The Windstorm
It was 2:30 a.m., and New Haven's Hotel Taft was crowded with politicians, all wide awake. Leading Candidate John Davis Lodge, of the Boston Lodges,* paused amid the swirling delegates and nibbled on the nail of his index finger. "This," grinned Lodge, "is like trying to pin down a pup tent in a windstorm." A fife, drum and bugle corps blew for Lodge outside the hotel, and delegates found new lyrics to When Johny Comes Marching
Home thrust into their hands; now the song was called The Logical Man Is Lodge.
Ankle-deep in broken glass and broken promises, discarded cigar butts and campaign propaganda, and up to their ears in smoke and conniving, 618 Republicans were trying to get together on selecting their candidate for governor. It was their most red-eyed, bitter and uncertain convention in 30 years.
Strategy on Eight. The delegates had been besieged for their votes by five candidates for the gubernatorial nomination: a well-to-do manufacturer in the basement, who had set up the best bar of any candidate; a lawyer, and the mayor of Waterbury, quartered on the second floor; Congressman John Davis Lodge on four, a onetime governor on six. Amid the general fuss and clutter, two men, in a feud that was both personal and political, worked hardest to collar delegates. Handsome, fast-talking Lawyer J. Kenneth Bradley, out for the nomination for governor, was trying to regain the party control he had o<
Four floors below, Congressman Lodge --a conservative Republican--greeted his well-wishers like a matinee idol, which in tact he had once been. Before entering politics he had appeared in 18 movies, was Marlene Dietrich's leading man in a 1934 picture called The Scarlet Empress. Beside him stood his pretty, Italian-born wife, Francesca Braggiotti Lodge, onetime dancer, whose singing of Italian songs in Bridgeport's Italian quarter had helped her husband in his races for Congress.
By the time Harold Mitchell went to bed upstairs at 5 a.m., almost everybody knew that Actor Lodge would clearly steal the show next day. He did. The final count: for Lodge, 358; for Bradley, 134.
Even his own backers figured that Lodge stood no more than a 50-50 chance against his Democratic opponent, incumbent Governor Chester Bliss Bowles, the New Dealing adman. Lodge would need all the support he could get; Bradley, alone of the losers, did not offer his.
Two for the Senate. Of more importance to the rest of the nation, though the convention spent less time debating it, was the choice of two Republican candidates for U.S. Senator. Harold Mitchell's organization again carried the day. Ex-Congressman Joseph Talbot, a Roman Catholic, was named, without competition, to run against Catholic Senator Brien McMahon, who had done his best to identify himself with an atomic peace (he is chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee).
The Senate seat now warmed by Adman Bill Benton (Bowles's old partner in Benton & Bowles) looked a little more inviting. Mitchell put his influence behind a hearty, handsome Wall Street banker named Prescott Bush,-who played first base at Yale (1915-17), likes to dance the polka with the Polish girls and join in singing "the old songs" at political rallies. Bush was opposed by starchy Vivien Kellems, a Stonington manufacturer, one of the few Americans who is far enough to the right to be considered patriotic by Westbrook Pegler. Vivien stopped the roll call when it reached 27 for her, 187 for Pres Bush.
Full of emotion, she took the floor, denounced this "humiliating" defeat of Connecticut's women, the whole convention system and the people who won with it. "Do you think that was the right thing to do?" she asked the convention. There were scattered yes's and no's. "Couldn't a pretense have been made," she asked again, "that a few of you wanted me?" Then she withdrew from the race.
The convention had been a triumph for 48-year-old Harold Mitchell, but it also had a terrible price. Exhausted, he returned to his home in West Hartford. Four days later he was found dead in his bathroom, of a heart attack.
-Younger brother of Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, grandson of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, descendant of early (1791-96) U.S. Senator George Cabot, who was spoken to by the Lowells, spoke to God, was a friend of Washington, an adviser to Hamilton. -A partner in Brown Bros. Harriman & Co. For news of another partner, see above.
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