Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 225, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 September 1915 — Democrats Fear Defeat With Vice-President Marshall on Ticket. [ARTICLE]

Democrats Fear Defeat With Vice-President Marshall on Ticket.

Indianapolis, Sept. 21, 1915.—They are after the scalp of Thomas R. Marshall, retiring and bashful candidate for renomination for the vicepresidency of the United States. It isn’t the Taggart gang in Indiana that is after him. It’s something that really counts in politics this time. It’s the national administration that is after him, and the plans to unseat Marshall from the democratic band wagon are fostered by not a few of the many senators of Washington. This news not only emanated from Washington to the democrats of Indiana, already scared to death because of the reports that the national administration practically had given up winning Indiana again to the democratic column next year, but it is being talked about in whispers and among leading democrats here, who a week ago believed that they would have no trouble in renominating Marshall and thus bringing a pressure to bear on Indiana voters to support the democratic ticket In Indiana—candidates of which are already so numerous that they look like a large flock of zeros.

The report that Marshall is to be sidetracked has caused consternation galore here and plans are already on foot but they will be useless, according to persons who are in touch with the Wilson administration at Wasnington. These persons say that Marshall has done many things that did not endear him to the official populace of Washington nor to the members of the Senate which he ruled over. In the first place these persons say Marshall was too apt to express his own views wherever he took a notion on subjects that were under debate in the senate. Now the vice-president is supposed to keep his hands off of things entirely. Then, too, the need of having a much stronger man than Marshall on the 1916 ticket, in its fight to live down the fiaSeoes, as the mammoth treasury deficit, which now appears, the Mexican situation, the work of Bryan along many lines, and the troubles fostered by the war, has become so apparent at Washington that they are actually talking of running Hiram Johnson, governor of California, and candidate for vice-president with Roosevelt on the democratic ticket, to see if the bull moosers won’t fall for it and support Wilson. Strange to relate, Thomas Taggart and his crowd in Indiana are just as anxious to have Marshall kept on the ticket as Marshall’s friends are. The crowd at the Indiana statehouse, headed by Governor Ralston, know that they cannot win the 1916 election unless some accident occurs, if they should even succeed in putting a bull moose ticket in the field again. There have recently been too many grand jury investigations, too many Terre Haute cases, too many patronage tangles fox Ralston to solve; and too many indictments in Marion county on the charge of election corruption, and too much news of a decidedly unfavorable attitude published about the state machine. Therefore they are doing two things that they think may help them. One is to boost renomination, hoping thereby to cement the party in the state; and the other is to seek by various devices, means to incite the progressives to put another state ticket in the field, knowing it again would run a bad third in the state race.