"Baloney"

Editors of Republican newspapers pointed with pride last week to "honest dignity" in Nominee Hoover. When his train paused in Montello, Nev., a woman thrust her child upwards to be kissed. The Nominee took the child and held it, but said: "I will kiss no babies for publication."

The pride-pointing Republican editors gave Nominee Hoover credit for something new in politics. But, as a matter of fact--_. A few days before the Hoover-Baby incident, Nominee Smith had been asked by press photographers at Albany to pose in the act of laying bricks. Nominee Smith refused and said: "I can't lay bricks, and any bricklayer that saw it would know I couldn't. That's a baloney* picture and I'm not going to stand for any baloney pictures in this campaign."

Democratic editors pointed with pride and credited their Nominee with this new thing in politics. But, as a matter of fact--

Two weeks priorto both the Hoover-Baby and Smith-Baloney incidents, Nominee Curtis (Republican) was approached in Providence, R. I., where he was resting and yachting, and asked to pose for press cameras in the act of dirt-farming. Nominee Curtis' reply was: "You've got to take me as I am. I'm not farming" (TIME, July 9).

Hasty editors might, from the above record, assign to Nominee Curtis the credit for eliminating "baloney pictures" from the 1928 campaign. But no editor would do so who is a journalist before he is a partisan. Because, as a matter of fact-- It seems indisputable that the underlying cause for this year's anti-baloney epidemic among politicians lies not in the politicians' honest hearts, but in the alert U. S. press, whose newsgatherers, observers, commentators and editors have spent many years trying to divest U. S. politics and politicos of the more obvious political shams and absurdities. Journalism, having sown well the seeds of satire, itself deserves credit for making "baloney" forbidden fruit.

*Sidewalk slang for "bogus," "artificial," "untrue."