On the Record

When brash young Burton K. Wheeler was campaigning for his first Senate seat 24 years ago, he made a proud boast: "If you ever see a picture of me on the front page of the Butte Daily Post, you will know that I have sold out to the company."

Last week the Daily Post, along with the rest of the Anaconda Copper Mining Co.'s big newspaper chain, wound up a booming campaign for Burt Wheeler's renomination in Montana's Democratic primary. But it was not enough. Burt Wheeler was soundly beaten (49,401 to 43,729). His defeat, like his conversion to the "copper collar," was the measure of the disrepute into which fractious Burt Wheeler had fallen.

The man who took his measure was smart, strapping (6 ft. 3 in.; 210 lbs.) Leif Erickson. A friendly, balding lawyer with a big, booming voice, he got his start long after Burt Wheeler had become a veteran of the Senate.

A farmer boy who made his way through the University of North Dakota and University of Chicago (LL.B., J.D.) by working as a cook and taxi driver, Leif Erickson won "his first political office (county attorney) in 1936. Until he was elected to the state supreme court in 1938, most Montanans had never heard of him; when he lost out to Wheeler-backed Republican Sam Ford in the 1944 campaign for governor, most voters figured he was through politically.

But Leif Erickson's selection for the President's railroad fact-finding board gave him national prominence. Last week the only thing that seemed able to stop him from taking over Senator Wheeler's seat in the Soth Congress was the possibility of a coalition of Wheeler Democrats and Republicans in the fall.

Out of Step. For Burt Wheeler it was a strange climax to a strangely twisted career. He had sailed triumphantly into Washington as the fighting apostle of Western liberals, won quick fame by dethroning Harding's President-maker, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. Over the long haul he had earned a solid reputation as eleven-year head of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee and its liberal, conscientious expert on railway legislation. At one time he was sure he would be picked as Franklin Roosevelt's running mate. But then he wandered off into the dead end of isolationism. Somewhere he lost pace with history.

Once the idol of labor, he found himself under heavy fire this summer from the C.I.O.-P.A.C. and from the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. His independence and disdain of party lines caused at least one section of his party, the Yellowstone County Democratic Central Committee, to repudiate onetime New Dealer Wheeler as a "party renegade" (though his good friend Harry Truman had tried to give him a hand). The veterans of the war he had tried to ignore campaigned ardently against him.

He was the fifth U.S. Senator denied renomination this year.* But he was still Burt Wheeler, and the country was still out of step with him. Said he: ". . .I am proud of the record I have made and I am confident that time will vindicate that record."

*The other four: Indiana's Raymond Willis, Idaho's Charles Gossett, Maryland's George Radcliffe, Minnesota's Henrik Shipstead.

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