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The Republican Party, like many other U. S. institutions, depends a very great deal on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The old rule that Depression makes it easier to turn the rascals out has never yet been tested by a regime which has spent money like Franklin Roosevelt's. While deepening Depression should presumably help turn the political tide this year, it might not if the Administration turned on another huge spending program such as last week seemed a fairly likely prospect. Last week, Practical Politician Joe Martin's chief complaint was strikingly familiar: "You just can't tell what that fellow in the White House will do next."
Joe Martin, one of the eight children of a machinist of North Attleboro, Mass., got into politics in 1911, after working up from reporter to owner of the North Attleboro Chronicle (circ. 2,400). After three years each in the State House of Representatives and Senate, he later became executive secretary of the Republican State Committee, obliged Calvin Coolidge in 1922 by running the campaign that saved Henry Cabot Lodge's Senate seat by 7,000 votes. In 1924 Joe Martin managed a campaign for himself, got into the House by a 9,600 plurality. He has remained there ever since, running far enough ahead of his ticket to win by 20,000 votes in 1936, when Roosevelt carried his district. The Roosevelt 1936 landslide turned out in one way to be a boon for Joe Martin. It occasioned the defeat in Ohio's 22nd District of popular Chester C. Bolton, famed as the richest man in Congress, who had also been for four years Chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. This year, one of Joe Martin's assignments may be to restore Mr. Bolton to a seat in the House, and it is just within the realms of possibility that he will restore not only Mr. Bolton but enough other Republicans to give his party a House majority. In that case little Joe Martin, who talks with a down-East accent, lives in an unpretentious bachelor apartment at the Hay-Adams House, would presumably become Republican Floor Leader to succeed Bert Snell who would move up to the Speakership. No one expects anything of this sort to happen this year. But how close Joe Martin can come to making it happen is, despite all the palaver of its more famed idealists, the G.O. P.'s main preoccupation for the present.
*Mr. Hoover's one specific proposal was that Europe's War debts to the U. S. be used for exchanging international scholarships. *Republican elephant like the Democratic donkey first appeared in cartoons by famed Thomas Nast.