National Affairs: In the Midlands

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Colonel Mann. Nominee Hoover has a Moses, a Good, a Work and a Mann. The four names might be worked into a campaign jingle, but for the fact that Mr. Hoover's Mann is very seldom officially mentioned in the party. After he has performed in the East and Nominee Smith is through in the Midwest, Nominee Hoover is going to make a trip unprecedented in G. O. P. history. He is going into the mountainous, Dry, Protestant, eastern end of Tennessee, up among the hillbillies, to small Elizabethton. He will go not so much as the G. O. P.'s nominee but more as a distinguished citizen seeking his fellow citizens' votes for the Presidency. There are a lot of Republican voters in Eastern Tennessee and the Democrats there are Jackson Democrats. That means dry, rural, Protestant, and every one knows that Citizen Hoover's opponent is Wet, urban, Roman Catholic. Citizen Hoover will stand there on the mountains and address all the anti-Smith Democrats in the South. It was an idea of Col. Horace A. Mann's.

Col. Mann is a Tennesseean of obscure origin, no relation of the late great educator, Horace Mann.* Republicans know, however, that Col. Mann is a considerable educator himself.

He is a lawyer. He used to play poker with President Harding. He turned up at the Kansas City convention last June with even more pledges and proxies of Southern delegates and alternates than Virginia's wily C. Bascom Slemp had collected. He helped the Hoover nomination, more covertly but little less substantially than James William Good. Then he dropped out of sight until last month, when it became apparent that he had been commissioned by Nominee Hoover to work, independently of the National Republican Committee, for a fusion of the South's anti-Smith Democrats and the Southern G. O. P. It was Col. Mann's idea that the Negro element of the Southern G. O. P. should be so far as possible eliminated, especially from the electoral tickets. As a result there is not a single Negro elector on a Southern ticket this fall. Anti-Smith Democrats, appreciating this courtesy, have flocked to accept nominations as Hoover electors.

The New York World sent an investigator to Col. Mann's office in Washington, which is maintained a mile from Republican headquarters and saves Dry Democrats the embarrassment of being seen crossing the party line. The investigator asked for campaign material "suitable for distribution among the women who would not be interested in economic matters." The investigator reported, and later swore, that one of Col. Mann's assistants offered to take her to the office of The Fellowship Forum, Ku Klux Klan sheet, published in Washington. There the investigator found that, for nominal prices, bales of stuff could be had attacking Nominee Smith for Popery. "Who pays the Klan?" asked the World.

Col. Mann contradicted the World investigator's affidavit. She had, he said, hung around his office and pestered for scurrilous material, although repeatedly told there was none to be had. Going to The Fellowship Forum was her own idea, said Col. Mann.