National Affairs: Now We'll Go After Them

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At a Tammany Hall rally last week Alfred Emanuel Smith first pronounced in public the names of the national Democratic ticket, promising the ''loyalty and devotion" of New York's "great Democratic organization ... in favor of the election of Roosevelt and Garner." Few days later Citizen Smith again mentioned Roosevelt & Garner, briefly as possible and at the very end of a long speech delivered in Newark chiefly to help out Boss Frank Hague whose New Jersey votes stood by him at the Chicago convention. Stumpster Smith began by expressing his regret that he could not speak in Connecticut for Candidate Cross, in Illinois for Candidate Horner. Then when Smith shouted in oldtime style, "Now we'll go after them," the cheering, laughing crowd knew what to expect. They got it. Out of four years of bitterness came raucous, fist-smashing denunciations of bigotry and Ku-Kluxery, a long tirade against that almost forgotten woman Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, plenty of "What happened? . . . Let's take a look. . . . Let us go back. . . ." An Al Smith occasion and an Al Smith speech in less than his most thoughtful vein, it accomplished one thing for his party: claiming credit for the Democratic wet plank, he placed it squarely against the Republican wet-&-dry one, left the way open for Governor Roosevelt, at Baltimore, to carry on.