POLITICAL NOTE: 100 Philosophers

Mrs. Worthington Scranton of Scranton, whose patrician features and baronial name do not prevent her from wearing all the fantastic headgear which fashion prescribes, is in many ways symbolic of the modern Republican Party. As National Committeewoman from Pennsylvania, Mrs. Scranton last year not only listened religiously to Alf Landon on the radio, but welcomed him back to the State of his birth. Last week, along with 19 other members of the National Committee's executive committee, a very serious Mrs. Worthington Scranton was to be seen daily entering & leaving a conference room on the first floor of St. Louis' swank Coronado Hotel.

Last month Herbert Hoover, who has been trying to convince his fellow Republican bigwigs that the best way to keep 17,000,000 Republican voters together in lean times is to supply them with a creed, proposed to the National Committee in Chicago that they call a party conference to formulate a positive program. Fearful of the splits this might disclose, the com mittee voted instead to have its creed drafted by the loo most representative Republicans in the U. S. All that remained was for the Republican executive committee to find 100 such suitable philosophers. So last week in St. Louis the committee, including New York's Old Guard Charles D. Hilles,* Illinois' Mrs. Bertha Baur, onetime National Chairman Henry P. Fletcher and the symbolic Mrs. Scranton, got down to the job.

Dissension. That even these cautious tactics could not prevent dissension was the best evidence that Republicanism, muddled and frustrated as it may be, still has plenty of political vitality. In far off Vermont, grey, bespectacled Governor George D. Aiken, who has been boomed by his New England neighbors as another budget-balancing Presidential possibility, took occasion to attack the party's present leadership and to demand, instead of a creed, an end to the age-old rotten borough representation of the South in Republican national conventions. To welcome Republican Chairman Hamilton when he arrived late in St. Louis from Washington, reporters asked him about such criticism as that of New Jersey's Robert W. Johnson (medical supplies). In no uncertain terms Mr. Johnson had called for the withdrawal from party councils of Herbert Hoover, Alf M. Landon, and John D. M. Hamilton. Reddening, Mr. Hamilton replied: "No one has the right to read me or anyone else out of the party."

Names. The embattled committeemen and committeewomen sought to solve their problem soothingly with Names. Those bruited outside the meeting, ranging in age and political experience from 35-year-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh to Illinois' 76-year-old ex-Governor Frank Orren Lowden, were so numerous that the committee decided to pick some 150 instead of 100 philosophers.