A Seat in the Senate?

A seat on the New York Stock Exchange, good for a lifetime, costs about $475,000. A very comfortable chair of special learning at a University can be endowed with $100,000. A seat at the Metropolitan Opera for six seasons can be had for $1,188. What is a fair and equitable price to pay, in a political campaign, for a seat in the U. S. Senate, good for six years?

Last week Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick appeared before the Senate Campaign Expenditure Committee to reveal that she had spent, almost entirely out of her own pocket, $252,572 to win the Republican senatorial nomination in Illinois in last month's primary against Senator Charles Samuel Deneen (TIME, April 21). Senator Deneen's expenditures, he said, were $24,493. Tapping a file of vouchers two inches thick, Senate Nominee McCormick cited as examples of her expenses: printing, $26,000; mailing, $20,881; county organizations, $107,518; postage, $12,432; "colored department," $8,090; newspaper advertising, $15,654.

The expenditure of a quarter-million dollars did not put Mrs. McCormick into one of the red leather chairs in the Senate. It simply gave her the privilege of making a formal bid for it in the November election. Between now and then another campaign must occur which will undoubtedly require many more thousands of dollars to win.

To guide North Dakota's Senator Nye, chairman of the Senate committee, in scrutinizing the details of Mrs. McCormick's expenditures, there are no set rules on how much a Senate candidate should or should not spend for a seat. The size of a State, the intensity of the campaign, the breadth of appeal generally control the outlay. Obviously it costs less in the aggregate to reach Nevada's 32,000 voters than New York's 4,250,000, though the cost-per-vote is often much higher in small States than in large.

The Senate seated but severely condemned Truman Newberry for spending $195,000 in Michigan in 1918 to beat Henry Ford. After the 1926 primaries it ousted Frank Leslie Smith of Illinois for spending $458,792 (a large part of which came from Public Utilitarian Samuel Insull) and William Scott Vare of Pennsylvania for spending $780,000.

Almost apologetically Mrs. McCormick told the committee:

"I regard this inquiry as extremely important in that it offers a basis for legislation which would provide specific regulation of campaign expenditures--a law is needed, both in the public interest and in justice to the candidates themselves. . . . Senatorial committees [must use] their own judgment and discretion in determining how much a candidate may spend. . . . In my campaign I had to make an appeal to approximately 3,000,000 voters.* . . . Simply the mailing of one letter each to all the voters of Illinois would cost $120,000."

*An error. In her Republican primary campaign Mrs. McCormick appealed to the 1,700,000 Illinois registered Republican voters, not to the State's 1,300,000 registered Democrats.

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