ELECTIONS IN AMERICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18722, 30 May 1924, Page 7

ELECTIONS IN AMERICA.

PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE.

. LAFOLLETTE TO STAND.

DEMANDS OF FARMERS.

(Received 10.5 p.m.)

A. and N.Z.—Rsuter. WASHINGTON. May 28

; Senator R. M. Lafoilette has virtually announced that he will stand for the Presidency as an independent candidate unless the approaching Democratic . and Republican Conventions demonstrate that rthey can and will purge themselves of evil - influences. Mr. Lafoilette • denounced the Communists, and charges them with trying to control the Farmer-Labour Progressive Convention, to meet ,at St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 17.

With the adjournment of Congress scheduled for June 7, in order , to permit the members to attend the Republican Convention, the Senate Farm bloc to-day made it clear that the session cannot end without : agricultural legislation. The wheat-growing areas are avowedly bankrupt, and the land values are disappearing under taxation, and the heavy mortgages held by the banks are causing many of these institutions to- fail, because the mortgages . are : "frozen assets." Congress has. discussed various , measures to aid the farmers, but none has been adopted. - Members fear to return to their constituencies without according to agriculture some practical aid. , . ; <

Senator . Frank R. Gooding called at White House and informed the President, Mr. Calvin Coolidge, that something must be done. He said he hoped a compromise measure would be rushed through in the next ten days. The Republican leaders fear a defeat at the polls in November unless the crucial central and north-western States can be placated.

- Senator Robert Marion Lafollette, of Wisconsin, will, be 70 years old in June, said the New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in a recent despatch. The threat from his sick-bed at Washington that he will lead a Third Party and bolt from the Republican Convention this summer unless a Presidential candidate and a" platform satisfactory to him are chosen' has' thrown American politics into confusion. Mr. Lafollqtte is a Republican when and where he chooses, and Mr. Lafollette is a man all the time. In the great parity pack he runs as a lone wolf, and frequently takes the trail with his own small pack 'and wrests the quarry from the greater. , Acknowledging i'o leader, he endures no rival. The groups in both ; Houses of Congress ' which hold the balance of power between the nearlymatched Republicans and Democrats follow Mr. Lafollette. He leads the rebels of all organisations; ha is the trumpeter: of ail Eoci 1 discontent and the drummor of economic revolution. . He may . never occupy the White House, it is commented, , but he may become America's political dictator in a time when many are denouncing both (the. great existing parties.