National Affairs: Carrying the Country

“We’ll carry the country!” exclaimed Vice President Charles Curtis last week as he swung into Kansas to close his solitary nation-wide campaign for reelection.

Finale. It was a doleful and dispirited little group of Cabinet stumpsters who scattered to their homes to vote last week at the end of what they feared had been a long, hard, losing fight to re-elect Herbert Hoover. The betting odds were 5-to-1 against their President and candidate. Expert political newshawks on one Republican newspaper after another could see nothing but a Roosevelt sweep ahead. As if in a final gesture of desperation the President had dashed across the continent to add in person one more much-needed vote to his California total. Two million good Republican dollars had been poured into what looked like a fruitless campaign. Wall Street, Eastern Industry and Society were earnestly, almost desperately for the President—but they did not seem enough to blast loose the rock of discontent sunk deep in the electorate at large. The last week of the Republican campaign was much like the first—only hotter. Every member of the Cabinet except Attorney General Mitchell (a nominal Democrat) had done his bit and more for the President. At Dayton Secretary of State Stimson proclaimed President Hoover “a real fighting Quaker, thoroughly aroused, smashing down his opponents’ positions one by one with irresistible logic.” Secretary of the Treasury Mills had worn his voice down to a hoarse croak. Secretary of Agriculture Hyde, unable to restrain his language longer, blurted out that Governor Roosevelt was “a common, garden variety of liar.” Montclair, N. J. put up 327 street flags for the coming of Secretary of the Navy Adams. After a protest against their use on a political occasion authorities ordered the flags down. Town Commissioner Washington Irving Lincoln Adams (distant relative) ordered them back up again. Hardly had they been placed out for a second time before the sun set and they had to be taken down again. After a drive through flagless streets, Secretary Adams snapped: “If Roosevelt is elected the homes and lives of 100,000,000 American people might be in jeopardy.” By radio from Cincinnati Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth delivered an anti-Roosevelt speech which she had written out in longhand. The Democratic campaign based on “distress and discontent” struck her as “an unusually ignoble policy.” Said T. R.’s first child: “I’ve seen many instances of unfairness in political campaigns but the effort of the Democratic party to saddle Mr. Hoover with complete responsibility for everything takes first rank among samples of conscious and unscrupulous partisan dishonesty.” Calvin Coolidge fired the Republican’s sunset gun by radio from Northampton. “For nearly 20 years,” said he, “our President Herbert Hoover has been serving our country and the world. . . . If five Americans were to be selected today to devise remedies for the present condition of the country Herbert Hoover would head the list. The name of no other presidential candidate would be considered. . . . It is not the spirit of the American people, when the captain of their ship has guided them through a storm and is approaching a safe harbor, to discharge him and then claim he created the storm. . . .”