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Promising a complete farm program as soon as the Supreme Court had disposed of AAA, Publisher Knox last week submitted to Republican Senators a tentative platform plank which proposed to pay farmers $6 per acre for 50,000,000 acres to be withdrawn from cultivation for 15 years. Cried one anonymous Senator: "Worse than the AAA!"
Though Illinois' Republican Central Committee had publicly urged him to seek the nomination, Publisher Knox was also last week waiting to fire his formal starting gun. As revealing as Candidate Landon's boyhood pictures was Candidate Knox's action in removing his semi-invalid, childless wife from long obscurity in New Hampshire to a "winter home" in Washington. Wall Street odds against the Knox nomination: 9 to 5.
Against the nomination of Senator William E. Borah, odds were 7 to 5. In the latest poll of the American Institute of Public Opinion, published last fortnight, Senator Borah stood second only to Governor Landon in the list of favored candidates. Borah boomlets were springing up in Ohio, Illinois, California. In the first of a series of radio addresses the 70-year-old Idaho statesman sounded off with equal vigor against New Deal experiment and Republican reaction, establishing himself as a middle-of-the-road progressive chiefly bent on destroying monopoly.
Of the two indispensables for every Presidential aspirant, Senator Borah has always had a plethora of publicity, a paucity of money & organization. Distrusted by GOPartisans for his habitual insurgency, he has a following that is largely the scattered, idealistic kind which attaches to any great personality but counts for little at the polls. That he means to have a large hand in picking the nominee and shaping the GOPlatform is undoubted. But having seen Senator Borah flirt with the Presidency every four years for the last generation, experienced political observers are disinclined to begin taking him seriously now. Wrote Pundit Frank Kent in the Baltimore Sun: "The Borah candidacy is not genuine, the Borah sentiment is not real, and the Borah 'boom' has neither substance nor sincerity. It will not get anywhere, and is not intended to get anywhere."
Since George Washington no man has accepted the U. S. Presidency reluctantly or left it gladly. Therefore speculation as to the intentions of Herbert Hoover last week seemed so much waste space. To the public Mr. Hoover had so far revealed only a bright smile, a new literary style and an unremitting distaste for his successor's personality and policies. But in 60 days he had twice swung across the continent, twice let fly major barrages at New