Dark Angel?

Many a wise Washington eyebrow went up last weekend as the Presidential yacht Potomac chuffed out into Chesapeake Bay carrying Franklin Roosevelt and two highly interesting cruise guests, Senator and Mrs. Robert Marion La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin. Five days previously Young Bob, over a nationwide radio network, had signed on with his brother Phil's new political party. If Senator Bob was kinder to the President ("one of the great liberal leaders of modern times") in his speech than Governor Phil had been in Madison last month, he was equally firm in his conviction that the Roosevelt Administration was hopelessly bogged down, that the La Follette National Progressives were the U. S.'s only answer.

Meantime Governor Phil, the recognized organizing brain of the National Progressives, held an equally significant meeting with Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Governor Elmer A. Benson. Occasion was a barbecue supper for the two third-party chieftains and some 40 of their friends and associates at a pleasant farmhouse near Hudson, Wis. The meeting on the Potomac looked like simple Roosevelt curiosity. The barbecue on the Hudson farm looked like the beginning of a national alliance, or at least of local modus vivendi, between two once faithful Roosevelt allies.

What made Wisconsin particularly interested in this meeting was the identity of the Benson-La Follette host. For the farmhouse belonged to none other than Charles Allen Ward, millionaire Minneapolis printer, longtime friend and backer of Minnesota's late Farmer-Labor Boss Floyd B. Olson. This fact promptly set tongues wagging as to whether the National Progressives have not acquired that indispensable aid to a fledgling enterprise, theatrical or political--a well-heeled, generous angel.

Quick to deny that report, for the present at least, were La Follette advisers and big, bluff Mr. Ward himself. Mr. Ward got his business start in Leavenworth where, serving a term for narcotic law violations, he fell in with President Herbert Huse Bigelow of Minneapolis' rich Brown & Bigelow (advertising specialties), who was serving a term for income tax evasion. When Mr. Ward was released, Mr. Bigelow, who thought him "good clay worthy of molding," gave him a letter to Brown & Bigelow that got him a job shoveling manure on one of the company farms. By the time Mr. Bigelow was released, Mr. Ward had worked up in the company so far that Mr. Bigelow, mightily pleased, eventually made him a vice president. In 1933, when Mr. Bigelow was drowned Mr. Ward inherited a third of his $3,000,000 estate. Impressed Brown & Bigelow directors elected him to succeed Mr. Bigelow as president, a job he conducts with profane efficiency in an ornate office with four secretaries.

Brown & Bigelow's highly satisfactory 1937 gross topped $8,000,000. Most conspicuous ornament on the broad Ward desk is an alabaster bust of Floyd Olson. Charley Ward is not so enthusiastic a party man as he once was, partly because he does not mix easily with Olson's milder-mannered successor, Governor Benson, but he is still a potent Northwest political figure. Wary Progressives reflected that if the La Follettes go through with their plan to put at least ten National Progressive candidates in the field in various States this year, Angel Ward will not be left in the dark very long.

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