(5 of 5)
Happy Chandler on the road is a sweating, laughing, singing, handshaking, baby-patting dervish. His speeches last only 45 to 60 minutes (as against 90 minutes for Mr. Barkley's). He calls first names and nicknames of people in the crowd, calls oldsters "Dad" and "Mom," old Negroes "Uncle." His sound truck plays him into the towns with Happy Days Are Here Again and he opens meetings by singing My Old Kentucky Home, is ever ready to oblige with Sonny Boy, Mother Machree or any other song the crowd calls for. Riding between towns he talks incessantly and watches for white horses, which he considers lucky. For each one he sees he licks his thumb and stamps it into the palm of his hand.
Turning Franklin Roosevelt's remarks about him to his own advantage—without quarreling with Franklin Roosevelt—was Happy Chandler's chief concern last week. Typical Chandlerisms:
"The President said, 'I have no doubt but that Chandler would make a good Senator.' What more do you want?"
But his basic appeal is brutually direct. To smalltown bigwigs partial to Barkley he will say straight out, "By God, Jim, you've got to vote for me or I'll make it tough for you!"
To people wearing Barkley buttons he walks up and, ripping off the button says: "You can't do that to me! I'm the best Governor you ever had!" That still left Happy Chandler under a Roosevelt handicap. While he told opponents, "You can't do that to me!" Barkley was telling his opponents: You can't do that to Franklin Roosevelt.
*A dignified judge. no kin to New York's redheaded, magisterial Racing Commissioner Herbert Bayard Swope. *In 1933 Mr. Chandler, thinking his mother dead, found her in Florida alive, well and remarried, took her to Kentucky to see her grand-children.