NEXT PRESIDENT

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6438, 15 January 1924, Page 8

NEXT PRESIDENT

AMERICA’S CONTEST

COLLIDGE AND McADOO MAY GET NOMINATIONS

PROSPECTS DISCUSSED

The political situation in the United States, as elsewhere, is like the theatre programme, “subject to change without notice.” With this invariable reservation,.,-it is possible to say that President Coolidge will be the candidate of *the Republican Party in the election in 1924.

If it were not for one unknown factor, it might be added with equal confidence that his Democratic opponent would be Mr William Gibbs McAdoo, husband of Mr Woodrow Wilson’s favourite daughter, former Secretary of the Treasury, DirectorGeneral of Railroads during the period of State operation, and now a resident in California. The unknown factor is his father-in-law.

Since March 4th, 1921, when he left the White House to drive down Pennsylvania avenue to the Capitol with his successor, Mr Wilson has lived in a quiet house in “S” street, in the north-west district of Washington. His pale and tragic face is sometimes seen, and always saluted, as he drives through the streets and the parks of an afternoon, and his occasional appearance at the theatre will rouse a cheer. When his birthday comes round, 'his admirers gather before his house, 1 and he emerges on the arm of a negro attendant to make a speech of thanks and to reiterate his belief that America will some day put away materialism and step out beyond her borders to share the burdens of the world.

POLICY THE SAME

In what he has said and written—it is not much—there is nothing to show that he has moved so much as an inch from the position he held when he gave up the Presidency. He is for the League of Nations, and for full and unquestioning American membership in it; he is for the bold acceptance of responsibility in the world affairs as the price a self-re-specting nation must pay for the advantages it seeks. The stubborness and the sheer political audacity which were his in the years of his Presidency are still his; affliction has broken his body, but has not tamed his spirit. Mr Wilson has not changed, and it is perhaps this fact which is turning the minds of an increasing number of his fellow-countrymen towards him. In the year of the amazing election of 1920 he was hated as no American of our time has been hated. Sixty million Americans then voted for Harding, not because they were for Harding, but because they were against him, and against anything that spoke in his name., The sentiment was as cruel as it was unreasoning, but the man against whom it was poured out neither whimpered nor weakened. He went quietly to his retreat, and there, with his wife, he has remained.

MR McADOO AND THE LEAGUE

To-day the heat and the bitterness have died down, save in the hearts of a few. The rehabilitation of Woodrow Wilson in the esteem of his countrymen has v gone on, imperceptibly but surely, in the last thirty months, until to-day he wields an influence which only the most passionate of his disciples could have believed possible when he left office. He is no, longer a name to frighten Republican children with, and in the Democratic Party he has power sufficient, not to name a candidate of his own Choosing, but immensely to weaken the chances of the man he should oppose. Will he support his son-in-law? Since there is a doubt that he will, there is also a doubt that Mr McAdbo will secure the Democratic nominate ion. If it is rigid, unbending advocacy of the League of the whole League and nothing but the League, that Mr Wilson would have in a candidate, then Mr McAdoo will hardly fill the bill. He is immensely clever, he is bold, he is consummately a politician, but he is not a champion of the causes he considers lost. Just at present, with the enthusiastic support of the wealthy and equally astute Mr Bernard Baruch, he is applying himself to the cause of the wheat farmers. If he can persuade them that he is the Moses to lead them out of their wilderness —and there is no reason why he should not, while the Republicans seem so impotent—he will become a figure indeed. His record as Director-General of Railroads made him popular with organised railway labour, and he believes that he will have its powerful and well drilled organisation behind him. There are nine months to run before the nominating convention is held,

and his strength is growing daily. Mr Wilson, however, in the quiet house in “S” street, has not yet expressed an opinion of his son-in-law’s fitness.

UNDERWOOD AND JOHNSON

There are other candidates, of course. There is Senator Oscar W. Underwood, of Alabama, able, forceful, popular, an adroit leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate. He returned from Europe not long since with the message that for its own sake America must help that stricken continent. It was just about this time that Senator Hiram Johnson, of California, landed with the warning to his countrymen that all the evils of Pandora’s box would be loosed upon this land unless it held to its isolation —and the warnings perhaps offset the message. Then Italy seized Corfu, and Senator Underwood drew in his horns a little. The story that he recanted his faith in the League of Nations he has denied, but it seems that he is a little troubled as to the future of that institution.

PARTY PROSPECTS

Mr John W. Davis, formely Ambassador to the Court of St. James’, is, as the newspapers say, “prominently mentioned.” He has assumed the practice of the law, however, and is counsel for certain great corporations, which is generally considered to make his candidacy undesirable, if not impossible. What special form of sin is implicit in the legal representation of a great corporation it would be difficult to say, but it has become axiomatic that men whose livelihood is gained as Mr Elihu Root and Mr Davis gain theirs cannot be elected President. It is a tribute to the brilliance and the flawless integrity of Mr Davis that even the axiom cannot entirely remove him from the list of possibilities. There are yet others, chief among them being Mr John Hassin Clarke, who resigned from the Supreme Court of the United States to devote the remainder of his days to the advocacy of the League of Nations; and Senator S. M. Ralston, of Indiana, generally regarded as a likely “compromise candidate”—a man, that is to say, upon whom the choice might fall if a deadlock occurred in the Convention. Any one of those named is a possible choice, and any Democrat who runs is a possible President, though with less chance of election than he would have had if President Harding had lived.

EVEN CHANCES

The fact is, though it seems ungracious to say it, that the death of Mr Harding has given the Republican Party a new lease of life. His administration had earned, justly or unjustly, a great deal of dissatisfaction, since it was believed to be responsible for the economic situation. The election of 1922, which reduced the Republican majority in the Congress almost to the vanishing point, was the expression of this dissatisfaction. Now President Coolidge comes to office free—at least for the present—of any responsibility for conditions not of his making, and guiltless of any act which his opponents of the Democratic Party or his rivals in the Republican ranks can exploit to his disadvantage. His party must nominate him, unless one of two things happens; that the Radical Republicans should take control of Congress and force a party split, or that his administration of affairs should be so patently a failure as to unfit him for leadership. . Three months ago the predictions were all of a Democratic victory in 1924; to-day the wiseacres say that the result is an even chance.