Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1920-03-04
POLITICIANS GO PUSSY-FooTING
TO GREET THE 1920 ZERO HOUR
When Somebody Finds Issues and Can.
didates All viii BE Ready for the
National Conventions

High hats are being made to shine
| Hotel suites by the hundred have beer
engaged at Chicago and San Francisco
where each presidential boom will al
! least be assured of plush and mahog-
any garage and comfortable place in
which to die.
And yet neither party has candi-
! date.
| Neither party has formulated an issue
| that can be clearly defined.
1t has been a generation since the coun-
try moved with such uncertainty to the
eve of general election.
| Are the party leaders looking for is
sues? They are not. No politician Of
mature experience would yet be seen in
public with an issue of any magnitude,
even though it arrived in state with a
letter from his pastor. No issue is safe
company until it's ability to withstand the
effects Of light and air has been tested on
the proving grounds. That is why there
are candidates like General Wood and
Governor Lowden, Mr.. Palmer and Mr.
Bryan. The ugly and dangerous work is
left to them.
General Wood has been testing out the
factor Of militarism in politics. Gov
ernor Lowden is apparently trying to de-
termine the drift of sentiment in relation
to old-guard doctrines. Mr.. Palmer is
frankly in the field to learn whether the
country is eager to have strong-arm in
the White House. The elder statesmen
are content to watch from afar the prog
ress of these experiments.
Clearly, then, a strange thing has hap
pened. Party leaders are actually max
ing elaborate efforts to sound out public
opinion.
They are at last aware of the country!
The general stats of both parties have
good reasons for their spectacular eau
ton. The face of the political situation
changes almost every day. Senator
Hiram Johnson, for instance, always felt
sure of California and the Roosevelt
West. California is forgetting him for
Hoover.
General Wood is not the center of any
enthusiastic uproar. The American
Legion, to which he made very definite
appeal, is obviously without interest in
khaki candidates. Can it be that the
members of the legion had enough of
khaki? Bryan is becoming a bore and
PaImer's candidacy may be matter for
the undertaken before the San Francisco
convention.
Meanwhile the full dinner pail and the
tariff, infant industries and all the slo-
gans of an idyllic past are outworn and
useless. New ones that mean something
will have to be found.
And If the ordinary voters are unre-
sponsive to tests of opinion represented
by preliminary booms, the women, who
may have 27O0O,00O votes to cast at the
presidential election, are ominously
aloof. 1t is plain that they are giving
the elder statesmen great many un-
happy hours.
Systematic attempts to organize the
women voters and align them with one
party or another have been without sue
cess. In this state Mrs. Barclay War
burton's organization of Republican
women and the group that has been en-
deavoring to mobilize feminine sentiment
on the Democratic side have alike come
upon obstacles altogether new in the
realm of practical politics. Confronting
the Republican and Democratic organ
izers is the State Federation of Women's
Clubs, of which Mrs. John o. Miller, of
Pittsburgh is president. Official senti-
ment in the women's federation is an
tagonistic to old-line party organizations.
The leaders continue to appeal for an in
dependent political consciousness.
The situation throughout the country
is not dissimilar to the situation In Penn
sylvania. Women votersChave disposi-
tion to be obdurate and bit mysterious.
The recent progress Of the suffrage move
ment was so swift that party leaders
were taken off their guard. They are
fumbling now for a method by which the
votes of women may be controlled.
Such method is difficult to find. Old
rules do not apply in the present emer-
gency.
Political organizations of the past
were created and maintained by the con-
venient system of patronage in states,
counties, municipalities, wards and divi-
sions, and safe najorities of men voters
were thus kept in intimate touch with the
guiding minds of their party.
Women for the time at least move be-
yond the reach of that system. And it is
rather startling to find that through their
clubs they have been organizing political
opinion as it has never been organized
in the easy-going resorts where men long
ago substituted poker and billiards and
ward gossip for political discussion,
The veteran leaders of past campaigns
will wait until the last minute before
they define their issues. They will wait
to give further study to the eternal mys-
terry of the feminine mind. They will
wait to see what happens in Washington
and in Europe, and they will wait to
watch public opinion as it reacts and
forms under the stimulus of Hoover.
The old guards in both parties are not
by any means easy in their minds. Dis
cipline is loose on both sides. The can
didates in the reserve lines will not stay
put. They crowd forward against or
ders. Governor Sproul refused to stay in
n