National Affairs: In the Midlands

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(See front cover)

Nominee Smith, with a formidable collection of advisers and impediments, entered the Midwest last week on the first militant move of his campaign (see Democrats). Missouri's inflammatory Senator James A. Reed was about to pass through to arouse the Northwest. Democratic money was pouring into Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas. The Brown Derby was out to line up the 1924 LaFollette vote.

Nominee Hoover, having paid his respects to the Midwest on his return from Notification (TIME, Sept. 3), and having inspected the work that has been done for him there, was content to leave the region's defense to his Chicago headquarters and to Nominee Curtis, who set out from Washington to criss-cross the trails of Smith and Reed for 5,000 miles. Nominee Hoover gave his own attention to the East. Red fire and amplifiers were in readiness for him at Newark, N. J. His Eastern managers redoubled their efforts in very dubious New York and dubious Massachusetts.

Dr. Hubert Work, National G. O. P. Chairman, is charged with Hooverizing all the land. Under him in the East, definitely restrained and subordinated, is ebullient Senator George Higgins Moses of New Hampshire. At Chicago, Dr. Work's name appears in handsome letters in the Hoover offices at 333 North Michigan Avenue (20th and 21st floors). But the pink-white-and-gray man in the office is only formally subordinate to Dr. Work. After seeing how ably the Midwestern cornerstone of his vote was being swung into place and how carefully the cement was being mixed, Nominee Hoover gave pink-white-and-gray James William Good implicit freedom and full control at Chicago. When Dr. Work goes to New York he feels free to issue suggestions and vetoes to Senator Moses. When he goes to Chicago, as he did on the eve of the Smith invasion, he just sits and listens to Mr. Hoover's Good.

The eleven States of the Midwest with their 149 electoral votes are to the G. O. P. what the eleven States of the South, with 124 electors, are to the Democracy. They are the cornerstone, the bulwark, among which "bolts" and "splits" and outright transitions occur far less frequently than among the eleven Western States, the eleven Eastern States, the four Border States.

This year the Midwest loomed more important than ever because it was throughout the Midwest that the Hoover nomination was most bitterly opposed. In Ohio there was Willis; in Indiana, Watson; in Illinois, Lowden; in Nebraska, Norris; in Kansas, Curtisall, except Lowden and Curtis, more downright anti-Hooverish than outright ambitious.

That there would be a scramble in the midlands over the 1928 nomination was visible a year ago. Herbert Hoover began looking around for a Midwestern manager. It was natural for him to ask James William Good, a onetime (1909-1921) Congressman from Iowa. Secretary Hoover had known Congressman Good as an able legislative Committeeman. He came from Cedar Rapids, near the Hoover birthplace (West Branch). Above all, he was the man who had organized the Midwest for Calvin Coolidge in the 1924 campaign.