POLITICAL NOTES: Roosevelt, Farley & Co.

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(See front cover)

When Henry Ford's Oscar II sailed out of New York Harbor one December day in 1915 to end the World War, its rail was lined with the most distinguished collection of naïve idealists the U. S. had laughed at in many a year. Aboard the Peace Ship were Rosika Schwimmer with a black bag full of papers from the Premiers of Europe, Feminist Inez Milholland, Publisher Samuel S. McClure, Judge B. B. Lindsey, Governor Louis B. Hanna of North Dakota, many another headliner of that era. Also aboard was a husky youngster of 21 who was neither distinguished nor naïve. The name of Emil Hurja was on the Oscar II's passenger list because the University of Washington was sending this student abroad as its peace delegate. Last week Franklin D. Roosevelt's chances of being re-elected President of the U. S. next November would be considerably less than they are if it were not for the off-stage activities at Democratic national headquarters of that onetime peace delegate. Emil Hurja did not get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas 1915, but he seems likely to keep his boss in the White House from 1937 to 1941.

Knockabout. Smallest (6 ft., 1 ½ in.) of five sons of a Finnish miner in Crystal Falls, Mich., Emil Hurja had left home at 16, hoboed his way West. He had sampled his luck in Butte, Mont., Yakima, Wash., Fairbanks, Alaska and Seattle, worked as a grocer's delivery boy, a printer's devil, got a night post-office job while he went to school by day, studied at the University of Washington, newshawked in Alaska's mining camps. After the Oscar II interlude he went to Washington, became secretary to Charles A. Sulzer, Alaska's delegate in Congress. During the War he served in the finance division of the Army, later married a blonde girl named Gudrun Andersen, daughter of a Yukon prospector. They moved to Breckenridge, Tex., the heart of a contemporary oil boom. The night they arrived there was a little shooting and three corpses were laid out on a billiard table in one of the town's play parlors. Emil Hurja started the Breckenridge American. All his life he had been familiar with mining in Michigan, Montana and Alaska. Oil drilling was a kindred occupation and in a few years his paper gained considerable reputation in mining and oil circles. One day a New Yorker dropped in to ask him a few questions. The upshot was an invitation to go to Manhattan and work for Joseph D. Gengler, specialist in mining securities on the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1927 Hurja sold his Texas paper, took his wife to a Manhattan apartment on Riverside Drive, settled down with sheets of statistics to chart the flow of gold and oil, their output and their probable consumption.