POLITICAL NOTES: Curley Over Cole

Brig. General Charles H. Cole last week made the painful discovery that a State convention cannot always deliver Massachusetts Democracy in the primary. No candidate for Governor of that State ever entered a primary campaign with better patched fences, stouter political lines than General Cole. Governor Ely was for him. Senator Walsh was for him. The deathlessly faithful following of Alfred Emanuel Smith was for him.

James Michael Curley also wanted to be Governor of Massachusetts. A charter member of the State’s For-Roosevelt-Before-Chicago Club, that jolly, apple-cheeked Irishman was routed at the Democratic convention which selected General Cole last June. That reverse did not daunt Boston’s three-time Mayor, a veteran of more than 20 years in the city’s political Wild West Show. All things to all men, Jim Curley took the stump, talked tough to tough audiences, talked polite to polite conservatives. Above all, he talked New Deal, of which he proclaimed himself the uncompromising local apostle. Result: on primary day he trounced General Cole and the entrenched Ely-Walsh machine 283,583 to 128,111. “The primary vote,” he boasted, “is an endorsement of the policies of our great President and I am confident that in November Massachusetts will join Maine.”

Nominee Curley’s opponent, simultaneously chosen by Republicans, is Lieut.-Governor Caspar Griswold Bacon, son of Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Robert Bacon, brother of Long Island’s socialite Congressman Robert Low Bacon.

In the Wisconsin primaries, five candidates for the Democratic Senatorial nomination polled 195,000 votes. The unopposed Republican candidate polled 111,000. Senator Robert Marion La Follette Jr. was given a complimentary vote of 138,000 by his new Progressive party. But few Democrats crowed over their showing because the winning candidate for the nomination was John M. Callahan, a strict conservative identified with the “Stop Roosevelt” movement at the Chicago convention two years ago.