Intimations of Grandeur

On a half-dozen fronts, Republicans made news last week as the party which used to be called Grand as well as Old bestirred itself for the fall elections.

P:In Washington the executive group of the Republican National Committee approved a $500,000 House and a $175,000 Senatorial campaign fund.

P:National Chairman John Hamilton hastened on July 4 to the tomb of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Va., bearing a floral wreath and saying: "Today the Democratic Party . . . under the domination of usurpers, pays only lip service to the immortality of Jefferson. . . ."

P:At San Jose, Calif., at a rally for the Congressional candidacy of Rancher John Z. Anderson, Herbert Hoover answered last month's "liberal" appeal of Franklin Roosevelt (TIME, July 4): "The New Deal has sit up labor boards which are executives, legislatures, prosecutors, judges, juries and executioners. It has tried to humble the judiciary and turn Congress into a rubber stamp. If this be liberalism, then King George III, Karl Marx, Mussolini and Boss Tweed were liberals."

P:Tired, discouraged, worried about health and money, Bertrand Snell, 67, Republican leader in the House, announced that after 24 years he would quit Congress, go back to his bank, insurance company and pump plant in northwestern New York.

But most noteworthy Republican event of the week took place at Indianapolis, Ind. There a convention assembled to nominate candidates, heard a new Republican Keynote sounded by Representative Bruce Barton. Mr. Barton, famed advertising man (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) and amateur evangelist (author of The Man Nobody Knows), has become fascinated by politics since Manhattan's silk stocking district elected him to Congress last year. Said he last week:

"After every Democratic depression in the past, they have called us back. The Democrats have proved again and again that they can conceive high ideals and enact far-reaching reforms. They have proved, perhaps, that they have more ideas than we have.

"Bryan had more ideas than McKinley. Debs had more ideas than Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt has more ideas than Coolidge had. They have ideas, but they do not seem to be able to make the ideas work. They can enact reforms, but they cannot give jobs. . . .

"We did not repeal the reforms of Cleveland. We put people back to work.

"We did not repeal the reforms of Wilson. But we put people back to work.

We will not repeal the reforms of the New Deal. But we will put people back to work."

Of Franklin Roosevelt's great personal popularity among Negroes, the poor and the underprivileged, Bruce Barton cried: "The fact remains that this mass feeling toward the President is the controlling political influence of our day. To ignore it is blindness, to inveigh against it is political insanity. The intelligent attitude is to admire it, covet it and set industriously and sincerely to work to deserve it."

Having listened to all this, Indiana Republicans proceeded to select their candidate for Senator. A movement to corral the anti-Roosevelt vote by nominating Democratic Senator Frederick Van Nuys, prospective Roosevelt purge victim, was sidetracked.* On the first ballot, trailing for first place by only two votes, was none other than that personification of Old Dealism, onetime Senator James ("Jim") Watson, large of paunch and small of eye. Another leader was Walter F. Bossert, former Ku Klux Klansman. The third ballot chose, for the G.O.P.'s Indiana champion, a party wheelhorse, Raymond E. Willis, 63, since 1897 editor-publisher of the weekly Steuben Republican, a rock-ribbed, double-chinned Republican whom William Howard Taft appointed postmaster of Angola, Ind. in 1912. Happy Nominee Willis chuckled into the radio microphone: "We will win this election! . . . Hello, Ma, it was a great battle royal! . . . I'll be home soon."

*A threat by Senator Van Nuys to run as an independent, thus perhaps splitting the Democratic vote so widely that a Republican could win, last week brought forth from his obedient-to-Roosevelt colleague, Senator Sherman Minton, this statement: "So far as both President Roosevelt and Jim Farley are concerned, the Indiana Democrats are perfectly capable of making their own selection." In short, at the Democratic nomination convention this week, Mr. Van Nuys might not be "purged" after all.

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