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It really did not seem as though this mahout-picking would interest Mr. Butler very much. He was, after all, a silent, efficient, behind-the-scenes businessman from Massachusetts who had reached the head of the G. O. P. only because Calvin Coolidge understood and appreciated the political talents which Mr. Butler sharpened under their joint tutor, the late Senator Murray Crane of Massachusetts; and which served Calvin Coolidge so well during his state-politics days. With Calvin Coolidge leaving politics, Mr. Butler was a sort of Mark Hanna whose McKinley has passed on. He, New England cotton manufacturer, banker and tack man, has little in common with, and small hold upon, the four outstanding candidates for the Republican nomination:
Frank Orren Lowden of Illinois is a farmer. At the 1924 convention, Mr. Butler's blunder in urging Senator William Edgar Borah for Vice President was painfully emphasized by the rush with which Mr. Lowden's friend and candidate, Charles Gates Dawes, got the vote. Mr. Lowden, furthermore, was all ready last week to be besought on his farm by pilgrims in 5,000 motor cars, in whose mobilization Mr. Butler had not been asked to participate.
Charles Gates Dawes, hardly a friend of President Coolidge and never Mr. Butler's friend, was playing "two pluck one" for the nomination with his lifelong friend, Farmer Lowden, it being agreed between them that if Mr. Lowden's motorcade did not have horsepower enough to climb Nomination Hill, that Mr. Dawes should take command of it and try, with the high-test gas of his banking connection, to reach the summit.
Herbert C. Hoover, the efficiency man, has only an academic attraction for so professional a politician as Mr. Butler, and vice versa. Between skiled practitioners of different techniques there exists no more community of interest than between dentists and surgeons. Mr. Butler can painlessly draw the teeth of snarling minorities, but probably not with so uncompromising a one as the U. S. emergency man.
Charles Evans Hughes, whose dignity evokes a veneration rendering compromise unnecessary, would seem to be closest to Mr. Butler's heart, as he is to the heart of the Mellon machine (TIME, Sept. 26). But to get Mr. Hughes to accept the nomination, the convention's first Hughes ballot would have to be just about unanimous, and unanimity will be as conspicuously absent at the 1928 convention as it was present at the Butlerized convention of 1924.