End's End

During Depression three U. S. politicians, billing themselves as the poor man's friend, went to town. Today one of them, Franklin Roosevelt, is in the White House. Two of them, Huey Long of Louisiana and Floyd B. Olson of Minnesota, are in their graves. Last fall in Minnesota Governor Olson's Farmer-Labor Party pulled through the election as it did during his lifetime but on that occasion it had the advantage of riding on Franklin Roosevelt's coat tails. Last week for the first time Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party, under the leadership of bespectacled Governor Elmer A. Benson, went to the polls without the aid of either of the gifted leaders who heretofore have aided it. Minneapolis was holding an election for Mayor.

Republicans had nominated a case-hardened politician, George E. Leach, Mayor of Minneapolis from 1921 to 1929, whose administration was marked by gambling scandals. Farmer-Laborites, after a split among themselves which eliminated their present Mayor, Thomas E. Latimer, nominated Kenneth Clair Haycraft, 1928 All-America end at the University of Minnesota. Young and inexperienced, End Haycraft did his best against a shrewder oldster. But when the votes were counted, Mayor Leach was in by a majority of some 17,000 votes. On its first independent try since it was orphaned, the once victorious Farmer-Labor Party was ditched.

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