U.S.A PRESIDENCY

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1928, Page 12

U.S.A PRESIDENCY

HOOVER, OR SMITH?

For an American possessing even the most cursory knowledge of transAtlantic peoples it is at once apparent how bewildering and even baffling must be the circumstances and significance of our present national election. This confusion arises primarily, I believe, from the fact that on all -the issues which divide Europeans, and supply the bases for political controversy and party groupings abroad, the parties and the people of the United States are in substantial agreement (writes Frank H. Simonds, the well-known American publicist, in the London “Sunday Times.”) Whether Smith or Hoover succeeds Coolidge our foreign policy will remain unchanged, tariff modifications will be slight, and in the domestic field there will be no real change in what may, perhaps, be called social policy. Not only do we lack a Right and a Left, but also there is no real ■economic break between Republicans and Democrats on any class issue, and if capital in the east and west tends to a Republican alignment, in the south the sectional conditions compel all Conservatives to be Democrats.

It follows quite naturally that our presidential campaigns most frequently resolve themselves into one of two sorts of contests. They are either a clash of personalities pure and simple,' or are dominated by the. attacks upon the party in power for inefficiency or dishonesty. In a word, we most often vote either for a personality or against a party. Of course, it also follows ■that we not infrequently vote against a strong man who has offended rather than for his opponent, who may be by contrast insignificant.

In the main, the Democratic Party, speaking nationally, exists to furnish an available alternative. Politically Republican by a decisive majority the nation preserves a Democratic party as a machine to employ. against the dominant party whenever its failures or offendings arouse popular indignation. A Democratic victory in a national election must be predicated upon one of two things, either a complete and scandalous Republican failure oi* a division within the Republican Party which splits it wide open. Of the two Democratic Presidents elected since the Civil War, Grover Cleveland owed his triumph to the former circumstance, and Woodrow Wilson his success to the latter.

To-day the puzzling circumstances about the impending campaign are precisely the facts that the Republican Party has, on the whole, laid itself open to no inconsiderable indictment on the. moral side, and at the same dime finds itself divided over the agrarian problem to an equally considerable extent. What no one can now .calculate is whether either or both of ;these traditional causes of Republican defeat will be sufficiently potent this jyear to produce a repetition of the Cleveland and Wilson episodes. Everyone would probably agree that these two factors will cost the Republicans many votes, but no one can say Whether the loss will be sufficient to elect Smith.

PROHIBITION AND RELIGION.

The same uncertainty exists as to

the effect of Prohibition. There has never been a real open popular test of the question. The assumption is that a majority of the country is Dry. On the- other hand the majority in the cities is certainly Wet, as is the majority in a number of States whose votes are of vital importance. Smith might lose thousands of votes in Western and even Southern States on

the liquor issue and yet be successful because he had picked up relatively few Republican Wet votes in certain pivotal States. As to the religious issue, it is again an incalculable factor, but on the whole undoubtedly exaggerated. The, single time the appeal to prejudice against Roman Catholicism was made in a presidential campaign, namely, in the Blaine-Cleveland campaign, Blaine, whose champion rashly uttered the famous phrase, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” was defeated, and it is commonly believed that the result, which was decided by barely a handful of votes in New York State, was the consequence of the anger of Republican Roman Catholics. Underneath all else in this present American campaign there 'is a fact which is exceedingly difficult to translate but not less real. Put badly, one might say that in a certain fashion Herbert Hoover represents the conception of an efficient America, and Al Smith the idea of a human America. Hoover is beyond all else the man of machines, Smith is a man whose political fortunes have been made by his knowledge of human nature.

Hoover’s business life has been spent in making the machine run smoothly and efficiently, while Smith’s public life, which has been almost uninterrupted since he cast his first vote, has been occupied in looking after the adjustment of the machine to the man. Hoover has abolished economic waste, but Smith has furthered humane social legislation. Hoover certainly does not represent the capitalistic idea in any sense which involves class warfare. But at bottom Hoover is a

scientist, and Smith a humanist, using r.hat term in a very limited, and perhaps, inexact sense.

It would be no exaggeration to say that not only has Hoover one of the greatest executive minds of our own time on the economic and industrial side, but also that he is even more certainly the greatest man of his sort yet to hold high office. He is an exceedingly representative example of a new idea in the world. But by contiast it would be no more an exaggeration to say that since Abraham Lincoln, no man has quite demonstrated the instinctive understanding of the American masses which Smith has disclosed.

If Smith is elected—and I believe he has at least a. better chance than would appear from mere professional judgment—it seems to me he will owe his victory very largely to the double sense of the masses, that he understands them, and that he can express them, together with a concomitant and coherent reaction, against the idea of puiely mechanical and impersonal efficiency To a degree one might perfiaps describe the campaign as the struggle between the democratic ideals ol Abraham Lincoln and of Henry Ford. J