THE FREE COUNTRY

If as some of the more violent observers have said, President Roosevelt intends this election to be America's last, he may be on the right track after all. Mass production left its mark on campaigning long ago, and the one just past looked even more like the others than Governor Landon looked like Warren Harding.

The daily papers have not let us down. The eighty-five year old man in Lawrence who has voted Republican since the Civil War has come out for Landon. For the past twenty years the rotogravures have had cheery pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred E. Smith out in front of the polling booth at crack of dawn, Al saying, "Here's one straight Democratic ticket!" Well, he won't have that line this year, but the photographers can not fail to come through. At his side will be Mrs. Smith, wearing a corsage of orchids. She's had those same orchids every election day since her husband was state assemblyman; they must be wax. And who ever heard of Mrs. Smith at any time during the year but election day? She's probably blown up for the occasion, like the dragons in Macy's Thanksgiving parade.

As for Mrs. Landon, no woman has any more right to be called "Theo" than she has to play the harp. The wife of the Kansas governor must take the rap on both points. But that isn't all. She also goes around one week before the election, one week during which she could be saving the American way of life, saying, "Oh, no, I'm not worried about the election. My children keep me too busy for that." It's remarks like that that undermine American democracy. Harpo Marx also plays the harp, but you won't catch him not worrying about the election. Besides, he keeps his mouth shut.

The whole mess may rightfully be blamed on the deplorable lack of Electoral College spirit. In another month the electors will get togethers in some hall and cast their votes just as if it didn't matter which way they went. How can they expect Landon and Knox and Roosevelt and Garner down there on the field to give everything they've got when the Electoral College boys sit back on the bleachers and say isn't it a shame we haven't had a good team since Lincoln and Hamlin?

There will be lots of other changes if Roosevelt sets up a dictatorship. The seven voters of a place called Millsfield, New Hampshire, won't have to get out of bed in the middle of the night to vote five-to-two for Landon and beat New Ashford, Mass., as the first precinct to be heard from. Nor will there be that phony voting machine in Troy, New York, which since time immemorial has broken down at ten o'clock election morning to show in all its nakedness twelve Republican and eighty-four Democratic votes. There won't be any more pictures of Presidential widows being marched to the polls by the Republican National Committee. The newspapers won't have to tell us that Lubec. Maine, is the easternmost and Tatoosh, Washington, the westernmost town to vote in the United States. Then we can settle down to some real freedom.