Indianapolis Times, Volume 48, Number 28, Indianapolis, Marion County, 13 April 1936 — Page 9

It Seems to Me HEVM H jyjIAMI, Fla., April 13.—Some hold that Alf Landon has said too little, but this is the careless talk of those who do not understand the auspices under which the Kansan purposes to run. Gov. Landon would be wholly justified in making this entire race in silence. Indeed, such a campaign would have the merit of frankness. Language from Landon merely serves to confuse the issue. Clarity

is preserved when Mr. Hearst does the talking directly. After all, what difference does it make what Alf says or what Alf thinks? Mr. Hearst found him in the bullrushes, Mr. Hearst directed the coming out party and Mr. Hearst is running the campaign strategy. A few have said, humorously enough, that Landon should repudiate Hearst, but as Mark Sullivan pointed out in a recent column, “No one says that the Kansas Governor solicited the support or that there is any relation of give and take between

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Heywood Broun

the two.” That is true enough. Mr. Hearst has made no campaign pledge or promises whatsoever, and in the event of the nomination and election of Landon there is every reason to believe that the editor will have a completely free hand. If the Kansan attempted to “repudiate” Hearst it would be as if Punch were to call out to the puppeteer, ‘‘Who do you think is running this show?” a a tt No Cause for Complaint BUT even if it were possible for Landon to disown his discoverer— or maybe inventor is the better word—why should he? Could any good friend of the budget balancer advise him to fall out of the arms of Hearst and into the lap of Fletcher? Up till now the Governor has no fair cause of complaint. The great editor paid him the unusual compliment of going to Topeka in person and parking his fleet of private cars almost at the Landon doorstep. To be sure, it was a dangerous proceeding. It might have filled the Kansan with delusions of grandeur, but everybody from Hearst up has pointed out that Landon is a man of hard, practical common sense. So far the king maker and the Kansas eaglet have conversed but briefly. There was no need for any extended talk. After all, Mr. Hearst has been extremely articulate in recent months. Gov. Landon can find out exactly what is expected of him by reading the editorial pages and the news columns. He will learn in time to know which is which. It is all as simple as that. The ease and democratic nature of the relationship between the great editor and the Governor should be emphasized because, in the heat of the campaign, mud may be thrown and mean things said. The suggestion is sure to be made that some sort of deal has been arranged and that Mr. Hearst wants to be Secretary of State or ambassador to the Soviet Republics. n tt tt Very Simple Requirements THERE’S nothing in that. Gov. Landon, if he makes it, will be free to say and do almost anything he pleases. This is particularly „rue in the matter of saying. Speeches about “the common man” and “the dignity of labor 1 ” and things of that sort will go wholly unrebuked. He may even talk about "peace” without let or hindrance. There isn’t any catch. I believe Mr. Hearst's requirements of Landon would be very simple. He would want a tax program calculated to protect the rich. He would want a labor policy aimed at smashing trade unionism and he would ask for a terror to drive liberalism out of the schools and colleges. The rest of the executive policies would be wholly in the hands of Landon. Oh, I forgot, one other thing—Mr. Hearst might want a war with Japan. (Copyright, 1936 i Roosevelt to Wage Aggressive Battle BY RAYMOND CLAPPER WASHINGTON, April 13.—Roosevelt is preparing for another campaign as aggressive as his 1932 fight. Although his confidence must be strengthened by polls and individual judgments forecasting the increasing probability of his reelection, he is taking no chance. More than that, it seems probable that he is determined to amass as heavy a vote as possible in order to emphasize the vindication which he anticipates for the New Deal's first term Tonight the President opens his active speaking campaign at a Democratic rally in Baltimore. Two weeks later he speaks in New York. On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Mr. Roosevelt will speak at Dallas, Tex., and then at Vincennes, Ind. Probably he will make a personal appearance before the Democratic National Convention as he did in 1932. White House word is that he expects to engage in a traveling campaign as in 1932. It won't be any fireside fight as far as he is concerned. tt tt SINCE the war we have had two White House incumbents up for re-election —Coolidge and Hoover. Both sought to maintain the fiction during their re-election campaigns that they were not waging aggressive campaigns. Coolidge stayed in the White House most of the time, conspicuously attending to business—without, of course, depriving himself of his customary afternoon nap. Hoover tried it, too, but toward the end of the campaign his advisers had a panic and in the final few weeks they chased him around the country like a tired rabbit, from one platform to another, with way station rear end appearances, in a frantic effort to check the oncoming tide. tt tt tt JOKES have been made about Republican Chairman Fletcher’s new brain trust. But they are beside the point. At last Republicans have discovered that the times have changed politics. Political questions are now saturated with economics. They can not be handled any more as simple fodder for cracker-barrel hokum. The average politician is lost in the issues of the day. He can’t dispose of them by telling about home and mother. The politician flounders around and makes himself ridiculous. He has to call in an economist to keep from making a fool of himself. tt tt tt NO clearer instance of the average politician's helplessness in dealing with current issues is at hand than the quarrel inside the Republican Party over the Hull reciprocal tariff policy. The Administration had sense enough to see that tariff making was a matter vitally concerning foreign trade, and a proper subject for international negotiation rather than cloakroom log-rolling by Senators and Congressmen—" You give me a tariff on artificial eyes and I'll vote* for your tariff on whortleberries." it a ANOTHER reason why the politicians have had to call in brains to help them with their campaign is that the public has lost confidence in the wisdom of the hack politician. The average citizen feels more confidence in what is told him if it bears the imprint of some study and thought. Thousands of persons are listening weekly to the Town Hall of the Air, to hear public questions discussed by persons who know something about them. Local forums are springing up in many cities. A New Public Affairs Committee, endowed by the Maurice and Laura Falk Foundation, has corralled a group of experts to prepare a series of popular pamphlets on economic questions. The foreign Policy Association is popularizing international questions. Organizations like the League of Women Voter* are conducting study classes more largely attended than ever before. There is every indication that we have not only a deep popular interest in political questions, but a more intelligent interest than ever before—a desire to know the facts, without the hokum

ROADS Business Man Will Breakfast in New York and Lunch in San Francisco When Giant Planes Take to Stratosphere. BY DAVID DIETZ Scripps-Hoivard Science Editor air transports will whiz through the stratosphere with double the speed of present planes. They will cross from New York to San Francisco between breakfast and lunch. Passengers will ride comfortably in sealed cabins equipped with oxygen tanks. A great “herring bone” network of airlines will cover the nation. Short branch lines will feed longer branches. These in their turn will feed transcontinental lines which will

make only one or two stops from Coast to Coast. The air will be divided into a three-di-mensional lattice-work of roadways with definite levels for planes moving in different directions and furnishing different types of service. A block system, accomplished by means of radio beacons and beacon lights will divide these sky roads into blocks precisely as the semaphore system of a railroad does with the rails.

FIRST OF A SERIES

Traffic control of the air will be so perfected that it will be possible to know at a given instant the position of every plane off the ground. Small planes will be capable of vertical landings on building tops. Privately owned planes will be almost as common as the highest priced automobiles of today. These are some of the things visioned for the next decade by the

man in America who is in the best position to know, Eugene L. Vidal, director of the Bureau of Air Commerce of the United States Department of Commerce. In fact, some of them will be realized within the next year or two. , For they are things which Mr. Vidal and his associates in the Bureau of Air Commerce are already working on with the active co-operation of the great commercial air lines, manufacturers, and the important institutions devoted to aeronautical research. RAPID STRIDES MADE T TOW rapid this progress of aviation has been is symbolized by the fact that 10 years ago these things would have been regarded as the visionary dream of some no velist. Only an H. G. Wells would have dared suggest them. Today, they are being seriously discussed at conferences in New York and Washington. In some instances plans have reached the stage where engineers and draftsmen are already working upon details. There is every indication that initial conquest of the stratosphere by the airplane is very close at hand. The recent successful balloon flights into the stratosphere plus recent transcontinental flights with planes rising at times to the substratosphere, indicate that. Most recent of these flights was the record-breaking one of Howard Hughes, millionaire motion picture producer and sportsman. Hughes, the nephew of the author, Rupert Hughes, left Los Angeles on Jan. 14 in his low-winged Northrup monoplane. Just 9 hours, 27 minutes and 10 seconds later he landed at the Newark Airport. This flight represented a saving of more than 35 minutes upon the record of 10 hours, 2 minutes, 51 seconds, which Col Roscoe Turner established for the same flight on Sept. 1, 1934. Solution of the econoomics problems of a viasion lies in the development of the “herring-bone” type of network rather than a “cobweb” type, Mr. Vidal told me when recently I spent the day at his office in the Commerce Building in Washington. By a cobweb type he refers to a situation in which large towns are linked with air with other large towns, without reference to any unified plan. The result would be a tangled mass of lines with no

THIS CURIOUS WORLD + By William Ferguson voung y 111 UH/ ' ' SCOW -WORM, // f KNOWN ALSO AS THE. &L/A/&]y /. WO&A1, IS NOT A WORM AT /Yy/ I/ all; neither, is rr slow nor. 1 cl/ Jr BLIND./ ALTHOUGH IT LOOKS LIKE V L A SNAKE, IT REALLV IS A LIZARD. 'll ©HERE IS ONE DAV IN.EVEJ^.MONTTH _ A\\— H ON WftlCH the: MOON DOES'not I RISE, AND ANOTHER DAV ON WHICH IT DOES NOT SET/ > © I#J BY NEA SERVICE, INC,

The moon crosses the meridian on an average of 51 minutes later every day. It actually varies in retardation from 38 minutes to 66 minutes. If it rises at 11:30 p. m. one night, it will not rise at all the following day.

The Indianapolis Times

more system than exists in a tangled mass of cobwebs. The other type would have each main line and each principal branch line and each of a system of feeder lines, Just as small bones radiate in either direction in parallel lines from the backbone of a fish. “In this way,” Mr. Vidal says, “air service can be brought to thousands of small American cities which are now without it. A small branch line might require the service of only one pilot. He would make his flights in a small plane carrying only a few passengers. His flights would be timed so as to meet the larger planes on the main lines. “Such a feeder system would increase vastly the amount of air traffic in the nation and go a long ways toward solving the financial problems of aviation. DEFINITE LANES NEEDED “T AM certain that we will see this A sort of development well under way in the next few years.” The problems of air traffic and its control are under constant discussion by Mr. Vidal’s bureau and the

WASHINGTON, April 13. Some of Madam Perkins’ chickens are coming home to roost. Os all the executive departments, her Labor Department is the only one whose appropriation bill was slashed. The House ripped $200,000 out of it, with Chairman James Buchanan and Rep. Thomas McMillan, Democratic leaders of the House Appropriations Committee, taking particular glee in wielding the ax. Sole cause of their sudden zeal for economy was the grudge which Congress holds for the lone lady in the Cabinet. Miss Perkins’ feminine hauteur, her love of lecturing committee members, her lobbying last year to get the Social Security and Labor Relations Boards under her motherly wing, soured the good old-fashioned legislators on Capitol Hill. The sad thing is that several of the most valuable and efficient

MONDAY, APRIL 13, 1936

operations men and pilots of the airlines: non-scheduled commercial operators; the military services and private flyers—in fact, every phase of aeronautics that uses the Department of Commerce lighted and radio equipped airways. Government officials and commercial operators alike realize that such unification of traffic control as is* contained in the establishment of definite lanes for traffic in different directions and the division of these lanes into blocks, is absolutely necessary for the future of flying. The question of the development of airplanes suitable for private ownership is receiving much atten-

Washington Merry-Go-Round BY DREW PEARSON and ROBERT S. ALLEN

agencies cf the government—part of Miss Perkins’ department—are innocent victims of the feud. Os the $200,000 cut, $136,000 was taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and $26,000 from the Women’s Bureau. Both agencies are performing outstanding service and their loss of funds, if permitted to stand, would be disastrous. Senatorial friends of the two bureaus are determined to restore the cuts. a tt tt 'T'HE pink whiskers of J. Ham A Lewis are turning white, but there has been no change in the Illinois Senator’s sense of humor. When recent Senate debate turned to the subject of oleomargarine, Lewis rose with serious mien and declared: “Mr. President, may I be pardoned for saying that in one of those cases I was counsel; and may I add that before the Supreme Court I made an argument so commanding in logic, so powerful in eloquence and so persuasive in presentation that at the close of my argument the court decided the case for the other fellow without hearing from him.” tt tt tt THE Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to stand pat on a personal scrap which may develop with the President himself. Not long ago the SEC sent a notice of dismissal to Andy Ten Eyck, who had been Roosevelt’s secretary while Governor of New York. Andy appealed to Louey Howe, another Roosevelt secretary, who advised him to sit tight, that everything would be O. K. But the SEC has stuck to its first notice, which takes effect in a month. It remains to be seen what Roosevelt will do. tt tt tt IF THE city of Tallahassee had known in advance, it would not have let the daughter of the President of Brazil walk through its streets at 1 a. m. lugging her own suitcase, looking for a place to stay. But Senorita Alzira Vargas gave them no advance notice. In fs>ct, it was all a surprise to her. She was on a trip to get really acquainted with the United States. With her were three other Brazilian ladies—the wife, the daughter and the sister of Ambassador Aranha. In the town of Williston, Fla., their car broke down. Impatient to keep moving, the ladies took a public bus for Tallahassee. It was all a lark until they were dropped in Tallahassee at 1 a. m. Deserted streets, no taxi, no porter. They picked up their baggage and trudged single file down the main street. “But, anyway,” says Senorita Vargas, “we got to know the United States.”

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Stratosphere Planes of the Future With Sealed-in Cabins

tion from one of the divisions of the Bureau of Air Commerce, namely, the Development Section. Much hope is being placed upon the outcome of researches now under way. The problem of vertical landings, of course, at the present time, necessitates the use of some iesign of the autogyro or helicopter type. FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT MR. VIDAL views the future of aviation in America with complete optimism. “The two chief problems in the

ANEW book, written by a Cabinet member, will be tossed into the political melee just in time for the national convention. It will handle controversial subjects—with the gloves off. The author is mild-mannered, two-fisted Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture. Probable title —“Whose Constitution?” tt tt it '"pHE withdrawal of all Persian A diplomats from Washington as a result of Minister Djalal’s having been handcuffed for speeding by the Maryland police, is no great blow to the State Department. It is supposed to be a diplomatic secret, but the Persian minister who preceded Djalal was recalled for alleged dope smuggling. Mirza Davoud Khan, the gentleman in question, denied this. He claimed that one of his diplomatic assistants, Prince Firouz, had instructed a friend in Persia to mail the minister a package of opium, following which Firouz had tipped off United States customs inspectors. At any rate, when the minister was called in to open the package, there was the opium. So both he and the Prince were recalled. (Copyright. 1936, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)

GRIN AND BEAR IT + + by Lichty

. • !*M y rKW rmm Sr4Ku, laa. ">* ~ /

“Now step back, Abner, and let me see how it looks ”

field,” he told me, “are weather and economics. The weather problem should be solved completely in a very short time. “The airline airplane will fly through any weather now except the critical conditions which cause the formation of ice on wings and propellers. De-icers or ‘rubber boots’ are being used for the wings and a device was developed by the Bureau of Air Commerce in co-operation with the industry to prevent the formation of ice on propellers. “Problems connected with the landing of planes in bad weather are being overcome rapidly. “In similar fashion, the economic problems are being solved. Planes are now being designed which will carry more passengers and operate at higher speeds. “Revenues go up when more passengers can be carried. Higher speeds are cutting costs of maintenance and reducing fuel bills per mile and the rate of depreciation. “One of the great needs of the nation today is a greater number of airports. Improvements in some existing ports are also desirable. “It would help aviation a great deal if more ports could be obtained closer to cities. But this is, of course, a difficult problem. In some places, where cities are situated on lakes or rivers, it may be possible to use ‘shuttle’ amphibian planes between the airports and business districts. “It is also possible that shuttle services will be developed making use of vertically landing aircraft when thoroughly developed. This would make it possible, eventually, to land passengers directly upon the roofs of downtown office buildings. “In one experiment, not so long ago, two autogyros landed successfully upon the roof of an office building in Philadelphia.” TOMORROW—Charting the new air roads.

The regular Bridge Lesson will be found today on Page Six.

Second Section

Entered as Second-Class Matter at Postoffice, Indianapolis. Ind.

Fair Enough WESIBROOK PEGLER long research in the Old World I am beginning to get at the reasons for the great American bashfulness in the presence of wine. It is due to the enterprise of the glassware departments of the stores and the essays of professional connoisseurs who heave and swell and run their chubby fingers through their hair, recalling something which they had to drink in some gummy little omelette room with grit on the floor and coagulated egg on the plate at a country crossroads in Burgundy a long, long time ago. In the period of prohibition and the boom, when

every executive’s office and every suburban home contained a private pub, the designers of glassware took mischievous advantage of the American desire to beau fait. They invented special glasses for gin, jake, mule, corn, racket beer and Chablis, and we, in our earnest ambition to keep up with the second vice president of the firm in his Tudor mansion on the 100-foot lot at the corner of the subdivision, were constantly accumulating new shapes. There are cocktail glasses with Shakespearean mottoes and

Wagnerian figures painted on them. There were seidels adorned with the crests of Heidelberg, Leipzig and Munich. The highball, a modest slosh in its old, normal state, grew and grew until the survivors of the long and exhausting rebellion found themselves hoisting a glass the size of a pickle crock, which took two hands to lift and should have been mounted on rockers. tt tt tt Nation of Sniffers THE brandy glass got elephantisis and delirium tremens as well, for there came a time when people were immersing themselves head first up to their ears in an enormous schooner containing Noah’s Ark figures imprisoned in a hollow blister in the stem and sniffing the fumes instead of drinkthe substance. The wine glasses came in shapes and sizes which were socially compulsory. It was illegal to drink alcoholic beverages, but, far worse, it was a grave social error to drink one type of spot remover from a glass designed solely for another type. It will be admitted that if any one has a right to set the fashion in such matters it is the Frenchman, and I found him completely free of self-conscious-ness in the presence of things which are to drink. He will drink wine from a tin cup, a shaving mug or an old plug hat with entire ease, provided he takes any wine at all, and it has been a mild surprise to note that very often he waves the waiter away with the remark that he doesn’t touch the stuff. In Paris one day I lunched with Mr. Percy Noel, an American journalist, who has become propagandist for the farmers who raise and squeeze the grape and sell the consequences. His chief problem is to dispel the social and aesthetic splendors from which the juice of the grape now suffers and live down a reputation created by loving friends of wine who did their work too well. tt tt tt No Holds Are Barred MR. NOEL has given me an official document, a sort of police card, permitting self and one to drink red wine with the fish or sauterne with the bifstek, at my own expense, anywhere in the world. I may even drink wine after whisky or douse port over my cornflakes, for he says the rules are freestyle, governed only by the personal preference of the subject. On behalf of the growers in his grrst clientele, Mr. Noel deplores all arbitrary restrictions as to time, place, sequence, social conditions and the mood in which wine may be drunk. He invites his countrymen at home to dunk it, suck it out of a sponge, spray it home with an atomizer or drink it out of an old-fashioned tin growler, according to their individual taste. It would not surprise me to learn that behind his zeal for reform, Mr. Noel has a secret motive to sell some wine to Americans who have been hesitant customers because they were taught to think of wine, like the classics, as something too pretentious for the results it gives.

Gen. Johnson Says—

WASHINGTON, April 13.—Raymond Clapper reported recently that on a trip to New York he failed to hear any Wall Street observations on Roosevelt that were too hot to print. Instead, among some business executives he thought he detected a sort of nervous looking about for an entrance to the band-wagon. I don’t think that is quite correct. The tribe at the south end of Manhattan Island moves like minnows in a shoal—all together, all in the same direction, and on impulses it is sometimes impossible to define. Just now, the Wall Street crowd psychology is poisonous bitterness—hostility hotter than anything I have ever seen there. It may be an altogether different matter in a month, but just now Roosevelt is Satan unchained. Landon is the White Messiah. The Day of Deliverance is so close that some are ordering ascension robes. tt tt it THE? E boys are willing to jar loose “money for he ey” in almost any amount. Some groups behind .andon are so confident his nomination is in the bar that they are already making gestures toward i .sociations and leaders of economic groups, and s r wing the color of their coin. Lar ion’s organization is proceeding with astonishing speed—and on a post-convention basis. It stems out from Wall Street. With exceptions, business leaders—as distinguished from financiers —are nowhere near so sure. The Landon wish is father to the Landon hope with some oil companies, and other exceptions are obvious. But, as Clapper suggests, the restless thought in most business minds is: “We’re going to have to live almost five years with this guy Roosevelt. It might be good business to get in bed with him.” The trouble has been that, on both sides, the appoach and the pourparlers have been wretchedly handled—and by the wrong people. (Copyright, 1936, by United Feature Syndicate. Inc.)

Times Books

THERE is something both tragic and romantic about an anthology such as “The Valiant Muse,” edited by Frederic W. Ziv (Putnam: $2.50). This book is a compilation of poems by poets killed in the World War. Rupert Brooke is here, and Joyce Kilmer, and a great many more young Englishmen of whom you probably never heard. While much of the poetry is pretty thin stuff, it is impossible to approach it objectively. For the table of contents, listing the poets by name, has its “Killed in action, 1916,” “Died of wounds, 1918,” or “Died in prison camp, 1917,” after each name. It is a book of verse written on the very threshold of eternity: who could read it unmoved? Mcst of them looked back fondly to their England, and tried to forget the war. They wrote of peaceful English towns, with rooks circling about chu.ch towers, with green cricket fields and misty hill ops and vineclad cottages. There is something unbearably poignant about their looking back to this setting from the reality of mud and pain and filth that was so soon to take their lives. (By Bruce Catton.)

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Westbrook Pegler