Compressed Air

Sometimes by day, sometimes by night, towns and villages of Pennsylvania last week shuddered as a gigantic Voice suddenly bellowed at them from on high. Its volume was as the volume of a political host heard over a hundred massed loudspeakers. Actually it was the voice of one man, very much alone, the Rev. Reginald B. Naugle, an extroverted middle-aged Lutheran preacher.

In 1935 he ran for mayor of Philadelphia. Now he is running for the U. S. Senate, sole candidate of a "Pathfinder Party," excoriating the Wagner Act and the C. I. O. Without party organization, without campaign funds, he motors 200 miles a day in a sound-truck fashioned like a railroad locomotive. In it he and four friends (two of them sound engineers), carrying their lunches, draw up on hilltops overlooking towns, turn on a magnavox contraption powered by compressed air, and while the populace marvels, Candidate Naugle hurls his thundering political imprecations for miles across the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Save in Maine, which held its election last month, and to the one-party Southern States where elections are mere formalities, the eardrums of the U. S. suffered last week as much as Pennsylvania's. With election day but a fortnight away the magnavox of Politics blared from every stump and hilltop, filling the air with civic sense and nonsense, but most of all with partisan fury.

Democrats. As the party in power, Democrats debouched upon the nation from Washington. To crucial Pennsylvania--for which Harry Hopkins last fortnight authorized 10,000 new WPA jobs--went Postmaster General Farley to warn a $100-a-plate dinner in Philadelphia that nothing could so comfort Republicans as to win back Pennsylvania, which they lost four years ago. Result in funds raised: $334,700.

To New Jersey went Secretary of War Woodring. To Council Bluffs, Iowa, having already visited Kansas, Texas, and Illinois, went Secretary of Agriculture Wallace to make another of a series of heartfelt speeches in defense of AAA. To Kansas went Senate Majority Leader Barkley. To Pennsylvania after Mr. Farley went House Majority Leader Rayburn. But of all the stump-speaking Democrats, loudest and longest was the Secretary of the Interior.

("Honest") Harold LeClair Ickes, after his handsome salute to the Negro vote in Baltimore (TIME, Oct. 17), crossed the continent upon the first major trial-balloon ascension of the White House Janizariat, which seeks data on 1940. Ostensibly out to whoop up the New Deal for the Congressional elections and attend a few ceremonies at which his presence was appropriate, Mr. Ickes went armed with eight full-length addresses to deliver in twelve days (besides informal talks and short speeches).

In these--carefully prepared and prereleased to the press--the editing of Janizaries Corcoran & Cohen was unmistakable. They stamped Mr. Ickes as Possibility No. 1 in the Janizariat's mind for a 1940 Presidential candidate acceptable to Mr. Roosevelt, a candidate to be built up before Democratic National Chairman Jim Farley and his alliance of local bosses can converge on someone else, such as Missouri's Senator Bennett Clark.* "I think President Roosevelt would carry the United States if he ran again, and he might have to run," declared Mr. Ickes.

"But for his sake I hope he doesn't." The Ickes itinerary took him and his attractive, giggling bride to St. Louis, Mo., where he took the opportunity of softening his reputation as a castigator of the rich by praising a rich, old-guard Republican, Jacob L. Babler, who had given the State a 1,600-acre park and $1,500,000 for its upkeep. ("I never heard $1,500,000 talk louder or better.") It took him to Reno, Nev., where he spoke on Conquering Climate ("The Bureau of Reclamation no sooner finishes one breath-taking project than it moves on to greater victories"); to Imperial dam (subject: Water Creates an Empire); to Los Angeles (subject: the Crisis of Democracy. "This is the City of Light--dedicated to the happy ending ... "); to San Francisco (subject: "Sixty Families Revisited"); to Berkeley, the University of California (subject: How Not to Do It).

Republicans. While the veterans of the New Deal went forth again to fight. Republican National Committee Chairman John Hamilton called his reservists again to the colors and assigned them to battle stations. Their assignments and the refurbished weapons with which they went into action:

The G.O.P.'s senior spokesman, Herbert Hoover, in conservative Hartford, Conn., a list of the five cardinal sins of the New Deal: "The degeneration of political morals"; "The malignant growth of personal power"; "Heartbreaking growth of hate, class division ... in the most classless country in the world"; "A creeping collectivism"; Depression II. "The old-fashioned pork barrel has become a whole pork-packing establishment. . . . We do not need to pull down the temple of liberty to catch a few cockroaches in the basement."

The most recent President-reject, Alfred Mossman Landon, at Vienna, Ill. (the heart of the cornbelt): The collapse of AAA, 50-c- wheat, 40-c- corn and 7-c- hogs. "Using the tactics of Croker and Murphy, and of Pendergast of Kansas City, the President is making pikers of them all. . . . He is better than Pendergast and Kelly (of Chicago) because he can quote the Scriptures to suit his own ends. The President preaches social justice and purity in administration of relief from the White House steps, while his ward heelers grease the machine with the help of the spending agencies."

Alf Landon's ex-running mate, Publisher Frank Knox of the Chicago Daily News, at Council Bluffs, Ia.: "Instead of a government whose total cost--paid in taxes-- in Coolidge days was $3,300,000,000, we now have a government which costs--ex-clusive of all relief expenditures--more than $7,000,000,000 a year."

Michigan's peripatetic Senator Vandenberg, in Detroit: "The foulest blemish on free American citizenship in the last century and a half has been the effort to trade bread for ballots. The man who asks American citizens to give up their freedom in exchange for something to eat doesn't belong in public office; he belongs in jail."

Chairman Hamilton himself at Cleveland (barging into the campaign of Robert A. Taft, who is trying to unseat Ohio's Senator Bulkley) : "The money you have paid into the Treasury for your old-age pension is not there. It has been spent, for Heaven knows what, and in its place is only an I.O.U. Unless the law is changed, when the time comes to start paying you a pension the Treasury will be required either to default or to tax you and the remainder of the country to get the money. . . . Instead of weakening Social Security, Republicans will strengthen it . . . put a firm foundation under that column of the temple of social justice, now falling down."

>Said New York's thoughtful Representative Bruce Barton, up this year only for re-election to the House: "I believe we are going to have, maybe not in 1940, maybe in 1944, a Republican party worthy of being trusted to run the affairs of the country."

>Said thoughtful Democratic Senator King of Utah, not up this year for reelection: "Candidates who promise most for their communities out of the Federal Treasury will fare the best."

*Of whom both Collier's and the Satevepost published flattering biographies.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.