Socialite, Senator, Sovieteer

Jay Cooke I was a 19th-Century magnifico, and looked it. He financed the Lincoln Government during the Civil War, went broke backing the Northern Pacific Railroad. The crash of his banking house touched off the cataclysmic Panic of 1873.

His great-grandson, Jay Cooke IV, who looks less like a magnifico than a well-coddled good egg, is an enthusiastic archer, a limited partner in a Philadelphia firm of securities underwriters, an amiable, conservative gentleman who neither courted nor got much public notice until 1937.

Then he was taken in hand by Pennsylvania's Boss Joseph N. Pew. "Too bad, dear," said rich, beauteous Mrs. Jay Cooke IV when her husband was made chairman of the moribund Republican City Committee in Philadelphia. Unrecorded were Mrs. Cooke's remarks last week, when Boss Pew headed Jay Cooke toward the U. S. Senate.

What earned this distinction for Mr. Cooke was his impregnable conservatism. Onetime (1922-35) Senator David A. Reed, by most standards a reactionary, was restless in retirement and pawing for a comeback. David Reed recently an nounced that, while he was dead against New Deal methods, he could see some good in New Deal objectives. To Boss Pew and associated fat cats who run the G. O. P. in Pennsylvania, this sounded alarmingly like rank liberalism. So they bundled Dave Reed back on to his shelf, chose safe and soundless Jay Cooke IV to go up against Democratic Senator Joe Guffey next November.

>Political notables in Washington, D. C. are a dime a dozen. Washington's biggest hero is the old "Big Train," onetime Pitcher Walter Johnson, who smoked them over the plate for the Washington Senators for 21 delirious summers. Most of the time since age caught up with his mighty right arm, forcing his retirement from the pitcher's box in 1927, Walter Johnson has raised pigs & cows on his Maryland farm. Last summer he broadcast the Senators' home games. As a broadcaster he was lousy but so great was his personal popularity that he twanged through the summer. In 1938 Walter Johnson ran for the Montgomery County (Md.) Board of Commissioners. He was the only Republican elected. Last week the Big Train announced he would run for Congress this year. Local observers gave him a good chance of getting there.

>Communist Earl Browder, out on $7,500 bail from a four-year jail sentence (now pending appeal) for fraudulent use of a passport, filed his name as Communist candidate for U. S. Congressman from the 14th New York District.

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