Touch and Go (7 page)

Let's go back a bit. It is summertime, 1924, and the living is fairly easy. I am the guest at a resort in South Haven, Michigan. My mother insisted that I was suffering from something called rheumatic heart fever and that fresh air of the lake would help. As well as the good food. In fact, the favorite—the only—question my fellow guests put to one another was: “What's for dinner?”

For some reason I cannot determine, even now, at ninety-four, what the attraction those radio voices had for me was. My interest in this convention simply happened because it was the same year that Senator Bob LaFollette was running for president on a Progressive
Party ticket. Poetically enough, Burton K. Wheeler was his running mate. It seems I was interested in how major parties ran things. While my contemporaries were outside in the hot sun splashing cold water at one another, I was glued to the slightly worn easy chair, mesmerized by those orotund voices. Remember now, this had been going on for some time—in fact, for my whole vacation. It didn't bother me at all. It was in the nature of relief. Were it not for that delegate from Alabama and Tom Walsh, I'd be splashing water at another twelve-year-old and listening to my elders discussing their disappointment with the lunch they had just ravished, demolished, and consigned to their insatiable guts.

Intermittently, a well-appointed matron, for whom the least deadly of the seven sins was gluttony, would freight her way toward my throne. “You on a fast or something? If you don't eat, you die.” I thanked her for her prescription as my attention wandered back to the Atwater-Kent and the prosecutorial voice of Tom Walsh.

Why did the contest last so long? There was a deadlock: William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law and the secretary of the treasury, versus Al Smith, the popular governor of New York. That Smith was the first Catholic ever put up for the presidency was the Roman candle that set off all those fireworks. The KKK was going crazy, white-sheeted all over the state of Indiana and a number of other border states.

The Teapot Dome scandal didn't amount to much in the campaign. It had happened during the administration of Warren Harding.
⁸

Calvin Coolidge, VP under Harding, did not appear involved. He was, in fact, not involved in much of anything. Thus, he had nothing to say. He is best remembered in history for his memorable decision to distance himself from the 1928 race for his party's nomination. What school child doesn't remember Cal Coolidge's proclamation: “I do not choose to run”?

I shall always be that twelve-year-old remembering Tom Walsh, of the inflexible spine, who refused to “cool things down a bit.” He saw that the people who picked others' pockets paid the price. Imagine how Tom Walsh as attorney general would have pinned down the Wall Street wise men, the Babsons, the others, and their waywardness—if not obtuseness—in impotently watching the free market fall so freely.

After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: What had really caused the Depression? The hearings were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. You read a transcript today and find them so unaware. The leading industrialist and bankers . . . they hadn't the foggiest notion.

HOW CAN I FORGET an encounter with one of those Wall Street wise men? He was the Alan Greenspan of his day, though that may be going a bit too far. Sidney J. Weinberg, a senior partner of the Goldman Sachs Company, had served as an industrial adviser during the Truman and JFK administrations. Our conversation was in 1968.

OH, I ALMOST FORGOT. There was a third-party candidate. Here was one campaign in which Gene Debs did not participate. In 1920, he polled a million votes while still in Atlanta Penitentiary. There was the last of his five runs at the presidency.

Fighting Bob LaFollette was the Progressive Party candidate in 1924, for the job over which McAdoo and Smith were battling all through my “vacation.” Cal Coolidge was, of course, the Republi-cans'
mute candidate. As the spiritual goes, “He didn't say a mum-blin' word.” He didn't need to. He was in.

There was my unforgettable meeting with ex-Senator Burton K. Wheeler. He had been Bob LaFollette's running mate on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924, the year of the convention that never ended. Remember, this was before his bitter contretemps with FDR concerning Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court and his turn to the right. Remember, Wheeler had been the eloquent and bellicose crusader, along with Tom Walsh, against the Montana Big Boys.

Fast forward. 1978. Here I am in Washington, in the office of ex-Senator Wheeler. He, as is true of many former Washington politicos, had pursued a private law practice. The toll of the long years since 1924 revealed themselves in his weariness and wrinkles. His fire, though considerably banked, was still burning.

He knew I had been involved with the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace in 1948, thirty or so years before. He knew that his daughter, Frances, and her husband, Alan Saylor, had suggested this meeting. They had been devoted Henry Wallace workers. Wheeler at first appeared at loose ends, a touch lonely and out of it. He seemed to come alive again remembering his run with Bob LaFollette.

I remember telling Wheeler how my father and I had heard him speak at the Ashland Auditorium, about three blocks from our rooming house. It was a Sunday afternoon. And, he, Wheeler, to a twelve-year-old, was Demosthenes and Abe Lincoln rolled into one. And my father bought one of the gilded busts of Bob LaFollette that were selling at five bucks a copy. Behind that desk, Wheeler became a different man; the glow replaced the glower. He obviously got a kick out of his daughter and son-in-law still fighting for the Progressive cause.

I remember some of the senator's tales out of school. Wheeler was on a roll. Corruption, especially being bought off by the corporate biggies, was a natural political syndrome. Our public servants
had become the private servants of our CEOs. As I recall, Senator Wheeler was his younger self again, acting out those old-time encounters.

“Remember J. Ham Lewis of your state, Illinois? He grabbed me in the Senate cloakroom. Remember him?”

Of course. We called him Dr. Brush. He was my senator, and he had slaughtered Ruth Hanna McCormick, the colonel's cousin, in the senatorial race of '34. “Do you realize, Senator Wheeler, J. Ham was a dead ringer for Yellow Kid Weil, the master con artist?” As Louis Sullivan was Lieber Meister to Frank Lloyd Wright, the Yellow Kid was role model to all the imaginative youngbloods who wouldn't hurt a fly, though they would skillfully relieve “the greedy who had too much.”

J. Ham and the Kid were each in a class by himself, well dressed. Oh, sure, there was Jimmy Walker, the one-time mayor of New York, and the Prince of Wales, who, with his great love, Wally Simpson, didn't think Hitler was quite that bad. In any event, I'll try to describe the Yellow Kid, and it could describe as well, spats and all, the august senator: a well-trimmed Van Dyke beard, a pince-nez, a pearl stickpin in a flash of tie, shoes that were far above Florsheim in style and value. Probably Italian. Each of them was possessed of a panache none of our young models in
Gentlemen's Quarterly
could touch.

A long time went by before I ran into the Yellow Kid. Dog days for him. I knew it because I spotted a slight egg stain on his once-expensive jacket. It was on a streetcar that we met. His eyes were watery, he appeared weary; yet he was the same articulate, persuasive Yellow Kid Weil.

I'm still in Burton K. Wheeler's office and he's still, in memory, back in the cloakroom with J. Ham.

There was a distinct difference between Yellow Kid Weil, Wheeler's fashion-plate colleague, and other political figures. The Kid had only one boss—himself. His credo was a simple one: “I am an educator. I educate only those who can afford to pay for their education. They are either rich widows on an expensive cruise or well-heeled men in finance who are by their very nature greedy. They want more. Always. As a matter of fact, I once took Andrew Mellon's brother for half a million. It involved a silver mine in Colorado.”

Remember that easy summertime of 1924, when I appeared to be in a catatonic state, bound to that Atwater-Kent and the never-ending dull, dull, dull convention—aside from the wondrous Tom Walsh's sternly comforting voice. The hard fact is that I was really invited to join the magic circle of politics by The Man himself. Non-Chicagoans, young ones, or those who suffer from Alzheimer's when it comes to politics, may need a guide. The Man to whom I'm
referring was not the mayor. He was Bill Dawson, the congressman from the First Congressional District. It was an overwhelmingly African American community, whose votes were always delivered by The Man, something like nine to one Democratic.

This was pre–Martin Luther King Jr. time and Adam Clayton Powell had the idea that he was The Man. I'm sorry, he was the second-most powerful of African Americans. Bill was the most powerful of all straw bosses. As overseer of his people he won all sorts of pittances for them, while in the meantime serving Mr. Charlie very well indeed. He was in a sense the ideal overseer. The small favors offered to African American voters were more matters of gratuity than of gratitude.

Because of the sudden illness of an old acquaintance of mine, I was chosen to introduce Dawson to a liberal white middle-class audience. I remember the occasion well. I was in good form, and my debating experience and mastery of ambiguity released a flow of eloquent bushwa. Had Tom Paine heard himself so quoted, he'd have suffered a case of carbuncles far worse than those he did have.

Of course, I called upon the heritage of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Madame C.J. Walker. I introduced Bill Dawson shortly after mentioning the others. It was done so casually. Of course, the guest of honor, The Man, felt honored indeed. Said he to me, “Son, you should be in politics.” You see, Bill Dawson recognized a con artist immediately.

My ill friend, an active African American, was deeply appreciative. He actually convinced me I had done the right thing. What the right thing was, I'm still trying to figure out. The fact is: I
coulda
been in Chicago politics. God, I
coulda
been a contender.

 

 

ONWARD AND UPWARD. There was a slight family split. A selling of the rooming house was in order. I accompanied my mother for a high school semester in New York. It was there that Meyer briefed
me for the first month I'd missed at Morris High School in the Bronx. He was, hands down, the best teacher I ever had.

I remember one young teacher at Morris. His name was Bernard Drachman, a dead ringer for Robert Louis Stevenson. Tubercular; long, struggling mustache; and quite wonderful. I still remember a border ballad he taught—Sir Patrick Spens. Years later, as a disk jockey, I played a Burl Ives version. And damned if I didn't remember half the words.