POLITICAL NOTES

If you were elected to Congress, how and where would you learn what to do next? Would you walk up the Capitol steps, hand the doorman your card, ask to be announced? Would you stop Mr. Mellon on the street and say: "Oh, Mr. Secretary of the Treasury, what about this week's pay?" If you would make these and other mistakes you had best attend the school of William Tyler Page, Clerk of the House of Representatives, and instructor in Congressional etiquette.

On Friday night before Congress assembled, Mr. Page gathered his pupils, some 100 newborn members of the House of Representatives, in the Republican caucus room of the House Office Building. He taught them the rules of the House, how to do things, how to get things done --in short, all the technicalities and mechanics of how to be a Congressman.

"Magnavox" Johnson made his first speech at the capital at a luncheon given by the Washington Advertising Club. Said he:

"I want you to take a good look at me, and make sure that I have no horns. In the 16 years I have been talking, molding public opinion in the great Northwestern States, I have left the people something to think about. . . .

"I am not going to turn things topsy-turvy. I know I have a lot to learn and I shall feel my way, but I shall use every influence in my power to bring up to the table with 'big Business' the classes which it is feeding crumbs in the chimney corner. . . .

"Mr. Business Man, the farmers are coming up to the table and sit beside you. We, the farmers, the workers, are going to stand for things that will be best for all, but we are going to sit at the same table with you!"

By this time it is possible to predict with approximate accuracy the two chief points of "Magnavox's" speeches. He "repeats himself" on almost every public appearance and his favorite themes are:

1) "The newspapers and my enemies say I can't speak English. My wife is an American and she understood me when I proposed to her. I guess Senator Henry Cabot Large [Lodge] and the others will understand me in Congress."

2) "I'm not a radical. I don't want to hurt anyone. Don't be afraid of me. Mr. Business Man, I want the farmer and the laboring man to eat at the table with you. I don't want to kick you out."

The Oklahoma Senate passed a bill prohibiting the wearing of masks, the writing of anonymous letters. It struck out a portion of the measure which would have made officers of secret organizations keep membership lists to be produced at court order. Senators who did not like the change exclaimed: "It is a Klan bill, not an anti-Klan bill."

Not only politicians but photographers advance Presidential candidates. Senator James E. Watson, of Indiana, called on the President. Emerging from the White House he was met by a battery of cinema men. He obligingly posed, holding up his hat. "Throw it down," said the photographers. He threw it. Then he was told that they had just erased a ring on the sidewalk which they had industriously photographed. By a little piecing of the film the Senator seems to have done that which he did not do.

The historian may add a footnote to his chapter on the 68th Congress, to the effect that it brought to Washington Henry R. Rathbone, Representative at large from Illinois. His grandfather was Ira Harris, Senator from New York, and his father, General Rathbone, was seriously wounded in the defense of a President.*

Into the office of a Manhattan newspaper walked a gentleman who said that he was Carl Chapin Countryman, that the Republicans would sweep the country in 1924, that President Coolidge would be reelected, that C. C. Countryman would be elected Vice President. His principal reason for the last statement was that, like Calvin Coolidge, hi? own initials are all C's.

Mr. Countryman's other distinctions include teaching in Aurora, Ill., Racine, Wis., and Stoneville, N. C., two unsuccessful attempts to get into Congress, an executive secretariat of the "American League of Young Americans" and an unpublished novel, The New Regime. As a novelist he prefers the nom de plume of Fred C. Putnam, for fear that the publication of his novel would! injure his chances for the Vice Presidency. It is understood that the plot of his novel is as follows:

In 1960, Theodore Roosevelt III (now a lad in knickerbockers) is elected President for a third term. At the same time the U. S. Constitution is amended to make the executive, legislative, and judicial branches all one, and T. R. Ill has a deep design to make himself dictator.

The only man to prevent it is Charlemagne Putnam, "Superintendent of the International Police Force in the U. S." C. Putnam is a remarkable man. He has a habit of beating T. R. Ill at golf; he spends home-like evenings with his family devoted part to study periods and part to "an hour of social intercourse" before retiring; he has a cousin, Fred C. Putnam (the gentleman whose name Mr. Countryman prefers as nom de plume) who is his double; and he has a charming foster daughter, Frances.

Fred C. Putnam is equally remarkable. He is almost a rake. He has an ambition to become "the Father of the Races" by having a mistress and a family of children in every land. At the time of the story he has perfected the arrangement in only about 20 nations.

T. R. Ill has a plan to get rid of Charlemagne Putnam by having him appointed International Superintendent of the International Police. C. Putnam accepts, but by an intricate series of exchanges of identity with his cousin, he succeeds in being wherever he is not believed to be.

Finally Roosevelt III is about to be inaugurated before an assemblage including flag-draped statues of G. Washington and A. Lincoln. The oath of office is read and T. R. Ill denounces it, claiming absolute power. Then C. Putnam emerges dramatically from the base of the Lincoln statue. A follower of Roosevelt shoots. The bullet nicks Lincoln and ricochets off. The bullet embeds itself firmly and fatally in T. R. III.

Meanwhile Frances, the foster daughter, has repulsed a hypothetical T. R. IV because she will not have the blood of a Roosevelt flow in her children's veins. Finally she marries Fred. C. Putnam. He, in turn, renounces his intention of becoming a universal paterfamilias.

Three million dollars is the goal of the Harding Memorial Association (TIME, Oct. 22). One of the three millions will be invested in Government securities to provide an endowment, the remainder will be used for the creation of a mausoleum at Marion, purchase of the Harding home, erection of a building to house Hardingiana, the endowment of a Warren Gamaliel Harding Chair of Diplomacy and Functions of Government at "an existing university."

Former Senator J. S. Freylinghuysen, of New Jersey, is Acting President of the Association. Calvin Coolidge is Honorary President. John Hays Hammond, John Barton Payne, George B. Christian, Jr., Andrew W. Mellon and Charles M. Schwab are active.

"A second Mount Vernon!" the cry is raised. "Let it be Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence."

So saying, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation is setting about collecting a fund for buying Jefferson's home, now owned by ex-Congressman Jefferson Monroe Levy* of New York. Rallying in the organization for public preservation of Monticello are Bainbridge Colby, former Secretary of State, Governor Trinkle, of Virginia, John W. Davis, James W. Gerard, Alton B. Parker, William G McAdoo, Theodore Roosevelt, jr., Charles D. Hilles, Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson.

To the Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson wrote: "I wish that my means were as large as my enthusiasm in this matter. If they were, the purchase would be made in short order. There are men in America who have the means and who truly reverence the principles associated with the great name of Jefferson. I trust they will help with open-handed generosity."

'General and Mrs. Rathbone sat in the box in Ford's Theatre with Abraham Lincoln, when John Wilkes Booth entered and fired the fatal shot. General Rathbone was stabbed as he grappled with Booth.

*Jefferson Levy is not descended, directly or collaterally, from Thomas Jefferson. His uncle, the late Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, U. S. N., purchased Monticello.