National Affairs: Shrewd

Now that successful businessmen have found politics a suitable field for extra-commercial activity, how might a wealthy manufacturer combine business with politics while running for office?

One way might be as follows, in simple steps:

1) Plan an advertising campaign for one’s product.

2) Explain to each publication to which contracts were awarded that, in return for the advertising one was buying, one would expect, and even insist, that the newspaper would give publicity to one’s political campaign.

Some such scheme appeared to have been employed shrewdly in behalf of Robert M. Leach of Taunton, Mass. He manufactures cookstoves (Glenwood Range). He wanted the G. O. P. to nominate him for Lieutenant-Governor. Seven other men wanted the nomination, a popular one nowadays perhaps because the Massachusetts Lieutenant-Governorship is one of the offices by which Calvin Coolidge came to fame.

Mr. Leach’s advertising agent, placing advertisements for Glenwood Ranges, wrote as follows to the Boston Review: “It is Mr. Leach’s understanding that in addition to this advertising you will publish in your news columns a story concerning his candidacy for the Republican nomination for Lieutenant-Governor and also publish additional items each week until the primaries.”

The scheme was made public by General John H. Sherburne of Brookline, Mass., one of Manufacturer Leach’s competitors for the nomination. General Sherburne cried out about “a scandal which would be comparable with the scandals in Illinois and Pennsylvania. . . . In a year when our supreme effort is being directed toward the carrying of Massachusetts for Herbert Hoover by an emphatic majority, we can ill afford a repetition of the Vare or Smith disgraces.”

Manufacturer Leach replied: “. . . The Glenwood product advertising is placed through an agency and I know nothing about it. We have followed the same procedure in placing Glenwood goods advertising as we have in the past.” He said his advertising agent had evidently been “very silly” and that he had “vigorously called him to account.”

The Massachusetts law limits would-be lieutenant-governors to $3,000 for their campaign funds. Candidate Sherburne contended that Candidate Leach was spending more than $100,000.