(See Cover)
When a certain train out of Chicago paused in Crown Point, Ind. last week, a tall, robust male of 47 who looked like a white-headed Indian chief descended to the station platform. With a moment-of-destiny air he announced to the reporters present: "I want to put my foot on Indiana soil."
Last week Indiana's soil, as distinct from its station platforms, was dotted with shocks of new-cut wheat. Young green corn was two to three feet high, and high-legged hogs stood up to their chocolate-colored rumps in lush, weedy meadows. Wild hollyhocks and roses splashed the fence lines with color, but nowhere bloomed a fairer flower for Hoosier politicians to gaze upon than their radiantly handsome master, Paul Vories McNutt, returning home to do some hoeing in his own back row. For Paul McNutt's Presidential hopes, carefully nursed through many a long winter, were at last up knee-high with the corn.
In Indianapolis, McNutt-for-President headquarters in the Claypool Hotel have been humming since last winter, in constant touch with the High Commissioner to the Philippines in Manila. That office and Paul McNutt's friends were ready with an efficiently stage-managed homecoming celebration. The timing was just about perfect. Now was the season for political bands, bunting, oratory, ballyhoo. Here was a candidate who could stride upon the national stage like a handsome Ulysses returning from labors abroad to hurl fear and respect into the hearts of Democracy's home-hugging suitors. It mattered not that the welcoming party was synthetic, that the Candidate's welcome to Indiana was rather warmer than its welcome to him. Now was beginning one of the earliest, boldest, most determined campaigns ever made for a major U. S. nomination. Paul McNutt, with truly towering modesty, declared:
"What happens to me is not important, but what happens to all of us is very important!"
Beef Trust. In 1928, two big men, Frank McHale and Bowman ("Bo") Elder journeyed to the American Legion convention in San Antonio. (McHale weighs 290 Ibs., Elder 310 Ibs.) Frank McHale was a Logansport lawyer who had played mighty football for Michigan (where his scrawny little brother in Sigma Chi, Frank Murphy, hero-worshipped him), and Bo Elder was the Legion's national treasurer. To these two it was important that they get the handsome, prematurely white-haired young dean of the University of Indiana Law School elected national commander of the Legion. They did so by shrewdly lining up the second-choice votes of other candidates' backers. They took Commander Paul McNutt back with them to the Legion's national headquarters in Indianapolis and then began planning to make him President of the U. S.
Paul McNutt had a Harvard law degree, a model record among educators as the youngest (34) dean of the Indiana Law School. During the War he became a major of Field Artillery, was never sent overseas. He could make a speech that lifted Legionnaires (or voters) right out of their seats. As national commander, he strode up & down the land making speeches, pumping hands, pounding backs, remembering names, flashing his magnificent smile.