DEMOCRATS: Stumped Stumper

Last week a big, taffy-colored boy stood before a microphone on the stage of the auditorium of Jersey City’s Henry Snyder High School. He grinned shyly, shuffled his feet, looked uneasily into some 3,000 beaming black and tan faces, listened to the applause of some 6,000 black and tan hands. When the applause subsided into a confused silence, he filled his great chest with air, pursed his huge lips, leaned toward the microphone, said nothing. Again he breathed deeply. Then he said tentatively: “I wish I could talk as loud as I can punch.”

This opening brought reassuring applause. “Although I have trained in Jersey,” he continued, “this is the first time I have been here in Newark.” This obvious geographic slip brought much laughter. Corrected the confused blackman: “I mean Paterson.” This brought more laughter that did not stop until he blurted : “Jersey City, I mean!” His nerves shattered, the taffy-colored boy plunged doggedly on. “I know Mayor Hague very well . . .” Here utter confusion seized him, took his wits, his voice. He bowed slightly, backed up to his chair, slumped into it in a complete fuddle.

Thus Negro Heavyweight Joe Louis of Detroit, the Brown Bomber renowned for his unfailing coolness in action, stumbled through his first political stump speech without naming the Democratic Party, for which he was supposed to be speaking, for its Presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Other athletes on the hustings: Jesse Owens, world’s fastest blackamoor, for Governor Landon “because he is O. K.,” and Jack Dempsey, stumping upstate New York with a free show of grunting, groaning wrestlers, for President Roosevelt.