National Affairs: Barbershop Talk

It was in a barbershop at Memphis, Tenn., last week. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo. Governor of Mississippi, was being-shaved. In the next chair, Governor Henry H. Horton of Tennessee was being shaved.

Said Governor Horton: “How’s politics down your way?”

Governor Bilbo: Oh, soso. Looks pretty easy for Smith. Think he’ll carry the State by 15 to 1. How about Tennessee?

Horton: You can just bet Tennessee is going to be in the Smith column, too . . . by 25,000.

Bilbo: What’s he going to do nationally?

Horton: Well, I don’t know. What do you think?

Bilbo: I have a hunch he’s going to win. . . . It’s a funny election. For the first time in the history of the country the bootleggers and preachers are lined up on the same side—fighting for Hoover.*

Nominee Hoover’s secretary, George Akerson, sent Governor Bilbo a long, long telegram last week. He protested that Governor Bilbo, if quoted correctly in the press, had made “the most indecent and unworthy statement in the whole of a bitter campaign.” The reported Bilboasm was to the effect that, on one of his Mississippi flood-relief trips, Mr. Hoover had “got off the train at Mound Bayou, Miss., and paid a call on a colored woman there and later danced with her.” “That statement is unqualifiedly false,” declared Secretary Akerson. “I was with Mr. Hoover every hour of the four months while he was engaged in the flood.”

* One George B. Quincy, who described himself as a traveling salesman selling flavor extracts and coloring material to a trade composed 95% of bootleggers in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and New England, wrote to the New York Times (Democratic) last week and deposed that of 289 inquiries he made among his customers, only seven revealed votes for Nominee Smith. Said Salesman Quincy: “Thirty-one of my customers have shown me cancelled checks they have contributed to the Republican National Committee. Seven . . . contributed to the Anti-Saloon League.

“In Massachusetts and Rhode Island one of my customers had been delegated to collect funds among the bootleggers which they sent to the Republican National Committee.”