Wrathful Kansan

Last year florid-faced, old (70) Senator Clyde Martin Reed went back to his home town, Parsons, Kans., where he published the daily Sun. There he heard that men wanting work at the nearby Sunflower ordnance plant had first to join an A.F. of L. union, pay $39 to $53 in initiation fees and dues. Many of the job-seekers were from Kansas farms. Hopping mad, he went back to Washington, introduced a bill calling for open shops on Government jobs. The bill was shelved in committee.

Last week Clyde Reed, choked by Washington inaction, made what his friend William Allen White called a Quixotic gesture. He rushed into the Republican primary for Governor, on a one-plank platform. The plank: the open shop and "fair" labor legislation. When labor leaders in Kansas City accused him of trying to cripple labor, to prevent the closed shop and "enforced membership," forthright Senator Reed replied: "Exactly what I mean. The gentlemen heard me correctly."

Clyde Reed has once been Governor of Kansas (1929-31), having got there with the help of Campaign Manager Alf Landon. He had a tempestuous administration, quarreled with everyone. His friend Roy Roberts, rotund managing editor of the Kansas City Star, told him: "If you manage to meet enough people, you're a cinch to be beaten next time." He did and he was. Reed stayed in political retirement until 1938, when he emerged to oppose rabble-rousing Rev. Gerald Winrod in the Republican Senatorial primary, went on to win the Senate seat.

In farm-minded Kansas, observers thought that Clyde Reed's one-man anti-labor crusade would fizzle. He has three opponents in the primary. Editor White thought Clyde Reed might finish "in a close tie for third."

Said he: "Just a man of wrath, such as Kansas often develops, as for instance old John Brown. Wrath in Kansas has moved more men to wreck their lives and fan the flames of fleeting fame than have been glorified in most States. This is the case of the old Kansas fever--diagnosed modernly as ants in your pants. . . ."

But Clyde Reed will not wreck his political life. He will remain a Senator until 1945.

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