National Affairs: Wildcatter

Oklahoma's Democratic Senator Robert Samuel Kerr began seeking his $10 million fortune by drilling oil wells in Oklahoma City right up to the lawn of the State Capitol. Last fall Bob Kerr began drilling a political wildcat which he hopes will lead to a better-known piece of public property.

He spudded in his campaign for the White House with a series of tub-thumping speeches through the Middle West, where he is best known. Publicly he was all for re-electing Harry Truman; on the side he was busily lining up the pols for himself, if Truman stays out. He revealed his strategy a fortnight ago by announcing that he would run in the Nebraska primary on April 1. Last week—while their man was speechmaking in Iowa—Kerr's supporters claimed that he has already lined up 150 Midwestern delegates to the Chicago convention.

Kerr is certainly no shoo-in. He is not well known nationally. He has alienated Northern Negroes by hedging on Truman's civil-rights program. Some labor and consumer groups turned against him in 1950 when he engineered through Congress a bill to exempt natural gas producers from control by the Federal Power Commission. Its opponents charged that the bill would allow the producers—including Kerr—to milk the public of nearly $100 million in higher rates. Truman vetoed the bill, but the Kerr forces got what they wanted anyway by persuading the FPC to refuse jurisdiction.

Big (6 ft. 3 in.) Bob Kerr's assets are nevertheless impressive. For a start, he was born, 55 years ago, in a log cabin. He is a teetotaling, nonsmoking Baptist* who teaches Sunday school. Last year he made the headlines by charging that Washington's cocktail-party society is "a national danger [that] dulls the wits of men who are determining the nation's future." As governor (and a good one) of Oklahoma from 1943 to 1947, he made news by betting a barrel of sorghum against a fatted hog that his state would buy more war bonds per capita than Nebraska. (It did.)

He vigorously supported Truman's campaign in 1948, jumped ably to his defense last spring in the MacArthur Donnybrook when other Democrats scurried for cover. On the hustings, Kerr is a master of give-'em-hell oratory. He loves to denounce the "bewitched, bothered and bewildered" Republicans. He says they are divided and ailing from "MacArthuritis." When Kerr's opponents make cracks about his wealth, he replies scornfully that he got married in 1925 on $125 a month, and adds: "You should have seen me and my family under Hoover."

That's the kind of brass-knuckled politicking that Harry Truman respects. But Wildcatter Kerr's one hope of striking the pay zone is Truman's endorsement.