France, Norris, California

Herbert Hoover was induced to enter the Maryland preference primary to quash, once & for all, the nuisance value of Dr. Joseph Irwin France, his only an nounced rival for the presidential nomination. For months Maryland's onetime Senator had been marching up & down the country declaring that in him alone reposed the hope of party victory in November. Not taken seriously by the Hoover forces, he had entered primary after primary, won them by default and was already claiming 153 convention votes.

Last week President Hoover carried the Maryland primary with some 26,000 votes.

That gave him the State's 16 convention votes. Dr. France was beaten on his home ground. Yet he managed to collect sufficient votes -- 16,900 -- to disturb the Hoover managers. What they could not explain was why so many anti-Hoover votes had been cast by Republicans who well knew they were throwing their ballots away on a vain candidate. President Hoover had won but he had not -- as Cartoonist Edmund Waller Gale of the Los Angeles Times elaborately suggested {see cut) -- vacuum-cleaned his absurd opponent as thoroughly as his Maryland friends had expected. The France nuisance value still remained and Maryland looked like a doubtful State in 1932.

P: "Of course I won't support Hoover. I thought everybody knew that," declared Nebraska's Insurgent Republican Senator George William Norris last week. "History has demonstrated that I was right in opposing him four years ago. He has not done anything he said he was going to do."

This old party rebel who campaigned for the Brown Derby four years ago was now ready to back Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

P: California Republicans in their primary last week worked hard to get out a big vote for their State's first President, show confidence in Herbert Hoover and impress the nation. Unopposed, the President got some 650,000 votes, 83,000 more than he got in 1928.

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