Presidential Possibilities

Few people expect him to win. He is an outsider compared with Dawes and an unknown compared with Hoover. But he will go to the Republican convention with a block of fifty votes, and in a free-for-all convention wonders have been worked with less than fifty votes by other dark-horse Senators. First man in the field to declare himself for his party's nomination, spokesman of a large section of the Middle West, regular of regulars, and despite this fact the farmer's friend, fashioned by Heaven's hand as the perfect politician--this is Curtis of Kansas.

The story of this man's life begins where most of Zane Grey's stories end: in a tepee on the Western plains. It runs a colorful gamut that suggests both the infinite variety of life in the American scene and the orthodoxy of much of our public thinking.

Was County Fair Jockey

The boy's mother died when he was three years old, and he went to his mother's people on the New Reservation, sixty miles west of Topeka. At the age of nine he turns up in the white man's end of Kansas as a jockey, riding races at the county fairs. At the age of seventeen Curtis left the track and got a job driving a hack in Topeka. By day he went to school. By night he drove his cab. Forming a friendship with a lawyer, he became interested in the law, and studied in his small spare time.

At the age of twenty-one he passed his bar examinations, and in three years he was county attorney of Shawnee County. Prohibition, at this time, was three years old in Kansas and far from a success. Curtis went at its enforcement with the same energy that had brought him under the wire first in more than one county sweepstakes.

After a reelection to the Attorney's seat and four years of practice as a lawyer. Curtis was elected to the House of Representatives in 1892. For fourteen years he was a member of the House.

Goes to Senate

In 1907, after a hiatus of fifteen years, there came another turn of fortune. The unexpected happened. A Senator in good health and sound mentality actually resigned his office. He was a Kansas Senator and Curtis was elected to succeed him. On January 29, 1907, Curtis left the House of Representatives and entered the Senate, of which Henry Cabot Lodge had been a distinguished member for fifteen years. Lodge had achieved a position third from the top of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Curtis began at the bottom of a committee which had no work and never met, the Committee on the University of the United States.

With one short lapse of two years-- from 1913 to 1915--Curtis has stayed in the Senate ever since he entered it; gradually bettering his committee posts and advancing toward seniority. He is now firmly established near the top of several committees which control the expenditure of public money. He is chairman of the committee on the Senate's rules. Three years ago his party honored him by electing him to succeed the vastly different Henry Cabot Lodge as Republican leader in the Senate. Yet in all this time there has been no important law enacted which bears his name. There has been no great adventure in which he suddenly flashed before the public. He has advanced to power and responsibility through the successful repetition of an orthodox routine. And between the colorful career of ol' Cap Curtis boy and the conventional existence of Charles Curtis. Senator, there is a gulf as wide as if these two were different persons.

The fact of the matter probably is that public life in our own times is poorly organized for great adventure and much better organized for regularly. Adventure has made a few successful men in politics, but it has unmade many moves. Men like Curtis picturesque, daring, headlong, vivid come to Washington and are swallowed by the system. Hitherto bold, they cover up, play safe, risk nothing, watch their chances and advance by inches.

Is "Political Regular"

There is no surer road to party eminence than regularity, and Curtis is nothing if not regular. He was so regular on the occasion of that important test of regularity, the great schisur of 1912, that he not only stood by Taft-- though he came from the insurgent West--but confidently predicted that Taft was the only man who could win and that he would be triumphantly reelected. The same regularity has been evident in other important crises in his party's history. In 1912 Curtis voted to unseat Lorimer; but in 1911 he had voted to seat him; and that, considering the mandate of his party nationally and the mandate of his party locally, was, from the point of view of regularity, about fifty-fifty. Similarly, in 1927 Curtis voted for the McNary-Haugen bill and exhausted every other possibility.

Curtis does not make policies; he unveils them. It is his business to sound out the opposition, plan a campaign, arrange a compromise if one is necessary, and muster the votes when the skies are stormy. As long ago as 1899 one can find him praised by the Topeka Mail and Breeze as a past master at the art of settling a dispute without an open quarrel. In that capacity he has been of inestimable service to successive Administrations. For he has what William Allen White calls "a blessed gift as a hand-shaker" and "the indefinable thing called charm which binds men to one another forever." "Add to that," writes White, "a gentle, ingratiating voice, and an easy flow of innocuous conversation unimpeded by pestiferous ideas, and you have a creature God-sent into politics."

Curtis seldom takes the floor in Congress, and then chiefly to make a point of order, remind his colleagues that they have strayed far from the matter theoretically under discussion, call for a vote, or move an adjournment. His legislative efforts, if they can be called legislative efforts, are chiefly of a domestic nature. In the last session of Congress he introduced seventy-six bills. Sixty-nine of them were pension bills. Five were bills to settle private claims. One was a bill to provide an Indian memorial at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. And the other was a bill to create the most innocuous of all farm boards.

Power in Senate

Nevertheless, despite these facts, Curtis is a power in the Senate and a great man in his own environment. His is usually the shoulder that makes the wheel turn round. His is usually the conciliation which finds a basis for agreement. He is an active man, tireless, industrious, and devoted to the routine of his office--a man still young at sixty-seven, stockily built, sturdy, with more spring to his step than most men half his age, and reported by one of the most competent newspaper men in Washington to be the best poker player in either House of Congress. He is everybody's friend. His colleagues call him Charlie. His constituents swear by him as they would swear by a trusted Ford or a well-tried almanac. He knows an amazing number of them personally. Twenty years ago this month, when he had already served fourteen years in Congress, he was quoted in the New York Sun as saying that he never forgot a name, that he never failed to shake a hand thrust out at him, that he never failed to answer a letter, and that his personal correspondence had been known to exceed twenty thousand letters annually.

Whether such a man can be nominated for the Presidency depends essentially upon what happens to his chief competitors. Curtis will go to the Republican convention with the twenty votes of Kansas and quite possibly with thirty more outside. What will happen to him then will depend on what has happened to the Hoover boom, the Lowden boom, the Dawes boom, and various other major and minor booms before the delegates assemble--how far short of a majority any single candidate remains, how available the engineers of the convention consider a candidate from the Middle West, strong in the Senate, popular with the farmers and yet no fire eater.

Curtis is an outsider, but a real contender. Nor would there by any essential injustice in his nomination. For he represents bold and dashing individuality tamed to the drab purposes of party routine. And that is essentially the history of politics in America