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The late, lion-maned Robert Marion La Follette once lectured on Hamlet at Ann Arbor, Mich. As he sonorously analyzed the Ghost Scene, across the stage behind him suddenly spooked a figure. It was not the Ghost. It was a young male embodiment in long knitted underwear. The audience guffawed. Old Bob did not see the apparition and the audience recognized it only as some University of Michigan fraternity neophyte. This year that ghost is the prime champion of human derelicts in U.S. politics, and he is recognized as Sheridan Downey, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in the great and screwy State of California.
Sheridan Downey was raised from Virginia stock in Laramie, Wyo. He returned there after learning the law at Ann Arbor. He tried to reform Laramie politics and, when he failed, joined his brother in lucrative law practice (mostly land cases against the Interests) at Sacramento, Calif. He stuck to the law—with a side-trip in 1919 to hunt monkeys in India—until 1934 when his hobby of reading economics led him to the Pasadena study of Upton Sinclair.
Author Sinclair had just launched EPIC* and Sheridan Downey—though he did not claim to be another Old Bob La Follette—had contracted a social itch, had to do something about Depression I. He and Upton Sinclair sat down, talked for seven days. No stenographer took down their scintillating exchanges, but Downey says now that he disagreed with Sinclair's absolute faith in production-for-use, clung then to the profit system, blamed excess savings† rather than excess profits for drying up the economic well. He says he just sympathized with Author Sinclair's objectives. But he agreed to run for Lieutenant Governor on the EPIC ticket.
One of Sheridan Downey's campaigning topics was old age pensions. The yearning throngs of oldsters who were beginning to cluster around Dr. Francis E. Townsend heard him lecture, by invitation, at their meetings. Mr. Downey liked the Doctor's monthly-spending provision—to speed trade velocity. When EPIC crashed, Sheridan Downey became attorney for the Doctor and his Plan. The Doctor's subsequent flirtations with Father Coughlin, Gerald Smith (inheritor of Huey Long's "Share the Wealth" movement) and Representative William Lemke cooled Attorney Downey. He and the Doctor drifted apart.
But Sheridan Downey had been bitten hard by the bug of social uplift and his activities had been noticed by politicians. These men, plus Sheridan Downey's middle-aged social inspiration, plus the Moon, have made him a significant character in the transitional political year of 1938.