Tales

Senator James A. Reed of Missouri transformed himself into a campaign funds' investigating committee of one, set out for Chicago to finish the prodding which he had suddenly left off in August.

In Illinois he unearthed no new grime.

In Indiana. Senator Reed heard a myriad of tales from a one-time Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan to the general effect that if Senator James E. Watson kept on being a good friend of the Klan he would some day be President of the U. S. Then he would appoint one William F. Zumbrunn (a man who "wines and dines" with Senators and their wives) as Ambassador to Mexico. Whereupon, Senator Watson called Senator Reed to his bedside in an Indianapolis hospital, informed him that it was all a great lie. Said the Senator from Indiana:

"I was never a member of the Klan. I know nothing of its internal workings. . . .

"As to Stephenson,* I knew him. All politicians in Indiana knew Stephenson. . . . I always was afraid to give him my confidence, and never did, because there was something about the man that always warned me not to do it. I was afraid he might push out, because he was, in a way a human dynamo and, at the time of his supremacy, might have controlled 150,000 votes in Indiana by his "ipse dixit!"

Then Senator Reed looked into the Republican campaign manager's story of an "$8,000,000 international hankers' pool" to elect Democratic senators in Indiana. This simmered down to a $600 bureau run by the gentle-voiced widow of a minister to promote "world friendship among children."

Senator Reed boarded a train for Kansas City, Mo., snarled: "I have more important things to do. . . ."

*Onetime Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan (TIME, Oct. 18). His famed box, weighing half a ton, supposedly containing devastating evidence of political corruption in Indiana, was secretly opened before a Grand Jury last week.