1940

U. S. crops looked good in autumn 1939 --all except the political. On the sprouting, tenderly nursed Presidential boomlets set out for 1940 flowering, an unseasonable frost had settled. But hopeful U. S. politicos still tried last week to squirm up into the sun of publicity.

>The pitcher-eared Galahad of New York County, District Attorney Thomas Edmund Dewey, reminded voters he was just a country boy at heart by buying the place where he has weekended for two years -- a 300-acre farm near Pawling in Dutchess County, New York. GOP-Hopeful Dewey thus became, like his 35-mile-away neighbor, Franklin Roosevelt, a titular constituent of GOP-Hopeful Hamilton Fish. Dewey farm facts: price, $30,300 ($3,000 down); a 175-year-old farmhouse, with front porch suitable for campaign purposes; two tenant houses, 70 head of cattle.

> Dour, GOP-Hopeful George David Aiken, Governor of Vermont, irked by pleas of pressure groups to "proclaim" special days and weeks for the promotion ot worthy causes and foods, issued a proclamation ending all such proclamations.

>U. S. citizens generally were surprised to hear of a still darker horse for 1940, little-known Francis Parnell Murphy, Governor of New Hampshire, latest GOP-Hopeful. Tax-cutting, budget-slashing Governor Murphy, Irish, Catholic, balding, is part owner of an eight-factory shoe company which makes 43,000 pairs of shoes daily, has long watched with interest the 1940 efforts of his predecessor, now Senator, GOP-Hopeful Henry Styles Bridges.

> GOP-Hopeless Julius Peter Heil, Governor of Wisconsin, blamed the debacle of the Wisconsin Legislature (which sat 269 days, passed no bill to meet the State's $21,000,000 deficit) squarely on "the lure of wine, women and song." Julius the Just, as he was called (before he took office January 2), said he now favored legislation which would "do away with the night work of lobbyists, both men and women, in Madison [State capital] hotels."

> Twelve GOP Senators who have not even been mentioned as 1940 Presidential possibilities banded together as the Republican Senatorial Neutrality Club. Their platform: to avoid entangling alliances with six GOP-Hopefuls, to accept any and all entertainment offered by the six Hopefuls.

The Hopefuls: Senators Robert Taft of Ohio, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Arthur Capper of Kansas, Charles McNary of Oregon, Gerald Nye of North Dakota.

The Hopeless: Senators Clyde Reed of Kansas, Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, Warren Barbour of New Jersey, Chan Gurney of South Dakota, Lynn Frazier of North Dakota, Wallace White and Frederick Hale of Maine, Ernest Gibson and Warren Austin of Vermont, Rufus Holman of Oregon, John Townsend of Delaware, James Davis of Pennsylvania.

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