National Affairs: Off The Sidewalks

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It was hard to tell whether Nominee Smith's Oklahoma City address had knocked any portion of his opposition to Smithereens. Correspondent Charles Michelson of the arch-Democratic New York World observed: "Nobody came up to the mourners' bench to express contrition for his illiberal views and to promise to lead a better life."

Detractor Straton spoke from the same platform the next night, called Tammany "organized political corruption," "this miserable monstrosity," "this hybrid impertinence," and "double-dog dared" the Nominee to debate him.

Detractors Owen and Cannon (Bishop James Cannon Jr., Methodist-Episcopal Church, South) arranged to counteract the Smith speech, beginning at next week's convention of the W. C. T. U. at Enid, Okla.

In Colorado. In Nebraska, the Nom inee had sounded like a professional vote-seeker. In Oklahoma he had sounded like a man outraged. Off the platform, how ever, he had said, and in Colorado he repeated, that neither Prohibition, nor Farm Relief, nor Intolerance was the paramount issue. "The big interlocking issue is the upbuilding and the prosperity of the country and the people." In Denver he took up the "interlocked" subject of Water Power. This time he sounded like an expert with convictions and a program.

He explained what water power is, in one-syllable words. He reiterated his stand for conservation of public power resources through Federal, Inter-State or State, ownership and control. He held up Nominee Hoover's brief water power statements as vague, inconclusive. He then proceeded to tie up the G. O. P. Nominee Hoover and power privateering in one big, compact bundle. His evidence consisted of Secretary of the Interior West's longtime connection with power privateers; the longtime privateer connections of the new Republican leader in New York State, H. Edmund Machold; and three close associates of Nominee Hoover who had joined the Power Lobby at Washington, whose national privateering propaganda has been exposed by the Federal Trade Commission. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt's warning that, "unless it is controlled, the history of the oil industry will be repeated in the hydraulic electric industry with results far more oppressive and disastrous for the people." He repeated his stand for Federal construction if necessary, interState control if possible, public ownership and control in any case, of a dam and powerhouse at Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River to serve the seven Colorado Basin States. He reiterated his stand for Federal retention and operation of the Muscle Shoals plant on the Tennessee River and in doing so took open issue with "President Coolidge himself."

His most provocative passage was when he pinioned Nominee Hoover's speech on Boulder Dam, delivered in August at Los Angeles (TIME, Aug. 27). The omission from that speech of any expressed preference between public and private control—the core of a ten-year controversy—was studied. Nominee Smith hailed Nominee Hoover as follows: