The People Take a Beating

When the citizens of Illinois go to the polls on April 14, in the first important U.S. primary election of 1942, they will find that the results were cut-&-dried last week. The people will be allowed to participate in the elections-but only to participate. For in Illinois the original purpose of the primary-to let the voters in each party choose their own candidates by themselves-has long ago been lost. Party bosses have willingly relieved the people of this responsibility.

The tickets will be: Republicans-C. Wayland Brooks v. Warren Wright and Ralph E. Church; Democrats-Raymond S. McKeough v. Paul Douglas. These names meant only one thing in a year of war and peril-that politics-as-usual dominated Illinois.

C. Wayland ("Curly") Brooks is an oldtime rabble-rouser, a flag-waving Billy Sunday orator who can jerk tears from any group of mothers with a recital of his own World War I experiences (wounded seven times, bemedaled thrice). He is the candidate of the Chicago Tribune's Roosevelt-hating publisher, Colonel Robert R. ("Bertie") McCormick. The lank Colonel had tried vainly to get Brooks elected to high office for years, finally got him by when the State went Republican in 1940. Frizzle-haired, heavy-set Curly Brooks, like his sponsor, was one of the most violent of Isolationists before Pearl Harbor. His only opposition in the primary:

Warren Wright, stocky, stodgy State Treasurer, a veteran campaigner for small offices, who won his first election in 1940, and who is now, as an officeholder widely unknown in his State, making the race chiefly for experience. Ralph Church, trumpeting ex-Congressman, who turned up as a last-minute candidate, undecided whether to run for Senate or House.

Raymond Stephen McKeough, now Congressman from Cook County, was picked by Chicago's famed Kelly-Nash machine as the candidate to oppose Brooks, when Mayor Ed Kelly failed to get an endorsement from President Roosevelt (TIME, Feb. 9). Old (78), horse-loving Pat Nash, who got rich tearing up Chicago's streets and inserting sewers therein, picked him for the practically honorary post (the Kelly-Nash machine gets all the upstate patronage, anyway). When he was tapped, McKeough spoke up with a lump in his throat: "Whatever I have accomplished in public life, I owe entirely to the Honorable Patrick "A. Nash, the greatest patriarch in the Democratic Party's history in all America."

Congressman McKeough, whom the enemy Tribune immediately dubbed "Small Potatoes" McKeough, is no ball of fire. In his seven years in Congress he has sponsored no important legislation, has made few speeches on the floor, has rubber-stamped all New Deal legislation, with only one painful exception: he voted last August against extending the draft. He has saved his slambang oratory so exclusively for Cook County that he is relatively unknown downstate, even to most party leaders. His only opposition:

Paul Douglas, 49, an absent-minded economics professor at the University of Chicago, now a Chicago alderman who acts as gadfly to the machine, a New Dealer who has little downstate appeal.

Result of the primary was in the bag: it would be Brooks v. McKeough. After April 14, the citizenry would again get % chance to watch the workings of the old Illinois maxim-anyone with a machine and $1,000,000 can be Senator from Illinois. Now there were two machines, plenty of money, plenty of politics-as-usual. In Illinois, in the 1942 elections, the voters would have little to choose between. Whether voters in other States would have better choices remained to be seen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.