National Affairs: Keynotes

• Share

Violence. To open a political convention there must be a temporary chairman, who makes an oration to start things going. This orator must choose a subject upon which the convention holds a unanimous opinion. A "keynote" speech, therefore, is by definition a solemn prating about undisputed things. The more vague or remote the subject upon which the audience agrees, the nearer to the brink of absurdity will the orator totter in his effort to be impressive. So it was with Keynoter Fess at Kansas City, who sounded crass and flatulent on the vague topic of Republican Prosperity. And so it was at Houston with Keynoter Bowers, who combined pedantry with abuse on Republican Corruption. An editorial writer on the New York Evening World, Claude Gernade Bowers is a short, slim, dark, studious, scholarly, quiet man in his middle years. His specialty is early U. S. history. Like many a bookish man he has his villain—Alexander Hamilton—and his heroes—Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. He gained fame as an exciting speaker last winter when Democrats celebrated Jackson Day in Washington. His assignment as Keynoter at Houston put an entire political party and a huge radio audience at the vocal disposal of a man long confined to the indirect, often anonymous, medium of the scrivener. Mr. Bowers made it a point to have his place on the program shifted to an evening hour, when more radios would be turned on. The Bowers speech began with contrasts between Abraham Lincoln and Harry Ford Sinclair and between the political schools of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamiltion. Next, the eight-year Wilson regime was lauded. Then the eight-year Harding-Coolidge regime was condemned, with the emphasis on the Harding days. Avoiding statements of fact, Mr. Bowers pumped his breath into alliterative generalities. Following are some of the epithets that rolled from his tongue and out across the land: privilege and pillage (repeated four times)

autocracy and bureaucracy

besmirched and bedraggled

brazen and shameless

blackened the reputation

caste and class

a mockery and a sham

smutty background

privilege and crime

carnival of corruption

a byword and a hissing

a scandal and a stench

loot

banner of the bloody shirt

brutal days

decline and degradation

thorns and thistles

brigandage

barons of iron and steel

pirate's flag

putrid beyond precedent

baser, more dastardly prostitution

shameful

thief

corruptionist de luxe

slink

tainted bonds

sneaking

perjury

Augean stables

a spotted thing

disease

plunderbund

sinister possibility

Pittsburgh Bratianu (Andrew W. Mellon)

purse-proud caste

temple of gold resting on the bowed backs