Public Men in and out of Office

BY NAT. S. FINNEY

THE CAREER OF U.S. SENATOR JOSEPH H. BALL, JUNIOR Republican member from Minnesota, began with an accident. The air liner in which the late Senator Ernest Lundeen flew northward out of Washington in 1940 to keep a speaking appointment before an isolationist audience was caught in an autumn storm and smashed against a hillside. Investigation of the mishap in which Lundeen died indicated he was, in a sense, the victim of an act of God, for the plane's pilot appeared to have blundered into that one cloud in a million in which the stress of conflicting air currents has the power to twist a wing off a strong aircraft or hurl it a thousand feet in either direction like a helpless leaf. At any rate the accident killed perhaps the most recklessly determined isolationist in the U.S. Senate, a man who had not hesitated to invite George Sylvester Viereck, known and avowed German propagandist, to use his offices on Capitol Hill as central point in a determined campaign to confuse an America upon which Germany later declared war.

To replace Senator Lundeen, Governor Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota appointed perhaps the last man Minnesota's Republican old guard would have listed as available. Governor Stassen picked a thirty-five-year-old St. Paul newspaper reporter known to his colleagues as Joe Ball, and it is fair to say that the appointment satisfied no one except Governor Stassen and Joe Ball. The county chairmen from the Lake of the Woods to the Iowa border went around for weeks with bloodshot eyes and apoplectic faces. Some of them grumbled inco

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