The Brown Derby

Smith v. White. In Kansas, Editor William Allen White of 'the Emporia Gazette exercised his pen and his tongue to tell Kansans exactly how many times Nominee Smith had voted in the interests of the saloon, the gambling den, the bawdy house. Nominee Smith quickly recognized Editor White's source of information to be one Rev. O. R. Miller, a pamphleteer whom the Nominee denounced as "a parasite living on the people of the State of New York ... an 18-carat professional faker."

Nominee Smith answered Editor White's remarks item by item and then announced that he would answer no more erroneous attacks upon his legislative record. Editor White stood corrected but added: "The undertakers are looking wistfully right now at three members of the United States Supreme Court, and with Al Smith as President we should have in that Court . . . three distinguished, learned, respectable lawyers . . . [who would] declare the Eighteenth Amendment unconstitutional before a cat . . . could wink her eye. . . . Smith's leadership comes from the amalgamated Tammanies of our great cities. . . . Shall Smith Tammanize America, or shall we Americanize Smith's Tammanies?"

Smith to Farmers. The Indiana Farm Bureau Federation asked to know what Nominee Smith's procedure on the agricultural problem would be if he were elected. That was an easy one: It did not require the Nominee to reply with a full-bodied solution of the farm problem. He replied that if elected he would at once call farm experts and formulate a concrete plan for presentation in his first message-to-Congress.

"I Don't Know." A Cuban news-gatherer asked Nominee Smith what his stand was on the Platt Amendment.* The Nominee replied: "I don't even know what the Platt Amendment is. ... In the course of the campaign all those matters will be taken care of."

Second Stroke? Having obtained General Motors' Raskob for his national manager, Nominee Smith was reported to be seeking General Electric's Young--Owen D. Young, board chairman of the General Electric Company--for his local lieutenant as Democratic candidate for Governor of New York. That would be a second stroke in the effort to show the country that there are big business brains beneath the Brown Derby.

"Tough Meat." Nominee Smith often plays golf with Alfred Emanuel Smith Jr. Last week he was asked if his son was easy to beat. "Not by a long shot," answered the Nominee. "That baby is tough meat!"

*An amendment to the Army Appropriation Bill of 1901 providing for Cuba to be given autonomy, but with a clause in the Cuban Constitution recognizing that Cuba is under U. S. protection, that under certain circumstances (e. g., the native uprising of 1906) the U. S. may intervene in Cuba's domestic affairs.