Elephant Boy

(See front cover)

In Washington last week, friends of lively Elizabeth Vandenberg, 26-year-old daughter of Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg, were surprised to hear of her marriage to Edward Pfeiffer, Trade Extension Bureau Manager of True Story Magazine. This was the second time in two weeks that lively Betty Vandenberg, who year ago made her debut as a pianist with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, contrived to make news. Last fortnight, she was the central figure in a de luxe musicale given by her father at the Sulgrave Club in honor of his own 54th birthday. The Vandenberg guest list of 300 included, as well as two Supreme Court Justices, half-a-dozen Ambassadors and a quorum of top-ranking Republicans, a good handful of anti-Roosevelt Democrats like Montana's Wheeler, Missouri's Clark and Rhode Island's Gerry. Washington political wiseacres promptly concluded that Mr. Vandenberg was launching his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1940 according to the festive precedent established by High Commissioner Paul Vories McNutt's fabulous cocktail party last February.

The Vandenberg musicale was by no means the only event that served to turn the political spotlight on Republicans last week. In New York, just back from his first visit to Europe in 19 years, Herbert Hoover, still his party's dean, sounded off. Main points: 100 dignitaries with whom he had conversed had given him the impression that immediate general war is unlikely but the U. S. should nonetheless keep out of entangling alliances, and totalitarianism will get you if you don't watch out.* In Bangor, Me., New Hampshire's Senator Bridges called on the country to put an end to "Roosevelt Constitutional tyranny." In a Washington broadcast, Idaho's Borah warned the U. S. not to be moved by "the din of screeching and incoherent propaganda" into lining up with European democracies against totalitarian governments. And in Newark, N. J. Republican National Committee Chairman John D. M. Hamilton spoke at a banquet in honor of New Jersey's seven Republican Representatives and Senatorial Candidate W. Warren Barbour. Mr. Hamilton's thesis: "In recent months there has been a tremendous flight of votes from the Democratic to the Republican Party"; and unless the Republicans succeed in winning 1938 Congressional elections, those elections might be the party's last fight. Said Mr. Hamilton: "I don't think we are going to survive a defeat of the Republican Party in 1938."

But well did Mr. Hamilton know that, far from having to face defeat this autumn, the Republican Party is almost statistically certain to add to its offices. No Presidency is at stake on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of this

November. Of the 48 U. S. States, 33 will elect Governors this fall. Of the 33, six are in the South where Republicans do not expect to elect candidates, seven are West, where Republican machines have broken down completely. Of the 20 left. Republicans are sure of only three and have no better than an even chance in most of the rest. Of the 34 Senators up for election this year, Republicans have a fair chance of electing nine, but the fight between Rooseveltian and Conservative Democrats is likely to hold the centre of the stage. Anyhow, the Democratic majority in the Senate is so overwhelming that it would take until 1940 to upset it even if the G. O. P. were given an improbable series of clean sweep elections.

But all 435 House seats are up, and from all indications it looks as though the G. O. P.'s present little herd would be just about doubled. This would represent a respectable comeback for a party which has taken three successive and terrible beatings at the polls since 1932. And last week the man whose job it was to change this strong possibility into a reality was quietly attending to his job in Washington. He,

Massachusetts' swart little Congressman Joe Martin, who since January 1937 has been Chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, was awaiting only the result of the first Congressional primary of the year in Illinois next week before going into action as the key-man in what may well turn out to be the most significant election battle in his party's history.

Party & Policies. The elephants which cartoonists have been using as a symbol for the Republican Party since 1874 are a satisfactory metaphor.*The G. O. P. is old (84), massive, retentive and, though powerful, often very clumsy. Since 1928, the last attribute of the Republican Party has been its most conspicuous one. First sign of smartness the G. O. P. has exhibited in almost a decade appeared last year in the fight over Franklin Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court. Smartness in this crisis, however, since it consisted merely of lying low and letting conservative and progressive Democrats battle it out, was of too negative a sort to be very encouraging. Not until this year have signs of genuine Republican resurgence made it of real interest to re-examine the party to see what it is in 1938, what it may become in 1940.

One way to see what the Republicans are is to see what they lack. As currently organized a list of Democrats' assets would read somewhat as follows:

1) A leader with A-plus rating as a radio and stage personality.

2) 28,000,000 votes when last counted.

3) 38 Governors

4) 77 Senators

5) 327 Congressmen

6) Jim Farley

7) Federal funds and patronage

8) A majority of the smooth-running State and city machines like Chicago's, New York's, Boston's, Kansas City's (see p. 14).

Republican balance sheet as of April 1 is much less impressive. The party has no leader. The only claimants to the title --Messrs. Hoover, Landon, Borah et al.-- are not compelling personalities. G. O. P. had 17,000,000 votes at last count but these were able to elect only five Governors, seven Senators, 89 Congressmen. It has no patronage to speak of. In place of able Mr. Farley it has brash Mr. Hamilton, whose talents, whatever they may be, have not had a chance to develop in the atmosphere of stale controversy which has surrounded him since 1936. One more thing which the G. O. P. has and the Democrats have not is a Committee of 200 to draw up a Program. Organized last autumn to appease Mr. Hoover, whose scheme of a mid-term convention was declined, the Committee's sole act to date has been to elect University of Wisconsin's onetime President Glenn Frank chairman. Whether the Committee should be listed as an asset or a liability will presumably remain undecided until next winter when it releases its report--of which, to the party's practical politicians, the only real virtue appears to be the fact that it will not be released until after election.

On any such balance sheet the Republican Party's main asset does not appear. This is Depression, the chief cause assignable to the Gallup poll's recent indication that the G. O. P.'s 90 Representatives would be increased by 85. An infallible rule of U. S. politics has always been that bad times, whether justifiably or not, are always attributed by voters to the party in power, which consequently gets ousted. Current Depression, which more plausibly than most, can be attributed to the Federal Government, gives the G. O. P. what it has not had since 1928, a real and resounding issue. Whether it is lively enough to capitalize it remains to be seen but at least the party which last year looked as though it were hunting for the legendary valley where elephants trudge to die was once more very much a going concern. Its headquarters last week were not the Program Committee's offices in Chicago but the busy suite in Washington's National Press Club Building, where the staff of Practical Politician Joe Martin's Republican Congressional Committee was figuring out ways and means to round up votes.

Practical Politician. The Republican Congressional Committee consists of 21 Republican members of the House of Representatives. Its capital, if it gets the same bankroll from the National Committee that it got in 1936, will be $350,000. Its job is to help those Republican candidates who have a fighting chance to get into Congress to do so. This it does by adding to their local campaign chests, writing speeches for them, and helping to publicize their campaigns. The Committee, soon to be enlarged, currently has a staff of three secretaries, two statisticians and two newspapermen, operating under Executive Secretary Earl Venable. Running it calls for craftiness, energy and a head for vote-getting detail, three qualities for which Joseph William Martin Jr., however little his name has appeared in the headlines, is pre-eminent in his party. In 1936, the abysmal failure of Republican strategy was nowhere better demonstrated than in the fact that money was overconfidently squandered trying to win in Congressional districts where the fight was hopeless, saved in districts where the fight was close. Overconfidence is not one of Joe Martin's faults. Less sanguine than the Gallup poll, he visualizes not much more than 75 new seats this year and would probably settle now for 65. The Illinois primary, though internal warfare between the State's two Democratic machines may help him to elect six Republican Representatives in addition to the six who represent the party now, will not be much more than a preliminary gun next week. By the end of May there will be 95 Republican candidates in the field and by the end of July, 156. To Joe Martin, the candidate is always more important than the issue, the place more vital than the program, but by last week he and grey-haired Mr. Venable, whose job is to pre-audit votes for the Congressional Committee as Emil Hurja did for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, were at least assured of where the autumn's battle would be briskest.

In 1936, 56 districts that elected Democratic Representatives did so by 5% majorities or less and it is these districts which can be principally expected to enlarge Joe Martin's herd. He does not plan to lose any of his present Congressmen. He hopes to gain six seats in New England (two each in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut). Gallup Poll gives the G. O. P. 39 new seats in the Central States. Joe Martin is currently counting on only 22, with ten from Ohio where Republicans anticipate defeating Governor Davey. The Committee expects eight new Congressmen from the corn & wheat belt, one or two from the Rocky Mountain States and two on the West Coast, from Oregon and Washington, where the Gallup Poll gave them none. Another item on the G. O. P.'s curiously negative balance sheet is of course the noisy Democratic split in Pennsylvania (see p. 16). Hoping then for a sure gain of 13, Joe Martin and his committee were last week inclined to revise their estimates upward as far as 23.

The Republican Party, like many other U. S. institutions, depends a very great deal on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The old rule that Depression makes it easier to turn the rascals out has never yet been tested by a regime which has spent money like Franklin Roosevelt's. While deepening Depression should presumably help turn the political tide this year, it might not if the Administration turned on another huge spending program such as last week seemed a fairly likely prospect. Last week, Practical Politician Joe Martin's chief complaint was strikingly familiar: "You just can't tell what that fellow in the White House will do next."

Joe Martin, one of the eight children of a machinist of North Attleboro, Mass., got into politics in 1911, after working up from reporter to owner of the North Attleboro Chronicle (circ. 2,400). After three years each in the State House of Representatives and Senate, he later became executive secretary of the Republican State Committee, obliged Calvin Coolidge in 1922 by running the campaign that saved Henry Cabot Lodge's Senate seat by 7,000 votes. In 1924 Joe Martin managed a campaign for himself, got into the House by a 9,600 plurality. He has remained there ever since, running far enough ahead of his ticket to win by 20,000 votes in 1936, when Roosevelt carried his district. The Roosevelt 1936 landslide turned out in one way to be a boon for Joe Martin. It occasioned the defeat in Ohio's 22nd District of popular Chester C. Bolton, famed as the richest man in Congress, who had also been for four years Chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. This year, one of Joe Martin's assignments may be to restore Mr. Bolton to a seat in the House, and it is just within the realms of possibility that he will restore not only Mr. Bolton but enough other Republicans to give his party a House majority. In that case little Joe Martin, who talks with a down-East accent, lives in an unpretentious bachelor apartment at the Hay-Adams House, would presumably become Republican Floor Leader to succeed Bert Snell who would move up to the Speakership. No one expects anything of this sort to happen this year. But how close Joe Martin can come to making it happen is, despite all the palaver of its more famed idealists, the G.O. P.'s main preoccupation for the present.

*Mr. Hoover's one specific proposal was that Europe's War debts to the U. S. be used for exchanging international scholarships. *Republican elephant like the Democratic donkey first appeared in cartoons by famed Thomas Nast.

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