National Affairs: In the Midlands

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The Good offices resemble those of any orosperous corporation−walnut furniture and woodwork, glass partitions, trim stenographers, pictures of the company's products−Hoover , Curtis, Coolidge, Dawes, McKinley, Taft, Roosevelt, Mrs. Hoover, Mrs. Coolidge, James William Good. ... As in most G. O. P. offices this year, there is no picture of Product Harding. ... A telegraph instrument chatters with nervous importance down the hall. There are private wires, telephone as well as telegraph, to both Washington and New York. . . . Throngs of people, some important, some trying to look important, "confer" in standing groups of two, three, four. , . . Throngs of Mr. Good's assistants come, go, confer. One is named Hainer Hinshaw. The office believes he is a distant relative of the Nominee. . . . One of the department heads is Col. Hanford MacNider. who resigned last winter as Assistant Secretary of War and in June got mentioned for the Vice Presidency. Another (Oh. shrewd Mr. Good) is Farmer Lowden's good friend, James G. Oglesby.

Conversation is drowned out now and again by grainboats whistling for bridges in the Chicago River, beneath the windows−insistent voices of the Farm Problem.

A drove of little elephants ornaments Mr. Good's personal office−on inkstand, bookends, paperweights His complexion remains that of a hard indoor worker. It has been organization and politics with him all summer, with only a few games of golf mixed in even on Sundays. When he does get off he goes to the Glen View Club, oldtime haunt of the late Fred W. Upham, treasurer of the Harding campaign.

Wisconsin and Minnesota are the Midwestern States which the Democrats have been claiming most persistently. Mr. Good was frank to say last week that "an educational campaign on the farm problem is essential." He arrives at decisions like this by forming Hoover-Curtis clubs throughout a State and from their reports compiling a cross section of the State's sentiment. He then prepares material, inspects the local machinery for distributing it and fires away.

He is more chary than less experienced organizers (viz. Raskob) about making claims of States or predictions of majorities. But he yields to no man as a writer of propaganda. In a bulletin which he composed last week he pictured Nominee Hoover as virtually the sole author of Coolidge Prosperity and the latter as a "world wonder." Money is what counts in an election but fine phrases help and James William Good knows it. It is very much like being an apostolic missionary. Sometimes you have to wrestle for a man's political soul for hours and hours. Sometimes you can win him in a trice with a ponderous period. And tiresome though it is to turn out ponderous periods, life is often brightened by the gorgeous retorts of the heathen. For example, this is the answer one Hooverizer got when he approached an insurgent South Dakota editor: "I am for Hoover just about as far as you can throw our party elephant by the pin feathers with your arm broken in four places!"