The Iron Road

Charles Linza McNary, 66, Senator from Oregon for 23 years, is no fire-eater. A soft-spoken legislative expert, he never makes a speech if he can help it, has long been a mystery to effervescent New Dealers, who call him able, shrewd, liberal, weary, lazy, cynical. When he was given the Republican nomination for Vice President they predicted that he would show no enthusiasm in his campaign, if he campaigned at all. They said that since he had voted for TYA, Bonneville Dam, had steadily fought the Hull reciprocal trade agreements, he and Wendell Willkie were on opposite sides of the fence and could never get along.

At Salem, Ore. last week, Charlie McNary formally accepted the Republican nomination in a speech (the first of eight scheduled for the campaign) that was neither weary nor cynical.

Sweat, Blood, Loneliness. Senator McNary warmed up his 12,000 listening Oregonians with a salute to the Oregon Trail. In a country where pioneers' picnics are an annual event and where the wheel marks of wagon trails still show near Emigrant Springs Park, that is as necessary as a tribute to Robert E. Lee once was in the South. But the Senator, who still farms land that he worked on as a boy, called it the iron road, the name given it by the people who followed it -- "from the Great Bend of the Missouri to the banks of the Willamette, following the valleys of the Kaw, the Platte, the Sweetwater, the Snake and the lordly Columbia; fording streams . . . suffering hunger, thirst and sickness aggravated by strange diets and exposure -- and leaving thousands of un marked graves beside the trail." Their trek, said McNary, was no Gov ernment project. "Land, if you had to work it, never was free. Men paid for it in sweat and blood and loneliness, if not in dollars." Their pioneering achievements were possible because "Americans had not then been instructed that they must look to Washington for inspiration and sanction for their every act. . . . What we cannot forgive is that the New Deal, finding itself unable to restore national vitality, fashioned its plan upon the thesis that America is finished, that . . . we must look increasingly to the Government for jobs, for security, and for the oversight of our private lives."

Nominee McNary's specifications for the reconstruction of the U. S.:

Agriculture. Soil-conservation payments, commodity-surplus loans, encouragement of farm purchase by tenants, the food-stamp program, "some such" formula as the two-price system in the twice-vetoed McNary-Haugen Bill. "The platform offers no magic formula. The problem is far too complex. ... It does constitute a promise that the Republican Party genuinely seeks solutions."

Conservation. Regulation of the annual rate of lumbering, expansion of forest reserves, reduction of forest taxation (since a high tax rate encourages wasteful cutting), assumption by the Government of half the cost of abating loss from fire, insects and disease.

Power. The public development of hydroelectric power. "From the standpoint of the Treasury, the records of the great public power projects at Boulder . . .and at Bonneville . . . are reassuring. Both are liquidating their commitments to the Government. . . . Where irreconcilable conflicts arise . . . private holdings should not be confiscated, and we now have a working precedent . . in the recent acquisition by purchase of private companies by the Tennessee Valley Authority." (Wendell Willkie had read this section of the speech in advance.)

Foreign Affairs. "America, as always, prefers peace. But America does not prefer the peace of appeasement, not the surrender of our national dignity, our independence of action, our political freedom or the civilized values that we cherish. ..."

The crowd that heard Vice-Presidential Candidate McNary disappointed Oregon Republicans, although it was the biggest for a political event in Oregon's history. (For Franklin Roosevelt at Portland in 1932, 8,000; for his dedication of Bonneville Dam in 1937, 6,000.) A small thing before the speech put the crowd in a frame of mind to respond to McNary's appeal to the pioneer spirit. Seven black-robed, black-veiled figures, like those who haunted the Senate during the conscription debate, tried to crash the bleachers, carrying anti-conscription signs. They were quickly ousted, their signs torn up, while the crowds cheered. One of the "widows" turned out to be a young man dressed in woman's clothing.

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