McCormick v. Lewis

When a politician is defeated for public office, custom requires him to do two things. To the press he must announce: "The returns speak for themselves." To his victorious opponent he must dispatch a telegram: " I congratulate you upon your nomination (or election)." Last week Senator Charles Samuel Deneen of Illinois grudgingly did both of these things when in the State primary he lost by close to 200,000 votes the Republican Senatorial nomination to Representative Ruth Hanna McCormick, relict of Senator Joseph Medill McCormick, daughter of Ohio's late great Senator Marcus Alonzo Hanna.

Mrs. McCormick was the second woman nominated by a major party for the U. S. Senate.* She has a good chance of being the first woman elected to the Senate. Her official campaign issue had been opposition to U. S. entry into the World Court and to this she ascribed her victory (TIME, April 7).

On primary morning Mrs. McCormick voted at her country home at Byron, then hurried to Chicago where with many a hug and kiss she was met by her good friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth, wife of the House Speaker./- When that evening returns showed she had carried the State, including Chicago, she announced: " I feel sobered by my victory. ... I would be less than human if I were not highly pleased." From Idaho's Senator Borah, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and also an opponent of the World Court, came a telegram: I HAVE A VACANCY ON MY COMMITTEE WAITING YOU.

Next day Senate Nominee McCormick traveled back to Washington where other women members of the House greeted her with applause, roses, waving flags. She called on President Hoover, World Court advocate, emerged to declare:

The President and I are Quakers and we agreed to disagree on the Court issue. On everything else we are in amicable agreement."

Asked how she would campaign next fall on Prohibition, she replied: " I will run as a Dry. I've always been a Dry and I do not switch on things."

What gave this statement political significance was the forthright Wet position taken by her November opponent, James Hamilton Lewis, whom Illinois Democrats had last week nominated for the Senate in their primary. " Jim Ham" Lewis is now 67. His famed whiskers are no longer the glittering pinkish red they were when (1913-19) he was a Senator from Illinois, but have turned a silvery grey.* But his speech is as flowery as ever, his manners as ostentatiously courtly, his choice in waistcoats and neckware as vividly colorful. Said he last week of the Republican primary and Prohibition:

"In the sham battle in Illinois the candidates shunted every principal issue the people wanted to hear about. The Prohibition issue is not a question of what to drink or what not to drink, but it is whether the individual in the U. S. shall be a free citizen. It is an issue from which I shall let no candidate -- man or woman -- escape."

A well pointed Wet-&-Dry contest between Mrs. McCormick and Mr. Lewis in Illinois aroused widespread interest. The State is nominally Republican by 500,000 votes. Also it has been proved thoroughly Wet, according to polls and referenda.

*In 1922, Minnesota Democrats nominated Mrs. Anna Oleson.

/-Speaker Longworth was last week granted a three-day leave by the House to rest at Aiken, S. C. In his absence Nebraska's Senator Norris proposed the Senate investigate his " discourtesy" by keeping for ten months on his desk without action a Senate proposal to eliminate " lame duck" sessions of Congress.

*Many have been the tales that Mr. Lewis' whiskers were dyed. Once while debating the creation of the Wartime Committee on Public Information, Senator Lewis expressed a fear that news might be "colored." Rapped out Pennsylvania's sardonic Penrose: "The Senator from Illinois has long been known as an expert on dyes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.