OHIO: Bogeyman

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Not for the sensible State of Ohio such harebrained schemes as California's Ham & Eggs, such a treasury-busting law as Colorado's. Safe & sound sat Ohio full of colleges and memories of Presidents. But last week, in spite of its stout constitution and sound heredity, Ohio was scared stiff that it might be going crazy. What scared Ohio was not only a bogey called the Bigelow Plan. Worse was the bogeyman himself—Herbert Seely Bigelow.

Shaggy-haired, 69-year-old Bogeyman Bigelow was a Congregational minister who, after taking over a Cincinnati church in 1896, leased it to a burlesque house, later founded his own "People's Church." In 1917 he was horsewhipped for pacifist preachings. Cincinnati knows him chiefly as a chameleon of political thought. He has been a Coughlinite, a Townsendite, an Independent on the City Council, onetime Democratic candidate for Secretary of State, Republican candidate for a seat in the General Assembly, an elected Democrat to the Assembly, in 1936 an elected Democrat to Congress. Now he is mostly Bigelowite.

After May 7, 1940 his Plan guaranteed an income of $50 a month to every Ohioan who had passed his 60th birthday and found himself without gainful employment; $80 a month to similarly eligible married couples. Estimated eligibles: 700,000.

Cost of the plan, by Bigelow figuring: $60,000,000 a year.* Tax provisions in the Plan would fix that, said he. The Plan called for a State income tax equal to one-fourth the Federal levy, a new 2% tax on land valuations of more than $20,000 an acre. So vaguely drawn was this financing feature that critics' estimates of how much could be raised varied by millions. Bigelow himself refused to be drawn into the argument, went frighteningly on about his business.

His business was to get his Plan before the people, to be voted on November 7 as an amendment to the State Constitution. To put it on the ballot, he needed 10% of the voters in the State. He got them: 241,288 valid signatures. By the same process he added a second proposed amendment which would relax the present law so that the process of amending the constitution would not be so laborious in the future.

Politicians asked each other in whispers whether Bigelow could summon up enough referendum votes to make him a prospective candidate for Governor. Said his campaign director, Charles H. Hubbell: "The amendments will be approved at the polls and then the people of Ohio will elect as their Governor the man who conceived them."