Congress Home Folks

...But though the published critiques have far outnumbered the printed eulogies, what matters after all is the popular impression...

...A typical and outstanding characteristic of these sections was the provincialism of the press...

...Then there was the tendency of the administration to encourage the belief that recovery lay in the passage of the tariff bill and its governmental commissions on law enforcement and farm relief had the misfortune to do poorly...

...While the situation of the so-called "poor whites" is vastly better than it was even a quarter of a century ago, much is still to be gained, and education offers the chief channel...

...Agricultural conditions in Louisiana are similar to those in Texas...

...Through its sins of omission, credence is lent to the old wives' tales which guide the political conclusions of the outlying electorate...

...If it is a "love triangle" in which a motion-picture actress is concerned, it is sure to get first-page prominence, as was the case in Texas early in June...

...Cities and towns are booming, with Houston the centre of activity...

...Back in the interior, far from the railroad line, the cattle still graze, the rattlesnake and the cactus thrive, and the men-folks, contrite of heart for having once strayed from the narrow path in behalf of Mr...

...It is founded on the dollar...

...All through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas great signs along the railroad blazon the advantages of the towns—their oversupply of cheap skilled and unskilled labor—to manufacturers and textile mill operators...

...As an American who had been long in the East and in foreign lands, I was prepared for changes in the West and Southwest, and especially in the South, but these differences were not so great as I had expected...

...this—the widespread business depression with its Coolidge's was stained with the oil and Department Mr...

...the schools for the Negroes and the mill-workers are tumble-down buildings...

...that it would be right and proper to give the Democrats another try...

...Smith was not elected, and, jinxfending republicanism notwithstanding, the depression is being felt in nearly every state...

...Instead of a lone horseman on an oldfashioned trail, low-priced automobiles clutter roads dominated by billboard advertising of canned foods and cigarettes...

...This opposition— and it is made up of the old aristocracy, the business and the wealth—wants a change in Baton Rouge, but it will get together with its opponents just the same on national issues after its Democratic fashion...

...Democratic prospects for the next presidential elec- It is true, of course, that Mr...

...Hoover was the inheritor of an intolerable of Justice scandals...

...Time, it was admitted, would probably bring some modification of the prohibition laws, but "the Eighteenth Amendment is here to stay...

...In the South, political traditions are as strong as they ever were since the close of the reconstruction period...

...Big crops of cheap corn and cheap cotton and millions in oil have not changed the current of life for these Nestors of the great Southwest...

...Here are factory sites for the taking, water power and electric energy for a song of your own singing...

...Added to this is wide division of sentiment within the state democracy over Governor Huey Long...

...New wells are coming in every day, and the five major oil companies are spending between $300,000,000 and $500,000,000 a year in development work...

...In so far as national policies are concerned, the same situation applies throughout the whole of the deep South, and the determination to leave buried the Republican pluralities of 1928 is very great...

...The implication is grave, for these people are in a fair way to lapse again into their lethargic isolation prior to America's entrance into the world war...

...One striking difference between the East, the Middle-West, the South and the Southwest lies in prohibition as a political issue...

...The factory sites are all cleared, ready for the builder...

...Many factories have been built, it is true, but not a few of these are on part-time schedule, and labor conditions are hard...

...Everywhere they are vocal about dollar wheat and what is left to the farmer when freight and commission charges are deducted, and of twelve-cent cotton, which, they declare, is worse than six-cent cotton in the nineties...

...It was as if these chambers of commerce cried with tongues of brass: "Come, Capital, into this virgin field...

...Newspapers like the Times-Picayune, of New Orleans, and the Chattanooga Times, with their own correspondents in Washington and New York, use press agency reports of national happenings in preference to interpretative accounts by their own writers...

...There would be nothing politically portentous in this, midway in a presidential term, if republicanism had slipped only in those states which broke over the Democratic traces in 1928, but a close survey of other states whose normal electoral vote is Repub- Wilkins Micawber, this leadership is hopeful that lican shows further slipping of the G.O.P., putting something will turn up...

...With the new industrialization south of the MasonDixon line and the advent of northern capital, I had looked for an almost equal inflow of northern labor and northern and eastern standards of living, all of which would make for a cleavage of party lines and the upbuilding of a two-party system...

...Education is making slow progress and is largely elementary...

...Hoover's first year tion in a livelier state than at any time since the Sage is not the only one in presidential annals to be marred of Princeton became the choice of the people for the by a national business depression...

...But Mr...

...I found nothing of the kind...

...The article is to be read, of course, as news and decidedly not as political propaganda for one party at the expense of another.—The Editors...

...Hoover back political condition by which the party of which he is the head is being bifurcated...

...Hoover to the country as the sure guarantor of continued and ever-mounting prosperity, or that Mr...

...And its inhabitants think —and especially of Mexican labor—much as their ancestors thought...

...It little behooves to repeat that Republican cockiness invited this reaction when it held up Mr...

...Neither Mr...

...One of these is the story about any political party having anything to do with either bad times or good, and of which the present villain is the hapless Republican administration...

...It is not going too far to say that the provincial press is in large measure responsible for a political situation which, short of miracle, will make the election of a Republican President in 1932 extremely problematical...

...If anything, the South is taking more than ordinary thought of what it means to be a Democrat...

...Geologists are combing the state from the Louisiana line straight through to El Paso, searching for petroleum, and big wells have been brought in as far west as Marfa— an arid region hitherto devoted exclusively to cattle and sheep...

...This is about the only fly in the Texas labor ointment—cheap Mexican labor, along with the tariff and the low price of cotton and corn...

...Hoover's administration has now nearly reached the centre of the four-year term...

...No one there is satisfied with the tariff, and, coming as it did with low commodity prices, it is proving a hardship for the farmers, who are talking strongly of retaliation...

...Best-informed observers declared it was not a political issue in these sections and that, aside from the "vociferousness of a few wets," these states are dry...

...But, when the administration was not able to conjure up prosperity despite augmenting totals of telephones, radio sets and automobiles, which were characterized as prosperity factors in that unprecedented marshaling of Republican forces in 1928, quite naturally the popular imagination considered itself affronted...

...Oil has made her what she is...

...This labor is wholly native, and the shacks which shelter it are clearly indicative of the poor scale of living...

...Hoover nor any Republican candidate will break the solid South in 1932, for reasons that are patent and threefold: First, because of political traditions which are immeasureably stronger now than they were in 1928...

...In the West the political unrest hinges wholly on economic conditions...

...Indeed, every line of news in the press of the more important cities indicates unmistakably the subservience of the editorial department to the business office, and the desire of the business office for advertising and the policy to print just enough news to carry the advertising...

...But with all this prosperity, Texas says with one voice that it is for a change in the White House, and even Republican leaders admit privately that by all indications the Lone Star State will "redeem" itself in the eyes of the Democracy in 1932 by piling up a vote for the Democratic candidate that will be doubtdispeling as to traditional party alignment...

...in a temporary business slump...

...Neither Tennessee, Kentucky nor Maryland are experiencing the prosperity that was stressed in the 1928 campaign as synonymous with a Republican administration, but the very reverse...

...Scant space or none at all was given by the same newspapers to the coincidental primary campaign in New Jersey in which Dwight W. Morrow, Franklin W. Fort and Joseph S. Frelinghuysen contested the Republican senatorial nomination...

...The old hitching-post and watertrough are gone from the court-house square, but the coatless loungers, their cane-seated chairs atilt and their toothpicks busy, are the replicas of their fathers...

...Hoover, vote the Democratic ticket...

...It was admitted everywhere that there was much bootlegging, but the wetdry issue is not in headlines in the cities south and west of Washington...

...Its policy explains in great part why the Congress is what it is, and why men whose chief stockin-trade is bigotry and intolerance and narrow-minded sectionalism can be elected to the legislative branch in Washington, and why, once elected, they can put through legislation or block measures, the ratification of treaties and the naming of supreme court justices or ambassadors after the thoroughly irresponsible fashion of nagging partisans...

...Sentiment in the border states takes on the complexion of both the South and the Middle-West...

...In the middle of June, corn was four to six inches high along the line of the Southern Railroad in Virginia and the Carolinas, as against six feet along the Southern Pacific between Houston and Seguin...

...It is admitted that the business set-back might well have obtained had Alfred E. Smith been sent to Washington...

...In the following paper Adam Day, returned from a news-gathering trip through the country, summarizes manifestations of the nation's political temper...

...Hoover, it is not only the depression, it is the Senate gone berserk under a leader whose rationalism was not the broadsword he needed to deal with his party in Congress, a sievelike law enforcement, unpopular appointments, the highest tariff in history and a stock market which turns bearish every time a phrase of reassurance issues from the high places in Washington...

...Crops are good, but prices of all farm products are at the low mark, and there is widespread unemployment...

...The consensus in these border states was that, if election came tomorrow, the electoral votes would go to the Democratic candidate...

...336 THE COMMONWEAL July 30, 1930 CONGRESS HOME FOLKS By ADAM DAY JUST as the prodigal son returned home after far-wandering, so is the South safely back in the fold of the Democratic party...

...men of strong body and women who will be mothers tomorrow and little children to work your spindles...

...It is a situation that the Republican leadership is going to have to meet if it decides to send for reelection...

...The thought is growing that a change would be good...

...There is a total lack of presentation of foreign news, save the stereotyped accounts sent out over the news circuits and these, when used, are almost always cut to the bone...

...For today Texas is one of the richest and perhaps the most prosperous states in the Union...

...Meanwhile, like attendant unemployment...

...But with Mr...

...It facilitates the work of the demagogue by precluding the possibility of the mass of the readers of the daily or weekly press forming intelligent judgment on national issues, and holds the national political picture to the class of cheap, highly colored lithographs...

...Floods and disasters at home, sensational divorce actions, murders and thefts constitute the daily news potpourri...

...Practically the only vestiges of the old order that have passed away are the split-rail fences and the razor-back hogs...

...They are uninformed of the debates in Congress and of the questions before the national administration, save as these relate specifically to their locality, and then the presentation is either in the stereotyped form of a press agency dispatch or of a color to suit the individual policy or the politics of the newspaper owner...

...more has been said on the score of disappointed hopes...

...because, secondly, the party whip has been wielded so effectively over recalcitrant Democrats who bolted the party two years ago and voted for Mr...

...Hoover—that he would bring relief to the farmer, never before relieved...

...And in the Southwest the wide open spaces and the trails that lead from ranch to ranch and from town to town have given place to roads that are lanes of barbed wire, and, especially between the Sabine and San Antonio rivers, farming has supplanted wholesale cattle-raising...

...would enforce prohibition, promote international peace and preserve prosperity unabated, which millions never had in any case —weighs nothing now, any more than does the fact that Mr...

...They complain against the Farm Board, Congress and the administration—and the spirit of revolt which they are provoking in the Republican ranks is making the signs propitious for the Progressives, so-called...

...Harding's had Outside the South, just one thing is responsible for the discouragement of the postwar depression...

...This aspect of the situation seems to be getting minor attention from officials and leaders in the mill towns and rural districts...

...Subjects of national import are printed in the news columns briefly at most, while from the editorial pages the old brilliance of the Prentisses and Wattersons is vanished indeed...

...and, thirdly, because nothing has occurred during the Hoover administration that would justify these bolters for their defection...

...From the wheat fields of the Middle-West to the cotton fields of the South, the farmers are complaining and, in turn, merchants and all kinds of business are dissatisfied with the status quo and vociferously antagonistic over the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill...

...The fact that an unprecedented lot was expected of Mr...

...It is apparent that, through all the decades since Appomattox, the South has been unable to change the old system that had its development when these states were colonies...

...This breach has rent asunder all the old-time ties of decorum between the legislative and the executive branches of the state government and reminds of carpet-bag days, save that now, those in opposition to the executive are less choice of their words than were the same elements over General Butler, General Sherman and the governors whom President Johnson sent to rule them...

...Much was expected of it...

...Wilson's ended highest office within their gift...

...Before now men in high office have served as targets for popular resentment when the times have fallen off, and once again the thought of people everywhere is connecting the administration with this depression without benefit of specific reasons...

...Hoover...

...I have just returned from a swing through the South and the West, and the political kaleidoscope was anything but cheering from the Republican standpoint...

...While the old glamor is gone, along with the slave-holding oligarchy, and a new industrial order has come, the class division is unchanged, save that the "new aristocracy" is immigrant from the West and the East...

...Hoover forwarded this appraisal as a necromancer during his campaign...

...Even Louisiana dislikes the bill, despite the sugar schedule...

...If it has lost the color of the old days with the advent of the flivver —old days when Roy Bean was law west of the Pecos —it still preserves the glorious traditions of the Mavericks and the Wests, the Driscolls and the Chisholms, and that long line of cattle barons whose herds grazed on a thousand hills...