UNDER THE BIG TOP AT WASHINGTON

JAY FRANKLIN

From April, 1929, until July, 1930, the inmates of America have been privileged to witness a continuous political circus at Washington. Under the new Hoover management, politics have been louder and funnier than at any time since the Torch Light Parade joined the soup-strainer mustache in the limbo of lost Yankee folkways. Not since Theodore Roosevelt was described as a man with as many facets as a diamond—and each one turned on—has there been an Administration which has supplied the public with as much good, clean fun as has the Hoover experiment in political engineering. Naturally, there is a reason for this, just as there is a box office attached to the latest superRingling amalgamation. But before we get at the where's and why's of the "gate" we might as well take a look at the show.

Step right up, ladies and gents, step right up. Get your peanuts and popcorn and crowd in under the big top. The conflicting strains of political calliopes rend the air with their rival theme-songs: the Republican instrument plays Have a little faith in me, dear with piercing sweetness; the Democratic national anthem is something about stocks being way down on the Swanee River. Out strides the ringmaster, Herbert Clark Hoover, with a double-breasted blue serge frock coat, a glossysilk hat, lily-white riding breeches, cracking a whip to which nobody pays the slightest attention, while the band thumps out Give yourself a slap on the hack! His face is intensely serious and from time to time he cracks his whip at a large committee of private secretaries riding tame newspapermen, who lope gracefully around the White House, while he consults the Party platform and announces the next event to the amplifiers.

* Yip! Yip! Whoopee! Here come the cowboys and Indians, dashing round and round the tent, lariats cracking, bodies flashing from one stirrup to the other. Charlie Curtis and Dolly Gann lead the redskins, mounted on extremely powerful white horses. Close behind them pound the pursuing roughriders, Nick and Alice Longworth, swinging lassoes, daringly trying to drag Dolly Gann from her seat. Round and round they go, Dolly maintaining her precedence by half a neck, slipping from side to side in her saddle, hut eluding with skill the swirling, swishing loops of social etiquette which Alice casts at her. . . .

Next number on the programme. Signor Melloni, the World Famous Juggler. He can keep discount rates, tax rates and interest rates in the air simultaneously and juggle aluminum ware and tax refunds on the side. Now and then he tosses the discount rate so high that it breaks into a shower of falling stocks. Then with unparalleled dexterity lie keeps the income tax just above his shoe-tops and announces that if someone will dig a hole he'll put it even lower. He is too skilful, too urbane, too sure of himself to catch the crowd, though here and there a financial athlete catches his hreath with sheer admiration at the exhibition of supple skill

m Wawrrr! Wawrrr! Wawrrr! Here come the lions. Six tawny Admirals roaring in unison at their trainer, Enrico Stimson, who, with his deep-blue water boy, Charlie Adams, tries to make them jump through the hoops. Something is wrong. The lions are hungry, starved, ravening for parity, and they refuse to jump through the six-inch cruisers. Enrico frowns and holds a lump of sugar in front of the smaller hoop. The Admirals pretend to misunderstand and jump again and again through the eight-inch cruiser schedule, hut become furious when they discover that there are only eighteen instead of twenty-one such hoops. Only one, Admiral Pratt, squeezes through the six-inch schedule, purrs, is given a lump of sugar and a pat on the head. The ringmaster cracks his whip. Pratt opens his mouth, Stimson sticks his head in it and removes it hastily, amid frenzied cheers. The whip cracks again and the lions slink off, still snarling for parity. Signor Enrico bows and smiles and the ringmaster announces that this act costs a billion dollars. The cheers subside instantly.

Next number. The daring aerial acrobatic artists—the Tariff Quartette, Senators Smoot and Grundy, aided by Representatives Tilson and Hawley, do a little harmless tumbling with the rates, form human pyramids and turn cart-wheels. Suddenly the house grows deathly quiet. "Ladies and gentlemen!" the ringmaster proclaims, "The Tariff Quartette is now about to perform the most dangerous, desperate and death-defying feat ever witnessed in America. They will perform a triple revision at the top of the tent, without a net\" Up the ladders scamper the acrobats. Now they are mere human flies at the giddy level of the Fordney Tariff. Higher and higher they climb. God! Will they never stop? They have reached the top of the tent and can climb no higher. They are heard asking for a larger tent and are told they can't have it. There they go, swinging from sugar schedule to wool schedule in great sickening arcs, higher and higher. The snare-drums in Wall Street start their ominous rumble. Whew! Did you see that? Smoot is now swinging head-down, held at arm's length by Grundy. Fifty schedules away, Hawley and Tilson are duplicating the feat. Faster and faster they swing. Now they are in conference. Higher and higher creep the rates. A foreign manufacturer faints and has to be carried out. A consumer screams. Watch it! Across the gulf of space the spangled bodies twirl in one-two-three summersaults. Then, just as they are about to fall, a swinging trapeze flashes up. The toes catch and they're safe! The band bursts triumphantly into the national anthem. But the applause is scattering. Nerves have been too badly shattered. The ringmaster senses the situation. He hastily announces that the condition of the trapeze is fundamentally sound hut that in the future, nets will be installed and the Tariff Commission will lower the rates by 5o%. . . .

* Now for the comic relief. Here come the clowns. What would we do without our political funny men? There's Senator Brookhart, chasing a dummy labeled "The Century Club" and belaboring it with a stuffed club labeled "Fish House Punch", turning every now and then to the peanut gallery for applause. The dress circle regard him as a little vulgar hut the hicks like it. And here's Senator Heflin, madly shrieking every time lie presses a button and lets the Pope-in-the-Box pop out at him. And here is Senator Wesley Jones, one of those sad-faced comedians who reduce the crowd to hysterics. He brandishes a whiskey bottle, which lie claims he got at the Five-andTen, full of good old-fashioned pre-Volstead fanaticism. He takes a swig, looks gloomily around and starts luinting for imaginary leaks in the Eighteenth Amendment. The crowd shrieks and holds its sides, not to mention its hip-pockets.

Quick change! Here come the specialists. Senators Borah, Johnson and Moses in their famous sword-swallowing, fire-eating act. The ringmaster watches Borah swallow a porcupine marked "Prohibition" and then begs him to swallow a pick-axe labeled "Farm Relief". Borah balks, but manages to gulp down a large anchor labeled "London Treaty". Johnson and Moses shy at the anchor and start eating fire. Did you ever see anything like it? Showers of incandescent oratory and red-hot similes cast a murky glow over the entire tent. Between spasms Johnson crunches broken glass and Moses blows reservations. There! it's too hot for them. They collapse from speech-prostration and are carried out to the political pulmotors.

Thenation's governing body provides an all-year-round circus featuring a sideshow and peanuts for the voters

Senators Smoot and Grundy trapeze artists in a hairraising, high tariff exhibit

Senators Johnson and Borah world famous fire eaters and daring sword-swallowers

Now for the tight-rope walkers—Dave Reed of Pennsylvania and Joe Robinson of Arkansas—balancing superbly between the gulf of partisan politics on the one hand and the abyss of subservience to the Executive on the other, while they shuffle along the slackening rope of popular approval. They teeter, they clap their hands, rub their feet in the rosin and grimace. Good Lord! they've done it. They have trundled the ringmaster and his treaty in a wheel-barrow from submission to ratification, with no aid to balance but a palm leaf fan and a sense of proportion. Isn't that a breath-taking accomplishment?

Aha! This is fun. Performing seals. Carter Glass and Claude Swanson of Virginia Hob out, uttering hoarse barks of excitement, climb on their little stands and balance gaily tinted balls on their noses, while the ringmaster tosses them minnows between tricks. Here come the chariot racers, Garner and Pat Harrison, in a low-slung chariot pulled by Charley Michelson and Jonett Shouse. They tear around the ring and claim that they have beaten the Republican Committee. They are rapturously applauded, although the ringmaster points out that the Republicans were not entered for chariot-racing and are far too busy doing other things to act like Ben-Hur or other famous charioteers.

What's that? Intermission? All right, let's stroll down and take a look at the side-shows and listen to the band. Mighty fine band, isn't it? and it plays beautifully. There's the bandmaster, F. Scott McBride, who thinks he's leading How Dry I Am! There are Bishop Cannon and Clarence True Wilson, just two piccolo players. The first is tootling Margin through Georgia while the second is working away to prove that "It ain't gonna rain no more". Walsh and Wheeler, the cowboy saxophone duo from Montana, are too busy investigating their saxophones to start up their famous rendition of Tell Me! Claudius Huston is busy thumping away on a base drum to the tempo of the Resignation from 'Thais', while Dwight Morrow puts his whole soul into the Maine Stein Song on the Jersey fiats and Franklin Fort accompanies him on the holding-the-bagpipes. It's difficult to enjoy the music, however, as Senators Copeland and Caraway crowd the lobby, peddling very small packets of political peanuts, while Representative Fish attempts to get us excited about red lemonade, a commodity very much in evidence under the tent.

Ah! here are the exhibits. Only a nickel a look. Here's "Prosperity, the Fattest Lady in the World". Good heavens, where did she get all those wrinkles? "Honest, pa, she ain't so big." "Hush, my son, the poor girl's been taking an eighteen-month diet." Here's the Tariff, "Tallest Man on Earth". "Land's sakes, he is tall!" "Yeah, but he don't look healthy. Something wrong with his glands, I guess." Now for the Naval Treaty, the Strong Man who can raise the United States to naval parity with Great Britain in six years, when, as and if. Well, let's see him do it. What's that sign? Says we'll have to pay him a billion before he does his stuff. There doesn't seem to be as much of a crowd here as there is at that Peaceat-any-Price Tent where Zuleika Phoole, the world's loveliest and most elastic nautch dancer, fresh from the Harems of the Orient, gentlemen, will dance before the world absolutely without a battleship on if the police don't interfere. Watch her squirm and twist and wriggle. See her undulate and writhe. Absolutely defenseless and it doesn't cost a cent. Disarming? I'll say. And here's the last one, Prohibition, the Dog-Faced Boy. He knows only one wrord and that word is "No!" Is he human? Can't say, gents. Judge for yourself. Last wreek he got at the Coast Guard and he nearly wrecked the Treasury before we dragged him off with promises of bigger prisons and no juries. There! Wait just a minute. He's going to speak. "No! No! No!" "Disgusting, I call it!" "They oughta put the poor guy in an asylum or something." "Oh, isn't he perfectly sweet?"

There goes the bell. The show's about to begin again. The Presidential committees and commissions are crowding back through the exits. Mr. Hoover is cracking his whip. What's next? Dunno, I lost my programme, but I suppose it's elephants. They never start on time, so let's slip into the box-office and ask for the Manager. Maybe he can tell us what it's all about.

Fanciful and unfair? Not particularly. There is an especial reason for the recent outburst of Congressional antics. It wasn't just an accident or just party politics. The old Romans had the idea. They gave 'em "panem et circenses" whenever things weren't going particularly well. Why go back to the Romans? It's an old family custom. Baby has a pain in the tum-tum, has he? Well, while we wait for the doctor to come or for the castor-oil to take care of those green apples, let's shake a rattle at him, sing to him, keep him interested and maybe he won't yell so loudly or so often. That is the simplest remedy and it always works.

We have eaten a lot of economic and political green apples in the last decade. We now have a severe cramp in the financial district and a high fever in the Farm Belt. And, naturally, we'd like to yell our heads off and kick the bed-clothes across the room. It's quite true that John across the way lost a leg in the war, and Otto is just recovering from financial prostration, while Ivan is still delirious from scarlet fever, and they aren't howling the wray we are. On the other hand, if they had eaten as many green apples as we did, they would probably be making a row about it, too. We've had to swallow a very nasty dose of deflation and we've been put on a stiff diet of low prices and unemployment. It's primitive medicine but it's the only handy remedy we know for our complaint.

It makes us cranky. We want to kick something or somebody, the Communists, the Republicans, Wall Street or Hoover. We've got to be distracted or wre may even cause trouble to the political apple-dealers who sold us the sinful pippin of unripened prosperity. That wrould never do! So the Congress has yielded to a profound, if unconscious, political instinct in staging the greatest show on earth beneath the Big Top on Capitol Hill. They've given us Prohibition, Peace and the Tariff to play with and have distracted us with Senatorial dumbcrambo and Executive charades. They have even improved on the old Roman formula. They have given us the circus, but they haven't bothered to see that we get the bread.

Who's who in the Washington circus:

Ringmaster Hoover; Signor Melloni, a juggler; bandmaster F. Scott McBride; Enrico Stimson, a lion tamer; the Freaks: Prosperity, the fat lady (on a diet), Tariff, tallest man in the world, Prohibition, the dog-faced boy, Naval Treaty, the Strong Man lifting the United States to parity; Indians and cowboys, Charlie Curtis and Dolly Gann being pursued by Nick and Alice Longworth