100 Philosophers

Mrs. Worthington Scranton of Scranton, whose patrician features and baronial name do not prevent her from wearing all the fantastic headgear which fashion prescribes, is in many ways symbolic of the modern Republican Party. As National Committeewoman from Pennsylvania, Mrs. Scranton last year not only listened religiously to Alf Landon on the radio, but welcomed him back to the State of his birth. Last week, along with 19 other members of the National Committee's executive committee, a very serious Mrs. Worthington Scranton was to be seen daily entering & leaving a conference room on the first floor of St. Louis' swank Coronado Hotel.

Last month Herbert Hoover, who has been trying to convince his fellow Republican bigwigs that the best way to keep 17,000,000 Republican voters together in lean times is to supply them with a creed, proposed to the National Committee in Chicago that they call a party conference to formulate a positive program. Fearful of the splits this might disclose, the com mittee voted instead to have its creed drafted by the loo most representative Republicans in the U. S. All that remained was for the Republican executive committee to find 100 such suitable philosophers. So last week in St. Louis the committee, including New York's Old Guard Charles D. Hilles,* Illinois' Mrs. Bertha Baur, onetime National Chairman Henry P. Fletcher and the symbolic Mrs. Scranton, got down to the job.

Dissension. That even these cautious tactics could not prevent dissension was the best evidence that Republicanism, muddled and frustrated as it may be, still has plenty of political vitality. In far off Vermont, grey, bespectacled Governor George D. Aiken, who has been boomed by his New England neighbors as another budget-balancing Presidential possibility, took occasion to attack the party's present leadership and to demand, instead of a creed, an end to the age-old rotten borough representation of the South in Republican national conventions. To welcome Republican Chairman Hamilton when he arrived late in St. Louis from Washington, reporters asked him about such criticism as that of New Jersey's Robert W. Johnson (medical supplies). In no uncertain terms Mr. Johnson had called for the withdrawal from party councils of Herbert Hoover, Alf M. Landon, and John D. M. Hamilton. Reddening, Mr. Hamilton replied: "No one has the right to read me or anyone else out of the party."

Names. The embattled committeemen and committeewomen sought to solve their problem soothingly with Names. Those bruited outside the meeting, ranging in age and political experience from 35-year-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh to Illinois' 76-year-old ex-Governor Frank Orren Lowden, were so numerous that the committee decided to pick some 150 instead of 100 philosophers.

An eclectic list finally was published. There was a solid underpinning of businessmen, manufacturers, publishers, local Republican leaders. There were names pure & simple, like Hollywood's Cecil B. DeMille and 58-year-old Publisher E. P. Chase of the tiny Atlantic (Iowa) News-Telegraph, who won the 1934 Pulitzer Editorial Prize for a rustic blast about money. For crusty Republicans there were Mrs. Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune and Prudential Life's Edward D. Duffield. For liberals there were such figures as onetime Immigration Commissioner Edward Corsi, nominated for the New York City Council with the support of the American Labor Party. For labor there were a few A. F. of L. leaders, among them Chicago's Judge Oscar Nelson. For farmers, most of whose leaders are practically committed to Franklin Roosevelt, there was a sprinkling of prosperous wheat growers, stock feeders, ranchers. By week's end only two of the nominees, Rochester, N. Y. Publisher Frank E. Gannett and Gifford Pinchot's lawyer brother Amos, had seen fit to decline.

A would-be master stroke, meant to unite in one man as many as possible of the strands that make up Republicanism in 1937, was the committee's choice for the program board's chairman. After hinting that he would be equally acceptable to Herbert Hoover and Alf M. Landon and that his eminence was such as to silence all partisan opposition, the committee announced his name--Glenn Frank.

Those who thought this was a fine choice declared that 50-year-old Glenn Frank was able, many-sided; would appeal to liberals as the eager village boy from Queen City, Mo. who won fame as a research assistant to Boston's late Merchant Edward A. Filene; would appeal to intellectuals as a onetime editor of Century magazine and president of the University of Wisconsin; would appeal to farmers as the present editor of a popular free-sheet Rural Progress. Those Republicans who disagreed said that dressy, snobbish, luxury-loving Glenn Frank was inherently too conservative for 1937, as he had proved too conservative for Wisconsin's La Follettes who ousted him from their university year ago (TIME, Jan. 18). Glenn Frank himself said he was gratified by the choice but asked a "few days" to consult his Rural Progress employers before formally accepting.

*Nominated last week to succeed Mr. Hilles who resigned three months ago as National Committeeman from New York was a more liberal party man, dapper young leader Kenneth Simpson of Manhattan.

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