Happy Clam

A baggy old man in a blue serge suit with white piping on his vest pottered out of the U. S. Senate chamber one day last week. With a long white holder and an unlighted cigaret in his hand, he emerged smiling like an imp. Through little knots of Capitol tourists he made his way under the rotunda to a small white door marked "To the Dome." clumped down a flight of steps and along a shining corridor, entered a three-room suite which is the only Senator's office remaining in the Capitol building itself.

His secretary pointed to sheaves of congratulatory telegrams piled high on the Senator's desk. Behind the eater-cornered desk hung a framed quotation from Lincoln: I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right; stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. With that motto as his back drop, Hiram Warren Johnson slicked his parted white hair and posed for photographers. Said he: "I am, as my grandmother used to say, as happy as a clam at high tide." The happy clam had just been triple-nominated for his fifth term in the U. S.

Senate. He had been nominated by Republicans--who elected him twice as Governor of California, whose Vice-Presidential nomination he, unwisely, let Calvin Coolidge get in 1920. He had also been nominated by Democrats--whose leader he supported in 1932, whose same leader this year repudiated Hiram Johnson as no longer a liberal. He had likewise been nominated by the Progressives, last echo of the party under whose banner he and Roosevelt I tried to capture the U. S. in 1912. In California this November, only Communists and Prohibitionists will run candidates against Hiram Johnson.

For this habitual tribute to a great political figure, everyone was, as usual, ready with a so-called explanation. Rush Holt said it was a victory for Isolationism.

Joe Martin said it was a rebuke to Franklin Roosevelt. Other Republicans found in it a happy portent for Republicanism in general, tried to get Hiram Johnson to endorse Wendell Willkie. Hiram Johnson himself said: "Of course, if they hadn't agreed with my views, they wouldn't have voted for me." All explainers ignored the fact that when a State once acquires a solid admiration for the gnarled-hickory character of an elder statesman it often continues to vote for him regardless of issues --as Idaho did for Borah, as Virginia has done for Glass.

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