State Committee met in Harrisburg to pick a candidate to succeed Joe. From Washington came hurried word that another wide-open Democratic split would be disastrous. So, after whooping through a Roosevelt-for-Third-Term resolution, the committee picked nobody, declared for an open primary for the first time in ten years. Under the circumstances, it was the best break Joe Guffey could have looked for, because: 1) Joe controls more patronage than any other Congressman in U. S. political history; 2) the Pennsylvania machine has no likely candidate to put up against him.

* Prime example: “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege”—Walter Lippmann, January 1932.

* Joe’s predecessor: William A. Wallace, 1875-81.